I hope that’s not a spoiler, buddy.

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If you see someone on teevee using a computer, it’s almost always a Macintosh Powerbook. Can’t really blame the producers for picking a Mac, they’re the most stylish and aesthetically pleasing computers around.^† How come, then, do they always try to hide the fact that it’s an Apple product?

I understand that they want to protect product placements and their adveristers, and giving Apple free time would be a bad precedent. But it’s not as if putting a sticker over the apple logo actually fools anyone, a Powerbook is a very distinctive computer. (Every time one pops I tell my wife, “Sidney Bristow uses a not-a-Mac!”) Do they really think they’ll get more ad money from Dell if they carefully position a lamp behind the “generic laptop” in every shot?

CSI: NY, for some reason, doesn’t buy into any of this. They constantly show the brandnames and logos of electronic products, whether it’s Dell, Toshiba, Apple, or Nikon. Anyone know why that is? I’m assuming that they’re not getting paid for each and every LCD monitor onscreen, so why is this the one show on teevee that doesn’t care about giving away advertising?

^†It’s the same reason that every cell phone flipped open in primetime is a Moto RAZR.

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That was one hell of a cliffhanger. Lemme make sure the DVR is gonna record next week… wait, next week is a repeat. Shit, so is the one on the seventh. Hang on, the we don’t get a new episode until January?!

Damn you, SciFi Channel! Damn you to Hell!

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While I understand the impulse, I think I’ll wait for the season premiere of Alias before I jump on this bandwagon.

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SHATNER!

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Inspired by the reaction that this post generated (I’m still getting, “Who’s the girl in that Motorola commercial?” comments two years later) I’ve started a new forum called AdActors.com.

I’m hoping this will be the place to go when you see that same guy in six different national commercials in one week and just have to know who he is and what else he’s been in. Clearly a blog comments section isn’t the place for this sort of dialogue, it just doesn’t allow for enough back-and-forth, user-to-user contact, so I needed to build something else. I realized that the wonderful forums at AdTunes answer very similar questions (”What’s that song they’re playing on Lost?”) very effectively. When I started thinking about ways to make a website dedicated to spreading info on ad actors, it was obvious who I should copy. An AdTunes-style bulletin board was the answer.

Go on over, log in, and check it out. I’m using Six Apart’s TypeKey for registration and authentication (thanks to Arvind Satyanarayan), so you’ll have to get a TypeKey account, but the sign up process is trivial. Please let me know in the feedback forum or via email if you see any problems or have any suggestions.

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Like I said before, I’m going to miss this show. For thirteen weeks every couple of years I really looked forward to Sunday evenings, and I don’t think I’ll feel the same way about Rome. As derivative as it could be at times (and I don’t think it was nearly as unoriginal as Goldstein will tell you) I think it approached many subjects that nothing on teevee has ever attempted to come to grips with before. I’m not talking about death here, lots of shows have dealt with death (although not many on a weekly basis). I’m talking about things like father/son conflicts, mental illness, drug use, religion. But mostly the show was about identity. The question that Nate (who was the main character, if you ask me) was always asking himself was, “Can I become the person I want to be? Or is it enough to pretend to be that person so that everyone I know is fooled?” I think he always found out it wasn’t enough, but he kept trying to fool everyone anyway.

Deep questions weren’t the reason I kept watching, though. It was, purely and simply, a very entertaining show. There’s nothing wrong with that, it doesn’t mean that it’s mindless. Teevee can be entertaining and still be good.

I thought the final episode was very good. There were no attempts to shock us, all (most?) the loose psychological ends were tied up neatly yet realistically, and the epilogue will help me feel like I haven’t missed anything when I start wondering what’s up with the Fishers in a year or so. I tried to come up with some comparisons to other last episodes for this post, but I’ve never really cared about a show from start to finish before. Buffy I dropped after a few seasons, then caught up with on DVD. Angel and Firefly I never really watched except on DVD. Seinfeld was a sitcom, so it doesn’t really count. Did anyone really care when The X-Files called it quits? Maybe I’ll feel this way about Battlestar Galactica in a few years (it’s definitely the best thing on the tube now).

Six Feet Under was my show, the one I where I watched nearly every episode on first airing week in and week out for five seasons. It makes me feel stupid, but it hurts to see a show like that go.

(If you’re wondering, the song played over the epilogue was “Breathe Me” by Sia, and you can find it on the second soundtrack. That little bit of trivia brought to you via AdTunes, which is a great website for that sort of thing. I still don’t know what that damn bumper sticker was, though. And who buys a fucking car to move to New York City?)

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I’m going to miss the Fishers.

(But one question. What did the bumper sticker on Claire’s Prius say?)

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Anybody else wonder what they’re going to do to top that? I’m thinking L.A. gets nuked and only George, who’s snuck back into his bomb shelter, survives.

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So I saw X-Files set at Target the other day. I’ve always held off buying the full season DVDs of the series, they’re pretty expensive and there are just so many of them. I’m not sure they’re worth it in terms of both time and money.

But these new Mythology sets seem like a good idea. Watch just the episodes related to a story arc, skip all the unrelated creature-of-the-week episodes. I’d buy all the sets right now if I knew that they were comprehensive enough. Amazon reviews seem to say that yes, they are.

Has anyone watched one or all of these boxsets? Do they contain enough of the episodes to understand all the characters and to follow the arc to its conclusion? Or am I better off just renting every single episode from Netflix?

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