The Yin Blog

What if . . . Congressional leaders and the President could only use lines from "A Game of Thrones"?

The other night, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno (yes, if I watch a late-night talk show, it's Leno's) had a pretty hilarious skit with Trevor Moore and Mikey Day. Basically, the two guys sit around in some L.A. location like Universal City and Dare each other to do goofy things with passersby.

In this particular sketch, Mikey challenged Trevor to go pick up women . . . using only lines from the HBO series/George R.R. Martin book series "Game of Thrones." It starts at 1:09:

 This got my demented mind thinking, "Hmm, what if Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, John Boehner, Harry Reid, and Mitch McConnell were locked into a room and had to negotiate a federal budget while preceding every assertion/demand with dialogue from 'Game of Thrones'?"

OBAMA: Winter is coming. We need a federal budget that won't raise taxes except on the rich, that reduces the deficit, that preserves Social Security and Medicare, and that jumpstarts the economy.

MCCONNELL: There is only one god and his name is death. And there is only one thing we say to Death: "Not today." You already got your tax increase. No more. It's time for budget cuts.

OBAMA: Some old wounds never truly heal, and bleed again at the slightest word. The American people support raising taxes on the rich.

MCCONNELL: If I look back, I am lost. No more taxes.

PELOSI: When you play the game of thrones, you win or die. We Democrats will be happy to take back the House in 2014 at this rate.

RAND PAUL (interrupting): A ruler who hides behind paid executioners soon forgets what death is. More transparency on your kill lists and drone strikes!

BOEHNER: A man who won't listen can't hear. Can we talk spending cuts? We need to reform our entitlement programs. We can't afford what we're promising.

REID: A Lannister always pays his debts. Social Security is perfectly fine. It's got all those U.S. Treasury bonds in the Trust Fund!

BOEHNER: A mad man sees what he sees.

REID: Is it so far from madness to wisdom?

BOEHNER: Minds are like swords, I do fear. The old ones go to rust.

DARRELL ISSA (interrupting) Do the dead frighten you? Why the Benghazi cover-up?

OBAMA: Some truths did not bear saying, and some lies were necessary.

PELOSI: A true man does what he will, not what he must. We got the Affordable Care Act through, and we'll get our budget through.

MCCONNELL: Most men would rather deny a hard truth than face it.

(ten hours later, with no agreement)

OBAMA: I swear to you, sitting a throne is a thousand times harder than winning one.

(more bickering)

OBAMA: Spikes. Heads. Walls.

First world problems of TV critics

There's too much good TV to watch.

Ha ha ha!! I love my job, but being a TV critic might be a better one. I do see the point, though. After coming back from spring break, my beloved TiVo was bursting at the seams with recorded shows. In fact, because I had kept "Avatar" around, it actually ran out of space and deleted some other shows. D'oh! (Fortunately, I had burned those shows on a recordable DVD disc to bring on the trip.)

Perhaps what I need is this TiVo DVR that holds up to 300 hours of HD programming.

I must be missing something about "The Walking Dead" . . . .

I missed out on "The Walking Dead" when it premiered, and I kind of regretted it, as I know it's gotten all kinds of critical acclaim -- not to mention, better ratings than just about anything on NBC, which is kind of hilarious considering how cable shows reach so many fewer households.

Anyway, I happened to catch most of this week's episode with my dad, who's been watching it enough to fill me in on the important stuff that I missed.

I was underwhelmed. I mean, the head-splattering gore was kind of interesting at first (wow, you can show that on TV?), but then it got repetitive. The constant hissing sound that the walking dead made didn't scare me so much as remind me of the sleestak from "The Land of the Lost," and I wasn't scared of those creatures even when I was a kid. I mean, frankly, these slow, shuffling things that seem dumber than your typical wild animal have somehow managed to bring civilization to its knees?

I get that you can't fairly judge a show with a complex mythology based on just one episode. I'm sure my favorite show "24" would come out pretty badly if you picked a particularly bad episode to start with (can you say, Kim Bauer and the mountain lion?). But I've got enough TV to watch as it is, so I'm glad that my one experience with "The Walking Dead" didn't leave me thinking, oh my gosh, I've got to go back and rent/buy all the previous seasons to catch up!

NBC's "Deception": haven't these people heard of Google?

I somewhat regret not getting into ABC's Count of Monte Cristo-inspired "Revenge," which is about a young woman who comes back to her hometown after years of being away, under a new identity, with the mission of destroying the rich family that drove her father to kill himself (I think that's the story).

When NBC debuted a similar show, "Deception," I decided to give it a try. In this show, the central mystery is the death by drug overdose of the older daughter of a rich family in New York. The FBI has been investigating the family related to its medical drug business but needs to get someone on the inside. How lucky for the lead FBI agent that his one-time paramour, now a San Francisco police detective, grew up in this family's house! You see, her mom worked for the family as a housekeeper/maid, and she was the same age as the now-dead older daughter, so not surprisingly, she became best friends with that girl.

(As an aside, the SF detective is African-American, as is the lead FBI agent, while the rich family is white. The show doesn't get in your face about the race relations, which I like, but I also don't think it's coincidental. There's a degree of subtlety here that works.)

Okay, so lead FBI agent talks SF detective into coming back to New York to go undercover and infiltrate the rich family. The dead daughter's funeral is the perfect entry point, and the detective's cover story is that she just got out of an abusive marriage and is looking for a new start. The dead daughter's dad shows warm feelings toward her and invites her to stay with the family for as long as she needs, and then hires her as an administrative assistant. However, some other family members are suspicious of her.

Haven't these people heard of Google? It's not like the SF detective can use a fake name; she has to be herself to be able to infiltrate the family. Yet, she was also using her real name with the SFPD. So if I were suspicious of her, after her 17 year absence, the first thing I would do is put her name in Google and see what pops up. I've got to think there would be some news stories/items about her as a police detective!!

More than 10 years later, the USA PATRIOT Act is still Hollywood's punching bag

Here we are, more than ten years after the initial passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, and Hollywood keeps (inaccurately) flogging it as the source of authority for everything bad about the war on terrorism. I actually like ABC's "Scandal" quite a bit, but it falls into the same predictable trap of having bad government agents justify kidnapping, detaining, and torturing an American citizen under the PATRIOT Act.

Um, no. The PATRIOT Act does have a provision for detaining suspected terrorists without charges, but only aliens, not citizens; and it says nothing about torturing those detainees. Moreover, I don't think this provision has ever actually been used, since Guantanamo detention has been justified under the President's Commander-in-Chief powers.

Now, one of the government baddies does say that the citizen detainee is an "enemy combatant," which is closer to the mark, but that just raises the question of why the writers/producers felt it necessary to invoke the PATRIOT Act?

What happened to Fox (network, not news) and me?

Once upon a time, or should I say, a long time ago in a TV era far far away, Fox used to be my favorite network. It was edgy, funny, and daring, with the only sitcoms I managed to watch regularly ("The Simpsons" and "Married With Children," and later, "Malcolm in the Middle"), and of course "The X-Files," which I stuck with to the bitter end. When the new century rolled around, it got even better, with my perhaps all-time favorite show ever, "24", and then "Prison Break." I also liked some of the new reality TV shows, such as "American Idol," and who can forget the genius of "Joe Millionaire"???

So it was kind of a shock to look at TV By the Numbers' assessment of this season's shows on Fox and to realize that I don't watch a single show on that network(!). I did watch "Fringe" up to the end of last season and earlier this season, but TV shows on Friday got moved around and somehow I ended up with a three-way conflict on Friday night with only a dual-tuner on my TiVo, and "Fringe" was left out. Last week's episode got recorded, and I tried watching it, but I've missed too much for it to make sense. (Not that things ever really made sense with "Fringe.")

The TV world changes, and I'd say that ABC is now my favorite network for scripted shows, with "Once Upon a Time" being my current favorite, and "Scandal" pretty high too.

ABC's "Scandal": a big continuity error, and my speculation about how it ends

I'm finally caught up on ABC's "Scandal," with one episode left before it goes on a hiatus for the winter, and I've really enjoyed it so far this season. Well, except for the drawn-out storyline about how much Olivia Pope and President Grant can't stay away from each other.

Anyway, this post includes spoilers through last week's (12/6) episode.

***

With me still? Okay, let's delve into the big continuity error. At the end of the previous episode, President Grant was shot as he stepped out of his presidential limousine. At the beginning of last week's episode, which immediately followed, the shooting scene is replayed in more detail, and we see that Grant was hit multiple times, and a few other staffers were shot as well.

In the subsequent obligatory wounded person on rolling stretcher in hospital scene, his shirt is bloody, suggesting at least one torso wound. No facial wound, though.

The news reports of the shooting, however, talked about how he was hit in the head; and the attending physician reported to insiders that Grant had cranial swelling due to bullet(s) in the brain.

Wha????

I'm not looking for excessive gore or anything (even though this is a 10pm show), but if you're going to be talking about headshots, don't we need to see, I don't know, a head injury??? And if you don't want to spoil Tony Goldwyn's looks, then why have it be a head wound? Why not just have the doctor say that the president has a bullet near his heart and build suspense that way?

***

Okay, now to my speculation about how it ends. So far, we know there's a big conspiracy that includes Olivia Pope, the President's Chief of Staff Cyrus Beene, a Supreme Court Justice, and scary businessman Hollis Doyle, which appears to have rigged the voting machines in a key county in Ohio to steal the election for Grant. Doyle arranged for a bomb to kill eight people, some of whom were connected to the vote-stealing plot but others of whom were innocent; and the whole incident was pinned on an innocent woman, who involuntarily underwent an identity change and is now working for Olivia Pope. The conspiracy may be starting to unravel, as Beene's husband (an investigative reporter) is on to the rigged machine story, as is an Assistant U.S. Attorney.

I'm guessing that in the end, which I hope is not for a few seasons, the conspiracy turns on itself. Pope is the star of the show, so I imagine she will end up cooperating with the AUSA to bring the others to justice. Cyrus Beene is a likeable character, so I think he will end up being killed by Doyle, and that will be what spurs Pope to cooperate with the government. The Supreme Court Justice is somewhat likeable, so it's unlikely that Pope would want to destroy her, but the justice is also suffering from cancer, so she'll probably just die of that.

Hopefully we'll get to see if I'm right (i.e., the show gets to end on its own terms, rather than getting canceled/non-renewed).

NBC's "Grimm" & fictionalized execution drama

Tonight's episode of NBC's "Grimm" relied heavily on an impending execution for narrative drama . . . . Of course, the show makes a big deal about its Portland setting (much appreciated!), with shout-outs to local institutions like Voodoo Donuts and the like. So whereas I wouldn't ordinarily nitpick too much about the finer legalities (okay, maybe I would), this is an instance where reality and fiction clash too much to ignore.

Specifically: (1) Governor Kitzhaber has issued a moratorium on all executions during his term in office, which lasts for two more years, so in fact, there would be no execution at all; and (2) the only two people on Oregon's death row to be executed since 1976 were "volunteers" -- meaning they waived their appeals.

I guess it's possible that the show takes place in the near future . . . .

The iPhone 4S and that "Talking Tina" episode of "The Twilight Zone"

Remember the "Talking Tina" episode of "The Twilight Zone"?

Well, that's a little like how I felt earlier this weekend. We were wondering why my wife's data usage had gone through the roof ever since she switched to an iPhone 4S a little over a month ago. She doesn't stream videos or music, doesn't video chat, or do anything that hogs data. At home, she uses wi-fi. And yet Verizon was sending alerts every other day about how close she was getting to exceeding the 2 GB limit.

When I checked the data usage info on our account, I saw that the phone was sending out huge amounts of data in the middle of the night! (When it should have been using wi-fi, no less.)

A call to Verizon didn't really help, as they suggested "restoring" the phone, and/or turning Siri off. Apple apparently had a software issue in earlier operating systems where the phone claimed to be using wi-fi, but was still on 3G. Maybe that would help, but what was the phone doing in the middle of the night???

Googling -- love the irony there, using Google to figure out what was wrong with the iPhone -- identified a likely source of the problem: the iPhone supposedly sends error reports back to Apple. What kind of stupid phone sends so many error reports that it causes users to exceed the data limit???

As I ranted about its stupid engineering, my wife's iPhone all of a sudden came awake by itself! (cue Twilight Zone music)

I was just waiting for it to say, "Hi, my name is Siri, and I don't like you at all."

Double yikes!! But anyway, turning off the error reporting has solved our data usage problem. For my part, though, I am even more pleased to have a Samsung Galaxy Nexus.

New TV shows, DVRs, Nielsen ratings, and the vicious cycle

I'm not a Nielsen viewer (i.e., one of the families that AC Nielsen uses to sample television viewing), but there's no reason to think that Nielsen viewers wouldn't behave similarly to me when it comes to new shows. And when it comes to new, serialized dramas, the last thing you want to do is to watch a show, fall in love with it, and see it get cancelled after three episodes.

Now, sometimes you can just spot a complete loser show from the start and avoid it. Last year, one of the networks thought it could capitalize on the "Mad Men" 60s-retro nostalgia with "The Playboy Club." Um, yeah. (Maybe something like that would work on cable TV. Regular broadcast TV, though?!?) I was certain it was going to die a quick death, and indeed, it lasted just three episodes.

On the other hand, there have been new serials that critics have adored, but that the general audience has ignored. If you think airing just three episodes is pretty bad, take a look at "Lone Star," which lasted just two! (But the critics loved it!)

Knowing that networks sometimes have itchy trigger fingers when it comes to eating the sunk costs of a destined loser show, viewers like me have developed defense mechanisms . . . like not watching a new show until there's reason to believe it will survive the first season. (Even that is no guarantee, as "FlashForward" started off with an incredibly awesome pilot, steadily lost viewers and logic-comprehending writers or something, and devolved into a mess by the end of the first season, at which time ABC mercifully decided not to renew it.) Even shows that make it past the first season can disappoint, as "V" somehow got to two seasons, only to fail to get renewal, even as it ended on a massive cliffhanger. (Or not -- I guess the show ended with the Vs having won, and humanity on the road to enslavement or being cooked for dinner.)

Anyway, one of the new shows that the critics lavished praise on this season was ABC's "Last Resort," which, I gather, is something like the movie "Crimson Tide" crossed with the TV show "Lost." The premise is that a US Navy sub gets orders to launch its thermonuclear warheads at Pakistan, but the crew refuses to do so and ends up on the run from other US warships, eventually settling on an island run by a dictator. Wow! Nuclear weapons, military drama, island setting, and no doubt political intrigue and hints of conspiracies. Sounds great, sign me up!

Except, let me wait to see how it does before getting invested in it.

And how it's been doing is . . . not good. Actually, "not good" would be a pretty good showing for it, at this point. Its ratings have been disastrously bad. I'm surprised it hasn't been yanked from the schedule yet.

Now, in the pre-DVR days, I would've had to watch the show live and just accept the risk of being disappointed when a show I was invested in got cancelled. Or I could have saved it on videotape, but it wasn't always possible to record one show and watch a different one. (It depended on the cable set-up.) With TiVo or any other DVR, however, I can record "Last Resort" and save it on the DVR's hard drive while I watch other shows, either live or recorded.

So I now have 5 episodes of "Last Resort" saved up. You can see the vicious cycle at work here. If lots of people wait to see how the show does, then the show can't do well, because there aren't that many people actually watching it live for the ratings. And then the show gets cancelled . . . .

I don't know what the solution is, but I guess I am part of the problem. (Except I'm not, because I'm not a Nielsen viewer.)