$#*! I Saw On TV Last Night

While I was anxiously awaiting the season premiere of Fringe last night, N. happened to notice "$#*! My Dad Says" in the TV guide that hovered before our eyes.

What better way to kill a half an hour, which would otherwise seem like an eternity as I counted the nanoseconds between 8:30 and 9:00? When the fate of Olivia Dunham, trapped in a a bizarro universe, facing such threats as brainwashing, a partner she doesn't have in her own universe, who will probably become a super-villian like Darkman because of a time travel accident that left his face horribly mutated, and her mother who is dead in her own world? How will she survive? Will she become bizarro Olivia???

Anyway, so I watched "Bleep My Dad Says," as they called it on TV last night.

I knew right then, before the show even started, that things weren't going well.

They said bleep.

They didn't even say "shiz" or "stuff" or, really, anything other than "bleep" which just sounds so...

Lame.

The premise is pretty simple. Kid in his mid-20's loses his job and has to move in with Dad. Dad's an old curmudgeon and doesn't make this easy. Though it sounds mind-bogglingly one dimensional, it is. Not that many a fine show wasn't based on a stupid premise. Take "Seinfeld," for example. Sadly, this is no "Seinfeld."

William Shatner didn't come close to saving it. I love him to death. He brings charm, wit and flair to almost everything he touches.

There were a couple laughs. Shatner successfully delivers a few of the watered-down raunchy truisms of the sort we have loved from the twitter feed that started it all. But watered down they were.

The edgiest things got was when the son (whose name I can't even remember) was taking too long to clean up the kitchen, and dad says, "How can you still be cleaning? We just had dinner, we didn't accidentally kill a hooker." That was kind of funny.

Compare that to this scene from Family Guy, more than a decade ago. Stewie is sitting on an actual hooker's lap and says, "Tell me the truth. Is there any tread left at all, or is it like throwing a hot dog down a hallway?"

Now that is disgusting, shocking, and hilarious. And technically not in violation of Federal broadcast laws.

The only hope for this show is that it becomes a new Married with Children. If you have one-dimensional characters, boring stories, and no obvious direction to go that hasn't been well traveled by Three's Company, then you can still make it work by walking right up to the FCC line, bending over, and farting onto the other side.

There's a place for raunchy humor in our TV culture.

There's no place for raunchy humor with a G-rated filter.

This show has to get nasty or get lost.

Television, And Canada, Why Do You Keep Letting Me Down?

I should preface this post by noting that I have watched at least 30 hours of television in the last five days, so my standards had gotten pretty low. Ah yes, the joy of having the flu. You can't read 'cause it makes your head hurt and you can only sleep so many hours. So it's back to that old "friend" cable television.

Somehow I ended up watching the last bit of some awful miniseries called "The Last Templar." I did this because I have always had a soft spot for quasi-religious mystical yarns like The Prophecy and The Da Vinci Code and The Omen. Too bad they often turn out to suck. This one was no exception.

What seemed promising when I first started watching was that it appeared that the entire point of the movie was to debunk the bible in it's entirety with the discovery of the actual diary of Jesus, apparently lost at the bottom of the ocean when some ship sank two thousand years ago. This gospel would in fact prove that the bible is a load of BS. This should be obvious already to anyone who's actually read the Bible, but as we all know, there are at millions upon millions of people who apparently can't smell a tall tale very easily. So this little scrap of paper would once and for all be the conclusive proof that the Christianity is, in fact, based on a load of horse puckey.

So, this girl played by Mira Sorvino is off on a ship with her mentor, who is apparently the last Templar, to find this manuscript. There's some assorted swashbuckling involving an evil priest along the way, but the good guys finally prevail. But just as they finally pull this diary thing up from the bottom of the ocean, of course there's a massive storm and the ship sinks. Impossibly, out of all the people on the ship, it seems that only our hero, this girl played by Mira Sorvino, and her boyfriend have survived, but are stranded on some Greek island. Unfortunately the boyfriend is in a coma. Amazingly, after never believing in God for a day in her adult life, Sorivino is convinced by the shiftless peasant who lives on this island -- off of the free food and clothing given to him by visitors who oddly respect his decision to do absolutely nothing productive, I might add -- that there is a god and she needs to pray to him.

Umm, yeah. I get told by lunatics on the street all the time that they are Jesus. They also can't feed themselves, it should be noted.

So off she goes and prays to the sea, and lo and behold what should she find washed up on shore during one of these excursions? The lost scroll of Jesus, safe and sound.

I admit I am stupid for having watched even this far. I should have known it was going to go horribly wrong, but I was slightly delirious, OK? So here's how it ends.

• Mira opens the scroll.
  
• At exactly the moment when she's going to read it, the Templar suddenly appears, alive, looking slightly sun-crazed.
  
• They are conveniently on the edge of a giant cliff and it is windy.
  
• Mira starts to read, but for some reason decides after looking for this thing her entire life, she doesn't want to know what it says.
  
• Templar tries to take it from her
  
• Mira has decided that it's more important for the entire world to continue their delusion than have access to an actual historic document
  
• She refuses to give it to him and throws it into the wind where it blows over the cliff edge into the ocean
  
• Templar guy dives after it, killing himself on the rocks at the bottom of the cliff.
  
• The world is spared the horrible, horrible truth, so everyone is able to go on picking daisies and killing people who don't believe in their particular BS-based religion.
  

At this point I turned it off. You bastards. You just had to go there, didn't you? I saw it coming, of course, I just didn't want to believe it was going to be yet another vomitous finding-faith load of crap. And somehow they make the guy who's just trying to find out the truth look like the bad guy - because he wants to take away everyone's little dream world where the bible is real, there really is some guy who takes care of you when you pray and gives people AIDS, and generally allows people to avoid responsibility for their actions.

And they validate all that. They dragged us through this whole absurd 4 hour miniseries (of which I feel lucky to have only seen the last 40 minutes) -- just to have the world's biggest Atheist find religion in her moment of vindication.

All I can say is, this drek is absolute proof that THERE IS NO GOD or if there is, then he is one mean-spirited son of a bitch. A truly good deity would never have allowed this to air.

One final remark: Wikipedia says the Canadians made this thing. Canada, I have to say, the list of your offenses just keeps getting longer. You may have apologized for Bryan Adams but this time you've gone too far.