Thread: The TV Thread
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Old 2010.06.01, 01:04 AM   #59
TeslaGuy
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I was intrigued by V when it was originally touted as a reprise of the serviceable, but kind of lame mid-eighties mini-series. Good aliens turn out to be evil aliens and we struggle and then eventually win. That sounded like good cheap fun. But when I found out that it was being renewed I was bummed. I'm undoubted biased as I remember the really pretty dumb original, and was perhaps naively hoping that the creators of V2.0 would re-interpret this 1950's vintage, barely drive-in movie worthy, silly sci-fi trope, juice it with some awesome 2010 special effects, and create something modestly awesome. But that was obviously silly of me. If the evil aliens actually win, I'll watch a rerun of that episode. Bit I'll skip the rest.

Ugly Betty reboot movie? That would be excellent. What I really hope is that it's awesome actors, writers, and designers will now be afforded the opportunities to do some more remarkable things.

Fringe. I have so many high hopes for this show. It is bursting with talent. So far, so good.

Jersey Shore. I just recently became aware of this, but hey, I'm a generation removed. When I was in my early twenties, lowbrow popular culture was metaphorically equivalent to a swarm of annoying gnats that I had to continually bat away from my face, unavoidably omnipresent, but a generation later, with so much intriguing information spilling in from everywhere that competes for my attention, I am sometimes behind the times. I wake up to NPR radio, click on NYT and WPost, and go.

Jersey Shore was intriguing. A melange of the unknown and familiar. As a college student, I had a memorable Mid-Atlantic boardwalk beach summer in Ocean City Maryland, but we didn't have any "guidos". I never even heard of the term until many years later. No one was ethnocentric, we we all just 21 and doing what ever we damn well pleased, within reason (usually).

I heard "guido" the first time some 17 years later. I had just moved up to Brooklyn, NYC, and was initially staying with a friend at the war zone edge of a decent neighborhood. I guess I was a bit unprepared, and was surprised that all street level businesses rolled down thick steel shutters at the end of the day. And when cars zoomed down deserted Fifth Avenue around midnight, blasting angry urban music off of the armored, reflective street level surfaces and into their 5th story loft, my friend's wife said "fucking guidos!". And I said,"what's a giudo?" She then went off on a rather indelicate diatribe about how they were arrogant, reprehensibly ignorant Southern Italian scum. Oh.

---Let me say right now that she was not American. Maybe French, maybe German, (those specifics are inconsequential), but certainly a New Yorker as that label transcends origin. Caustic but not hyperbolic. Probably a bit mean and unkind. But raw and honest.---

But anyway, I watched some of this Jersey Shore show, and it was taking place in Seaside Heights, the hometown of my best friend in my freshman year in college. Al DelMonte. Italian-American. Jersey Shore born and bred. A champion goalie. And really bright.

And proudly Jersey. What was Jersey to him?
Bruuuuuuce!
Springsteen.

A dude who was working his ass off for four hours on stage and giving his fans more than what they paid for.

Real New Jersey is so not these transient jokers, but there are an awful lot of them, unfortunately.

So, whatever, I've known Jersey shore guys and been exposed to some real guidos too, and know that this audience is probably astute enough to recognize that MTV is forced to dredge deeper each time they have a hit.

Can American TV ever get possibly better or worse? Yes.

Last edited by TeslaGuy : 2010.06.01 at 01:18 AM.
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