Reality TV, Glee, and Jealousy

I’ve watched a few TV shows die over the years.  I caught Firefly when it was first shown out of order, and tried to get people to watch, only no one would listen.  Now, ten years later, people are still wandering up to me and asking if I’ve seen it yet.

I used to rant more about it.  I do it less now.

I also caught a show called Drive, which was cancelled after four episodes, with two never making it to air (you can buy all six online).  And Wonderfalls, which ran four episodes, and then wandered onto DVD as a complete 13 episode tale.

That one was mind-blowing to me, with the series not even getting to the halfway point.  And it was a solid series, that later developed a touch of a cult following.  You can still get it on DVD even as I type this.

Most of those shows, however, didn’t go quite so quietly as one I ran across recently.  A short little series called The Next Big Thing: NY.

I found the way the show was handled fascinating, though frankly I didn’t like the show much.  It was a reality series that mostly followed this guy named Trapper, who is some kind of musical mentor/manager type.  He had a cadre of kids, and spent his time coaching them towards musical endeavors, like making albums and getting on Broadway.

Some of his kids have been on commercials and in movies and such as well, but I don’t know if he had anything to do with that.

Trapper might be good at what he does, and in fact he must be, because he has two assistants and a massive rehearsal area, and knowing what it costs to rent space in New York the guy has to be doing well for himself.

But man, what a not-fun guy to watch.  He yells a lot, frequently at his performers.  And at least two plotlines involved him lying to people in elaborate ways for reasons I didn’t understand.  As in, he told a producer that one of his kids was also part of a sister singing act.  Only they weren’t.  So he got the kids and made them into an act.

And then he held some benefit and used it entirely as an excuse to show off his kid collection, in hopes that they would get more work, because of course that means he gets more money as well.  Or not.  The show didn’t exactly explain that.

The point is, I can’t say that I could spend time with him in real life.

And then there are the kids.  A couple of them, I really liked.  They were down to earth, funny, talented, and working hard to get jobs.

But some of them.  Ugh.  In particular, one girl was like a real-life Veruca Salt.  She spent her dad’s money recording pop songs and making a music video (more on that in a moment) and she got some sort of massive party for her 17th birthday, where she also got to perform with her girl group and with some guy she liked, and her mom made sure that a bunch of buff dudes were walking around in their underwear serving people.

(One hopes that they were informed, vigorously, that most of the girls at the party were underage.)

Oh, and when she was told there would be a party, she was mad that there were only going to be 100 people there.  Yes.

Now, granted, I don’t think these people were Jersey Shore hateful, and maybe that’s why the show failed.  It was a behind the scenes show with people who didn’t suck enough to be interesting, or who you cared about enough to, well, care.

And then there was the scheduling.

The show debuted right after The Glee Project, which is a fairly plum spot, and pretty well-matched, what with the whole kids and show business thing.  But then, well, things went South in a hurry.

Next ran after Project for two weeks.  Then, the third week, it was shoved to Wednesday, at six PM.  Granted, they tossed a promo up during Project to alert you to this fact, but it was clear it was a last-minute shrug of a decision, throwing this show into a time slot no one was watching or looking for it. 

It ran there for another week, bringing the number of aired episodes to four.  Then, the next week, it aired an episode at 5 PM, and the second at 6 PM, and that was the finale, and boom, the show was over.

Yikes.

Granted, I already stated I wasn’t much of a fan of the show, but I was curious just how dire the whole thing was.  So I hopped on YouTube to find out whatever happened to the music video I wrote about a handful of paragraphs ago.

Now, it’s worth noting that the video was by the Veruca Salt girl, that it looks reasonably professional, and that the song was reasonably catchy.  Neither great nor awful. 

Two days after the episode aired, it had a few hundred views.

A week later, it had barely cracked 1000. 

I gotta be honest, I felt both good and horrible about this.  The fact is, a large chunk of the video was shown on a TV show on a cable channel.  That’s a major, major push.  Short of hiring a major music producer/director, which would probably run into the millions of dollars, this thing had some serious backing.

And yet, maybe 1500 people have looked at it.  That’s not going viral.  That’s going anti-viral.

Despite the fact that I didn’t care for the show, I stated that I felt a little bad for the people involved, and I stand by that.  A bunch of people made the show, and they had jobs, and now they don’t.  Some of these people seem genuinely nice, and fun, and talented, and they had gotten on TV, and that’s going to lead them pretty much nowhere, because no one was watching.

I’ll come back to that, too.

I already mentioned The Glee Project, which I’m watching again because my wife wants to and now it’s half-over anyway, so I guess we should just wait and see what happens, y’know?   I mean, we’re almost there.

We’re talking, of course, about a show that’s tied to another show that’s slowly dying, and I joked with my wife that the stars of Glee are a lot more willing to drop by for a visit because they need the money now that they’re off the show.  Or about to be off the show, when it finally limps off the air a year from now having created just enough episodes to make it to syndication.

This year, there are a lot of talented people on the show, and the singing is often first-rate.  So that’s nice.

But something is kind of off about the show, and it took me a while to figure out what it is, and really, there’s a bizarre letdown factor here.

Last year was kind of exciting.  They were coming off year two of Glee, the ratings were way, way, up, and the Project itself had a few fun twists in it.  Four winners (kinda).  The return of all the kids at the end, so everyone could cheer their friends.

There were moments.  And now, we see those moments again, and they’ve lost some of their luster.

There are other issues, of course.  After last year, it’s clear that we’re not watching a singing competition, so much as we’re watching Ryan trying to turn these people into characters he can pop into his show.  He’s not collecting talent so much as he’s collecting dolls.  (“Whoah, a Muslim!  I don’t have one of those yet!”)

And then there are the contestants, who keep talking about how badly they want this, about how important this role is, and then one of them flat-out admits they’ve never heard a particular song, only it was on Glee, so clearly they aren’t what you’d call a huge fan.

I’ll be curious to see if they’re putting up casting notices for a third year of this show, when the finale hits in a handful of weeks.

Speaking of things going through a revamp, people are now backing out of American Idol, now that the mutual fame bump has carried everyone as far as they can go.  Steven is back together with his band, and they’re heading out on the road.  The bad news is, they’re also putting out a new album, and the song they sang on Idol demonstrated that their songwriting chops have taken a serious hit.

On the other hand, they’ve got an hour of hits and more than a handful of filler, and they’ll make some money and that will be nice for them.

And Jennifer, of course, has this other TV show, and a new boyfriend, so she’s stepping down too.

There’s talk of Randy leaving as well.

Oddly, I was just having a conversation with some friends, wherein we were talking about when enough is enough.  I joked to my wife that if they offered me 16 million dollars to do Idol for a year, she should let me do it.  Even if I’m not home for seven months straight, at the end we’re set for life.

Randy has 11 years in now, and I’m sure his checks have gotten sizeable.  His coffers are filled.  And this is his side job.  He can wander away from everything secure in the knowledge that both he and his kids will never, ever, ever have to work again.

Of course, there’s a bigger question there.  If he leaves, would it help the show?  Would Fox get two more years if he left, and they brought in all new judges?  Would the show finally sink to the point where they decide to get rid of it?

How much does the nation love Randy Jackson?

For that matter, how much does the nation love the idols they picked?  There are 11 of them now, and a bunch of people who lost who are still doing pretty well for themselves. 

That’s the thing of it, really.  I find myself looking at all these people, on all these shows, and all of them want to be stars.  They want to get out into the world, and be creative, and be loved for it.  And maybe they don’t need to be rich, or really famous, they need just enough love that they don’t have to go into an office each day.

And maybe that’s what kind of tears at me, as I watch these people, on shows both well-loved and massive and barely noticed and forgotten.

It’s that two-sided thing, where you see people getting there, becoming someone who just gets to wake up every day and do what they wanna do, and you think, “I could do that.  Why don’t I get that?  What do they have that I don’t?”

And you see them fail, and you kind of laugh, and say, “I don’t get this, and you don’t get it either, so at least the world is kind of fair for a moment.”

It’s a strange thing, really, the human mind, that it wants people to succeed because it means you can, and then you want them to fail because someone has something you don’t.

A Nice Man Makes Me Feel Stupid

Donald J. Sobol was probably the first man to ever make me feel stupid.

Granted, I don’t think he did it on purpose.  But at some point in my young life, one of his Encyclopedia Brown books was thrust into my hands. 

The format of the book was simple.  Various short mysteries were presented, and then Encyclopedia Brown would make some sort of vague statement, and then, if you were very, very, very smart, you (and Encyclopedia, naturally) would solve the case.

Of course, if you couldn’t figure it out, you could always flip to the back and learn the answer.

Over the years, I read several of the books, and I can count the number of times I solved a mystery on one hand.  Actually, I can count the number of times I solved a mystery on no hands.

I never solved a single mystery.

Really.  Not one. 

What’s worse is, over the years, some of the books got new titles, or were reissued with new artwork, and I’d find myself sitting at home reading a mystery I’d already read once before.

And then I would fail to solve the same mystery a second time.

One would think this would cause me to give up on the mystery genre altogether, but no.  Over the years, I read several books of this type, and I almost always failed to beat the book at its own game.

Granted, this wasn’t really my fault.  Most of the mysteries involved knowing some totally random fact that a kid my age had no reason to know. 

Ultimately, I was much more entranced by the companion volumes the author produced, which went under the title of Weird and Wonderful facts.  It was trivia stuff, with no real agenda or story beyond, “Here’s some crazy stuff about the world we live in.”

And perhaps that’s what I took away from Mr. Sobol, in the end.  I might not have gotten to feel “smart” reading his books, as I got mystery after mystery wrong.  But I certainly learned a few things.

And what can be better than a little failure and a little knowledge?

A new Encyclopedia Brown book came out a couple of years ago, after a very, very long hiatus.  I considered picking it up at the time, but in the end realized that certain childhood pleasures aren’t always as much fun as an adult.

But maybe now I’ll pick up the book, just to see if I really am older and wiser now than I was then.

And hey, even if I’m not, I’ll still learn a thing or two.

My Flash Mob Story

Okay, I’m just going to admit that it’s been way too long since I updated here.

Subsequently, if you come back here from time to time, you will now be subjected to a story that I have quite literally never told anyone:

The Time I Was In a Flash Mob

Now, there’s a bit of backstory here, so hold on for a moment.

First, the term Flash Mob didn’t exist when I did this, which might explain why I sort of mentally filed it away and forgot about it (there’s another reason, but I’ll come to it at the end).  The world of YouTube and cheap digital cameras has made it easy to capture and upload these types of things for the world to see.

But this was back in, I’m going to say, 1992.  If my research is accurate, the name Flash Mob didn’t exist until 2003.  And if anyone had videotaped the one I was in, trying to get anyone a copy would have required multiple VCRs and a lot of free time and postage expenses. 

It was a one-shot deal, it was over in two minutes, and then I totally forgot about it.

Here’s how it happened (more backstory, folks!).

Starting in the summer after eighth grade, I began attending a music camp every year.  I would pack up, my family and I would drive to the campus it was held on, they’d drop me off on a Sunday and then come back and get me on a Saturday.

The upshot was, when they came back, they got to see me perform in whatever I’d signed up for.

The rule was, you had to be in at least one large group (choir, band or orchestra) and then you could either take classes or sign up to be in another, smaller group.  I usually did the latter, with Musical Theater being my additional choice.

I just realized, about five minutes ago, that this meant I memorized anywhere from 30-40 minutes of music, plus some dance steps, in five days every year for four years.  I suddenly find the performers on American Idol a lot less impressive.

Anyway.

I passed on musical theater one year so I could take some extra classes.  In particular, 20th Century Music, Commercial Composition, and Choral Choreography.

I took the last class because I was, at that juncture, preparing myself to be a music teacher.  I figured as long as I was there, I might as well learn something that could help me in my future career.  Good gravy, I’m a boring dude.

So, I took the class.  Much of it was about ideas.  Ways to make another concert by a bunch of high school kids more exciting, either through basic choreography, costumes, or staging.  We did some of each. 

And in the middle of it all, we did some dancing.

The man leading the class was, in my estimation, a brilliant dude who had clearly been teaching for a long time and who had a ton of ideas to fall back on.  One of his suggestions was choosing a popular song, locating the music video for that song, and stealing the choreography of the video for your presentation.

Well, he probably said borrowing, but there you go.

In this case, he had selected the Janet Jackson song Rhythm Nation.

By that time, the album was a couple of years old, but it was one of those releases that had clearly grabbed the public consciousness.  It had gone platinum six times.  Everyone at the camp knew it, because all of us were teenage kids deep in the maw of pop culture.

Thinking back on it, I’m especially impressed that he chose a song by a black artist, making it a song all of us, regardless of ethnic background, probably knew it.

He spent a handful of minutes explaining that music videos are, of course, all about takes.  Everyone stands, then falls to their knees, and they do that six times and then they take the one where everyone hits the ground at the same time.

He also explained that no one can dance that much and sing.  In concert, all the people in the back would be dancing like mad while Janet stood up front singing and keeping a basic beat.  It sounds obvious, of course, but something about hearing it stated crystallized it for us. 

He then went through the first couple of minutes of the video, pausing and showing how he broke down the choreography bit by bit, wrote it down, and adapted it for an actual stage with no camera moves.

And we started learning it, one step at a time.

We didn’t do the whole song.  All told, we learned about 80 seconds of actual choreography, along with some simplified dance moves that could be applied to this or any other song.

And then we were stuck.  What to do with this new knowledge?  After all, if you learn how to dance, and show no one, what was the point, really?

The teacher mentioned that there was a courtyard outside the main building where we all ate.  If we waited until the last 15 minutes of the lunch period, we could perform this newly acquired move-busting for a few hundred other kids and teachers.  We all thought this was swell.

He then emphasized that this should be a secret, in order for it to have the most impact.

So we ate, we went to the courtyard, and we waited for the teacher to press play.

What do I remember about it?  I remember being curious about the reaction.  I remember the moment the music started, and about how we’d all been instructed to walk, as through mesmerized, to our appointed dancing place.

I also remember hearing some kid, off on the sidelines, remark to one of my classmates that “he knew some choreography for this song, if you want to learn it.”

Mostly, I remember it being over quickly.  The song started, we walked to our spots, we started dancing, I tried to remember everything I was doing, and then at the end of our routine, the music was still going, and we didn’t have a plan.

So the song kept playing, and we all wandered off in various directions, and then it was over with the firm click of a Stop button.

Was there applause?  Shock?  Surprise?  Did anyone tell me how awesome it was?  I don’t recall, which I suspect means that it wasn’t all that interesting to people.  It was, after all, a music camp.  People constantly burst into song spontaneously, so why NOT have a dance number?

Weirdly, I can’t even remember how well or poorly I danced.  I’m not all that great a dancer, and all I really remember was that the girl next to me was generally worse at remembering her moves, so my only hope was to be better by comparison.

It ended, and we went to class.

Back when the movie Once won an Academy Award for best song, the guy who wrote and sang it got all giddy and called out, “Make Art!”  The problem with art is, of course, that even if you create it, no one has to look at it or care about it.

I went to multiple concerts in college that were attended by less than 20 people.  The folks performing were talented and fun, but people were either busy, or just didn’t care.

And so I wonder: Is it worth it?  Probably to musicians.  They were crossing the country and I’m sure they got paid for the night, regardless of the number of people in the audience.

But for a bunch of kids in a courtyard, with no money coming in?  No fame?  Did we gain anything?

I dunno.

I guess what I’m asking is, what does it mean when you put your art into the world, and is received with a shrug?

Also, I’m glad YouTube didn’t exist in 1992.  Because seriously, I’m not sure anyone wants to see my flailing like that.

What I'm Watching: The End (For Now)

It’s always strange to get to the end of the TV year.  May sweeps ends today, at which point everyone will know what they can charge people of advertising.
So now, a wrap-up.  Of sorts.
The Walking Dead:
The season ended.  It was slow, but it held a few surprises back and went for the season-ending shocks, and next year they’ll bring in two of the most iconic, well-loved characters from the comic, along with the prison.
People keep hoping for more from this show, but AMC would rather put the big money into other things.  That’s fine.  Next season will also be the same combination of fun and boring that this one was.  People will watch, and if the show improves, they’ll hang around a few more years.
But if next year is boring, I suspect we’ll see the ratings start to erode, and quickly, as the prison is kind of the last bit people have been waiting for.  (At least, from what I’ve seen.)
Spartacus:
Hands down my favorite show on right now.  Great writing, surprises that are actually surprising, really well-done action.  If the show has a flaw, it’s that the CGI is going to age very badly.  I don’t care.  If you can handle a show that’s very R rated, you need to check this out now.  Right now.
Game of Thrones:
My wife nailed this one.  Inevitably, we’ll get to the end of every 55 minute episode and go, “What?  That’s it?  It’s over?”
Apparently it’s the most expensive show on TV, and HBO sunk of bunch of extra money into a big upcoming battle. 
All that said, even with a massive budget, it isn’t a movie budget, and sometimes the seams are going to show.
Well, okay.  I’m good with it.  This is almost certainly the best possible version of these stories we’re ever going to get onscreen, and I’m really enjoying myself.
Glee:
I wrote a huge essay (actually, two) about all the problems with Glee, and, well, here we are, and it’s the end of the third season. 
The show has wandered to a lot of places I think we’d rather all forget by now, but it nailed a lot of solid emotional moments in its finale.  It even had the guts to (turn away if you don’t wanna know) take a hammer to the Kurt/Finn/Rachel trio, in the best and worst possible way.
I wish there was a way to start an anti-write-in campaign.  The season ended beautifully, with only a little plot thread stupidity, and Rachel walking into New York City was an image that would have ended the show in the perfect way.
Next year, the show will come back, and all the issues will still be in place, plus new ones created by the fact that the show just can’t let Rachel walk off into that final image.  Ah well.
American Idol:
Eh.  Today, either Jessica or Phillip will win.  Jessica’s song was eh, and Phillip reminded me of a cross between Willy Porter and Rich Mullins, both of who create okay albums that contain three or four sparkling, perfect gems.
Actually, I just want Phillip to win so I can hear his song a second time.  That would be nice.
Modern Family:
Still funny.  Still a strong show, though you can tell when the writers are really trying and when they just need to get another episode out.
Pretty sure it’ll make it seven years.  Maybe ten.  Can’t say I’m looking forward to the “unexpected pregnancy” plotline that’ll happen around year five or six, when they’re dying for new plotlines.
The Big Bang Theory:
Still a show that’s about “nerds” that contains mostly easy nerd jokes.  They broke 100 episodes this season, and the show continues to pull huge ratings, even as it exits its fourth year.
I sometimes feel a sense of ambivalence about this show.  And yet I watch because every once in a while they nail a joke so hard I have to stop the show so I can laugh.  This one will run ten years, I’m sure.
Parks and Rec:
Thanks to Idol and Big Bang and The Vampire Diaries and Parks and Rec all being on all being on at the exact same time, I’m just now starting this season.
Four episodes in, and I’m just so very happy to have it back.  It gets everything right that Big Bang gets wrong, from creating a true ensemble cast to using brilliant political satire without drawing attention to itself.
Maybe next year I’ll try to find a way to roll Big Bang off the DVR and watch it over the summer instead.
Or perhaps not.  This is a show that’s fun to gulp.
The Vampire Diaries:
The other day, I wrote and deleted 1500 words talking about the various flaws Diaries has slowly introduced over the last half-season.  It’s always been a lightning fast show, telling everyone where they shouldn’t go, and then going there two episodes later.
It’s still doing that now, but it’s rapidly running out of shocks and cast members.  I started writing about it, planning to put together a series of thoughts and complaints and praises, and then I realized it was 1500 words long and I was nowhere near an ending and I erased it.
Look: The show is going into a loop now.  They spent a season building up The Originals, and a second season fighting them, and now we’re going to blunder right into a third season that will involve fighting them some more.
They’ve now dragged out the whole “the girl must choose between the two brothers” thing for three seasons now, and that’s also going to get stale pretty quick.
Also, the show is approaching supernatural critical mass.  We’re down to one frequently used character (Matt) who isn’t supernatural or in possession of a Supernatural ability.   And if they’re going to take Elena in the direction it looks like they’re taking her, she is probably going to get even more mope-y.
In other words, this is now a very, very tall house of cards.  In the past, they’ve managed to reinforce and keep on stacking the cards.  But soon, and possibly very soon, they’re going to either need to blow it all up and start over with something cooler, or watch it hit an unbreakable wall, and then the cards will start to slip and it’s not going to be fun or pretty.
The Secret Circle:
Circle was cancelled at the end of the year, and I’m still not sure whether they made the right call on that one.
Part of the reason I’m not sure is that I’m behind on the show.  We let it stack up for a long time while we watched other things, and then came the depths of winter, when nothing else is on, and we caught up.  Then everything else returned and it sat there and sat there, and now we’ve got most of the back half of the season to watch.
Will it be worth it?  I dunno.  There were some really good episodes in there, but no great ones.  I’ve read that there are some very good episodes yet to come, but I’m guessing we’ll watch it to the end and delete the last episode with no regrets.
Supernatural:
Somewhere around season five this was my favorite show.  Six was good.  Seven was better.  As my friend Avi says, a lot of good episodes, some very good, and no bad.  Every new season is a gift.
Sometimes you can really see the budget cuts these days.  The final fight was three guys, and it lasted about sixty seconds.  Outside, someone fought an “army” of three people.
But still.  A good season with fun subtext (Americans are fat and lazy!) and a fun cliffhanger.  It’s coming back next year, and according to a friend of mine it’ll probably come back for another year after that. 
Much like Diaries, this has lost some of its appointment TV luster, and it’s no longer my Very Favorite Show, but it’s an incredibly fun way to spend 45 minutes, and I’m happy it’s coming back again.

Glee: Why Not End It Now?

I stick with things to the bitter end.  I was, for example, that guy who kept watching Heroes from week to week, even when my wife started saying things like, “Well, we have three now.  We may as well watch them and get it over with.”
Granted, in the end we got a few good, but not great, episodes.  An interesting story here and there.  And surprisingly, a fun setup for a fifth season that never happened. 
And then the show was gone, and we shrugged and got on with our lives.  Though I do enjoy the occasional internet poster who jokes, “It’s too bad Heroes was cancelled after its first season, it had such potential.”
Fox has gotten a little weird this year, racking and stacking their sitcoms for season finales, and maybe other reasons, I dunno.  But I had to laugh when my mother-in-law informed me that the season finale of Glee was last night.  Not because she was wrong, but because she was the fourth person I had encountered who was wrong.
Nope.  Rest assured, whatever Glee fans are still out there: Next week is the season finale.
A few months ago, I wrote a long essay that detailed the various problems with Glee, what might fix the problems, and listed the reasons that the problems won’t get fixed.  And most of my thoughts have proved to be more-or-less accurate.  But now we’ve had a couple of really good episodes, and I think it’s worth talking about what they’ve done with the show, and what they’re going to do to the show.
And how they haven’t fixed the show, but they patched up bits of it, so that maybe you’ll notice the wear a little less.
So let’s start with last night, where they gave us two episodes, one of which was a culmination of something they’ve been working for over the last three years.  They won nationals.  They won because they had to win, really.  That was sort of the point of the show.
But to the show’s credit, for a minute there, I thought they might lose.  Even after they won, I was waiting for it to all be one long dream sequence, and really they lost again and now they were seniors and they would never get to win, and that’s life.
(And that is life.  My home school football team didn’t build and build until my senior year, and then come out on top.  And even if they had, it meant that 10 or 15 or 20 other teams were NOT the winners that year.)
I kind of liked that ending in my head.  But no.  They won.  And Rachel, who lost her shot at going to the only school she tried to get into, never mind that there are probably two dozen schools just as good that she didn’t bother to audition for, got another chance to “audition,” which is something I figured out weeks ago. 
Granted, I had a whole different direction I wanted that to go, too, where Rachel DOESN’T get what she wants, and spends the next year of her life in New York watching her man and best friend succeed in numerous ways while she works as a maid.
And then, at the end, she begs April Rhodes just for a chance to work backstage at her still-a-smash show.  And it’s humiliating, yes, and it will be years before Rachel gets anywhere at all, yes, but she finally knows that she doesn’t get to be a special snowflake in New York, and things are not magically handed to her, and that you can break your back working at something and still fail.
I’d be more interested in that show than the one we’re going to get.
I digress.
Let’s go back to what they did right. 
The thing about Glee is, a lot of times the show forces its characters into various weird situations and then refuses to let anyone do anything an actual human would do.  And then we get something really nicely written, and we get to remember that these actors are really good at what they do when they get to do it.  This time around, we got to see Dot and Puck have this huge wonderful moment, and even if it got a little weird (Dot has a knife under her pillow?  Puck gets to retake a test because he showed passion?  Or something?) I didn’t care because they tapped an actual emotion.
And as far as I’m concerned, they’ve been on fire with the Mr. Shu storyline, as he’s come to realize his first real batch of kids is heading out into the world now.  I only taught for a year, but when you see a group of kids that often, you get enmeshed in what’s going on in their lives whether you want to or not.  There was a picture going around Facebook not long ago, about how teachers aren’t in it for the income, they’re in it for the outcome, and that’s true.
You meet these wonderful people and you become a part of their live for five hours a week, and you give them information and you root for them to succeed, or to do something cool, and then one day, they’re gone.
Glee is capturing that.  And Shu is a little over-the-top on that score, and is reaching a point where he could use some adult friends, but otherwise?  Nearly note perfect.
And Sue has gotten a fresh coat of spackle, which almost covers the dings, though not quite.  They got another character to slap her around a bit, and are trying to humanize her, using this weird baby thing.  I think they’re trying to pretend her bizarre run for a government slot never even happened, at this point.
And now there’s talk of what comes next.
Truth be told?  I wish there wasn’t a next, because I can’t see it ending well.
Because we’ve had our three years now, and it adds up to a complete, if somewhat random, story.  The team has won, and people are graduating, and the ratings have slipped quite a bit.  This week was pretty lovely, and next week will almost certainly tie up a few more plot threads before everyone goes off to live the rest of their lives.
It would be, as the saying goes, a good death.
There’s already retooling talk, as well.  The big three, Kurt, Finn, and Rachel, are all headed to New York, and now there’s babble about how instead of letting them leave, because their time is done, there’s going to be a “show within a show.”  There has been discussion about how this has “never been done before.”
But, um… No.  Degrassi did it for several seasons.  Kids graduated, and went to University.  And we followed everyone, and sometimes they intersected, but mostly they didn’t.
(Also, both shows used Perez Hilton, which to me is the final wink to the audience that, yeah, Glee is just wholesale taking ideas from Degrassi now, like the religious character struggling with faith issues, and the transgender character.)
I think in everyone’s mind, Glee was going to continue to be a huge hit this year, and next year the trio would get a show, and the Glee folks would keep their show, and sometimes they’d cross over.  It would be like Buffy and Angel, in a lot of ways.
But…  The ratings slipped, and now everything is all jumbled up.
And now Glee is being moved to Thursdays, where it will sit behind the results shows for The X Factor, which didn’t do all that well, and American Idol, whose ratings had eroded somewhat this year.
And with the last season being so downright bizarre, I wonder how many people are going to exit the Glee train after next week Tuesday?
You’ve got me.
One of the creators of the show, Ryan Murphy, has a new sitcom coming on the air next year, and another show besides.  If he’s smart, he’ll call up Fox and quietly ask to pull the plug.
If he doesn’t, I see a slow bleed, and maybe the show makes it through its fourth season and into syndication.  And yay if it does, I suppose.
But I imagine that a lot of people will stop now and, much like Heroes, go, “It was nice the way it ended.  Graduation, a passing of the torch to the next group of people.  Too bad we never got to see that…”

American Idol: Last Call

Here are a few thoughts to roll around in your brain:

In a couple of weeks, Kelly Clarkson will have been an American Idol winner for 11 years.  Probably 100 one-hit wonders have come and gone in that time, but Kelly stands firm.  Not bad for a girl who won a singing competition. 

What interests me most about this process is that when she auditioned, she was only up against about 10,000 people.  Now, contestants have to beat off more than ten times that amount to get to the top.

I remember someone joking, years ago, that everyone in the top ten would get a record deal.  I don’t think that was really true the first year, but it’s getting pretty close to that now, as record labels get more and more desperate for their artists to scratch and kick their way to selling a million units.  James, who was ejected last year, said with some pride that his album had sold about 100,000 units.

Something to be proud of?  Maybe.  But the guy had a national platform.  Millions of people voted for him to keep singing.  And in the end, despite getting a nice placement in Wal-Mart (a store that sells more CDs than any other in the country, I’d wager) he only moved 100,000 copies.

That’s kind of sad.  Par for the course, probably, but still kind of sad.

It also demonstrates one of the problems with the show, in that it doesn’t produce all that many idols.  Perhaps five people with any sticking power at all, many of whom lost the competition.

Which I guess brings me back to this year.

We’re down to the final three, which is nice because it means in two weeks the show will be over and done with and I can resume not thinking about any of these people.  It’s not that I hate them.  I just don’t care all that much.

As I stated some time ago, there has been talk of the show coming to an end, and I made an assumption and it appears I was wrong.  Turns out Ryan is making 16 million dollars a year on the show, which, frankly, seems a lot higher than it needs to be.  Apparently, Jennifer Lopez gets the same.

To which I must say: It’s strange how popularity feeds popularity.  Lopez’s movie career was pretty much at a standstill and her music career wasn’t much to write home about either, and then suddenly she’s on Idol and her records are selling and she’s on the cover of People and she gets a new show and so on and so on and so on.

Good for her, I guess. 

At any rate, here are the last three people:

Jessica:  I might have said this before, but it’s really been hitting me harder the longer I watch the show.  Jessica isn’t an artist, she’s a human jukebox. 

There’s a comedian who does a bit where he sings Bohemian Rhapsody in the voices of 24 different singers.  (Or more.  Or less.  I can’t remember off the top of my head.)  That’s Jessica.  She’s not up there feeding her emotions into the crowd.  No.  She’s offering up nearly note-perfect renditions of big hit songs.  It’s impressive, even kind of amazing.  But it’s also karaoke, and it’s not going to help her when someone hands her a new song and says, “Here, sing this.”

When I was in college, one of my singing teachers told me he’d had a student who didn’t want to learn how to pronounce the various languages.  He just figured he’d have his voice teacher read it off, and he’d learn it phonetically, and only use those songs for performances.

That’s Jessica, too.

She’s young.  That may change.  But my suspicion is that if she wins, and I don’t think she will, her album will tank, because it would be technically impressive and also very boring.

Phillip:  I know that Phillip hasn’t been well, having heard he underwent surgery.  But I heard, recently, that he’s been holding off having more surgery while he tries to make it through the competition.  That’s impressive, but it’s also a little crazy. 

To that end, I think it becomes very difficult to judge the guy.  It’s like watching a baseball player who broke his leg running the bases.  Do you applaud because he made it to second?  Do you complain because he didn’t make it to home?

Without seeing him at his best, there’s just no way to know.

He’s been hassled for not singing the melody, but when you literally can’t get your breath under you, it’s hard to fault you for being flat.

What most interests me now is, if he gets to release an album, what will it sound like?  I truly want to know.  Of the three, I might consider buying what he puts out.  But I’m not clamoring for it.

Joshua:  Jimmy nailed my thinking in three areas.  One: He doesn’t know who is going to win.  Two: Joshua’s version of one of James Brown’s signature tunes was amazing.  Three: And he doesn’t know what songs Joshua would record if he wins.

I suspect this is what kills a lot of people who just wanna be singers. Much the way a writers loves to write, a lot of singers just want to sing.  They don’t care all that much what, though they might have a few avoids.

So we’ll pretend, for a second, that Joshua really wants to be an old-fashioned soul singer, ala James Brown.

How do you sell that?  Who do you sell that to?  Jimmy said “maybe we’ll just record that song,” and okay, sure, you can, but putting out a string of karaoke-style tunes isn’t going to do much for your intended audience.

No.  It just isn’t.

So then what?

I dunno. I don’t have to sell the guy.  I think if they were smart, they’d let him be the next Reverend Al Green, and hope that his people find him.

In the end, I agree with Jimmy.  Any of these three could take it.  Phillip was in the bottom two last week, with Jessica already getting a save, and her and Joshua being so similar, I suspect Jessica is gone this week. 

Or perhaps I’m wrong.

As for the winner?  I’m going to give that to Joshua as well, only because I thought Phillip would have been gone long ago.

Best of luck, you silly little trio.  Hope you enjoy your upcoming obscurity…

Why MCA?

It’s weird.
I’m quite sure that my first memory of the Beastie Boys was You’ve Gotta Fight for Your Right to Party.  It has to be.  The song was everywhere, and even for a kid like me who barely listened to the radio, and never watched MTV (my parents didn’t allow it), you couldn’t escape the song.
It was the first time I ever remember anyone using a call-and-response, even.  In grade school, there was a field trip, and there we were at a skating rink, and some DJ would wait for the chorus, and say, “All right, EVERYONE” and all the kids would yell.  He’d dial down the actual rap portion, so the kids would go, YOU’VE GOTTA FIGHT (guitar riff) FOR YOUR RIGHT (guitar riff) TO PAAAAAAAARTAAAAAYYYYYY.
And this wasn’t some special version of the song, so he was just dialing the volume by hand, the buzz fading in and out.
I remember that.  I also remember taking a wrong turn and running into a girl’s ankle, and then standing there feeling helpless and ashamed as her friends took her away while she cried.  We’re Facebook friends now, so I guess she forgave me.
Paul’s Boutique came out, and was never quite as ubiquitous.  I didn’t hear it.  We were kids, we didn’t get what was happening, that music was going to be changed by samples, that the Boys got away with something by putting hundreds of samples on one record and not paying anyone a dime for them.  Today, I don’t know if anyone could do that again.  They’d have to pay everyone for each little riff and vocal shout, probably.  Who could afford it?
But that didn’t matter to me.  Not really.  I had been told that the Beastie Boys were potty mouths, and I wasn’t really into that kind of thing.  And they yelled a lot.  Not something I enjoyed.
At some point, I was in middle school, trapped at the library while my parents were looking for something, and I flipped open a random magazine.  There was an article in there about how Stephen King’s novel The Stand was too long and boring and changed points of view at awkward times.
I disagreed.  I liked it.
In the same magazine was an article about how the Beastie Boys were a bunch of foul-mouthed non-musicians who drank beer and had scantily clad women in cages on their stage when they performed.  But I only knew the one song.  It didn’t have any meaning to me.  But there was something about that level of hedonism I found fascinating.  Drinking?  On stage?  And girls?
Today, I’m not sure rap shows are allowed to go one if there isn’t at least one scantily clad female up there somewhere.  I could be wrong.  I probably am.
I got to high school, and the Boys put out Check Your Head.  That one was weird.  The kids in my school loved it, and I found it used, and I put it on in the CD store, and my brother wanted to buy it.  But it had one of those parental warnings on it, so I knew that would never fly with my parents.
I bought it for myself, and put all the songs my brother would be allowed to listen to onto a tape for him.
So What'cha Want was the big “hit” off of that one.  I saw the video.  Three guys jumping at a fish eye lens.  I couldn’t say that I really “got” it, but there was something weirdly compelling and low rent about it.  It felt like the kind of thing you could do with your friends.
I found Licensed to Ill and Paul’s Boutique at the library.  I understood the former to be dumb fun.  The latter left me cold.  I was young.  It happens.  Regardless, I got into a conversation about the two recordings with an acquaintance.  I told him I liked Ill more.  He said, “You’re so wrong, and I have so many reasons why.”
I went to college.  Sabotage became a big hit.  My brother was now “old enough” to own something with bad words on it.  He wanted Ill Communication, so I ordered it for him on vinyl.  It came out three days before the rest of the world got it.  Somewhere along the line, my brother found CD copies of the first stuff the Beastie Boys ever did: Pollywog Stew and Cookie Puss.  He bought both of them.
A year later, they would both be released together on a much cheaper CD.
Hello Nasty came out right as I left college.  I heard Intergalactic.  I shrugged.  The boys put out a Best of, and I saw the receptionist at my workplace listening to it, and I got one of those first hits of nostalgia you get when you hear something you “used” to listen to.
I eventually found The Sounds of Science used.  When I was job hunting, I’d listen to Hey Ladies on the way to interviews.  It woke me up.  It made me happy.  I’d listen to it over and over, getting a tiny bump of joy, trying to pump myself up so when I got to my interview I wasn’t just some sad guy desperately looking for work.
The boys released three more albums after that.  To the 5 Boroughs, The Mix-Up, and Hot Sauce Committee, Part 2.  I’ve never heard a note.
MCA died.  There are probably a bunch of half-done tracks sitting around, and the remaining Boys will put them together, and that little lump of my childhood will sigh, and look at that sad number (MCA?  Dead at 47?  A guy partially responsible for changing the face of an entire genre of music, gone, and only 12 years older than me, and who am I and what am I doing with my life and where is my childhood?) and all that stuff will go into a little mental box and someday I’ll tell my kid, “Well, we used to listen to this group.  They were kind of considered dirty when they started, but they changed the musical world, which is more than I can say for myself.”
And maybe I’ll put on Hey Ladies one more time.  Because Paul’s Boutique really is better than Licensed to Ill.