Just as soon as Tivo can suck down enough of the program to give us a commercial buffer zone, Clyde and I pile onto the couch for our weekly visit with Deputy Chief Brenda Lee Johnson.
About fifteen minutes into the show, Brenda Lee, struck hard by an attack of the stake-out munchies, rummages in her purse ... wrestles with a shiny silver wrapper ... and starts choking down what looked for all the world like a turd dipped in flesh-colored paint.
I know Brenda Lee quite well -- we're on a first name basis, you see. I know her eating habits. When under pressure, she frequently locks herself in her office and woofs down an entire 12-pak of Zingers. This treat, though, looks so unfamiliar and inappropriate that I snatch the Tivo remote, backtrack, and replay the scene.
This time, through Brenda's frantic fingers, I make out the product name: SOYJOY.
Clyde shakes his head. "She's eating a SoyJoy bar?"
"What's a SoyJoy bar?"
Neither of us know. And then -- five minutes later -- the network helps us out ... by playing an ad for SoyJoy bars.
Coincidence? I think not.
On one level, the product placement works. Prior to seeing the product placement, SoyJoy bars weren't on my radar at all; now they are. Prior to seeing the product placement, I had never visited the SoyJoy website; now I have. Prior to seeing the product placement, I didn't know SoyJoy bars were "fortified with optimism." Now I do.
But on another -- and, I'd argue, more important -- level, the product placement is a total failure. The sight of Brenda Lee wrapping her lips around a SoyJoy doesn't make me want to buy one ... it just makes me exclaim, "Hey, that's not something Brenda Lee would eat!" (On the other hand, had she pulled out a box of Pop Tarts or a bag of Oreos, I wouldn't have batted an eye.)
Worse, that first visual impression -- that fleeting image of a pale, oblong, lump emerging from the shiny, space-age wrapper -- had a visceral impact on me that no amount of perky website copy can counter.
Instead of being enticed, I'm repulsed. Instead of feeling intrigued ... I feel slightly nauseous. No SoyJoy for me!
On So You Think You Can Dance, young female dancers frequently audition in tight, form-fitting, or revealing outfits. It's not uncommon for the girls to display bare midriffs or perform in little more than a bikini top. The judges take this in stride; no one comments.
But when the shirts of young male dancers become untucked, unbuttoned, or get removed entirely, the judges (including Nigel) squeal like schoolgirls.
"Keep that shirt on!" shouts one. "Button up that shirt, please!" insists another. Last night, when a male dancer's shirt rose high enough to expose a half-inch of his flat tummy, Mary pitched a fit. "Watch that shirt! It's coming outta there!"
I don't get it. If it's okay for a woman to prance and twist and leap around in little more than a bra ... why does the exposure of a male's abs or chest cause such a huge commotion?
That's it. No more Big Brother for me.
When Big Brother premiered years ago, Clyde and I missed out completely on the entire phenomenon. Friends W & D raved about the show, but after watching one episode, we felt no real attachment to it. As years passed, we continued to ignore Big Brother ... until, finally, one dull summer, we found ourselves caught up in Big Brother 5. (Remember Cowboy and his tattooed half-sister Jennifer/Nakomis?)
We got hooked.
Over the next few years, Big Brother continued to be one of our guilty summer pleasures. The year Janelle and Kaysar appeared on the show, we actually subscribed to the 24x7 feed. (Once was enough; having fallen for that, we didn't fall for it again. There's a reason the show is heavily edited!)
Though we didn't know most of the contestants, we got into Big Brother All-Stars ... and the following year, we were intrigued enough by Big Brother 8 to sign up for Showtime's Big Brother After Dark. (Again, once was enough. There are only so many whispered hot tub conversations you can bear to watch for three hours at a whack.)
So this year, when CBS rushed Big Brother into production as a last-minute stop-gap strategy for dealing with the writer's strike, we popped some corn, poured ourselves a Coke, and settled in for what we hoped would be a distracting alternative to, say, reruns of King of the Hill.
Alas, 'twas not to be so. Big Brother "'Till Death Do You Part" is, quite possibly, the worst reality show ever aired on network television. (And that's saying something. Remember Temptation Island?)
Since the clueless crew at Comcast can't manage to get a decent cable signal to my Midtown Atlanta home, I completely missed November's broadcast of Battlestar Galactica: Razor. Amazon.com, however, came to my rescue, shipping me a copy of the show on DVD.
In this mini-movie, Battlestar goes where none of the official Star Trek series ever dared to go, revealing that Captain Kane (of the Battlestar Pegasus) is a lesbian. In fact, Kane -- a strong, but vulnerable woman, haunted by painful memories -- is not just a lesbian ... she's openly lesbian, greeting her lover with a public kiss.
What's even more remarkable is that Kane's lesbianism is not an issue. The one character who expresses surprise over Kane's having a female partner is not shocked by the partner's gender, but by the fact that someone as self-sufficient and harsh as Kane needs a parter at all.
Before Gene Roddenberry (the creator of Star Trek) died in 1991, he acknowledged that Star Trek's futuristic universe should be making television history by depicting gay and lesbian characters as readily as the original Trek depicted an African-American bridge officer in the 1960's. After Roddenberry's death, though, inept producers refused to make the show relevant to one of our time's most challenging themes; for this reason (and others) the franchise quickly became stale and left the air.
By contrast, Battlestar Galactica -- gritty, hard-hitting, realistic, and complex -- continues to push boundaries and break taboos. Episodes focused on the war between humans and Cylons have raised more poignant questions about the war in Iraq than the American press ever has.
Like any network television series, Battlestar occasionally loses its way (last year's third season was, for the most part, a muddled, disjointed mess). But, for the most part, Battlestar achieves in a single hour of television than most sci-fi series ever attempt.
If you're not watching it, you should be. Start with the mini-series, watch the excellent first season (particularly the first episode, 33, which may be the tightest, most compelling hour of television ever written), the second season, the beginning and end of the third season (skip the middle), and Razor ... and you'll be good to go when the fourth season cranks up in March 2008.
Good friend and fellow writer Barbara Moore (blog, website) recently turned me on to Zen Habits, a great site for those of us looking for practical tips for more balanced living.
Today's Zen Habits post, A Guide to Escaping Materialism and Finding Happiness, makes several suggestions ... including freeing yourself from the influence of television.
"Do you really enjoy watching TV for hours? Think about which shows you really, really love, and only watch during that time. When the commercials come on, go do something else. Or use Tivo to watch TV. You can even give up cable TV entirely, if you’re brave — I have, and it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done."
A team of all-Iraqi filmmakers is producing Hometown Baghdad, a video series documenting the lives of three 20-somethings who are living and working in modern-day Iraq.
MTV's The Real World features lame egomaniacs agonizing over which roommate to hook up with. By contrast, Hometown Baghdad features optimistic college kids trying to live normal lives ... despite living in the kind of place where eating a salad makes you an infidel and where the local university, unable to clear away all the human remains on campus, makes do by covering the mess with rubble.
Follow this link to see three short, great episodes on YouTube.
Seed Magazine recently published this first-person account of a cognitive neuroscientist's successful appearance on Who Wants to be a Millionaire.
The concept of priming -- just talking, in hopes of using the brain's own stream of consciousness babbling to uncover unexpected links and memory triggers -- was new to me. I gave it a test-drive today, and found it really can be a useful memory aid.
I also found his conscious use of intuition as a problem-solving tool fascinating. Given the question, "What was the first product featured in the Sears and Roebuck catalog?" would I have been willing to risk $50,000 on a mental picture of a watch that flashed through my thoughts, unbidden and unexplained, before the multiple choice answers were revealed?
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