Spike: update

My apologies to anyone who got misled by my yesterday's post: Spike had cleaned up its game. 'Bar Rescue' appears to be airing full episodes for now, while 'Deadliest Warrior' and co once more show the 'episode highlights' label where appropriate. Sorry about the rant yesterday, then.

Spike: latest developments

For an opening line, I am a fan of the TV channel Spike. Sadly, it appears to have become discontinued in Canada, but that's off topic. The topic is that Spike seems to be going downwards in quality, and its latest 'trick' is just another symptom of this deterioration.

Let's start at the beginning. And in the beginning we have one of the several programs that are aired on this channel: 'Bar Rescue'. As I said, Spike appears to have become discontinued in Canada, but its' site is still accessible, so that's okay.

On the other hand, this site doesn't show most of the new episodes from such shows as 'Bar Rescue', but they are releasing the so-called 'episode highlights': a bundle of scenes from various eps of different shows that are aired on Spike. That's still ok.

Lately, though, Spike has began to label those highlights as 'full episodes', which is not ok. A 3-4 minute scene from a 'Deadliest Warrior' episode is not a 'full episode', not to mention - seriously? A single clip (say, about an AK-47) from an episode 'Somali Pirates vs. Medellin Cartel' is the only highlight of that ep? Seriously?

In 'Bar Rescue' case this isn't as extreme, there the audience can enjoy a bit over 15 minutes worth of highlights from their latest ep, but it is not a full ep. No, for real - use the right label! If people will want to see episode highlights they will see them all the same, and if you try to trick other people into seeing them by using the wrong label, this will work only once or twice, and that's it. No one else will go there because the audience doesn't like to be tricked.

So: a popular TV channel is reduced to somewhat fraudulent tricks to have its audience watch the highlights from the new episodes of its' shows. How the mighty have fallen!

Did you know?

Did you know...?

1) ‘Bella’ is an anagram for ‘label’. Seriously. ‘Label Swann’ – that just sounds really wrong. ‘Mrs. Label Lestrange’ – that is even more wrong.

2) Ditto for ‘Kratos’: it is an anagram of ‘Sokrat’ – Socrates, who was one of the greatest Greek philosophers and a founding father of Western modern philosophy as well. Kratos is a great guy, but a philosopher? I think that he would be first to admit that philosophy is one thing that he isn’t strong at – now if it was head-bashing, then he would be on top of things...

3) If you read the Old Testament part of the Bible, you can see the growth of patriarchy. Abraham might have been a God-fearing man, but he was also totally dominated by his wife, Sarah. The incidents with Hagar and Israel (Genesis 16; 21) are rather unseemly by modern standards, but they also indicate the importance of Sarah in the relationship of Abraham and God: Sarah is not afraid of speak up even to Almighty; the latter has to talk to Abraham in private regarding the sacrifice of Isaac; and Abraham has to trick Isaac (and his mother?) to get Isaac out of the camp and onto the sacrificial mountain – maybe because if Sarah knew about this, she would’ve put her foot down very firmly and the entire Biblical history would need to be re-written from Genesis onwards.

By contrast, in Quran the sacrifice of Israel was done voluntarily – this version of Abraham had no need to trick Hagar and Israel regarding the sacrifice. This was done because the authors of Quran (unlike Genesis) were fully patriarchal and did not need to trick their wives to do what has to be done (at least in theory).

Back to Genesis. There, Abraham sold Sarah several times to various pharaohs and kings, and each time God intervened to ensure that Sarah would return to Abraham via various pestilences and plagues. Clearly, not unlike the pagan deities, God of Abraham (Genesis 11-25) had his favorites among the Jewish women, like Sarah.

It is different with Isaac and Rebekah. It is anyone’s guess what their family life was like, but at the end Rebekah had to trick Isaac into blessing Jacob rather than asking for Divine intervention: the Almighty has already turned away from women and towards men at this point in Biblical history. Rebekah could not apparently directly impose her own will onto Jacob as Sarah did upon Abraham either – either Isaac was made of sterner staff than his father was, or Rebekah lacked some tribal rights or customs that her mother-in-law had, I do not know.

Finally, Jacob has 12 sons, but only one of them from Rachel, the woman he really loved. I am reasonably certain that Rachel also had feelings for Jacob, and also, as the mother of the second-youngest son she cared little for her and Joseph’s rivals, but again, unlike Sarah, she did not do anything – maybe because she could not do anything? In any case, whereas Sarah played a large, active, and directly connected to, role in Abraham’s career, Rachel’s role was much more passive, and she was much more submissive, both to her father and her husband; in fact, she is almost completely defined by her relationship to these men; even her theft of her father’s idols was done only to promote the success of her husband, nothing more – Sarah, for all of her flaws, was a character and a person in her own right, moreso than her daughter- and granddaughter-in-law, it seems.

And as for Joseph’s wife? His wife, Asenath, does not even feature in the Biblical canon; texts such as ‘Joseph and Asenath’ are technically more like first fanfics (Bible-themed) than Biblical canon, so they do not quite count among the religious people.

4) A new season of ‘River Monsters’ in on the way; pity that it does not air in Canada just yet: I cannot wait and see for myself what JW has been up to!

5) Spike site has invented a new trick – episode highlights. Basically, they had full footage of some of the episodes and assembled video clips of the others. So, they took those video clips, and assembled them into single features. Good idea?

Maybe, but the execution of this idea is not that good. You click, for example, onto the highlights of DW episode ‘Aztec Jaguar vs. Zande Warrior’: what you get is a brief promo of the episode in general and a longer clip of the Aztec maquahuitl saw through a gel head of a horse. That is it, seriously. People, come on, I’m sure that there are many DW audience members that would argue that that decapitation isn’t the only video highlight of that episode, now is it?

Or you click for the highlights of a SFD episode ‘Dr. Quarantine’. Here, you get three combined clips of varied length – in reverse. The first clip should have been the last and vice versa, but the video editor of Spike’s site has not done a good job, and so the video highlights were combined in reverse. That is just dumb.

6) Speaking of SFD, (‘Savage Family Diggers’/’American Digger’), what can be said about it? It is just lackluster, though Ric Savage does do his best to liven it up. It is also not staged as some of Spike’s other series (‘World’s Worst Tenants’, ‘Urban Tarzan’), something that I can clearly respect. Of course, I am not sure how the Savage family can make a real living from what they dig-up (a typical payload appears to be somewhere between 1500 to 3500 dollars, it seems – a sum that people can live off, but not particularly well or long), but meh, the head of the family used to be a professional wrestler, he probably got enough money saved up to run this hobby, so kudos to him for that.

Well, that is it for now. See you in May, hopefully.

Beauty and the Beast, ep 1 - Oct 11

Yesterday I watched the pilot episode of Showcase's "Beauty and the Beast". What can be said about it?

For a start, confronted with such fantasy shows as "Grimm", "Once Upon a Time", their own "Lost Girl", etc, where fantasy and mystery genres collide, Showcase made B&B more Gothic, rather than fantasy and also more modern. The Beast, Vincent, is an ex-veteran of fighting in Afgan, where he apparently started mutating into a "monster", while Beauty is police officer Catherine, who seeks to find the criminals who killed her mother and almost killed her.

Does this sounds cliched? Certainly, for the plot of Vincent (Jay Ryan) and Catherine (Kristin Kreuk) is very much influenced by "Buffy's" relationship between the titular heroine (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Angel the vampire (David Boreanas) back in the 1990s. This means that Vincent and Catherine's relationship will have lots of angst, with Vincent's friend J.T. (Austin Bates) providing the occasional comic relief (and Austin isn't very good at it).

That's the more Gothic plotline. The second plotline, apparently is Catherine and her partner Vargas (Nina Lisandrello) go around solving crimes, as Rizzoli and Isles do, only without the lesbian subtext, since Catherine's "one true love" is Vincent. (Otherwise, the whole "Beauty and the Beast" idea is null and void.) That said, the detective portion of the show is good, showing very intense psychological work, similar to Disney's idea (in "Hunchback of Notre Dame") - "what makes a monster, what makes a man"? Guess B&B are going to show the audience, while the FBI appears to be the show's main bad guys, fighting Vincent for unknown reasons, and also possibly being connected to the death of Catherine's mom.

Sounds exciting? Perhaps, yet Ryan and Kreuk pull off the Gothic angle much more poorly than Boreanas and Geller did. When those two interact, it's the weakest part of the show, at least of the pilot. Guess they're just not a good couple, they lack the chemistry!

And speaking of what was lacking, DW came back today to Spike channel, at least from the first two seasons out of three. Its episodes were intermingled with episodes of other Spike series, like "1000 ways to die" and "Repo games". Coupled with the fact that throughout September DW's Facebook page was bombarded with links to the show's clips, all connected... to the upcoming Halloween makes me wonder if DW doesn't plan to return with a fourth season or something like that, or at least a holiday special. Got to admit, it was missed and its' return was appreciated.

So, a rather lopsided new show, and an old one coming back (at least temporarily). It could've been worse.