Love of PRISONER

I'll say this about bad weather; it gives me an excuse to catch up on my TV. Thus this week I consumed the entire A&E remake of The Prisoner.

Presold property or not, it's hard to imagine a product more likely to piss off its target audience. And man, does this series annoy the fans. Typical is this comment from the IMDb listing:

As a fan of the original Prisoner I can't begin to say how incredibly disappointed I am with this "remake". The "plot" is non-existent and makes no sense.

There are 82 comments at this writing; they're almost all by fans of the original series and they all hate the new series. And I think they all hate it for the wrong reasons.

At the risk of seeming unmutual, let me play Number 2's advocate here and suggest that the new Prisoner is a mostly successful take on the concept. That is, the new guys made a few controversial choices (which I won't go into because I'm not a spoiler guy) and the reason you liked the old Prisoner so much is for its own controversial choices. For example the quote above - did they guy manage to make sense of "Fall Out," the insane final episode of Prisoner V1? I'm not even sure Patrick McGoohan knew what it was about, and he wrote and directed it.

Most of the fan criticism I've read is of the opinion that the new guys didn't understand the original series, but obviously they understood it enough diverge from it. Would McGoohan have approved? He probably wouldn't have written it the same, but he would have approved of a new direction. And now that I think of it, this has been in the works since 2005, so McGoohan probably at least read a script.

In fact, the fans might be a lot more favorably disposed toward this series if Paddy Fitz lived to film the cameo at the beginning. In the first minutes of the new series 6 wakes up in the desert, disoriented; his eyes fall on a very old man running through the hills, attempting to escape his captors. That old man was supposed to be McGoohan, if I recall correctly. Had he gotten killed off in those first few minutes, it would have been a stamp of approval which would have allowed fans to just relax and enjoy the ride.

So having said that, the new series has a few things to recommend it - splendid casting of every character except the lead (Jim Caviezel is okay but he just can't seem to find the right balance between victim and protagonist - and even that seems to be a flaw in the writing, not the acting), nice new Village, liberal use of the sunny and creepy music of Brian Wilson, and mostly consistant internal logic. Okay, I can't go into that for obvious reasons, but there are a few lapses. I think. It might be worth watching again. And yes it's pretty confusing at times, but that's an essential narrative strategy. Plus it's only six episodes, which means less filler. Let's see Lost make its point in six, baby!

Maybe the only thing that's really wrong with this show is that I have to spend a whole blog post justifying why I liked it. Hey, I'm a fan of the old series too... it's brainwashed me.

Odds, Ends

HBO's 'Flight of the Conchords' grounded

"Tears Of A Rapper" indeed.

Singer Sinead O'Connor demands Pope steps down

Sinny, enough already with the Pope!

Judge: Jon Gosselin must stop unofficial events

Just a reminder here that the US legal system is useful.

New show, exhibits to mark Elvis 75th birthday

Keep an eye on the old fat bald guy in the 2nd row. Just sayin'.

The Soap Runs Out

Okay, you have until September, 2010 to get into As The World Turns, CBS's long-running soap opera (er, daytime drama). After that they're pulling the plug and presumably stopping the world from turning, which may cause the cessation of gravity and cause all the characters to fly off the surface. Soon the space surrounding the world will be peppered with too-good-looking corpses, aimlessly drifting with perpetually concerned expressions on their gorgeous faces.

Seriously, this thing has been on TV for over 50 years, which is an awful long time for a TV show. Especially when you consider that it's an hour of scripted drama 5 days a week for fifty years. Without reruns.

I had occasion once to visit Antonio Sabato Jr on the set of General Hospital once, and it was a glimpse of how this herculean feat is accomplished. GH has its own building a two-story affair on the ABC television lot. Sabato and another actor shared a dressing room, where they clocked in every day at 7am and hung around until they were needed for a scene in the main studio, where 4 or 5 sets were maintained. In the meantime, they answered fan mail, signed headshots, and talked to their agents about getting out of this gig. The shooting day ended around 5 or 6. It seems a little brief compared to most shooting days (they go for 14 hours normally) but I imagine that if you're looking at that schedule all year round with no termination date, you damn well better have some "me time" built into every day.

The soap opera appears to be on the wane, a victim of declining viewership and competition from cheaper game shows and reality shows. And ATWT was the last Proctor-and-Gamble-sponsored soap opera, meaning that the soap that gave the genre it's name is no longer in the business. Probably there will still always be one around, perhaps with a stricter policy of letting the talent go when they reach a certain income ceiling. But this golden age is over. Just like the other golden ages.

Weekend Box Office

Numbers here.

Talk about blind-sided: The Blind Side, Sandra Bullock's latest bid for Oscar attention, takes the #1 spot, leapfrogging over teen vampire saga New Moon. Quelle surprise! Of course the numbers are comparatively unimpressive, and Bullock wins because the vampires are burning out pretty fast (down another 64% in its 3rd week) but hey, better 'n' nothing.

Other new movies: Brothers, Armored and Everybody's Fine. Meh.

Bottom of the chart is From Mexico With Love. #112, grand weekend total of $16. Yes, that equals 204 pesos! Call it 205.

They Should Have Made an Even 100 Episodes

This last weekend saw the series finale of Monk, the brilliantly formulaic detective show that proved even hour-long dramatic is better-done on basic cable nowadays.

I always liked the basic premise of the show, about a brilliant detective who also suffers from crippling obsessive-compulsive disorder. Really, when you think about it ALL good detective characters have these traits. They walk into a room and immediatly focus on the one detail that's out of place, and refuse to let it go. It took series creator Andy Breckman to recognize that this ability is a gift AND a curse.

Daily Variety notes that the final episode yielded some mighty tasty numbers, in fact, they highest ever for an hour-long dramatic show on cable.

Though gone, Monk is expected to run for the next 10 years (exactly) in syndication or whatever it's called nowadays.

Consider Yourself One Of Us

Here's a confession - for several years I maintained a subscription to the print edition of Variety just so I could enjoy the "For Your Consideration" ads.

To catch you up, the movies that are nominated for awards seldom get that way simply because a buncha show people happened to see them and like them. The studios have a pretty large portion of advertising money tied up in lobbying guild members and critics to consider their films for awards. It pays off in increased ticket sales, and also in less tangible things like prestige and good will from the talent.

As it happens, Variety has a piece today about this very practice. The thrust seems to be that once Harvey Weinstein starts with his ads and parties and screenings and goodie bags, it signals the official beginning of awards campaign season. Fair enough. The pre-Weinstien years were nothin' compared to the modern era, because Weinstein devoted at least as much of the Miramax publicity apparatus to awards as he did to just buying TV ads. And it worked too!

My favorite ads are the ones where there clearly is absolutely no possibility of consideration. Often when a studio makes a deal with a star, there is a rider in the contract that x amount of money has to be devoted to consideration ads. Thus you might see, for example, "For Your Consideration: Halle Berry in CATWOMAN." Maybe this year, "Gerard Butler in GAMER". As my friend Bill says, it's a magic town.

Weekend Box Office, Thanksgiving

Numbers - want 'em?

It turns out that even dropping 70%, New Moon still took the #1 position with $43 million. Scary! Gotta say, that's a considerable slump from last week, but nobody has bad word of mouth for the movie except the people who knew better than to like it in the first place. Meanwhile, the more conventional success story is The Blind Side, which is up 15% from last (non-holiday) week. I think Sandra Bullock is back, baby!

New for family holiday viewing this week: Old Dogs (#4, 16 mil), Ninja Assassin (#6, 13 mil), and The Road (#10, $1.5 mil). That last one is deceptive - bleak as hell, it still pulled down $13,000 per screen, the highest average of any movie in the top ten. I'm guessing that people confused it with 2012. Next week will be worth watching.

Loser of the weekend, Endgame! Coming in at #109, it made $24.00. I sure hope it didn't have a screen all to itself - then again, sometimes the ushers need a quiet place to hide during a busy holiday weekend.