Posts Tagged ‘Television’

Is it just me, or has TV suddenly discovered Twitter?

Sure, TV shows or personalities tweeted before: Survivor‘s Jeff Probst has live-tweeted episodes for the past few seasons, so has Phil Keoghan of The Amazing Race. But suddenly, it seems every TV show wants you to tweet with them while you’re watching the program. Some even give you a hashtag to use with your tweets.

Some recent examples include 60 Minutes (#60minutes), 20/20 and CBC’s The Fifth Estate. Sure, these programs are all newsmagazines, so I can see why they might want to engage their audience on this new medium (and hey, trying to get people to watch live TV again and commercials instead of having them PVR it, is a better business model). But there’s one show who’s sudden interest in social media perplexes me.

The Good Wife.

Yes, that Good Wife. The courtroom show. The women’s show that men also happen to like so it’s a hit.

A couple weeks ago for their season premiere, viewers were invited to follow the actors feeds (and the main Good Wife account), while they tweeted during the episode.

That alone caught me off guard. While I don’t mind keeping half an eye on my iPad while watching Survivor or The Amazing Race, The Good Wife is a show I want to pay attention to (and typically it’s a show you need to pay attention to, it leaves a lot unsaid).

But the I found this: A fake gossip website that’s blogging about things that are happening in storylines in the show.

It leaves me a little perplexed. I know that women tend to use social media more than men, but I wonder how much traction stuff like this gets. Do people tweet while watching the show? Is there an appetite for some gamification around the web? Will the show’s demographic even participate in an online game based on the show?

I’m not sure where The Good Wife is going with all of this, but I’m interested to find out.

I came across an article that really piqued my interest and bothered me, both as a journalist and an avid TV watcher.

The article, The Sexual Proclivities of Friends, was written by Mike D’Avria and aimed, I think, to discuss how disgusting and shocking it was that over the course of 10 years, six characters had 85 sexual partners between them.

I don’t know why this is shocking, many other series did it too. He sites Sex and the City as an example of one character who has many sexual conquests, but as I remember the series, it wasn’t just Samantha who jumped into the sack (or sac as he wrote it) with every man she saw.

But I digress.

Do these Friends sleep with too many people?

How did D’Avria come to his conclusions? By watching the series again? Of course not. Instead, he went through and read “every single outline, and look(ed) at the guest star cast list, for every episode aired in the ten seasons on NBC.”

He admits the number could be “way higher” (but not way lower) because of the way he collected his data (which the column header refers to as “important”).

(And in case you’re wondering, Chandler scored the lowest and Joey scored the highest.)

The first comment on the piece rips apart a number of the partners that D’Avria sites in it, pointing out that those people never had sex with any of the friends, they were in relationships — or just casually dating them. D’Avria responds to the comment, admits he didn’t rewatch the series “something that would take an extremely long time,” and even congratulates himself for admitting his mistakes saying, “I wanted to show how I got to my conclusion — wouldn’t it be nice if all journalists were as transparent in their reporting?”

Here’s the thing, if you’re going to do an analysis of something, you need to commit 110 per cent to that analysis. If that means renting the DVDs and spending a weekend watching over 200 episodes of Friends, you need to do that.

According to the article, Joey slept with 1.7 women a year over the 10 years we knew him. Oh, the horror.

And just what are D’Aviro’s qualifications to write such an article? He has a journalism degree. That’s it. And sure, there’s a lot of so-called “criticism” from self-proclaimed critics on the Internet these days, but really there should have been something more here. Like what, exactly, is D’Aviro criticizing, we never really get a thesis in the intro to his piece except, “Hey, remember that show Friends? Yeah, they had a lot of sex.” Uh, OK.

As an aside, my partner wonders what the next piece of D’Aviro’s will be. Perhaps the fact that Dexter kills more people than any other character on television before him? Oh the outrage.

If you’re going to try to your hand at criticism, you need to know what you’re criticizing and actually do the work involved to properly criticize your subject. Journalism is not just looking up stuff on the Internet, there’s offline work to be done as well.

This piece has almost inspired me to rewatch the series of Friends and do a proper analysis of their sexual conquests. Who’s in?

It’s November 19, 1990. I’m eight years old and in Grade 3.

School gets out somewhere around 3:30 p.m. I remember running to my best friend Debby’s house, about a 15 minute walk on a good day. We get there in record time and run up the stairs. We flop into her brother’s room, the one with the extra TV. Debby fiddles with the dials until she finds the channel we’re looking for.

We make it just in time as the New Kids on the Block take the stage. I remember Donnie being asked for his underwear. I remember how awesome I thought it all was. I remember thinking if I was the one who had gotten Donnie’s underwear I would have totally died.

That is the first Oprah Winfrey Show I ever remember watching. It wouldn’t be the last.

And while Oprah wasn’t on the air when I was born (she started her show in 1986 when I was just four years old), it’s still been pretty much my entire life that I’ve come home and Oprah’s been on at 4 p.m. to greet me.

I remember watching her with my mother when I was a teenager and then, after moving out on my own I taped Oprah for myself and spent my evenings with her.

Oprah taught me to dream big, to never stop believing in myself and the fact that I was put her for a reason. She taught me to have faith, even when it seems impossible. She taught me to open myself up to others, to love, to hope and to trust. She taught me that I can be anything I want to be. She introduced me to books, authors and ideas I might otherwise never have given a second glance to.

Through all of my life changes, everywhere I’ve lived and everyone I’ve been, Oprah’s been the one constant in my life.

Sure, she can be over the top sometimes and she tends to be loud and go overboard, but there’s no denying the power of Oprah.

Without her, I wouldn’t have been introduced to so many amazing people who have survived things I don’t know if I ever could. So while I’ll miss Oprah, it’s her guests I’ll miss even more.

I’ll miss seeing how the human spirit can overcome almost anything. I’ll miss laughing with her and crying with her. I’ll miss being amazed by makeovers and surprises.

The Oprah Winfrey Show may just be a TV show, but to a lot of people — myself included — it’s been so much more than that over the years.

I’ll be sad to be deleting it from my TiVo on Thursday. My evenings just won’t be the same without Oprah filing them.

Thanks for everything Oprah, even if you never introduced me to to George Clooney. You’ll be missed.

I’d love to know if you have a favourite Oprah Show moment or guest. What will you miss? Leave a comment and let me know!

ABC announced late Saturday night it has snagged a one-on-one interview with embattled actor Charlie Sheen.

The interview was held after CBS announced it was halting production on his sitcom Two and a Half Men for the season because of  his off-screen behaviour.

This isn’t the first time the star has “spoken out” (if you want to call it that), since he started making headlines for partying too hard, drinking too much and behaving badly.

Last week, in a radio interview with syndicated radio host Alex Jones, Sheen spoke out. (The interview was apparently the reason production was halted on his sitcom).

Some of what Sheen said included:

Well yeah but I’m tired of being told “well you can’t talk about that and you can’t talk about that” BULL S-H-I-T. Let me just say this, there’s nothing. I just think it’s deplorable that a certain Heim Levine, that’s Chuck’s real name by the way, mistook this rock star for his own selfish exit strategy bro.

Well, you’ve been warned dude. Bring it.

It’s yeah, it’s an understatement, you know it’s, I’m sorry man I got magic and I got poetry at my fingertips most of the time and this includes naps. I’m an F-18 and I will destroy you in the air and I will deploy my ordnance to the ground.

I was shackled and oppressed by the cult of AA for 22 years… Newsflash, I’m special. The only thing I’m addicted to right now is winning.

Debate me on AA right now. I have a disease? Bullshit. I cured it right now with my mind.

So it begs the question, just what crazy things will Charlie Sheen say Tuesday night?

Perhaps the question we should be asking is: Is it really fair to mock Charlie Sheen? If he is having a problem with alcohol or drugs right now, is it right that we laugh at what comes out of his mouth?

I say no.

However, some of my Twitter followers disagreed with me when I posed the question to them Sunday afternoon.

“It is fair. Nobody held a gun to his head. He wanted the show to get cancelled and found a way,” Noah Love commented.

And he wasn’t alone: “All public figures are fair to make fun of. (Unless something really bad as happened to them like they get shot.)” Sam Obermeyer said.

JGoldborough agreed: “Absolutely fair to make fun of him. Public figure. And he has made lots of $ playing himself in 2 and a Half Men.”

Is Charlie a public figure? Sure. Does that mean that he shouldn’t be made fun of? No. But alcoholism and drug addiction is a serious problem that shouldn’t be taken lightly.

Is anyone doing Charlie Sheen any favours by not offering the man some help?

Shutting down his sitcom for the rest of the year only puts hundreds of people out of work who have nothing to do with what Sheen does in his personal life. It will not teach Sheen a lesson, nor should it be expected to.

Sure, I don’t know what’s really going on with Charlie Sheen, and I don’t pretend to. But there comes a point when the jokes aren’t funny anymore, and I think we’ve crossed that line.

Perhaps instead of making fun of Charlie Sheen, or just simply putting him out of work (when he’s already made millions of dollars this year), somebody should step in and try and get him some help.

Otherwise, Charlie Sheen might lose more than just his career.

Can social media be a judge of who will win Tuesday night’s Dancing with the Stars finale?

After the jump, see my Storify post with video of the freestyle dances of the finale three as well as to see how the celebrities were faring on Twitter Tuesday afternoon.

You can see all my past Storify posts here.

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