Monthly Archives: June 2013

This Is What a Family Looks Like

So, I will now be watching two “young adult” shows on ABC-Family. Switched at Birth was a guilty pleasure that turned out to be a justifiably great show.  The summer premiere is next week. Yay! The Fosters, is a new family drama, with a too-cute name. It’s the story of a family, two moms, the biological son from a previous relationship, two adopted kids and the new foster girl. The way I figure it, if it pisses off the so-called “One Million Moms,” it deserves a chance. That’s why I shop at JC Penney.

Having briefly worked on the outskirts of the foster care system in Vermont, I find the premise not unrealistic. I’ve met families like these – adults who’ve built families by taking in kids that need them, and often spend their working lives serving the community as well. In this case, one mom is a cop, and the other a vice-principal at the bestest charter school ever.

The pilot throws a few curve balls. One mom is black, the other white. The adopted kids are Latino twins – Jesus and Mariana. Jesus takes medication, and though it’s not stated, it seems to be for ADHD. Mariana is “the good one,” but she has some secrets. Brandon, Stef the cop’s biological son, is a talented musician, the oldest, and an understated hottie. His girlfriend is a bit uh possessive, or maybe just a run of the mill mean girl. All of them go to a magical charter school on the beach (!) where teachers go by their first names, and the cafeteria is probably organic. Callie, the new girl, was recently sprung from  juvie, but by the end of the pilot, we find out she landed there trying to protect her cross-dressing kid brother. And just to throw more into the mix, for no good reason, other than “family drama” Stef’s new work partner is her ex-husband, Brandon’s father.

The acting is good, and the writing has a bit of depth. I was impressed by one scene with Stef’s boss, where a bunch of stuff about their relationship — including its boundaries, was nicely implied. That had to have been thrown in for the adults. Nice touch.

I wonder if they’ll make having two moms seem as cool as being deaf? All I know is if I were Callie and I landed at that school, I’d do just about anything to stay. At one point, Stef talks to Lena about making space for the growing brood and says, “We’re not The Brady Bunch.” But really, given how functional this blend is, they aren’t very far from it.

I’d say ABC has another show families can watch together, and even olds like me can enjoy. If you don’t have cable or missed it, you can check it out here, free and legal, and/or watch this trailer:

(Enjoy this review? Isn’t it strange that Marion, who loves these sappy television shows writes hard-hitting transgressive fiction?)

Awwr Matey! How to End TV Piracy

Stumbled across an article in Forbes from back in April, referring to a New York Times columnist’s confessing to illegally using someone else’s HBO-Go password to watch the premiere of Game of Thrones. GOT is known as the most pirated show on television.

I know piracy is prevalent, but I wonder how much of it comes from people with cable who just aren’t paying for premium channels.  How many people who would have subscriptions forgo them in order to stream or download illegally? I don’t imagine too many families or even groups of roommates sitting around someone’s tablet searching for a none “broken” illegal link to a program. If you’ve got a cable television subscription, it’s not a big deal to add a premium station or two.

The real issue is that more and more people are choosing to opt out of watching “television”  the old-fashioned way, and are now watching exclusively through the Internet. Most network shows are available albeit with commercial interruption free the day after they are initially broadcast.

Some shows do have to be paid for. AMC offers episodes of Mad Men and The Walking Dead through Amazon for $1.99 an episode. Viewing legally means not having to worry about picking up malware and viruses, or deal with pop-up ads and other annoyances. This in addition to its being both ethical and legal. I’m sure people use illegal sites to watch AMC offerings anyway, as some people just can’t wait until the next day or love the idea of getting something for nothing, but my guess is that there is less stealing going on proportionally than for HBO. This is because neither HBO nor Showtime offer an option for non-subscribers to watch current programming legally. You can get a cable or satellite television subscription or you can wait a year or so for the disks.

If HBO-Go offered services to people who don’t have cable television, or allowed one-time streaming of current episodes for a per episode fee, they’d be able to cut down substantially on theft. If all channels offered access to their shows at the same time as they are broadcast, they could probably defeat the pirates and make more money.

The premium stations wanted to make Internet-only subscriptions available, but the cable companies prohibited it. Runaway piracy of popular programs is a by-product. Understandable that these dinosaurs want to put off extinction for as long as possible. But how long until everybody gives the boot to cable television as we know it? The cable companies are like the publishing houses and bookstore chains of a few years ago, dismissing e-books as a fad when they should have been figuring out a new survival strategy.

(Enjoy this post? Marion’s books are so cheap, you don’t have to pirate them!)

You REALLY Can’t Reboot Character

So after writing about Star Trek – Into the Darkness without having actually seen it, I finally went to see it, and boy was I right. Who are these people? You really can’t reboot character.

What follows is a rant, which should not read by anyone who has not yet seen Into the Darkness, but intends to:

I get that JJ Abrams is trying to create a “new” Trek, but then why doesn’t he just throw in a new captain and a new crew and give them another part of the galaxy to explore? Instead he’s turned McCoy, Chekov, and Sulu into near parodies of the originals, and given us an Uhura who bears no resemblance to the one we know. I do not recognize any of old Kirk in new Kirk, and I’m not talking about Shatner’s unusual phrasing. I understand Abrams’ Kirk is different. He grew up in a different timeline without a father. It made him more rebellious and “angry,” a kind of a rebel, which is how we first saw him in the original reboot – driving a souped up convertible like James Dean. Roddenberry’s Kirk was a boy scout compared to him. Zachary Quinto is somewhat more successful at giving us a recognizable Spock, but this Spock is rudderless. He’s lost his parents and his planet and somehow carries the Continue reading You REALLY Can’t Reboot Character

Your Saturday Book Review — The Philosopher’s Apprentice

After hearing an interview on NPR with author, James Morrow, I went to a bookstore (Remember those?) to search for a copy of his then new novel, The Philosopher’s Apprentice. I couldn’t remember the title, but when I described the plot – teacher, remote island, mysterious happenings — the clerk thought I was talking about The Magus, a book which bears almost no resemblance to this one. The Island of Dr. Moreau would be getting warmer.

The island here is off the coast of Florida, the teacher a brilliant philosophy graduate student who has just blown his thesis on principle. . He is offered a job by a billionaire scientist who tells him her teenage daughter was in a diving accident and suffered damage resulting in the loss of her moral conscience. His mission is to guide her in developing a sense of ethics. It’s an offer too tempting to refuse, especially given the $100,000 salary. Of course, once he arrives, things aren’t what they seem and yadda, yadda, yadda.

Most of the action takes place years after the island sojourn when his pupil has made her way into the world, intent on changing it.

While the book clearly falls into the sci-fi genre, the author is after bigger fish, taking on bioethics and religion with satiric aim. Whether or not he succeeds may be subjective. The better-half felt Morrow went too far and sometimes missed the mark. (Several reviewers agree.) But I found the story entertaining and thought provoking throughout though at times Morrow’s reach may have exceeded his grasp.

While a knowledge of western philosopher (among other things) is not a necessary prerequisite to the enjoyment of the book, it couldn’t hurt. It’s certainly worth checking out especially for well-read fans of satire.

(Apology: I have been slow on getting these reviews out and didn’t post last week. I guess I’m kind of depressed because my own books haven’t been selling lately. Check them out, why don’t you?)