The Beginning of the TV Shelf

One of the wonderful things about the advent of DVD is the number of full seasons and full series that have come onto the home movie market, sure there was VHS releases but it just wasn't the same. I have an incredible number of Television on DVD titles, from both sides of the pond. This regular thing will deal more the television stuff I've been watching and making my way through.

A quick catch up with Christmas. I got a few titles. NewsRadio Season Four, Robot Chicken Season Two and Saturday Night Live: The Best of Saturday TV Funhouse (all on R1, these seem unlikely to recieve a British release).

NewsRadio Season Four is the third of the NewsRadio DVD releases and ran the 1997-1998 season, notable for the fact it was Phil Hartman's last. The series is funny from start to finish and the show clearly didn't give a damn about attracting an extra audience anymore so they just had funny. Bill (Hartman) is playing a piano for a number of the episodes. Very funny stuff, now I need to decide whether I should get the Phil Hartman-less Season Five

Robot Chicken Season Two, a show for Adult Swim created by Seth Green and Matthew Senreich as some great little bits but isn't as instantly memorable as the first season. Hogan's Heroes (featuring Roddy Piper and Hulk Hogan) and Captain Planet are probably two of my favourite bits, pretty darn good rather then exceptional as an whole though.

Saturday Night Live: The Best of Saturday TV Funhouse is the brainchild of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog creator Robert Smigel is at times hilarious, the most brilliant animated bits are of course the Ambigously Gay Duo (picture above and voiced by Stephen Colbert and Steve Carell), The Michael Jackson cartoon, Saddam and Bin Laden, The New Adventures of Mr. T, Sexual Harrarsment and You and Shazzang are all hilariously funny. Recommended cause there's also about an hour of extra cartoons.

A couple of DVDs I've been watching since Christmas...

Lost Season Three is a great season after the sometimes clumsy and lacklustre second season. The episode features a lot of memorable twists (including the last scene in the last episode) and some great characters in Ben, Juliette and Desmond (who are all main characters this season). It's like what the first season was: Gripping from start to finish, plus you finally learn how Locke ended up in a wheelchair and many other little things.

St. Elsewhere Season One (file under What I'm Currently Working my way through) is an amazing medical drama (with an often quirky nature) that began in 1982 and featured an amazing cast including William Daniels, Howie Mandel, G.W. Bailey, Christina Pickles, David Morse and Denzel Washington, I'm only 5 episodes in and I'm enjoying it lots. The fourth episode "Cora and Arnie" featuring Doris Roberts and Tim Robbins is the first truly brilliant episode of the series and I very much recommended. On a note Tim Robbins is deliciously vile and I wish one of the doc's would punch him in the face.

Saturday Night Live Season One (Review 2 of 8)

As promised after a long hiatus, probably get the next couple up within a few days while I write this. Anyways let's get quickly onto Disc 2 in the same format.

Disc 2

Episode 4: Candice Bergen

The Good

• THE LAND SHARK. Comedy genuis.
• Andy Kaufman's Foreign Guy bombing terribly.

The Bad

• Nothing overly bad, a lot of it though is not brilliantly memorable.

Episode 5: Robert Klein

The Good

• the Sam Peckinpah sketch
• The cockroach exterminator sketch.
• Gilda Radner's fire safety tips.
• Loudon Wainwright's musical performance.

The Bad

• Should take time to mention here the amount of times the fake adverts seem to get repeated over the season. Sometimes the ads are funny but not at the third or fourth time they've been repeated.
• Again nothing too bad, it's starting to find it's feet here.

Episode 6: Lily Tomlin

The Good:

• John Belushi as Beethoven. Again comedy genuis.
• The Return of the Land Shark.
• Lily Tomlin is an excellent host.
• Lily Tomlin and the Muppet Scrat (if my memory serves me right). The few times the Muppets are enjoyable in the entire show is when there with a human.

The Bad:

• Nothing really, a strong episode, like anything so some sketches are stronger then the others.

Overall a strong collection of episodes. The show was really starting to find it's feet here and 9/10 does get better as the season goes on. I can still recommend the set at this point. I'm also falling in love more Gilda Radner as the show goes on.

First Update of August

Been somewhat away from a computer for the last weekish or so. Anyway a quick catch up on my life at the moment.

Ran my first filmmaking workshop as tutor last Wednesday, it exceeded all expectations in quality. All my students (I have an hard time calling them that for some reason) where very keen and eager and in two hours we brainstormed an idea for a film, came up with some scenes, shot the scenes, edited it which included adding musical and sound effects aswell as credits and showed the film on our big screen. All in two hours, I impressed myself there. My only worry his I set the bar a little too high for future workshops.

In other news, I should be back updating this regular after the week off, everything seems to have sorted itself out.

What I've been watching.

The West Wing: Really getting into Studio 60 in the Sunset Strip and the quality of that made me decide I wanted to revist the first season of this classy drama. Like I said in an earlier post Bradley Whitford's Josh was probably my favourite WW character (Leo, C.J. and Toby are very close though). I just love the interaction between the characters in this show.

Seinfeld: I am working my way through the first and second season. George is easily my favourite character ---Jason Alexander is just so perfect for the role---, It's been said before it's a show about nothing and that's why people love it.

Saturday Night Live: Will go more indepth with this in a later post. Really digging John Belushi and Gilda Radner on this first season though.

I think I'm going to see The Simpsons Movie tonight. I didn't want to see it the first week cause of the annoying kids in the cinema.

A bigger updater later.

Saturday Night Live Season One (Review 1 of probably 8)

It came out on R2 DVD yesterday and picked it up today. I always think of this and another sketch show as the groundbreaking North American sketch shows, the other one I am referring to is of course SCTV. I am actually more of an SCTV fan myself. There's a lot of reason to compare both, both feature very funny people who had successful careers ahead of them, both used the sketch format obviously, and both had musical guest. However SNL was recorded live as the title suggests and SCTV had a laugh track added later (much to the hate of the SCTV cast), Saturday Night Live is still going after beginning in 1975 whilst SCTV lasted in a couple of versions between 1976 and 1984. Let's cover the first disc of SNL...

Episode 1: George Carlin

The Good

• George Carlin's monolagues, always funny. Big fan of him so I'm bias.
• Andy Kaufman's performance of Mighty Mouse- Genius
• Albert Brooks Mock Documentary "The Impossible Truth"
• The Musical performances of Janis Ian and Billy Preston.
• Gilda Radner's reaction in the courtroom scene.
• The expecting fathers what are bees waiting at hospital.
• The video asking people to show there guns.
• The debut of the weekend update with Chevy Chase. Little uncomfortable here but still funny.
• The Home Security sketch.

The Bad

• See I'm a Jim Henson fan. Love Seasame Street. Love The Muppets. Don't discount Fraggle Rock, Labyrinth or Dark Crystal either. But what the hell is going on here. This muppet sketch with characters like King Ploobis and the Mighty Favog just doesn't sit well.
• Lack of Gilda Radner
• Valri Bloomfield's stand up routine, just not very funny, no suprise Kaufman was asked about multiple times and not her.

Episode 2: Paul Simon

The Good:

• Simon and Garfunkel reforming and sing a few classic songs.
• The basketball game between Paul Simon and Connie Hawkins.
• The Weekend Update again.

The Bad:

• Too much Paul Simon. Now I am a big enough Simon and Garfunkel fan, anything solo of theirs just doesn't do it for me.
• The cast (Not Ready for Primetime Players) are in for only about thirty seconds in bee costumes.

Episode 3: Rob Reiner

The Good:

• Rob Reiner's lounge singer monologue.
• Reiner with Penny Marshall presenting the segment on fashion faux-pa's, features most the cast.
• Andy Kaufman's performance of Pop Goes the Weasel, even funnier then his first appearance.
• The Squeaky Fomme interview.
• The end skit with the Bees.

The Bad:

• Albert Brooks' short film on heart surgery just goes on way too long.

All in all not three bad episodes, all have their shining moments for tuning in. It's clearly a show evolving into what it became within these three episodes. Gilda Radner is wonderful, John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd wonderful and Andy Kaufman's bits are genius. I can strongly recommend the first disc.