More television notes

I posted my thoughts about last night's Lost season 3 finale over on lost_theories. Spoilers, of course. Lots to chew on until February!

Yesterday my Tivo auto-recorded a Genesis concert film from 1976 on VH1 Classic. I don't think I knew this existed! Steve Hackett was still in the band, and Bill Bruford was their touring drummer. I haven't watched it yet except for the beginning, enough to see that Phil Collins has a huge beard and Mike Rutherford has long hair and looks like he's 18 years old. (It's especially weird since I just saw the video for Mike + the Mechanics "Silent Running" a few days ago.) And tonight Genesis is on some Rock Honors show. They'll be rerunning both the concert and the Rock Honors thing several more times, so set your Tivos!

[Edit: The concert film appears on the bonus DVD that comes with the remastered edition of Trick of the Tail that came out last week. I hate the idea of buying CDs that I already own, but I may make an exception for this! Watching "Entangled" now, getting huge high school flashbacks...]

Tonight is also the return of "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip". It won't be coming back next season, but I'm glad they're airing the final few episodes. I wish they'd do the same for "Day Break", "Six Degrees", "The Nine", "Kidnapped", or "Vanished"! Apparently there was a big outcry over the non-renewal of "Jericho" (which was at least allowed to end its season), and CBS is planning to "develop a way to provide closure".

Despite all these doomed serials, I'm still planning to watch "Traveler" this summer. The sneak preview of the pilot a few weeks ago was terrific; they're showing it again next Wednesday, followed by a new episode. It's hard to say anything about the show without spoiling it a little bit, but check it out if you like action/drama/mystery serials (it's not sci fi, more along the lines of "Kidnapped" or "The Fugitive").

Other new shows I'm planning to watch this summer are "Pirate Master", a new Mark Burnett-produced reality game show; "John From Cincinatti", a "surf noir" drama on HBO; and "Creature Comforts", a claymation show from Aardman Animations. And some returning summer shows: "Rescue Me", "Big Love", "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia", "Big Brother", and the aforementioned "Andy Milonakis Show". I think "My Boys" is also coming back this summer (great sitcom on TBS), but I don't see any dates yet (edit: July 30). What else should I be watching? I think I decided to pass on "On the Lot", the Spielberg reality show about amateur filmmakers.

Al Gore wrote another book

Al Gore has a new book, The Assault on Reason. I applaud the avoidance of a long subtitle (as is fashionable these days), but the title is a little misleading (and I don't think it was a good idea to have lots of people saying "the assault on reason by Al Gore"): it turns out mostly to be a broadside against the Bush administration. It is also, though, somewhat of an appeal to reason in general, which I think is great and dovetails nicely with the recent spate of anti-religion books by Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, Harris, etc. (I should be clear, I haven't read the book, just the excerpt at Time.com.) Here's a paragraph that makes me cheer:

Unfortunately, the legacy of the 20th century's ideologically driven bloodbaths has included a new cynicism about reason itself—because reason was so easily used by propagandists to disguise their impulse to power by cloaking it in clever and seductive intellectual formulations. When people don't have an opportunity to interact on equal terms and test the validity of what they're being "taught" in the light of their own experience and robust, shared dialogue, they naturally begin to resist the assumption that the experts know best.

Where I think he goes wrong is in railing against television as a dumbing-down medium: "the passivity associated with watching television is at the expense of activity in parts of the brain associated with abstract thought, logic, and the reasoning process." As is obvious from this journal, I watch a lot of television, and I think my brain has not suffered from it; on the contrary, things like "Lost" or "The Colbert Report" or "Charlie Rose" or even Gore's own Oscar-winning movie can engage the mind in powerful ways and even enrich the viewer's mental capacities. I'm tempted to say that Tivo is a different medium from the television he's talking about, since you can pause and rewind just like you can re-read a difficult passage in a book, not to mention that you can fast-forward through the repetitive barrage of commercials. But no, I think he really means that anything with moving pictures and sound is somehow inferior to the written word, and I just don't buy that at all.

He also goes on to express support for net neutrality, but it's thinly argued and kind of a non sequitur. So, once again he's pointed in the right direction, but bumbling about it. But I think it's better that he's writing books than running for office—the last thing we need is more bumbling in our leaders, regardless of the ideology.

Also, he's on Letterman tonight, about 30-40 minutes from now, in case you're near a TV.