Middleman!

It's been a while since I lost my geek heart to a TV show that was so obviously doomed. Which brings us to The Middleman, on ABC Family of all places.

I had been avoiding this on the grounds that it was just a silly-looking summer series and also the whole obviously doomed thing but a series of positive mentions on io9 and other Web sites (including a plug by Justine Larbalestier) led me to try the thing once.

I was hooked within the first five minutes, by about three very clever bits. That kept me going, but I was very surprised after a few episodes by how much I came to like the characters.

Five things:

• It's unabashedly geeky. I initially described the show as "Men In Black, if the characters had all seen Men In Black." It's awash in SF/Comic references, many of which are placed in the background to reward those who are paying attention.

• It's unabashedly heroic. The Middleman is the kind of square-jawed throwback that snarky shows usually make fun of. Not here. Somehow the show manages to make the hero retro and cool, without really making him just retro-cool. If that makes sense, which it probably doesn't.

• It's unabashedly silly. Plots to date have included fish loving zombies that shout "TROUUUUT", vampire puppets, and a grunge match between kung-fu masters and masked Mexican wrestlers. It's the goofiest show this side of Pushing Daisies.

• The heroes have fun. The series creator said he wanted to get past the current idea that comic-book-esque heroes need to be dour and wear their responsibilities like a 2000 pound weight. In this show, the Middleman pulls a rare reverse Peter Parker, telling his sidekick Wendy that if she falls in love and doesn't follow it, that's on her, she can't blame it on the job.

• I also really like that, in a show that features a character who uses a "NDBS Detector" (Not Detectable By Science), they've also made Wendy's best friend a Carl Sagan reading skeptic (among other things).

So, go watch the one remaining episode next week. And then say good bye. Let's just say the ratings were so low that ABC Family won't even release what the ratings were. Plus they cut the series order to 12 episodes from 13. The outlook isn't good. But the whole season is on iTunes...

Parenthetically, if you can believe the numbers that the series creator threw out in an interview, the show, which is ridiculously low-budget, still costs roughly 1.5 million dollars an episode. (He said ABC Family spent 17 million on the series as a whole.) That's staggering.

Thing I Need To Write About, Part 1: Dr. Horrible

It seems like I'm forever mentioning that I'm not posting here as much as I'd like. I said a while back that between here and the Pathfinder blog I'd be posting two to three times a week. Turns out that's actually been more or less true, just that all of it has been on the Pathfinder side.

I do miss it here, and there are a few big genre/geek things in the last couple weeks that I really wanted to write about here, where nobody can interrupt me.

First up: Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. I have to admit that I was ridiculously over-psyched about this project from the beginning. Joss Whedon, musical, hapless supervillain, Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion. They didn't just have me at "hello", they had me at "h". Honestly, I was worried that no actual project could live up to my expectations.

Well, a week later, having basically memorized the songs, I'm pleased to say that it's still fantastic.

I want to talk about this as a business model first, since it lets me put spoilers at the bottom.

• There's no question but that this is a huge test of whether online-only content is financially viable. If Joss Whedon can't turn a buck on this, given his huge existing support and the amount of buzz this show has gotten, then it's going to be very hard for other established creators to justify web-content. As much as I don't like judging movies or TV by their bottom line, in this case, if it's a gold rush, then we're going to see a lot more of it.

• That said, it's not completely clear this has much implication for a more typical web video project, like Felicia Day's The Guild, which would have a much smaller budget and much less entrenched fan base. I think the main implication is "get it done and get it out there".

• A back-of-the envelope guess suggests they haven't made a profit yet (or not much of one), but almost certainly will shortly. Hard numbers are scarce, two that have been released publicly: Whedon said the budget was "in the low six figures" (and that may be without paying the cast and crew), and that there were about 2 million individual hits on the web site for individual episodes.

• So.. that's probably around 500,000 people who streamed all three episodes. No idea how many people have bought it on iTunes yet, but I'd be surprised if it was more than 50,000 and very surprised if it was more than 100,000. Again, no clue what their deal on iTunes is, but I'd be surprised if they got more than about $2 per download of the episodes in a bundle. Add that up, and they are break-even at this point at best.

• But there are more revenue streams. I don't know what their arrangement with Hulu was for streaming. There's merchandise. There will be a soundtrack, and there will be a DVD release. And people are still buying it on iTunes. So in the end, I expect it will more than financially justify everybody's time, while not exactly being a Scrooge McDuck level of money pile.

That's more than enough on financial stuff, let's talk about it as a show. Spoilers ahead, I guess.

• All three of the main players are great, but Neil Patrick Harris takes it to an entire other level. Really, there's very little in the entertainment world that I've enjoyed more in the last few years than watching Harris methodically take it over. This part is a perfect showcase for everything he does well -- it's dark, it's light, it's funny, it's serious, and he sings amazingly.

• I'm not really qualified to judge the music, but it's been stuck in my head for the last couple of weeks, so I'm going to confidently say that it's pretty catchy. Some great lyric work here.

• After some back and forth in my head, I've come to accept the ending, even though it's a bit depressing. Here's why: For about 30 minutes of show, Whedon is deliberately ambiguous about whether Billy Horrible (not his real name) is actually evil, or just playing around. He calls himself Dr. Horrible, but he's kind of a buffoon (at first), he kind of is creepily stalking Penny, but Captain Hammer is an even bigger jerk, he wants to join the Evil League of Evil, but is clearly squeamish about killing...

• What works about the ending is that it preserves the ambiguity in the most intense possible way. Horrible is willing to disrupt the event, but flinches at the moment when he could kill Captain Hammer. He's willing to reap the benefits of being perceived as a killer, but is obviously -- given the last line -- somewhat ambivalent about it. It'll be interesting to see where the character goes if and when everybody gets around to another shoot.

Hmm... that turned out longer than expected, no wonder I'm not posting here as often as I'd like.

Boxcars

Battlestar Galactica 402ish "Six of One"

Some quick bullet points before the next one comes down the pike.

Very pleased with the first two episodes of the season -- I think it's encouraging that this episode, credited to a writer whose last couple were not that strong, was arguably better than the first.

• Katee Sackhoff had an amazing week -- Starbuck was all over the place, on the very edge of hysteria of not past it, a lot of great scenes. The Adama/Roslin scenes were also very good.

• If you are looking for a line to take a something other than face value, I'd recommend "I'm no more a Cylon then you are"

• How long can Tigh, Anders, Tory, and Tyrol meet together before somebody gets suspicious? It's not like they travel in the same social circles or that anybody is going to believe they've got a bridge game going...

• Loved the Cylon civil war idea -- it's very consistent with what Moore has said in a number of interviews about Cylon society being young and under it's first real stress. (This is actually where I thought they were going to go at the end of Season Two, after "Downloaded" first hinted at pro and anti human politics among the Cylons. Plus it's always nice to see Dean Stockwell. (The actual confrontation scene was capped by Tricia Helfer's look of shock at the end.)

• Okay, having two farewell ceremonies for Lee was a bit much, especially since you'd think that there would be some resentment over an able-bodied person leaving the military. That said, both scenes worked on their own, and I thought the aside in the bar scene of the group presumably strip poker was weird and funny.

• There are many reasons I like this show. One is that Baltar, after the events of last episode, still had a visible scar in this episode -- a point that many shows would ignore. Watching Callis play against himself was also fun.

Doctor, Doctor, Give Me The News

5 Things About: Doogie Howser, M.D.

Why Doogie? Because the parody at the end of How I Met Your Mother a while back, plus a desire to wander through hulu.com. So I watched the Doogie pilot from 1989. And now I'm writing about it.

1. I was really not expecting the show to hold up at all. It's actually a pretty solid piece of late 80's TV, despite the cheesy theme music and classic 80's opening sequence.

2. It's still possibly the most absurd premise that a TV show ever expected the public to take seriously. In the pilot, they work around that through an exceptionally well-crafted script combined with Neil Patrick Harris' talent and likability as Doogie.

3. I remembered it as just a Stephen Bochco show, but it's actually Bochco and David E. Kelley. Kelley's name wouldn't have meant anything to me at the time, but in retrospect his involvement makes so much sense, it's exactly the kind of quirky drama he would become known for.

4. Let's take this as a writing challenge. You have one opening scene to make this ridiculous premise believable. Your hero needs to be smart enough for the audience to buy him as a doctor, but not so nerdy or arrogant that it's off-putting. Again, you have one scene. First scene of the pilot: Doogie is taking his driving road test, his mom is in the back seat, and he's clearly nervous and tentative. Until they see an accident on the roadside -- Doogie suddenly is in total control, parking, running up to the accident, ordering cops around and saving a guy's leg. That's the whole show, right there. Corny? A little bit, although Harris' performance blunts that. Effective? Yep.

5. Another nicely done bit: later, Doogie has the inevitable conflict with an older doctor who thinks he's a smart-ass young whippersnapper. My eyes rolled in anticipation of some scenery chewing, but actually the scene ends pretty quickly from there. The dilemma at this point is: if Doogie is right, then he comes off as kind of an insufferable know-it-all, if he's wrong, it's harder to take him seriously as a doctor. The writers opt for door number three -- events overtake the patient without proving Doogie right or wrong, he has a brief, nice scene with the older doctor, and the potential conflicts about his age are established without being nailed into our heads.

I'm about 100% sure, based on my own memory, that the scripts weren't always this good, but still, the pilot is pretty good.

I Believeth, I Believeth, Don't Die Tinkerbell...

Battlestar Galactica 4-1 "He That Believeth In Me"

I'm relieved, frankly. Not surprised, exactly. I liked Season 3 more than a lot of people seemed to, and I'm optimistic that Ron Moore and his crew understand what the problems were and how to avoid them. Still, it's good to see the show starting out it's final season with a strong episode.

This was basically the episode I was hoping for, with two extra plusses, and one kind-of minus.

Spoilers Ahead, I suppose

I really liked where they took the Final Four Cylon story. After three seasons of asking "What does it mean to be a human", they inverted it -- what does it mean to be a Cylon? What does it mean if your spouse, or best friend, or your whatever the heck Lee and Kara are, turns out to be Cylon? Does it matter? Should it? Great questions, and I can't think of a previous SF work that's attacked the basic what-is-human question from this angle.

The specific pieces of the storyline were well-done. Anders' nerves about going into combat, Tigh's general Tigh-ness. The bit where the Cylon Raider scans Anders and get's the blip response was very cool.

But what really made the episode was the way that Starbuck's return integrated with the Final Four. Of course everybody would think Starbuck is a Cylon trick -- half the audience thinks so too. In the show, this allowed the characters to all talk about what it would mean to be a Cylon over the uncomfortable glances of the Fantastic Four. A really clever piece of writing structure.

The negative is the Baltar storyline. Not only does this put Baltar back in another situation where he's separated from the rest of the crew and in a place with creepy customs, but the whole thing is way too much like the telepath underground from the final season of Babylon 5 for comfort. (Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if the attack on Baltar was staged to make him stay with the cultists. But then, I'm cynical.)

• Some great acting work all around -- watch how much of the episode is carried by the reactions of the Fab Four. And James Callis' facial expressions were the most bearable part of the Baltar story.

• I thought that the tension between Lee and Adama was maybe resolved too quickly given how intense their argument was. I'm assuming the writers have bigger fish to fry.

• I watched this one on hulu.com, since I don't get Sci-Fi on my cable system, and they pulled out of iTunes. Overall, it wasn't bad. The video quality was worse than the iTunes files but still watchable. The biggest problem was the interspersed commercials -- not that I'm inherently against the commercials, just that they aren't synched right. Two of the breaks came about a second after the actual episode act break and one of them came right in the middle of Baltar being attacked. Annoying.

Cuts Like A Knife

SF Movie Review: Battlestar Galactica: Razor

(Continuing the enlargement of things I write about on this site, and I think this will be the last post containing a disclaimer about topics...)

I'm not sure what this says about me or my relationship to this show, but the following is all true:

• I bought this DVD the day it came out (I don't get Sci-Fi at the moment...)
• I then let it sit for three entire months while waiting for the right time to watch it in one sitting.
• I finally decided that I'd watch it in pieces, so I started it at about 10:45 at night.
• Got so caught up in it that I watched it all the way through, then read Jacob's incredible TWoP recap before sleep.

The movie is made up of several nested flashback stories (don't even try to use this movie as an introduction to the Galactica universe...), mostly unified by the person of Kendra Shaw, whose official title might be "Highest Ranking Pegasus Officer We Never Saw Before". Shaw arrives on Pegasus about fifteen minutes before the original Cylon attack, and has a front row seat for the craziness hinted at during the first time through the Pegasus story. Later, she becomes Lee Adama's XO, and leads a mission to a mysterious Cylon outpost dating from the first Cylon war. Add in a couple of flashbacks as to what the elder Adama and Cain were doing on the last day of the first war, and you've about got it.

The basic issue with a this movie, which is designed specifically not to be necessary to understand the main story, is for the show to justify it's existence as more than a way to move DVD's at Best Buy. I think it does, not so much at a plot level, but in the way that it deepens the Pegasus story, already one of the show's best storylines.

The Galactica story has always revolved around about three questions, how do you deal with overwhelming loss, how are you supposed to act in the name of survival, and how are you supposed to treat a mortal enemy. Razor encompasses all three. The earlier Pegasus arc was, in some ways, a little too easy -- Cain fits very neatly into the model of Crazy Commanding Officer Who Goes Too Far. By taking us through the all the steps from beginning to end, Razor makes it harder to dismiss Cain as a lunatic -- it explains her actions without excusing them. Kendra Shaw, who pretty much wears a sign at the beginning saying "I'm Not Crazy" gets drawn straight into the heart of it all. As a result, Razor ends up being a very dark story even by Galactica standards.

• My list of bedrock Galactica questions doesn't include the question of whether the Cylons are human. While that's frequently a topic of discussion on the show, it's clear to me that the creators of the show know the answer to that question... they use the human/robot question as a way of getting at the deeper issues.

• I liked the subtle ways in which the movie placed itself in the Galactica timeline, the exact number of survivors in the credits places it, plus there were a couple of background references to major events in the last half of season 2.

• Have they ever mentioned on the show exactly what caused the first Cylon war to end so abruptly? That's a possible plot issue to be dealt with in season 4. Or, I suppose, the on-again, off-again Caprica miniseries.

• Moore's commentary is very interesting -- as with many other Galactica episodes, this one changed dramatically in editing. Essentially, they turned the entire movie inside out, and what was originally the framing sequence became the ending mission, and the original meat of the movie became the framing sequence.