Should I be concerned ...

... that every single TV show that I own on DVD features high schoolers?

... that of all the shows I've tried out this summer, the only one that has remotely stuck is Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares?

... that SBS documentaries are starting to really appeal to me right now?

... that I'm enjoying reading about TV about a billion times more than I am watching TV at the moment?

Discuss.

Kids in the Kitchen

*** Warning: food puns ahead ***

No matter what else I might watch on the old teev, one thing that never fails to catch my attention is cooking. I don’t know whether it’s my pretensions to being some kind of dinner party host to the stars (or at least my friends), but I have always been intrigued by cooking shows, ever since my mother would let me watch King’s Kitchen (or as I liked to call it, “King’s Chooken”) while my sister had her afternoon sleep.

And haven’t there been a mess of cooking shows in the last decade? If it isn’t Jamie this, it’s Nigella that, and Gordon and Rick besides. Celebrity chefs are so thick on the ground you could use them as a handy alternative to porkers at a spit roast.

Given that the format of cooking shows is somewhat static, the appeal of cooking shows is based either on the expertise of the presenter or their folksiness (or in outstanding examples, such as ‘The Best’, a mixture of both). So here is my deconstruction of the currently available fare:

read the rest

The Cook and the Chef – ABC, 6:30pm, Wednesdays

If there are three words which define The Cook and the Chef, they are “nut-brown butter”. For crying out loud Maggie, isn’t it possible that you don’t always need your butter to be nut-freaking-brown? Every time butter is used, I hope that she will use some other adjective. But no. It’s nut-brown or nothing. Another friend claims that the utter lack of chemistry between Simon and Maggie is off-putting. I don't know. I kind of like the idea that they aren't pretending to like/respect/tolerate each other.



Iron Chef – SBS, 8:30pm Saturdays

Who doesn’t love Iron Chef*? The kitchen stadium, the ridiculous cravats, condescending commentators, the mindless consumption of raw capsicums. This show has it all!




My major beef with Iron Chef is that the theme ingredient is often incidental to the dish prepared. I wouldn’t argue, for example, that in a dish which features lobster, foie gras, saffron and the tears of a sentimental duck, the defining ingredient is zucchini.

The other thing that bugs me about this show are the celebrity guests. They seem to INSIST on having a woman on the panel, and then constantly ridicule her for her lack of knowledge about cooking. What is the point of that, other than to make me cross?

Ready, Steady Cook – Ten, 2:00pm weekdays

I like the idea of this show, though it is a complete rip off of Iron Chef. What a shame that the host has the kind of knowledge about cooking that David Reyne has about placebos. The chefs are good – but I do wonder why they bother with audience participation – it just seems to slow everything down.

Jamie at Home – Ten, 7:30pm, Fridays

One of my friends remarked recently that the great benefit of Jamie Oliver is that he has identified his niche. His niche appears to be people who can’t be bothered undertaking some kind of Homeric Odyssey to discover the oregano growing on the side of a forbidding cliff, picked by raven-haired virgins at midnight on a blue moon. His niche, therefore, is people like me, who are just pleased that their local supermarket actually stocks fresh kaffir lime leaves. Having said all of this, boy oh boy am I sick of Jamie Oliver.

Karen Martini on Better Homes and Gardens – Seven, 7:30pm Fridays

If only I could stand to wade through all the other home-renovations crap that is this show, I would quite like to see more of Karen Martini. She makes great food – and she has the ability to avoid talking-down to her audience without selling herself as some kind of skills-vortex.






And it doesn't stop there. You'll notice I haven't mentioned: Food Lovers Guide to Australia, Vasili's Kitchen, Huey's Cooking Adventures, Fresh, Surfing the Menu, Heart and Soul, the Hairy Bikers Ride Again, or the veritable pantheon currently available on pay-TV.





Or Two Fat Ladies, the Naked Chef, Cooking with Kurma, Yan Can Cook, Nigella Feasts, Delia Smith, Rick Stein's Fruits of the Sea, Surprise Chef, Nick Nairn, Captain Cook, or the BBC's amusing sit-com starring Lenny Henry, Chef!



Okay, so at the end of the day I’d rather be at Jacques Reymond, but in the meantime I’m happy to keep watching cooking shows. Who knows, one day I might even cook something.


* Mr Fix.


Also - you have no idea how difficult it was not to label this post "nut brown butter".

And yet Everybody Loves Raymond stayed on air....

To say that I am super excited about writing for a blog dedicated to the cathode ray is most definitely an understatement. Believe me when I say that I have my ponytail pulled high, my best Sparkle Motion dance hands and a pair of pompoms shimmying away in time to the flips of my joyous heart. But alas not all TV related writing is so joyous, and I am afraid I will be sharing some of my soul's burdens with you all today. The lovely LaRue wrote about When Good TV Goes Bad, well I'm writing about When Good TV Gets Cancelled.

I love a cliffhanger, but only when I get to know what's to be found at the bottom of the damn plummet! Why is it that the viewing public seem to be such arse heads? Not us, I mean them, out there, the ones who watch McLeod's Daughters and rate Home and Away ahead of Neighbours. Someone is watching Yes, Dear and it's no one I know (or at least they won't admit to it)! And yet programs with scope and lashings of ingenuity are shunted into the obsolescence of TV's week night carousel, swapping times and days like I wish I swapped lovers.

I was a late bloomer when it came to recognising the genius of Joss Whedon. As an older teen I had the tendency to pooh-pooh anything that wasn't consciously arty or literate. And to me the high point of TV literacy was an adaptation of a classic Victorian novel by the BBC costume department. As the years went on I managed to remove my head from my buttocks and catch a few episodes of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. I liked what I saw. Skip forward many years and I am living with a pal who has them all on DVD. I barely spoke to anyone for 6 weeks, but when I emerged, pale of skin and lank of hair, having watched all 144 episodes (plus all of the commentaries and special features) I was most certainly a fan of Joss. This set me on the path towards Firefly, a show that had been cancelled years before I discovered it. Firefly is a space show unlike any other. Set 500 years in the future, there are no aliens, people are still people and the average Joe can speak Mandarin. It takes the film school theory that Sci-Fi's are really Westerns in space to the next level. Firefly is most definitely and deliberately a Space Western. This is not the clean and clinical world of Star Trek, this is the world of petty crims, hustlers and smugglers who live on the edge of the civilised world. This is the world that Han Solo left when he picked up some passengers at Mos Eisley. This 'verse was seriously cool. It lasted a mere 11 episodes in the US on Fox, who presumably cancelled it after waiting for the vampires and moody teens to show up and improve their ad earnings.
Fox sabotaged their own show. They played episodes out of order (the pilot episode, where they set up the, uh, plot, was the final one that aired), they didn't promote it beyond 'From the man who brought you Buffy: The Vampire Slayer' promos and they kept asking the creators where the vampires and foxy teens were. The series is now available in a handy DVD box set, with 3 unaired episodes and buckets of special features. Oh, and the lovely people at Universal Pictures coughed up the dosh for a feature film called Serenity which finished off some of the story lines and gave a degree of closure. This sort of resurrection is a rare occurrence in cancellation land. Only the complete resurrection of Family Guy comes to mind as another time the TV gods intervened to save the viewing public from their evil network masters.

A far sadder cancellation abomination was that of Carnivale. Set in the US Dust Bowl of the Depression, this spooky, gripping, sexy and smart series was nothing short of a masterpiece. A wonderful mix of real life drama; historical accuracy to please the most picky; a custom built mythology that was breathtaking in it's scope, and the weird and wonderful world of freaks and carnies. This was TV of such high quality that even the harshest critic would have had trouble finding fault with it. Unless of course their world view was so easily threatened that they attended book burnings. It referenced real events, while building towards the final battle between good and evil. But good and evil with silky, silky shades of grey. And did I mention the sexy? Purrrrrr.
It was art, it was terrifying, it was gorgeous and it got cancelled just as the plot twist of the century was revealed. GAH! Bastards! I have such respect for the commissioning execs at HBO (Oz, Six Feet Under, The Sopranos, Deadwood, Sex and the City) but what the hell happened in the HBO offices in May 2005? A mass TV exec brain fart? There are rumours of a 1 off mini-series to finish off the story arc, but after nearly 2 and a half years I fear that the battle for Carnivale is lost.

These are but two of many excellent programs that were cancelled before their time. Deadwood, Angel and Arrested Development all leap to my mind (no one tell me what happens in Angel season 5, the DVD's are waiting for me to get back home and watch them). At least the these three managed to wrap up some of the loose ends before being yanked. And I think this is what annoys me most about cancellation. It's just damn rude! You wouldn't start a joke and then refuse to give the punchline. Or tear out the last chapter of your own novel. So why do it to TV? It's that money thing, isn't it? I'm almost annoyed enough to go out and join Resistance.

So tell me, what show has you asking 'They cancelled this, but Everybody Loves Raymond went for 9 seasons?'

When Good TV Goes Bad

They call it jumping the shark: the moment the writers of a TV show run out of ideas, named after that infamous episode of Happy Days where the Fonze does just that - jumps over a shark on waterskis. It was the end for Happy days and the saying has been around ever since.

Traditionally shark-jumping involved the addition of a new character - in a sitcom almost always a cute child or an amusing neighbour (fat kid from Hey Dad, anyone?) - but these days shark jumping seems to be more about the writers having total amnesia and giving all their characters the stupidest, most contrived plotlines ever, especially in the soap-drama genre.

It's kind of fun trying to spot the shark jump in any used-to-be-good-now-bad TV show. The Simpsons jumped the shark quite literally when Homer recreated that scene from Happy Days - but I believe I may be alone in thinking that it hasn't jumped the shark for reals yet. The OC jumped the shark when Marissa became a lesbian for three episodes. SVU jumped the shark when Olivia got a rapist for a brother. E-Street jumped the shark with Mr Bad.

What's more interesting, though, is when there is no shark-jump, no contrived lesbian plotline, no little green alien. When a show is still exactly the same as it was on the day it aired, and yet, it goes from being must-watch to shoot-me-now.

Take Spicks and Specks. Man, I loved Spicks and Specks when it first started. I loved it so much I taped House to watch it - because as adorable as House was, Spicks and Specks had me in stitches. I loved Adam. I loved Myf. I loved Alan. I loved the guests. I loved the kooky theme music. I probably would have ranked it as one of my top five TV shows - that's how much love their was.

And then one day ... the jokes weren't really that funny.

And someone was singing from the stupid 1975 Torana Owners Manual again.

And it occured to me that Alan's chin was the scariest thing I'd ever seen on the TV and Myf's voice made me want to take a power drill to my ears.

It was the strangest thing but I was overcome with loathing for this stupid show, and I flicked over to House.

I tried again a few times to watch it, and every time the hate grew more pronounced. It was funny - because the show itself had not really changed - they were still making jokes and obviously they were kind of funny because the audience was laughing, and there was still trivia - but the whole thing just really annoyed me. Kind of like when you're eating dinner with the man you've been married with for twenty years and suddenly you notice that the sound of his chewing is actually rather revolting, and you have to fight the urge to leap over the table and puncture his oesophagus with your butter knife, I suppose. Except it's television.

And it's not just Spicks and Specks. I feel the same way about that sacred cow of Australian comedy: Thank God You're Here, except that I only moderately liked it to begin with. Still, now there's hate. Pokey-eyes-out hate.

So the question for the square eyes is this: what makes good TV go bad? And once it's gone bad - is there any way back?

Channel Surfing.....of Doom

I am waiting for Californication to start.

I am channel surfing.

I flick through to Channel 9 and the atrocious 1 vs 100.

And there is the boy I sat next to in Grade Six.

I hope all that Pursuit reading comes in handy.