Soundboard

Opinions, observations and other fun stuff.

Amazon bringing exclusive Harry Potter to your Kindle for free…sort of

The online retail giant has announced an exclusive deal with Pottermore to include all the Harry Potter novels as e-books in their Kindle Owners’ Lending Library program starting June 19. That means all Amazon Prime subscribers can now check out the Hogwarts saga in e-book form—in addition to tons of other e-books, streaming movies and TV shows and free shipping—at no additional charge. For those keeping score, that’s a lot of stuff for free, with your $79 a year subscription, of course. A pretty good deal, I’d say, except for one thing.

Ever since I bought my iPad late last year, I’ve found myself picking up e-books more and more, and while I’m enjoying the selection that Amazon has in their catalog, non-Kindle owners like me (which I suspect far outnumber Kindle owners) will be locked out of the Harry Potter action. It’s understandable that the company is trying to bolster its Amazon Prime and Kindle efforts, and at some point, I imagine it’ll be “subscribe to Amazon Prime and read/watch/listen to anything for free” for Kindle owners, but I wonder how a move like this might sit with the Department of Justice considering their recent antitrust suit against several major book publishers and Apple in which Amazon was clearly painted as a victim of collusion and price-fixing.

Then again, maybe this is akin to when the Beatles finally allowed their music to be sold digitally through iTunes a couple of years ago. It was a nice thought, but for most fans it was a non-event. Anyone who’s into the books probably bought them from Pottermore already, right? And besides, it’s Harry Potter. That’s sooo last year.

Stuffing The Ballot Box

A great year for movies has resulted in a silly and safe Oscars to rival 2000′s ceremony, when the likes of Being John Malkovich, Fight Club, The Matrix and Magnolia were pushed aside to honor Best Picture nominees The Green Mile and The Sixth Sense. Still, many of our favorites managed a nomination this year, even if they have no chance of winning in a year that all but promises a blowout for the mediocre The Artist. Here’s how we’d cast our ballots. Continue reading →

21 Things I Learned From Listening To Eight Straight Hours Of Top-40 Music in 2011

1. Andy Grammer (“Keep Your Head Up”) is not only musically redundant, but in possession of an infuriating last name.
2. Mick Jagger would not like “Moves Like Jagger.” This is a man who does not whistle.
3. Jason DeRulo has other songs besides his Imogen Heap-sampling “Whatcha Say,” and that’s not all bad.
4. Bad Meets Evil is one of the dumbest band names I have ever heard, and yet “Lighters” is a sweet little nostalgia ditty. That said, I wonder if The Kids Of Today know what its title refers to – at a concert in 2011, “A Sky Full of iPhones” would be the more appropriate refrain.
5. No one I have heard singing Kevin Rudolf’s “Let It Rock” has been doing it correctly.
6. The nation can rekindle its love affair (of sorts, as explored on “Saturday Night Live” recently) with Adele by taking all of her songs off the radio for a month, and then returning to them again. Voice of a damn angel.
7. Gym Class Heroes can only be helped by confusion with Cobra Starship as I have been doing for about five years now.
8. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you look better with the lights off” is 2011’s “I’m trying to find the words to describe this girl without being disrespectful (sexy bitch)” or, if you prefer, “I’m not trying to be rude, but tonight I’m fucking you.”
9. After just 2 hours of the hits of today, 2010’s “California Gurls” improves a little. This will now be known as Max Martin Stockholm Syndrome.
10. It’s unfair to grade LMFAO on a curve just because they’re Berry Gordy’s son and grandson, and not a bunch of obnoxious white frat boys.
11. Bruno Mars and Pink will eventually converge into one singer.
12. The songs from Lady Gaga’s “The Fame”/”The Fame Monster” sound remarkably stylistically uniform now compared with those from “Born This Way,” and it took me this long to realize it because I never hear more than one of her singles sequentially.15. “Na na na na na, every day, like my iPod’s stuck on replay” is the new “All I want to do is… [gunshots] and take your money.”
13. The tyrannical grip of Kings of Leon is loosening upon this vale of tears.
14. Katy Perry’s not-even-slant rhymes attempted in “Firework” are desperate enough (sliding on rhyming “Oh” and “Sky”?) but her pairing of “park” and  ”dark” with “menage a trois” in “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)” is debatably worse, because it’s pretentious as well as incorrect. The Swedish song machine is breaking down! Whatever happened to the organization that came up with Shelleyisms like “Ain’t nothin’ but a heartache/ Ain’t nothin’ but a mistake/ I never wanna hear you say/ I want it that way.”
15. Gaga’s “Yoü and I” makes more sense when you discover that it was coproduced by Mutt “Formerly Mr. Shania Twain” Lange (oh my God, this should have been obvious).
16. Justin Timberlake’s “What Goes Around… Comes Around” may be the oldest song I’ve heard all day. It was released as a single in 2007. Repeat: Justin Timberlake has not released an album since 2006. You know what’s not cool?
17. Here I figured this endeavor would mean eight straight hours of “Party Rock Anthem” and we’re only getting to it now after six hours. I assume the hamsters borrowed the tapes.
18. Kelly Rowland‘s “Motivation,” is so beloved of the soundtrackers at the gym that I can only conclude a robot pulls that programming together because this song? Is not about motivating yourself to work out.
19. See #13, but for Train’s “Hey Soul Sister.”
20. As dumb as “after dark/ then we had a menage a trois” is, I think K. Perry has been trumped by the lyric “Love you like a love song.”  (Selena Gomez and the Scene) Roland Barthes’ head just exploded.
21. If you think Foster The People’s “Pumped Up Kicks” is truly the worst thing to happen to music this year, take my pop challenge and find out for yourself.

X Marks The Rot

Two years ago, The X Factor was coronated as the biggest show on earth. Simon Cowell, the star of TV’s #1 megahit for a decade, was leaving that gig to headline his own creation that spiced up the stale format that made him famous. A year and a half after that, X Factor started filming and troubling reports of uncooperative audiences, network interference and casting woes started appearing. Then it premiered a month ago to big — though not mind-blowing — ratings.

You’ve probably heard all of this business talk. But what no one seems to be talking about when it comes to X Factor is the show itself. That’s probably because no one in the media has actually watched it; it’s way too long (most new shows have aired between three to six hours of content in the last month where X Factor is almost up to thirty), and reality shows are assumed to suck by design unless they’re Project Runway or Top Chef. But X Factor is shaping up to be another beast entirely. It sucks, but it’s sucking on a gigantic, train wreck level. There are literally hundreds of millions of dollars riding on it, and it’s a complete and utter failure in which nothing works. Host Steve Jones is a brainless tool, the distracting editing and direction drive me to drink, the horrid set looks like it caught fire en route from the People’s Choice Awards, the vast majority of contestants wouldn’t make it past the audition stage of American Idol, and the judges have zero relevance in the music industry (with the notable exception of L.A. Reid, the show’s sole realistic and honest bright spot). But last night’s first live performance show made it clear that aside from all of its aesthetic problems, X Factor is rotten to the core, based on an insidious central premise that demeans artists and elevates suits.

Let’s start with what I believe audiences are looking for in a performance-based music reality show. First and foremost, they want it to discover a superstar, a Kelly Clarkson or Carrie Underwood who will embark on a decades-long career filled with songs we all know and love. Secondly, they want to see lots of people with great voices, and they want that person to come in off the street with nothing but $2 in their pocket and a dream that they pursued by using a sick day to skip their waitressing job for the afternoon. Then, they want three judges (not four, or five, or nine) who are funny, provocative and tough, and talk no longer than 10 seconds about each performance.

X Factor, on the other hand, is a show about reality show judges. They are introduced stepping off helicopters in slow motion, wearing sunglasses, hanging around Italian villas, with apocalyptic opera music blaring behind them, projected on multiple 100 foot screens. By extension, the judges are surrogates for record company executives. They select useless lumps of clay off the street and shape them into what they want them to be, giving them ridiculous arrangements of karaoke songs, backing them with dozens of embarrassed-looking backup dancers, and then taking all the credit for their success.

It’s a competition show, but the competition is among the judges. As American Idol devolved into a boring lovefest last year, I and everyone else looked forward to Simon Cowell coming back this fall and telling it how it is. Last night, he did not criticize a single performer onstage… not one, despite the fact that there are literally only three people on the show who are passable singers (and not a single extraordinary one). His criticism was reserved only for his fellow judges, who picked wrong songs or used the wrong choreography or weren’t contemporary enough. If a performance went well, the congratulations went to the judge/mentor, who did all the heavy lifting. The success or failure of every contestant was in the hands of the executive who molded them, not the singer of the song.

This bizarre reduction of artists and celebration of executives is nauseating, but it’s made even worse by the fact that X Factor is built on an idea of the music industry that crumbled over a decade ago when Napster and bittorrents came around. Record companies wield about as much power now as someone who makes cannonballs. It’s undeniable that an effective executive can guide a talented artist to a productive and profitable career, but the idea that Cowell can pull a completely untalented pretty girl off the street and turn her into a recording artist with good marketing (as he attempted and failed miserably to do twice last night) is as sick and wrong as it is delusional. The anachronistic silliness is hammered home even more by the fact that these visionaries who are tasked creating contemporary superstars selected songs almost exclusively from the Reagan administration; the newest song was “I Kissed A Girl” (which was sung by a man, edgy!).

No matter who wins X Factor, the real winner will be American Idol. Two years ago I thought stodgy ol’ AI was headed to the trash heap and X Factor would steal its thunder, but now it seems simple, true and — its secret weapon all along — American. Nobody wants to see a billionaire turn somebody who can’t sing into a one hit wonder. They want to see a normal person walk in and become a superstar with longevity on the strength of their own talent. We all know that rich dudes are running everything behind the scenes and that Simon was the real star of the show, but the presentation worked how it should, with the spotlight on the artist onstage. X Factor inverts that, celebrating the executive at the expense of the artist. That’s why it will never be the giant cultural event Cowell expected and Fox wanted. Who would cheer for Col. Tom Parker and dismiss Elvis?

What Was Your Shameful First Album Purchase?

It started as it usually does, with some healthy skepticism. Scott pointed to a Pitchfork Q&A with the indie band Cults in which singer Madeline Follin says the first album she ever bought was the unassailable London Calling by The Clash. “YEAH SURE London Calling was the first record you bought, girl from Cults,” quipped he. “Was Apocalypse Now the first movie you saw?” We can’t know for sure if Follin was burnishing her rock credentials or if she simply had someone to steer her into good taste, but for most of us, our listening history contains a fair amount of potholes, railing breaks, even sinkholes of bad taste.

How much more do our shameful and regrettable purchases say about us than that one time we sailed into Other Music and got the clerk’s nod? (And how much more fitting Follin’s cohort Brian Oblivion – talk about improving your image there!! – and his answer of Eminem’s The Slim Shady LP, undoubtedly grumbling through many a suburban boy’s CD wallet still?) The Sodapop Journal staff reaches deep down into its subconscious to highlight the musical moments they’d much rather forget. Group therapy’s on the house.

Scott: When I’m asked what the first album I bought was, I have a quick go-to answer: Stone Temple Pilots’ Purple. Pretty good, eh? Stone Temple Pilots were often mocked in their time as cheap, glammy SoCal imitations of dour, humorless Seattle bands like Pearl Jam, but today I don’t think there’s a person on Earth who’d rather listen to “Jeremy” over “Interstate Love Song”. Purple definitely belongs in the top tier of 90′s alt-rock behemoths with In Utero, Siamese Dream and  Superunknown; only 3 or 4 tracks are skippers, and the singles are all radio classics (along with “Interstate”, there’s “Big Empty” and “Vasoline”).

But while that’s truly the first album I bought, the first album I ever asked for and got was a cassette of The Simpsons Sing The Blues, the heavily-hyped novelty record wrapped around the Michael Jackson-penned “Do The Bartman”. Historically, a lot of kids’ first records are novelties, like The Archies and The Monkees. Sadly, there are no “Sugar Sugars” or “I’m A Believers” to be had on this thing, though if you’d like to hear a Chuck Berry song performed by Bart Simpson, Buster Poindexter and Joe Walsh, this is currently the only way to do so.

The second album I ever bought was also a weird novelty: The Flintstones: Music From Bedrock, the soundtrack to that dumb Flintstones movie that “Steven Spielrock” produced. God knows why I wanted this hunk of junk, anchored by the great B-52s slumming it as “The BC-52s”, but the tracklisting reads like a compilation of a marketing department’s most desperate attempts to cram the word “rock” or “stone” into songs that have nothing to do with The Flintstones. I only remember it now for being my roundabout introduction to The Sex Pistols via Green Jelly’s cover of “Anarchy In The U.K.”, which lazily changes the lyrics to stuff like “I wanna beeee… Fred Flintstone!” and “Anarchy iiinnnn Bedrock!” and “Wanna destroy Mr. Slate!” When I heard the real song for the first time many years later, I was like “Wait, how old was that Green Jelly song that The Sex Pistols could cover it in the 70′s?”

The concert front wasn’t much cooler for me. In third grade, my mom took me for my first concert: NELSON (ridiculously and officially to be spelled in all caps), the Aryan-looking hair metal sons of Ricky Nelson known for “After The Rain” and “(I Can’t Live Without Your) Love and Affection”. NELSON sprayed the crowd with Super Soakers, which at that time was the most advanced water gun technology available to consumers. A few years after NELSON, I saw Hootie and the Blowfish at the height of their popularity, when the obvious singles from Cracked Rear View had reached critical mass and they were forced to scrape the bottom of the barrel for “I Only Wanna Be With You”, which features the immortal lyric, “I’m such a baby, yeah the dolphins make me cry.” Like The Flintstones soundtrack, the Hootie and the Blowfish concert sucked in retrospect (let the record state that this is the first time in history such a thing has ever been written), but it introduced me to something great when Hootie bellowed “I Hope That I Don’t Fall In Love With You” from Tom Waits’ 1973 sad bastard classic Closing Time.

Paul: The worst part about my totally sincere purchase of DC Talk’s 1992 album Free At Last was my wholehearted embrace of the thesis of the album’s second track, “That Kinda Girl,” in which Michael Tait, Toby McKeehan, and Kevin Max Smith sing (and rap, because we mustn’t forget our hip-hop roots, now) about the sort of woman they will one day be involved with―respectfully and chastely, of course, at least prior to marriage. I bought the schtick lock, stock, and barrel, in retrospect mostly because embracing the doctrines of abstinence provided a convenient narrative by which I could explain away my total and most assuredly non-voluntary celibacy throughout college. My DC Talk phase was relatively brief (okay, okay, I bought Jesus Freak, too, god damn me) but its effects rippled forward through half a decade of brow-furrowing efforts to hang onto a faith that had never served me particularly well. And though I am now a wild-eyed atheist of the worst kind, I can never un-buy Free At Last, nor un-sing the awkward singalongs in which I absolutely participated in a certain minivan on the way to summer bible camp in the summer of let’s say 1994. I can, however, feel a deep and abiding shame over these things. And I do.

Ellen: In time I’ve learned to forgive myself for being swept up in the ‘90s popular currents that brought us bands like 311. Sure, I taped that Reel Big Fish song off the radio onto a cassette. Absolutely I thought the song “Crash” was uniquely relevant to my feelings, never mind that it has now been used as the substitute for emotions for thousands, nay millions of bros the world wide. When in doubt I can always point to the fact that I didn’t have access to everything “the kids these days” had at their disposal to discover new music. I didn’t burn my first CD until I was a junior in high school, and without a decent record store in walking distance of my house, I had nowhere to turn when I wanted to learn what good taste was.

By the time I bought my shameful album, though, I had recourse; I knew better. I knew I would regret it as soon as I took off the shrink wrap, but years later I am still one of the over two million purchasers of Eiffel 65’s Europop. Bought on a Target run with some friends, one of whom had just gotten her driver’s license the day before, I felt the urge to purchase something just to mark the trip. I didn’t even like the song that much, it just felt so ubiquitous that I had no choice. Then we listened to it in the Mazda minivan that would be the bane of my friend’s existence till senior year when her brother wrecked it. We listened to it on repeat in my driveway, even though it was probably on the radio at the same time. Need I even mention that we weren’t on drugs?

I think I listened to Europop all the way through once, out of obligation. But I didn’t have the heart to give it away in subsequent years when I packed up jewel boxes stamped with radio-station logos or bearing the non-UPC backing common to CDs from the BMG Music Club (joined behind my parents’ back, and now apparently disbanded). There will always be another shitty novelty single on the horizon, but today’s music buyers won’t be pressed to buy the album, and erasing humiliation is just an iTunes click away.

Robert: First things first: Carmen Electra’s Carmen Electra is not the first album I ever purchased. That one I’m not so ashamed of, but after going through my music collection from over the last 25 years, this lump of coal from 1992 immediately leaped out at me. Secondly, I have never considered this a good album. It’s sleazy, campy, awkward and uninspired, and although I’m admittedly ashamed of ever having purchased it, it’s still tucked away in my CD collection only because of who was the driving force behind it.

As Prince fans know, the early ‘90s were a turbulent time for the purple one and his Paisley Park stable, and looking back on it now, this album is evidence of just how disjointed the creative forces in that big white mansion had become. It also goes to show just how devoted Prince fans can be—devoted enough to blindly buy an album by yet another protege and somehow convince themselves that it was a worthwhile purchase despite every instinct telling them otherwise—because while there are traces of Prince’s musical influence throughout, it’s largely a mish-mash of groan-inducing lyrics laid over stale ‘90s urban pop. Listening to it today, I imagine the only place it’d go over would be a seedy downtown strip joint—in 1992.

The one single that managed to find some traction was “Everybody Get On Up” with its Monie Love-penned lyrics and Prince-ly rhythm section, but as I remember it, the album quickly vanished from the radar after that. And even though a few of the tracks (“Go-Go Dancer”, “Fun”, “Just a Little Lovin’”) are stylistically in line with what Prince and the New Power Generation were doing at the time in Diamonds and Pearls and the Love Symbol album (on which Electra first appeared in “The Continental”), the album ultimately feels like leftovers rather than prime cuts. Not to mention that, as much as she was positioned as a dancer, singer/rapper and all-around hottie, Carmen Electra likely shuddered at the harsh reality of the world outside the Paisley Park bubble. The fact that she went on to notoriety in other avenues that were decidedly not music-related says it all really.

Then again, maybe she was just ahead of her time. In a short promo attached to Prince’s 1992 Sexy M.F. video single, a voice proclaimed “This is our future” and “She is inevitable” (and, I shit you not, “To listen to her music on a loud system is to come a thousand times.”). It sounded just as ridiculous then, of course, because the idea of a super-sexy pop vixen seemed to fly in the face of where music was headed at the time, but imagine my amusement when, over fifteen years later, the likes of Fergie, Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj — essentially more-perfected iterations of what Carmen Electra was intended to be–now reign the charts. And yet, it’s just as vapid and adolescent now as it was then. I suppose the only difference now is that I know better than to waste money on it.

Netflix-ocalypse: Still A Bargain

On Tuesday, Netflix announced that it would changing its pricing plans by splitting its current $9.99 per month DVD-and-streaming scheme into two separate plans, creating both DVD-only or streaming-only options of $7.99 each. When the two are combined—to effectively give current customers the same thing they’re getting now—that amounts to a significant increase of $15.98 per month. After the news broke, the typical “how dare they” outrage ensued, but when you take a step back and look at what Netflix is doing, it makes complete sense.

Now, I’m one of those few that would have preferred Netflix stuck to its original per-disc plan in which I’d only have to pay for what I actually watch. Back in 1999, when the company shifted to monthly subscriptions only, I recall an public outcry similar to what’s happening now. For many (including myself for a brief time), it seemed to be a deal-breaker, but the decision made sense and it clearly didn’t take away from the company’s momentum over the following decade. In comparison, while this new price hike is a sudden, substantial change to those new to the service, it’s also necessary to the company’s health going forward.

What this move essentially boils down to is Netflix spinning its streaming business off into its own orbit. Previously, access to the streaming service was always an add-on to the existing DVD plans (or the other way around, as Netflix puts it), and while that was fine just a couple of years ago when devices that could use it and people that understood it were sparse, Netflix’s streaming content is so widespread that it now makes up for as much as a quarter of all North American internet traffic during peak hours. Twenty-five percent. That’s a lot of hamsters turning those wheels, I’d say, and it’s clearly the way of the future for mass home video consumption. But we’re not quite there yet.

Netflix has been gradually transitioning itself towards the streaming market, but there’s clearly still a demand for physical media (of which there’s a wider selection). So instead of ditching DVDs and moving on to greener pastures, the company now has to straddle two diametrically opposed delivery methods. They each have their advantages, but neither is the perfect solution for consumers. DVDs are plentiful but more expensive and time-consuming to deliver; online titles are instantly available but licensing agreements and costs mean less selection.

So instead of DVDs dragging along streaming or vice-versa, it appears that Netflix has chosen to move both models forward in parallel at their own pace. The trade-off, of course, is that each must now pull its own weight in revenues. If demand for DVDs becomes so small that it’s prohibitively expensive to carry them, you can bet Netflix won’t. If streaming never builds enough selection to appeal to a wider audience, I have no doubt Netflix will kill it. And yet, the chances of either of those scenarios happening are slim at best.

With this new pricing, Netflix has also created the opportunity to weed out some of the deadbeats—you know, the folks who rent a DVD and hold on to it for months and months. Now, instead of titles being perpetually unavailable because those slackers haven’t bothered to watch them yet, they can go back into rotation to customers who have been patiently waiting their turn. If there’s any downside to the “no late fees” model that Netflix hinges on, this is it because clearly some customers have placed a different value on their entertainment than others, but maybe, just maybe, it could become a thing of the past.

But because all that reasoning about why a company does what it does won’t necessarily mean anything to an angry customer, let’s do some math. How much would it cost to pay for Netflix for the rest of my life (I think 40 years is an optimistic number, don’t you?) versus the only comparable alternative of buying every title in the Netflix library (we’re talking DVDs here for parity).

With Netflix’s new price plan for unlimited streaming and 1 DVD out at a time:
$16 per month × 12 months × 40 years = $7,680

Purchasing Netflix’s entire (estimated) library:
35,000 titles × $15 per copy (average retail price) = $525,000

Now that’s a bargain.

Even if I went back to my original plan of unlimited streaming and 3 DVDs out at a time:
$24 per month × 12 months × 40 years = $11,520

Yep. Still a bargain.

And that’s not even including the cost of a place to keep all 35,000 of my newly-acquired DVDs!

Now, would I consider paying double that? Fifty dollars a month for unlimited streaming and DVDs? Probably not. But some people—likely the same people complaining about this—pay that much or more every month for cable TV service. So then the question becomes: Where are you really getting your money’s worth?

At some point, it simply becomes a matter of what (and how much) you intend to watch. If you don’t have enough free time to justify renting discs and using streaming, then you’d be better off choosing one or the other. If you’re only interested in the latest and greatest Hollywood blockbusters, or if you’re just not a frequent renter at all, then it might be wise to use an alternative like Redbox or iTunes every now and then. However, if you’re someone who, like me, watches a lot of films and TV shows, and likes to go for the deep cuts from time to time, Netflix is still the best deal around.

TV Reality

Are you surprised by the news from Fox last night that they’d cancelled all of their bubble shows? Because I’m surprised by all the surprise.

The people who ran Fox in the late 90′s and early 2000′s earned it a permanent place on the shitlists of everyone who loves TV. They mishandled and axed Firefly. They mishandled and axed Wonderfalls. They loaded their airwaves with specials about killer bees and car chases and Who Wants To Marry A Millionaire.

But what was the last really awful thing Fox did? They canceled Lone Star after two airings, but the show was a miserable flop that didn’t connect with the public despite a very visible ad campaign and tons of critical buzz. They canceled Arrested Development, but they gave it three seasons despite the fact that nobody was watching. They canceled Dollhouse, but it was a flop from the very first episode, and they gave it an entire second season out of charity! Yes, the constant time slot shifting hurt AD, and Firefly, and Fringe. But that happens on every network.

In a lot of ways, the networks are actually becoming much more merciful than they used to be. In past years, low- to middle-rated shows with lots of critical acclaim like Community, How I Met Your Mother, Parks and Recreation, Parenthood and especially Fringe would’ve never made it this far. Fringe, in particular, is an extremely expensive show with very, very low ratings. Granted, Fox wounded it horribly by moving it last year from Tuesdays to Thursdays in the most competitive timeslot on TV, but the numbers weren’t exactly through the roof on Tuesdays, either.  Having the prestige factor of critical attention and a small but devoted audience actually pays dividends these days.

So let’s look at the shows Fox canceled last night. Breaking In and Traffic Light? Generic, disposable sitcoms that no one cared about. Lie To Me and Human Target? Both shows with great casts but creative misfires from the start. And if you were a fan of either show, guess what? You got multiple seasons, with 48 and 25 episodes respectively! Feel lucky! The only show I personally felt sad to see go was The Chicago Code, a show with a great cast created by Shawn Ryan, one of the true geniuses working in television. But it had bad ratings and frankly never fulfilled its potential. Fox gave it wall to wall coverage during the Super Bowl and a full season to find its footing creatively and commercially, which never happened.

This is how TV works. If a show doesn’t get good ratings, or barring that, a lot of critical attention, it won’t be around for 10 years.

If you’re upset today, expect the same disappointment when NBC, CBS and ABC releases their new schedules. This was a really strong pilot season after 2-3 years of very weak pilot seasons, and networks won’t — and shouldn’t — miss out on great new shows in favor of keeping stagnant old ones.

Back To Norm

It’s been said that the Golden Age of Entertainment is whenever you were 13 years old. I’m inclined to believe that’s true, and when I was 13 years old, the funniest guy in the world was Norm Macdonald. Everyone agrees that Saturday Night Live was largely in the doldrums at the time – this was the 1994-1995 season where Phil Hartman, Mike Myers, Chris Farley and Adam Sandler left or were in the process of leaving – but Norm was the sole bright spot, turning in legendary performances week after week. I still quote his material from this period almost daily; his Burt Reynolds on Celebrity Jeopardy insisting he be addressed as “Turd Ferguson” and choosing “Swords for $48,000″ (the category was “S Words”), his Larry King shouting out non sequiturs like “If you only see one movie for the rest of your life, make sure that it’s Gattaca” and “An underrated chef in my opinion: Chef Boyardee”, his Charles Kuralt signing off on CBS News Sunday Morning with tales of depraved sexual encounters over the decades.

But obviously, he’s most remembered for being the best Weekend Update anchor of all time, a fact that even those who don’t understand or enjoy Macdonald’s delightful strangeness now concede. A few years ago, I read Steve Martin’s comedy memoir Born Standing Up, along with several tributes to him written by people who were in their teens and early 20′s when Martin was at his peak. I’d always thought he was funny, but when I was growing up he was already in the phase of his career when he’d left his influential stand-up behind and was playing middle aged dads in safe family comedies like Father of the Bride and Parenthood. Reading those tributes, though, I came to realize that what people 15 to 20 years older than me saw in Martin I saw in Macdonald. Both were young absurdists who came from TV writing gigs (Martin from The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, Macdonald from The Dennis Miller Show and Roseanne), both used a straight-laced appearance to subvert the deep weirdness of their material, both confused and alienated older audiences, both used Saturday Night Live as a springboard for success.

To an impressionable young man whose only experience with comedy was crappy sitcoms and Nickelodeon, Norm was an absolute revelation. He seemed dangerous, unafraid to piss the crowd off… in fact, he loved pissing the crowd off. When his extended delivery finally culminated in a punch line, if the crowd didn’t laugh, he’d just stare in the camera, smirking, knowing that the only thing funnier than his joke was the audience being dared to laugh. What made him seem so edgy was how safe and old-fashioned he was 99% of the time. He was a normal guy, which upped the shock value considerably when he would do things like telling Will Ferrell’s James Lipton that he hopes the first thing he hears in Heaven is, “James Lipton’s in hell right now, being raped by the Devil.”

After being fired from SNL, Macdonald has struggled to find a second act to his career aside from some classic appearances on Conan O’Brien and Howard Stern and an Andy Kaufman-esque appearance on the Bob Saget Roast. There were a couple of failed sitcoms, movies that never took off, etc. He’s never been a traditional stand up, and there aren’t a lot of venues for hurling one liners at a camera like he did on Update. So finally, he’s created his own: Sports Show with Norm Macdonald, which premiered last night on Comedy Central. Sports Show doesn’t even attempt to shy away from Norm’s Weekend Update glory days in appearance or delivery; in fact, for a second I thought I’d been put in a cryogenic chamber for 15 years and woke up on a random Saturday night at midnight. The pilot felt a tad dated as it was cobbled together from test episodes shot over the past few months, but it was funny as hell, and one joke at the end of the first segment reminded me of why he’ll always be a comedy icon to me: “UFC and World Extreme Cagefighting have announced they’ll be joining forces to create a new league. The new sport will be known as ‘Murder’.” It feels so good to have you back, Norm.