Genres

ABC’s ‘Detroit 1-8-7′ Tries for Greater Realism, with Mixed Results

October 19, 2010
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ABC’s ‘Detroit 1-8-7′ Tries for Greater Realism, with Mixed Results

Having achieved success with medical dramas on Thursdays and situation comedies on Wednesdays, along with some popular reality shows, ABC has set its sights on another TV staple in the past couple of years: crime dramas. It has a winner in Castle (Mondays, 10 p.m. EDT) and experienced a couple of audience failures with two very good shows, The Unusuals and The Forgotten. All three of those shows were a little off the beaten path, a bit quirky, not the ordinary run of police procedural. Given the decidedly mixed results of that strategy (one that fits with ABC’s basic programming approach, which has mined the mildly quirky vein since the late 1950s), it’s no surprise that with Detroit 1-8-7 the Alphanet is trying a show much more in line with current-day police procedural formulas. And wonder of wonders, audiences like it, so far. Viewers gave it a B+ in the USA Today audience poll, second-best among the twenty-one series rated, and it finished second in its timeslot last week, behind CBS’s The Good Wife, with 7.4 million viewers (Good Wife having grabbed 11.8 million). Reviewers were less enthusiastic, giving it a 64 out of a 100 on Metacritic. The show

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NBC’s ‘Chase’ Strong on Moral Issues, Crime Show Formulas

October 18, 2010
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NBC’s ‘Chase’ Strong on Moral Issues, Crime Show Formulas

Both NBC and Jerry Bruckheimer Productions have hit some hard times in recent years. Bruckheimer’s signature programs—notably the CSI franchise—are past their prime, and recent series such as The Forgotten and The Whole Truth have failed to generate the hoped-for audiences. NBC has been mired in fourth-place among the broadcast TV networks and is struggling to recover from a series of blunders exemplified by last season’s Tonight Show disaster. Bruckheimer’s latest new series (one of two this year), the police drama Chase (NBC, Mondays, 10 p.m. EDT), is up against a big challenge: Monday Night Football on CBS, the established hit cop show Castle on ABC, and the new hit cop show Hawaii Five-0 on CBS. Add to that a relatively weak lead-in from The Event (which is getting killed in the ratings by ABC’s Dancing with the Stars and CBS’s Two and a Half Men), plus a lackluster reaction from those who have seen the show (a C+ rating in the USA Today audience poll—14th out of the 21 new shows), and things do not look good for Chase. That’s a pity because the show has some good things to offer. The central character is Annie Frost, a U.S.

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TAC’s Fiction and Poetry Review

October 10, 2010
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TAC’s Fiction and Poetry Review

This week’s issue begins with the fantastic and closes with a great man of letters, who takes poetic license, literally, with a pivotal 16th century event. Some might describe much included below as escapist drivel, but as Tolkien wrote ‘Why should a man be scorned, if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?” Short Fiction & Excerpts: The Dark Muse by Karl Edward Wagner “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard” by Cordwainer Smith “The Lady Who Sailed the Soul” by Cordwainer Smith “Twenty-Ten” by Christian Moody Essays, Commentary, and Criticism: Gospel Echoes in Fantastic Fiction – Part I and Part II by Travis Buchanan Religious Science Fiction? by Hal G.P. Colebatch Are Labels Useful? or Why I’m not sure about “Christian” Literature This Side of Sunday: Theological Fiction in Light of G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (link opens PDF document) Reviews: Learning to ‘Pack a Punch’ in 150 Pages – Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg reviews Philip Roth’s Nemesis News: The Imaginative Conservative on Mario Vargas Llosa’s Nobel Prize for Literature Literary Criticism Comes to the Movies – ” ‘Howl,’

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A Torrent of Tall Tales and Tantalizing Tidbits

October 2, 2010
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A Torrent of Tall Tales and Tantalizing Tidbits

This week’s bevy of fiction related links began in the belly, with a search for food related yarns. First up, a story by the author of A Moveable Feast. From there it is on to a food fable by two grim brothers and later a collection of essays on feasting and fasting. Man, however, does not live by bread alone, so I moved on from gustatory related canards, as you can see from the plethora of links below. For you cigar aficionados there’s a story link to a site for smoking poets (or at least a site managed by a smoking poet). You’ll have to click through to find it. Enjoy. Fiction: “A Very Short Story” by Ernest Hemingway “Queen of the Sea” by Grace Delobel “God’s Food” by Jacob & Wilhelm Grimm “An Anarchist” by Joseph Conrad Mercury in Retrograde by Daren Dean Essays, Commentary, and Criticism Leslie Leyland Fields’ Introduction to The Spirit of Food: 34 Writers on Feasting and Fasting Toward God What are Books Good For? by William Germano The World Between Two Covers by Alan Jacobs – his brief comments on Germano’s essay The Freedom of the Press by George Orwell – his proposed preface

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John J. Miller’s “The First Assassin”: A Literary Labor of Love

October 1, 2010
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John J. Miller’s “The First Assassin”: A Literary Labor of Love

If you’re looking for a kick-ass espionage thriller that moves at a breakneck speed, features a large cast of characters behaving honorably and/or atrociously, and ups the ante and anxiety as well as any episode of 24, you’ve found the right book.    -    Terry Goodman, Senior Editor – AmazonEncore Chances are, you’ve already read John J. Miller without realizing it. Having “made his bones,” as the Corleones say, at Reason magazine, the libertarian-leaning journalist has been a fixture at National Review for well over a decade and has recently penned a number of high-profile pieces for the Wall Street Journal. Several provocative nonfiction books bear his name, and the intriguingly titled The Big Scrum: How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football is up next from Harper Collins. Given his ambitious nature, it was probably inevitable that he would make a stab at fiction. I am pleased to say, however, that he has bucked the trend of so many of his colleagues on the right end of the teeter totter and has opted to not serve up a “ripped-from-the-headlines” techno-thriller bursting at the seams with conniving Middle-Eastern terrorists and the ever-present threat of nuclear armageddon. Instead, he has hurled us back in

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NBC’s ‘Undercovers’ Is Appealingly True to Formula

September 29, 2010
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NBC’s ‘Undercovers’ Is Appealingly True to Formula

As the fourth-rated broadcast TV network, NBC has made plenty of mistakes during the past few years, under now-ousted CEO Jeff Zucker. These failures actually arose from NBC’s longtime corporate culture and mission, which have been in place since the 1950s: an emphasis on specials and spectacular ideas as opposed to creating solid entertainment. It was NBC’s ambitions, inherited from the innovative TV programmer Sylvester “Pat” Weaver in the 1950s, that led to expensive, high-concept shows such as Kings, Heroes, The Event, and the like (note the high-flown titles of these series). Even last season’s Tonight Show debacle can be seen as part of this trend, an attempt at innovation and specialness on the cheap. This approach has failed at least as often as it has succeeded—NBC’s ratings were seldom spectacular under Weaver; CBS tended to rule the roost then, as today. In fact NBC’s greatest success in the post-Weaver years was the Brandon Tartikoff era, when the former ABC program exec wedded  the network’s typical ambition and thirst for innovation with a smart quest for personable actors and entertaining concepts. With Zucker now on the way out and Jeff Gaspin installed as board chairman, NBC appears to be trying

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A Prose and Poetry Cornucopia

September 25, 2010
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A Prose and Poetry Cornucopia

A plethora of links to stories, excerpts, commentary, criticism, news and knick-knacks that just might  satisfy your hunger for info from around the world of prose and poetry. Short Fiction: Excerpt: Chapters One & Two from Sloane Hall by Libby Sternberg Excerpt: “Il Colore Ritrovato” from The Pacific and Other Stories by Mark Helprin “Napoleon and the Spectre” by Charlotte Bronte “The Whistling Room” by William Hope Hodgson “Can These Bones Live?” by Manley Wade Wellman Commentary and Criticism: Jane Eyre: An Introduction by Joyce Carol Oates Episode, Scene, Speech, and Word: The Madness of Lear by Norman Maclean About Sloane Hall and its Inspiration, Jane Eyre by Libby Sternberg The Literary Tenor of the Times by Mark Helprin Literature and the Realm of Moral Values News, Reviews, and Other Interesting Tidbits: Review: Haunted and Confused – Andrew Klavan reviews The Hilliker Curse by James Ellroy Barnes & Noble has Setback in Struggle over Board Stigma of the Paperback Originals Lost Libraries – The strange afterlife of authors’ book collections Lessons in Manliness from Beowulf Brian Gruley discusses his second novel, The Hanging Tree – video from WSJ.com Will the Real Shakespeare Please Stand Up? – Chapter One from The

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Criminal Protagonists Criticized

September 24, 2010
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The contemporary glut of stories in which a criminal is the protagonist is far from an unalloyed good—for aesthetic reasons, not only moral considerations, writes mystery author and critic James Lincoln Warren.

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Affleck’s ‘Town’ Does Well in Opening Weekend

September 20, 2010
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Affleck’s ‘Town’ Does Well in Opening Weekend

As Hollywood has known since the 1960s, heist films, also known as caper movies, are generally a good box office draw, and this week’s strong opening performance by The Town confirms that truism. The Ben Affleck-directed film about Boston bank robbers finished first in U.S. movie box office receipts over the weekend with a decent $23.8 million, about 50 percent more than industry analysts had expected. That’s a very decent performance for a film with no big stars in its cast and a cost of $32 million. The film received very good reviews—93 percent positive, according to RottenTomatoes.com. Affleck is proving himself a capable director, after Gone, Baby, Gone and this film. Takers, another heist movie, topped the movie box office three weeks ago, without the benefit of positive reviews (but audiences disagreed, rating it twice as positively as critics). Other new releases were the positively reviewed romantic comedy Easy A, which came in second with $18.2 million, and Devil, which finished third with $12.6 million despite having the box-office poison of M. Night Shyamalan attached to it as the film’s producer. The animated film Alpha and Omega stumbled out of the gate, finishing fifth with $9.2 million. Hampered by

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USA’s ‘Covert Affairs’ a Fresh Entry in Espionage Genre

August 30, 2010
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USA’s ‘Covert Affairs’ a Fresh Entry in Espionage Genre

USA Network has established itself as the master of smartly entertaining TV drama, not just on cable but on all of TV. Starting with Monk at the beginning of the decade and steadily adding a solid lineup of hit shows such as Psych, Burn Notice, Royal Pains, and White Collar, USA has reminded both audiences and the industry that good, old-fashioned, relatively wholesome entertainment that conveyed sound values was the real key to success with audiences. The latest addition to the network’s roster of original drama programming, Covert Affairs (Tuesdays, 10 p.m. EDT), is another solid entertainment with something more. Taking up the 1960s-style adventure formula of current shows such as Fringe and Human Target, the show refreshes the genre by creating realistic moral dilemmas for the characters, without indulging in the sort of flamboyantly gloomy agonizing over the morality of the spy game that has made the genre increasingly boring since John Le Carre introduced it in the early ’60s and began flogging it to death. The central characters are Annie Walker (Piper Perabo), a new CIA agent in her late twenties. Annie is brave, tenacious, devoted to her duty, and attractive. The same is true of her colleague,

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Full Week of ‘Hawaii Five-O’ on Spike TV

August 29, 2010
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Full Week of ‘Hawaii Five-O’ on Spike TV

Time to fire up the DVRs: Spike TV is running a week-long marathon of the 1970s cop show Hawaii Five-O, including all twenty-two episodes from the show’s first season. Starring Jack Lord, James MacArthur, and Cam Fong, the series depicted an elite Hawaiian state police unit that fought the Mafia, foreign secret agents, and other sinister forces too powerful or obscure for the regular police. The show ran for a dozen years (1968-80), the longest-running crime show except for Law and Order. Unlike that show and most other police dramas of its own time, however, Hawaii Five-O was tough and self-confident, filled with action and no nonsense about the cops anguishing over whether they’re on the right side of things. On the contrary, the crooks were real crooks, and the cops were the thin blue line that stood between the evildoers and the good, productive people who obeyed the law. The show’s name entered the common parlance as a synonym for tough, no-nonsense cops: the Five-O, reflecting the unusually direct and clear-headed values the show represented. CBS, which originally aired Hawaii Five-O, has scheduled an updated version of the series for this fall.

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This Week in Prose and Poetry

August 27, 2010
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This Week in Prose and Poetry

I’m still working on a pithy title for this weekly posting of links to short stories, criticism, news and reviews from the literary world. I’m more than willing to entertain suggestions. To cite the English translation of an ancient Chinese proverb, we are living in “interesting times”. In a bit of a nod to that, this week there’s a classic short story by Washington Irving and a reflection on Irving’s work that appeared at the First Things blog  ”On the Square”. Jagi Wright presents David Marcoe’s brief reflection on elements of a story in this week’s “Wright’s Writing Corner”. The poetry entry comes from two Southerners from the “Fugitive Poets”, who wrote during a period of “interesting times” in America’s history. Finally, there is a bevy of links to short stories, reviews, news and opinion from around the literary world. Short Stories: “The Devil and Tom Walker” by Washington Irving Short Story: “An Insurrection” by JR Walsh – Esquire Fiction Contest Winner Audio Short Story: A. M. Homes reads Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” Reviews: Book Review: Jack London’s Dark Side - Wolf: The Lives of Jack London by James L. Haley Book Review: Contemplating Death From Above – Robert Messenger on Bomber

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Newswire

In U.S., Nearly Half Identify as Economically Conservative

Bald Eagles Fall to Green Energy

Phillips: Movin' Out

‘American Idol’ Posts Lowest-Rated Finale Ever

Phillip Phillips is the new 'American Idol'

Cooling Global Warm-Mongers

Boy Jesus, Big Screen: Anne Rice's 'Christ the Lord' to be Made into a Movie

Ross Douthat: What Has Jerusalem To Do With Athens?

Is TV Destroying U.S.?

Confessions of an Atheist Darwin-Doubter

Secularization and Christian Institutions

Biggest Religious Lawsuit in U.S. History Launched, Liberal Evening News Shows Ignore It

Government is Force!: Why individual rights demand limited government and constitutional democracy

A New Dark Age

Media Works To Suppress Obama 'Born in Kenya' Bio

"Freedom's Forge" tells the story of how U.S. business leaders were mobilized to build ships, tanks and weapons faster and better than the enemy, to win World War II

How to Enjoy Going to the Movies Again

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