Gabba Flamenco Crossover
High Sierra Skullfuck
I've been rocking Arrested Development all winter on DVD, and I finally got around to checking The Wire out last week when I was ill - watched all of series one over a few days. Both total classics IMO.
AD is just insanely funny with so many levels of comedy. Once you start getting into the characters and how they relate to one another, petty jealousies etc, then it just becomes something totally different.
And The Wire... I put it off for a long time from hype aversion, because people I knew were banging on about it so much. But it's absolutely fucking brilliant. The thing it really reminded me of was the Dickens novel Bleak House - same vast array of finely etched, slightly hyperreal characters, same panoramic sweep of society from the lowest to the highest, same cold-eyed dissection of the uneasy relationship between power, justice, and criminal law. The NY times made a Dickens comparison too - part of the hyperbolic praise that seems to follow The Wire around, and which I assumed were OTT, but having seen it, well...
The point here is that I was watching both of these series on a laptop, with instant access to any point in any episode, and all the resources of the WWW in support if needed - and it really opened them up as programmes to watch them in this way, especially The Wire. Being able to hop back to scenes in earlier episodes to get a better handle on what just happened, or call up maps of Baltimore on the net, or online urban dictionaries to work out what the hell the drugs gangs are talking about - all essential to getting the most out of it. With AD, it was enough just to be able to hop back over each episode to pick up on the subtle sight gags missed first time round.
Both of these series famously bombed on US TV despite massive critical acclaim. The Wire was broadcast on an obscure cable channel in the UK so hardly anyone saw it (all the fans I know picked up on it subsequently on DVD or bittorrent). AD was on late on Sunday night, at a time when a lot of people are either asleep or out, so not many people saw it. I saw a few episodes on TV, and they were entertaining in a circus-type way, a half hour of chaotic randomness. But I didn't get into it properly until I got copies on the PC to watch on demand.
What I'm saying is that while most TV execs are still chasing ratings and watercooler TV moments that unite the population, both of these series seem to be reaching out into a post-television future of on-demand, instant access programming supported by web resources, and finding creative space to do things with that model that weren't possible with old-fashioned TV.
What do people think? And are we going to see any British shows doing this?
AD is just insanely funny with so many levels of comedy. Once you start getting into the characters and how they relate to one another, petty jealousies etc, then it just becomes something totally different.
And The Wire... I put it off for a long time from hype aversion, because people I knew were banging on about it so much. But it's absolutely fucking brilliant. The thing it really reminded me of was the Dickens novel Bleak House - same vast array of finely etched, slightly hyperreal characters, same panoramic sweep of society from the lowest to the highest, same cold-eyed dissection of the uneasy relationship between power, justice, and criminal law. The NY times made a Dickens comparison too - part of the hyperbolic praise that seems to follow The Wire around, and which I assumed were OTT, but having seen it, well...
The point here is that I was watching both of these series on a laptop, with instant access to any point in any episode, and all the resources of the WWW in support if needed - and it really opened them up as programmes to watch them in this way, especially The Wire. Being able to hop back to scenes in earlier episodes to get a better handle on what just happened, or call up maps of Baltimore on the net, or online urban dictionaries to work out what the hell the drugs gangs are talking about - all essential to getting the most out of it. With AD, it was enough just to be able to hop back over each episode to pick up on the subtle sight gags missed first time round.
Both of these series famously bombed on US TV despite massive critical acclaim. The Wire was broadcast on an obscure cable channel in the UK so hardly anyone saw it (all the fans I know picked up on it subsequently on DVD or bittorrent). AD was on late on Sunday night, at a time when a lot of people are either asleep or out, so not many people saw it. I saw a few episodes on TV, and they were entertaining in a circus-type way, a half hour of chaotic randomness. But I didn't get into it properly until I got copies on the PC to watch on demand.
What I'm saying is that while most TV execs are still chasing ratings and watercooler TV moments that unite the population, both of these series seem to be reaching out into a post-television future of on-demand, instant access programming supported by web resources, and finding creative space to do things with that model that weren't possible with old-fashioned TV.
What do people think? And are we going to see any British shows doing this?