Today in Things That Are Awesome

As my parents would say, "Nerd Alert!" And rightly so. But awesomeness is awesomeness.

Week in TV: August 1-7

True Blood

More Action Tara - I'm particularly impressed by her dogged refusal to forgive Bill for leaving her at the mercy of Franklin and the Mississippi vamps (in addition, as of this episode, to nearly killing Sookie). This season has dragged a bit with the plot-stretching between the more over-the-top sequences - like this week's detour to wherever Sookie went in her blood-free coma (Fairy Heaven? Fairy Purgatory?) - but I'm optimistic about the coming weeks. It looks like most everybody's returning to Bon Temps and Denis O'Hare is really dishing out some scenery-chewing fabulosity, so hopefully the run up to the finale will be as wonderfully crazed as it was last year.

Mad Men

- Man, even for Mad Men that episode was grim. I love that the episode drew on the show's past - Glen Bishop returns to offer Sally the sympathetic ear she's been craving since even before her parents' divorce, Freddy Rumsen gets back into the game with his former employees, newly sober but feet still firmly planted in the prior decade, and the Christmas party recasts Sal's Lee-Garner-placating firing as establishing a dangerous precedent for the men in charge of SCDP. It makes the show's universe feel more lived-in and cohesive, and respects the audience's ability to engage intelligently with the show without being too "hey, check out our righteous continuity" about it.

- The A.V. Club did a great Q&A recently about distracting actors, a concept to me that is particularly relevant in period television. Some actors just don't blend into the Mad Men milieu - they read as too 21st-century, or I've seen them in too many other things - Nora Zehetner (Don's indulgent neighbor), for whatever reason, is one of those for me.

Rubicon

I'm reserving judgement for a few weeks - right now, it's intriguingly oblique, but that could quickly turn into "frustratingly mysterious" depending on how long it takes for the show's conspiracy to unfold.

Friday Night Lights

If this season finale was any indication, next year I'll be drowning in tears when FNL comes to a close. While I liked the new characters introduced this season, I loved that "Thanksgiving" drew upon some of the show's best-established relationships - Matt and Landry, Tim and Billy, the Taylors - for the grandest emotional beats of the finale.

Ongoing:

Deadwood, Season Three, Episodes 5-7

- It feels like Deadwood added a few too many new characters in the third season (I like Brian Cox, but the theater troupe is not working for me) but I'm a big fan of Cleo King as Aunt Lou and the way that she infuses her performance with subtle code-switching based on Lou's varied interpersonal relationships.

- Speaking of distracting actors in period shows, something about Omar Gooding showing up really threw me. I guess I just watched too much Wild & Crazy Kids back in the day.

Star Trek: The Original Series, Season Two, Episodes 1-4

I watched all of the first season in a week-long binge last year right before the movie came out, and this week finally decided to start back up.

- A lot of the Star Trek 2 speculation seems to have focused on which classic villain might get a reboot with the new movie's altered timeline, but I'd really like to see them give the ass-kicking 21st-century makeover treatment to Christine Chapel. An assertively reimagined Chapel could make a great foil for McCoy and/or Kirk.

Also Watched: Degrassi: The Boiling Point, Covert Affairs, Top Chef, So You Think You Can Dance

Where No Man Has Gone Before

I wish I could say I was resourceful/intrepid/obsessed/awesome enough to have found this fab retro 70s-tastic Star Trek convention slideshow myself, but I wasn't. Liz pointed me to it. I just thought it was so rad that I had to give it a post here. It combines two of my most favorite things: pop culture phenomena and candid photographs from the seventies. I also got to file something under "learn something new every day" - the earliest Trek conventions were dominated by women, making things like this "What's in Star Trek for Girls?" piece on MTV seem especially insulting. Their answer: hot guys, which, true, but the actual answer is: awesomeness, which everyone loves, regardless of gender. No need to be reductive, MTV. Women made Star Trek the phenomenon it is today.

Fandom

I like the question at the heart of this Washington Post piece by Hank Stuever - do overinvested fans interfere with the production of quality films? - but I would have liked him to interrogate the idea a little more. He never quite lays out his rationale for what makes a film successful or not - it seems to be connected to box office numbers, but he never makes that explicit; to take it further, what about a film like The Golden Compass, dismissed as a flop in the U.S. but vastly more popular overseas? What about the involvement of creators? The two franchises where he cites manic fandoms are Harry Potter and Twilight, both of which have their creators actively involved in the book-to-film process - J.K. Rowling's outing of Dumbledore came due to her correcting some script reference on Order of the Phoenix, and Stephenie Meyer has stated that her sale of the Twilight rights to Summit contained a guarantee of some measure of story fidelity. (Not to mention that after Chris Columbus left the franchise the Harry Potter movies became much less beholden to their source material.) Is the fact that Gene Roddenberry is no longer around a factor in Star Trek's ability to play with his characters and mythology? What about the fact that even though J.J. Abrams has admitted that he wasn't a Trek fan, the screenwriters are? Or that Abrams has his own fanbase? Admittedly, it's not quite as crazy as, say, Joss Whedon's, but I was a huge, huge Alias fan (and Felicity, Lost, and Fringe in varying degrees) and that absolutely played a role in my wanting to see Star Trek - it is always thrilling to me to see the Bad Robot logo, and I totally laughed a crazy little laugh of recognition when Amanda Foreman showed up on the bridge.

Ultimately, it's a tough line for studios to walk. Aim for the biggest audience possible, and you risk not even bringing in the one group who should be automatic. Make it too niche, and that built-in audience is all you get. Personally, I'm a big fan of faithful adaptations, but there should always be room for some improvisation.