A beautiful grind: Some of the best jokes on The Grinder come from composer Jeff Cardoni and music editor Ryan Castle

Every year, there's a bunch of "funniest shows you're not watching," and Fox's The Grinder (no relation to the gay dating app Grindr), which hasn't exactly been pulling in Empire season 1-type numbers but has been devastatingly hilarious, definitely falls under that category this season. Rob Lowe and the showrunning duo of Jarrad Paul, who's best remembered for his role as the struggling screenwriter of the wonderfully titled Beverly Hills Gun Club on the 1999 Fox cult favorite Action, and Andrew Mogel have somehow come up with a character who's even funnier and stranger than Chris Traeger, Lowe's fitness-obsessed, touchy-feely character from the beloved and similarly underwatched Parks and Recreation (although this new show's shtick of Lowe giving other men intense, head-rubbing "man hugs"--"Everyone should get hugs from Rob. It's like a massage," said Fred Savage about his Grinder co-star in New York magazine--initially felt like a rehash of Chris kissing a typically flustered Ron Swanson on the lips on Ron's birthday or Chris weeping in Ben Wyatt's arms).

On The Grinder, the former Brat Packer stars as Dean Sanderson Jr., a pampered Hollywood actor who grew tired of the network TV, uh, grind. After quitting his role as Mitchard "The Grinder" Grinder, a super-brilliant maverick lawyer, on The Grinder, a long-running Fox legal drama that's as popular overseas as Baywatch was in countries where nobody speaks English but they all speak in worshipful tones about C.J. Parker as if she were a bottle of Coca-Cola, Dean Jr. has returned to his hometown of Boise, Idaho to check in on his younger brother Stewart (Savage) and their close-to-retirement father Dean Sr., who are both actual lawyers (as Dean Sr., William Devane doesn't really get to do much, but Devane does enough with his character to make us realize where Dean Jr. inherited all of his weirdness and sunny optimism, and like everyone else in the Grinder cast, Devane's able to do a lot with just one or two lines).

But Dean's stopover in Boise turns into a permanent stay when he realizes he wants a more normal life like Stewart's--Stew is happily married to Debbie (Mary Elizabeth Ellis), and they have two kids, Lizzie (Hana Hayes) and Ethan (Connor Kalopsis)--and he wants to be the Grinder in real life, and his delusions of taking the most absurd TV tropes from his old show and bringing them into the much more mundane reality of practicing law continually irritate Stew. Unlike Dean, who believes he doesn't need to pass the bar to practice law, Stew went through years of law school and hard work to get to where he's at today at Dad's law firm (Stew has also gotten the chance to blossom far away from his celebrity brother's shadow, so he resents having to go back to being the Sanderson brother who's not the center of attention in Boise).

Dean's favorite response to any person's admission that a goal or strategy is impossible is "But what if it wasn't?," a line his character used to frequently say on the old show. As Todd VanDerWerff notes over at Vox, "Dean doesn't know how our 'real' reality works; nearly everyone he encounters is so excited to get a taste of Dean's version that they go along with whatever he says should happen." However, there are two lone holdouts in Boise who object to whatever he says, and they are Stew and Claire (Natalie Morales, another Parks and Rec alum), the Sanderson & Yao firm's attractive new hire.

Claire is the only character other than Stew who has always found the plot twists on Dean's old show to be ridiculous. Dean is under the impression that Claire's dislike of both his vanity and his cluelessness about legal procedure in the real world is actually that old network TV cliché of masked sexual tension and that she's his love interest on this new show called real life, just like all the equally hot female second-chair characters he got to make out with when he played Mitch (Emmanuelle Chriqui and Arielle Kebbel are among the sultry "Grinder girls," and it's remarkable how they're able to not corpse whenever Lowe overdramatically slides office supplies off his desk before each of his love scenes with them for the show-within-the-show). But Claire is genuinely not interested in Dean (she prefers Dean's nemesis Timothy Olyphant, who nicely plays a very Zen--as well as douchey and childish--version of himself), and feminist viewers have interestingly found Dean's pursuit of Claire to be The Grinder's weakest element and way too reminiscent of the "Boyle wants to date Diaz and won't take no for an answer" storyline that Brooklyn Nine-Nine thankfully abandoned early on in its run.

Meanwhile, Debbie stands by her man Stew, but we get a slight inkling from the body language of Ellis' rather underwritten character (I'm enjoying how Ellis handles Deb's incredulous reactions to anything, particularly whenever junior-high-age Ethan emulates his Uncle Dean, but what the hell does Deb do for a living at her office?) that Deb's secretly enjoying the intrusion of TV reality into our reality a lot more than her husband is. She appears to be as fascinated by that intrusion as she is by the old show's implausible writing (whenever she and the other Sandersons are seen watching The Grinder or The Grinder: New Orleans, a spinoff starring Olyphant as Mitch's brother Rake, Deb's curling up with a relaxing glass of wine, as if the Grinder franchise is some trashy yet highly entertaining paperback, which it essentially is). Deb has the look of someone who sees Dean's weirdness not as an embarrassment but as an advantage for Stew and a welcome challenge to push Stew out of complacency and make him the best lawyer (and Sanderson) in any reality. Maybe the recapper community should start calling her Lady Macdeb.

The Grinder is a great mismatched sibling/business partner/buddy comedy in the vein of The Odd Couple--the Jack Klugman/Tony Randall one, not the Matthew Perry/Thomas Lennon one--and Savage is a terrific and relatable everyman foil to the bizarre Lowe in his first regular series role since 2006 (Savage had taken a quasi-Dean-style break from acting to become a prolific TV comedy director, working for shows like the one that introduced his current TV wife to comedy nerds as "the Waitress," It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia). But the things that make The Grinder really stand out as a mismatched sibling comedy are the way that, as VanDerWerff puts it, the collision between TV reality and our reality borders on becoming a horror movie and, of course, the show's extra doses of Community-style meta-humor.

Dean, who's quick to recall storylines or tropes from his old show as if he were Manhattan E.A.D.A. Jack McCoy rattling off the names or outcomes of past trials from other courts, is basically Abed with abs. He's constantly talking about the rules of either TV logic or the TV industry like Abed--who, in my favorite moment of Abedness on Community, drove the super-pretentious professor at a Who's the Boss? studies course crazy over his elaborate theory that Who's the Boss? ruled in favor of Angela as the boss--used to do. For instance, Dean brings up the difficulties many showrunners experience whenever they have to follow up the pilot with the second episode while he's playing back his old show's second episode for Stew's family during, of course, The Grinder's second episode.

As clever as those bits of dialogue about TV logic are, the juicy little clips of the show-within-the-show, which foreshadow the themes of the A-plot during each of the cold opens, are actually more enjoyable as moments of meta-humor on The Grinder. In those clips, The Grinder astutely makes fun of a certain kind of early '00s network TV show that, due to changing tastes and the popularity of anti-hero dramas on both streaming services and cable, doesn't really get made anymore, except by CBS or TNT: the procedural as glitzy wish-fulfillment fantasy, anchored by the noble and hyper-competent cop or attorney who can do no wrong and always gets his man (or woman). On the show-within-the-show, the Grinder never settles and never loses a case. This gives him a better win record than that of Perry Mason, who was allowed to lose only once on CBS.

The show-within-the-show contains some nods to the soapy writing from one of Lowe's own post-West Wing attempts at wish-fulfillment TV, the 2003 NBC flop The Lyon's Den, in which he starred as the most idealistic and virtuous attorney in a law firm full of sharks. Mitch's scenes are even lit to look exactly like The Lyon's Den. In the name of justice, Mitch frequently pulls unlawyerly stunts that, in the real world, would either get him disbarred or cause evidence that could have benefited his clients to get thrown out of court, like disguising himself as another litigator with the help of a mask straight out of Mission: Impossible. Every episode of the show-within-the-show also finds him pulling some unbelievable skill out of what the ambiguously gay Craig Robinson thug character from Pineapple Express would have referred to as his little sexy ass, like the ability to canvass a crime scene more effectively than any other homicide detective in the city. All that's missing from Mitch is a cape.

If all this reminds you of Horatio Caine, the Miami-Dade police lieutenant who was written like a superhero and played by David Caruso as if he were auditioning to be Hyperion in a Marvel Studios screen version of Squadron Supreme (Hyperion's the only orange-haired male superhero I could think of), that's exactly who The Grinder is spoofing. Mitch even punctuates a courtroom scene with the Horatio-style donning of shades at one point. There's also a great little jab at Caruso's well-documented ego when Cliff Bemis (Jason Alexander), the creator/showrunner of both Dean's show and its spinoff, plans to kill off Mitch on The Grinder: New Orleans, and Stew reminds Cliff that Dean has a clause in his contract that says only Dean has authority over Mitch's fate--a deal that's similar to the one that was demanded by Caruso, who, in the universe of Jarrad Paul and Andrew Mogel's show, became so convinced that he was Horatio in real life that he asked for a clause stipulating that Horatio can't be killed without his permission.

Varèse Sarabande's "LP to CD" series is a bonkers idea only hoarders would sign up for

The AFOS blog has a schedule each week: just two (or sometimes three) new posts, and one of the posts is a Throwback Thursday post where I draw from a desk cabinet a movie ticket I saved and discuss at length the movie on the ticket (occasionally, if I draw a ticket for a movie I won't find to be stimulating to write about--like, say, Transformers: The Torture of Hearing Shia LaBeouf Scream "No!" 50,000 Times--I'll change it to a different movie). I chose a two-per-week schedule so that this blog has something new every week and it doesn't wind up looking like tumbleweed drifting across a vacant lot, which is what has happened to so many blogs I used to enjoy reading before their authors simply lost interest and abandoned them without even saying a proper "I'm Swayze."

Finding a topic to write about other than the Throwback Thursday movie-of-the-week has sometimes been difficult. In the last couple of weeks, I've wanted to write about how I wish the late, great movie trailer announcer Percy Rodrigues were alive to read promo copy for Penny Dreadful or trailer copy for 2011's Attack the Block because they look so much like things Rodrigues--whose favorite trailer campaign of mine has got to be the one he recorded for 1995's Tales from the Hood--would have been hired to read copy for when he was alive.



But the problem I've been having with that topic is that it's difficult to write about in a structure that's not a listicle. Earlier this year, I vowed to never write a listicle again because 1) listicles at their worst are such lazy and vapid writing; 2) every time I see an article hed that consists of a numeral followed by a plural noun followed by "That You Didn't Know Were This," I feel like punching a millennial hed writer in the face; and 3) if your film music blog or pop culture site has posted tons of listicles where the hed starts with a numeral, and it continues to post such lists, your blog or site sucks.

So while I was experiencing starts and stops with the topic of trailer campaigns Rodrigues would have been perfect for, I saw "Varèse Sarabande Launches LP to CD Series" in my e-mail. Then I said, "Interesting. I've found my non-TBT topic for next week." And good thing it's the kind of topic that can't be shaped into a fucking listicle.

"Varèse Sarabande has delved deep into our vinyl soundtrack vaults to locate fan favorites and hard-to-find gems that have never been released on CD to date!," announced the inkblot-logoed soundtrack label on its site last week. "The LP to CD subscription series will feature one CD soundtrack per month culled from Varèse Sarabande's archives and available only to subscribers."

The label plans to debut 12 long-out-of-print score albums in CD form instead of in mp3 download form. Subscribers who pre-order for "LP to CD" membership ($10 per month, plus shipping) before June 14 will receive from Varèse (pronounced "vuh-rez") a CD carrying case in the shape of a vintage vinyl carrying case. After June 14, people can join the subscription series on a month-to-month basis. The first out-of-print score in the "LP to CD" series is Charles Bernstein's score to the '80s horror comedy April Fool's Day.



Eh, I've never seen April Fool's Day (even though I kind of remember the tongue-in-cheek April Fool's Day TV spots from when I was a kid, and judging from those TV spots, it looks like the type of horror comedy I'd be into renting these days), so the score doesn't interest me. But bringing 12 score albums from Varèse's pre-CD past back into print is both a nice thing for Varèse to do--it's reminiscent of the MOD (manufactured-on-demand) business model Warner Archive has created to give film geeks access to previously unreleased or out-of-print catalog titles from the Warner Bros. and Turner libraries--and a subscription series I'd get on board with if I had more money.

Actually, I thought it was a subscription series I'd get on board with--until I found out the other 11 score albums in the series haven't been announced by Varèse yet. So anyone who subscribes before June 14 won't have any idea what they'll be filling their red carrying cases with after the April Fool's Day score and maybe whatever score is scheduled to follow that one, which I think is crazy. To be put into that kind of guessing game is the kind of thing I wouldn't sign up for. A guessing game might be great for a pie-of-the-month club, but it wouldn't be so great for a score-album-of-the-month club. To give other score album collectors an approximate idea of what else Varèse might reissue for the "LP to CD" series, someone on the Film Score Monthly message board posted a list of Varèse titles that never made the jump to CD. There are more than 12.

Yeah, that's not exactly an enticing list. Meanwhile, the world's only two or three fans of Blame It on Rio or From the Hip just creamed their pants.

I've always liked Varèse, and I put selections from tons of Varèse albums into rotation on AFOS all the time. My favorite release of theirs has to be the six-CD 2010 release of both Alex North's 1960 Spartacus score and the various cover versions of North's Spartacus love theme, a tune that became a jazz standard and one of the late Nujabes' favorite things to sample. The handsomely packaged, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink Spartacus box set is a release that, on paper, sounds like the old "We've put 50 songs on 50 CDs!" joke from the "Greatest Hits" game on Whose Line Is It Anyway?, but it's no joke, and that box set is the impressive pinnacle of Varèse's work in both giving beloved film and TV scores proper releases and honoring the art of film and TV scoring.

But despite my liking of Varèse, I've never been a Varèse soundtrack release completist like the completists who would subscribe to the "LP to CD" series. Who out there makes it their life's mission to collect every single release put out by a record label--rather than a musician or band they might love--even if an album made by the label contains a score from a movie or TV show they're not familiar with and even if a score released by that label was written by a composer they never liked? That's like if a hip-hop head bought every single release from Def Jam just because it's from Def Jam, including everything from the failed Roc La Familia imprint and even Kingdom Come, which Jay Z considers his worst album. It's just so bizarre. I call it bizarre, while A&E has a different word for it. Maybe you've heard of that word. The word is Hoarders.

Paul Chihara

Only one out-of-print Varèse score on the above list interests me. It's Paul Chihara's score to 1981's Prince of the City, one of my favorite Sidney Lumet films and a film that inspired Dick Wolf to create for Prince of the City star Jerry Orbach a wiseass Law & Order detective character slightly modeled after Orbach's corrupt and racist NYPD narc character (hey, Law & Order afternoon marathon-obsessed moms and stand-up comics who don't work during the day, remember when Briscoe was introduced as the formerly crooked, estranged-from-his-grown-up-daughters and twice-divorced antithesis of Paul Sorvino's fatherly and happily married Sgt. Cerreta?). Prince of the City is also a film that must have influenced Shawn Ryan in his TV work. The Shield, The Chicago Code and even the non-police-related Last Resort owe a lot to Prince of the City, which the late Lumet signed up for after Brian De Palma left the film (man, take me to the parallel universe where De Palma made Prince of the City!) because Lumet wanted to tackle a portrayal of the police that was more complex and morally ambiguous than his own 1973 smash hit Serpico. Prince of the City is the kind of audacious and grown-up cinematic fare that, like I said in my discussion of Horrible Bosses, major Hollywood studios used to be good at crafting in the days before the stink of PG-13, and it's the kind of fare that's found only as original shows on cable TV or streaming services these days.

The melancholy Prince of the City score--which was recorded in Paris with Jules and Jim and Contempt composer Georges Delerue as conductor instead of Chihara, due to an American musicians' strike at the time--is an important score to me and a noteworthy achievement because it's a solid score written by one of the few Asian American composers in the still-not-so-diverse world of film and TV music. Chihara, who collaborated frequently with Lumet and Farewell to Manzanar director John Korty, may not be as active in that world anymore (his last significant screen scoring credit was additional music for the John Turturro-directed 2005 musical Romance & Cigarettes), but the Japanese American composer remains active in the classical music world.







Outside the context of the film, the Prince of the City score isn't exactly a rollicking good time like, say, "I Don't Know" by Slum Village or "A Roller Skating Jam Named 'Saturdays'" by De La Soul, but it nicely reflects the isolation and angst of Treat Williams' character Daniel Ciello, a corrupt-cop-turned-whistleblower-taking-down-other-corrupt-cops. "Conceptually, Danny Ciello was to be treated always as one instrument: saxophone. Over the body of the picture, his sound was to become more and more isolated, until finally three notes of the original theme, played on sax, was all that remained of the music," wrote Lumet in his 1995 book Making Movies.

Chihara's score is an effective score from a film that's still underappreciated, and if Varèse's "LP to CD" series does rescue the Prince of the City score from the out-of-print doldrums, then we're getting somewhere. For now though, the series' "hey there, completists, for $10 a month, you won't know what you're getting!" concept just gives me bad--not to mention Hoarders-y, crazy cat lady-ish--vibes.

I don't want to write listicles anymore

Every time I see a numeral followed by a plural noun followed by "That You Didn't Know Were This" in an article hed, I feel like punching a millennial hed writer in the face.

It didn't used to be this way. In fact, about a year ago, I used to write some of my blog post heds like this. But then over time, my tune changed. It started changing when I saw the following depressing snapshot in somebody's tweet.

Why have there been so many articles in the past few years where people list things? Is this all part of the rise of the borderline-autistic nerd? So his need to count things or list them and be fastidious and organized about what he likes or hates has to dominate the format of everything I read on the Internet now? "The listicle concept lends itself to digital media more so than any other medium. With ubiquitous clouds of content to select from, choosing something to read or information to digest can be downright cumbersome"? Fuck that noise. I want cumbersome. I want to read full-bodied paragraphs. I don't want to read grocery lists anymore. I want to see thought put into lists, just like I how I want to see thought put into anything that's not a list. I don't want disposable, less-than-150-words shit that's made for smartphone zombies to easily digest because they're too damn lazy and feeble-minded to scroll through an article with both substantial and substantive content on their phones.

Even Chris Rock's new film Top Five isn't immune to this habit of listing things--the characters in the film rattle off lists of their five favorite rappers or comedians--hence the title Top Five. The only listicles I like reading these days are any of the ones Rock himself was asked to assemble, the ego trip interviews with beatmakers about their favorite sample flips or the A.V. Club "Inventory" pieces. The "Inventory" listicles have always been smartly written. Everything else is mindless and lazily written click-bait.

Jack McCoy used to theorize during Law & Order about how the first Menendez brothers trial's hung juries put an end to "the Oprahfication of America," the first and last place where I heard the word "Oprahfication." I wish the original Law & Order were still in production so that the murder of some douchey Silicon Alley news site CEO that EADA Cutter has to prosecute would cause McCoy to complain about the BuzzFeedification of writing. (Not all of BuzzFeed is awful, by the way. A few good pieces about Asian Americans in hip-hop have been posted by BuzzFeed, which, for a while, I didn't know is being run by Jonah Peretti, the brother of the very funny Brooklyn Nine-Nine star Chelsea Peretti, a fact of trivia that intrigued this Brooklyn Nine-Nine fan when he found out they're siblings because it makes me wonder what dinner with the Peretti kids was like. Maybe it was lots of "Mom, Jonah's bothering me in .GIF form again!" Anyway, BuzzFeed's also got Alison Willmore, who's an excellent film writer, and Kate Aurthur has written for them several terrific hard news pieces about all the homophobia, misogyny and racism that's still prevalent in showbiz. It's the rest of BuzzFeed--the .GIF-heavy listicles about pointless shit--that makes me want to punch out a millennial editor.)

The BuzzFeedification of writing has caused me to decide to never write another listicle again, whether I'm writing for my own blog or Word Is Bond or any place else. A few months ago, I wanted to write a Word Is Bond post that would have been a rundown of hip-hop videos that are filmed in one long take. But then I noticed other hip-hop sites are succumbing to the listicle format too, and that's also made me regret dragging Word Is Bond down with me during the two listicles I wrote.

Hip-hop videos that are filmed in a single take are a fun topic, and I still feel like writing about it, but there's got to be other ways to structure that topic and make the hed look attractive and tantalizing without making it all appear to be yet another pointless listicle or a parody of terrible listicle writing that would show up on the Onion's clever BuzzFeed and Upworthy parody site ClickHole. As I try to figure out those other ways, I'm swearing listicles off forever. You'll Never Believe The 9 Reasons Why I'm Swearing Them Off Forever.

Psych.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: South Park, "Go Fund Yourself," and Space Dandy, "Dandy's Day in Court, Baby" (tie)

Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

The last time South Park was on the air, Trey Parker and Matt Stone put together perhaps my favorite South Park episode in years, "The Hobbit." Like many latter-day South Park storylines, "The Hobbit" lampooned a reality TV star whose show will no longer be relevant a year after you first watch South Park mock it--in this case, Kim Kardashian--but then the episode concluded on an unusually devastating note and critiqued the pressures placed on girls to fit certain beauty standards, without turning all Diff'rent Strokes preachy on us during its critique. For its 18th-season premiere, "Go Fund Yourself," South Park critiques another issue, and it's been a huge one in the Native American community for over a year now: Dan Snyder's stubborn refusal to change the racist and outdated name of the NFL team he owns, the Washington Redskins, which resulted in Native American groups starting a "Change the Name" movement.

Throw in a bunch of hilarious gags about the evilness of Snyder's fellow NFL team owners and the recent ineptitude of NFL commissioner Roger Goodell in how he's handled Ray Rice's domestic violence incident--we have South Park's amazingly fast turnaround to thank for those gags about Goodell--and you've got a solid season premiere that's the cathartic laugh we needed after months of constantly being subjected to appalling examples of how much of an evil organization the NFL is, from the head injury scandals to its hypocrisy regarding women's issues. "Go Fund Yourself," which has Cartman, Stan, Kyle and Kenny launching a startup where they make money doing absolutely nothing, also contains some jabs at the dumbest aspects of Silicon Valley culture. Those aspects are always worthy of a skewering because I'm currently stuck living in Silicon Valley, and I despise all things having to do with Silicon Valley culture. It's nice when latter-day South Park goes after subjects that aren't reality TV for a change.

But what really bolsters "Go Fund Yourself" is all the satirical material about the NFL (Snyder enters the picture when he demands that Cartman and his friends stop calling their startup the Washington Redskins). The episode's portrayal of Goodell as a malfunctioning robot is laugh-out-loud funny and perfect, especially in a week when ESPN punishes Bill Simmons for speaking his mind about Goodell's ineptitude and bizarrely gives the Grantland editor-in-chief a suspension that's longer than the one the annoying Stephen A. Smith received for blaming domestic violence victims for provoking their attackers. ESPN's tongue is so far up the NFL's ass it can report to you on SportsCenter what the NFL had for lunch.

***

There's only one episode of Space Dandy left, and at this late point in the game, all we know about the past of Dandy--this doltish hunter of aliens who knows as much as we do about his origins--is that his body was infused with an enormous amount of a highly coveted element called pyonium (also known as "the God particle," it's the same element that once caused QT to increase in size when Dr. Gel's ship accidentally blasted him with it); he's a middle school dropout; he used to date a female heart-in-a-transparent-box who hails from the fourth dimension; and the pyonium enables him to cross dimensions and remember every single one of them, including dimensions where he died. In "Dandy's Day in Court, Baby," we now find out he has no DNA, which confirms a theory I've had since "A World with No Sadness, Baby": Dandy isn't human, baby.

I think Dandy's either the escaped result of an experiment to construct a person out of pyonium or a god who developed amnesia, much like Will Smith in Hancock. Since then, he's been wandering space without any cash in a clunker of a ship for a long-ass time, barely aware of his special pyonium-related power, which the Gogol Empire wants for its own nefarious purposes. Like I've said before about any theory I've had regarding any mystery on Space Dandy, I could be wrong either way, and we'll see how wrong I'll probably be in the final episode of Space Dandy's way-too-brief run.

In the meantime, "Dandy's Day in Court, Baby" is an interesting case of a bottle episode of an animated show that's clearly a bottle episode--BONES Inc. reportedly went all out with the animation for the finale and needed to rush out an episode that's not as expensive--but instead of putting together a clip show like Space Dandy general director Shinichiro Watanabe and Manglobe once did for Samurai Champloo, BONES chose to set most of the episode inside a courtroom to cut costs. The episode actually works despite its downsized scope. For one thing, "Dandy's Day in Court, Baby" isn't recycling old material like those superfluous clip shows do. It's 100 percent new material, including the flashbacks to the crime scene where Dandy inadvertently became a murder suspect, and I'll take a courtroom trial with completely original content over a clip show any day. Plus the whodunit that "Dandy's Day in Court, Baby" writer Dai Sato came up with is simply diverting and full of what the NBC announcer who used to record all its promos (before Dorian Harewood's current stint as the voice of the network) would intone were "those Law & Order twists."

"Dandy's Day in Court, Baby" is more of an homage to the courtroom drama genre than a parody. For the first half, it's played completely straight to trick us into thinking a sad, remorseful-looking and mute Dandy really did kill an alien named Guy Reginald, a rare Lumetian (his race is named after the late director of 12 Angry Men and The Verdict), right in front of Reginald's hot wife Rose, a waitress at Dandy's favorite hangout Boobies (both Reginald and Rose are named after the writer behind 12 Angry Men, Reginald Rose). Instead of aping the original Law & Order, which I don't think is even popular in Japan (and if it were popular over there, Sato would have been aware that Law & Order never spent as much time in the jury room as "Dandy's Day in Court, Baby" does), the episode has more of an Ace Attorney vibe. Ace Attorney is a popular Japanese series of video games where the player gets to be heroic lawyer Phoenix Wright and make legal decisions instead of shooting at zombies or enemy soldiers. I knew all those hours of watching X-Play on G4 despite not being a gamer at all wouldn't go to waste someday.

In the second half of "Dandy's Day in Court, Baby," things get nutty, and the case goes from appearing to be a noirish crime of passion to turning out to be an absurd foofaraw involving a kid who was angry at his best friend for blocking him on Chwitter, Space Dandy's Twitter knockoff; a runaway baseball that contains a massive amount of pyonium like Dandy's body does; Lumetian pro wrestlers' secret identities; and Reginald's sleep apnea, which fooled his wife and the coroners--the dumbest coroners in the galaxy--into thinking Reginald was dead. Dandy is exonerated, and in the episode's best gag, the judges learn why he was being tight-lipped and reserved all through the trial. For a while, I thought the reason why Dandy was immobile was because he skipped the trial to hide from the court and replaced himself with a realistic-looking rubber decoy, but it turns out that he was actually asleep in the courtroom the whole time.

Then things turn serious again in the episode's great cliffhanger ending. Before "Dandy's Day in Court, Baby," Dandy never once got face-to-face with the Gogol Empire--every time Dr. Gel would come close to capturing Dandy, the alien hunter would be unaware of the presence of Dr. Gel's ship and then Gel's ship would immediately get blown up before Gel could get his mitts on Dandy--but now Dandy and the empire finally get to see each other when the empire's troops surround Dandy outside the courthouse. The conclusion of "Dandy's Day in Court, Baby" also marks the first time that the "To be continued" graphic at the end of many Space Dandy episodes isn't a joke.

Whether Dandy turns out to be a god or the God (or neither), I don't want Space Dandy to end because it's shown so much creativity in its brief run. An extra season of a few more special guest animators bringing their idiosyncratic flair to Dandy's universe(s) would have been nice. It's funny how I initially thought Space Dandy was going to be Shinichiro Watanabe's first artistic failure and just another lewd sci-fi comedy. Instead, it's turned into something better and unexpected: an anthology-like show that captures the adventurous and exploratory spirit of both the original Star Trek and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy--and more effectively than the last time Star Trek hit the screen. Now that's a feat as impressive as anything pyonium can do.

"Oh my God, that's the funky shit!": Five hours of badass sample flips

David McCallum and Dre, brought together through the magic of both Photoshop and a Wacom pen tablet

Dr. Dre is reportedly executive-producing a scripted TV series for FX about the connections between L.A. organized crime and the music industry. My reaction to that bit of news is "So when's Detox coming out?"

While we wait for an album that's never going to drop, I want to revisit one of Dre's greatest sample flips, off his last official album, 1999's 2001. "The Next Episode" kicks off "Kids Come Running for the Rich Taste of Samples," a five-hour playlist of my favorite sample flips. I've juxtaposed dozens of bangers with the tunes they sampled. So "The Next Episode" is followed by the piece it sampled, "The Edge," a cinematic-sounding 1966 David Axelrod instrumental performed by David McCallum, back when he was both Illya Kuryakin and a Capitol recording artist on the side (instead of trying to become a pop singer like Crockett or Tubbs, instrumental pop was McCallum's bag).

Likewise with Ghostface and Henry Mancini

In some cases, I've grouped a frequently sampled work with two or three of its "descendants." I've also taken a Frankenstein's monster of a track like Redman's "Tonight's Da Night" and juxtaposed it with the tunes it was formed from (in "Tonight's Da Night"'s case, Isaac Hayes' "A Few More Kisses to Go" and the Mary Jane Girls' "All Night Long").

I always enjoy playing Spot the Sample, a game that's become much easier now thanks to a site like WhoSampled or ego trip's "Sample Flips" series of interviews where beatmakers talk at length about their favorite moments of sample wizardry by other beatsmiths. A whole section of this playlist is devoted to the work of the late J Dilla, whose way with hooks (for instance, I was never aware that he chopped up Rick James' "Give It to Me Baby" on Common's "Dooinit" until Questlove pointed it out recently on Hot 97) has been frequently spoken of with awe by the interviewees during the ego trip series.

Several of the sample sources on this playlist are movie themes (the Curtis Mayfield-produced themes from Let's Do It Again and Claudine) or re-recordings of movie themes (John Dankworth's cover of his own Modesty Blaise theme). DOOM's use of a lesser-known Henry Mancini piece (the Thief Who Came to Dinner theme) for a Ghostface Killah joint he produced was a particularly inspired choice and is, of course, part of the playlist.

If FX greenlights Dre's project, will it tank like John Ridley's UPN show Platinum, the last attempt to make a serialized drama set in the rap world (not counting The L.A. Complex)? Fake hip-hop has rarely sounded convincing on these crime shows. The Law & Order franchise does an especially terrible job coming up with fake rap or rock acts whenever an episode involves the music industry. Law & Order writers' ideas of what's popular in music are always hilariously seven or eight years behind present-day sounds, like in Criminal Intent's 2007 "Flipped" episode with Fab 5 Freddy as murdered rapper Fulla T or "Discord," the Briscoe/Logan-era mothership episode that guest-starred Fringe's Sebastian Roché as a rapey hair band idol known as C Square, whose late '80s-ish, Warrant-style sound would have barely sold any CDs in the era of grunge, which was when "Discord" first aired. The involvement of Dre on one of these shows (even if it's just as an EP and not as a showrunner) could change all that.

Take it away, Dre.

Complete tracklist after the jump...

The people who run Sleuth have no Cloo

When NBCUniversal (now one word instead of two) added Sleuth to its stable of cable channels in 2006, it was an alright idea for a channel: Nick at Nite with guns. For its first couple of years, Sleuth's 24-hour lineup was comprised of reruns of NBCUniversal-owned cop or detective shows like Dragnet, Magnum, P.I., Miami Vice and the always-worth-revisiting Homicide: Life on the Street.

But like so many other channels, of course, Sleuth has strayed from its original purpose. These days, DirecTV channel 308 is an ill-defined dumping ground for reruns of current original shows from its sister station USA (Royal Pains, In Plain Sight)--and Walker, Texas Ranger. With content like a doctor show (Royal Pains), a cop show with very little detective work because of its focus on witness protection (In Plain Sight) and a cop show with no detective work that's only watchable when Conan O'Brien's around to butt in with snarky and appalled commentary (Walker), the name Sleuth doesn't make much sense anymore. Cloo--the new name that Sleuth will assume on a yet-to-be-confirmed future date a la the still-inane 2009 conversion of its other sister station Sci Fi to Syfy--makes even less sense. What's next? NBCUniversal rebranding USA as YouSA? (They also own Telemundo. Maybe they should rename it YouEse.)

Occasionally, Sleuth has done something nice like temporarily revive a show I've longed to see again (Keen Eddie, The Rockford Files) or air a 007 marathon or the surprisingly good 1973 made-for-TV caper movie/unsold anthology show pilot The Alpha Caper, which isn't on DVD and stars Henry Fonda as a forcibly retired parole officer who teams up with the ex-cons he used to watch over--two of whom are played by Leonard Nimoy and Larry Hagman--to hijack a shipment of gold. But otherwise, as a fan of the private eye and caper genres, I've found Sleuth to be a wasted opportunity, regurgitating too many of the same broadcast network procedural reruns that can already be found on USA (House, NCIS).

Unless it's airing a White Collar episode I've never seen before or a Burn Notice rerun with a useful spy tip I need to jot down, Sleuth isn't worth my time. The channel's so cheap it doesn't have any on-air hosts or any original programming that could have given Sleuth a distinctive personality, like how breezy procedurals have become USA's forte or how FX has become synonymous with edgy comedies and gritty and violent but intelligently written dramas (the only original show that Sleuth has produced is a 2006 I Love the '80s-style special about "America's Top Sleuths").

It's owned by NBCUniversal and it's called Sleuth (that is until the name change to Cloo takes place), so why isn't the channel diving into the NBCUniversal library, with its vast history of influential crime shows, and pulling out classic sleuthy properties like Columbo (R.I.P. Peter Falk) or the other NBC Mystery Movie shows? Shouldn't a channel called Sleuth be a little, uh, sleuthier?

Also, as someone who stopped finding Law & Order interesting after an ailing Jerry Orbach left the mothership (although the later pairing of Jesse L. Martin and Jeremy Sisto was a great and too-brief one during the mothership's Law half, as was the duo of Chris Noth and Annabella Sciorra on Criminal Intent), I don't think Sleuth needs to be another repository for Criminal Intent and Special Victims Unit reruns (TNT has exclusive rights to reruns of the mothership, which explains its absence on the NBCUniversal channels' schedules). Okay, maybe Criminal Intent is tolerable once every weekday, but a five-hour Goren-thon like the ones Sleuth often does is overkill. Plus, Sleuth is the sixth channel on the dial that currently airs Criminal Intent reruns, after USA, Bravo, Oxygen, WGN and the local MyNetworkTV affiliate. Enough already, man.

Lost, "The End": "I don't believe in a lot of things, but I do believe in duct tape"

As someone who's watched every single episode of Lost since the still-amazing pilot and recapped the series' entire fourth season for another blog (and never got paid for writing those recaps--as Chris Rock would say, what kind of gangster shit is that?), I'm still processing the events of Lost's lukewarmly received and sometimes frustrating series finale. I wasn't expecting the finale to answer every remaining question about the series' mysterious goings-on. How could it do so in one episode, even with an extra half-hour? I just wanted a finale that gave proper farewells to the characters and brought the goods action-wise like those eps when Sayid busted out his badass breakdance fighting moves, and "The End" delivered in the character and action sequence departments. But was all that time spent in the sideways universe during the final season worth it? I don't think I'm completely satisfied with the reasoning for the sidewaysverse. That whole business with the giant cork didn't make much sense either. Bullet time:

-My favorite recurring Lost theme was the conflict between a man of science (Jack) and a man of faith (Locke). The final season resolved that conflict beautifully, with Jack finally accepting Locke's beliefs in the specialness of the island and dying the way he wanted to (which was seeing his remaining friends leave the island safely) in a pitch-perfect final image that referenced the pilot's first moment and showed how much of an influence the Watchmen comic had on Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof.

-I'm glad Ken Leung's Miles, the character who provided the above one-liner about duct tape, lived to see another day. Bloggers like angry asian man and DISGRASIAN were disappointed that their favorite pair of Lost characters, the supercouple of Jin and Sun, was offed in "The Candidate" (some have even cried racism over the demises of the Kwons and Sayid), but I think the death of Miles, the show's sole Asian American regular and one of the few APA guys in prime-time who's neither a martial arts expert nor a coonin' buffoon, would have been a bigger letdown. (Speaking of Asian stuff, spoken-word artist Bao Phi wrote a nice post earlier this season about Lost's huge Asian American following.)

-I was also jazzed to see Miles' fellow freightie Lapidus alive after the submarine debacle in "The Candidate" because Jeff Fahey, who was underused on Lost but served as great comic relief whenever he did get screen time, is a master at making something out of nothing, ever since his laconic turn as the eccentric title hero of ABC's short-lived '90s procedural The Marshal. One of the reasons why the Star Wars prequel trilogy was an epic fail was because it lacked a Han Solo-esque figure who would wittily comment on the mystical goings-on and serve as a relatable audience surrogate. I like to think the Lost creators took notice of that flaw in the prequels, so they gave us not just one Han Solo-esque foil, but four: Sawyer, Miles, Lapidus and the not-as-cynical-or-snarky Hurley.

-The sci-fi geek in me who enjoyed all the time-travel material during my favorite Lost seasons, four and five, was disappointed that neither the nuke in "The Incident" nor the island's funky science was the reason for the sidewaysverse. The afterlife angle pretty much shot down my theory that Desmond or some other character with extraordinary powers created the sidewaysverse to hide his friends in there from the homicidal Smokey. On a superficial note, Sidewaysverse Kate looked slammin' in that black miniskirt.

-So Hurley and Ben are basically Mr. Rourke and Tattoo now? I bet the new island protector begins each morning by greeting everyone else with "Smiles, everydude, smiles!"

-Since when is Shannon the love of Sayid's life? I thought he was into Nadia. Whatever, man. I'm sure the Sayid and Shannon shippers got their panties wet that night. God, I hate that term "shippers." Other terms I hate are "squee" and "bromance." All those terms should be taken out back and shot and given a burial like the one Rick Rubin gave to the word "def" when he removed "Def" from the name of his label American Records.

-Yes! Lt. Van Buren is cancer-free! Woops, wrong series finale.

NYCC bound

From February 5 through 8, I'll be making my first visit to the New York Comic Con to get interviewed by the Comic News Insider folks and to meet other comics writers, as well as artists who are way better at this drawing thing than I am.

This will be my first trip to NYC since 2005. On my old jim.aquino.com site, I posted a gallery of snapshots I took of Manhattan when I hung around there in '05. Because jim.aquino.com is no longer on the Web, I'm reposting some of my favorite shots from my NYC photo gallery, as well as the original gallery text, which is in italics.

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From 2005:

I flew to New York in early October for a long-overdue break from work and radio projects. During my brief trip, I enjoyed my first-ever egg cream (do believe the hype) and checked out both the first annual New York Television Festival in Chelsea and a screening of the controversial Korean movie The President's Last Bang at the New York Film Festival (a terrific film--my favorite politically charged dark comedy since Three Kings). I would love to live in New York someday. It's my kind of town. I wonder if there are any Fistful fans in NYC. If you're a New Yorker who tunes in, next time I'm in town, holla at me. However, I'm an Internet radio show host, and we're not quite known for having recognizable faces, so hollering at me can be kind of tricky.

The East River, where hundreds of disobedient Mafiosos are dumped each year.

King Kong climbed this and got killed. Sixty-seven years later, that guy from Rage Against the Machine pulled a King Kong onstage at the MTV Video Music Awards, and it was his band's career that got killed.

Who's this handsome fella?

Too bad I wasn't there the day those guys in Stormtrooper costumes goosestepped all over Times Square to pimp some new Star Wars PS2 game. When I saw that Times Square Stormtrooper photo online, I thought it was some archive photo from 1999 showing how Giuliani enforced his homeless policies.

Hey, it's Robert Blake on the NBC Astrovision. And even when Baretta's face is as tiny as it is in that photo, he still creeps me out.

I don't know why I like looking at this billboard. Can someone find out why?

"In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the parasites known as the tabloid press and the jurors who'd rather not be there. These are their stories."

"Shame on you when you step through to the Ol' Dirty Bastard, Brooklyn Zoo!"

The Sung Tak Buddhist Temple. Wow, I didn't know BJs are that cheap in Manhattan.

Hey, young Meredith Baxter, easy on the cigarette. It's only a Marlboro, not Tommy Lee's cock.