No Soup for us: The disappointment over E! never archiving The Soup for the show's fans

This is the third of 12 or 13 blog posts that are being posted on a monthly basis until this blog's final post in December 2017.

The longest I laughed over one of Joel McHale's quips on E!'s now-defunct pop culture clip show The Soup ("a sort of national archives of idiocy" was how TV Insider astutely described the show, a few months before its cancellation in 2015) was the moment when The Soup played a Today Show clip of Richard Simmons--this was way before he went "missing"--being Richard Simmons while sitting on a couch with a miniskirted Lisa Rinna. The former Days of Our Lives star, who looks a lot different from her pre-Botox days in Salem, covered her crotch when Simmons lifted up her legs because she thought the viewers at home were getting a glimpse of her Salem's Lot (actually, the viewers at home couldn't see shit).

Neither the accidental quasi-upskirt clip nor McHale's scripted response to the clip were what made me laugh for two or three minutes. The muttered aside that the Soup host clearly ad-libbed right after his scripted response was what caused my sides to hurt from laughing for two minutes: "Her lips are full of collagen."

The Soup studio audience laughed over the ad-lib for longer than half a minute as well. On a broadcast network, Standards and Practices would lamely bleep out "lips" and ruin McHale's joke, but because this was basic cable, E! let the randy ad-lib go. It was a rare wise decision by a cable channel known for a million dumb programming decisions that were made fun of by McHale and his fellow joke writers on the regular during The Soup's 11-year run.

I wish I could revisit that improvised Soup moment and a bunch of other lines that were ad-libbed by McHale (in addition to wishing I could revisit the memes that originated from The Soup, like Spaghetti Cat and "Stay out of it, Nick Lachey!"), just like how I can easily stream an entire episode of The Daily Show from any point of history during the Dubya Administration or how I can easily stream the classic 2007 Colbert Report interview segment where Jane Fonda took Stephen Colbert by surprise (by sitting on his lap and kissing him to persuade his fake Republican alter ego, also named Stephen Colbert, to remove her name from his "On Notice" board). (Also, a search for almost every discriminatory thing that has come out of Steve King's mouth isn't so difficult, thanks to the Colbert archive.)

Unfortunately, I can't revisit as much Soup content as I'd like to because E!'s online staff never bothered to put up an archive of full Soup episodes like how Comedy Central built exhaustive online archives of full Daily Show episodes and lengthy Colbert Report clips. And that lack of a Soup archive--meanwhile, all 12 interminable seasons of Keeping Up with the Kardashians are up on Hulu--is an even dumber move on E!'s part than building an unwatchable reality show around a tanning salon.

Atlanta season 1's sweetest move was an old 30 Rock move: it never tried to sell Paper Boi as God's gift to the trap scene

This is the first of 12 or 13 blog posts that will be posted on a monthly basis from now until this blog's final post in December 2017.

I was skeptical about Donald Glover's Atlanta when FX first announced in 2014 that it picked up Glover's creation, his first TV series since his departure from Community, the offbeat cult favorite where he continually killed it each week as Troy Barnes, a high-school football star trying (and failing) to suppress his nerdy side (like that time when Troy, in what has to be my favorite acting moment from Glover on Community, was so excited to be in the presence of his childhood hero LeVar Burton that he turned catatonic). A half-hour comedy about a trap rapper and his manager cousin trying to get by in the rap game? Disquieting visions of "Entourage for the Atlanta trap scene" danced in my head when FX first hyped Atlanta. The world doesn't need another half-hour piece of boring lifestyle porn where the lead characters constantly bang anything that breathes in the most opulent of settings and the storyline with the biggest stakes would be "Is Vince Paper Boi doing or not doing the movie A3C?"

Another disquieting vision I had was that Atlanta was going to be a weekly half-hour ad for Glover's musical career as Childish Gambino. Glover is a good example of an actor/rapper whose beats, frequently provided by Community and Creed score composer Ludwig Göransson, are solid, but his bars leave a lot to be desired. I was never a fan of Gambino's corny verses about his Asian fetish.

Gotta have fetishized at least 3 asian chicks before u can really appreciate Childish Gambino's music

— Desus Nice (@desusnice) October 31, 2013

I caught up on Atlanta season 1 on FX on demand, about a few weeks after the season concluded, during a couple of breaks between chapters for a manuscript I've been working on since August (chapters that I, by the way, ended up having to delete from the manuscript because I found myself thinking, "This material isn't gonna work as a YA novel anymore. A Jim Rockford-type Pinoy should be the audience surrogate, not a precocious Richie Brockelman-type Pinoy," so I got rid of all the teenage characters). Atlanta, which took home the Best Comedy Series and Best Actor in a Comedy trophies at the Golden Globes earlier this month, exceeded my expectations. As a half-hour single-camera comedy about the rap game, thankfully, it's more Taxi than Entourage.

Sure, Atlanta is frequently funny (three words: secret revolving wall), but Glover and his writing staff's brand of humor is tinged with Taxi-style melancholy, particularly about how working-class adult life often feels like you're running in circles. That melancholy reflects Glover's belief, as he once said during a 2016 Television Critics Association press tour panel, that "you watch Master of None and it's a very optimistic look at millennialism, [but] I'm pessimistic about it. I feel like we kind of fucked up."

There's nothing lifestyle-porny about Atlanta. Neither are there any moments of blatant product placement for Awaken, My Love!, the surprise Gambino album Glover dropped one month after the Atlanta season finale, save for a cameo by the Awaken, My Love! cover artwork on a bookshelf in the "Juneteenth" episode. The non-rap Awaken, My Love! is also the first-ever Gambino release I've genuinely liked from start to finish, aside from whatever the fuck Bino was doing with his voice during "California."

The show is an exploration of, as Joshua Rivera put it in GQ, "the stress and pain of being broke," particularly when that broke-ass person is both a creative and a POC, like Earn Marks, Glover's Ivy League dropout character, and, to a lesser extent, his cousin Alfred (Brian Tyree Henry), a.k.a. the trap rapper known as Paper Boi (not to be confused with Paperboy, who recorded the 1992 one-hit wonder "Ditty"), who's more economically stable than Earn, thanks to income from drug dealing, but he's not exactly on the level of Future/Gucci Mane-type wealth yet. "Ballin," singer/songwriter Bibi Bourelly's current ode to finding ways to "treat yo'self" when your savings account is empty, could be an unofficial theme song for the daily hustle of either Earn, who becomes Alfred's manager, or teaching assistant Van (Zazie Beetz), Earn's ex and the mother of his baby daughter (I wouldn't be surprised if Bourelly's extremely relatable song surfaces on Atlanta during its second season, which is currently scheduled to air in 2018, partly due to Glover's upcoming gig as young Lando Calrissian).

The novel I've been writing is set in a Drumpfian world of science under attack, which will be closer to reality now that Clinton conceded to the orange Babadook

Protesters in Seattle on the day after Election Day (Photo source: The Atlantic)

Protesters in San Francisco on the night after Election Day

Since August, I've been working on a manuscript for a sci-fi comedy novel that I first outlined in 2012. I've described it elsewhere as a cross between The Big O and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, without giving too much of it away because it's a work-in-progress, and this work-in-progress has taken up so much of my time that it's been difficult to write new posts for this Blogspot blog. It's all I can talk about to anybody. My brief mentions of the manuscript always seem to put people on Facebook to sleep (except one person who has similar interests in comedic sci-fi), and their lack of interest has become one of 4,080 reasons why I hate Facebook.

The manuscript is why this blog has consisted of nothing but reposts of previously published shit in the last few months. I've got nothing. I'm all out of new content for this blog. Meanwhile, I'm having a ball running Accidental Star Trek Cosplay over on Tumblr, because 1) ASTC isn't as time-consuming as a.k.a. DJ AFOS has always been and 2) ASTC gets more responses from readers. Both the new Tumblr and the manuscript are why I've been considering putting an end to this blog in the future and writing a farewell-to-Blogspot post.

Larry Wilmore perfectly rips apart the idiotic "All Lives Matter" crowd

For a couple of years, whenever moments of appalling racism would dominate the news cycle for an entire week, I'd think to myself either "I can't wait to hear what Totally Biased has to say" or "What would be Jon Stewart's exasperated but largely funny response to all this, and could he please not sing again like he tried to do at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear?"

Well, Totally Biased doesn't exist anymore (although a couple of weeks ago, Totally Biased alums W. Kamau Bell and Hari Kondabolu started joining forces again for a new podcast, Politically Re-Active, so Kamau has now hosted so many different 30-to-120-minute shows in the podcastosphere that he makes Guy Smiley look like a lazy douche), and Stewart left The Daily Show in the hands of Trevor Noah. So these days, it's "I can't wait to hear what Larry Wilmore has to say" or sometimes "How will Noah's non-American and more global perspective handle this one?"

Samantha Bee and Larry Wilmore delivered the most satisfying late-night responses to the Orlando massacre, and, whoa, you can say "fuck" unbleeped on TBS after 9pm now?

Last Saturday's terrible massacre at an Orlando gay nightclub, the worst mass shooting on American soil, led to a range of mournful responses from late-night TV hosts the following Sunday and Monday nights. But two of those segments stood out because of one host's genuine anger over lax gun laws and the other host's emphasis on the troubling fact that this massacre was a hate crime targeted at the LGBT community in the middle of Pride month (and at a time when the community has won several legal battles against anti-gay conservatives over civil rights), a fact that homophobic conservatives try to ignore in various ways, like the way one of those right-wing morons said to the press that the massacre isn't a hate crime. Wait, what? It isn't a hate crime? Of course it's a hate crime, fucknuts. Saying it's not would be like saying, "You know that Texas chainsaw massacre? Pfft. I saw the aftermath. It was nothing. It was just a Texas paper cut."

Samantha Bee was often a terrific Daily Show correspondent (like in the remote where she mischievously tricked pro-lifers at the Republican National Convention into saying the word "choice"), but it wasn't until she performed a hilarious one-woman version of the Fox News bloviation fest The Five that I realized she could carry an entire show on her own. And that show has turned out to be a doozy: the weekly Full Frontal with Samantha Bee on TBS. Right now, Bee is, out of all the ex-Daily Show correspondents who are anchoring either their own half-hour current-events shows or the actual Daily Show itself, the one who's most deftly enacting her former Daily Show boss' memorable final-show message to everyone who's wary of bullshit, whether that steaming pile comes from the news media or from either the right or even (on occasion) the left: "The best defense against bullshit is vigilance, so if you smell something, say something." She doesn't care how angry she gets in her scathing takedowns of either misogynists, the anti-feminism crowd or the right, and it's a beautiful thing ("I don't fucking care if you like it," Amy Poehler's famous reply to Jimmy Fallon's mock-squeamish objection over some abrasive thing she ad-libbed in the SNL writer's room, comes to mind).

Trevor Noah is taking the reins of The Daily Show, not the "reigns"

After I watch any movie, whether on Netflix or in the theater, I like to read the reviews it received or the think pieces it spawned, if it's a movie that has left or is leaving an impact on the zeitgeist. Since its release, Avengers: Age of Ultron has been the subject of many think pieces about either robot sci-fi; the ways innocent bystanders are portrayed in superhero movies; the fear that the Marvel Cinematic Universe will lead to the infantilization of cinema; the lack of female leads in MCU movies (which shows how badly the MCU--the film division, that is, not the TV division behind Agent Carter and A.K.A. Jessica Jones, both projects anchored by female leads and spearheaded by female showrunners--is lagging behind the progressiveness and diversity of current Marvel superheroine comic books like Ms. Marvel, the Marvel Now! revamp of X-Men, the gender-swapped Thor, Spider-Gwen, Silk and A-Force); feminism on social media; or the fact that people on social media really need to take a breath and siddown, relax, have a sandwich, drink a glass of milk, do some fuckin' thing, will ya?

Age of Ultron's connection to the last two items is due to female Marvel geeks' Twitter rants about their frustrations with the film and Age of Ultron director Joss Whedon's departure from Twitter after he encountered so much Twitter vitriol from a not-so-civil segment of those female geeks. I planned to watch this blockbuster that caused these lapsed Whedon fans to Hulk out on Twitter--and broke Whedon's spirit "a little bit" while he worked on it--about three or four weeks after its crowded opening weekend, which is when the crowds for these tentpole blockbusters usually dwindle completely, as does the possibility of having your morning or afternoon movie screening be ruined by an imbecile who brings his tablet to the theater and keeps switching on his tablet during the feature presentation (that, by the way, happened during Kingsman: The Secret Service). Trying not to click to any of the Age of Ultron think pieces during those three weeks before I saw the movie was quite a challenge. I was interested in what the writers of these pieces were talking about, but at the same time, these pieces gave away much of the movie, and I hadn't watched it yet. So it was a relief to finally be able to read them after watching Age of Ultron.

For Age of Ultron and other summer blockbusters, YOMYOMF likes to take several of their writers and have them give roundtable discussions of those blockbusters. I'm often interested in what YOMYOMF has to say in these discussions, even if it results in an inane moment like one of their writers giving director Bong Joon-ho's terrific Snowpiercer--a Chris Evans-led comic book adaptation that, as a movie, is superior to even any of the MCU comic book adaptations that either feature Evans or don't--only one out of four stars (actually, YOMYOMF uses bananas instead of stars for their movie rating system). So I went over to YOMYOMF's discussion of Age of Ultron, and the most interesting part of the discussion has to be the spelling of "take over the reins" as "take over the reigns." Yeah, that's not how you spell it.

It's a common mistake. "Reigns" and "reins" are both homonyms related to control and dominance, so they can be easily mixed up. I don't want to single out YOMYOMF because everyone does it. Even newspapers like the New York Observer misspell "reins" as "reigns" too, like when the Observer brought up South African stand-up comic Trevor Noah's controversial--and, of course, just like in the case of Age of Ultron, led-to-an-outcry-on-Twitter--promotion from Daily Show correspondent to Daily Show host.

It should be "Mr. Noah will officially take the reins on September 28," not "Mr. Noah will officially take the reigns on September 28." The reign of "reigns" over "reins" continues elsewhere.

Like Ann Peebles said, I can't stand the "reigns" against my window. Here's how I differentiate "reigns" from "reins" and avoid misspelling one or the other: yes, both words are related to control and dominance, but "reign," when used as a noun, means the time period when someone--or a team like the Golden State Warriors--is in charge or is dominant. "Rein," as a noun, means either a restraint, as in Tobey Maguire pulling on Seabiscuit's reins to slow the horse down, or a metaphorical steering wheel ("Mr. Noah will officially take the reins").

In verb form, to "reign" means to rule as a king or to conquer like one ("Marvel may currently reign supreme at the box office"), and to "rein" means to restrain, but unlike "reign," "rein" must always be accompanied by "in" or "back" (two such sentences are two of the above sentences with circled typos, which should be spelled as "It reined in character development!" and "The Wild Wild West reined itself in with Season 3"). Another difference between "reign" and "rein" when they're verbs is that "reign" is an intransitive verb, which means it doesn't take an object, while "rein" is more often a transitive verb, which means it needs an object ("character development," "itself"). Here's a fun way to remember how to differentiate "reign" from "rein": "reign" is the verb that prefers to be alone at the top, while "rein" is the verb that doesn't like being alone. It's the Al Green of verbs.

So on August 6, Jon Stewart will cause Daily Show fans' living rooms to get dusty when he vamooses his exhausted dad-bod out of Comedy Central and hands over the reins of his show to Noah, not the "reigns." Meanwhile, at the end of Age of Ultron, Danny Elfman temporarily takes over the musical reins from the film's other composer, Brian Tyler, and restates for the last time in the film his "New Avengers" theme, a straight-out-of-vintage-Elfman-circa-1990 update of Alan Silvestri's main theme from the first Avengers. Also at the end of Age of Ultron, Joss lets the Russo brothers take the reins of the Avengers movie franchise and is now probably giggling to himself the following: "They are gonna be so exhausted halfway through the making of Infinity War Part I."

The best anthology show I saw this year first aired three years ago in the U.K.

"Fifteen Million Merits"

"I love technology, but not as much as you, you see... But I still love technology... Always and forever."--Kip Dynamite's wedding song

My favorite anthology show of the moment is one I watched for the first time when all six of its episodes so far became streamable on Netflix in America just last week, but international viewers, Americans who were able to catch it on DirecTV's Audience Network last year and, of course, torrenters have been aware of it for quite some time. Even though its first season premiered three years ago on Channel 4 in the U.K., Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror easily trounces Fargo and True Detective--or as a Yo, Is This Racist? reader wanted to rename it, White Men Talking, Black Men Listening--as an anthology show.

While Fargo and True Detective are anthologies with a self-contained season format that was first popularized by American Horror Story, Black Mirror opts for the older Twilight Zone/Outer Limits self-contained episode format. Before Black Mirror, I was only familiar with Brooker's work as a satirist in the mold of The Daily Show and The Soup and an essayist castigating The Dark Knight and Skyfall for being too po-faced as action entertainment, so I was initially surprised by the unrelenting bleakness and serious questions about technology, social media and celebrity culture on Black Mirror. It's akin to Daniel Radosh or his former fellow Daily Show staff writer Wyatt Cenac suddenly wanting to write and produce The Twilight Zone. As Brooker said during Black Mirror's first season in 2011, his show raises the question "If technology is a drug--and it does feel like a drug--then what, precisely, are the side-effects?" On Black Mirror, the side effects are, of course, not pretty.

The first season of the original version of The Outer Limits was noteworthy for featuring in each episode what Outer Limits showrunner Joseph Stefano referred to as "a bear," which he explained was "that one splendid, staggering, shuddering effect that induces awe or wonder or tolerable terror or even merely conversation and argument"--or in other words, the creature of the week. On Black Mirror, the bear is YouTube or the iPhone--or in the show's more fantastical episodes, it's a chip in your skull that can record everything you see (and then play the footage back to you in your head) or a digital incarnation of your dead lover that can replicate that deceased individual's personality and sense of humor. That particular Black Mirror episode about a dead lover's return, "Be Right Back," is, interestingly, like a precursor to those gender-reversed Her parodies that were all over the Internet earlier this year, but darker and sadder (and anchored by an effective performance by Hayley Atwell, a.k.a. Agent Carter).

Where Black Mirror differs from the '60s sci-fi anthology shows that influenced it--other than the sex scenes and profanity, of course--is its unwillingness to hold the viewer's hand as it immerses the viewer in whatever future world it posits in each installment. There's no Rod Serling or Control Voice to provide soothing exposition; Brooker never turns up on screen or in a voiceover with some overly flowery intro to set up the future world of the week. That's one reason why "Fifteen Million Merits" is my favorite Black Mirror episode. It's set in a future where the working class is forced to pedal exercise bikes that power an unspecified energy source--the workers are paid in "merits" that they're required to spend only on porno videos and pointless apps for their avatar or "doppel"--and the episode outlines the rules of this dystopia in only visual terms, a very cinematic approach to storytelling beautifully and confidently laid out by veteran modern Doctor Who director Euros Lyn.

Daniel Kaluuya stole The Fades as the lead hero's nerdy, Mork & Mindy-loving best friend (in fact, back when Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. hadn't hit its stride yet and was struggling to figure out what to do with Fitz, the supergenius character played by Kaluuya's Fades co-star Iain De Caestecker, I initially wanted Agents to replace De Caestecker with Kaluuya), so it's a bit jarring to see this guy who was such a charismatic chatterbox on The Fades robbed of his voice at the start of "Fifteen Million Merits." Kaluyya doesn't speak for about the first 15 minutes, but he's terrific at expressing his worker character's ennui with just his face and posture--I had flashbacks to Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. In fact, that's what "Fifteen Million Merits" carries echoes of: a little bit of Modern Times with a smidgen of THX-1138 and a shitload of the Axiom from WALL•E, but with the added twists of both a reality TV talent show as the primary escape route for the working class (Brooker's wife Konnie Huq, who co-wrote "Fifteen Million Merits," skewers her own reality TV hosting past here) and a clever visual metaphor for "people who live in their phones."

Other than MC Bashy's hideous attempt at an American accent while portraying a talent show judge, the most disturbing thing about "Fifteen Million Merits" is how much this world where workers must live in cramped cells that look like smartphone menu screens--and where a female contestant like Abi (Jessica Brown Findlay, a.k.a. "Way Hot" from Downton Abbey) has such depressingly limited showbiz career options--isn't too far off from our own. I refuse to get a smartphone. I don't want to be a smartphone zombie. "Fifteen Million Merits" is a great argument for why some of us refuse to get bitten.

Kaluyya and Findlay's episode is Black Mirror's second episode, but it really should be your intro to Black Mirror if you haven't streamed it yet. It's where Brooker's blend of satire and despair first truly comes alive. Like Alan Sepinwall said, "Fifteen Million Merits" better represents what Black Mirror is capable of--and how unconventional and imaginative it is as an anthology show--than "The National Anthem," the more conventional premiere episode. However, "The National Anthem" is hardly as mediocre as "The Waldo Moment," Black Mirror's last episode before the show's return to Channel 4 next week (on December 16, to be exact) in the form of a Christmas special guest-starring Jon Hamm and Oona Chaplin.

I like what "The Waldo Moment" says about how an apathetic attitude towards democracy can be destructive; I just don't like the way it's executed. It's the show's only dud so far (the fact that "The Waldo Moment" was a rejected script idea from a completely different show explains much of its clunkiness). Remember the Star Wars Machete Order? A Star Wars fan suggested to other fans that they should try rewatching the pre-Force Awakens films in a different order: the 1977 Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back first, followed by Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, and then Return of the Jedi as the final installment, with no need to suffer through The Phantom Menace again. Because Black Mirror's episodes are self-contained, they can be watched in any order, so for Netflix viewers who are about to discover Black Mirror, I've come up with the Black Mirror Machete Order.

1) 1.2, "Fifteen Million Merits"
2) 1.3, "The Entire History of You"
3) 2.1, "Be Right Back"
4) 1.1, "The National Anthem"
5) 2.2, "White Bear"
(Skip "The Waldo Moment" or save it for another week. An underwhelming episode from Brooker is actually better than most American network TV.)

This rearranges the order of Black Mirror episodes so that the strongest episodes are first--"Fifteen Million Merits," "The Entire History of You" and "Be Right Back"--followed by the slightly lesser "National Anthem." Under the Machete Order, Black Mirror doesn't end with a whimper and wraps up instead with a gut-punch of an installment, "White Bear." It's best to not know anything at all about "White Bear" before watching it. Like "Fifteen Million Merits," "White Bear" excellently immerses the viewer into its future world through largely visual storytelling, and then like the most unnerving past works of horror anthology TV--the '80s Twilight Zone's "Gramma" comes to mind, as does "Home" from the quasi-anthology that was The X-Files--it proceeds to sock you in the nads. Then after you stream those episodes, read the thoughtful essays Emily Yoshida wrote about each episode back when she was a Grantland staffer (she's now with The Verge).

"White Bear"

At about this time last year, the Seattle hip-hop group The Physics released Digital Wildlife, a finely crafted concept album that could function as an aural companion piece to Black Mirror. Both the Physics album and Black Mirror explore the idea that digital advances may be improving a few aspects of our lives, but those advances haven't yet been able to delete human problems like loneliness or concealing lies. But Black Mirror goes a step further and straight-up says those problems can never be deleted. They'll only get worse at the rate humanity is going. Somewhere, Kip Dynamite is eating his words.

Both seasons of Black Mirror--just three episodes each--can be streamed on Netflix. The original Twilight Zone, a huge influence on Black Mirror, was turned into a 1983 feature film that remade three of the '60s show's episodes. The John Landis and Steven Spielberg segments suck, but the Joe Dante and George Miller segments are excellent, as is the late Jerry Goldsmith's original score. Goldsmith's Twilight Zone: The Movie end title music isn't currently in rotation on AFOS, but it ought to be.

Tip-Top Quotables: "Some couples have a song. Ours is the theme from Jaws," plus a few other great lines this week

My favorite monthly section in old Source magazine issues was "Hip-Hop Quotables," in which the Source editors printed out their favorite new rap verse of the month, from the first bar to the last. "Tip-Top Quotables," which I've named after that Source section, is a collection of my favorite quotes of the week from anywhere, whether it's a recent TV show or a new rap verse. "TTQ" won't appear on this blog every week. It'll appear whenever the fuck I feel like it.

* "Tell him that snoring is usually a sign of a condition called sleep apnea, which causes a lot of people to die in their sleep. Be like, 'Here, Google it.' And then he'll be so scared he'll never be able to sleep again."--Kumail Nanjiani, giving advice to an Esquire reader about how to deal with a roommate's boyfriend who snores too loud

* "We've got some very attractive rewards at every level. For instance, $10,000 lands you in a signature CNN mass-shooting coverage six-box. For $25,000, you get to take molly with Fareed Zakaria. What what! For $5 million, CNN will air a 24-hour, two-week hunt for your lost car keys."--Jon Stewart, announcing his Kickstarter to buy CNN

(Photo source: Wendy Liebman)

* "Tony played it like a failed Scientologist."--Sam Rockwell, recalling to MTV News his Galaxy Quest co-star Tony Shalhoub's hilarious performance as a constantly stoned, non-Asian TV actor playing an Asian character, which Shalhoub based on constantly stoned Kung Fu star David Carradine, '70s TV's most infamous example of a non-Asian playing an Asian

(Photo source: Pia Glenn, the writer behind the #TimeTitles hashtag, which is a mockery of this)

(Photo source: Hari Kondabolu)

* "That is not good. The only time when you are happy to hear the words 'Maggots were found' is when you are a maggot whose family was lost at sea."--Last Week Tonight's John Oliver, joking about a news report of maggots being found in prison food supplied by a shady subcontractor



* "Garner was an expert at pulling the viewer into the action and acknowledging the ridiculousness of most television storytelling without quite breaking the fourth wall. He was the guy who crawled out of the screen and sat beside you munching popcorn on the couch."--Todd VanDerWerff, Vox, "James Garner has died; these five roles will remind you of his greatness"

* "If Netanyahu is so bothered by how dead Palestinians look on television then he should stop killing so many of them."--Benjamin Wallace-Wells, New York, "'Telegenically Dead Palestinians': Why Israel Is Losing the American Media War"

5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (12/26/2012): The best episodes of 2012 (part 1)

The helmeted villain with no name attempts to trim Mike's bangs.

Every Wednesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I dine on five of the week's most noteworthy animated cable shows that are found outside my Adult Swim comfort zone. There will be no new columns this week and next week due to the holidays and the lack of first-run programming (only Tron: Uprising and Motorcity are first-run because Disney XD chose to burn off the rest of their episodes over the holidays). In a special year-end edition of "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," here are previous reviews of five of my favorite non-Adult Swim cable cartoon episodes from May to December 2012.

Motorcity, "Power Trip" (from May 11, 2012)

Motorcity, the only one out of the five cartoons this week that's not based on a superhero comic for a change, is only two episodes in, and this unlikely collabo between Disney and the not-so-family-friendly Titmouse animation studio (of Metalocalypse and Freaknik: The Musical fame) is already the most inventive and thrilling of the five. It's not a superhero show, yet it's dealing with questions about heroism (and even activism) more interestingly than most cartoons that are actual superhero shows.

In Motorcity's future setting, the socio-economical punching bag that is Detroit has been divided by greedy developer Abraham Kane (Batman: The Animated Series and Metalocalypse vocal MVP Mark Hamill) into two sections, the sparkling-clean, EPCOT-like Detroit Deluxe for the city's most affluent inhabitants and Motorcity, a subterranean ghetto that Kane is plotting to completely bulldoze. Teenage gearhead Mike Chilton (Reid Scott, currently appearing on HBO's Veep as the conceited douche on VP Selina Meyer's staff) has banded together with cowardly hacker and best friend Chuck (Nate Torrence), industrial spy Julie (Kate Micucci) and mechanics Dutch (Kel Mitchell), Texas (Jess Harnell) and Goat Jacob (Brian Doyle-Murray) to prevent Kane and his Shockbots from wiping out Motorcity. These tech-savvy rebels call themselves the Burners. If an older Phineas and Ferb joined Dominic Toretto's crew from the Fast and the Furious movies and then were all forced to live in a dystopic ghetto of the future, it would look something like the Burners.

To borrow a line from the infamous Super Bowl XLVI Chrysler ad where Clint Eastwood big-upped the Detroit auto industry, now Motorcity is fighting again. But will Kane succeed in turning the Burners and the people of Motorcity against Mike, who, like Jacob, used to work for KaneCo? Will the fog, division, discord and blame make it hard for the Burners to see what lies ahead?

Even though Motorcity must have been created by Titmouse honcho Chris Prynoski long before the Occupy movement began (and judging from how much work Titmouse put into making the show's visuals look amazing, it had have to been created that long ago) and Prynoski is more concerned with high-octane action than political allegory, it's hard to ignore how similar the Burners' opposition to Kane is to the struggles of us 99 Percenters. It's about time Occupy protesters got an animated show they can root for and embrace--and of course, watch while being camped out between protests, most likely through Burners-style illegal means that would make Disney's blood boil.

Speaking of Disney, how the hell did a show with a clear disdain for EPCOT-like things manage to get Disney's approval and make it on to a Disney-owned channel?

"When I asked Prynoski about this [satirical] aspect of Motorcity," wrote Jim Hill in his article about Motorcity, "all Chris could do in response was laugh and then say 'I don't think I'm allowed to comment on that. But I will say that you're a very perceptive fellow.'"

For a long time, I found it difficult to get over Cartoon Network's cancellation of the Titmouse-produced Megas XLR, which, like Motorcity, had a bunch of teenage gearheads as the heroes (instead of souped-up hot rods, their ride was a giant robot from the future). I think I'm finally over it. Motorcity is a great substitute, and in some ways, it's an even better show. Sure, there aren't as many amusing pop culture reference gags on Motorcity as there were on Megas XLR, which, for instance, regularly ridiculed MTV for cancelling the Titmouse cult favorite Downtown by destroying a "PopTV" sign in every episode (Roth, a robot named after car customizer Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, and a shout-out to Admiral Ackbar's "It's a trap!" line from Hamill's Star Wars past are as reference-y as Motorcity gets). But the Burners are more interesting characters (I especially enjoyed the matter-of-fact way the "Battle for Motorcity" premiere episode revealed that Julie is Kane's daughter) and more fallible heroes than Megas XLR's Coop, who always triumphed over the Glorft at the end of each episode despite leveling most of New Jersey in the process. On Megas XLR, the destruction of Jersey was a running gag, but on Motorcity, the impact the Burners' battles against Kane have on the fragile ghetto they call home is treated a little more seriously.

This week's "Power Trip" episode, scripted by Megas XLR co-creator George Krstic, features a great scene where the Burners brainstorm how to break into the KaneCo Tower and realize why each of their ideas would suck donkey balls. In that comedic scene and in later moments where characters debate over weaponizing an unstable KaneCo energy source, "Power Trip" deals with how heroism sometimes requires compromise, but without getting preachy about it. Mike gets a KaneCo R&D scientist (Jim Cummings) to steal from Kane an energy core, which would result in Kane's evil empire being shut down once and for all. But even though the energy core is too unstable and dangerous for the Burners to keep around in Motorcity, Mike insists on using it as a weapon, and his stance is met with opposition by Chuck and the scientist. The series isn't afraid to show that while Mike is a great leader, he's also an adrenaline junkie, and his recklessness can be a liability for the people he wants to protect.

In "Battle for Motorcity," the constantly whiny Chuck, who's so squeamish he makes Shaggy from Scooby-Doo look macho, quickly became the show's most grating character. He's still a whiny crybaby in "Power Trip," but luckily, this second episode gives Chuck more to do than just whine, squeal and activate his ejector seat, and in the scenes where the characters express their hesitancy over handling the energy core, we see why Mike values Chuck as the conscience of the group and why Mike needs him to keep him in check (over on Tumblr, several Motorcity fans are already shipping Mike and Chuck as a gay couple, and I wouldn't be surprised if some female viewer somewhere is currently hard at work on her Mike/Chuck slashfic).

(Photo source: People of MotorCity)

I'm making Motorcity sound like a serious show, but it's far from it. It's as wild a ride as that rollercoaster Phineas and Ferb built in their backyard. Disney and Titmouse may turn out to be the most worthwhile partnership between The Mouse and another animation studio since Disney and some little computer graphics company from the Bay Area.

***

Motorcity, "Vendetta" (from June 19, 2012)

Motorcity introduces yet another adversary for the Burners during another solid episode of this finely crafted cartoon, "Vendetta." This time, it's a nameless, red muscle car-driving warrior (Eric Ladin, just recently killed off on The Killing) in a spiked helmet who looks like a rejected Tron: Uprising baddie and is referred to in the end credits only as "Red"--although this mystery man's beef is mainly with Burners leader Mike Chilton. On the one-year anniversary of the day Mike severed ties with Abraham Kane, Red emerges from out of nowhere to take revenge on Mike and eliminate him.

In juicy flashbacks that finally explain what Mike did when he was a KaneCo employee, we learn that he was a cadet in Kane's army of soldiers known as the Ultra Elites. The fact that a businessman assembled an army to guard him and do his dirty work shows how psychotic this particular businessman is.

At the height of Donald Trump's still-continuing racist nonsense about President Obama, Lewis Black did a hilarious Daily Show "Back in Black" segment where he joked that he wants Trump to be the next president because America needs to be run by someone as insane as Muammar Gaddafi and Kim Jong Il. Kane is like a mash-up of Trump's Third World dictator-style craziness and Steve Jobs' technological genius, his dickish treatment of his Apple colleagues and his love of the color white--in the wardrobe and burly body of a douchey gym manager.

"Rock Box" Track of the Day: The Roots, "Here I Come"

Song: "Here I Come" by The Roots featuring Malik B. & Dice Raw
Released: 2006
Why's it part of the "Rock Box" playlist?: It's featured in Superbad. (It also appears in the Hancock closing credits.) "Here I Come" is the most upbeat (and party-friendly, hence its inclusion in Superbad) track on 2006's Game Theory, The Roots' most militant and brooding-sounding album. Game Theory was a bold move for their first album for Def Jam, a label that many feared would interfere with The Roots' sound and force the band to be more mainstream (luckily, Def Jam's been hands-off). You may be more familiar with the faster-paced version of "Here I Come" that The Roots perform each weeknight during the opening titles and end credits of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. Dammit, Fallon! That was supposed to be the theme song for my talk show! You know, the one I host in my basement with my special guests, a cardboard cutout of Liza Minnelli and a cardboard cutout of Jerry Lewis?
Which moment in Superbad does it appear?: The scene where Jonah Hill, Michael Cera and Christopher Mintz-Plasse finally arrive at Emma Stone's party.

Speaking of Superbad, last night's Daily Show superimposed the face of a crying John Boehner from 60 Minutes over the body of McLovin while he lost his virginity in the movie. That cracked my ish up.

Hear Black Thought, Malik B. and Dice Raw disturb the peace.

All the other "Rock Box" Tracks of the Day from this week:
Classic & 86, "Ridin'"
Pulp, "Like a Friend"
Run-DMC, "Rock Box"
The Crystal Method, "Starting Over"

Sign, sign, everywhere a sign

Just when I thought I saw all the clever signs from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's nearly one-week-old Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, more signs continue to be collected and posted online.

(Photo source: Rachel Donner)

That WWII vet's sign and this one I saw during Comedy Central's live telecast were neck-and-neck for my favorite sign:

(Photo source: Funny or Die)

But then I discovered the following four. Those of us who have been suffering from post-election blues need some cheering up, so here are some other funny signs you might have missed.

One rally-goer channeled a movie I love (the guy who shouted that line used to regularly pester Colbert on The Daily Show!) and another rally-goer amusingly referenced a recently-debuted-on-Blu-ray '80s movie that's still enjoyable despite its really dumb race-related moments.

(Photo source: The Huffington Post via FoD)

(Photo source: Ryan Splitlog via FoD)

(Photo source: Blastr)

(Photo source: Blastr)

I'm in another book: SMITH Magazine's It All Changed in an Instant: More Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous & Obscure

I first heard about SMITH Magazine's six-word memoirs on Facebook and wrote a few of my own on SMITH's site. The new SMITH/Harper Perennial collection It All Changed in an Instant used one of them.

I share a page with T.O. I'm on page 198:


It was inspired by an ancient Tonight Show clip I once saw in which George Gobel asked Johnny Carson if he ever got the feeling that the world's a tuxedo and he's a pair of brown shoes. I wrote those little memoirs a while ago, before I started including my middle initial in everything I do to distinguish myself from other guys with the same name.

I wish the It All Changed in an Instant editors used one of the other memoirs I wrote (like "So broke, can't afford longer sentence" or "Nothing kills boners like yacht rock") instead of the one they chose. But still, I'm honored to be in the same book with the following people whose work I've enjoyed: Andy Borowitz, Andy Richter, Bob Odenkirk, Brian Baumgartner (Kevin!), David Wain, Duff Goldman of Ace of Cakes, Eugene Mirman (his heartwarming memoir is "I've fucked at least eight people"), Henry Rollins, Henry Winkler, Joe Queenan, John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants, Kathy Najimy, Leonard Nimoy, Linus Roache, Margaret Cho, Neil Patrick Harris, Rick Parker, Rob Riggle, Shepard Fairey, Tommy Chong and Sound of Young America host Jesse Thorn, who started out at the same radio station where I first deejayed.

Parker, whom I met at San Diego Comic-Con last year, and Fairey submitted a couple of my favorite memoirs, which they drew:




Daily Show alum Riggle's memoir "I love my big, big balls" would probably get him into a heated balls-measuring contest with a certain fellow TDS alum (I bet he'd respond with "But mine are bigger, Rob Riggle").

But my favorite memoir comes from Lalah Hathaway, a singer like her legendary father Donny Hathaway: "So I only get six words?"

WonderCon 2009 wrap-up

Out of all the comic book cons I've been to, I prefer San Francisco's WonderCon because it's more laid-back than the other cons and Moscone Center South isn't so packed. And yes, there are TV show and movie panels like the Chuck panel with cast members Zachary Levi, Yvonne Strahovski (above), Adam Baldwin and Joshua Gomez and series co-creators Josh Schwartz and Chris Fedak, but there aren't so many TV and movie panels that they cause the programming schedule to be overcrowded, so that gives me more time to talk shop with people and check out their comics. Plus, WonderCon is right across the street from Jollibee and Red Ribbon. Automatic win.

Obama's inauguration: America reboots itself

For readers who aren't my Facebook friends, I've compiled and reposted the status updates that I wrote on the Facebook/CNN Inauguration Day coverage site on this uplifting day of history and balls.

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Jimmy just booed the arrival of Mr. Potter from It's a Wonderful Life.
via CNN.com Live - 8:39am

Wow, the surviving Tuskegee Airmen are at the inauguration.
via CNN.com Live - 9:24am

Amen!
via CNN.com Live - 9:37am

Jimmy is wondering how the other cable channels are covering the inauguration. I hear the Sci Fi Channel sent Mansquito to interview the crowd.
via CNN.com Live - 9:47am

Favorite part of Obama's inaugural speech: "The world is changing and we have to change with it."
via CNN.com Live - 9:51am

Jimmy enjoyed that recent Slate.com article that basically said, "What's Bush gonna do now? No one will hire his ass."
via CNN.com Live - 9:59am

The President and the First Lady's parade walk was badass. South Side, walk it out!
via CNN.com Live - 1:19pm

TV One is doing the best coverage right now: Anchor #1: "Joe the Plumber is enjoying his 15 minutes of fame." Anchor #2: "And it's 14 minutes too long."
via CNN.com Live - 2:35pm

Jimmy is trying to figure out what the Howard U. Marching Band has been playing. Whatever it is, it's slammin'. Sounded like "I Need a Freak" by Sexual Harassment.
via CNN.com Live - 3:29pm

20 favorite TV moments of 2008

Happy New Year. These favorite moments of mine are all from scripted or non-reality TV. Screw reality TV.

(Warning: some spoilers ahead.)

20. Conan, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert try to kick each other's asses to the tune of "Brianstorm" by the Arctic Monkeys (Late Night with Conan O'Brien).

19. Barney, Ted and Lily rock "the Naked Man" (How I Met Your Mother).

18. Rob Riggle gives Code Pink enough rope to hang themselves (The Daily Show with Jon Stewart).

17. Walt blows up Tuco's office (Breaking Bad).

16. Brock battles a French assassin who's obsessed with Silver Age comic books (The Venture Bros.).

15. Michael goes undercover as a wimpy chemist (Burn Notice).

14. "She must prove she loves America, as opposed to Republicans, who everyone knows love America. They just hate half the people living in it" (The Daily Show).

13. The island is visited by the freighties, who include Daniel, a heroic science nerd, and Miles, a wiseass "ghostbuster" and the most interesting and least clichéd Asian American male character to hit network TV in years (Lost).

12. Patterson punches Encino Man (Generation Kill).

11. "Hey John, I got a question! You need a ride to the airport?" (Late Show with David Letterman).

10. Stephen tries--and fails--to hide actual tears during Barack Obama's historic victory (Indecision 2008: America's Choice).

9. Wendy emerges from the water in Ursula Andress' Dr. No bikini (The Middleman).

8. Don tells Peggy to get out of the hospital and move forward (Mad Men).

7. The survivors find Earth (Battlestar Galactica).

6. Katie Couric (Amy Poehler) interviews Sarah Palin (Tina Fey) (Saturday Night Live).

5. Jack crashes Liz's high school reunion (30 Rock).

4. Bubbles is finally invited to the dinner table (The Wire).

3. Vic confesses (The Shield).

2. Joe Biden (Jason Sudeikis) and Sarah Palin (Fey) go head to head (SNL).

1. Iceman's team sings "Teenage Dirtbag" (Generation Kill).

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Runners-up:
- The Bawlmer cops sing "The Body of an American" for the final time (The Wire).
- Desmond looks for his constant (Lost).
- "A guaranteed disaster. Like eating a burrito before sex" (30 Rock).
- Samantha Bee tries to get Republican delegates to say the word "choice" (The Daily Show).
- BET fires everyone who can read (The Boondocks).
- 6H turns into Amadeus (30 Rock).
- John Legend sings "The Girl Is Mine" with Stephen (The Colbert Report).
- Will Arnett does his last sex tape (Human Giant).
- Sayid sells his soul (Lost).