TV Review | Frakking Up Is Hard to Do: Battlestar Galactica's Series Finale

How could a show that was so gritty and challenging descend so quickly into bathos and implausibility? Have them go camping. Check out a few of my many thoughts on the Battlestar Galactica series finale at my new television blog Pan & Scan.


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TV Review | Amateur Hour: Late Night with... who, again?

I and my friend Kristen have been working slowly (oh so slowly) on a new blog focusing specifically on television, and even more specifically on all the things we know about television that you don't. It's in its infancy, this media empire of ours, but so far we've set a little of our minds out on display, mine in the form of this critique of Jimmy Fallon's faltering go at Late Night.

More cocksure opinionizing to come.


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Stuff I Wish I'd Done | Catch the Frak Up!

"Catch the Frak Up!" is a video recap of the last four seasons of Battlestar Galactica, and it's Something I Wish I'd Done, damnit.

First of all, get off your high horse--Battlestar Galactica is excellent TV. It is easily the most sophisticated sci-fi series ever made, and like nothing that's been on television before, genre or otherwise. It's what you'd get if you let Joseph Conrad write Star Trek after getting high and watching soap operas with Philip K. Dick. There's no room for whimsy here--no lasers, no growling space bears and no velour onesies. People smoke and drink, lie and fight and play cards. Some dude fucks the wrong girl and the world ends. And then things get really bad. It's frakkin' awesome.

Anyway, the folks at scifi.com put this thing together to help people get a handle on the story. The 13-minute film surveys the entire sixty-five-episode broadcast run, with all of its shifting alliances and snaking storylines. Faster-than-light editing efficiently puts weird names to pretty faces while shuffling us through the sweaty intimacy, quaking cinema-verite and gunmetal hues of the show's palette.

Catch the Frak Up!, Part 1 [8 min. 9 sec.]

The narration (my chief creative woulda-coulda) is deadpan perfection--a caffeinated stream of minimalist snark that manages to evoke the clicking chatfests of the nerderatti with only a touch of technojargon and not one whiff of fanboy elitism.

Catch the Frak Up!, Part 2 [5 min. 2 sec.]

The show's makers, mavens and marketers are shrewdly extending an olive branch to the uninitiated, leaving the screen door cracked for neophytes and stragglers who might have otherwise gone home. Diehard fans might slurp up every drop in one sitting, while new and lapsed viewers are free to linger, unfolding layers of subtlety and gathering precious tokens of geek-chic cred. Catch the Frak Up! works either way, bringing the new and confused down to Earth (hee...) for the big finale.

And I wish I'd done it.


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