NEWSPEAK Blog

I am about to blow your fucking mind.

You ready? K, let's do this:

It's the trailer for Joss Whedon's new show, Dollhouse, starring (gasp!) Eliza Dushku and (gasp!) Tahmoh "Karl 'Helo' Agathon" Penikett and (gasp!) some other people, one of whom is (gasp!) Amy Acker and none of whom are (boo!) Marc Blucas. Yay!

The premise of the show is pretty rad:

In Dollhouse, Dushku plays a young woman named Echo, a member of a group of people known as "Actives" or "Dolls" who volunteered for the work in the Dollhouse. They give up five years of their lives, and at the end they receive a large sum of money and no memory of anything they did for the Dollhouse. The Dolls have had their personalities wiped clean so they can be imprinted with any number of new personas, including memory, muscle memory, skills, and language, for different assignments. They're then hired out for particular jobs, crimes, fantasies, and occasional good deeds. On missions, Actives are monitored internally (and remotely) by Handlers. In between tasks, they are mind-wiped into a child-like state and live in a futuristic dormitory/laboratory, a hidden facility nicknamed "The Dollhouse". The story follows Echo, who begins, in her mind-wiped state, to become self-aware.

So watch the trailer and stuff. And hey, Joss? I love you so much. Like, deeply. You are my density. But can you please find a font more creative than Papyrus? It's sort of like using Comic Sans for your title. Just my persnickety-do!

Oh, here's a full scene from Dollhouse, where Helo is all, "What the frak?" and Faith's like, "Don't sweat it, B. I'm five by five," and then I poop my pants. Fin.

Friday's BSG

(Spoilers throughout, duh.)

Some points:

Enjoyed Roslin's fear about her diminishing mental faculties and Hot Evil Tori. My only wish would be that Annoying Emo Bang Callie is revealed as a Cylon so that Hot Evil Tori can kill her in every single episode. It could be a spinoff: Hot Evil Tori Dispatches Annoying Emo Bang Callie In Creative New Ways: The Series. Viewers could call in and vote! It'd be like the American Idol of killing Callie!

Loved, loved, loved the continuation of the Cylon civil war and the vindication that Starbuck was kinda-sorta right all along. See humans try to fly a Basestar! And you know, it occurred to me that Hybrids are essentially just River Tam in goo. And yes, that Six/Six scene was gratuitous fanboy heaven. Mmmmm. Bejeezus. But damn—that was some bloody stuff. And did anyone else think that the whole, "You are a harbinger of death, Kara Thrace" thing was redolent of this? (Warning: BAD fanvid there. Oh, and while you're at it, here is proof that someone out there is nerdier than me.)

However, I did disagree with making President Roslin into Corrado Soprano:

Today in documentaries about things that float.

So last night I was channel-surfing and ended up watching and getting completely engrossed in three episode of PBS' Carrier. I have no idea how long the show has been on the air, but it's really pretty fascinating.

It's the story of a six-month deployment aboard the USS Nimitz, as it travels west from San Diego to the Persian Gulf, and the filmmakers got pretty unprecedented access to the ship and its 5,000 inhabitants. Everyone is sort of brutally honest, from the E1 Culinary Specialist who wishes aloud that she had never joined to Navy to the Airman who says, "This war's just all about oil."

The thing that quite struck me, because I'm a gigantic dork—is how similar the structure of the Nimitz is to depictions elsewhere, like, say, aboard the Galactica. There's the horde of blue-collar folks commanded by the chiefs, the disciplinarian XO and the hard-partying, sort of privileged pilot class. Of course, in the this case, the Cylons would be Iraqis. Lousy skin-jobs!

The bad news: the show is done by Icon, which is Mel Gibson's vanity production company. This means that the show is infused with a great deal of sis-boom-bah-ing and shots of American flags rippling in the righteous breeze of Freedom and Liberty and Stuff.

The good news: there's plenty of ambivalence injected into the show. It's a show about people, not about war. Plus, the hydraulic catapult that launches fighter planes is wicked. I recommend you check it out.

Bwaha! That zany Preznit of ours.

Here's George W. Bush making an appearance on Deal or No Deal. I cannot even comment or my brain will 'splode.

Four point five hours.

Yes.

BSG April 4 . . . woo-hoo!

Good News!

Bob Odenkirk and David Cross are returning (sans Jesus) to HBO! It'll be a half-hour sitcom. Sez Comedy Central:

It’s currently called “David’s Situation” with Cross playing himself. In the show, the comic has quit show biz and is working for inflight magazines. He lives with two roommates in a gated community, each the polar opposite on the political scale - one left and one right. David: “And I’m right in the middle.”

[T]he pair intend to keep the sitcom act break structure and break them up with fake commercials, which will allow the pair to exercise their considerable sketch comedy chops directly.

David Cross writes:

HBO has officially picked up the pilot Bob and I pitched them and wrote. We should be shooting in LA in the beginning of MAY. We'll keep you posted on exactly when and where (we'll have room for 150 audiencers). We are both very, very excited about it and feel it's really strong and important to the health of America. We know that America is hurting right now and old people like to say that "Laughter's the best medicine" So, keep hope old people, an injection of 10cc's of funny is about to be shot all up in your funny bones!

The Bob be praised!

The writers are back!

Thanks be! Our insane bizarro universe of no TV writers has come to an end!

The best news since ever of all time.

An Arrested Development movie looks likely.

Last night on PBS ...

In addition to a fascinating Independent Lens about Asberger's, Frontline's topic was "The Medicated Child" (which you can watch in its entirety here, and I highly suggest you do). This was a terribly upsetting program for a lot of reasons.

Apparently, there's been a 4,000% rise in diagnosing children with Bipolar Disorder, which is accompanied by a shocking curriculum of accompanying medication. Children are given one drug to stabilize mood, then another stimulant, then anti-anxiety medication, then a depressant to help them sleep, and pediatricians or child psychologists keep piling on the prescriptions to smooth over every behavioral burr in the kids' lives. Needless to say, these kids are deeply affected; Frontline followed around a young teenager who had been on a panel of drugs his whole life (as many as eight prescriptions at a time) and has consequently developed involuntary tics. The use of anti-psychotics has also apparently seen an upswell, and doctors use them to replace antidepressants.

All of this strikes me as terribly, impossibly wrong. I don't have children, but it seems to me that kids have behavioral problems sometimes. You do not diagnose a two-year-old as bipolar because he or she is acting like a two-year-old, and it would seem like many, many behavioral problems could stem from diet; last night's show featured a woman talking about how her 4-year-old—who is already on numerous medications—is hyperactive, and then shows him gulping sugary foods (a bottle of Gatorade sits on the table). Like anything in American medicine, the doctors are sadly often predisposed to treating any problem with drugs instead of examining the roots of the problems, and it's no coincidence that the explosion in Bipolar Disorder diagnosis occurred, quelle surprise, just after new drugs to treat it were introduced. Often, diagnosis and treatment is beholden to the pharamaceuticals who fund the studies.

Like I said, I don't have kids, so I don't know how I'd deal with a problem child. What about you breeders out there? Any take on this?