Onde: a TV weblog

My gleeful journey

Saturday, August 28, 2010

In the past couple of days I’ve watched the entire first season of Glee, despite the fact that, after watching the first two episodes, I had decided I wasn’t interested at all. But since risking an anaphylactic shock is a lot of fun, I gave the show the Sex and the City treatment—that is, if I want to be able to comment on it (and justify my dislike), I need to have watched the whole thing, like I did years ago with Sex and the City. (Although in this case season one is as far as I’ll go.) »

Criticizing criticism

Saturday, July 31, 2010

Call me short-sighted, but I don’t understand academic-level television criticism. I’m not saying it’s not interesting or it doesn’t stem from accurate—and often passionate—viewing; what I mean is you can bring to the table all the readings, all the theories, all the analogies you want, but if you lack a solid analytical method, it will show. And it will make your argument moot—academic, as they say. »

Understanding the end

Thursday, June 24, 2010

Warning: if you haven’t watched the Lost series finale, or the final season, or the whole series, you might want to wait until you’ve done so before reading my ramblings. However, if you haven’t watched Lost at all I don’t see how you should be interested in this article in the first place. Nonetheless, and despite whatever my judgment may appear to be in this article, if you haven’t watched Lost—or are one those who watched nothing but a season-two episode featuring a strange Nigerian man carrying a stick and claim that nothing makes sense in Lost—I really advise you to point your time machine to September 22, 2004. Or just get the DVDs—whichever is easier. »

My lost focus

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

I have no idea how some people can watch the finale of a show like Lost—an emotional episode, and also very controversial—and immediately start writing about it. I admire those people. All I could do yesterday, after watching the episode at 6 a.m., was wait for the evening and watch it again. I decided to focus on the good stuff, and tweeted extensively about it, possibly without giving anything away to those who haven’t seen it yet. That comes way before any analytic effort on my part.

So, here it is—my list of favorite things about the Lost series finale: »

Television is heartbreak

Thursday, January 28, 2010

In a perfect world, good stories would never end. Wait—let me rephrase that. In a perfect world, good stories would always end gracefully. I don’t mean happy endings across the board. I mean good stories should always be allowed time to reach a conclusion after they’ve hit their narrative peak.

On television, however, the narrative peak often coincides with a peak in viewership—in ratings—and after that is reached the networks are just not interested anymore. A few months’ notice, if anything, and the show is gone. I will not delve into the historical implications of this. Current technology allows for easy storage of and access to all sorts of content, so it’s not oblivion I’m concerned with. »

Sitcom Time

Monday, October 5, 2009

Thanks to @janefader for tweeting me a link to an article on next week’s Time magazine, “No Laugh Track Required: The Comeback of the Sitcom.” At first I feared the writer, James Poniewozik, was concentrating in three pages the last four and a half years of my research time (which would have been quite annoying), but in the end the article is just a review of new and not-so-new shows currently airing on American television. »

More new shows

Friday, October 2, 2009

It is confirmed: CBS didn’t get the memo about sitcom being dead and all. Still, Accidentally on Purpose won me over the moment I realized it’s set in San Francisco. What can I say?, I’m sentimental like that. »

The new TV season is on

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

The 2009-2010 television season has officially started, and I’ve been doing a little research on what new shows will replace the defunct ones, or those that I simply bumped off my schedule. I’ve decided that I will mostly stick to comedy – for academic reasons and because I still think comedy usually has more to offer. »

A Lost sense of language

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

I realize how easy it is to shoot at the dubbing actors, considering the situation in which they are forced to work. Ever since, last year, the Fox Italia channels started airing American shows even before the end of the original season, translating and dubbing episodes must have become a frantic job.

Such premise cannot be an excuse for the way in which, when dubbed, characters lose depth and often become ridiculous.

One example is Lost, one of whose most notable features is the treatment of characters. The whole show – and particularly its season one – is founded on cultural differences, which are in good measure manifested in the different accents in which the English language is spoken: the California “standard,” the New York, Australian, Scottish accents and so on. These are all nuances that will necessarily be lost when the show is translated and dubbed. »


Tuesday, September 7, 2010