A Blog About Nothing in Particular
Biggest surprise of the summer for this blogger? It’s “Louie,” hands down.
Marked improvement over “Lucky Louise,” his short-lived show on HBO, which lasted just a season. His raw standup and wry wit were perfectly blended into a more coherent narrative detailing his daily drag. Love when a comedian takes on the big issues, makes funny observations, but doesn’t lecture the audience. If you missed “Louie” this year, you really missed out.
Just watched The Promise, a new documentary about Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town. I have mixed feelings. I’ll be writing about it for Fancast.com this week.
But I can’t help but feel like it’s a baseball-centric Entourage, with Johnny Drama in the lead role.
Having said that, I enjoyed Eastbound and Down this morning. Stayed up way too late watching TV last night. Mad Men, Boardwalk Empire and Eastbound and Down in one night? How am I supposed to catch up on Bored to Death? Do people still watch that? Or is that borne of an Anderson guilt complex in me, whereby I really want to like anything that reads as an homage to Truffaut?
Also, can someone explain to me why the Boardwalk Empire intro is like Deadliest Catch, but with bottles instead of crabs?
If this show is the closest we ever get to an actual conclusion to Deadwood, I’ll take it. I’ve watched the pilot episode three times!
One knock: could they at least pretend to know how a Philadelphian talks? Buscemi will do Buscemi, but no one in the cast sounds like they’re from Philly at all. Didn’t “The Wire” teach anyone the importance of local dialect?
I knew things weren’t good when I first caught a glimpse of Zane Lamprey in a Subway commercial. When I started following Lamprey on Facebook, I saw that he was working on a new project, but his other show, Three Sheets, has gotten a stay of execution. Then I read this post over on his site. This tweet did little to convince me that Mark Cuban was destined to save Three Sheets.
Is Zane Lamprey cursed? Should the title of this post really be “How Zane Lamprey Sank Two Networks?” Think of the SEO!
Now, I get why Travel Channel balked. They have Anthony Bourdain’s show, No Reservations, which features him doing much the same thing, with more culinary insight and less self-awareness. People like that. He’s macho. He knows famous people. Win, right? Who could be bothered with the wildly relatable Lamprey who seems to make friends easily wherever he goes.
I still don’t remember how we discovered “Three Sheets.” My guess is that Helen happened to find it while channel surfing, or a friend told us we should tune in. The show was great. Even if you don’t care about booze, who wouldn’t enjoy on-screen talent willing to debase himself in ways even the Three Stooges would refuse?
Whether he was at home or abroad, Zane got himself into all the best kinds of trouble. Anyone who’s ever gotten drunk overseas knows how it feels to wake up the next morning and hop on a plane, impossibly hungover. It’s hell, yet Zane subjected himself to such torture gleefully. I sometimes found myself really rooting for the booze to defeat him, but like the Washington Generals, it never won.
I hope Zane isn’t exiled to Cuban’s HDNet. Where does anyone watch that? I’m really sorry we missed him when he blew through town last June. Hopefully he’ll find a munificent home for “Three Sheets” before he’s back through.