News You Can Bruise

There is brutality in Fox News Sunday, but little bitterness. Like sunlight on ice, its painful beauty glints and stabs the eyes.

Or this, adapted (and greatly improved) from Scott Weinberg's review of Bruce Lee's Return of the Dragon:

Certainly the only TV show in history to have Bill O'Reilly and John Gibson do battle in the Roman Colosseum.

Here's the segment that reveals the bot. The bot actually exists, you can follow it on Twitter, and indeed as of this writing about 11,000 people have done so. (By comparison, my second-most-popular bot has 145 followers.) I personally think this is crazy, because by personal decree of Stephen Colbert (I may be exaggerating) @RealHumanPraise makes a new post every two minutes, around the clock. So I created a meta-bot, Best of RHP, which retweets a popular review every 30 minutes. Aaah... manageable.

I figured I'd take you behind the scenes of @RealHumanPraise. When last we talked bot, I was showing off Col. Bert Stephens, my right-wing bot designed to automatically argue with Rob Dubbin's right-wing bot Ed Taters. Rob parleyed this dynamic into permission to develop a prototype for use on the upcoming show with guest David Folkenflik, who revealed real-world Fox News sockpuppeting in his book Murdoch's World.

Rob's original idea was a bot that used Metacritic reviews. He quickly discovered that Metacritic was "unscrapeable", and switched to Rotten Tomatoes, which has a pretty nice API. After the prototype stage is where I came in. Rob can code--he wrote Ed Taters--but he's not a professional developer and he had his hands full writing the show. So around the 23rd of October I started grabbing as many reviews from Rotten Tomatoes as the API rate limit would allow. I used IMDB data dumps to make sure I searched for movies that were likely to have a lot of positive reviews, and over the weekend I came up with a pipeline that turned the raw data from Rotten Tomatoes into potentially usable blurbs.

The pipeline uses TextBlob to parse the blurbs. I used a combination of Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB data to locate the names of actors, characters, and directors within the text, and a regular expression to replace them with generic strings.

The final dataset format is heavily based on the mad-libs format I use for Col. Bert Stephens, and something like this will be making it into olipy. Here's an example:

It's easy to forgive the movie a lot because of %(surname_female)s. She's fantastic.

Because I was getting paid for this bot, I put in the extra work to get things like gendered pronouns right. When that blurb is chosen, an appropriate surname from the Fox roster will be plugged in for %(surname_female).

I worked on the code over the weekend and got everything working except the (relatively simple) "post to Twitter" part. On the 28th I went into the Colbert Report office and spent the afternoon with Rob polishing the bot. We were mostly tweaking the vocabulary replacements, where "movie" becomes "TV show" and so on. It doesn't work all the time but we got it working well enough that we could bring in a bunch of blurbs that wouldn't have made sense before.

Most of the tweets mention a Fox personality or show, but a minority praise the network in general (e.g.). These tweets have been given the Ed Taters/Col. Bert Stephens treatment: a small number of their nouns and adjectives are replaced with other nouns and adjectives found in the corpus, giving the impression that the sock-puppetry machine is running off the rails. This data is marked up with Penn part-of-speech tags like so:

... the film's %(slow,JJ)s, %(toilsome,JJ)s %(journey,NN)s does not lead to any particularly %(shocking,JJ)s or %(interesting,JJ)s revelations.

Here's a very crazy example. Again, you'll eventually see tools for doing this in olipy. It ultimately derives from a mad-libs prototype I wrote a few months ago as a way of cheering up Adam when he was recovering from an injury.

We deployed the bot that afternoon of the 28th and let it start accumulating a backlog. It wasn't hard to keep the secret but it did get frustrating not knowing for sure whether it would make it to air. It's a little different from what The Colbert Report normally does, and I get the feeling they weren't sure how best to present it. In the end, as you can see from the show, they decided to just show the bot doing its stuff, and it worked.

It was a huge thrill to see Stephen Colbert engage with software I wrote! I wasn't expecting to see the entire second segment devoted to the bot, and then just when I thought it was over he brought it out again during the Folkenflik interview. While we were all waiting around to see whether they had to re-record anything, he pulled out his iPad Mini yet again and read some more aloud to us. Can't get enough!

After the show Rob took me on a tour of the parts of the Colbert Report that were not Rob's office (where I'd spent my entire visit on the 28th). We bumped into Stephen and he shook my hand and said "good job." I felt this was a validation of my particular talents: I wrote software that made Stephen Colbert crack up.

Sumana, Beth, Rob and I went out for a celebratory dinner, and then I went home and watched the follower count for RHP start to climb. Within twenty minutes of the second segment airing, RHP had ten times as many Twitter followers as my personal account. And you know what? It can have 'em. I'll just keep posting old pictures of space-program hardware.

Shows with high FA quotients are more beloved by fans than by the general IMDB-using public:

FA quotient	Show	Show rating	Mean episode rating
1.63	"Entertainment Tonight" (1981)	3.7	6.0
1.34	"Melrose Place" (1992)	5.7	7.6
1.28	"Dynasty" (1981)	5.9	7.6
1.28	"The Rosie O'Donnell Show" (1996)	3.6	4.6
1.26	"Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers" (1993)	6.0	7.5
1.24	"Full House" (1987)	6.0	7.4
1.20	"Ghost Whisperer" (2005)	6.4	7.7
1.20	"Fear Factor" (2001)	4.9	5.9
1.16	"Dharma & Greg" (1997)	6.7	7.7

Note that since this is a quotient, it has nothing to do with the magnitude of the ratings. "The Rosie O'Donnell Show" got terrible ratings even from the people I'm assuming are fans; it's just that the show as a whole did even worse.

OK, smarty pants, what about a low FA quotient? How can a show appeal more to the mainstream than to its own fans? Well, I think a low FA quotient means that a show seems better in retrospect than it actually was. Or, more positively, it means that a show was more than the sum of its parts. Either way, here are the shows with the lowest FA quotients:

FA quotient	Show	Show rating	Mean episode rating
0.78	"Bonanza" (1959)	7.3	5.7
0.78	"NYPD Blue" (1993)	7.7	6.0
0.77	"In Living Color" (1990)	7.9	6.1
0.75	"Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" (1987/I)	8.1	6.0
0.73	"Gunsmoke" (1955)	8.0	5.8
0.71	"What's My Line?" (1950)	8.9	6.3
0.71	"Saturday Night Live" (1975)	8.1	5.7
0.68	"House of Payne" (2006)	2.5	1.7
0.62	"Ellen: The Ellen DeGeneres Show" (2003)	7.3	4.6
0.60	"MADtv" (1995)	6.7	4.0

Look how much sketch comedy there is on that list! I think I'm on to something. Two of my favorite shows, ST:TNG and MST3K, also have low FA quotients of 0.83 and 0.84 respectively.

And right in the middle we have the shows that are exactly as good (or bad) as you remember them:

FA quotient	Show	Show rating	Mean episode rating
1.00	"Becker" (1998)	7.6	7.6
1.00	"Cold Case" (2003)	7.5	7.5
1.00	"Dancing with the Stars" (2005/I)	4.8	4.8
1.00	"Hercules: The Legendary Journeys" (1995)	6.6	6.6
1.00	"MacGyver" (1985)	7.8	7.8
1.00	"Mission: Impossible" (1966)	8.1	8.1
1.00	"Project Runway" (2004)	6.6	6.6
1.00	"Rawhide" (1959)	8.2	8.2
1.00	"The Practice" (1997)	7.7	7.7

Haters

Similar to the struggle between fans and non-fans is that between fans and antifans, a.k.a. haters. Fans of a show will give it a very high rating, and haters will give it a very low rating. We can detect this by looking for shows whose ratings have high standard deviations. IMDB doesn't make the standard deviation available directly, but it does provide a ten-character ASCII string that represents the distribution of ratings.

Star Trek: The Next Generation has been rated 16,974 times. Its rating distribution string looks like this: "0000000124". The "4" means that the number of ten-out-of-ten votes is somewhere between 40% (6,790) and 49% (8,316) of those 16,974 votes. The "2" means that between 20% and 29% of the votes are nine-out-of-ten, the "1" means that between 10% and 19% of the ratings are eight-out-of-ten. The zeroes mean that the other star ratings account for between 1% and 9% of ratings each. You can see the conversation about TNG is very heavily dominated by the fans.

I reconstructed the original rating distribution very roughly by treating the character "0" as five percent of the total votes, "1" as fifteen percent, and so on, up to "9" meaning 95 percent of the votes. How rough is the reconstruction? Well, for TNG, the reconstructed distribution has 20,363 data points, where the actual distribution (whatever it is) only has 16,974.

When I take the standard deviation of the reconstructed distribution for ST:TNG, I get 2.74 stars. This particular number is not trustworthy because of the assumptions made in reconstructing the distribution. But by making the same assumptions for every show, we can see which shows are the most divisive. Here are the shows with the largest standard deviations, among all shows with more than 1000 ratings:

Standard deviation	Show	Rating	Votes	Distribution
3.85	"Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County" (2004)	3.7	2170	3000000003
3.76	"Barney & Friends" (1992)	3.7	1255	4000000002
3.76	"Jon & Kate Plus 8" (2007)	5.4	2716	2000000004
3.76	"The Hills" (2006)	3.3	5828	4000000002
3.75	"Shake It Up!" (2010)	4.8	1013	2000000003
3.75	"Paranormal State" (2007)	4.5	1438	3000000002
3.75	"Flavor of Love" (2006)	4.5	1254	2000000003
3.75	"The Simple Life" (2003)	3.4	2956	3000000002
3.75	"The Jerry Springer Show" (1991)	3.9	1631	3000000002
3.75	"Jersey Shore" (2009)	4.5	3130	3000000002
3.75	"Hannah Montana" (2006)	3.9	1927	3000000002
3.75	"Big Brother" (2000/III)	4.0	1621	3000000002

That list has a bottom, but it's not interesting--it's the shows about whose quality there is general consensus. All right, here it is:

Standard deviation	Show	Rating	Votes	Distribution
2.38	"Mork & Mindy" (1978)	7.0	1746	0000012211
2.38	"Around the World in 80 Days" (1989/I)	6.9	1446	0000012211
2.38	"Amazing Stories" (1985)	7.3	1467	0000012211
2.38	"V" (1984)	7.2	2557	0000012211
2.38	"Crusade" (1999)	7.0	1133	0000012211
2.34	"Impact" (2008)	5.6	1633	0000111000
2.31	"Nuremberg" (2000)	7.2	2754	0000012311
2.22	"Moby Dick" (1998)	6.5	1967	0000112100
2.15	"Golden Years" (1991)	5.0	1459	0001211000
2.12	"Covert One: The Hades Factor" (2006)	5.7	1011	0000122000
2.12	"The Andromeda Strain" (2008)	6.1	5858	0000122100

I experimented with a different mapping of the distribution, e.g. saying that "0" meant 2 percent of the votes, "1" meant ten percent, "2" meant 20 percent, and so on. This made the standard deviations into smaller numbers, but it didn't change the ordering of shows very much.

Variability

We can also measure how much a show varies in quality by taking the standard deviation of the ratings given to its episodes. For this I looked at shows which had at least ten episodes that had been rated at least ten times. Here are the results—the "Variability" is the standard deviation of the episode ratings, in IMDB stars.

Variability	Show	Show rating
3.32	"The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson" (1962)	8.3
2.74	"The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson" (2005)	8.6
2.62	"Jimmy Kimmel Live!" (2003)	6.4
2.60	"Beauty and the Geek" (2005)	5.9
2.37	"Late Night with Conan O'Brien" (1993)	8.5
2.23	"Late Show with David Letterman" (1993)	6.9
2.04	"Silk Stalkings" (1991)	6.1
1.89	"The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" (1992)	5.3
1.87	"Superboy" (1988)	6.3
1.70	"Duck Dodgers" (2003)	8.2
1.68	"The Virginian" (1962)	7.7
1.68	"Ellen: The Ellen DeGeneres Show" (2003)	7.3

There's a lot of late-night talk here. If I loosened the restriction on number of ratings per episode, I also got a lot of soap operas (most of whose episodes have no ratings at all).

And here's the bottom of that list: the most consistently good (or, in theory, bad) shows on TV:

Variability	Show	Show rating
0.20	"Day Break" (2006)	8.3
0.20	"Lucky Louie" (2006)	8.1
0.20	"Boardwalk Empire" (2010)	8.9
0.20	"Hung" (2009)	7.5
0.19	"Outsourced" (2010)	7.7
0.19	"The Ben Stiller Show" (1992)	7.3
0.18	"Happy Endings" (2011)	8.1
0.18	"Lewis" (2007)	7.9
0.08	"Planet Earth" (2006)	9.7

I looked into the variability of the ratings distribution for individual episodes, hoping to find the most/least controversial TV episodes ever aired, but most of what I found looked like ratings juking. For instance, "Friday Night Lights" and "The Shield" show a hater/fan dynamic on the episode level: some people rating every individual episode very low and others rating every episode very high.

I think that's enough for now, but I'll come back to the data as I have more ideas, and maybe I'll even learn more than basic statistics for you.

We sort of can. The problem is that only a true fan bothers to go to IMDB and rate individual episodes of a TV show. So you can't really trust the episode ratings--they're too high. But we can visualize trends in show quality, as percieved by the fans.

For these visualizations you want long-running series with lots of die-hard fans. So let's start with Star Trek:

(Note the very last data point in that one. That's the series finale, which everyone hates.)

There's a lot of scatter, but you can generally see the common Star Trek pattern of the show getting better as the ensemble cast comes together. Except for the original series, which ended with a lousy season. Now let's look at another nerd favorite, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer":

Beth requested that one. I've seen exactly one episode of Buffy so I wasn't expecting anything in particular. It looks like a show that's consistently good, but wildly inconsistent within the bounds of "consistently good". It doesn't really get better over time. Maybe the Voyager and DS9 graphs look the same to someone who's not a Trek fan.

But compare "Mystery Science Theater 3000", which gets drastically better over time. When I was younger I would have disputed this finding, but now I basically agree with this graph:

I did a lot more graphs, but I'll just show two more. Here's the graph for "The Simpsons", a very long-running show with a very fickle fan base (see title of this post):

Wow! I love this graph! I don't know enough about the history of the show to name the historical trends, but I'm pretty sure a Simpsons fan will be see a big part of their life history reflected in this graph.

I wanted to see if this sort of coherent shape was just an artifact of the fact that "The Simpsons" has been on the air for over 20 years, so I graphed another long-running show notorious for huge variation in quality, "Saturday Night Live":

You can definitely see where things went wrong, but even within a season there's huge variation in quality. The Simpsons is created by the same people every week, where SNL has two wild cards every week: its guest host and musical guest. And since it's sketch-based, three good or three awful minutes can make or break the entire episode.

Next up, the third and possibly final part of this analysis, in which I'll pit fans of a show against the general public.

PS: For the record, according to IMDB data, the actual worst episode ever of "The Simpsons" was #9.11, "All Singing, All Dancing".

Update: People in comments had questions I can't answer because I only know how to do very basic statistics, but they also had questions about how many people rated the episodes, which I can answer. This table shows how many people have rated each series as a whole, as well as the median and mean numbers of ratings for every episode that has any ratings. I also included how many people rated the first episode, how many rated an episode in the middle, and how many rated the last/most recent episode.

Series	Series ratings	Show ratings (median)	(mean)	(std)	First show	Middle	Most recent
"Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (1997)	34564	498	553.41	224.88	862	511	1091
"Enterprise" (2001)	8843	140	189.27	242.28	2397	130	152
"Mystery Science Theater 3000" (1988)	6650	57	65.54	47.41	21	78	131
"Saturday Night Live" (1975)	10151	15	19.86	15.65	112	11	60
"Star Trek" (1966)	12695	419	480.95	222.83	668	389	1923
"Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" (1993)	9779	172	188.32	107.37	1501	151	290
"Star Trek: The Next Generation" (1987)	16974	329	375.62	354.49	2189	318	4580
"Star Trek: Voyager" (1995)	11245	153	169.08	110.96	1558	177	348
"The Simpsons" (1989)	15578	319	355.07	173.09	2214	309	96

So SNL actually has very few ratings per episode, while The Simpsons is on par with ST:TNG. It's common for the first episode and the finale to have many more ratings than others. And here's a graph of the number of people who have rated "The Simpsons" over time:

I don't think ratings are a great proxy for quality--a look at the highest-rated TV shows will put a stop to that nonsense. And the run length of a show is at least an objective fact. But I think our collective opinion of a TV show today is a better proxy of quality than how long the network was originally willing to keep it going. And if you use ratings, I think you can get closer to answering the question "what would a golden age of television look like?"

My guess is, Arbesman didn't use ratings because it's kind of annoying to get that information out of the IMDB dataset. But I'd already done a lot of work on the dataset for The MST3K-IMDB Effect, so in this post I crunch the numbers my way and see what falls out.

If you're expecting controversy, I can't provide. My findings don't contradict Arbesman's, they just provide a different way of looking at the data.

Step 1: Get the data

(If you're impatient, you can skip to the graphs.)

It all starts with IMDB's plain-text data dumps. I downloaded release-dates.list.gz and ratings.list.gz from the FTP site. I also downloaded distributors.list.gz, but it turned out that data wasn't useful.

Step 2: Identify shows, episodes, and air dates

release-dates.list lists all movies, TV shows, and episodes of TV shows. TV shows are in quotes, and episode names are in curly brackets.

Point Break (1991)					USA:12 July 1991
"Star Trek: Voyager" (1995)				USA:16 January 1995
"Star Trek: Voyager" (1995) {Caretaker (#1.1)}		USA:16 January 1995

Unfortunately, web series look just like TV shows, which is going to mess with the data for recent years:

"The Angry Video Game Nerd" (2006) {A Nightmare on Elm Street (#1.13)}	USA:31 October 2006

I tried some tricks to get rid of web series, like only considering shows with a listed television distributor (distributors.list), but there are tons of dinky cable reality shows that have exactly the same data characteristics as web series. So I'm leaving them in. Just know that when I say "TV shows", I'm talking about TV shows + web series.

To make the initial dataset smaller, I used grep to remove everything except the US premieres of TV shows, and of episodes of TV shows. (And web series.) Then I wrote a Python script that turns this information into a picklable data structure.

The script ties a show to all of its known episodes, and parses out each episode's release date along with the premiere date of the show itself. I want to know every year in which an episode of the show premiered in the US. This has some problems--it makes the original "Star Trek" show up as a 1988 show because that's the first time the original pilot was aired--but they're pretty minor.

Step 3: Add the ratings

Now I know when every show started, and in many cases I know every year a show was on the air. In the next step I load in another file and add ratings to shows and episodes.

Ratings are kept in ratings.list. They look like this:

      0000001212   11245   7.5  "Star Trek: Voyager" (1995)
      0000012111    1558   7.1  "Star Trek: Voyager" (1995) {Caretaker (#1.1)}

There's lots of cool stuff here like a histogram (0000012111 means 10% of people rated the premiere of Voyager a 6, 20% of people a 7, and so on), but what we're after are the IMDB ranks: 7.5 stars and 7.1 stars in this case.

Unfortunately, there's a lot of boring stuff in ratings.list like the top 250 movies. Fortunately, I already wrote code to parse this file during my investigations into the MST3K-IMDB effect.

Step 4: Graphs!

Now I'm going to break out numpy and pychart. Let me start with a calibration run, a graph Arbesman also did. How many shows were on the air in a given year?

Pretty similar to Arbesman's graph. My graph doesn't go down at the end, because I cut the data off at 2011, the last full year of data. I also start later, with the first year for which there were five rated TV shows. I'm picking up some shows he's not, possibly because I'm counting a show in every year it aired, possibly because I'm picking up shows that don't have any episodes listed on IMDB, possibly because he found some way I didn't think of to exclude web series. But it's a similar shape.

Now here's the graph you've been waiting for: mean rating over time:

It's a sad story of precipitous drops in quality: one between 1959 and 1980, one between 1999 and 2005. By this measure, 2005 was the worst year in television history. If you only looked at mean rating over time, you'd say that there was one golden age of television, from 1955 to 1965, and that the 1980-2000 period was a period of stagnation interrupting an otherwise steady decline.

The graph of median rating over time tells much the same story, so I won't transclude it, but you can follow this link to see it.

But, mean rating isn't the whole story. Let me pull out the only statistics trick I know: look at the standard deviation of the ratings over time.

1959, the year with the highest mean rating, is also a year of extreme homogeneity. Less than one star of difference separates the very good shows from the very bad shows. After 1959, the good shows get better, and the bad shows get worse, relative to the mean. In 1980 the standard deviation was 1.37 stars, and in 2011 it was almost two stars. Remember that ratings are not normally distributed, so two stars is quite a lot. (Even one star, as in 1959, ain't nothing.)

Combine this with the skyrocketing number of shows (which begins in the late 90s and goes into overdrive once we start counting web shows) and you can see how that 2000-2005 decline happened. Over 1300 distinct shows aired in 2005. Of course the mean show is going to be crap! The amazing thing is that things have gotten better since 2005, even as we now make over twice as many shows per year. (And web series! Can't forget those!)

Another factor is that people aren't even bothering to rate the bad shows. Here's the percentage of shows that aired in a given year that don't have IMDB ratings because they haven't gotten enough votes. For 2011, this was a majority of shows!

Old shows aren't rated because nobody remembers them. New shows aren't rated because... well, I did a bunch of spot checks, and they fall into three categories. 1) web series, 2) shows that were never aired and maybe never even produced, 3) crap. Only #3 can properly be considered part of "television". The mean rating would certainly be lower if every show had a rating, but I don't know how much lower.

That's where we stand: television is bad, and it's getting worse. That trend may have been reversed recently, or the decline may have been masked by web shows with passionate fans, or things may have gotten so bad that people stopped even bothering to rate the crap. But! Would you exchange the television of today (mean rating: 6.2) for the television of 1973? (mean rating: 7.3). I wouldn't, and I don't think you would either. What's going on?

Well, we don't watch the mean television show. We only watch the good shows. (If you've read this far, I'm gonna go ahead and make that assumption.) And if you look at the good shows, the picture looks very different.

Here's what the shows look like one standard deviation above the mean. This is basically the top 16% of shows:

At the high end, the decline in quality is reversed in the 80s and early 90s. The gains are undone in the late 90s (2005 is still terrible), but then quality shoots back up. This is very similar to Arbesman's graph of show length over time.

What if you're even more selective? Let's graph the value 1.5 standard deviations above the mean for each year. I don't know what percentile this would correspond to, but it's something like the top 5%. This is the very best stuff you can find on TV in a given year:

This graph, I think, is the best answer to "what would a golden age look like"? It would look like the 60s, when there were three channels under tight quality control, and you could turn on the television at any given time and probably find something good. Or it would look like right now, when a huge number of shows are being produced, and it's easy to be a snob and only watch the very best. This is why we don't remember 2005 as being the worst year of TV in the history of the medium, and this is why I'd never trade today's TV for 1973's TV, even though 1973 looks pretty good on that graph.

So, there you have it--another way of looking at the IMDB data. More to come! Next up: a little thing I like to call "Worst Episode Ever".

What does being on MST3K do to a movie's IMDB rating? My best guess is that it knocks 2.9 stars off what what the rating would have been if the movie hadn't been on MST3K. But read on to see how I came up with that number, and why it depends on the director.

Disclaimer

I am not a statistician. I'm not even a data scientist. I know how to get data out of the Internet. I know the difference between mean, median, mode, and standard deviation. And that's about it.

Example

Here's an example in case you're not familiar with the MST3K-IMDB effect, which there's no reason you should since that's a name I just made up for it. Consider "Speech: The Function of Gestures", a short film directed by Arthur H. Wolf. It's got 5 votes and an IMDB rating of 5.2. Now here's another short film in the same series, "Speech: Platform Posture and Appearance". Same director, same writer, same lead actor, but this film had the misfortune to be double-billed with Red Zone Cuba on MST3K. As a result, it's got 98 votes and an IMDB rating of 1.6.

Call me skeptical, but I've watched both films and I'm not convinced there's really a three-and-a-half star difference between them. Another film in the series, "Speech: Using Your Voice", was also featured on MST3K, but in a less memorable episode ("Earth vs. the Spider"), and it struggles along with an IMDB rating of 2.4.)

Methodology

Since the "Speech" films are part of a series, it makes sense to suppose that the difference between them is mostly due to the MST3K-IMDB effect. Of course, most films aren't part of a series. So I went by director instead. I picked up the filmography of every director who directed a film that was on MST3K. I split their films into two lists, "Normal" (not featured on MST3K) and "MST" (featured on MST3K). The "Normal" set only includes films that had enough IMDB votes to be given a rating. I included shorts and episodes of TV shows. This isn't perfect, because IMDB's plain-text data dump sometimes (but not always) gives a director's credit where their website gives a writer's credit. But it's close enough.

I took the average rating of the "Normal" list and the "MST" list. The difference between the two averages is how much it hurt that director to have one of their films featured on MST3K. As we'll see see, some directors were hurt a lot, and some of them shrugged it off, both for interesting reasons.

For the sake of comparison, the mean rating for a movie on IMDB at large is 6.4 stars, the median is 6.6 stars, and the standard deviation is 1.6 stars. However, "one star" is not a consistent unit of measurement. I'm considering redoing this table with normalized percentiles, but I'm not convinced there's a big demand for that, so for now you get stars.

Data

Here's a big table with the data for every director who had at at least five films in the "Normal" set and at least one in the "MST" set. Normal_m and Normal_std are the mean and standard deviation for the IMDB ratings of that director's non-MST films, and Normal_n is the sample size. MST_m, MST_std, and MST_n are the same thing for the director's MST film(s).

Effect₁ is what we're looking for: for a given director, how many stars does a film lose just from being on MST3K? But wait! What if the director made some good stuff and some bad stuff, and only the bad stuff ended up on MST3K? The MST3K set would have lower ratings, but it wouldn't be because of MST3K. That's where Effect₂ comes in, and that's why the table is sorted by Effect₂. I'll explain Effect₂ after you get a look at the data.

Click here to skip the table.

Analysis

Now, for the explanation of Effect₂. From Normal_std we know how likely this director is to make a film that's substantially better or worse than their average. If they made one bad film that was on MST3K, and there was no MST3K-IMDB effect for that director, the rating for that film would most likely be within two standard deviations of the director's average. But if there were a strong MST3K-IMDB effect for that director, the rating for the MSTed film would be much lower than the director's other bad films. So, Effect₂ is: how many standard deviations below Normal_m is MST_m?

Let's look at the extremes of the list. First, the directors with very low Effect₂:

• Mario Bava seems to have actually benefited from having his movie Diabolik appear on MST3K! Looking at the IMDB reviews, it seems that the nostalgic 60s-spy-movie fans have taken the upper hand over the MST3K-IMDB effect and given this film a rating in keeping with the director's other films.
• At the top but in non-anomaly territory, we have Pietro Francisci, who directed a bunch of sword-and-sandal movies (Normal_m=5.0), including two of the Hercules movies shown on MST3K (MST_m=4.8). These movies are nothing special but they're pretty fun, such that being on MST3K barely hurts them at all.
• On the other hand, we have Ray Dennis Steckler, who directed movies so bad (Normal_m=3.1) that having one of them appear on MST3K (MST_m=2.1) barely hurts the rating at all.

And this is the big thing I learned doing the project: you can calculate the MST3K-IMDB effect, but you must also look at the director's average movie rating to see what it means. A low Effect₂ just means that being on MST3K doesn't hurt a director's ratings very much. It doesn't say anything about the movie's quality.

OTOH, a director with a high Effect₂ is probably worth a second look in a non-MST3K context.

• Look at the director at the bottom, David Elliot, with Effect₂ of 14.1. He worked with Gerry Anderson, creator of "Thunderbirds", and Invaders From The Deep is made up of recut episodes of "Stingray", a "Thunderbirds"-type show. Cutting episodes of a TV show into a movie is never a good idea, but "Stingray" has an IMDB rating of 7.9, which is quite a way from the MST_m of 2.1.

  I'd couldn't even remember Invaders From The Deep being on MST3K. Investigation reveals it was on the very first non-pilot episode of MST3K. This episode is lost and no one's seen it for over twenty years, so why is Effect₂ so large? Could it be that a bunch of MST3K fans gave this movie a one-star rating without even seeing it on MST3K?

• William Morgan made the questionable decision to direct the Ed Wood-penned The Violent Years (MST_m=2.6), but he also directed six-star movies like Mr. District Attorney and Disney's cartoon compilation Fun and Fancy-Free (Normal_m=6.2). This is a case where it's hard to isolate the MST3K-IMDB effect. It's probably there, but we're looking at a guy who made one really bad film in an otherwise average career, and that bad film also ended up on MST3K.
• Douglas Williams directed Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, a movie that was pretty good for made-for-TV but whose rating (MST_m=2.1) is almost ten standard deviations away from his stellar Normal_m of 8.5, which he got from directing episodes of Fraggle Rock.
• Robert Carlisle directed Last Clear Chance (MST_m=2.3), a short film that was a hoot on MST3K, but he also directed a series of shorts called "Unusual Occupations" that looks interesting. ("A daisy grower invents tinted daisies; a woman makes 3-D seaweed art[.]") (Normal_m=7.3)
• Alan J. Levi directed TV shows from "Battlestar Galactica" in the 1970s to "Airwolf" in the 1980s to "Columbo" and "Quantum Leap" in the 1990s to "NCIS" today. (Normal_m=7.2). But when the mediocre "Gemini Man" (IMDB rating: 6.4) had some of its episodes re-cut into Riding With Death, suddenly the premise becamse ridiculous and the director earned an MST_m of 1.7.
• I always enjoyed Aleksandr Ptushko's lush Soviet epics, and IMDB agrees (Normal_m=7.2). But put one of his movies on MST3K and it instantly loses three stars. (MST_m=4.2)

And so on. The MST3K-IMDB effect is real--ninety percent of the directors in this table have an Effect₂ of more than one standard deviation, and for sixty percent of them, it's more than two standard deviations. But it doesn't affect all directors equally.

Let's close out by taking a look at some of MST3K's favorite directors.

• Bert I. Gordon has a Normal_m=4.2, which is pretty bad. But his record 8 MST3K movies have an MST_m of 3.2, which isn't much worse. Put one of his movies on MST3K and it loses only one star.
• Roger Corman, the B-movie king, has a pretty respectable (if you're Roger Corman) Normal_m=5.4, but the same MST_m as Bert I. Gordon: 3.2.
• Ed Wood isn't especially well-known for being on MST3K but he does provide a pretty clear example of the MST3K-IMDB effect. His fifteen non-MST movies have a Normal_m=4.0. His two MST movies have a MST_m of 2.8. Is The Sinister Urge (IMDB rating: 2.11) really the worst movie Ed Wood ever directed?
• Unfortunately, there is no way to calculate the MST3K-IMDB effect for the notorious Coleman Francis: since every film he directed was on MST3K, we can't calculate Normal_m.

Conclusion

I'm still annoyed by those one-star reviews, but I understand them a little better now. When you watch, say, "The Function of Gestures", you enjoy it for its camp value, you have fun with it, and you give it a relatively good rating. But when you watch "Platform Posture and Appearance" or "Using Your Voice" on MST3K, you're watching someone else making fun of it, you have fun at its expense, and you give it a bad rating as a sign of solidarity with the MST3K characters.

Finally, I'd like to thank IMDB for, in a relic of its geeky past, making plain-text dumps of its data available. It's a strange feeling to have a file open in an Emacs buffer that lists nearly every movie ever made. (There are about 2 million, if you're curious.) Now that I have the data and scripts to process it, I may run other cinematic experiments in the future. One thing I would like to see added is IMDB links for the people and movies. It's a pain to look all these things up, which is why there aren't as many links in this post as you'd think.

It all went downhill once Sumana suggested casting Dulé Hill as Geordi La Forge. I think Dulé Hill would make a better Data, but this never came up because somehow we got the incorrect idea that Dulé Hill is two years younger than Levar Burton was when he started doing TNG, and started coming up with strategies to compensate for the age difference:

"Well, we could wait a couple years to do our imaginary remake of Nextgen."

"Or, we could clone Dulé Hill, and since memory is genetic, we can age the clone at an accelerated rate while maintaining his acting ability."

"He could contract the aging virus that Dr. Pulaski got, and get cured after five minutes."

"He could breach the singularity of a Romulan warbird and spend some time in one of the areas where time runs faster."

"We could cast the rest of the show, then they could spend two years in a transporter pattern buffer, the way Scotty did in 'Relics'."

"Or they could live through the three-day time loop from 'Cause and Effect' over and over again."

"We could do a controlled version of what happened to Crewman Daniels when he became unstuck in time and his body was aging at different rates."

"He could move to the planet from 'Children of Time', and we could cast one of his descendants."

"He could wait two years and come back to the present day through the Guardian of Forever."

"Or use the slingshot effect."

"We could create a holographic representation of what Dulé Hill will look like in two years, then hire it when it inevitably achieves sentience."

"We could cause a quantum fissure like in "Parallels" and mine alternate realities for one in which Dulé Hill was born two years earlier."

"If we need him to be more mature as an actor, not necessarily older, he could spend two subjective years in his own head, like those aliens did to O'Brien in 'Hard Time'."

"Or he could run into that probe from 'The Inner Light' and gain a whole lifetime of experience."

"He could acquire a Trill symbiont that's two years old."

"He could use temporary cosmetic surgery to make him look like a human, when he's actually a slightly younger human."

"We could use a telepathic trick or an addictive video game to trick the whole world into thinking Dulé Hill is two years older than he really is."

"We could do a new animated series and just have him do the voice."

"The Traveller could do something."

"If Q were around he could do it by changing the gravitational constant."

"Isn't there something we can do with relativity?"

"There's no relativity in Star Trek."

Unfortunately, I ruined the whole thing by checking IMDB:

"Wow, Dulé Hill was born in 1975! He's thirty-five!"

"How old was Levar Burton in 1987?"

"Only thirty! It's a temporal paradox!"

"So Dulé Hill needs to become younger."

"There can be only one answer: reproduce the transporter accident from 'Rascals'."

This has been bothering me for fifteen years.

Earlier in the week, a conversation with a friend who shall remain nameless:

Leonard: So Lucian is now really into Babylon 5. Which is understandable because the character arcs are so great.
Friend: Yeah, I saw some of that when it was airing, it was pretty good.
L: Can I give you an example? Like, you don't mind spoilers?
F: Yeah, I'm not gonna see it.
L: [Explains his favorite Babylon 5 character arc in some detail.]
F: I like Baltar.
L: That's Battlestar Galactica.
F: Oops.

"Okay, how about this theory. What if none of the stuff in Murder, She Wrote actually happened..."
"It didn't!"

Since it costs $25 to get in to the archive, we thought it would be nice to pool conundra. Bothered by something about television or radio history that, if you had access to a huge archive, could be resolved within fifteen minutes? Search the archive index to see if they have what you need to check, and post your comments here or on Sumana's weblog.

• "Fitz and Bones": The Smothers Brothers and Diana Muldaur star in this "hour-long comedy/drama show about a mis-matched TV news team". IMDB reports one episode. A show generated from one of the more obscure tables in the Dungeon Master's Guide.
• "Falcon Crest": I made a joke about star Jane Wyman looking like Nancy Reagan; IMDB reveals Wyman was Ronald Reagan's first wife. Maybe I already knew this subconsciously, but clearly Reagan had a type. Robert Foxworth gets second billing as a winery owner who undoubtedly plans to betray the Federation/Vulcan High Command/Earth Alliance as soon it comes into existence. Also stars Lorenzo Lamas, who went right from this show to "Renegade".

• The single best media value of 2009 is Chrontendo. About 30 hours of video reviews of Famicom and NES games. My consistent exercise companion.
• Academic runners-up: David Blight's incredible class on the Civil War and Reconstruction, and J. Bradford Delong's economic history of the 20th century, which is really more like "J. Bradford Delong talks about whatever he wants and then tests you on it," but which is full of interesting stuff.
• Surprise dark-horse entertainment: bobtwcatlanta's Youtube channel, full of engrossing television ephemera from the 80s and 90s.
• James Rolfe continued to entertain with his AVGN videos (best episode of 2009: Michael Jackson's Moonwalker, posted before Michael Jackson's death made it cool/tasteless to do Michael Jackson-themed web videos). But if you can't stand Rolfe's scatology-obsessed Nerd character, you should at least watch his amazing documentary of a life spent making films, Cinemassacre 200, which only has one F-bomb right at the beginning.
• Infomania's Viral Video Film School and Target: Women also continued their runs of excellence.
• Another noteworthy workhorse: the mega-agglomeration of That Guy With The Glasses, which at this point has a couple dozen web "shows", transformative works all. They're hit or miss, but I've found maybe eight that I really like, and I let those accumulate in browser tabs until I've got enough to get me through a thirty-minute run.
• Now on to miscellaneous one-offs. The Match Game 1977 School Riot, in which the mannered high civilization of The Match Game collapses into anarchy and warlordism. (Don't know how TMG worked? Invest a couple minutes in some boring video of TMG working properly, and then you can enjoy both this video and the excellent Saturday Night Live parody "It's A Match".)
• Music videos: One from the 80s that uses "Sinistar" as a metaphor for a bad relationship. One from TMBG. OK Go does it again. A rerun of "Wishmaster Misheard", revealed in 2009 to have been created by our friend Lucian.
• Music videos featuring unrelated pop culture characters: The world-famous Bohemian Rhapsody Muppets turns the unwieldy, huge Muppets cast into a strength. Four Super Mario World levels, one for each part in Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now".

Film: I don't watch a lot of movies. I think I only went to the theater four times in 2009: to see "Star Trek", "Moon", "My Winnipeg", and "Ponyo". Most of the time Sumana and I watch movies at home. That said, the Crummy.com Movie of the Year is "University of Laughs", a 2004 Japanese movie that I've been looking for since 2005. (We eventually imported it from Yes Asia for an exorbitant sum.) It's an awesome film. Like, imagine "The Five Obstructions", except instead of Lars von Trier playing a funny prank on you, it's a police censor and your livelihood is on the line. And the film is hilarious. We saw it with Lucian and couldn't stop laughing. Between this movie and "Game Center CX", I'm coming to appreciate how dependent is Japanese humor on body language. Truly, this is the real secret of manzai.

Runner-up: the thematically similar "The Lives of Others", which won a lot of awards and you probably don't need me telling you how great it is. If for some reason you demand that I give the 2009 award to a film released in 2009, then I give it to "Moon", despite its huge plot holes.

Television: After Battlestar Galactica ended in disaster, I watched only one TV show: the ultimate Sumana/Leonard guilty pleasure, USA Network's Psych. The show's silliness continually breaks the fourth wall and the old dictum how "if it ain't on the page, it ain't on the stage". The "Tonight's Episode" episode titles are the clear spray-on preservative that gives the icing on the cake its gloss.

Food: Is food a "medium"? I say yes, and give appreciation for three New York restaurants that started in 2009 (or very late 2008): Vesta and Bare Burger here in Astoria, and Dos Toros (Mission-style taqueria!) near Union Square.

Books: I read 88 books in 2009 if you count the one I created, which I'm going to because that means I read exactly twice as many books as in 2008. I made a special effort to read more books this year, and it definitely succeeded. The Crummy.com Book of the Year is "Mason & Dixon" by Thomas Pynchon. Reread of the Year: my mother's copy of Stephen Jay Gould's "Bully for Brontosaurus", the book that originally introduced me to evolutionary theory (a ringer, it was practically my only reread of the year). "The Complete Dying Earth" was amazingly fun, as mentioned earlier. I also had a really good time with two espionage books: "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" and "The Zimmerman Telegram".

I can recommend two books from 2009 that you've never heard of. First, "Monday Begins on Saturday" by the Strugatsky brothers, obtained from Susan McCarthy. Second, "A Time of Gifts" by Patrick Leigh Fermor, which sat on my wishlist for 4 years after I heard about it on Crooked Timber. It's a book where I start every tenth paragraph thinking "This is it, the purplest prose ever, there's no way Fermor can pull out of this nosedive!" and by the end of the paragraph I'm like "Good show, old chap! Pip-pip, what?"

Worst book that I read all the way through in 2009: Reward for Retief, one of Keith Laumer's last novels. (My LibraryThing review: "Man, what a train wreck. Give us more Groaci!") I read it all the way through because I'm a Retief completist and because I admired Laumer for continuing to write after his stroke. Objectively speaking, he should have stopped in the mid-80s, but I'm sure he needed the money. Keeping a midlist author on your publication rolls as he passes his prime is not the most efficient method of wealth transfer, but it's a time-honored one.

I read about 150 individual short stories (ie. not part of collections), from magazines, writing group, and the TE slush pile. There is no Crummy.com Short Fiction of the Year this year because I recuse myself for conflict of interest. Also I can't really think of one, though you can't go wrong with Jack Cady's "The Night We Buried Road Dog".

Video games: I was talking about this with Kirk. Here's the thing. When I read a book, even a book I don't like, I learn something about writing. But when I play a video game, even a good game, I don't usually learn much about game design. There's probably fifty games I spent at least an hour playing in 2009, but I can only think of one that was both as stylistically interesting and as viscerally enjoyable as, say, "A Time of Gifts".

People who love movies might make a similar distinction. There are really interesting movies, there are really enjoyable movies, and every once in a while there's a movie with crossover appeal, the first movie to tell a really fun story using some previously introduced innovation. I think comparing video games and movies is a sucker's game so that's as far as I'm going to take this analogy.

When I think of 2009 games that are pure fun I think of a lot of entries in series: the "Metal Slug" anthology I picked up, "New Super Mario Bros. Wii" in multiplayer, Mega Man 9, the DS Grand Theft Auto game (I really love sandbox games, but most 3D first-person games make me nauseous, so I liked having a modern GTA I could physically play). All of these games combine a close allegiance to some longstanding series with solid implementation and attention to detail. I also think of "Retro Game Challenge" and my "Cave Story" replay, games that are just a collection of well-executed callbacks to older games.

When I think of games I that have a lot of innovation I think of "Scribblenauts", an amazingly creative game that has huge, huge conceptual and implementation problems. I think of "Barkley: Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden", a game that presents a deadpan sarcasm I can't remember seeing outside of interactive fiction, but objectively speaking not a game I want to play all the way through. I think of "Treasure World", a game that I was obsessed with for a couple weeks but which is not technically a game at all.

"Spelunky" is the only game I played in 2009 that I would consider fully successful in both enjoyment and innovation. It took the least popular aspects of roguelike games (permadeath and extreme dependence on randomness) and made them crowd-pleasers by incorporating them into a preexisting genre (super-difficult platformer), introducing roguelike replayability to people who hate ASCII graphics and turn-based keyboard controls.

The fact that I'm describing Spelunky in terms of other games and genres implies that it's not all that innovative. But creativity is almost always the combination of two preexisting things. The ideas in this year's innovative titles will be synthesized into 2011's crossover hits which will lead into 2015's soulless cash-cows.

OK, time to start work on the New Year's Eve party. Happy new year!

When Voyager was on the air, my problem with it was I didn't like the writing. As I watched it later I discovered another problem: the supporting cast is redundant. Most Trek supporting casts have an air of blandness (this is, in a nutshell, why DS9 is the best Trek series: pretty much the entire recurring cast is well-developed), but in VOY a lot of characters are just unnecessary.

Specifically, you don't need Chakotay, Tom Paris, or Harry Kim. You just need Tuvok. Whenever one of those three characters has a scene, it would be a better show if that were Tuvok's scene. You're probably thinking: "What about the episode where Paris learned a valuable lesson about blah? That wouldn't make sense with Tuvok!" Here's the thing: that episode was lousy. Pretty much every episode where these three characters act on their own initiative (as opposed to following orders) is lousy. But once those characters existed and the actors had contracts, the writers had to use them, and it watered down the plomeek soup.

Once we started talking about this, Sumana and I started trying to compress the casts of other Trek shows. The point is not to eliminate characters that we don't like--we love almost all these characters--but to try to get a similar cast with fewer characters, so that every character can be essential to almost every episode. This is a ruthless exercise in minimalism.

What's the point? Well, all these characters looked good in the series bible, but some of them didn't pan out. Some of them consistently bombed, some were underused. The thing is, you don't know ahead of time. A series bible is like a meta-screenplay. It can be implemented well or badly, and the final verdict doesn't come in until the end of the series.

This exercise is the flip side of tie-in novels and fan fiction. Instead of fleshing out the underused characters and exploring the ignored relationships, it lets us see which parts of the show were absolutely necessary to get the stories we liked. If you totally disagree with what Sumana and I like about Trek shows, you can probably express that disagreement in terms of your minimal cast.

Now on with the show. When I think Star Trek and "ruthless exercise in minimalism", I think of the original series. You can tell almost every TOS story with just Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. Everybody knows that. But you gotta have some other characters to spread the dialogue out, so let's dig deeper.

Do you need both Chekov and Sulu? Nope! TOS got along for a full season without Chekov. Do you need both Scotty and Spock? Not really! Let Spock fix the engines himself instead of telling Scotty to fix them.

Sumana took this opportunity to complain about the fact that Uhura, a chronically overlooked main character, is the only woman in TOS's main cast. I suggested making McCoy a woman. Sumana pointed out that they did exactly that in TNG, and nobody liked Dr. Pulaski. This had me stumped for a while, but now I have the solution: have Nichelle Nichols play McCoy instead of Uhura. Who would complain? Well, DeForest Kelley fans would complain, but look, now DeForest Kelley can play Khan. (Second-best solution: combine Scotty with Uhura instead of with Spock.)

Now that you see how the game works, back to VOY. As above, Tuvok subsumes Chakotay, Paris, and Kim. Apart from that, my suggestions are pretty minor. Seven of Nine can replace Kes--in fact, she did. With their powers combined, Seven and the Doctor can replace Neelix. Seven can also replace Torres, or Torres and the Doctor combined can replace Seven. But honestly I'd be perfectly happy with the Tuvok thing. You can tell most good VOY stories with Janeway, Tuvok, and Seven, but it's a stretch.

DS9 did an amazing job of developing a huge cast, so objectively speaking it doesn't need this exercise, but that's what makes it such a ruthless exercise. No one is spared! The TNG imports are out: Kira can do O'Brien's job, and Odo can do Worf's. Dax and Bashir can be combined. You still need Quark, but he can be a recurring character, like Rom, instead of a marquee character.

Sumana and I had a lot of fun messing with TNG, because it's the Trek we both grew up with. And TNG shows that major characters can just leave a show. The show didn't drastically change when Tasha Yar died, when Beverly Crusher left (or when she came back), or when Wesley Crusher left.

It's not much of an exaggeration to say you can tell all the interesting TNG stories with just Picard and Data. But you can't run the day-to-day business of Star Trek with just two characters, so let's add some more.

I think we have to leave Worf in place, especially since we got rid of him on DS9. The big question here is what to do with Riker, Troi, and Crusher, TNG's equivalents of Chakotay, Paris, and Kim. The situation's better than VOY because there's about 1.5 interesting characters between the three of them--but how to arrange them? The obvious thing to do is combine the two medical types, but the resulting character isn't any more interesting than Troi alone.

That's why we prefer to merge Troi with Riker and create a real XO character, someone responsible for mediating between the captain and crew. Either Marina Sirtis or Jonathan Frakes could play this character well. With this character you can play up Picard's reserve, make him a little less of a nice guy. If Picard is the captain everybody admires but nobody positively likes, this Troi-Riker character becomes the most interesting character on the show! Picard's more interesting, too. Combining characters doesn't just tighten up the show, it creates new possibilities.

You don't need Geordi LaForge when you have Data. If you really want to keep him (I do, he's my favorite TNG character), have him replace Crusher, but I don't think TNG needs a main-character doctor at all. Crusher was incredibly underused; have recurring guest stars do the sickbay scenes.

OK, one more. I haven't been messing with the commanders, because if you change the commander character you change the whole tone of the show.[1] But on ENT, Captain Archer isn't the strongest character: Tucker is. You can tell almost every good ENT story with Tucker, T'Pol, and Phlox[2]. You'll need an Archer+Reed+Mayweather+Sato character to spread out the dialogue, but with those four you're good to go. A Trek show where half the command staff are aliens would be really interesting, and quite appropriate for the ENT era.

[0] "Demon" and "Course: Oblivion" are among my favorite hours of Trek. For Sumana-like skeptics, some more excellent VOY off the top of my head: the "Equinox" two-parter (which shows what would have happened if VOY had been the Battlestar Galactica reboot), "Body and Soul", "Message in a Bottle". VOY also had some excellent stories about storytelling (eg. "Muse" and "Living Witness"), something that TNG tried occasionally but it never worked. DS9 fans especially should watch "Message in a Bottle" for its view into the Dominion War.

[1] Here's the kind of thing I come up with when I mess with the commanders. The DS9 pilot focuses on the great Federation diplomat Curzon Dax (Terry Farrell), who's been posted to the Bajoran system following the discovery of a strategically significant wormhole. Halfway through the pilot, Curzon is assassinated by Bajoran extremists trying to disrupt an ancient prophecy. The Dax symbiont must be saved at any cost, but the only Trill within range is Ezri Tigan (Avery Brooks), the troubled first officer of a nearby Federation starship. Yes, I said it. Avery Brooks plays Ezri Dax as the main character of DS9.

[2] Yeah, Phlox. He did kill a whole species that one time, but take him away and you no longer have ENT. Phlox's strength as a character comes from the fact that, by human standards, he's insaaaaane. IMO one of the most realistic depictions of a "human-like" alien in Trek. (Sumana asked me to add this disclaimer: "We cannot be sure how realistic this depiction is, because hypotheses about the behavior of imaginary aliens cannot be tested.")

In that spirit, let me help you waste some time. Recently, through Jaime Weinman's weblog, Sumana and I discovered the YouTube channel of bobtwcatlanta, who's put up hours and hours of video: old commercials, which I thought would be kind of interesting, but which have paled in comparison to the amazingly engrossing intros to old TV shows. Sumana and I have spent a couple hours watching these intros and marveling at the crap that used to be on TV, and also at the surprising non-crap where we were expecting terribleness of a cosmic-microwave-background-like uniformity.

Occasionally we were so astounded (positively or negatively) by an intro that we wrote down the name of the show for later research. Now, I share this list with you. Although this list reads like Leonard's wacky list of fake TV shows, this is 100% stuff that was shown on real televisions. (Except, possibly, the last one.)

• "Gung Ho" (1986): Scott Bakula's first TV series, a nine-episode sitcom about lean manufacturing. Also starring Patti Yasutake for the ultimate Trek crossover. Of all the shows on this list, the one I have the most genuine interest in watching.
• "Charlie Hoover" (1991): "Wow, they're really going for a Sam Kinison feel on that imp from hell character, that's a little tasteless." "And Sam Kinison as the imp from hell!" "Okay..." It seems Sam Kinison didn't die until 1992. The non-Sam-Kinison actor, Tim Matheson, went on to play the vice-president on The West Wing, and I gotta say the show would have been a lot more interesting if the Sam Kinison imp from hell had been following him around.
• "The Home Front" (1991): An interesting-looking drama with a huge cast about the WWII home front. About as obscure as a 1991 major-network TV show from 1991 can be in 2009.
• "The People Next Door" (1989): Wes Craven is billed as creator of this Young Ones-lite surreal sitcom.
• "The Famous Teddy Z" (1989) looks like an OK dramedy about Hollywood, but Sumana and I were captivated because the star, Jon Cryer, looked exactly like our friend Stuart Sierra. We're talking an amazing resemblance. Jon Cryer now stars opposite Charlie Sheen on "Two and a Half Men" and only looks a little bit like Stuart Sierra.
• "Civil Wars" (1991): One of the most depressing TV shows ever, a lawyer drama about divorce court. The intro sets the scene by playing depressing dialogue ("He's a monster!" "If he's a monster, it's because you made him into one.") over grainy wedding footage. Stay tuned through the commercial break, folks! Amazingly, this lasted two full seasons.
• "Here's Boomer" (1980): This one you really gotta see. It's the second intro in that video; just sit through Pink Lady and Jeff. This is a saccharine show about a dog who solves people's problems. The only good thing about this show is that it's funny to imagine the sappy theme song playing over the scene in Battlestar Galactica where Boomer shoots Adama.
• "Lifestories" (1991): Some kind of medical drama that... I really don't know. If you only watch the visuals it looks totally generic, but Robert Prosky is credited as "the Storyteller", and here's what the Storyteller has to say in the intro:

  There are dramas we can see, and others that mature, full of conflict and battles and tension, where we cannot: inside our bodies. Finally the two will intersect. That intersection is what this program is about. We are a mystery to ourselves, and nowhere more so than in our bodies.

  There you go, now you know as much as I do. Except that I also know the show had Dwight Schultz in it.
• "Good Grief": This one made it into the list simply because watching the intro gave no information about the show. My best guess was that it was about a pro golfer who befriends the angel of death. I was kind of close: it's about the wacky employees of a funeral home. Not recommended.
• "Q.E.D." (1982): I'm just gonna quote the IMDB user summary: "The tales of Quentin E. Deverill, an eccentric expatriate American professor who uses his unique skills to solve mysteries in Edwardian London." Starring Sam Waterston. AWESOME.
• "No Soap, Radio" (1982): Another intro that gives no information about the show premise (they just put the camera on a roller coaster and showed that footage). However, it does give you enough information to stay away: "Starring Steve Guttenberg." IMDB says this five-episode wonder is about "The third-generation owner of a seedy hotel in Atlantic City." It took guts to name the show after a joke that's funny because it's not funny.
• "Bring 'Em Back Alive" (1982): Bruce Boxleitner is 1930s Steve Irwin! Not as awesome as it sounds.
• "Square Pegs" (1982): Sarah Jessica Parker's first TV show, a kind of proto-"Freaks and Geeks". The introduction is extremely well done.
• "The Devlin Connection" (1982): Someday I'll find it, the Devlin Connection. I did not expect to see a crime show starring Rock Hudson, but IMDB says this wasn't even the first crime show starring Rock Hudson. Not that interesting; we put it down because an extended Apple II sequence in the intro made us think Rock Hudson's character might have a sideline in computer programming, but no such luck.
• The New People (1969): All the excitement of "Lost", in the 1960s.
• We saw promos for the fall of 1969, and they were already using the moon footprint video as shorthand for "important news".
• Also in 1969, sketch comedy group The Committee had a TV show that doesn't show up on IMDB; maybe it never really aired.

But as Joel Hodgson once said, you don't have to take the ending they give you. You know I haven't been boring you by posting about BSG every week, and I wouldn't post about the finale if all I had to say was "I'm disappointed". But ever since the DS9 days I've considered Ron Moore a role model for SF storytelling with long dramatic arcs, and I need to write this alternate ending so I don't remember the BSG arc as fundamentally flawed.

Obviously this discussion is full of spoilers, so if you're Nandini or someone else who's waiting for the finale to show up on Hulu, don't read this yet.

It looks like the finale was as sloppy as it was because Ron Moore had a few major obsessions that drove the story to a place nobody but Ron Moore wanted it to go. A place the story itself didn't want to go, such that an entire pantheon of B-movie dei ex machina had to be deployed to push it there. I'm gonna take one of the obsessions as revealed in the final episode, and ditch the rest.

For me the wheels came off the story right after Galen killed Tory. That made sense by itself, but not much afterward made sense. I'm gonna back up the story to just before that, get rid of the memory-sharing tech that gave Galen his motive, and start from there.

The five uber-Cylons put their minds together and decrypt the secret to resurrection technology. An uneasy truce is formed between the humans and all models of Cylon. Galactica docks at the Cylon colony and the Five begin work on a new resurrection hub.

What I'm about to write doesn't really have any conflict in it, which is usually a problem, but it has more conflict (read: shouting) than the final hour of the actual finale. There wasn't any conflict in the second hour of "What You Leave Behind", and that was fine. And if you want more conflict you can just add back in Galen finding out about what Tory did.

During their work on the hub the Five make a discovery: there's no reason why resurrection technology can't work on humans. It may have been a human invention in the first place. The inability of Cylons to reproduce sexually is some kind of DRM that can be broken if you understand resurrection tech. There is no longer any fundamental difference between humans and Cylons.[0] The cycle is broken. The human race and the Cylon race merge. Laura Roslin's death is especially poignant because she'll be one of the last people ever to die.

The show ends with a flash-forward to twenty years in the future. Some people we knew as humans now exist in multiple copies. There are some new hybrid characters.

The occasion is the commissioning of a new ship, a colony ship the size of a base star, built with human and Cylon technology. The people who were born human have been living in space for far too long. They've built this ship and are leaving to continue their search for a habitable planet. Of course they call this new ship Galactica and there's bookending and all that good stuff.

That's my basic storyline. There are many possible variations: if you want the cycle to restart in the end, I think you can see a couple ways of doing that. There are problems you'd have to finesse but by and large the real show finessed the same problems. Watch this video of Edward James Olmos at the UN and tell me this ending isn't more in the spirit of BSG.

One last thing. Let's talk about Starbuck. Pretty much the only thing I liked about the final hour of BSG was the revelation of what Head Six, Head Baltar, and Starbuck were. I'd like to keep that, but Starbuck's arc needs some changing now that there's no "real" Earth for the humans to find.

So. Sometime in the final hour Starbuck disappears from human sight, as per the actual episode. But instead of Lee's "that's strange, the woman I love suddenly disappeared, oh well" shot, we go to her POV. She sees Head Six and Head Baltar. They tell her that she is a construct created by God for the fulfilment of the plot prophecy. Prophecy is a very tricky thing and when the instrument of prophecy dies at an inconvenient time, extreme measures must be taken. She was brought back to lead the fleet to Earth. Earth sucked so much that the humans became desperate enough to make an alliance with the Cylons, a move that has now led the human race to its end. Now the plot prophecy is over and it's time for Starbuck to come with them.

Needless to say Starbuck does not take kindly to this revelation. Here you get your shouting. You can resolve this in a number of different ways, most of which are more interesting than what happened in canon.

[0] That was my prediction that came true in a really unsatisfying way, ie. by killing off the humans and the Cylons and making us all descendants of the hybrid.

The format is a simple one. Jane and I sit in front of a television set at home watching a television show. The show we watch is usually a sports reel, a travelogue, or a whatnot, and we make up funny jokes to say while looking at it...

It will be a new kind of writing for me. We have to write jokes to fit the footage of the film shots. Like I need a forty-foot joke to describe what the man is doing when he examines the sheep's wool in Australia, so I say to Jane: "See, they examine the wool to determine if it's ready for shearing." And she takes the rest of the 40 feet to tell the joke. Which in this case turns out to be: "Oh yeh--they want to make sure it's a hundred percent wool."

Hilarious, isn't it? And after writing 40-foot jokes, 75-foot jokes, and even 108-foot jokes, we have a nine and a half inch [Nielsen] rating, and all is well.

IMDB doesn't know about this television program and it's not clear who "Jane" is, though picking up context throughout the book indicates that it's Jane Ace, Goodman Ace's wife.

So which episode? If someone can find a screenshot of George in the same shot as the magic button, or tell me which episode it happens in, I'd be grateful, or at least more grateful to you than I am to the average NYCB reader. Otherwise I'll just use a screenshot of him kicking back.

Instant update: The button thing shows up in the 1990 Jetsons movie. Is that it? The only thing I like about The Jetsons is the 1960s aesthetic, so if that's it I'll just use the old screenshot. Because I'm a snob even about things I don't care about.

S: "At Vorlon Farms."

L: "Vorlons? In Berkeley? ffshffshwhrrmngffsh Yes."

(Needs so much hyperlinking I don't even know if I should post it, but it made Sumana snort-laugh.)

Big deal, they subcontracted with some company that's got a bunch of prewritten Flash games and skins them for whatever the client is plugging. I don't really understand the point of these games but it's doubly stupid here, because there already is a card game in the Battlestar Galactica universe, and it's not frakjack. It's Triad. Unlike blackjack, Triad is "a friendly game" instead of a game of one person against a dealer. It's played with cool hexagonal cards instead of standard rectangular cards with the players' own faces on them. And it makes a nonzero amount of sense to do it as a tie-in game on the scifi.com website.

I'm well aware of the reasons why this didn't happen, but all those reasons just throw into stark relief the stupidity of what did happen, and what happens whenever you do a tie-in game without doing any game design.

• mst3k.com, "The Official Mystery Science Theater 3000 Website" re-envisions MST3K as a Flash web cartoon, complete with store selling catchphrase T-shirts. Cartoons feature the bots not watching movies or interacting with humans. Not really recommended, though "Thanksgiving Clown" is funny and there is an extremely awkward moment of Tom/Gypsy sexual tension in one of the other cartoons. Who's behind it from original MST3K? Jim Mallon and Paul Chaplin. This appears to be what's left of Best Brains, Inc.
• Mike Nelson's well-known Rifftrax gets around derivative-work copyright problems by taking an Oleo approach to MST3K. After doing commentary for many DVD releases, Mike Nelson had the breakthrough that made it possible to MST movies (like the Star Wars prequels) he'd never get the rights to redistribute: sell only the commentary track and let the end-user sync it up with their own DVD. Frequent MST3K guests include Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett. Occasional MST3K guests include Mike's wife Bridget Nelson (née Jones).
• Barely distinguishable from Rifftrax is The Film Crew, previously alluded to in this space. Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett perform MST3K, except with the plot from Uncle Morty's Dub Shack. The difference between this and Rifftrax is that since these are B-movies, you buy a DVD and get the whole movie, not just the audio commentary. If you know of someone who liked MST3K, one of these DVDs would make a good Holiday gift, because there's really not a huge chance they've heard of this revival.
• OK, that's where the entry in my head stood as of yesterday. But we've got five, maybe six of the original MST3K people still working that angle at all. Everyone else seems content doing comedy shows and writing for America's Funniest Home Videos, though that means they're probably on strike. Except! Yesterday I found out about Cinematic Titanic, the closest thing yet to an MST3K revival, with silhouettes and everything. Tomorrow they start selling DVD ISOs. And look at the lineup: Joel Hodgson (!), J. Elvis (aka Josh) Weinstein, Trace Beaulieu, Frank Conniff, and Mary Jo Pehl. That's the whole Los Angeles branch of the MST3K diaspora!

Put those together and you've got everybody, except for Patrick Brantseg (who played Gypsy for a couple seasons), and Bridget Nelson, who shows up only peripherally in her husband's projects. I think it's great that all these people are producing fun in a style I enjoy, but it's also a little sad. It's not quite like skating on your previous accomplishments, since everyone's producing new stuff, but it's something similar: skating on the style of your previous accomplishments.

Joel left MST3K right at the time it was getting big, explaining (as I read in a newspaper at the time) that he didn't want to "end up signing pictures at an R.V. show." Later I found out that MST3K wasn't even the first time Joel walked away from a career that was going really well. This aspect of Joel's psychology is well-known to the extent that it made one fan call Cinematic Titanic a hoax. (Before pictures went up on the site of everyone holding props and working on the set, I'm guessing.)

I can empathize with Joel's walking away whever he's on the cusp of fame. "I want to get on to the NEXT weird show. I want to be an idea man." I had two great ideas, I can have three great ideas. But what if two great ideas is all you get? Why stop doing something if you're still having fun? On the Internet everyone is famous for fifteen people; that might be a number Joel can be happy with.

PS: If you're sick of my rambling and psychoanalysis, here's a straight news take on all these projects, which brings up the excellent point that there's now an experimental framework in place for Joel vs. Mike analysis.

A corollary of this is that the theme song to Star Trek: Enterprise would make a good sitcom theme song. I lack the raw materials and skill, but you could get some mileage out of playing the Enterprise theme song over the opening sequence to Perfect Strangers.

Another thing I didn't pick up on until now was that sitcom theme songs never mention the name of the sitcom, [Update: not true, see comments] probably because they were commissioned long before the name of the sitcom was finalized, and probably because they were written long before that and shopped out to multiple sitcoms. Also, a common trope in these songs is to talk about how the world has gone to pot and how the relationship formed by the sitcom's main characters (family/friendship/bar) is the last outpost of civilization. So you could switch a lot of theme songs and it would work fine.

As a test I improvised the worst imaginable theme song, for a sitcom called "Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise". It was terrible.

"I'm gonna watch this video slideshow on the history of the laugh track."
"Yeah, I'm gonna shut the door for that."

Stuff I've seen. First, from the fanboy attic, Brannon Braga admits the last episode of Enterprise was lame. When there's a franchise novel devoted entirely to walking back an episode of the TV show, there was probably something unsatisfying about that episode.

Trip was always my favorite character on the show and I wanted to... I just wanted to kill him. I can't give you a coherent response. We wanted to do something that had emotional impact and had consequences which is something we were never allowed to do.

Okay, that's actually an understandable impulse, but don't just do it randomly; work it into the drama. Oh wait, THERE WASN'T ANY.

But even more tiresome than bad episodes of Enterprise are fanboys who know a lot about what happens in various episodes of Star Trek but not a lot about how to put it into a larger fictional-historical context, and pester Braga with misplaced nitpicking.

One of the biggest beefs is that we violated the Vulcan culture, that we did things with Vulcans like the mind melds that clearly were not kosher with regards to the Original Series. But remember, cultures change... American culture is not the same as it was 200 years ago.

The only time a Trek culture was presented as other than homogenous and unchanging, and people complained!

PS: the eternal question about why things look so nice in Enterprise and so cheesy in TOS is pretty easy to answer. The answer is that these are different TV shows made 35 years apart. I don't mean that flippantly. When you watch a TV show you're not peeking directly into a fictional universe where everything looks just like it appears on your TV. Your experience of the fiction is mediated by a bunch of people who built sets, read lines, chose specific takes to edit together, etc. There are infinitely many ways of dramatizing a fictional event. A script can be written well or badly, and a TV show can have clean 2000s-looking sets or dorky 1960s-looking sets. It's not an inconsistency on the level of the fiction. PPS: Spock's science station Viewmaster is awesome.

This makes catching up on the Space Ghost canon a good way to use time when you're sick but can't go to sleep: even when you feel like you can't do anything you're up to the task of comprehending a Hanna-Barbera cartoon. The stories are dull, the animation is yabba-dabba-lame, and the orchestration is almost always this ponderous horn section stuff. On the plus side, the art itself is good, the guest villains are often excellent, and sometimes the horn section gives way to '60s jazz.

It's pretty clear that the scripts were written in total disjunction from the animation, because everything that happens is both shown and clearly narrated. It's like the script to a radio show with no foley. Made up example: "I'll open the door. What's that coming through the door? Some kind of... monster! It's got me! I'll just... use my power bands!" Actual quote: "I've got to stall for time!" Truer words were never said.

In the first episode, Space Ghost and his pals go to another planet and just complain about everything, like stereotypical American tourists. Hey, people live on this planet! Or did, until you blew it up. "I can only pray that these poor creatures will find a home." My heart bleeds for your concern, Space Ghost. How about not blowing up the home they already have?

I only remember one funny joke. Villain: "Behind that door is a super-mechanical creature who needs only one thing--the brain of Space Ghost!" Space Ghost: "Oh, that routine!" Lots of unintentional jokes, such as Tansit's reassuring: "No threat, Space Ghost. Just a demonstration of my newest weapons of destruction."

It was fun to see Zorak and Brak. Zorak sounds just like in C2C, but Brak has a kind of German accent. Like I said, the guest villains are the best part. Sometimes you get a Law and Order type intro where the villain finishes off some unfortunate cargo ship and then Space Ghost comes over to investigate.

We didn't reach agreement on which deity it should be. If it's Zeus you can have a funny theme song about a swan/shower-of-gold encounter gone awry, but that's about all Zeus has going for him. What about Athena? Still working on the concept. There's no rush as it will be quite a while before time loops back on itself and the 1960s come along again.

To refresh your memory, the basic plot is that a real estate company is trying to make money by building houses. In the pilot, the company has only a model home: an incomplete shell of a house designed to sell other houses. Over the course of the series they build more houses, but their fortunes never improve, because the company is run by incompetents who care only about polishing their egos and stabbing each other in the back. Now, I'm not a big reader of Variety (or, as I believe it's now called, More of the Same), so I'm not up on all the industry gossip, but that dysfunctional environment seems a lot the one in which you put together a television show. Especially a relatively highbrow show that lacks support from the network.

Maybe the reason no one has pointed this out before is that over time the metaphor was presented in more and more blatant ways, making it seem obvious. The most famous intrusion is at the beginning of the third season (which was cut from 22 episodes to 13), where it's revealed that the company had a contract to build 22 houses but it's been cut to 13. As the show's fortunes got worse and worse, more and more of its fans' anguish and desperate, doomed attempts to save the show bled into the fiction as attempts to save the real estate company. But I think the basic metaphor (Bluth company = Arrested Development, building houses = producing television) was there from the very beginning.

Here's a still Jimbo sent us, though not from footage that was actually used. I wonder if this qualifies us for IMDB entries. I'm only credited as "Leonard".

I recommend you watch it if only to use our gaudy dress as markers for the amazing continuity errors. We warp around the bar, appearing in almost every scene because we were the only extras who showed up on time for the shoot.

The episode itself is best summarized by a Trevor line: "That's the second-best song I've ever heard about big butts!" Later I'll tell you about a funny scene that they cut.

I could buy the robonic (were they trying to get a trademark?) modifications if the show took place in a Harrison Bergeron society, where as a matter of social policy people at the Stooges' level of competence were given special abilities to bring them up to the level of the general population. But it ain't so. There aren't even any Three Laws of Robonics. The only thing this cartoon has going for it is that according to IMDB, the guy who dispatches the Six Million Dollar Stooges is code-named Agent 000. The show predates and has the same basic plot as Inspector Gadget (minus the PSAs, but if you started doing PSAs after Stooges shorts you'd never be able to stop). You think that'd be worth something, but it's not.

Obviously the Stooges are not some wonderful cultural icon that has been demeaned by this stupid cartoon, but that doesn't excuse anything. Though by any measure the Stooges come up short when compared to the Marx Brothers, they have the same basic dynamic, and it's one you don't see enough anymore. Characters with no marketable skills, who cling together more through inertia than attraction or synergy. Coveting a position in high society, they end up going for it because they've seen that nothing really separates them from the current inhabitants of high society (who have no marketable skills either). But their plans are jeopardized by their own self-destructive behavior. <-- This paragraph doubles as my "outreach" attempt to explain to women the appeal of the Stooges, such as it is.

8) STORY DISQUALIFICATIONS:

...

c) Stories that deal with the previously unestablished death of a Star Trek character, or that establish major facts about or make major changes in the life of a major character, for instance a story that establishes a long-lost sibling or reveals the hidden passion two characters feel for each other.

d) Stories that are based around common clichés, such as "hurt/comfort" where a character is injured and lovingly cared for, or "Mary Sue" stories where a new character comes on the ship and outdoes the crew.

From Sumana.

The conceit is way too complicated, like a movie version of Pee-Wee's Playhouse that spends forty-five minutes building up Pee-Wee Herman as an eccentric cyberneticist who after his wife leaves him decides to build a strange playhouse with sentient talking chairs, etc. There's a theme song that explains the idea, but before that you get a thirty second-intro to the theme song that puts it in context, and by the time it's all over you've lost a good chunk of the air time.

Basically, four slackers are compelled to dub English versions of old Bollywood and kung fu films, but they don't have any translated scripts, so they just make up whatever story seems to fit the action. The show is half dubbed film clips and half skits like the ones before the movie on MST3K. Sumana originally thought the skits were dumb and fast-forwarded through them, but they're actually pretty funny and often clever.

Uncle Morty's Dub Shack is on the poorly-named Imaginasian TV, the new basic-cable answer to local Chinese channels. They run an episode practically every day, and it's not the big watching-a-movie investment of an MST3K episode. You just get the ten minutes of the movie about which the show's creators could make up the funniest story.

This season of Enterprise has been great for fansboy like me (apart for moment of sheer wince-inducing awfulness like week-before-last), but that's because it's been filling in gaps left by other Trek series. This comes at the expense of doing new interesting things that a franchise needs to do to get new viewers, and creating new gaps to be filled in by later editions of the franchise. I don't know if this navel-gazing was why Enterprise was cancelled, or whether, given the probable fact of its cancellation Manny Coto (my new Trek hero, BTW) decided to just do everything he ever wanted to see in Trek and damn the consequences.

Fanboy Roundup continues later this week with the Hitchhiker's movie.

Near the beginning he took a potshot at the narrator of some other fictional show, and then kept sniping at that other narrator throughout the episode. I couldn't get enough of this, as narrator-on-narrator bickering is one of the purest forms of fourth-wall-breaking comedy gold in my book, second only to narrator-on-character bickering.

"Is he an alien or does he just have a big wart on his forehead?"

PS: Bonus fanboy quiz: IMDB trivia for Enterprise says that T'Pol was originally named T'Pau in tribute to the T'Pau character in "Amok Time". They changed her name so they wouldn't have to pay royalties to Theodore Sturgeon (author of AT) for every episode of Enterprise. To my knowledge this is the second time this (renaming a Trek character so as not to have to pay royalties) has happened. What's the other time?

Sumana loves this, as you might expect. Almost as good is the fact that the automatic ad at the bottom of the page tells you to make out your will. Because next week, Law and Order is all new, ripped from the headlines--and YOU'RE the body!

If there were a Weyoun action figure I would buy two, just so I could have one of them face the other, and say "Oh. An action figure of me. How banal." Also, if one of the action figures were to break I could replace it with the other with no problem.

There was a show where Jack Hanna was in Thailand at an elephant refuge. It was bath time for the elephants, so he rode an elephant into a river and scrubbed it and kept falling into the river. Fun. In the next scene the elephant was on land and Jack, surrounded by onlookers, rinsed off the elephant with a hose. Then he turned the hose on the onlookers and sprayed them with water for twenty or thirty seconds, laughing manaically the whole time!

The onlookers were laughing, too, and it was supposed to be all in good fun, because of course Jack was already soaking wet from spending so much time in the river. But the scene went on way too long, and it got sort of creepy. It was as though Jack, sick of not quite being the Crocodile Hunter, had finally snapped. "You're all elephants! I know it! Ah ha ha ha ha!"

What? You wanted to know how actual television broadcast works, with the antennas and the sets? Sorry, can't help you.

Now it's time for the Nitpicking Fanboy Roundup, with your host, Bob the Tholian.

Today we take a look at the angry mob that descended upon your humble webmaster after he posted some random observations on Star Trek. A two-person mob can be pretty nasty, let me tell you. First up is everyone's favorite Kiwi fanboy, Joe Mahoney, self-described "owner of many a Star Trek reference book", who writes:

TOS also had Dr M'Benga on the medical staff - a specialist in Vulcan physiology he appeared in two separate episodes so he's at least as legit a character as Yeoman Rand or barclay in TNG/Voyager

Barclay was in Voyager? Did he get transferred and nobody noticed him for years and years? Seems about right.

Then we have Brendan, whose weblog is currently broken and who writes:

Actually, the doctor from Voyager showed up, albeit in a cameo, in First Contact. Crusher used him to distract some Borgs; he nervously asked if he could prescribe them some skin cream. Anyway, I'm pretty sure that movie is canon. The holodoc lives!

I'm Bob the Tholian. Until next time, fear my mighty web!

Update: You could make the Enterprise theme song a lot more bearable by replacing key lyrics with old episode titles from these lists:

'Cause I got dark side of heart
Goin' gorgeous transfiguration
I got Earth martial law
I can Rom's mutiny
I got terrible people-weapon
No one's gonna stolen Spock's brain
I can nature regression
I got dark (I got dark)
I got daaaaark...
Dark side of heart

Speaking of which, keep those fanboy Star Trek rebuttals coming so I can keep justifying the delay in posting them.

Also speaking of which, if you're a cheapskate you can get your Salon Premium subscription for only $23 instead of $35. You see, when you subscribe you can sign up for a free subscription to Wired. Wired then gives you a chance to revoke your subscription and get a $12 refund. You could probably also do this with the other magazine subscriptions as well, which would mean your Salon viewing was completely subsidized by other companies... wait, that's what most people already have.

1. The TNG-era Enterprise has three or four holodecks. I'm not saying they should have more; they take up a lot of space. But a lot of people like to use them in their off hours, yet somehow one is always free whenever a senior officer needs to run a holodeck simulation. I'd like to see the scene where Geordi has to kick some ensign out of the holodeck so he can test his pet theory.
2. Every Star Trek show has exactly one M.D. I think they should have had more. Especially DS9, although they probably had private-sector doctors in addition to the Starfleet doctor. Voyager had one doctor who could be instantiated multiple times, which is a great idea, but unfortunately Voyager is not canon. I get the impression that the writers treated "doctor" as a role to be filled by a main character rather than figuring out how many doctors these people would actually need. The doctor on Enterprise doesn't even have any staff to help him. He has to get other crew members to help him, as a favor.
3. Orion slave girls. Sometimes otherwise sympathetic Star Trek characters get a gleam in their eye when the topic of Orion slave girls comes up. Hey, we're talking about slavery here! You know, the bad thing? They should work on getting rid of it instead of drooling over the green women. (It does look like they got rid of it between TOS and TNG.)

I got a Tivo, and it is a lot of fun. Instead of a taskmaster determining the times I can do exercise without being bored, basic cable is now an obsequious chimpanzee offering me delicacies off a salver. Then I crack my whip and send it scurrying into the underbrush, and fifteen minutes later it comes back with a rabbit between its teeth. I don't know where I got a whip.

When you buy a Tivo, it starts out completely unusable because its commercial-skipping functionality is crippled at the implicit behest of the broadcasting giants. Basically, you can fast-forward so slowly that you effectively see all the commercials without sound, or so quickly that instead of skipping commercials you skip the pesky intervals between commercial breaks. However, there's a secret cheat code, just like in the game "Contra", which lets you reinstate the famous 30-second skip functionality. There are lots of other cheat codes which aren't as useful, but some are cool.

Originally I thought I'd like some way of doing a 10-second skip, because that's the way I would ideally watch TV: is this program more interesting 10 seconds from now? How about now? But after about two days Tivo had enough stuff recorded for me that now I can just pick something I'm pretty sure will be good. If it turns out to be boring I can just delete it and watch something else. I don't have time to watch everything it records, but who cares? I don't want to; I'd turn into a couch legume. Tivo is a prefetching cache, and when the thing being fetched costs a fixed amount, there's no need to complain about a prefetching cache.

A lot of times people will say "I don't watch much TV, except..." then rattle off a list of about five or ten programs, their desire for accuracy trumping their need to seem hip and TV-illiterate. That used to be me, except for me it was just two programs, so I managed to avoid embarrassment. Now it's five or ten. The difference wasn't that I was purer before Tivo, but that I was lazy and couldn't be bothered to stay up 'til midnight to watch Space Ghost. Now it's in my queue and I don't have to

I sort of wanted to be really cool and build my own PVR using off-the-Sourceforge-shelf technology, because then I could then 1) affect a superior attitude to nearly everyone, and 2) implement neat things like my ten-second skip and a smarter preference-guessing system (for some reason it thinks I like 1960s television Westerns, possibly overcompensating for the negative publicity caused by "My TiVo thinks I'm gay"). But it turns out I actually went and bought a Tivo; ostensibly to test the waters but actually because I couldn't justify spending all that time making a hacked-up free software PVR when I might not use a PVR at all.

It turns out I will use a PVR, but with the 30-second skip in place the Tivo is good enough for now. Send me mail when your cool open-source PVR product costs less than $300, or when it costs more than $300 but Tivo does a 30-second-skip-crushing software update, and I'll look at it.

PS: One thing I don't like about Tivo, but which is probably unavoidable due to the underlying technology: you can't record two programs simultaneously, and you can't watch one program while recording another.

John Jay plays the eccentric next-door neighbor.

I call it "The Federalist Capers".

Consider the archetypal replicator command: "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot." Captain Picard never orders anything else from the replicator, yet either there's no way for him to get the replicator to know that when he wants tea he wants hot Earl Grey; or there is such a way, he can't figure out how to set it up, and he's too proud to ask anyone for help.

What's more, the captain's utterance implies that if he just asked for "Tea. Earl Grey.", either the replicator would give him iced Earl Grey or the ship's computer would ask "At what temperature do you want the Earl Grey?" like a text adventure parser. How come they had time to do a molecular scan of a cup of Earl Grey but not time to put into the 24th-century equivalent of Cyc that Earl Grey is the sort of tea you drink hot?

This is not rocket science; it's the sort of thing that contemporary programmers use as fanciful examples in their EuroPython talks. "Let's take a hypothetical Person, Jean-Luc. Jean-Luc likes Tea, so he sets that as his default Drink, but there are many different kinds of Tea, so he can set a default for Tea as well..." It wouldn't be hard to do the interface either; after you got your elaborately specified tea you could say "Bookmark. Tea." and thereafter it would just be "Tea." Except for the inevitable wacky malfunction, where the attempt to bookmark tea would give you a tea-colored bookmark, you would be fine.

Next time: I tackle the question of what happened to all the industrial designers between Enterprise and TOS.

We audition for people with skills associated with how-to shows: cooking, home improvement, gardening, etc. Our ideal candidate is someone who thinks he or she is very good, but who by any objective measure is awful. We film a "pilot" with each candidate, which is broadcast as an episode of the actual show. For instance, we'd have a cooking show set where people would do their cooking show pilots. We'd have everything they might need, but they'd be done in by their lack of skills and/or imagination.

The show is awful, both in a cruel way and in a campy way. The audience watches both to vicariously enjoy the victim's incompetence and to secretly hope that they'll actually do well and put one over on us. However, we use deceptive editing to eliminate any aspect of that.

The other idea from our group I liked was Jason Brittain's "The Great Weiner Dog In The Sky Show", in which a troupe of trained dachshunds perform death-defying high-wire and trampoline acts.

Today's story is about Saudi Arabia's own Sheik Mohammed al-Fassi, who recently was posthumously slapped with an enormous divorce settlement. Actually, this story is about his old house. That CBS news article will tell you that al-Fassi had a house in Beverly Hills which was burned down in 1980. What it won't tell you is that there's still nothing there[0]. It's a vacant lot with some statuary lions or something near the Sunset sidewalk.

My mother said this was because the Beverly Hills zoning laws prohibit any new development whatsoever, but I don't think that's true. I admit that the inhabitants seem interested in turning any arbitrary piece of fire-scorched land into a park, but assuming the house is zoned R-1, I see no reason why you couldn't build a new gaudy mansion there if there was a gaudy mansion there before.

I think a more likely explanation is that the land has been a pawn in the divorce proceedings, and that now that a judgement has been rendered, something will be built there. If development is in fact being held up by the restless natives of Beverly Hills, it's surely only because of their superstition that anything built on that lot will be as tacky as al-Fassi's place was.

Incidentally, on my trip through the Beverly Hills Municipal Code I discovered that the city enforces a blanket ban on mining and severe restrictions on oil drilling, presumably in some sort of preemptive anti-Beverly-Hillbillies move.

[0] As of the last time I passed by that way, which admittedly was several years ago.

"Married By America" is a new reality show where a woman has "volunteered" to have her spouse selected via the viewers of the "reality television" program of the same name. At the end of the show, they'll get married. At least for a few blissful minutes.

I think that "Married By America" should be cancelled so that we can start using "by America" as a down-home oath like "by gum", as in "You two lovebirds should be married, by America!"

[0] Obscure comment follows: the inevitable sequel will be called "Married By America: With Children".

• People who make jokes that seem a little over the line, "the line" being defined by context and the makeup of the joke audience.
• People who still live with their parents, but they're trying to get jobs and they're still in their mid-twenties so it's not incredibly pathetic or anything.
• People who cultivate little everyday superstitions, and try to perform them in unobtrusive ways so that people don't notice and ask them why they always eat their food in alphabetical order.
• Women Who Love A Little Bit Too Much, And The Men Who Love Them, But Not Quite Enough.
• The audience members from any other given talk show.

Eventually the talk show would become desperate for ratings and go all sensationalist, but when it did it would only be as bad as a regular talk show is now.

The other thing I think talk shows could do is form a Talk Show Wrestling Federation like the WWE, have talk show hosts bad-mouth each other and every once in a while get into a ring and hit each other with folding chairs. They could orchestrate rivalries and make up story arcs about how host X had stolen host Y's guest, or whatever. I don't know whether this would help ratings, but I figure it's a good test case for this alleged superpower of mine, where I can trick arbitrary people into hitting each other with folding chairs.

Anyway, I've long maintained that there should be a mathematical cop show about Alfred Tarski and Alonzo Church, called "Tarski and Church". My proposal has been met by stony silence by major television networks, or at least by the large statues outside their office buildings, which I took to be the receptionists. However, I'm nothing if not a team player, and I'm willing to sweeten the deal with a lighthearted sitcom, entitled "Everybody Loves Riemann". Who'll take a chance on the pilot?

NewsBruiser!

Only you sing it like "Transformers!" in the Transformers theme song. This is actually the better of the two versions. The extended remix goes:

NewsBruiser!
More than eats the pie!

Again like the beginning of the Transformers theme song. I don't know what qualities enable NewsBruiser to exceed mere eating the pie, but it's a theme song that Joe Mahoney will like, which is the important thing.

This reminds me that for my entire life until about a year ago, until I got braces, I thought it was normal in humans for the upper and lower teeth to meet, because that was how my teeth were. Now it turns out that (what I thought was) a slight overbite is normal.

Speaking of which, tonight is the night Brian takes control of the world's satellite broadcast system, with an appearance on TechTV's The Screen Savers. Their hailing of Brian as an OpenOffice and Sunversion [sic] developer and "the founder of the open source movement" smells of #FFFF00 journalism, but TechTV once mentioned Segfault, so they're fine by me (tip: this no longer works).

Update: I forgot to credit Sumana for coming up with this idea.

The West Wing premiere was awful. Hey, you know who could save that show? Jackie Chan! He could balance the budget with his bare hands! Think about it.

[0] Not meant to imply that Jackie Chan could leap a full story even with a running start.

My favorite part of Enterprise is when Archer is talking to someone he doesn't trust (which is basically everyone not his superior officer or a member of his crew). He'll talk and talk and be very reasonable and then suddenly yell "Why are the Vulcans spying on us?!?!" or "What have you done with my chief engineer?!?!". I think his character book says "his style is a mix of Kirk's and Picard's", and the writers are taking that too literally.

Unfortunately, that didn't happen in this episode, so there's no good reason for me to mention it here, except that now's when I thought of it.

Bonus: The Twilight Zone remake, starring Forrest Whitaker, of which we watched about a minute after Enterprise. It's insufficiently UPN! Forrest Whitaker's experiences in the Twilight Zone have left him so jaded that he's incapable of showing any emotion except for that evinced by his general hang-dog look. This is a great touch, but the show is incredibly lame anyway. So as long as they're running the franchise into the ground, they should replace Whitaker with a younger, hipper host who refers to the Twilight Zone as simply "the Zone". Jason suggests the kid from the Dell advertisements. "Dude, you're in the Zone!"

But how to get rid of a Twilight Zone host? There's precedent.

'The Osbournes' will return, Sharon says

Take that, Arafat!

My dilemma here is severalfold; in a bizarre sense, and in common with who knows how many others, I consider the Lone Gunmen show to have been my idea. It's implemented pretty much the way I would have done it (except my version would have taken place in a universe with encryption software), and it airs a year and a bit after I had the idea; about the time I'd think it would take to turn an idea into a television series. And yet, now that it's on the screen, I really can't see where it can go, other than a retelling as farce of X-Files, which is a good idea but which is bound to get tiresome after a while.

Also, any mental commitment I might make to watch TLG next week and see how it comes out is a) likely to be forgotten, since four times out of five I forget to watch TV when I mean to, and b) the exact same mental promise I made for Star Trek: Voyager, and we all know how that turned out.

Mike just sent me a bunch of code for the pig from Degeneracy (not to be confused with the girl from Ipanema). He's been doing more work on that game than I am.