Bill Roper's Journal

Gretchen and I got around to watching this tonight. As I said to Gretchen at one point during the film, it's the best bad movie I've seen in a while.

It's also not actually bad. Although there was also a point when I asked Gretchen "Is there anything that they do that isn't a clusterf***?"

But seriously, it's not bad. It holds together pretty well.

Just don't overthink it.

I ducked out and saw the new Star Wars this morning at the first show. Gretchen, who has been dubious about going to see the film, joined me for lunch and a quick review / spoiler session. We'll leave the spoilers out here and just cut to the chase, which was I told her she should really go see it.

The movie has flaws, but that's ok. It's recognizably Star Wars, which the previous film was not. And since I wanted to see Star Wars, the result was eminently satisfactory.

I'm thinking that the next version of the Machete Cut should just omit Chapter 8...

As we arrive at the end of the year, it's time for the report on the state of the television (and associated DVRs) in our house. Otherwise known as "What the Heck Have They Been Watching?" The lists below are mostly ordered by day of the week, as that's my only hope of keeping track.

Shows That We Are Essentially Up-To-Date On

Scorpion

Me, Myself, and I

Lethal Weapon

NCIS: New Orleans

Legends of Tomorrow

The Big Bang Theory

Young Sheldon

Mom

The Orville

The Good Place

Marvel's Agents of SHIELD

Hawaii Five-O

The Librarians

Well, that's an odd little list. The science in Scorpion remains laughable, but the character dynamics are fun to watch. Me, Myself, and I was a sweet little series that completely failed to find an audience -- it might have been better paired with Young Sheldon which is -- in a surprise to us! -- a much nicer series than we feared it was going to be. Adam is the best thing that has happened to Mom -- it's fun having a character sit there and say so many of the things that we've been thinking.

Lethal Weapon may well be my favorite show on TV right now. I say this as someone who has never watched any of the movies. It is a wonderfully nuanced funny show, with both romance and explosions. What's not to like?

I worry that Legends of Tomorrow will suffer greatly with the cast changes, but we'll see what happens. Hawaii Five-O seems to be surviving its cast changes -- I don't believe it is long for the world in any case. SHIELD has been solid in its return to the lineup; I'm hoping that things pay off nicely. NCIS: New Orleans has been its usual comfortable self.

The Big Bang Theory continues to be funny. The Good Place continues to be both funny and strange.

And then there's The Orville, which took a ninety degree turn after the pilot episode and decided to be one of the better SF series that I've seen on TV in years. The ensemble is strong and McFarlane has been writing scripts to showcase them, not himself. I've been impressed.

Oops! And I almost forgot to mention The Librarians as it just popped up again for its short run. Nothing new to see there, to be honest, but still a good light show to watch.

Shows That We're In The Middle Of

Once Upon a Time

Once Upon a Time is pretty much the only series that we've watched any substantial amount of this year that we're not caught up on. The reboot is interesting, but we're wondering how any of this is going to pay off and when. I suspect that the ratings will not be high enough to earn another season, but we'll see.

Shows That We Have Barely Watched

Supergirl

9JKL

Superior Donuts

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Inhumans

We're behind on Supergirl, because Julie has spoken of wanting to watch it with us. As a result, we've only seen the Earth-X crossover episode, which we decided to watch out of order with the rest of the series.

I would like to like Superior Donuts more than I do, but it is trying desperately to escape from the original shell of the play that it is based on and is having a hard time succeeding. But we are short on sitcoms on the viewing schedule right now...

We have watched the beginning of Inhumans and will probably watch the rest of it -- eventually. Far from now eventually.

We have watched one episode of 9JKL. Gretchen hates it. I thought the pilot was pretty awful, but had hope that things might improve. Eventually, we will get desperate enough to watch a few more episodes and find out whether or not we are going to delete the rest of them from the DVR.

And then there's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, which I am still interested in, but which was getting crazy enough by the end of last season that Gretchen was becoming unwilling to put up with it. We haven't even started this season yet; maybe we'll get to it together or maybe I'll watch it by myself.

That's the score here.

How are things where you are?

Still liking it. SFX nicely done.

And I looked at a particular situation early in the episode and said, "This will end badly." I was right. Of course, practical jokes are like that, more so when trying to explain them to an intellect that does not understand humans all that well...

(It's quite possible to say "This will end badly" about many things that happen on The Orville. But I suppose that's the essence of a lot of humor. :) )

We watched NCIS: New Orleans last night. I've never really been a fan of either of the other two incarnations of NCIS, but this one could grow on me. Although original NCIS creator, Donald Bellisario, isn't apparently involved with the show, it features two veterans of earlier Bellisario shows: Scott Bakula, from Quantum Leap, and Zoe McLellan, from JAG. And it feels like a comfortable old shoe.

With luck, this one will hang around for a while.

So let's talk briefly about some of the summer replacement (and leftover from last season) TV that daisy_knotwise and I are watching. Spoilers may abound.
( So I'll cut tag this... )
I suppose most of this could be classified as good reasons for getting to bed earlier.

daisy_knotwise and I engaged the services of the girl next door to babysit Katie and Julie tonight and headed out to the theater with samwinolj and Bonnie to see Green Lantern. The reviews have been pretty uniformly unhappy with it from what I gather.

We all liked it, from the GL geeks that Sam and I are to the relative novices that Bonnie and Gretchen are. It holds together well, there are a lot of nice bits of character work, and the special effects are just fine (although Gretchen feels they're a bit reminiscent of Harry Potter. I attribute that to it being the current state of the art in Hollywood.)

I'm hoping the numbers hold up well enough for there to be another film. We'll see.

daisy_knotwise and I got around to watching the series finale of Medium last night, slightly delayed by my trip to Confusion last weekend. I've officially decided to add this to the scrap heap of final episodes that I intend to ignore, much like Quantum Leap.

Yes, it was that bad.

It was late, SportsCenter wasn't on due to an excess of college football, and daisy_knotwise and I were looking for some brain candy on the TV Guide when I spotted 1 vs. 100, which I'd never actually seen a full episode of, and suggested that we watch that. It's actually fairly interesting, although it relies on having contestants who seem to have escaped from Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?

The game has a series of multiple choice questions with three possible answers. If you answer a question correctly, you stay in the game, whether you're a member of the "Mob", which starts with 100 members, or the singular contestant. The contestant wins money for each member of the Mob that they eliminate and is allowed to leave with the money they've won at various points in the game. If the contestant is the last person standing, they win $1 million. If the contestant misses a question, the remaining members of the Mob split the accumulated prize money. Mob members who answer all questions correctly are retained to the next game and the Mob is recharged to 100 with new players.

The contestant gets three "helps". They can "Trust the Mob" and accept the consensus answer. They can "Poll the Mob" and see how many Mob members picked a particular answer. They can "Ask the Mob" in which case one member with the correct answer and one member with the incorrect answer will be picked randomly and the contestant can ask them why they picked that answer. (The Mob answers are usually pretty uninformative, which is somehow not surprising, since they're playing for the same pool of money.)

Of the questions we saw in the two games, there was only one that I couldn't immediately answer and -- as it happened -- I picked the right answer, although I would have definitely asked for help on it. (Which of these three band members was not married to Heather Lockyear? Ack! Not my cuppa...)

The first game ended with 25 Mob members left standing; the second with only 7. However, the 7 still there were pretty good, including professional poker player Annie Duke. There were a number of other celebrities in the Mob, including David Eckstein, Wink Martindale, and Bob Eubanks.

My suspicion is that the folks who select the contestants make sure to select the brighter ones into the Mob. I didn't see the Mob make any money, but there may be some lovely parting gifts I suppose. :)

And it's an interesting game.