If you understand more than five words of this account of the Lost session at the San Diego Comic-Con this weekend, you are certifiably, hopelessly a geek. Your life will end with the show this spring. Maybe you can come back as a ghost on Being Human.
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Screen Gems: TV the week of July 26
Unforgettably Evil (10 p.m. Tuesday, Starz) -- If you ever wanted to see Norman Bates, Hannibal Lecter, the Terminator and that mean lizard chick from Alien all in one show, here's your opportunity. This documentary explores some of the great movie villains of all time through film clips and interviews with directors and stars. Alas, shooting was completed last spring, so there's nothing from Miami Social.
The Storm (9 p.m. Sunday and Monday, NBC) -- In this two-part miniseries, evil gazillionaire Treat Williams creates his own weather, which surprisingly doesn't turn out much better than Dr. Frankenstein creating his own people. Hurricanes run amok! Locomotive winds change from searingly hot to frigidly cold and back! Lightning crumbles skyscrapers! Good thing the Marlins are getting that new stadium, huh?
More to Love (9 p.m. Tuesday, Fox) -- If you love fat people dancing in Dance Your Ass Off, wait til you see fat people dating in this new reality show from the same guys who gave us such epochal TV as Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? and The Bachelor. (This show was originally titled -- honest to God -- The Fatchelor.) If this is a hit, look for When Fat People Attack this fall.
Let me program your TiVo! Just click on my best bets for the week at www.tivo.com/guruguide.
'Being Human': cold dead fingers but a warm heart
Come and knock on our door . . . and you might get eaten. Mitchell's nice enough, except he keeps sinking his fangs into all his friends. George single-handedly keeps IKEA afloat by wrecking all the furniture when he turns into a wolf every full moon. And Annie's jittery insecurities about her looks have certainly not been calmed by her death. Toto, something tells me we're not in Three's Company territory anymore.
Indeed not. Being Human, a surprise hit earlier this year in Great Britain that's now being exported to the colonies, is not the silly sitcom its premise -- a vampire, a werewolf and a ghost rooming together -- suggests. Neither is it a Gothic slice-and-dice of politics and culture like HBO's True Blood.
What it is is darkly funny, deeply affecting and utterly cockeyed, a work that celebrates life by dwelling on death, love by abiding loneliness.Read my full review of BBC America's new show in Saturday's Miami Herald.
Lou? Lou? There's an angry viewer on line 1...
Looks like I'm not the only one who finds Lou Dobbs' rants about President Obama's birth certificate pointless and slightly nuts. On Friday night, staffers at Dobbs' CNN show got a cranky email on the subject that observed: "It seems this story is dead -- because anyone who still is not convinced doesn't really have a legitimate beef." It was signed by a longtime viewer named Jon Klein, whose day job is president of CNN.
ABC's 'Over a Barrel': voodoo economics
There are so many things wrong with Over a Barrel: The Truth About Oil that I hardly know where to begin, but let's start with this one: It doesn't contain a single word about onions.
This silly, conspiratorial documentary (airing as an episode of 20/20) hosted by ABC anchor Charles Gibson spends a considerable chunk of its 42 minutes of air time trying to prove that we had to pay $4 a gallon for gasoline last year because sinister Wall Street speculators deliberately ran up oil prices. The obvious answer, according to Over a Barrel, is to put tough new restrictions on the trading of futures in oil.
Except that's not obvious at all if you know your onions. Onions are the only commodity for which the United States government has banned all futures trading. The result: Onion prices jumped 400 percent in 2006, plummeted 96 percent early in 2008, then jumped again 300 percent later in the year. Read my full review of Over a Barrel (thought not my secret recipe for French onion soup, in Friday's Miami Herald.
Lou Dobbs: certifiably crazy on Obama's birth certificate
Once upon a time, the main alternative to the dreaded mainstream media was the fillings in our teeth. When I was a kid, scarcely a month went by without a story of somebody, somewhere, picking up secret messages on their fillings. The CIA, the KGB, space aliens, the emergency medical team tending the comatose John F. Kennedy in a secret basement room of Parkland Memorial Hospital -- they all transmitted their radio traffic on frequencies that was no match for American dental technology. Of course, some tyrannical forces tried to turn our fillings against us. I remember reading about some poor old man who was chasing down Kate Jackson, one of the original Charlie's Angels, to make her stop broadcasting threatening messages to his teeth. (There was a reason why everybody always said Kate was the smart Angel.)
These days, you no longer need to develop cavities to get messages from outer space. You can just tune in Lou Dobbs, either on CNN or his daily radio talk show. His weird obsession with Barack Obama's birth certificate is reaching Martian proportions.
The claim that Obama is a secret Kenyan or Indonesian or whatever who has used a fake birth certificate to pose as an American goes back to the Democratic primaries of 2008, when supporters of Hillary Clinton first made the claim. It's been rebutted a million times a million times, not just by independent websites like Politifact.com but CNN itself.
The basis for the suspicion is that Hawaii, like many other states, is digitizing its records, and what Obama usually displays is the new digital form. But every relevant state official in Hawaii has sworn that it's valid. Even more to the point, researchers have found birth announcements for Obama published in the Honolulu newspapers in 1961. If the Illuminati were already hatching a conspiracy to get him fraudulently elected president 48 years ago, we're doomed anyway.
Nonetheless, the birth-certificate conspiracy theory still lives on the far fringes of the Internet...and on Dobbs' shows. For the past week, prompted by a trumped-up lawsuit by a soldier trying to get out of serving in Iraq on the basis that Obama's presidency is illegitimate, Dobbs has been hammering away on the theme of the birth certificate. Citing the evidence that he's wrong has only prompted Dobbs to lash out at "certain quarters of the national liberal media that are just absolutely trying to knock down the issue of President Obama's birth certificate," which are "focused on being subservient and servile to this presidency rather than being inquisitive and doing their jobs with, you know, the White House."
Well, I've never been accused of "subservient and servile" to Obama, but I think this is silly. The case against Obama's birth certificate, which was never very strong -- how many Americans have their original birth certificate? I certainly don't have mine -- was laid to rest long ago, when the birth announcements in the Honolulu newspapers were discovered. For Dobbs to raise it again, a year later, at best smacks trying to summon viewers (or listeners) with smoke and noise rather than substance. At worst, it's a right-wing version of the stupid, pointless and ad hominem attacks on Sarah Palin's supposed cover-up of the true parentage of her baby, another vicious canard that should be buried in a deep grave. Obama and Palin's enemies should confront them on the issues, of which there are plenty, and not from news flashes they got from their fillings.
The CW just can't get good help these days
Listen, buster, and listen hard, because we're only going to repeat this once: The production delay on The Beautiful Life,The CW's new soap about the angst-ridden lives of beautiful jillionaire fashion models, has nothing to do with the fact that star Mischa Barton went crackers over the weekend and had to be locked up in a rubber room at Cedars-Sinai. No, it's just that the setsweren't built. Because that's what the viewers will be looking at as a bunch of fashion models rub suntan on each other's nekkid bodies around the pool -- the sets.
NBC's sleazy, cheesy 'The Wanted'
In the early minutes of The Wanted, NBC News' peculiar new series about the pursuit of terrorists and war criminals, an Australian TV reporter is arguing that the death of his cameraman in a car-bombing in Iraq amounted to murder. ''I had a large press tag emblazoned across me,'' he explains. ``We were clearly journalists, there was no question of that.''
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for The Wanted. This cheesy, queasy crossbreeding of journalism, reality television, paramilitary black-ops and back-channel diplomacy, blurs more lines than a broken Etch-a-Sketch toy -- to the benefit of neither viewers nor the news business. Read my full review in Monday's Miami Herald.
Love in the Nicaraguan ruins
In Nicaragua, Sunday will be a day of political passion. Millions of Nicaraguans will celebrate -- or revile -- the 30th anniversary of a revolution that ended four decades of authoritarian rule by the Somoza dynasty, and began a decade of totalitarian rule by a Marxist party, an event that colors the country's politics to this day.
In the New York City apartment that Fox Business News anchor David Asman shares with his Nicaraguan-born wife Marta Cecilia, the passion will be of an entirely different kind. Even though they didn't meet until five years later or marry for another five after that, the Nicaraguan revolution in a way is their anniversary.
It drew in David, who as a journalist covered its twisting path; and it repelled Marta Cecilia, leading her to a dinner with political dissidents that ended in a storybook wedding -- that is, if your idea of a storybook is something written by John Le Carré.
''It's not your average love story,'' concedes David, ``but it's a good one.'' Read the whole tale in Sunday's Miami Herald.
