Television Migrations

Televison shows are migrating all over now.

The Tudors are migrating from HBO to BBC ("The royals are coming home," a husky-voiced British woman intones in the promo spot).

I will probably watch this, as I've seen a few episdoes and they were very sexy.

Yes, it's ridiculous. Nobody looked that good back then. But if you saw what their teeth looked like, their chlorotic skin, their poxy bodies, you'd not watch now--would you?



I can't believe they used Joe Jackson's "I'm the Man" for this commercial! Lee and I saw him play in Philly a few years back. In that little South Street theater. Talk about an artist with a range of material. Hard to connect the writer of "Loisaida" with the guy who penned "I'm the Man." But he's always been all over the board. It was a great concert.

Also migrating (and shedding its British skins for American ones) is MTV's revisioning of the BBC's popular teen drama Skins.

I watched a little of this and got bored, but I was impressed with the music selected. I heard more than a few keepers, and they were all bands unknown to me.



You can watch Episode 1 here.

I keep getting forced off INVESTIGATON DISCOVERY because about 90% of their programming is shows I've seen once, twice, thrice. Yes, I rewatch many of the shows.

When you rewatch the shows, though, you begin to see cases where you notice things that are VERY troubling. You begin to sense miscarriages of justice that might have been missed. That freaks me out. When I notice something like that.

Like the Stephen Truscott case in Canada. Okay, the entomological forensics freed him after many decades (and I'm not convinced that meteorological anomalies might not skew the timelines of metamorphosis in some of these species). But that case is often cited as a triumph of forensic entomology--a wrongly-accused man is freed after many decades imprisonment (and given a hefty settlement of millions to boot).

Okay, but guys, please explain one thing. Why do you never come back to the fact that little Stevie's bike tire tread was found in the soil leading right up to the victim's body. You said in the show that it "was a match." Nobody later ever explains how or why this vital piece of evidence was dismissed/discarded?

The m.o. indicated a more experienced killer, IMHO, agreed, somebody physically more like the other principal suspect--who was not a fourteen year old boy like Truscott but a grown man, a soldier from the nearby base.

Is it not possible that Truscott was present at the rape/murder and witnessed it or was complicit in some other way, even if he was not the initiator of the murder?

If the bicycle "evidence" was discarded (and it's hard to imagine how unless it had later been proven to be a frame job) it was your job as writers to explain why and how this occurred. Epic fail.

So you leave the viewer this big enigma, a mote to trouble the mind's eye indeed!

This isn't a clip of the show I watched, but the YouTuber does a good job of giving a precis. The clip ends before the decision was made concerning exoneration. Truscott did prevail in that bid.

I'd like to think Truscott was wholly innocent, and I don't believe he was the one who strangled Lynn Harper, but that bit of evidence connecting him to the scene of the crime (Lawson's Bush) should have been explained in the ID documentary.



I found myself flipping back and forth between two equally viewworthy documentaries last night. One was Nick Broomfield's Kurt and Courtney (1998) and the other was Spellbound (2002).

I had never seen the Broomfield but I confess I've seen Spellbound before and can never resist it.

I won my school's spelling bee as a 7th grader and then got wiped out at regionals, but have always loved watching the National Bee, and love it when ESPN broadcasts it (it's as much fun to hear the bitching from jocks that it's even run as it is to watch it!)

I can usually spell the impossibly polysyllabic words without even thinking twice. But I'm that ace speller who has a set of mostly completely common words that I still get iffy on in certain circumstances.

Spellbound is fascinating because its subjects, kids who made it to the final level (Washington D.C.) of the Scripps-Howard National Spelling Bee, are fascinating. The handful of young kids the documentary follows are truly a cross-section of America. They are different ethnicities and different colors, from disparate social classes, display different degrees of nerdiness and cool, have different talents and interests aside from spelling, and so on. And it's a study of the parents of these kids too. It's also (subtly) a documentary about parenting--mercifully, almost all of the parents can accept defeat with aplomb. Maybe I should say the best parents don't even see losing as "defeat" and won't allow their kids to see it that way either. They see it as a wonderful learning experience and training ground for life's future struggles. All that, plus you get the nail-biting suspense of the competition itself. This is a classic documentary. If you've never seen it, give yourself a treat and check it out.



Neil Broomfield is a controversial figure. I enjoyed his Kurt and Courtney but I imagine this would have held much for fascination in 1998, when Kurt-fever was still very high. His exploration of the "Kurt was murdered" theory mercifully comes to a sane conclusion (he was almost certainly not). Broomfield is a very likeable presence in the documentary. I read online just now that he is seen as a big influence on other documentary makers of note.

It is for this reflexive film-making style—a film being about the making of itself as much as about its subject—that Broomfield is best known. His influence on documentary is clear: Michael Moore, Louis Theroux and Morgan Spurlock have all adopted a similar style for their recent box-office hits. Film-makers who use this style have been referred to as Les Nouvelles Egotistes; others have likened his work to the gonzo reporting of Hunter S. Thompson. (Wiki)

The most fascinating thing to me in the whole documentary was the recording of a very young Kurt Cobain (two years old?!) talking to his imaginary friend Boddah. I was looking for the clip from the documentary (provided by Cobain's Aunt Mary, who features prominently in Broomfield's documentary) but ended up at this clip instead. This is the recording that Broomfield used in the documentary.



Around 4:00 I think you can hear him improvising "Heart-Shaped Box." I'm joking! Only partially joking though lol! His "Hey Jude" is sort of hypnotic. That really put me in a trance. He was playing with one of those plastic reverb toys. You know what I mean. Shaped like a microphone. I'm sure you had one as a kid.