Recently I had a very intelligent lunch conversation with peers about the MTV show Punk'd. For those of you who don't know, Punk'd is a show that Ashton Kutcher started that is kind of similar to Candid Camera, but with celebrities. Kutcher hires actors to put celebrities in really ridiculous situations and usually worries them or makes them very angry and then walks out and laughs at them.

Anyway, our conversation began because someone had recently seen an episode in which Ellen Pompeo (Meredith Grey on Grey's Anatomy) was punked and said some pretty weird things. The episode involved a waitress (actress) hitting on Pompeo's fiance while serving them lunch. Pompeo goes on to say some pretty malicious stuff about stabbing the woman and watching her bleed everywhere. Pretty weird. The link to that on YouTube is here:

The last candidate for the position in Media Studies / Sociology will be speaking tomorrow at 4:15 PM in Hahn 108! Details below...

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DEVORAH HEITNER
(Ph.D. Northwestern University)
Candidate in Sociology & Media Studies

"POSITIVELY BLACK: BLACK POWER TELEVISION, 1969-1980"

Wednesday, November 29
4:15 PM, Hahn 108

Devorah Heitner is a Ph.D. Candidate in Media, Technology, & Society at Northwestern. Her research focuses on how African Americans challenged racist conditions in U.S. media by creating a national movement of black public a

I was having a conversation a while back with my favorite Media Studies-hating friend while we were watching television. We saw one of those many commercials that have begun springing up in which a brief part of a story is told or something and then the commercials ends with an encouragement to go visit the website for more of the story.

His conclusion was that this was pretty stupid. He had never followed those directions and was kind of offended that the company was making him do more of their work. If they wanted to advertise to him, they should do it on their time, not on his. Going to their website would just mean buying into their whole marketing scheme.

Okay, so I'm sure that someone has written about Borat, but I can't find it to attach this to their blog, but I'm going to tie it in with Parental Control, so I figure I'll probably say something slightly new to the blog.

I'm sure that many of you have seen the Borat movie, but I'll still try not to give anything away. And I hope that many of you have seen Parental Control, because after Yo Momma it is the best reality show on television. For those of you who are unfamiliar with its genius, the plot is that there are two parents who are ridiculously unhappy with their son or daughter's significant other. So they interview a slew of willing candidates, choose two of them and then sit at home with the unhappy significant other, watching the son or daughter go on televised dates with the new candidates. After the two dates, the son or daughter has to choose between staying with his or her current significant other or taking one of the new candidates. The show makes me feel ridiculously trashy sometimes, but I can't help loving it. Sometimes I'll even skip meals to stay home and watch it on MTV. I often think to myself, "Why do you like this show?" I think it's because I'm convinced it's not actually real.

So I’ve been watching the new season of “Degrassi: The Next Generation” and as usual, they’re dealing with interesting issues. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, “Degrassi” is a Canadian show about a group of teens in Toronto who go to a school called Degrassi, and the crazy stuff that happens to them. The tend to deal with a wide range of social issues, and the tagline for the show is “Degrassi: it goes there.” So far this season we’ve had street-racing, jail, dating a co-worker, teen mothers, and the sexual problems faced by paraplegics. They just finished a two-part episode dealing with teens and internet safety and privacy, which I found really interesting. The premise of the story was that goody-goody Christian cheerleader Darcy (with the help of resident creep and all-around jackass Peter) starts posting sexy pics of herself on her blog in order to raise money for the cheerleading team. Peter tells Darcy that he has a friend who likes to read her blog, and this friend ends up being their benefactor of sorts. Although the pictures were password protected, some students hacked in and downloaded them, plus it turns out Peter’s friend was just some random guy he met in a chatroom, who later shows up at Darcy’s house, scaring the hell out of her.

not to be confused with Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. So basically, Dr. Phil has a new show called “House of Hatred” in which 6 very different people have to live in a house together, have their lives taped, and find out what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real. Actually, that’s “The Real World”, but the idea is similar. But in Dr. Phil’s house, the people are literally positioned as the binary opposite of another person in the house and forced to room with this person. Pair number 1 is the white supremacist guy and the black woman who hates white people, followed by the thin girl who hates fat people and the 600 lb man who hates thin people, and lastly the homophobe and the straight-hating lesbian. Everything about this premise just rubs me the wrong way. First of all, for a guy like Dr. Phil who’s known for saying “Get real!”, this is incredibly contrived, and the binaries are so extreme whereas in real life, issues of ignorance and/or hate are so much more complex than this. Which brings me to my second point, which is that it eschews any attempt at a more complex (and more relevant) discussion about difference in our society by reducing the housemates to representing one thing in a binary rather than as complete people. Plus the name of the show is pretty awful.

I've been meaning to blog about this for a while now, but life just keeps getting in the way. Really who would have thought that blogging would be so hard? So constraining? You would think it would be one of the easiest, most liberating parts of class. No dice. Huh…

Anyway, this post is not about blogging, despite outward appearances, it's about TV. I've been getting DVDs of television series on my Netflix lately because I discovered that I almost never have two hours of consecutive free time in which to watch a movie any more. Lately I've been watching Samurai Jack, the Cartoon Network animated series. I don't know how many of you have seen it. If you've only seen one or two episodes, you probably don't have all that high opinion of it and I can't say I blame you, but watched as a whole it's pretty damn cool and I'll tell you why!

So, in section four of Hamlet on the Holodeck, Murray says:

“Meanwhile, the Internet is beginning to function as an alternate broadcasting system… as television channels and the World Wide Web come closer together, the telephone, computer, and cable industries are racing to deliver the new digital content to the end user faster and in greater quantities”(253).

I think that we’re definitely seeing the ways in which the Internet is influencing TV. I find that nearly all of my TV watching is on my computer and is facilitated by the internet, even when I’m at home for holidays and have more access to actual TV. While most TV on the internet is provided by users (such as the person who puts the latest episodes of America’s Next Top Model on YouTube. Thank you, whoever you are…), the TV broadcasting companies are getting in on the TV on the internet train too. Aside from iTunes, which has deals with several networks to sell episodes in the iTunes Music Store, some networks have their shows available for free on their websites. Two examples would be abc.com and the-n.com. ABC uses the tagline “Watch tonight on TV, watch tomorrow online”. The-N has a section of their website called “The Click” where viewers can watch full episodes of shows, as well as previews for upcoming shows, and “webisodes”(which are kind of like the gutter space between episodes). Although there are still commercials, there are far less than on real TV and they tend to be only at the beginning of the episode. It will be interesting to see if more companies follow suit, and what effect the corporate presence (and copyright laws) will have on the more user dominated forms.

So I was going to include this in my last blog but if you guys are anything like me, I know the more lengthy the blog, the less likely it will get read all the wa through. So... here is one more of my thoughts on television culure.

Despite the more recent uproar that violence in the media has caused in Congress and legislation, sex has always been the more debated issue when it comes to censorship and regulations. In a day and age when murder and mayhem rule the silver screen, dominate prime-time television, and grace the front page of every major news source, why is the majority of our attention always on sex? In th article I read for class, the author, George Gerbner says in his article, “formula driven violence in entertainment and news is not an expression of freedom, viewer preference, or even crime statistics… but rather the product of a complex manufacturing machine” In other words, violence and blood sells. He continues to say that "Sex is second but, ironically, it runs into more inhibitions and restrictions.”

Everyone seems to be talking about House of Leaves right now, and a lot of you have really interesting things to say, but the book messes with my head too much for me to have anything intelligent to say about it, so for the moment I will discuss something else entirely...

I have Net Flix and lately I haven't had time for movies, I mean since when do I actually have over an hour of concurrent free time that isn't sleep? So instead I've been getting lots of TV shows from them. The problem is I've burned through most of the Simpsons and all of the Futurama that they have, plus a couple of crazy anime series (Serial Experiments Lain fucked with my head in a way similar to House of Leaves), so I'm beginning to look more at live action TV series. I tried Sex and the City, can't stand it. Desperate Housewives was even worse. I hate cop/law dramas, so that counts a lot out, and unlike most people I know I hate both Seinfeld and Friends. I've been told I should try Monk and House MD, I've seen a few episodes randomly and they seem promising. But that's beside the point. Anyway, last night was one of my biggest strikeouts yet. I took Net Flix and a couple of my friends up on their suggestion that I try Weeds, thinking, "oh this will be fun, light-hearted, maybe even a little counter cultural”. I made it through the first episode, put it back in its mailer and sent it back, the worst run of any series yet. I mean no offense to anyone who likes Weeds or any of the other of the aforementioned TV shows. Many people that I like and respect like at least one, if not more of them, I'm just really picky about TV. But I mean really!