Battletipjar Galactica

Steamboy was mediocre and had too many endings. Pretty to look at, though. Sorry, I won’t be enriching you. Anime box sets are still way too expensive to justify buying….

Why buy when you can netflix? Seriously, how many times are you going to watch the series?

Virtually no anime is worth buying in the US, IMO, because the markups are just ludicrous. [And unnecessary, I’ll wager, but that’s for another time.] That said, I’ve got Big O and an (inadvertently pirated) copy of Cowboy Bebop* and am considering getting both a legitimate copy of CB and maybe another one if I can scrounge the cash (Paranoia Agent, Samurai Champloo, FLCL, Fullmetal Alchemist; Ghost in the Shell SAC ended up too wanky for me, even though I quite liked bits of it).

Of course, all of those purchases will have to wait since I just picked up both the Complete Mr Show — I *knew* they were going to do this, and at a reasonable price too! — and the 1st season of Veronica Mars — ok, that one, I’m just a sucker — so that’s my TV purchases for the season, I think. Although I’ll guzzle down BSG S2 in a heartbeat when it comes out.

* Ordered it off eBay without knowing that there’s a common pirated copy of CB floating around. So common, in fact, that it was damn hard to find the real deal and when I did, I couldn’t afford it.

Belle,

A lot of the cheap VCDs I have give you Mandarin on one side and Cantonese on the other. It seems to be a pretty common thing. A lot of TVs will actually let you shut off one channel (and play the other through both speakers) if you fiddle with the audio controls

I don’t understand — I thought Henry’s bleg was for “people not paying for copyrighted material through P2P is bad”, not “P2P is bad.” DVD sales for TV series are pretty robust — they’re what caused Serenity to get green-lighted, after all — but if existing DVD revenues depend on people not using P2P to get the content for free, then how does that reinforce the “P2P is good” case?

You will not be sorry that you gave the new Battlestar Galactica a chance: it’s simply the best TV out there and certainly the best TV I’ve seen in years.

Avoid Battlestar Galatica unless you are willing to be bombarded by excessive amounts of sleazy sex (they think it is somehow “character driven” to spend time dealing with the secondary female lead bellowing out one guys name while sleeping with another) and assaultive efforts to be “gritty”. If you must watch it, fast forward through any scene that do not exclusively focus on Mary McDonnell or Edward James Olmos in it (they almost are able to save the show).

Finished “Desperate Housewives Series 1” in December, *now* almost through with “Lost Series 1”. I doubt my wife would like Battleship Gallatica, so I guess we’ll be waiting for Sopranoes or 6 Feet Under to appear on TV.

Just to add to what Scott has said, as another expatriate. I find the DVD experience much preferable to watching the series on broadcast TV. My wife and I can choose the start time, and we can watch the series over consecutive nights, rather than once a week. There are no ads and we can pause if we need to (is that W. crying in his bed?). Since it’s pretty much the only thing we are watching, it comes down to about 30 euro for a month’s worth of TV. At times this seems to me to be expensive, at other times it seems to be a bargain.

It’s become pretty much a truism about how bad American culture is, with American TV being the worst. But I think these American TV series (Sopranoes, 6 Feet Under, Desperate Housewives, Lost, and others) are much the best things going today. Would that French TV could show the same inventiveness and creativity, rather than yet another variety show with has-beens singing “Je ne suis pas un hero.”

a (cf. #21), I have now for several years been telling Belgians that truisms about American TV are simply false – that since the collapse of the three network system, American TV has grown consistently better. It is one of the clear examples of competition increasing quality.

Alas, the size of the American market has seriously distorting consequences in Europe. It is far cheaper to dub or subtitle American shows than to produce your own of comparable quality. Audiences may (and usually do) prefer programs that were originally made in their own language – dubbing lowers perceived quality dramtically – but the proliferation of commercial channels in Europe does not seem to be breeding the kind of improved production values that it has in the US.

When cable first became available in the US, one of the big winners was Ted Turner, simply because he had could sell the TV equivalent of shovelware to channels that were just looking to fill their time. It took a few years before the market started producing genuinely new programs.

It seems that right now new TV stations in Europe are just buying American TV to fill timeslots cheaply, like early American cable. We have two whole channels in Flanders that do nothing but broadcast American shows and cheap, locally produced reality TV. But, I see some signs of hope. VTM – commercial Flemish TV – is pushing Matroesjkas with considerable success. It seems to me to be a low-rent rip off of The Sopranos – more tits, more ass, about the same amount of violence, less than half the character depth – but at least it suggests that the idea of producing different kinds of TV shows has occurred to someone in Europe.

One difference between US and Flemish (for example) TV production is that HBO has a larger potential audience (on first sale) and an awful lot more money. Producing Battlestar Galactica is a gamble for a US channel, but it’s an enormous and unaffordable gamble for RTE or TV3.

John, the miniseries is included with the Season 1.0 collection; it’s the entirety of the first disk. You’ll pop it in and three hours later look up and go wha?

And then leap to swap in disk 2. The first “real” episode, 33, will kick your ass.

The season 2.0 disk set is the first ten episodes of season 2, collected just before the second half began (the SciFi channel runs a weird split-season schedule, which means shows with long arcs get a cliffhanger in the middle), which was a lightning-fast and supersmart move, at least from their perspective of me as a consumer; I wanted more, and could get it, quick enough, and now I’m up to speed with everyone else. (Of course, since we can download episodes from Apple pretty much right after they’re broadcast, we don’t have to subscribe to cable to get the new stuff.) –Anyway: good stuff, and I’ll stop nattering about the meta aspects.

(Actually, a question and a caveat: do you know the old skool show at all? And: its one drawback is how relentlessly straight it is. Plenty of ho-yay, but none at all actually acknowledged except with the winkiest of wink-nudges.)

You guys are so far behind the curve. There’s loads of BSG slash popping up now! Yay for sleazy sex.

Anyone on for a discussion of BSG and Mormonism?

Battlestar Galactica is unquestionably one of the finest shows on TV right now, and definitely the best SF show to hit the airwaves since Firefly (which is all of, what, 3 years ago? heh).

That said, I find it philosophically frustrating (if the Cylon-humans are physically and psychologically indistinguishable from humans, how are they still Cylons? Derek Parfit would hate this show. And what exactly does Baltar’s test DO? And how did the Pegasus survive the Cylon virus that disabled all advanced ships? And why didn’t Roslin just promote Adama as soon as they came into contact with Pegasus? And and and…)

Whatever you do, don’t waste time on 2001, a Space Odyssey. I found out the hard way, when the turkey first came out, just how utterly boring it is.