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A Nada World
The TV Series

A Nada World



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So, ok, here we go, ok, right, so, anyway, yeah, ok, here's the deal, ok.

ok.

so, there's this TV show, right, and it's a drama series all about people, right, get this, people who work in a theme park! Brilliant! Theme park! Excellent. hold on...(long snort)...ok, where was I? Ok, now the people at this theme park, right, they're like young people, so they can be young beautiful people, maybe working through college, or even going to high school, but they also work at the theme park, doing this like fantasy shit with princesses and dragons and stuff, right? You getting me? yeah? well, check it out! You know what we do, get this get this, right: We build the whole theme park! Completely! A real theme park! Where our TV show is set. Brilliant! Why? I'll tell you. I'll tell you right now. Ok, you see, we've got the show about the people who work at a theme park, then people watch the show and love it, and so when they hear about that the theme park is real, they go "Wow! I'm there dude!" and they go to the theme park and rides on the rides that they saw on the show and go "Dude, I was like so there!".

(long pause, deep breath)

And then on top of the TV show about the theme park, you have a cartoon series with the characters from the TV show, so that you can get the youngsters in early, and you don't have to worry about your stars getting old-lookin'.

Ok, so we've got the TV show based in the theme park, and the theme park based on the TV show, and a cartoon based on the TV show based in the theme park, what next? What next? CDs of the music performed at the theme park, as seen on the TV show about the theme park! Brilliant! People will be stoked to listen to the songs they heard at the theme park after hearing them on the TV show! And the songs will be sung by the people on the show! And in summer we can have big outdoor shows of the people on the TV show at the theme park, singing the songs that the people heard on the TV show about the theme park.

Man this shit is great!

Ok, so where to we go from there? Where? I'll tell you where! We take the stories from the rides at the theme park and make them into movies! So people can watch the TV show and see the theme park, then visit the park and ride the rides, then go see the movie and go "hey, dude, I get it now!" and then they'll go back to the ride and ride it again.

That's so coooooooool.

And and and and and and guess what else? While you're making the theme park, and the TV show about the theme park, and producing the music and the movies, you get a camera crew to follow everyone around, and then produce a reality show about the making of the theme park, TV show, music and movies! So instead of getting just an hour of television a week, you could get maybe three to four hours a week out of the same material!

UUUUUNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNREALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!!

Then there's all the merchandise available based on the theme park, TV show, CDs and movies: toys, clothes, stationary, DVDs, lollies, photos, giftware, limited-edition maquettes... the list goes on.

snnnnnooooooOOOOOOOooooort!

Whaddyareckon!!





posted by Chad 9:04 AM

So here's my question: Why hasn't someone produced a series about Paintball?

In an age where sport and entertainment are intertwined, isn't Paintball the epitome of television entertainment?

You have the element of sport: two factions, fighting it out, a battle between two sides, each member relying on their companions, chasing victory.

You have the element of war: two factions, fighting it out, a battle between two sides, each member relying on their companions, chasing victory.

You have an element of Wrestling: a bunch of grown-ups acting like children, for the entertainment of others.

You have the element of tactics: which style of play will outfox the other?

You have an element of fashion: Who's wearing what on the battlefield this season? If the Paintball colour clashes with their ensemble, will they just die?

Seriously, look at WWE. It's a fictional sport, where guys dress up and do choreographed routines, for the delight of thousands of live fans, and millions of fans on the telly.

All the backstage stories are staged, the people involved are kept or discarded depending on their usefulness to the story, and there is very little in actual shock value.

In comparison, with Paintball, you could have several teams of real combatants, with real tactics, working as a cohesive force to beat another team and secure victory.

It could easily be as exciting as any sport. It could be commentated like footy or rugby, and covered with cameras ala Big Brother.

It would do a valuable public service showing the damage the impact from a paintball can do on the human body. I think that would be a deterrent against idiots with guns of any kind.

Winning teams would be applauded, their strategies deconstructed and analysed, footage of their victory played from every angle.

They would be sports heroes and battle veterans rolled into one. They would have the athleticism of the former and the instincts of the latter.

Paintball could be the next Wrestling, without the lycra.





posted by Chad 4:24 PM

Bow your heads and pray:

Oh Lord, let this be the last column about the finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

May this simple offering be the final drip of the proverbial tap that has gushed for so long with rivers of words about the show, deep as a diving pool in column-inches, yet shallow as a wading pool in depth.

We beseech thee that there be no more articles going on about how fantastic and interesting the show was, while being neither fantastic nor interesting to read, simply regurgitating facts about the show that anybody who had vaguely heard of it already knew.

Oh, let there be no more paragraphs filled with phrases such as "cheerleader who kicks ass", "girl power", "cult following" or "wicca", and contains delightful wordplay, such as "so much at stake" or "slaying her inner demons".

We pray for a time of peace, when reporters cease from explaining the differences and similarities between fans of Buffy and Star Trek. And talking about how many university-minded people are fans. And how Buffy singly reinvented the genre, promoted the strength of the female and apparently busted through taboos such as sexuality, drug use and witchcraft that no show had ever done before.

Let there be no more mention that "Hush" didn't have dialogue, or that "Once More with Feeling" was a musical episode.

Let there be no more mention of Buffy's amazing fashion sense, or her ability to kick demon booty and still remain immaculately dressed.

Let there be no more use of the phrase "coming of age".

For the roar of words that began in the States has reached the shores of Australia, and the reporters of news have taken up the cry, cheering the demise, yet not adding a jot to the common knowledge.

The words, strung together like good poetry, contain little depth, like bad poetry.

So we beseech you, oh Lord, enough with the onerous crap.

May people who write things give it a rest, in the hope that one day, we can come back to the show with a fresh eye, keen wit and an unjaded use of the Microsoft Word Thesaurus.

May the next person who writes an article about the finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer have something more than platitudes.

Let them add to the public knowledge, not repeat it ad nauseum. Let them sip from the Cup of Originality, not sup from the Goblet of... Unoriginalitiness... or something... like that...


Otherwise, just let it rest in peace.


Amen.

The above prayer, while directed towards the aforementioned "Lord", does not register a gender to any deity listening in, or any higher being with omniscient powers who happens to be trawling the web. He, She, It or Them can be Whoever, Whomever, Whatever or However they like. On the occasion that He, She It or They are reading this blurb, if you could see yourself clear to give me some more hair, that would be much appreciated. On my head this time. Thanks.

posted by Chad 12:09 PM

Having television shows making up things for the sake of a plot device is one thing, but when your show’s significant feature is using realistic scientific to solve crimes, using dubious technology to move the story along is not on.

CSI:Miami had a story about a sniper shooting people from high distances. Mr Sniper (or Snipee to his friends) liked to lie on top of tall buildings and pick off people several hundred feet away.

In an effort to pinpoint the sniper’s location, Horatio and his team use a bunch of dummies with laser pointers sticking out of faux-wounds.

So Horry and his tribe then use a set of binoculars to find the laser points, which they find – in their technicolour glory, looking two metres wide, on the side of a tall building!

Success!

It’s lucky that Hoz and Co were looking in the right direction, otherwise they wouldn’t have seen the giant computer-generated spots hovering on the side of the building.

OK, one breach of the computer-generated plot contrivance is acceptable. But two?

Later in the same episode, two of the investigators are checking out the ATM camera footage of a bloke with sunnies on. Hold on, says one, there’s a reflection on his sunnies. Zoom in on that blur there. Now clean it up. Now zoom in some more on that cleaned-up blur. And what do we see?

A crystal-clear image of a baseball team logo.

All from a blurred reflection from a pair of sunnies in an ATM surveillance tape?

Two strikes.

If it wasn’t CSI, I would still probably bitch about it. But the fact that the primary defining feature of the two CSI shows is the science solving the crime means that the story shouldn’t require science to be botched for the sake of the story progression.

Still lukewarm to the CSI:Miami experience…







posted by Chad 6:21 PM

Angel has finished for the year, which makes fours years down for the vampire with a soul, and all the other tag-alongs. It’s been up ad down life for the lifeless one in his own show. First year, Angel broke away from the continuity of Buffy and started it’s own little world of vamps and demons in the inner-city, and even crossed a line that Buffy only dabbled with: evil in the hearts of man, not demons. And who represents the evil that man can do?

Yes, lawyers. Angel’s biggest bad wasn’t an abstract demonic personality, it was a law firm. OK, a law firm whose senior partners are of a demonic variety and whose law staff practise dark arts as well as… er… law, but it made a distinction from the various covens and mystic gatherings that entertained us on Buffy.

Season 2 continued along the same lines roughly as Season 1 to begin with, then started down the track of Darla and Drusilla’s appearance into the fray. From that point, a convoluted story began to emerge that hit a peak with the introduction of Connor, son of Angel, during Season 3. When I say peak, it’s a dramatic storytelling peak, not “peak” as in really interesting thing that happened. Because it wasn’t.

Connor was abducted as a bub, then returned soon after as a teenage boy: moody, angry, sullen. Angel Junior. You would think after growing up in a demon dimension, he would be a little different to any other teenage boy, but apparently not.

Unfortunately, Season 3 relied heavily on the story arc of Angel and his son, to the detriment of the individual stories. Continue the overeaching story, at the expense of the entertainment value of the here and now.

I guess the thing about long running shows is that they can require the viewer to see everything that came before to understand the story.

Anyway, Season 4 started where the last season left off: Angel under the sea, Cordy among the stars. So Wes gets Angel up out of the drink and Cordy turns up, bleary-eyed and singing the amnesia blues. Then things start happening and… actually I got a little lost after a while. Something about a guy blotting out the sun (but only in Los Angeles) and Angel turning into Angelus (because that always turns out well) and Cordy being evil and giving birth to a fully-grown bewitching black goddess (excuse me, bewitching African-American goddess).

Which leads to the final confrontation between good and evil – and the most god-awful convoluted plot explanation this side of a soapie wedding.

Shits me to high heaven. I watch the show avidly, and I also check stuff out on the net, and even I was confused. What is a new viewer going to think? So the evil chick is the girl that Angel loves? What, like the old Batman/Catwoman deal? And the middle-aged goddess is the product of the chick in the coma and the little boy? And what was the deal with the Destroyer dude?

Word on the dubs has it that next season is looking to be more directed towards single stories. I for one say bring it on. Have all the linking arc you like, but keep it in the background.

If someone turned on the show for the first time halfway through Season 4, do you think they would tune in the next week?

Remember Joss, everyone is a Angel virgin at one point.

(I said “Angel”, smut-bags…)



posted by Chad 6:12 PM

The grand experiment that was Micallef Tonight has been knocked on the heads like so many stray cats. Packer and his band of merry men in programming have decided that the ratings for this show weren't really justifying its continued existence.

And fair enough too. The show was being constantly outrated by Andrew Denton's show on the ABC, and if a commercial show is being outrated by whatever is being shown on ABC, well, it's not exactly a good commercial property is it?

So what was wrong with Micallef Tonight that made people not want to watch it?

Could it be something to do with the abundance of Channel Nine personalities who made appearances? At least four people from The Block made appearances, which is almost half the regular "cast".

Could it be a lack of interest in the night-time talk-show format? Enough Rope with Andrew Denton has had decent figures during the life of Micallef Tonight.

Could it be that the show drew nothing new out of its guests? I don't remember anyone who appeared as a guest showing off any particular entertaining new traits, be it juggling or yodelling, magic tricks or breakdancing. In fact, all the guests I can remember sat down, talked for a while, then either sang or just left. All the "improvisational" humour came from the regulars.

And I say "improvisational" in inverted commas because it was the most tightly-scripted improvisational comedy seen for a long time. Francis Greenslade and Livinia Nixon's asides were all perfectly pre-planned, allowing very little spark between the players. A lot of the humour from the show played on blank looks following misdirected questions, which are funny in spontaneous circumstances, but become tired when repeated in a scripted format.

A lot of the time both sides of the equation, the questioner and the questionee, were scripted players, with the result being a scripted line, or a scripted blank look, which is not as funny as the same blank look from an unscripted guest.

A lot of laughs depended on the bizarre rather than the outright funny. I'm a big fan of "funny (peculiar)", but for the general public to enjoy a comedy show, it needs to be balanced with "funny (ha-ha)". The average viewer doesn't want to put the effort into seeing the comedic connections: they'll laugh when an Englishman, an Australian and an Irishman go into a bar, but not when they see the three men at a bus stop waiting for the bus to Punchline.

People don't wanna work for their laughs at 9.30 at night. It's a sweeping generalisation, but methinks a valid one.

Of course the show did do some things right. Regular spots such as "Shaun gets in his High Horse" gave Micallef the opportunity to spout catch-phrases like "Into the bin! (whip-crack)". "Consumer Power...tips" was reminiscent of Amanda Keller's spots on the old Channel Seven Denton show. And occasionally the ongoing gags concerned more than just someone dressed up in a funny costume.

Personally, I think if the show had come across more honest, rather than as a set-up, it would have connected with more people. Thinking back to the days of Tonight Live with Steve Vizard, you could see that Vizard really wore his emotions on his sleeve: if he thought it was funny, he laughed, if he didn't think it was funny, well, he laughed, but he moved onto a different topic soon after.

Micallef's smug yet startled persona never appealed as much as a real personality would, which is why I think the audience didn't stick around. Look at presenters such as Rove McManus and David Letterman and you have a fair idea of what they are like personally. If Shaun Micallef's on-screen character matches his off-screen personality, I'm thinking awkward silences, sideway shuffles and half-coughed apologies, like walking into a politician at a adult bookstore. All day. Every day. For life.

The sad thing is that if anyone was going to make it work, I would have picked Shaun Micallef. I think there was a lot of backroom shuffling before it got off the ground, which accounted somewhat for its late arrival. Some of the apprehension may have come from not knowing what the show actually should be: comedy show or talk show. The end result was a comedy show with segments of talking to guests, having to bounce back and forward throughout the hour.

It’s never been easy for an Australian comedy show of any description to find an audience. It took Rove McManus two goes for he got it right. Maybe next time will work out for Shaun Micallef.



posted by Chad 10:49 PM

OK, so three guys in bad 80s vinyl jumpsuits are showing their best breakdancing moves, poppoing and locking on a street corner. “The Robot” hasn’t been so prominent on TV since 1983.

And so the three guys, in lovely matching pink, green and blue outfits are breaking it down and chilling and whatever breakdancing people do when they’re breakdancing.

And then they pick up their boombox (do they still call them ghetto-blasters?) and head out, and the super advises us to check out the new coloured wrappers.

And as the guys walk away, and we see their names on their backs (Mini, Reg and Super), they finally reveal the product which is trying to suck us all into their vicious consumerial circle: tampons.

Frigging tampons.

There are so, so many levels at which this ad is wrong.

For a start, three guys breakdancing in technicolour vinyl suits? What demographic in Hell responds to that?

And if there are people who belong in that cursed demographic, how many of them are women?

And if indeed there were breakdancers in brightly coloured vinyl suits inhabiting the streets of BigTown, how many of them would call themselves Mini?

Crazy Legs? OK, a little silly.
Kuriaki? No idea.

A guy called Mini? How long do they think he would last on the streets with a tag like that?

And further, once they leave the sidewalk and go walk off into the sun-less-set, where the hell do they go?

Home to some surly 40-foot woman?

This has to be one of the stupidest ads I have seen for quite a while.



posted by Chad 6:12 PM

Who said that Hungry Jacks aren't cool and with it, as the young people used to say, but would now be laughed at for mumbling?

Yeah, those pimp daddies at HJ's are cutting it with homies and chilling Eastside with their peeps.

They're panging their ding-dongs with the mojo working riverside, G, and they're hopping on the phatcruiser to Dishville.

Yeah, I got no idea what that means either...

I'm slightly bemused by a new Hungry Jack's ad featuring a pastiche of an Eminem song and a "cool guy" doing a Fonz impersonation.

Despite wedging two cultural icons into an apparent amalgam of cool (eh?), Hungry Jacks just doesn't cut the mustard in the cool stakes.

The music, for a start, is tacky. It's everything an Eminem song sounds like, if produce by a low-budget sound production house with a Casio keyboard.

Then there's the guy in the leather jacket, from memory, leaning against a car, who gives the camera a thumbs-up as it passes by.

Then there's the close-up of the obviously fake tattoo in the arm, complete with white background so you can read the writing.

It's all the things that your parents never liked, rolled up into one tacky, cheap, vacuous bundle, in an attempt to buy a Whopper.

"If you're a tosser with fake tattoos who wears a leather jacket and likes to give the thumbs-up, while listens to muzak versions of young-people's music, this is the burger for you!"

Can't wait for the next series of ads:

"Like Trivial Pursuit? Think goatees are neat? Enjoy house music from the early 90s while wearing your Hypercolor shirts? Well, have we got the burger for you!"

or maybe:

"The new Orange Swirl Flavoured Drink: It's for everyone!*

_{*"everyone" includes only people who own trading cards and a yo-yo. People who remember the line "I love it when a plan comes together" are also included, but only if they don't actually smoke cigars, but just mime them. Unless they mime like Groucho Marx, ala Alan Alda in M*A*S*H. They're not included."}

If you're looking at attracting the "young adults", Mr and Mrs Jacks, try giving your advertising account to a company that knows what the young adults really respond to, not some amalgam of ideas over the last quarter century. Spend less on fake tattoos and more on cutting edge graphical style.

The type used on the ads is mundane, not eye-catching at all, just purely functional. In other words, dull.

But, says Messrs Jacks, if you mess with the type, then people can't read it!!

But, says I smugly, look at the recent Coke ads, where the type is all over the shop. That's impressive, AND readable.

MacDonalds pushes funky people over food in ads that come across like a music videos.

Hell, the graphics on the Discovery Channel look funkier that Hungry Jacks ads.

Lift your game, H. Jacks, or you'll never be the cultural reference point you aspire to be.



posted by Chad 4:03 PM