Charloween

FOX's latest crack-fest attempt at pretending it's still got some cred in making dramas is Drive... in which a group of strangers who don't know each other and don't really interact over the epic scope of the show participate in some epic road race thing. The catch - they're not all in it voluntarily, which means the stakes are high and there are lives on the line . Omg. But all the characters have different reasons for participating which means there'll probably more flashbacks than you can swing a Lost fan at. There's going to be car chases. There's going to be Momnets of Introspection. There's some ridonculously huge cash payoff which may or may not exist. There's some shadowy conspiracy thing happening, too.

...sound a bit like Heroes, eh? Ensemble cast, season-long plot arc played out in bits each week, action sequences, heavy on the character development. Even FOX's promotional photography for the show just screams "HAY FOLKS WE WISH WE WERE NBC AND THOUGHT OF IT FIRST". Heroes meets The Amazing Race meets that Stephen King novel The Long Walk (except probably not good). It premieres April 15 (8pm, FOX), if you're interested.

Which begs the question: why do I even care? Well... it stars Nathan Fillion. And Tim Minear is one of the writers, so maybe it isn't going to be as bad as all that. Maybe it'll be a case of really wacky marketing, like when CityTV was telling us to watch SPN because "It's like The OC, but with ghosts", or "Like your worst nightmare, but with hot guys!" (But that is a rant for another day.) Speaking of Tim Minear, I was listening to a commentary track of his and he speaks just like Joss Whedon. Their vebal patterns (whatever it's called) are nearly identical; the way they put sentences together, how and when they pause... it's uncanny.

I'm not going to watch SPN tonight (though the idea of Sam gettin' sexed up is pretty appealing); schoolwork is kicking my ass, I'm getting lazier and lazier and I can watch SPN any time but my English TA needs this paper tomorrow. So. There it is. I'm also looking forward to/dreading the next SPN ep, where it looks like they're hauling out the meta crack and aping more bad late-season XF episodes... and the episode title is from a Kenneth Anger book. Kenneth Anger, the noted gay experimental filmmaker, whose Hollywood Babylon (1965) is an exploration of fandom in relation to Hollywood scandals, "perverse" sexualities (that is, "the gay"), and the metatextual relationship of the fan to the product.

Kenneth Anger also had a thing for Aleister Crowley, was buddies with Anton LaVey (hee!), made a film called Invocation of My Demon Brother, and liked playing with supernatural/satanist imagery in his films. I saw some of his work last year. I don't think anyone's ever argued for SPN's subtlety, but this just takes the cake. If these references are intentional, that is.

I'm not sure whether to applaud the cleverness of the writers or cry little tears that the show is riffing off itself already. They've got a solid enough canon, yeah, but why are you turning inward (again) when you could be telling solid ghost stories? It took XF seven years to get to this level of cracky self-referentiality, but I guess the SPN fandom is large and rabid enough that they (okay, "we") must have hurried things along a bit. (Hollywood Babylon is also probably where Green Day got the line "Boulevard of Broken Dreams", but that's a whole other kettle of squee.)

Sigh. My education means I can *headdesk* about a whole other level of references. I should also stop reading SPN spoilers and get back to writing that paper about 1950s Hollywood. I'm also starting to wonder if anyone on the SPN staff has seen Anger's work, or if they just grabbed the title... BAH. This is so not worth thinking about.

( Quite possibly the strangest meme ever )

...& I've finished all three seasons of Arrested Development. I burned through the last season this weekend.* ♥. Next: VMars.

VMars, that is, and The Sweeney, a British cop show from the 70s, also referenced in an episode of Black Books- the one where Manny stays up all night, watches the DVD boxed set of The Sweeney and drinks espresso and ends up running around the city, impersonating a cop and carrying out the best damn interrogation that Inspector had ever seen... *sigh* Oh, the memories. I forget: it's never made quite clear who gave him the DVDs and the espresso machine for his birthday, is it? Which means: I must have been Bernard! Oh, Bernard.


I mentioned it yesterday, but I have to plug the "Nathan's my hero" clip again. Oh, Sean Maher. Oh, Nathan Fillion.



* Of course, now I've got in in my head I'll only watch DaVinci Code when and if there's a special director's cut with Ron Howard narrating the film.