- Hope that was worth it, Brady Quinn. The greedy, arrogant would-be golden boy quarterback has finally signed a contract with the Cleveland Browns and now we can all see if he’s as good as he thinks he is. Quinn and the Browns have reached an agreement on a 5-year deal, meaning he can sign it and get into camp. I’ve been hard on the guy for holding out, and that resentment stands for now, but realize one thing, that if he comes in and performs extremely well, most of the animosity from his holdout will go by the wayside. Yes, he may still have a bit of a stigma from holding out for so long, but what ultimately matters to players, fans and coaches is whether you can be out there on the field, helping your team win. If Quinn does that, then in the long term you have to weigh his contribution to the team against holding out for a week and a half and decide which is more important to you. Now, if that holdout retards Quinn’s growth and hinders his play during the season, that obviously changes things. However, five years down the road he’ll be judged on how he has played on the field and not on how long he held out. In other words, during a long holdout, the holdout itself becomes a big issue, but once a player gets on the field the holdout fades into the background and you move on. For the first half of this season or so, it might linger in the air for Quinn because he could have had a chance to win the starting quarterback job outright if he’d been in camp on time and now he’ll have to sit and wait, but in the long term the past week and a half won't matter nearly as much – if he plays well, that is. But at this point, Browns fans would be well advised to put the holdout out of their minds and judge their new signee by how he does on the field.
- Last night’s episode of Greek was a mixed bag, fluctuating between hilarious and overly obvious in its humor and resulting in an uneven, decent episode that definitely wasn’t among the series’ best so far. High points for humor would include Cappie (Scott M. Foster) calling for a pledge to fetch him his “Cougar Sack” so he could sweet talk an older woman named Gladys into approving the fraternity’s noise permit for their Vesuvius party, the scene where Rusty’s (Jacob Zachar) plan to fix the broken mini volcano of the Kappa Tau house results in beer “raining” from the sky and Rusty’s roommate Dale (Clark Duke) sweet talking a particle-accelerating weather device like it was a girl, even as those around him looked on mortified at the weirdness of his monologue. Still, minus points go for the clichéd, tired scene where a girlfriend (Spencer Grammer) tries to secretly crash a party to check in on her boyfriend and ends up making a scene and embarrassing herself instead. Plus, the show continues to hammer on two topics that are totally unimaginative and have little entertainment value: 1) Every scene Duke’s Dale character appears in, the guy is spouting religious talk nonstop, which I think is supposed to be humorous because he’s such an uptight dork, but at some point it just gets annoying when a character is that one-dimensional, which brings me to the second topic, 2) the same thing that’s true for Dale is true for Calvin, the character whose sole known quality on the show has been that he’s gay and doesn’t want people to know. Every scene he has centers on his trying to live his life as a gay guy while at the same time keeping those around him from knowing that he is gay. Right now, keeping every character but the main two or three (Rusty, Casey and possibly Evan) so one-dimensional isn’t a big deal, but this show is going to crap out much sooner than it should if the producers and writers don’t develop more of the characters and give them some depth. The fact that Rusty is such a likeable character and you’re always rooting for him helps immeasurably, so props for ending the whole dork/virgin/never been kissed drama and finally having the poor guy get a kiss from an equally awkward, overly talkative fellow pledge from his sister’s sorority (Jen something-or-the-other, like the girl said, there are three girls named Jen at the sorority, it’s hard to keep them straight). If I were giving a grade for this episode, it would be a B or B-, still not bad. As always, if you missed it you can catch a re-air Friday on ABC at 9 p.m.
- Different lead singer, same blatant cash and glory grab. Van Halen is back on tour, this time with Eddie Van Halen at the mic, fresh out of rehab and ready to rock. Yes, rock fans, one of the most sellout, corporate, arena rock bands of all time is back and just as mediocre as ever. Break out the big hair, black leather jacket and pompous attitude, because Eddie and the boys are about to embark on a 50-city U.S. tour to rake in millions of your hard-earned dollars. There had been talk of an amphitheater tour this summer, but E. Van Halen’s trip to rehab scuttled that idea. Well, at least he can be thankful that his rehab stint was longer and more successful than any of Lindsay Lohan’s many, many trips to posh detox centers. I don’t think the combined time from Lohan’s four or five rehab trips is as long as the few months Van Halen spent getting clean, so props on that Eddie. If you recall, the band’s last tour was in 2004 with Sammy Hagar as lead singer and the tour grossed nearly $40 million. Eddie Van Halen hasn’t toured with the group in two decades, but my guess is that his goal for this tour, besides padding his bank account and satisfying his ginormous ego, is to earn more than the Hagar-led tour. Allow me to take you on a hypothetical tour experience so you can avoid wasting time and money on attending a show in your area: Tickets will be grossly overpriced and you won't be able to shake the feeling that you wasted a lot of money on them. Souvenirs will also be overpriced, with t-shirts selling for $35-40 and concessions going for three or five times their normal cost. The music will be mediocre and the musicians will be overweight, poorly conditioned versions of their former selves, leading to a nonstop series of remarks between you and your concert companion about how the band just doesn’t sound as good as they did twenty years ago. So there you have it, now you can spend that money on something more worthwhile, perhaps some new socks or a new iPod.
- Researching booze is a career that at least two-thirds of Americans aspire to at some point in their life. Like many other “scientific” studies done, though, alcohol research seems beset by the problem of spending loads of time and money yet reaching blatantly obvious conclusions that we all already knew before the study was done. This new study has set the scientific world on its ear by revealing that teens tend drink what they can get from their parents liquor stash, while adults who can legally buy alcohol tend to go for beer because it’s cheaper. Wow, you mean that kids who want to experiment with alcohol tend to drink whatever is close at hand? No way! And then you want me to believe that adults tend to drink beer, which is cheaper, easier to find and more socially acceptable to drink en masse? With findings like those, I’m inclined to believe that the researchers were the ones binging on alcohol instead of studying those who do. What was the budget breakdown for this project, anyhow? Was half of the money spent on beer, then ten percent each on buying vodka, gin, tequila, rum and scotch? Good job researchers, once again you’ve succeeded in “informing” us about things we already knew, mission accomplished.
- The success of supernatural-themed shows like Smallville, Supernatural and Heroes has inevitably inspired a slew of shows attempting to gravy train off the genre’s success, two of the more pathetic examples of which can be seen coming up in a few weeks when the fall TV season kicks off. Maybe you think I’m jumping the gun by shooting down two shows that haven’t even premiered yet, but Reaper (CW) and Pushing Daisies (ABC) both look….umm…..bad. Reaper looks to be the worse of the two, with the laughably bad premise of a guy whose parents have sold his soul to the devil and conscripted him to a life of capturing souls that have escaped from hell and returning them to the devil. Worse yet, this is supposed to be a comedy. However, when you can't even find funny sequences with decent acting for the promos, your show doesn’t have much potential for success. Seriously, the acting is so bad in these promos that it makes Gigli look Shakespearean by comparison. Add the bad acting to the ludicrous premise and you have a show I not only won't watch, I’ll go out of my way not to even flip past the channel when it’s on. Pushing Daisies has a slight advantage in that it’s produced by ABC, an actual major network instead of a hack-job amateur-hour joke of a network like the CW. Still, Daisies relies on an equally absurd premise, that a guy can touch dead people and bring them back to life and presumably uses this ability to revive murder victims, get them to tell him who killed them and then touches them again, thus rendering them deceased once more. Again, the way the network is promoting this, it’s supposed to be a comedy, ha ha. If you’ll notice the three shows I listed at the beginning of this paragraph, the reason they worked is that they are supernatural-themed shows that are dramas. Supernatural dramas work, supernatural comedies invariably fall flat on their faces. But at least when both of these new shows are canceled a few weeks into the season, I won't have invested any time in watching them and won't be sad to see them go.
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