“George Hurt You” shirts are in the store!!!
I like to imagine that if Jorge Garcia and Sam Niel backed out of J.J. Abrams‘ Alcatraz due to extreme insulaphobia, the producers would just go down the list of combination Lost and Jurrasic Park stars. First they would ask Matthew Fox and Jeff Goldblum, then Evangeline Lily and Laura Dern until they eventually settled on the guy that played Boone and the bottom half of an animatronic triceratops.
I watched the two episode premiere of Alcatraz and I definitely enjoyed it. It seems to be the J.J. Abrams show that has learned from the mistakes (real and perceived) of previous J.J. Abrams shows. It is a serialized mystery like LOST, but they have clearly planned out a trajectory for the show as opposed to “let’s keep doing crazy shit and hope it all works out in the end.” I say this only because there is no way he would pitch another show with no endgame after the complete shit-bagel that was the final three seasons of LOST. It also relies on the LOSTesque “present day/ flashbacks” plot device to tell it’s 50 year spanning story. It worked for the first few seasons of LOST and I expect it to work for this show as long as they don’t lose themselves trying to make TOO MANY interweaving back stories in the flashbacks.
Despite the fact that I think Fringe is the best show on television, period, I know that there are aspects of it that have scared off a mass audience and even universal adoption among geeks and sci-fi fans. Chief among them are the show’s “bad guy/experiment gone wrong of the week” elements overshadowing the overall story arch and vice versa. With a show like Fringe, or the X-Files or now Alcatraz striking a balance between episodic story and seasonal story is key to maintaining audience interest without leading to frustration. Alcatraz has laid the groundwork for a pretty flexible mix between the two that should lend itself to compelling stories with a fair amount of payoff vs. new questions. Since the premise depends on some 250+ inmates, guards and personel coming back from the past (seemingly one at a time) there should be room for a nice mix of “there’s a new murderer on the loose,” “there’s an inmate that we can feel sympathetic toward,” “hey, now there’s a guard and we need to help him find closure,” and due to the large numer of returning baddies they should be able to do the occasional ep featuring groups of them coming to the present to cause trouble.
Of couse, I might be just overly optimistic that Bad Robot is going to take everything they’ve learned from making (mostly) high quality television over the last decade and put that knowledge to good use. As a frustrated fan of LOST and an evangelist for Fringe, the “right things to do” seem obvious to me. Then again, I don’t make TV shows.
- POLL: So does Alcatraz have what it takes to be the next Lost?
- Alcatraz is only really interesting when it’s about prison brutality
- Jorge Garcia unravels the brain-twisting mysteries of Alcatraz
Speaking of people that make TV shows and J.J. Abrams, my dear friend Amy is now a writer/executive producer on Bad Robot’s Person Of Interest. It premiered at a time that I felt like I was being crushed under the weight of the amount of TV I was already watching, but I have only heard good things about the show. I need to start watching and get caught up.
COMMENTERS: What did you think of Alcatraz? Good start, shows potential or pass? How exactly has their island time effected Hurley and Dr. Grant’s daily lives? What other combination of LOST/Jurassic Park cast members should be on Alcatraz, or any other show for that matter? How about an CSI spin-off starring Anna Lucia and Nedry? She’s the angry, drunk, tough-as-nails detective who keeps accidentally murdering people, and he’s the fat, bumbling forensic scientist that keeps getting acid spit into his face!
Speaking of other people that make TV shows, Jon Rogers makes a show called Leverage, Wil was a guest star on that show, during filming he got the whole cast saying/doing the “Sci-Five,” Aldis Hodge adlibbed one during the season finale (“The Last Dam Job”) and IT MADE IT IN! A phrase coined by one of my shirts, was uttered and acted out in a TV show that I watch. ON THE TV! What is that I don’t even…
I was going to look up information about the real Alcatraz Island in order to make some sort of witticism, but Wikipedia is blacked out in protest over SOPA. Instead, I'll have to rely on my own spotty memory and accumulated knowledge of bad Sam Neil movies, which may or may not be cross-wired with Back to the Future in my brain.
Where they're going, they won't need roads to see.
Thank you for opposing Sopa and Pip!
On a side note I would buy a shirt that said "Raptors: Pissed off chickens with machetes for feet."
… and almost as scarey as the tattoed-illiterate-overpaid-overmedicated-overhyped-rubber-ball-bouncers-in-cutoffs. They also pretend to reside in a city called Toronto …..
Watched the first two episodes, and I think I'm gonna have to give it a pass. Due to the whole "criminal of the week" setup, it feels to me like CSI:Time Travel. Just not digging it at all.
It's ironic that you are showing the T-Shirt bemoaning how George Lucas keeps tinkering with his Star Wars movies when discussing JJ Abrams, aka the man who #@$%ed up Roddenberry's Star Trek!
Considering that the previous outing in the Star Trek 'verse was the diarrhea milkshake called ENTERPRISE, I would say that JJ Abrams instead pulled off a Bionic Man:
"Star Trek, franchise. A once fantastic universe, barely alive.
JJ Abrams: Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the technology. We have the capability to build the world's best rebooted franchise. Star Trek will be that franchise. Better than it was before. Better… stronger… faster!
Better, stronger, faster…more lens flare.
Mmm… milkshake.
The two are in no way even similar. Lucas makes insignificant changes to existing works. Abrams took an existing franchise in a different direction. I think 50 years is a long enough time to wait for a reboot. Also, Rodenberry (according to his son) wanted someone to reboot Star Trek. He even named JJ Abrams as a likely candidate.
Making an entirely new movie in the franchise isn't what the T-shirt is about, it's the back-dated remasterings and re-editings and re-everythings that change the original movies without actually leaving the original in all its glory. He isn't taking the creative license to attempt a remake, he's just butchering what we fell in love with in the first place by changing those films themselves.
Girlfriend and I watched the first 40 minutes and then turned it off. The part that made me reach for the remote? 2 shot cops in the street. Girl runs up and grabs A RADIO… and says "2 officers down, send a bus" and then runs the fuck away without ever say where the fuck she is. Dispatch is not a mind reader. Those cops aren't tagged with tracking devices. A writing mistake like that, to me, did not bode well for the rest of the series.
Wow, you're right! That's an epic fail on their part. I think there's a trope for that: Did Not Do The Research.
I have not seen the series, but if they arrived in squad cars, then yes dispatch has access to the location of their squad cars since those are on GPS.
I'm fine with the present day/flashback thing for now. But the first flash-sideways I'm outta there.
I'd just like to point out that you made a typo or two in that pretty-cool protest page. The flashlight thing more than makes up for this, of course.
If you see a typo, contact me directly so I can fix it. Otherwise, just pointing out that there was one, without even mentioning what it was just seems unnecessarily pedantic.
Point taken. If you keep it up/there's another protest, I'll send you a version with the typos fixed (if you didn't find them).
I love Josh's pancake, egg, bacon, burger, bacon, pancake sandwich! Your friend Amy joined a great show. I have never missed an episode of Person of Interest.
It looks delicious doesn't it. so delicious.
It needs a name.
Reference to a kiwi actor in one of my favorite web comics, jingoistic high five!
Didnt realize he was a kiwi. I know he was born in Ireland but apparently moved to NZ as a kid.
Neill is most definitely a kiwi, though I wasn't even aware he was born in Ireland. His Father was third generation New Zealander though (I missed you wikipedia).
I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I love the dynamic of having a criminal of the week that continually adds to the cast exponentially per show, but now that you mention it, the show has a serious lack of Goldblum.
"Nature, and murders, find a way."
I plan to watch Alcatraz, haven't gotten to it yet.
I have tried watching Person of Interest, because there's nothing else of interest to me in that particular time slot. So far, it's not gripping me. It's "I can watch this, or I can go take a shower."
It started as a must-try-to-see and now it's a if-nothing's-on.
I just want to say thank-you for all and any references to Moon!
But on topic, after X-FIles and Lost, both of which still possess me, I find myself tired of what I call CSM Syndrome, in which the shadowy authority figure gives only cryptic answers, and the hero just accepts it and follows him into danger instead of saying, "No, asshole, answer my question."
Reading this strip, i felt like I was reading xkcd.com (another webcomic for those who don't know about it), a running joke in it is the author, Randall Munroe's, intense fear of raptors.
The 2-dimensional characters here are the dead giveaway, rather than xkcd's stick men. 🙂
The real question is, "where are Joel and Josh in the first panel?" I don't know about you, but anyplace that serves steakcicles and breakfast artery smashers is somewhere I want to be.
WOOT! The interwebs are WINNING! Now if only we could get people to care this much about all political matters…
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2087673/W…
what if JJAbrams wrote a script that had nothing to do with time travel? would the universe wink out of existence?
"Alias" didn't time travel (as I recall).
Nor did MI3.
So. Does Alcatraz have what it takes to be the next Lost? In my house? Absolutely. I never felt a compelling reason to watch Lost & feel likewise about Alcatraz..
It was a fun show, but the police procedural end was full of holes. Bigger than the bad research, though, I had a problem with Sarah Jones as a homicide detective. Sure, she’s 5’8″, which is above average for a woman, and she looks fairly athletic (although she runs like Steven Segal [i.e. – like a nine-year-old fat girl]), but she looks like a goddamn pixie. No way the police would take her seriously. I realize this is a bit shallow, but if you naturalky look like Peter Pan, shouldn’t you at least be smart enough to wear a hair style that looks a little more butch?