On Sun, Nov 5, 2017 at 2:50 AM, Kevin M. <[email protected]> wrote:
> > On Sat, Nov 4, 2017 at 10:23 PM 'David Bruggeman' via TVorNotTV < > [email protected]> wrote: > >> Craig Ferguson is joined by wife Megan on Couple Thinkers, a six-episode >> online interview show sponsored by Gant, one of the plethora of online >> clothing sites littering peoples inboxes. Episodes run roughly 30 minutes, >> and you can go to the website below, or search for it on the YouTube. >> >> http://www.gant.com/couplethinkers/ >> >> Four of the six episodes are currently available, with the other two >> being released over the next two Sundays (so episode 5 may be available by >> the time you read this). Noted gasbag (tm Kevin) Jon Ronson is one of the >> guests, >> > > Yeah, I’ll skip the Ronson and Huffington episodes, but I’ll check the > rest out. I agree NDGTyson is potentially overexposed lately, but I still > find him amusing. > I watched the first episode a couple of weeks ago about food and urban farming with Kimball Musk. If I really like a series I make sure to watch an episode a day in order not to let my attention go to other things. That I haven't been back to watch the second episode is telling. I am a fan of Ferguson's work going back to when he was a guest on Tom Snyder's Late Late Show. I have read his books and seen him perform live. I truly want to like this series. The problem is that the show is not simply Craig's vision or his humor or his sensibility. The direction is all over the place and it feels that concepts don't get time to develop or penetrate the viewer's consciousness before they move on. It probably did not help that Kimball Musk (Elon's brother) is not very engaging even though his project is praiseworthy. I will concede that a lot of this might be pilot episode problems and they iron things out and improve as they make more episodes. I will give them credit for this: the urban garden they visited was in Watts. It was refreshing to see a part of LA that show business ignores and though there was little in the way of establishing shots, they didn't make it out to be a hellhole. The other side of this is that they spent a lot of time in Watts talking about making things better and the only people on camera were three affluent white people. I'm not especially looking forward to the NDGTyson episode, which is episode 2, and that may be why I'm watching the episodes daily. The problem is I'm pretty sure I know what Tyson is going to say. Science is studied by many of people with many viewpoints and a variety of voices is an important part of science communication. Making Tyson the go-to guy not only makes him overexposed it limits science to what Tyson thinks is noteworthy. I don't put Tyson himself at fault for this as I think he just wants to reach the biggest and most diverse audiences possible and being good on camera isn't a qualification for being a scientist. Still there must be other scientists, science writers, or science journalists to turn to. Jon Ronson has a new project out, an audio series called The Butterfly Effect. It's seven half hour episodes about what is happening in the porn industry in the wake of websites that show videos for free. The figurative butterfly flapping its wings was a techie teenager in Belgium who was in a Compuserve forum where people shared passwords to porn paysites and he listened to music that users uploaded to YouTube. And that starts off the chain of events. The series was done for Audible and it became available for download as a podcast in iTunes this past week. -- -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
