2010 Primetime Emmy Nominations

The 2010 Primetime Emmy nominees were announced this morning. Let's see how "my shows" fared.

Glee was one of the big winners of the morning, with a total of 19 nominations, including one for Outstanding Comedy Series. Apparently there are some Gleeks in the Academy. Matthew Morrison (Will Schuester) and Lea Michele (Rachel Berry) received nominations for Outstanding Lead Actor and Actress in a Comedy Series, and Jane Lynch (Sue Sylvester) and Chris Colfer (Kurt Hummel) got nods for Outstanding Supporting Actress and Actor in a Comedy. A few guest stars also got recognized, with Outstanding Guest Actor/Actress nominations for Mike O'Malley (Kurt's dad Burt) in the episode "Wheels" (where he argues for Kurt's right to audition for "Defying Gravity"), Kristin Chenoweth (April Rhodes) in "The Rhodes Not Taken" (the first episode she was in where April joins the glee club), and Neil Patrick Harris (Bryan Ryan) for "Dream On". Glee also got nominations for writing in the pilot episode, and directing in the pilot episode and the episode "Wheels". If you're interested in the other nine nominations Glee got, they were for casting, art direction, interactive media, costumes, sound mixing, and two noms each for hairstyling and makeup. All very well deserved.

Lost got some nice recognition for its epic final season. It was nominated for Outstanding Drama Series for the fourth time in its six-season run (it has only won the award once, for its first season). Matthew Fox (Jack) finally got his nomination for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series and, as they have before, Michael Emerson (Ben Linus) and Terry O'Quinn ("Locke") were nominated for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama. Elizabeth Mitchell (Juliet) got an Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series nomination for her role in final episode "The End". Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof were nominated for Outstanding Writing for a Drama for "The End", which also received nominations for directing, editing, sound editing, sound mixing, and music composition. Lost also got an art direction nod for episode "Ab Aeterno".

OK, now that I have the big ones out of the way, I'm just going to do a quick overview of the rest.

Big Bang Theory got a nomination for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy for Jim Parsons (Sheldon Cooper). It also got an Outstanding Guest Actress nom for Christine Baranski as Leonard's mom in episode "The Maternal Congruence".

How I Met Your Mother earned Neil Patrick Harris yet another supporting actor nomination for his role as Barney Stinson. But the show also got a nomination for Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics for "Nothing Suits Me Like a Suit" in the episode "Girls vs. Suits". Classic.

Canceled FlashForward got a tiny bit of recognition with a cinematography nod for episode "No More Good Days", as well as nods for stunts and music composition. My dear Fringe had to make due with a single sound editing nomination. A shame. Chuck also got one measly little nom, for stunt coordination.

Lastly, So You Think You Can Dance got two nominations for Outstanding Choreography: Stacey Tookey for her "Fear" dance, and Mia Michaels for "Gravity/Addiction", "Koop Island Blues" (aka "the butt dance"), and "One" (a group dance I had largely forgotten). The addiction dance gives me chills every time I rewatch it (which is a lot), so I hope she wins. No nomination for Sonya Tayeh, though--maybe next year. SYTYCD's Adam Shankman received a nomination for Choreography as well, for his work on the Academy Awards show.

Well those were the highlights of the nominations for me. I know there are lots of shows I should be watching that are also celebrating today (True Blood? 30 Rock? Modern Family? etc.). You can find all the nominees here, or a list of just the major category nominees here.

Winners will be announced in the awards ceremony on Sunday, August 29, hosted by Jimmy Fallon. Congratulations to all nominees!

Fall 2009 TV Season

Some TV shows have had an early start to their fall seasons (e.g., Glee's new episode last week), but for the most part, shows are just about to kick off for the year. Here's a list of the shows I'll be watching and when they'll air just in case you're interested, too.


Wednesday, Sept. 9

8/7c - So You Think You Can Dance (FOX)
Dancers of all disciplines from across the country must salsa, waltz, disco, hip hop, contemporary dance, tango, jazz, etc. their way through the competition to win the title of America's Favorite Dancer.
Kind of like American Idol for dance, SYTYCD is a competition where unknown talented dancers (and um, not-so-talented dancers) audition, the 20 best (10 girls, 10 guys) are selected to compete on the show, and America votes on their favorite dancers, eliminating one guy and one girl each week until one dancer wins in the finale. The dancers perform in couples (1 guy/1 girl except on special occasions towards the finale), selecting one or two styles of dance to tackle for the week. For the first five weeks, dancers are voted on as couples, and the judges have the final say in who goes home, selecting one guy and one girl from the three couples with the least votes. Once it's been narrowed down to the top 10 dancers, though, dancers are voted on individually and it's all up to America's votes. Dancers perform solos in their own style of dance if they are in the bottom three couples, and also every week once they get to the top 10, but most of the competition forces the dancers to move outside of their comfort zones--ballet dancers do hip hop, break dancers do smooth waltz, etc. How the dancers adapt is always surprising and impressive. The choreographers, who are tasked with not only choreographing but also teaching the dancers their style of dance, are amazing. I love this show for exposing such a large audience to such different styles of dance, making true art in many cases. ANYWAY, SYTYCD has had five successful summer seasons (one just ended a month ago), and now FOX is bumping it up to "real season" status. As long as they keep the good dances coming, I'll keep watching. Actually, I generally skip the audition episodes and wait until the real competition (with the top 20) starts. That won't happen until Tuesday, October 27.

9/8c - Glee (FOX)
Misfit students in the high school glee club try to find success (and glee) in the face of their "cool kid" oppressors (i.e., cheerleaders and jocks).
I talked about this show last week. The new episode last week was even funnier than the pilot (in my opinion)! It's a really smart, hilarious new show, and the music is delightful.


Thursday, Sept. 17 (FOX)

9/8c - Fringe (FOX)
FBI agent Olivia Dunham investigates crimes and disasters relating to the fringe sciences, along with Walter Bishop, a scientist specializing in fringe sciences, and his son Peter.
This show started off a little shaky last year, but by mid-season it was going strong with exciting mysteries and a thrilling blend of suspense and ickiness. The metaphysics behind the storyline revealed at the end of the season is intriguing. FOX is moving it up to the big time--9PM on Thursdays is the prime time slot, shared by juggernauts CSI and Grey's Anatomy. It holds the title of "last season's strongest freshman in the 18-49 demo", but here's hoping it'll catch on even more and hold its own.


Monday, Sept. 21

8/7c - How I Met Your Mother (CBS)
Ted tells his two kids the long, meandering story of how he met their mother. Many hijinks involving him and his four best friends ensue.
In my opinion, this is the best sitcom on TV right now. Hilarious, clever, and sweet. I still haven't seen most of the early seasons, but I didn't have too much trouble diving right into it at the beginning of last season. And we're getting closer to meeting the mother than we've ever been before. It's going to be legendary.

8/7c - Heroes (NBC)
Normal people, who have discovered they possess mutant superpowers, try to go about their normal lives but mostly find themselves fighting to resist (or assist) assorted bad guys and organizations hatching nefarious plots that only the Heroes can stop.
Like many, I loved the first season of this show, but in the two years since then, I've been disappointed. They keep saying they've learned from their mistakes and will make it good again, but they keep not delivering. I'll at least give it another shot. If it continues to be sucky, though... my schedule is pretty full.

9:30/8:30c - The Big Bang Theory (CBS)
Nerds Leonard and Sheldon, along with friends Howard and Koothrapali, and their new "normal girl" neighbor Penny find that they can learn from each other. Hilarity ensues.
This show is definitely funnier for the nerds and geeks among us who can understand all the jokes. There are some jokes that even go over my head--it's that nerdy/geeky. But the quirky characters (who with the exception of Penny are triple-crown nerds, geeks, and dorks) are different and adorable, the writing is good, and the story is being taken interesting places (I loved last season's episode where the four nerds tried to muster the courage to talk to Summer Glau on the train). I'm looking forward to its return.

10/9c - Castle (ABC)
Popular murder mystery author Richard Castle tags along with NYPD homicide detective Kate Beckett for research and inspiration, much to her annoyance, but beyond explanation manages to be helpful in many situations.
This was a new show last spring, and I had to tune in because the main character Castle is played by dear Nathan Fillion. He's great, the female lead Stana Katic is also great. The show isn't brilliant or anything, but it is light and enjoyable.


Wednesday, Sept. 23

10/9c - Eastwick (ABC)
Three New England women discover that they have supernatural witchy powers.
I've heard very little about this show, and it might suck, but I will probably tune in to give it a shot. I like witches.


Thursday, Sept. 24

8/7c - FlashForward (ABC)
All at once, every human being in the world blacks out for 2 minutes and 17 seconds and has a flashforward vision of what they will be doing at 10pm on April 29, 2010. Having people black out for over two minutes causes some considerable chaos to recover from, but there remain questions of why the blackouts and flashforwards occurred and what each person's vision portends.
This is the show ABC is hoping Lost fans will pick up while waiting for Lost's final season in 2010 and then stick with in following years. I had wondered at first whether they could continue the show after the first season (it seems that after April 29, 2010 it will lose some of its mystery), but apparently they've mapped out five seasons of FlashForward should they prove necessary. The cast includes Joseph Fiennes (Shakespeare in Love), Sonya Walger (Penny from Lost), John Cho (Harold & Kumar, Star Trek), and Dominic Monaghan (Lost, Lord of the Rings). This one looks promising.


Friday, Sept. 25

9/8c - Dollhouse (FOX)
Armed with technology that allows them to program a person's mind, an organization known as the Dollhouse rents out its "actives" who have been specially programmed to be suitable for their clients' tasks. There are weekly missions to complete according to the current clients, but there are also greater mysteries about the Dollhouse to uncover.
It took several weeks to hit its stride, but Dollhouse is good enough for me to tune back in. Everyone was surprised when it got renewed, since it didn't have the ratings--one can only assume that FOX was still regretting the way it ended Firefly (like Dollhouse, a Joss Whedon show) and wanted to avoid repeating that mistake (though Dollhouse wasn't as worthy of saving as Firefly). Guest stars this season include Summer Glau, Alexis Denisof (both Whedon alums), and Jamie Bamber. Can't wait.


Tuesday, Nov. 3

8/7c - V (ABC)
Aliens arrive on Earth claiming to come in peace, but some people know better and work to expose the aliens' evil plans.
A remake of an 1980s NBC miniseries, this looks like it might be a cool new sci-fi show. Its cast includes Elizabeth Mitchell (Juliet on Lost) as an FBI agent in the resistance movement and Morena Baccarin (Inara from Firefly) as the alien leader. Sounds good to me. Unfortunately, we'll have to wait a long time for this one.


So what is that? 12 hours of TV a week? (SYTYCD is a time hog with 3 hours a week once it reaches its 2-hour performance, 1-hour results episodes routine). I'll be busy this season...

Schedule conflict: Champions Online and SYTYCD

Oh dear. I have just realized that my only summer TV show, So You Think You Can Dance, has its performance episodes on Wednesdays 8-10pm, smack dab in the middle of my Champions Online Beta play tests! Oh no! Two precious hours of my twice weekly play test lost to a TV show I can't miss. I can probably find all the SYTYCD clips from the show online, but it's annoying and not the same as watching the entire episode while it airs. I don't think they like to put SYTYCD conveniently on Hulu, unfortunately. Silly Fox. DVR, I have never wanted you as much as I do now!

Still, I am excited about watching SYTYCD. I don't like almost all reality TV shows and competitions, but I love to watch dancing and this show has some great dancing. It's like the dance version of American Idol, except that I find the talent pool more consistent and the judges more helpful and less gimmicky (OK, so Mary likes to scream and put people on the "hot tamale train" if they're really good, but I don't mind it as much as some other people seem to). The show actually started a few weeks ago, but I haven't been watching because I don't enjoy the audition episodes as much. Like American Idol, it seems that for every amazing person they find at auditions, there's some truly awful contestant who is just hopeless. And I have yet to acquire a taste for watching people's dreams get dashed on national TV.

But tonight is the Top 20 episode. This is when the real spectacle starts, with lighting, staging, costumes--the works. One of the greatest things that SYTYCD has going for it is its phenomenal team of choreographers from all sorts of different disciplines: contemporary, jazz, hip hop, salsa, foxtrot, disco, jive, swing, waltzes, etc. Some of my favorites have been Wade Robson's jazz, Mia Michaels' contemporary, and Tabitha and Napoleon's lyrical hip hop, but last year there was also an amazing Bollywood style dance, and there are too many other great dances to name. And starting tonight, the top 20 contestants are paired up (10 girl-boy pairs) and each pair is given a different style of dance to perform, choreographed by one of the superb choreographers. This is where the growth really starts. Dancers specializing in one discipline may be stuck performing a completely different style, and they are forced over a grueling week to learn to adapt. And the result is more often than not remarkable. The dances as well as this growth are thoroughly entertaining to watch.

Well I can't wait for the show, but for now, Champions Online awaits!

Chuck saved, upcoming fall shows, and Thor

I don't have much interesting new entertainment news to report since my last post on the subject, but there are a couple exciting things that I couldn't wait to share.

Firstly, NBC renewed Chuck! It will come back with a tighter production budget, but at least it secured a 13-episode order for a third season (Variety). This was the last show that I follow whose fate I was waiting to learn. Turns out the only show I watch that got canceled this spring was Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Chuck, Castle, Dollhouse, as well as all the other shows that were never in serious danger got renewed. This means that I will be rather busy next fall.

Fox has made some interesting choices in their fall schedule (Variety). First, their summer hit "So You Think You Can Dance" will be getting a fall skein. I have loved watching this show for the past few summers--I love dance and greatly admire the quality of the choreographers and dancers in the show--so I'm excited to see it moving up in the world. But it is a big time commitment, with two hours on Tuesday and one on Wednesday, which is fine when I don't watch anything else in the summer but will make things a bit crowded in the fall. Following the SYTYCD results show on Wednesdays will be new musical drama/comedy "Glee". The show focuses on a group of high school geeks who find their place in the school glee club. Fox clearly has high hopes for Glee, granting its pilot a golden sneak preview spot this Tuesday after the final performance episode of American Idol (that is, at 9pm). Early word is that it's clever, funny, and overall pretty great. Fringe has been moved from its first season Tuesday spot to the 9pm Thursday slot in the fall. This essentially is a big promotion, that time slot being the high attention spot that currently is home to heavy hitters CSI (CBS) and Grey's Anatomy (ABC). The question is whether Fringe will be able to hold its own in the time slot. Dollhouse will remain at 9pm on Fridays. New show "Human Target," about a decoy-for-hire who saves lives by assuming the identities of people in extreme danger, will debut in the winter starring Mark Valley and featuring Jackie Earle Haley; a new season of 24 is also scheduled to start in the winter.

ABC has given a series order to new sci-fi show "Flash Forward" (Variety). They had been promoting it with teasers during Lost commercial breaks, showing little clips followed by the words "What did you see?" without naming the show, and during the season finale last week gave it a proper full promo. The premise is that on one day, for 2 minutes and 27 seconds, everyone on Earth falls unconscious and sees a flash forward of their lives six months in the future. The show seems meant to tide Lost viewers over through the fall as they await the final season of Lost to arrive in the winter. Joseph Fiennes, Sonya Walger (known to Lost fans as Penny), Courtney B. Vance, Jack Davenport, and John Cho are among the cast.

My last bit of cool news is that it looks like Thor has finally been cast. Chris Hemsworth, recently seen as Captain Kirk's father (himself a Captain Kirk for 12 minutes) in the new Star Trek, is in final negotiations to take the lead role in the Kenneth Branaugh-helmed movie adaptation of the Marvel franchise (Variety, IMDb).
Hemsworth
The deal would also land him a part in Marvel's planned Avengers film. Oh, Chris Hemsworth. Yesterday morning, I didn't know who you were. Then just minutes into the Star Trek film you won me over and broke my heart with your heroic resolve and sparkling blue eyes at once both joyous and pained beyond imagining... *Sigh...* Ahem. Yes, well, now he's poised to become a blockbuster superhero. God of thunder and all. I hope the Thor movie will be good.

Dancing with the Woz

I do not watch Dancing with the Stars. I mostly steer clear of reality/competition programming, though I will admit that I have been watching So You Think You Can Dance the past three summers. Anyway, though I don't watch Dancing with the Stars, I am generally aware of any particularly notable happenings on the show (e.g., there have been a surprising number of injuries this season). So I know that Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, was a contestant this season. And I know he was supposed to be a pretty bad dancer. On Monday, as I flipped through the channels trying to find something suitable for my housemate to watch before I left the room (I know my own TV show schedule, so I usually don't need to channel surf), I came across Steve Wozniak performing on Dancing with the Stars. And thus I saw his dancing for myself. Yes, it was kind of sad. I felt bad for his partner (How do they decide which dancer gets paired with which star? How did my sweet SYTYCD gal Lacey Schwimmer get stuck with Steve-O?")

As it turns out, The Woz got voted off the show on Tuesday night. Considering that from the beginning he had consistently received the worst marks from the judges, it was impressive that he had already survived two rounds of elimination. How did he last that long? On Dancing with the Stars, the judges' grades are combined with call-in votes to determine who will get kicked off each week. And despite Wozniak's extremely low scores from the judges, for the first two weeks he received enough viewer votes to keep him in the game. So who was voting for him and his poor attempts at dancing? The geeks, of course!

People commenting on Dancing with the Stars this season have not hesitated to attribute Wozniak's success to the "geeks." CNN reported, "What he lacks in technique, Steve Wozniak makes up for in geeks" (CNN.com). I haven't been following the story on very many news outlets, but I found that IMDb has also made free use of the term (March 25, March 31, April 1). I suppose that as a geek I might find some pride in the geeks' ability to band together and collectively support and sustain a hopeless contestant in a popular reality contest (Dancing was the third most watched show of last week, with a 12.9/19 rating). But that's not where I'm going with this. Instead, I have taken issue with this branding. Granted, I am only very, very mildly miffed. But here's why.

I am a geek. A huge geek, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. But I have not been voting for The Woz. Why would I? I feel no particular allegiance to him. Half of the time I'm at work I use a Mac, and I use iTunes, but that doesn't make me feel any connection to him. I guess some of the idea may be that a geek would vote for Wozniak just to support a fellow geek. But that would require a hardcore computer nerd, not a computer game-playing, fantasy-reading, sci-fi-watching geek. Basically, I think "geeks" is too broad a category for the people voting for Steve Wozniak. Shawn Johnson, another contestant on Dancing this season, would not be said to be receiving the "jock" vote. But I bet she is getting votes from gymnastics fans. Perhaps it would be appropriate, then, to say that Steve Wozniak is getting votes from Apple fans.

Who, if the Mac commercials are to be believed, are decidedly not geeks. No, PCs are for geeks. Mac enthusiasts are the cool Justin Longs of the world (which is sort of funny because Justin Long's first screen role, and thus the one that I will always remember him for, was as the super nerdy fan in Galaxy Quest). If Apple fans are so cool and normal, why are they rallying for the nerd who can't dance? Answer that, Mac Geniuses.

So maybe this isn't the most logical argument I've ever presented. But I did say that I was only mildly miffed; I can't justify being outright offended. I'll just end this with my suggestion of what the Dancing with the Stars producers should do if they really want geeks to watch their show and call in votes. Two words:

Summer. Glau.