God bless ye weary TV Critics this season’s shows dismay
There’s not a program goes to air that’s not ’bout Xmas Day,
The Yuletide of relentless cheer and sap’s upon us all
Grim tidings to all with a remote, with a remote
Thank Christ for dvd and the Blu-Ray;
THE SIMPSON XMAS (Season 1) is sure to be on Ten,
We’ve all seen it 5 million times, well here it comes again;
PRANCER, THE SANTA CLAUS and BRADY CHRISTMAS on Nine or Sev’n,
If BLACK CHRISTMAS, ALL THROUGH THE HOUSE or GREMLINS aired instead
t’would be Heav’n
And save us all from that LAST LEAF crap that comes on every year
It’s like being drowned in a bucket of cranberry sauce with a tinsel gag from ear to ear
But luckily not everything is Xmas-pudding shaped,
There are some shows that are not holly-wreathed and angel-draped,
THE CHRISTMAS STAR may be in space but so are alien hordes,
On Mondays then us Grinches will all get our dark rewards
So join us as we watch the skies for other things than Santa and his sleigh
As The Event (Mondays, Seven- 10:30pm) sends alien bottom-probes your way!
THE EVENT is an American sci-fi/thriller/drama series that plays like DAWSON’S CREEK with a swamp-full of alien hybrids instead of a creek, or perhaps 24 if Keifer Sutherland was also an extraterrestrial instead of an alien (this would actually go a long way to explaining why he seems to be able to go an entire day without sleeping, eating or using the toilet).
The show’s extensive prologue sees an alien mother-ship crash in Alaska- and no, this happens just after WWII, so Sarah Palin and her gun-totin, helicopter-huntin’, moose-killin’ kin had nothing to do with it. The mother-ship is carrying several hundred extraterrestrial beings that look almost completely human, and have DNA only 1 per cent different than that of human beings- which is something of a suspension of disbelief-killer, as such a minor difference in DNA structure would make the aliens not only genetically from Earth but also Higher Primates, like Chimpanzees, Gorillas, and well, Us. The improbably hominid extraterrestrials seem friendly enough- I presume someone at NASA gave them a banana- and look amazingly like normal human beings; they don’t even have the usual array of bizarre wrinkled foreheads on an otherwise human skull that most STAR TREK aliens have. It’s only internally that the aliens look alien- their vital organs are in the wrong places and aren’t vital, they flush deathly white when expressing strong emotion, they breathe through their skins like amphibians and they age only one year with each passing decade- they’re basically a tadpole tail and a Botox overdose or two away from being Nicole Kidman.
Most of the suspiciously terrestrial extraterrestrials are captured by the US government and housed for the intervening decades before the main plot kicks in at an alien refugee containment facility that is definitely not at all Roswell, New Mexico like that other show ROSWELL. And it totally isn’t a reflection of Guitanamo Bay with literal aliens either. A small number of the aliens however, were not injured during the crash and escaped into the wider community to live amongst us, as humans. And presumably eat our brains/take our jobs/healthcare/whatever whacko bullsh*t the Tea Partyists are accusing The Other of this week.
Zip ahead a few years to 2010 and US President Elias Martinez (African American actor Blair Underwood) finds out about the extraterrestrials in a plot machination so contrived it makes your average X FILES episode look like a bastion of linear plot-pointing. Martinez makes the decision to both free the extraterrestrial people remaining in detention and inform the American (and world) public about the existence of the aliens. This does not sit well with several people in various shadow organisations (and no, none of them smoke to excess) and a plot is hatched to assassinate the Prez before he can reveal to the world that E.T exists; and the person in charge of the assassination squad is himself secretly an alien. I think this is the textbook definition of conflict of interest.
Aliens, humans, human/aliens and cute guys and girls with hidden agendas. Who needs a sleigh pulled by magical reindeer when you can have an alien mother-ship and pull Jason Ritter?! Beam Down and Watch it!
WICKED WEDGES!
MUSEUM OF LIFE (Tues Dec 14, ABC- 8:30PM)
Excellent fly on the wall (not to mention fly stuffed, mounted and nailed to the wall) warthogs and all documentary that goes behind the scenes of jobs at the British Museum of Natural History. Complications in getting specimens ready for public display during the program include a missing, presumed escaped terrarium of the flesh-eating Dermestid Beetles used to flense flesh off skeletons for articulation (there’s a horror film in there somewhere- ‘they don’t just want squirrels…anymore’); a tourist accidentally knocking over a T-Rex display (this is one time where breaking a leg can cost millions!) and a Giant Mekong River Catfish being mailed to the museum by post. I hear they sent it C.O.D!
IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE (Sat Dec 18, ABC2- 8:30pm)
Classic Fifties movie in which Jimmy Stewart’s Christmas wish to have never been born is heard by the angel, Clarence, who shows him how much worse off his friends and family would have been without him. If you’re a Grinch like me, you’d wish a film which is this well made but unbelievably saccharine and mawkishly sentimental never existed. Diabetics are warned that exposure to this film may lead to sugar coma. I think I’ll stick with the awesome 1978 slasher film BLACK CHRISTMAS….
GOOD NEWS WEEK (Mon Dec 20, Ten-8pm)
The show that was once a Camp, Queerstravaganza has become a pale, commercial-filled, heterosexual version of itself. No lesbian heroine Julie McCrossin (replaced by some token unfunny blonde) far too much Mikey Robbins (note to Mikey- you’re not funny) and ambisextrous cypher Paul McDermott now married- to a woman!
STALE CHIPS !
BIG, BIGGER, BIGGEST: DAM (Fri Dec 11, SSB- 7:30pm)
British doco that looks at the technological achievements that led to the construction of the world’s largest dam- China’s 60 storey high, 2 km long, 600 km reservoir Three Gorges Dam. Unfortunately, whilst singing its architectural praises, the program mentions nothing of the disgusting environmental cost of the project- most notably the Baiji or Chinese River Dolphin, which went extinct in 2008 as a direct result of the Three Gorges Dam construction. I’d much rather have the Baiji back than a few more electrical outlets in my house…
THE BATMAN (Sun Dec 12, Go!- 10am)
Holy Travesties, Bat-Daddy! Awful animated cartoon clearly designed to try and cash in on the brilliant, Emmy-award winning Nineties BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES (which starred Mark Hamill as the definitive Joker); this one is badly animated, the characters have been ‘re-designed’ to the point where they look ridiculous (botanical bioterrorist Poison Ivy looks like a Spice Girl and the Joker looks like Ken Done took an acid trip whilst watching GREMLINS). Plus Batman is a whiny emo who complains to anyone within earshot how awful his life is. The one bright spot is Robert ‘Freddy Krueger’ Englund as the Riddler- sure, he’s drawn like Marilyn Manson, but Englund brings him a creepy, campy gravitas. Avoid like a (bat) plague…
JUICY JACKETS!
DEGRASSI NEXT GENERATION (Thurs Dec 23, ABC3- 8:35pm)
The Canadian high-school drama wavers between being a soap for teens and an issue-of-the-week platform (like the kids learn about leprosy during Health class and then the popular kid’s nose falls off in the canteen) but is still excellent viewing. Most of the core cast of the original Next Generation have by now gotten too old to realistically pass as High School students and have been written out, or at least transferred over to the school at 90210, where students seem to be able to take high school into their early Forties. That includes series hottie Spinner Mason (Shane Kippell) and the excellent gay character Marco (Adam Ruggiero) but fortunately there’s a Next Next Generation this season, with a new hot guy and a new gay guy- and they’re both the same character! Riley Stavros (Argiris Karras) is the school’s new football scholarship, and has all the girls in a swoon. His big secret, of course, is that he’d rather have the guys performing said swoons, and there are two of them in particular he’s got his eyes on- Peter, a (straight) friend of his on the football team, who he unsuccessfully hits on (the pair eventually become Besties though) and the openly Gay Zane, whom he seems to be having better luck with so far. There’s already been a couple of kisses, fairly ground-breaking for a show aimed at tweens!
