television

I have a confession to make: I watch America’s Got Talent, and quite enjoy it. I know, I know - David Hasselhoff is in it, and I’m slightly embarrassed to be watching anything in which he appears. But despite his awfulness (proof thereof), it’s an entertaining show. There’s a surprising amount of people who appear on it who are genuinely talented. There’s admittedly only one winner, but perhaps those talented individuals who appear on the show will gain the exposure they need to make it big elsewhere.

It’s not, however, the talented people I’m wondering about. I’m wondering about the people who stand in a massive line of people for a whole day or more, in order to show on national television that they’re not overly talented. Or worse, that they’re just downright bad. Take, for example, this couple, who claim they’re going to wow the world with “Polka Today”, a style of dance they created. While I know very little about dance, what they’re doing does not look particularly revolutionary. Are they suppose to look so… flaily? Perhaps it was just a bluff, but the guy seems genuinely confident that their dancing will impress everyone there. Or check out this compilation video of some of the worst acts seen in this season thus far. What were these people thinking when they said, “Hey, I think I’ll try to win America’s Got Talent”? Did the Ozzy impersonator really think he sounded like Ozzy? They showed his closing remarks on the show (not included in the above video), and he, too, seemed to feel that he was genuinely good.

I’m sure some people who go on the show just do it to be a goof; they know they have no real talent, and that they have no real chance of winning. They do it to for laughs, to say “look at me, I’m on TV!” But it really does seem that a lot of the folks who are just bad think they’ve got what it takes to win the competition. Are their talent radar machines broken? I suppose tone deafness might explain some of the awful singers, but what of the magicians who drop their cards, lose their birds, and fall to the floor when they try to “levitate”? The lady who tried to rap, while jumping up and down on big shards of broken glass? The lady who crushed a sack full of soda cans with her enormous breasts?

What’s up with these people? The show is American’s Got Talent, folks, not American’s Got Crazy People. (Not to imply that we don’t have our fair share of those, mind you…)

I’m nearly a month behind on this, but I suppose if I could go a month with not knowing, plenty of other Battlestar Galactica fans could do the same. In a nutshell: we’ll be getting Battlestar Galactica: Razor, a 2 hour special, on November the 24th. After that, the Battlestar Galactica signal will go dead again until April. This is truly foul news. When I learned earlier this year that Battlestar Galactica would be mostly gone until 2008, I assumed that by “2008″, they meant “January of 2008.” Wishful thinking, I suppose. As it is now, besides the Razor special, Battlestar Galactica will have been off almost a year when Season 4 starts up. I think I may end up going back and rewatching Seasons 1 through 3.

In checking out the Razor website, I saw this at the bottom:

From October 5 through November 16, SCI FI whets Battlestar fans’ appetites every Friday night with “Razor” Flashbacks during all-new episodes of Flash Gordon. All the flashback clips will be available on SCIFI.COM immediately after broadcast.

Written by Michael Taylor and directed by Wayne Rose and Felix Alcala, these intense, roughly two-minute segments tell the story of young William “Husker” Adama’s rookie Viper mission during the first Cylon war. In addition to fighting for his very survival against relentless Cylon centurions, Adama makes a terrifying discovery that will come back 40 years later to threaten him, the crew of the Pegasus and the survival of the human race.

Well, that would have been nice to know back at the beginning of October. Then again, maybe it’s for the better; now I can watch all of the Flashback things back-to-back. Why, that’ll give me nearly 15 minutes of Battlestar Galactica! (I feel like a junkie saying that.)

If you’ve not seen the Flashbacks, check ‘em out; part 1 is here. A warning, however: don’t watch it at work! I just started to watch it at work, and was greeted with a sex scene. I guess I’ll have to wait until I get home this afternoon for my BSG fix. Figures.

On Monday night, I watched the latest episode of Heroes, The Line. In it, Noah Bennett, a.k.a. Horn-Rimmed Glasses, went to Odessa, Ukraine, to hunt down his old mentor, Ivan. He was after some paintings and, indirectly, information about The Company, the group that, for lack of a better word, hunts people with special powers.

The plot of the Heroes episode is largely unimportant for what I’m wanting to write about in this post, other than the fact that in the episode, Ivan was a bad guy. He had trained Bennett to work for The Company, and indeed, Ivan was still being employed by The Company, until Bennet blew his head off. Ivan was: of Slavic ancestry (which, for most Americans, might as well be Russian), and a bad guy. It’s peculiar how often this combo pops up in American television.

When I started thinking about this, I tried to conjure up as many instances in my memory of television shows where a Russian (or someone from a former USSR country) appeared as a character. While I’m sad to say I can’t come up with any specific examples, I know I’ve seen a fair number of Russian characters in television shows over the years - usually in things like Law and Order (and its offshoots), Criminal Minds, etc. - and all of them were dirty in some manner or another. Killers, drug dealers, mob lords - if they were Slavic, they were trouble.

Does any of this sound familiar to American television watchers (or non-Americans who regularly watch our shows), or have I just imagined this?

If I’ve not imagined this, it begs the question: why? Why have I never seen a good Russian / Slavic person in an American T.V. show? Does it hearken back to when Americans hated Russians because of communism and the Cold War, and the negative view of the people as a whole has continued to this day? Do Russians just make really good bad characters?

What gives?