My new guilty pleasure

Sometimes, a movie or TV show is so ridiculously over-hyped that one feels more inclined to gouge out one’s own eyes than bother watching. Case in point: I have yet to watch an episode of LOST, largely because during its run so many people of my acquaintance entirely failed to shut the fuck up about it for more than an hour or two. Now that it is over, I may opt to see what all the fuss was about. Maybe.

And then there is Glee.

Glee has been over-hyped the bejesus out of. (I’m fully aware of the grammatical inconsistency of that sentence, but am including it in homage to a similar phrasing used by my boss recently.) The trailers I saw made the show look so bad that the prospect of watching a full episode seemed a torture worthy of Abu Ghraib.

And yet, against my will, it has become my guilty pleasure.

It is by no means a televisual phenomenon on a par with The X-Files or Firefly or The West Wing. With any of these shows, I can rewatch an episode several times, dissecting and discovering, coming up with new evidence of the sheer genius with which the show was done. These are the literature of television.

Glee, on the other hand, is the novel you buy at the airport while your departure time whooshes by with nary a call for boarding. It’s a fun, largely surface-level diversion which is certainly worthy of the time you invest in it, but is unlikely to stay on the shelf to be watched time and again. Refreshingly, it doesn’t try to be anything more than that.

The music and choreography is (largely) very well executed, the cast is (again largely) talented and the balance between humor and melodrama is (etc.) well maintained. There are a few moments of painfully obvious auto-tune, or where even the greatest suspension bridge couldn’t quite hold up the disbelief, but on the whole it is done well.

Plus, even were I inclined to give up at this stage, the prospect of an episode directed by Joss Whedon and guest-starring Neil Patrick Harris and Idina Menzel would keep me going for the next however-many episodes it is until then.

So… yeah. I guess, on top of being a “believer”, a “Browncoat” and a “Wingnut”, I am now officially a “Gleek”.

Read Full Post »

Obama’s choice for Army Secretary

Looks like it’s Congressman John McHugh.

Although I get the ‘team of rivals’ philosophy, any time Obama nominates a Republican for a post I find myself looking for the benefits to the Democratic party. Naming Jon Huntsman ambassador to China, for example, takes a potentially credible 2012 GOP contender out of the public eye quite handily. So why McHugh?

Here is John McHugh’s congressional district map:

Not much help there. Most of that is pretty solidly in the redder parts of NY, so a special election would most likely still result in a Republican seat. No guarantees, though – NY-20 squeaked to Murphy in their own special election, and NY-23 is considered a slightly more Dem-leaning district than that.

McHugh’s voting record is somewhat mixed – he consistently voted with the GOP on key issues regarding the “war on terror”, but has broken with them on other issues such as S-CHIP, federal minimum-wage increase and repeal of oil company tax credits. He also takes positions in favor of educational grants and fair trade.

It sounds more as though Obama would be losing a potential ally in Congress than strategically removing an obstructionist. So perhaps he really thinks McHugh is the right man for the job. He certainly has the credentials, having served on the House Armed Forces Committee for a long time now.

Here’s hoping that having a moderate choice in there will do some good.

Also of note is that McHugh apparently has something of a sense of humor; having worked hard to support the Army base at Fort Drum, NY, McHugh took issue when the TV show The West Wing mentioned closing it – and went so far as to co-write a letter (with Hillary Clinton) to the character Josh Lyman to urge him to reconsider his position.

Read Full Post »