I was just reading about the new shows CBS has coming up this fall, and I found something curious about this one:

MOONLIGHT, from prolific movie producer Joel Silver (“The Matrix” Trilogy), is about Mick St. John (Alex O’Loughlin, upcoming “White Out”), a captivating “undead” private investigator who uses his acute vampire senses to help the living – instead of feeding on them. In an agonizing twist of fate, Mick was “bitten” 60 years ago by his new bride, the seductive and beguiling Coraline (Amber Valletta, “Hitch”). Immortal and eternally as young, handsome and charismatic as he was then, Mick is sickened by Coraline and other vampires who view humans only as a source of nourishment. With only a handful of undead confidantes for company, including deceitful ally Josef (Rade Serbedzija, “24”), Mick fills his infinite days protecting the living, and trying not to think about how his life would have been if he hadn’t followed his heart. However, after six decades of resisting, he wonders if it’s time to pursue the love of a mortal. He has his eyes on Beth Turner, a beautiful, ambitious reporter who has been covering the ongoing plague of unusual murders. But would Beth even consider giving up a normal life to be with him, and can Mick risk the pain of seeing himself as a monster in her eyes? As Mick lives between two realities, fighting his adversaries among the undead and falling in love with Beth, he knows he needs to figure out a reason to keep “living.”

You see, I remember that show being called Forever Knight when it aired about 15 years ago…

Remember a while back when I expressed cautious enthusiasm for the SciFi Channel’s upcoming take on the venerable Flash Gordon character? Well, I’m no longer so optimistic about this project, not after seeing who the producers have cast as Flash and his lady love, Dale Arden.

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One of the groovy things about having one of those new-fangled HDTVs is that I now get more channels than I used to, and I didn’t even have to sign up for cable or The Dish. The secret is the digital transmissions that piggyback onto the plain ordinary old signal that merely mortal TVs pick up. Where I used to get only channel 5, for example, I now have 5.2 (a high-definition version of the same programming carried on analog 5) and 5.3 (a local weather channel and news headline ticker). It’s pretty cool. And something that’s really cool is channel 16.1, part of the ION television network. (My old TV didn’t pick anything up at all on channel 16, so I don’t know if this station has an analog equivalent or not. It’s a completely new thing for me.)

And what, you may be asking, is so cool about this channel 16.1? Only a nice assortment of the classic programs that I grew up loving. How does The Wonder Years every night at 9 pm sound to you? Or Kung Fu, Charlie’s Angels, and the original Mission: Impossible?

Or how about the fact that I was channel-surfing last night and ran across my beloved original version of Battlestar Galactica, airing at 6 pm on Sunday night just the way it did back in ’78? It was even a good episode, “The Living Legend,” with Lloyd Bridges as Commander Cain in command of the Galactica‘s long-lost sister ship, the battlestar Pegasus.
I have the series on DVD, of course, but there was a certain small thrill that came from just running across it somewhere on television, instead of deliberately choosing to put the disc on. The only thing that would’ve made it better would’ve been if I’d laying belly-down on the floor in front of a roaring fire, resting my chin in my hands and feeling the ends of my shoelaces dangling across the backs of my legs, the way I remember doing it when I was eight.

Of course, a roaring fire last night would’ve been a little uncomfortable; it is drifting into summer, after all. But you get the idea.

A long time ago, just before I started my freshman year of high school, I fell in love with the British TV series Doctor Who. You know, that ultra-low-budget sci-fi serial about a guy who time-travels in an old telephone booth (well, technically, a police box, but it’s still a variety of phone booth) and encounters all manner of bizarre creatures bent on destroying humanity and conquering the universe?

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This is something that’s bothered me off and on for several years, but this morning I finally reached my breaking point: what the hell is the matter with the audio mix on The Today Show?

Anytime they use background music for a segment — which is pretty much all the time these days on this increasingly fluffy and pointless “news” program — the music is so loud that it drowns out the voiceover. It happened this morning while Matt Lauer was reminiscing about his best experiences while doing his “Where in the World is Matt Lauer?” segments, which I still enjoy despite my general disdain for Today. The insidiously catchy and terminally annoying Outkast tune “Hey Ya” was playing over the story, cranked up to the point where I could hardly hear Matt at all, so what I ended up with essentially a music video with visuals of Lauer on an aircraft carrier, walking around Red Square, etc.

I’ve wondered for some time if the problem was with the TV in my bedroom (I usually half-listen to the various morning shows while I dress for work, so I can catch a weather forecast), but today, because I was actually interested in the story in question, I tried the HDTV in my living room; same thing there. Are the show’s producers even aware of this issue? Is it deliberate on their part? Do they think for some reason that viewers find it pleasant or exciting to have music drowning out the host personalities that we’re supposedly tuning in to listen to? Or are we just supposed to look at them? Why have the hosts at all? Why not just play music? Oh, wait, that’s what the radio is for, isn’t it? Idiots…

Oh, and as long as I’m bitching, I’d love to see all the national morning shows drop their outside “plaza” segments, too; listening to the screaming crowds of people who all seem to think that their Aunt Mildred in Peoria will somehow pick out their single voice from the cacophony is even more annoying than the nine-millionth play of “Hey Ya.” Not that the goofball weather-guessers who mingle with the crowd ever have anything all that important or amusing to say, I just don’t like all the noise. Arg…