You know what makes a good start to a long weekend? Shih Tzus.

Consider this my slightly entertaining version of posting a Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup can. (Besides there are plenty of must-see videos out there right now.)

This is now my favorite mash-up video mixing pop culture and current events:

Someone give me my Avenue Q movie already. Please?

How the cast of The Office spent their summer:

“I’m already 30% more unpredictable.”

Elijah Wood dances on Yo Gabba Gabba:

And I thought Bananas in Pajamas was like an acid trip without any chemical assistance. (Wood looks to tiny surrounded by those costumed folk, too bad he didn’t clean up the facial hair a bit before this appearance.)

Hm, I thought I brought this up before but either I thought I did and forgot or it’s another blog post I accidentally overwrote… Earlier this month, Fox shuffled its fall schedule a bit, moving New Amsterdam to midseason. Fox insists the show isn’t cancelled and episodes are being made, but that story is very familiar. In 2003, The Ortegas, an adaptation of The Kumars at No. 42, was announced as part of the schedule but never made it on the air. In 2005, the Marti Noxon drama Still Life was set as a midseason debut, but, while six episodes were produced it never aired. The 1997 Scott Baio comedy Rewind also never aired, despite being announced as part as Fox’s fall schedule.

While it hasn’t happened in the last few years, for a while it was almost a part of the fall season for one of the shows announced on Fox’s fall schedule to get pulled during the summer with promises of a midseason debut, only to never actually air. Seeing New Amsterdam get pulled certainly recalls those days — it’ll be interesting if it does eventually air.

From the sounds of things, AfterEllen’s Sarah Warn enjoyed watching Jekyll as much as I did, but what I find really striking is her praise for Gina Bellman:

From her teasing seductiveness in flashbacks of her first meeting with Tom, to her mix of confusion and curiosity when she learned about Hyde, to her bewildered outrage when she was taken captive by the evil corporation out to get Hyde, to her steely determination to protect her husband against himself and the evil corporation, both the character and the actress began to steal the show.

In the last few episodes, I thought she commanded just as much attention as series star James Nesbitt, once her character, Claire, becomes strong Bellman displays an impressive presence.

Part of what I liked about her character was, from a plot perspective, Claire isn’t much more than the typical girlfriend/wife character. She exists just to incite the male lead into action. However, even as that role becomes even more significant and key to the series’ premise, Claire becomes a stronger person. Just when you’d expect her to cringe and run, she stands her ground and refuses to back down. Just as you’d expect her to be a helpless fool, she turns out to have a sharp grasp of the schemes around her. As much as I enjoyed seeing strong female characters like the sharp lesbian detective or the doctor who helps Jekyll manage his condition, my favorite part was seeing a character who’s very existence was all about the men in her life take on an active role.

And since this is the only excuse to mention this thought… there have been rumors of Steven Moffat (Coupling creator, Jekyll writer) taking charge of Doctor Who if current showrunner Russel T Davies left. That led to (quickly denied) rumors that Nesbitt was being considered to take over the role of The Doctor, since Moffat likes to re-team with actor. If I absolutely had to give up David Tennant, I really do like the sound of “Gina Bellman, first female Doctor”

AfterElton’s Brian Juergens takes a look at the ABC Family channel, which has an intersting history (starting as a way to get The 700 Club on cable in its early days) eventually becoming the network getting decent buzz with series like Kyle XY and Greek. The whole article is worth a read, but the part that sticks out to me is this:

ABC Family’s current slogan — “A New Kind of Family” — indicates that the network seeks to set itself apart from traditional family entertainment. And indeed, the net’s target audience is the 14-28 range, which skews slightly older than other family networks such as The Disney Channel or Nickelodeon, and places it more in line with The CW, MTV or The N in terms of its viewer profile.

In an interview with AfterElton.com, Paul Lee, President of ABC Family since 2004, notes that redefining “family” was a key initiative when the channel began the shift toward its current incarnation.

“When we came in, one of the key things we wanted to achieve [was] to reclaim that word “family” for what it really means in real families across America. And when you talk to 14-28-year-olds, one of my shocking realizations early on — unlike my generation, who were not talking to their parents at all — this is a generation that is really interested in and passionate about families. But they define families in a very, very different way.”

Lee continued, “It is not Ozzie and Harriet “two parents, two and a half kids living in a farmhouse” family. It really is family in its chaotic, wonderful, dysfunctional, loving, passionate, American, modern self. And that’s how we came to “A New Kind of Family” as a push, because if you ask a 17-year-old, ‘What are you passionate about your family; what is your family?’ they’re as likely to say, you know, ‘It’s my stepmom, and it’s my friend Julie and it’s my dog, and it’s my best friend.’ The modern American family is a very fluid, very important, very passionate unit, defined in a very different way.”

When I first heard the network’s slogan, I figured it was just marketing speak but this is the first time I’ve heard a network say they’re persuing an audience that has a non-traditional view of “family” — The N has also pursued that audience (mostly through Degrassi and trying to build on that success) but I don’t think they spoke to the idea of younger audiences’ view of “family” programming has changed.

I’ve talked about how much I’ve enjoyed Hollyoaks, the Channel 4 soap currently airing on BBC America. I’ve been frustrated that BBC America didn’t manage to leave Hollyoaks in the same time slot for thirteen weeks and, now, it’s leaving the cable channel to go exclusively to webcasts.

I’m a bit annoyed that BBC America’s schedule is back to being a mess. After all, it hasn’t been long since BBC Worldwide America president Garth Ancier said, “I really believe, especially at a smaller cable network, you need to be extraordinarily consistent with your audience so that they know what to expect when they tune in to your channel, from mornings to primetime and all the way into late night.” Hollyoaks isn’t the only spot where the cable network’s schedule has been frustratingly inconsistent of late — their Saturday rerun of The Graham Norton Show was dropped last week for a Jeckyll marathon and next week it gets dropped again for a Doctor Who marathon. (Additionally, it’s incredibly frustrating to try to get accurate information on who Norton’s guests are each week — their own website usually lists the wrong guests.) It’s frustrating to hear a problem so accurately defined only to see the solution be abandoned so quickly.

Still, if the network doesn’t screw this one up (and, considering that their selection of Hollyoaks videos contains TV spots advertising the old time slot, I’m feeling pessimistic on that account) there’s an interesting opportunity, here. Hollyoaks’s audience is one that’s used to watching TV on their computer and putting the show online frees viewers having to keep up with the schedule. I’d like to think that if it succeeds there’s a chance of leverage that into importing some of the other Brit shows that have moderately good but, but not enough to spend the money on adding it to the schedule (like, say, that UK edition of Big Brother which, even with fans complaining, is far more compelling than the US edition).

Hollyoaks moves to BBCAmerica.com on September 4.

Despite my promises not to watch again, I did check out the most recent Big Brother after hearing enough good things to pique my interest. For the most part, I still find myself largely disinterested in watching any more, but last night the only tolerable cast member was eliminated and the show was forced to give her some final moments of airtime.

Jen Johnson has been getting scripted into a largely negative light — one of the major failings of Big Brother’s writers is an inability to adapt to changing circumstances, rigidly sticking to their initial characterization of someone. The first person to say something homophobic gets cast as the resident homophobe and everyone else is free to be as bigoted as they want because they’re not going to show that they cast more than a handful of bigots. Jen started out on the show with some obnoxious attention seeking stunts (crying at the sight of her picture for not meeting her standards of quality, endlessly wearing t-shirts including a pun on her name such as “Jensa Member”) and once she was cast as the narcissistic, self-centered airhead there was no changing that characterization.

That’s too bad, because she turned out to be one of the most interesting reality TV personalities to come around in a while. One refreshing aspect to her personality was that she (despite her early bit of crying) lacked the usual reality TV tendency for melodrama — as the others in the house mined drama out of every little thing and turned minor disagreements into signs of fatal character flaws in others, Jen took it all as a game with a shrug and a chuckle.

There was a social awkwardness to Jen that contributed to making her so interesting. She usually talks with a flatness to her voice and there’s usually a distant look in her eyes. At first, that makes her look like the self-centered airhead the show portrayed her as, but she would sometimes deliver some sharp wit that would come off as very deadpan in how she delivered it. In getting to give her final words to her competitors she said, “In my whole live I’ve always been a happy, positive person… honest. Obvious, I don’t fit in here. But I got thrown this opportunity to be here and happy to leave.” Considering how, at that stage, Big Brother contestants take that moment as their last opportunity to flatter a vote out of the other contestants, it came off as a very dry burn.

Then, upon exiting the Big Brother house she smiled and signed, “Real people!” at her first sight of… well, people who weren’t a part of this season’s Big Brother. Then, for a capper, they let her push a button to dunk her former housemates into a vat of (what they promised was) ice cold water. Now, I normally don’t go for reality TV with a mean streak but considering how ugly this season has been, I would have enjoyed seeing Jen dumping bags of ice in those dunk tanks.

That’s not really to say, overall, that we got a good episode of Big Brother. It was filled with the kind of suck that was too common in this season. However, it was an episode forced to give some time to its unsucky side.

Okay, this totally flew under the radar but the second season of Frisky Dingo debuts this weekend. Yay!

If you missed this slightly absurd parody of super-heroes the first time around, it’s worth checking out. For a well-worn genre, Frisky Dingo manages to find its voice by mixing superheroes with absurd business comedy — in the first season we saw millionaire superhero Awesome X lay off his sidekicks to maintain his budget for the frivolous “train island”, villain Killface haggle over the cost of postcards to let people know about his doomsday machine (especially after typos are discovered on the final version) as well as a corporate takeover storyline. Amid all that, Frisky Dingo nicely took advantage of the Adult Swim format, using its 15-minute episodes to effectively mock cliffhanger serials.

Check out a sample scene from the first season:

I can’t wait, I hear this season there’s a penguin!

I’ve grown cynical in my age, I’ve encountered too many games that sounded very cool only to be disappointed — the majority of them come from Lionhead/Bullfrog who’ve become the masters of overpromising and underdelivering.

I worry if Spore will fuel that cynicism or be one of the few games to make me happy after the hype. The trailer here reminds me a lot of the hype for Black & White or Populous: The Beginning, games I never finished because I got to the point where it’d take me several days of micromanagement to get through a level. In both games, I was expecting quite a bit more in the “god sim” aspect, Spore might deliver more, there, since I’m not seeing an easier-to-program aspect of the game that could become the whole game.

Time will tell, I suppose.

Found at GayGamer.net

So. Uhm, okay so apparently the men from Brit pop group Billiam posed nude for a eating disorders awareness ad (NSFW image at link)… an ad where they reveal that the all have the kind of gym perfect bodies that inspire guys to spend hours each day working out, trying to look like the guy on that Men’s Heath cover.