By Troy Brownfield

Summer, Summer, Summer...

I'm not sure about where you live, but in Indiana it skipped from cold to friggin' hot in like two weeks. And of course, we pay for it with the usual tornadoes, power outages, flash floods, and hail. Yay-rah. At least I don't live in Greenwood, which seems to have a tornado magnet built in the center of town.

Gettin' Bachelored Up: Our erstwhile webmaster Shawn Delaney, my friend for over 20 years, is getting married on July 2nd. A few members of the wedding party drug his monkey ass to Chicago last weekend for gambling, strippers, beer and baseball. I find it odd that the prices for concessions at Wrigley are cheaper than the attentions of an Illinois exotic dancer. Seriously; cover was $20, no-contact dances are $20, and a Diet Coke for one of the guys was $6. And seriously, what's with the law about having the nipples covered with latex? In Indiana, $5 gets you in the door, you can get bizarre amounts of contact for as little as $1, a beer is only $4, and the only latex involved in for long-haired men who know how to talk. I guess it's a trade off for the tornados.

Riddick: I'm not sure what to make of how The Chronicles of Riddick has been marketed. I liked Pitch Black, mainly because they weren't afraid to off kids and I cottoned to the idea of villain as protagonist. I also like that the new film brings back young girl "Jack" and holy man Keith David. Still, you wouldn't know it was a sequel from the way it's been played. And I'm not sure that I like Riddick as a straight-up hero. Sure, they pay lip service to evil fighting evil in the trailer, but Mel Gibson was supposed to be clinically over-the-edge in Lethal Weapon, and by the fourth one, he's just a Three-Stooges-quoting clown.

Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars: Sometimes internet bitching can make a difference. Farscape went from being cancelled by the boneheads at Sci-Fi to becoming an independently financed mini-series that Sci-Fi had to pony up for to be able to run. Nice. Even more encouraging was talk in TV Guide that the October-airing mini is priming the works for either a feature film or another spin-off starring Ben Browder as John Crichton. Good job, Scapers!

Crichtonisms: And now, in tribute of our beloved lost astronaut with a penchanct for pop-culture humor, alien confounding, and near-suicidal plans, here's a few of my favorite crazy-ass John Crichton lines. Check out the site Crichtonisms for more.

Boy, was Spielberg ever wrong. Close encounters my ass!

Freeze! Don’t move! Or I’ll fill you full of....little yellow bolts of light!

Hey, you bastards. John Crichton was here. (okay, not so much a zinger as a bad-ass send-off at the end of Season 1)

Get back, or the white boy gets it!

One riot, well-done, hold the mayo. Now!

I am so ready for this show to come back, I can't stand it.

TV: As I've said before, I think TV is just getting worse and worse. I'm happy for two things: the rise of cable and the proliferation of good shows on DVD. The broadcast networks become more irrelevent by the year. I actually think that ABC might collapse by 2008 if they don't fix their trajectory. Really, radio isn't far behind. If Stern goes to satellite, I predict many others jumping off too. Regular radio is too bought and paid-for by pop pap. The future is pay entertainment, customized to what you want. It's one good end-run around the friggin' meatheads who are always trying to ban things.

Dr. Randy Lance: After years of slugging it out in the trenches, my old college roommate and good pal Randy Lance finally FINALLY finishes all of his rounds of medical education. Dr. Lance will be moving to Evansville to knock people out for money. I guess being in anesthesia is similar to being a boxer, except the patients don't usually hit back. I find it funny that Randy chose this speciality, considering all the times in college that he practiced on himself with Wild Turkey. BADA BING!

Identity Crisis: Whether you're a typical comics fan or not, READ THIS BOOK. A murder mystery by Brad Meltzer set in the DC Universe, IC explores the ramifications of identity and the dangers of adventuring in its first issue. Elements of the first part are heart-wrenching and amazing, with at least five ideas I've never seen in DC books before. The art by Rags Morales and Michael Bair is career-making stuff, and Meltzer (best known as a best-selling novelist) writes the big guns of the comic world as if born to it. Without exaggeration, this is already the thing that everybody is talking about, and that includes USA Today, Entertainment Weekly, and even ESPN. Get on board.

The Walking Dead: And while you're in the comic shop, get the first collection of this superlative zombie thriller, Days Gone Bye. This is primo stuff.

I Love the '90s Ad: Say what you will about VH-1's retrospective shows, but damn, the commercial for the latest is hilarious. Fronted by the brilliant Hal Sparks and Nat himself, Joe E. Tata, the show rifs on 90210 while running through a dozen or so sight gags, including Monica Lewinsky and President Clinton sharing a milkshake. Monica about inhaling the straw was funny, but the Spice Girl clones shouting "Girl Power" with a second-too-late hand-sign and "That's right!" from the Posh stand-in is hysterical.

One Last Angel Rant: So I got the new Entertainment Weekly (Tom Hanks cover), and there's a report on the final ratings for every broadcast series from the past season. Curiousity got the best of me, and I decided to check out how The WB's shows stacked up. Obviously, I did it out of my Angel fandom.

Get this: of the top seven WB shows, Angel was the ONLY ONE that posted a gain this year. Its overall ratings were up 8%. That's not super-huge, but it's fairly significant for a show in its fifth season. The other six all dove, some precipitously. 7th Heaven dropped 15%. Smallville plummeted by a stunning 25% from last year. Everwood and Charmed both dropped 4%. Reba lost 11%. And critical darling Gilmore Girls went down 21%. For an even more shocking number, the final episode this year posted almost 1.5 million more viewers than normal; stunningly the numbers for the finale even beat the numbers for the finale of its parent show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Clearly, something was going on here.

In addition to the "show reset" that Angel did this year, the show sold strongly on DVD (the first three seaons are out) and has become a staple of TNT's syndication rotation. Essentially, that means that The WB's argument that Angel was inaccessible to new viewers has an awful lot of holes. If all of TV is a game of numbers and money, then I'm frankly baffled as to why a show with growing numbers that's obviously capable of generating money gets dumped when other gems of the net are bleeding viewers. What's more remarkable is that the two genre shows that were alleged to take Angel's place, the ill-conceived Dr. Smith-less Lost in Space remake and the ill-conceived hasn't-this-failed-once-already Dark Shadows re-remake, both failed to make The WB's fall slate. What will occupy the old Angel slot? Sketch comedy shows from Drew Carey (who already had a sitcom AND a sketch comedy show shitcanned by ABC in the last year) and Jeff Foxworthy's redneck comics.

The only thing that seems to make any sense at all is the fact that The WB blanched because they had to pay a bit more for the show, since it was a 20th Century Fox production. Still, increased ratings, word-of-mouth, and the ability to sell product are usually seen as desirable things. The fact that UPN didn't pick up Angel they way they did with Buffy (which was not cancelled, but rather, moved) has more to do with the fact that UPN lost money on the Buffy manuever and is busy pissing away cash on the swiftly sinking Enterprise (all I need to say there is "Alien Nazis"; didn't Roddenberry already beat the fuck out of that dead horse once?).

I believe that the Angel situation and the bleak nature of the fall line-up for every network underscores my earlier point: the broadcast networks become more irrelevent by the year. Fates willing, Whedon can reconvene his big stars in the next year or two and give the Buffyverse the big, all-star action blow-out it deserves as a final chapter. Until then there's animation, DVD, comics, and the glimmering hope that is cable.

Troy Brownfield is the Editor-in-Chief of Shotgun Reviews. Email Troy at psikotyk@aol.com

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