Why Network TV Is Losing Its Edge (Part I)

As I spent the summer helping my parents out with a bunch of housework (and eating for free, a super important aspect of any life choice for a grad student) I had the pleasure of enjoying the use of their TiVo Premier, which is cooler than my TiVo because it picks up an HD signal.  Anyway, good ol' me got a little loose with the Season Pass trigger and ended up trusting the TNT hype machine and trying out one of their new series, Perception.  Whoops.  Holy shit whoops.  Now, I enjoy Eric McCormack when he's good, and Rachel Leigh Cook is the cutest, least-believable federal agent in recent memory but this show is awful.  What it really is, at its core, is an attempt to capitalize on the new "niche" of terribly flawed main characters.  But where Gregory House was super smart and mostly a prick, or Tony Shalhoub was a germophobe as Adrian Monk - and arguably originated the whole trope - Dr. Daniel Pierce (McCormack) is just a neuroscientist with schizophrenia.

Characters like House, Monk, Temperance Brennan (Bones), Cal Lightman (Lie To Me*), or even Charlie Eppes (Numb3rs) have in common an uncanny brilliance that can be positively applied to the world by the right "handler", for lack of a better term. Their brilliance has limited their ability to engage and play nicely with the "normal" people in society, but eventually the communication line kicks through and the case gets solved.  Perception, however, uses Pierce's schizophrenia as some combination of a superpower and deus ex machina to make sure that each episode clocks in at under 48 minutes.  Mental illness is not the added quirk that is a tradeoff for spectacular reasoning or interpretive capabilities.  Instead the good Dr. Pierce uses his schizophrenia to entirely solve his cases.  The actual science that he engages in lies within the purview of a first-year nursing student, so the only thing that's actually impressive is that Dr. Pierce somehow solves all these cases by talking to imaginary people who are supposed manifestations of his subconscious.  And his subconscious already knows all the deepest darkest secrets of the villain in custody or whatever.  Basically, TNT randomly flipped open a medical diagnosis textbook and pointed to a condition and gifted the world this asinine hour of television on Monday nights.  Please don't watch this show.  It's not good.

You may be saying to yourself, "If this article is supposed to be about how network TV is losing its edge to cable and premium stations, why is he bellyaching for two paragraphs about a show on cable!?"  Good question.  Better answer: Because five years ago cable stations wouldn't have had the balls to even try a show like Perception!  And that's what the crux of this and a number of ensuing articles is going to focus on.  Station-by-station we're going to semi-live, semi-regularly, possibly drunkenly explore all the things that various network, cable, and premium stations are doing right and wrong.  Out of this will come a fluid network power ranking, which will be based on show variety, originality, quality, and the all important aspect of taking a chance with programming.  (If you're TV savvy, you'll realize that this means FOX will be losing mondo points for American Idol, NBC will lose even more points for The Voice, and that AMC is probably the fucking New York Yankees of TV until further notice.)  Quick on the heels of this belated post (which should have been up on the 15th but it was my birthday last week so deal with it) will be an exploration of the network TV station that I watch the absolute least: NBC.  So look for an out of order, 'bonus' post from us here at Opportunity Assassins.

Until then, it's your time. Waste it how you see fit.

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Opportunity Assassins: Tools for the Lazy

Prelude:

The last new content piece for Opportunity Assassins is our weekly "big" article. As we stated during our launch, we'll find something interesting to talk about then do the heavy lifting so you, our dear readers, don't have to. We here at OA don't have and fancy pants name for this section so we'll settle for a fabulously lazy name of "OA Wednesday Post". There are no rules for this content - no word counts, no formatting, no nothing. Just information you need to perfect your procrastination skills to become the next Opportunity Assassin.

Becoming an Opportuinty Assassin (read: professional procrastinator), you need several tools to help speed life along so that you don't have to worry about the blur. We have only 1 thing that we look for when selecting the best tools for the job - Can I reach it while laying down on my couch? Well, it turns out there are amazing tools that accomplish just that and I'll tell you three of my favorite.

The Coin Toss

It's time for an Opportunity Assassins History Moment [1]. Since the invention of two sided items, the world's most important decisions have been made by which side lands face up. Of course, the advent of the money system, and more specifically coins, not only gave The Coin Toss its name, but made decision making portable. Examples of history's best and worst coin toss decisions include: the invention of Beer, Napoleon attempting to invade Russia, the invention of Whiskey, Hitler attempting to invade Russia, the invention of Pizza, Russia moving ICBMs to Cuba,  the invention of Air Conditioning, the invention of Golf, the invention of Football and mullets. As any Opportunity Assassin knows, no decision was ever made with a single coin toss. As a matter of fact, it's a universal law that no decision is final until after the third toss - a law called the Definitive Triumvirate Law.

The Opportunity Assassins Approved tricks of the trade for satisfying the Definitive Triumvirate Law are:
Any Coin
Any two-faced item
Random.org's Coin Flipper

The Universal Remote

A Universal Remote is the cornerstone for any good Opportunity Assassin's coffee table. While the Logitech Harmony family of is probably the best known and most popular of universal remotes on the market. The programmability, flexibility and ease of setup really helps the Harmony excel, but it's missing the one important feature included in the remote to receive the Opportunity Assassins Stamp of Approval - Bluetooth to control my home theater center Playstation 3. The Opportunity Assassins approved solution is the SMK-Link Blu-Link Universal Remote a combination PS3/RF remote. This allows me to control my music, movies, Netflix and plenty of other distractions from the comfort of my couch. The big benefit is that I can actually turn on just my surround sound and my PS3 then take the remote to another room where I can control my music without direct line of sight to my TV.


A Deck of Cards

Here's your next Opportunity Assassins History Moment. [2]There is no single distraction older than a deck of cards. It's a well known and well documented fact that raptors used to set up campfires all around Pangaea after a good T-Rex hunt and play games of Smear. Fast forward to a small Croatian village in the late 1800s and you'll find Nikolai Tesla playing games of Solitaire in a chain mail suit between two powered Tesla Coils. Second only to the Coin Toss in the list of procrastination's highest value historical contributions, a deck of cards is a savior to all species of creatures the world over. In a pinch, it's simple to shuffle up a deck of cards and deal out a game of King's Corners, play a game of Memory or the quickest card game of all - 52 Pick-Up. Perfect for everything from drinking games to picking Fantasy Football draft orders, a deck of cards is a life-saver in a pinch and a great way to waste time the Opportunity Assassins's way.

But hey, it's your time. Waste it how you see fit.


What's your favorite procrastination tool that would meet our stringent approvals?

[1] Opportunity Assassins History Moments are fictional creations because we're simply too lazy to do real research.

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