The Extratextuals

1. Jacqueline Vickery has a neat piece on Flow about a memorial site and a Facebook page that FOX put up following Kal Penn’s character’s suicide on House, M.D.  It’s a really smart discussion of what’s in it for FOX, especially since they don’t plaster the screen with ads.

2. YouTube has signed a deal with Sony, Lionsgate, and others to make films and television available. How they plan to do so, and with what costs to YouTube and its community, we’ll wait to see.

3. Several journalistic outlets have reported on this US Dept of Justic memo from within the Bush Administration that allowed certain forms of torture, including “walling,” “facial hold,” “cramped confinement,” sleep deprivation, and others. Mind you, the Obama Administration should be roundly condemned for its own lax policy on torture, moving Gitmo to Loews and AMCs around the nation, and by allowing exposure to the equally heinous The Ghosts of Girlfriends Past and The Hanna Montana Movie. May God save their souls.

4. I’ve been remiss in announcing that the Internet Movie Poster Awards site of which I’m a fan has its 2008 award winners up. Best Poster went to this one from The Dark Knight, which also won the Best Poster to Display in a Bus Shelter award:

Bringing up the rear, with Worst Movie Poster was Bangkok Dangerous, about which IMPAwards had this to say:

Now, the only thing that could possibly make sense with this poster is if he just suffered some kind of seizure (causing his right hand to cramp up) and is reaching for his medication (which he unfortunately dropped down his sleeve) with his other hand. In the meantime, he is being shot at and slowly melting in a pit of lava.

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This is the first in a series of posts I hope to write, evaluating and discussing not the recent spate of new shows per se, but rather their promos, both on air and online. A good promo shouldn’t just get one turning on the television, but it should also start the text, telling us what to expect, creating characters, introducing themes, and so forth, and a good website should do likewise, while also reinforcing central themes and frames for those who visit after seeing the promo or the show itself.

I start with NBC’s Southland

While the clip above is an extended promo, many of the smaller ones underlined similar points, pushing three key points:

1. It stars Ryan Atwood, of The OC fame
2. It’s an edgy, gritty, warts and all depiction of the tough job of policing LA’s streets that promises to tell us what it’s “really” like for the city’s cops. Think Training Day meets Colors for television
3. It comes to us from the folks behind ER

More after the fold …

Read more…

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