TVSquad

I like lists as much as the next guy, but I'm not sure how useful a "100 Best" list of anything is. Twenty-five best? OK. Ten best? That's good too, because you're really picking what you think are the best. But once your lists gets into three digits, it seems more like history than opinion. I mean, what wouldn't be on the list?

Time's James Poniewozik picks the 100 Best TV Shows of All-Time (or All-TIME, as the web site cleverly puts it). Since he picked 100 shows, all the usual suspects are here. The obvious ones (The Dick Van Dyke Show, All in the Family, Your Show of Shows, 60 Minutes, Cheers, I Love Lucy, M*A*S*H, etc) and the not-quite-so-obvious but certainly deserving (Mystery Science Theater 3000, The Odd Couple, Friends). And it includes a few surprises too (American Idol, King of the Hill, Oprah).

Starting in 1913 and ending in 1967, Time Inc provided a series of newsreels to theaters called "The March of Time." The series chronicled significant world events using photos, filmed elements and dramatic reenactments. When theaters stopped showing newsreels in the early fifties, Time Inc continued to make new documentaries and news stories for television. In the end, "The March of Time" covered more than 70 million feet of film.

Thought Equity Motion and the HBO Archival Collection recently teamed up to make all of the footage from "The March of Time" series available online. Unfortunately, it's only available to media professionals, but you can see a "trailer" of sorts here. It's nice to see this footage maintained, rather than simply fading away in a vault somewhere, plus it's a reminder of a time not terribly long ago when going to the movies or watching TV was more of an event than it is today.

1. Wait for the movie to finish downloading, and then disconnect your network adapter.
2. Clear your browser cache and cookies.
3. Reconnect your network adapter after you've finished watching the movie.
4. Netflix will subtract a few minutes from your clock, allowing you to watch dozens of additional movies this month.

The cool thing about portraying time travel, whether it be in books, movies, or television, is that no one has figured out how to do it in real life so you can pretty much just make it up as you go along. It's not as if there are people at home who have actually time traveled yelling at the screen: "Damn it! That's not how we did it when we went back in time and used Marie Antoinette's head as a soccer ball!" That is, however, a line from my new screenplay about time travelers who go back in time for the sole purpose of kicking around severed heads. It's called The People Who Go Back in Time and Kick Severed Heads Around.

If you didn't notice (which is fine, people shouldn't obsess over things like this like we do), MSNBC debuted a new news crawl and new on-screen graphics this morning. So far, it's a thumbs down.

While CNN and FOX News have cleaner, squared off graphics, MSNBC has gone with funky, pointy boxes on the right hand side that show the time and the MSNBC logo, while the left hand side shows the stock report. It's great that they separated the time and stocks, so now both can be on the screen at the same time, but the way they've done the boxing, it looks odd (and the text on the screen sometimes overlaps the new graphics, which isn't good). The crawl is odd too, because it doesn't crawl across the entire screen, only half of it (the stocks block the rest of the screen), and since only so many words can stay on the screen at once, it takes several seconds to even figure out what the story is about (but maybe that's on purpose, to make you stick around longer).

The new MSNBC logo is good though. It keeps the colorful peacock but it's now a lot thinner. Too bad they didn't put good boxes and a better setup around it. And I think it's time to get rid of the "MS" part. Why not just make it NBC News Channel now?

(S02E02) This episode of Wonder Showzen began with Chauncey visited by himself from two minutes in the future. It turns out Chauncey's future self is a hundred times cooler than Chauncey, so Chauncey sets out to build a time machine and travel even further back in the future (four minutes) so he can be even hipper. But we'll get to all that in a moment.

I said in my last review that the "Beat Kids" segment wasn't my favorite, only because I don't think it always works in the execution. Of course, that was before last night when they had a kid put on zombie make-up, dress as the Pope, and interview people in front of a Catholic Church under the pseudonym "Little Dead Pope." Trey Parker has been quoted time and again saying Cartman was his way of creating a character who could say things that would get most real people burned at the stake. Wonder Showzen takes that concept one step further and actually uses real children, which adds a whole layer of apprehension when you hear them say things to unsuspecting adults like, "The Pope should go to Hell for promoting a corrupt system. High five!" Not many shows can make you almost fall of the couch laughing while at the same time fearing for a child's life. They should have some kind of award for that.