TVSquad

I thought it was a rule that TV stations covering sporting events (at least in baseball) didn't show drunks, streakers, and other morons who jump on the playing field in the middle of a game? Last night FOX happily showed a guy at the Yankees/Angels game who somehow got into the waterfall area of the outfield and went for a swim. Well, he laid down in the water.

I think we can assume the guy got at least one beer from the concession stand.

[via TMZ]

Sorry for the lame headline.

We're in the middle of the Discovery Channel's annual Shark Week celebration, a whole of programming involving sharks, sharks, sharks, sharks, and the people who love/fear them. But David Zurawik over at The Baltimore Sun doesn't understand why some people get excited about it. He wants someone to explain its appeal.

Last week I showed you the new print ad for the third season of Mad Men, and we were all wondering exactly what all the water means. Well, AMC has put together a video that shows how they shot the video and what the water symbolizes. The stand-in looks a lot like Jon Hamm.

Not really sure what to make of this new print ad for the third season of Mad Men (August 16 at 10PM). I would assume it means that Don about to get in over his head, that a lot of things in his life are closing in on him, that things are about to get worse for Don and others on the show.

Or maybe they just had a problem with the plumbing at Sterling-Cooper.

I almost chose the above pic for this week's "What the heck is this?," but realized it would be too obscure for readers to get. What is it? It's a bloody pair of chewed up shorts, and it's part of the press kit for Discovery Channel's "Shark Week." James Hibberd over at The Hollywood Reporter gives a rundown on what the kit looks like up close. It includes Hibberd's obituary.

I once got a "Shark Week" T-shirt from the network but nothing like this.

Last night was the season premiere of ABC's crazy game show Wipeout. I have to admit that it's one of my guilty pleasures. I ignored the show on its first run but started to watch repeats on Sunday afternoons and grew to like the show. The play-by-play is often annoying and I don't know why the contestants have to be so trash-talking and cocky, but it's fun. The new season has new obstacles for people to get through to the $50,000, and I think co-host Jill looks a bit different (though still hot!). What's your take on this show?

DockDogs is not a sequel to Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, but rather a new seven-part series on the Outdoor Channel focusing on a competition in which dogs jump off of docks. There's dock-diving, which is scored based on distance, and the extreme vertical, which is scored based on how high the dogs jump.

I've seen plenty of dogs take to water willingly, but have never heard of it as an actual competition. I decided to search for footage on YouTube and came across a short clip from the Ducks Unlimited Great Outdoors Festival in Oshkosh, WI. What I've gathered is that there's this dock . . . and dogs jump off it. Seems pretty straight forward.

Japanese television makes American television look sleepy. Especially their game shows. I don't even know the official name for this game show, but it's essentially a human version of Tetris. Big walls of styrofoam come flying at contestants who have to contort their bodies to fit through the shape in the wall, or be pushed into a pool of yellow water. It's sort-of like Tetris. I've attached a four-minute clip to this post. For some of those challenges, I have no idea how a human body would get through the space (I think that's the point).

I want on this game show more than I want on The Price is Right.

Video is after the jump:

I only watch Montel when psychic Sylvia Browne is on, because I like to study her and hopefully improve my own psychic abilities. So far I can bend spoons with my mind and talk to animals, though bending the spoon with my mind means I just press a spoon against my forehead until it bends, and while I can speak to animals, I can't actually understand what the animals themselves are saying. I've been trying to combine both of my psychic abilities into one by headbutting a cocker spaniel across the room, but so far no one is that impressed.

I haven't caught ol' Sylvia in awhile, but I did find a couple clips on YouTube that help to prove one very important rule for psychics: never, under any circumstances, admit you're wrong. In the first clip, which I placed after the jump, Sylvia tries to convince a grieving couple that their deceased daughter, who passed away five years ago at the age of seventeen, was shot in the chest. Actually, the girl just collapsed in her room and the autopsy revealed nothing. Undeterred, Sylvia changes "shot in the chest" to "something hit her in the chest," which, when you think about it, is really the same thing. Just the other day somebody punched me in the chest and then later somebody shot me at pointblank range with a .44 and I couldn't tell the difference at all.

(S05E05) This episode was directed by Peter Weller, who also played the actor portraying Stottlemeyer in the season premiere, something I complete missed when I saw that episode. Shame on me.

The show also introduced a new love interest for Stottlemeyer, a no-nonsense real estate agent named Linda Fusco, played by Sharon Lawrence. They left their relationship pretty wide open by the end, so I suspect she'll be returning for more episodes, which is always cool because I like it when they take the focus away from Monk once in awhile and flesh out the side characters a bit more.

In this episode, Natalie, inspired by her late grandfather who started a toothpaste company in England ("talk about optimism!"), leases some office space and sets up a private detective agency for Mr. Monk. Their first client is the aforementioned Linda, who wants them to find out who dented her fender. She's convinced it was her ex-husband, but as they delve deeper they discover the man who did it is also the same man who drowned his lover by knocking her out, sealing her in a box, and dumping her over the side of his yacht (a yacht called "Lucky Lady" by the way. Never let it be said the Monk writers don't have a sick sense of humor).

(S05E03) I think I may have made this comparison before, but Monk reminds me a lot of Scooby-Doo. It's not so much because both shows are about solving crimes, but because both follow essentially the same basic formula for every episode. Despite this, however, I still love the show.

In this episode, Julie's basketball coach is killed when a towel is left on the floor drain of the girl's locker room and a hairdryer is also left on the floor, causing the coach to become electrocuted when she steps into the water. This is yet another of those rather convoluted James Bond-style murders that always open an episode of Monk. Seriously, had she looked down at the floor before stepping out of the shower she would have seen the hair dryer, but lucky enough for the killer, she just happens to not be paying attention. Also, how many high school coaches actually use the showers in the locker room? Wouldn't they just go home for that sort of thing?

Discovery Channel's Shark Week, possibly my favorite seven days devoted to deadly marine life, will be popping its crazy dorsal fin out of the water from July 30 through August 4. Hang on, that's only six days, isn't it? I want a full seven days of deadly, man-eating fish, dag blast it. Whose chum bucket do I have to kiss to make that happen, huh? Well, whatever, I guess six days is okay. The first night of Shark Week will begin at 9 p.m. with a special episode of Dirty Jobs titled Dirty Jobs: Jobs That Bite. Host Mike Rowe will go underwater with great whites (as opposed to them coming above water to see him, I guess) and also visit a place in Florida that creates replicas of sharks fishermen have captured. Rowe will also finish Shark Week with Dirty Jobs: Jobs That Bite Harder on August 4.

Other shows to air throughout shark week include Shark Attack Survivors; Perfect Shark; Sharks: Are They Hunting Us?; Shark Rebellion; and Science of Shark Sex. Click here for a video preview.

(S01E04) "The End of the Whole Mess" is one of my favorite Stephen King short stories for two reasons. One, it's written by a protagonist who is slowly losing his mind as the story progresses, much like an earlier short story of his titled "Survivor Type" (from the Skeleton Crew collection). The other reason I like it so much is that it's very unstereotypically King. It's a very touching and very human story about misplaced good intentions, those same intentions that pave the road to Hell, as the cliche goes.

In the story, the teller is Howie Fornoy, a freelance writer. In the TV version he's a documentary filmmaker and he tapes his final moments on Earth rather than writing about them, which makes sense, this being a television episode after all. Howard is played by Ron Livingston, and his younger brother, Bobby, is played by Henry Thomas. The two brothers are intelligent kids with intelligent parents, but Bobby is especially so. Howie describes him as a kind of wandering genius, someone like Da Vinci or Einstein flittering from one interest to the next like a compass trying to find True North. Bobby finally finds his True North when he and a team of researchers discover a town in Texas called La Planta where the water contains proteins not found anywhere else, including one only found in the human brain. It turns out the water acts as a kind of "calmative" that renders the entire town and its people completely passive and nonviolent.

That's "V" as in the letter "V," not the Roman numeral for "five." Otherwise, I guess the sequel would be "VI."

Now, the original V aired when I was about seven, so I never watched much of the original miniseries, or the TV series that followed. It's not like I couldn't have watched it as a seven year old, but I was kind of a wuss when I was a kid and those scary lizard people were too much for me. If any of you would like to go back in time and heckle me as a seven year old, feel free to do that. Seriously, that kid needs some toughening up.

So anyway, TV Filter hepped me to information about a possible miniseries sequel to the original series, helmed by original writer and director Kenneth Johnson. Right now it seems they're trying to secure the finances needed to do the series, but before that happens you'll be able to purchase the novel based on Johnson's screenplay by early 2007. According to the IMDb trivia page for V - The Second Generation, several original cast members have signed on to the project, including Robert "Freddy Krueger" Englund. This is IMDb, so I don't necessarily trust the information completely, but if all of this turns out to be true, it could be a very cool thing for fans of the series.

(S02E02) This episode will air Sunday night on Adult Swim, but you can catch it over at the Adult Swim Fix site now. This episode begins with Tom visiting the town "darn" (he doesn't like to say "dam") while on a field trip with his adult school class. Sean Hayes from Will and Grace does a hilarious turn as a tour guide.

It turns out the dam is also home to Bass Fest (that's "bass" as in the musical instrument, not the fish). I'm actually a bass player myself, so I have to admit all the bass references cracked me up, especially when bass player Wizzard (Bob Odenkirk) announces on TV that he'll be playing a G three octaves lower than anyone has ever played. Tom tries to protest the festival, however, when he discovers that the low frequencies could rupture the dam. He takes his position in his "protest canoe" above the dam, and begs Wizzard to stop playing when leaks start appearing and water begins to pour out of the dam. The Mayor insists it's not the bass playing but Tom's "heavy canoe" that's causing the dam to give.