The people who run Sleuth have no Cloo

When NBCUniversal (now one word instead of two) added Sleuth to its stable of cable channels in 2006, it was an alright idea for a channel: Nick at Nite with guns. For its first couple of years, Sleuth's 24-hour lineup was comprised of reruns of NBCUniversal-owned cop or detective shows like Dragnet, Magnum, P.I., Miami Vice and the always-worth-revisiting Homicide: Life on the Street.

But like so many other channels, of course, Sleuth has strayed from its original purpose. These days, DirecTV channel 308 is an ill-defined dumping ground for reruns of current original shows from its sister station USA (Royal Pains, In Plain Sight)--and Walker, Texas Ranger. With content like Royal Pains, a doctor show, In Plain Sight, a cop show with very little detective work because of its focus on witness protection, and Walker, a cop show with no detective work (and one that's only watchable when Conan O'Brien's around to butt in with snarky and appalled commentary), the name Sleuth doesn't make much sense anymore. Cloo--the new name that Sleuth will assume on a yet-to-be-confirmed future date a la the still-inane 2009 conversion of its other sister station Sci Fi to Syfy--makes even less sense. What's next? NBCUniversal rebranding USA as YouSA? (They also own Telemundo. Maybe they should rename it YouEse.)

Occasionally, Sleuth has done something nice like temporarily revive a show I've longed to see again (Keen Eddie, The Rockford Files) or air a 007 marathon or the surprisingly good 1973 made-for-TV caper movie/unsold anthology show pilot The Alpha Caper, which isn't on DVD and stars Henry Fonda as a forcibly retired parole officer who teams up with the ex-cons he used to watch over--two of whom are played by Leonard Nimoy and Larry Hagman--to hijack a shipment of gold. But otherwise, as a fan of the private eye and caper genres, I've found Sleuth to be a wasted opportunity, regurgitating too many of the same broadcast network procedural reruns that can already be found on USA (House, NCIS).

Unless it's airing a White Collar episode I've never seen before or a Burn Notice rerun with a useful spy tip I need to jot down, Sleuth isn't worth my time. The channel's so cheap it doesn't have any on-air hosts or any original programming that could have given Sleuth a distinctive personality, like how breezy procedurals have become USA's forte or how FX has become synonymous with edgy comedies and gritty and violent but intelligently written dramas (the only original show that Sleuth has produced is a 2006 I Love the '80s-style special about "America's Top Sleuths").

It's owned by NBCUniversal and it's called Sleuth (that is until the name change to Cloo takes place), so why isn't the channel diving into the NBCUniversal library, with its vast history of influential crime shows, and pulling out classic sleuthy properties like Columbo (R.I.P. Peter Falk) or the other NBC Mystery Movie shows? Shouldn't a channel called Sleuth be a little, uh, sleuthier?

Also, as someone who stopped finding Law & Order interesting after an ailing Jerry Orbach left the mothership (although the later pairing of Jesse L. Martin and Jeremy Sisto was a great and too-brief one during the mothership's Law half, as was the duo of Chris Noth and Annabella Sciorra on Criminal Intent), I don't think Sleuth needs to be another repository for Criminal Intent and Special Victims Unit reruns (TNT has exclusive rights to reruns of the mothership, which explains its absence on the NBCUniversal channels' schedules). Okay, maybe Criminal Intent is tolerable once every weekday, but a five-hour Goren-thon like the ones Sleuth often does is overkill. Plus, Sleuth is the sixth channel on the dial that currently airs Criminal Intent reruns, after USA, Bravo, Oxygen, WGN and the local MyNetworkTV affiliate. Enough already, man.

As for SVU, I never cared for a show that's like Law & Order for people who enjoy those lame Lifetime women-in-peril TV-movies. Also, it turned Munch, one of my favorite Homicide characters, into a boring extra. That's criminal. I'm glad Christopher Meloni jumped ship because he can now concentrate on unleashing again his much-missed comedic side (a highlight of Wet Hot American Summer and the Harold & Kumar movies).

If I ran Sleuth/Cloo, here's how the schedule would look for what I always thought a crime show channel should be.

The original Law & Order isn't on here because of TNT (another reason to dislike them besides their cancellation of Men of a Certain Age). Wiseguy isn't on here because I assume the most recent syndication package is just like the DVD and iTunes versions of the show, which removed The Moody Blues' "Nights in White Satin" from the famous "Vinnie and Sonny stare into each other's eyes and wind up as footage for The Celluloid Closet II" sequence due to clearance issues. A butchered Wiseguy is like a piece of bitter melon that winds up in my plate of fish and rice: I don't want it. The Shield is missing because Spike has the rights to it, and as for my all-time favorite The Wire, DirecTV's Audience Network currently has dibs on it. I wouldn't want to acquire Wire reruns anyway because NBCUniversal wouldn't let them air uncensored:

MONDAY-FRIDAY
6am: Columbo
7:30am: Barney Miller
8am: Psych
9am: Monk
10am: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
11am: The Rockford Files
12pm: "Brilliant But Cancelled" (a revival of an old programming block that was the highlight of NBCUniversal's long-dead Trio channel and has lent its name to a blog at the NBCUniversal-owned Television Without Pity site, the hour would alternate between Terriers, Eyes, Black Tie Affair, Andy Barker, P.I., A Nero Wolfe Mystery, Karen Sisco, Keen Eddie, the Touching Evil remake, Vengeance Unlimited, EZ Streets, Crime Story, Andre Braugher's Thief, Thieves, Day Break, Tenspeed and Brown Shoe and Police Squad!)
1pm: Burn Notice
2pm: I Spy
3pm: The Avengers (I miss A&E's Avengers reruns that used to air at 3pm in the '90s)
4pm: It Takes a Thief
5pm: Mission: Impossible
6pm: Alias (two impeccably scored spy shows back-to-back!)
7pm: "007 at 7" (a broadcast of a 007 movie hosted by Mozzie from White Collar, who points out mistakes in the movie he wouldn't have made if he were Bond)

10pm: Veronica Mars
11pm: Burn Notice
12am: The Equalizer
1am: Law & Order: Criminal Intent (just so that there'd be that one night where the Equalizer episode featuring a Full Metal Jacket-era Vincent D'Onofrio as a crazed arsonist ends up back-to-back with Criminal Intent)
2am: Homicide: Life on the Street (now what if one night, that D'Onofrio Equalizer guest shot ended up getting followed by a D'Onofrio episode of Criminal Intent and then D'Onofrio's guest appearance on Homicide?--that would be even more awesome: D'Onofrio lights people on fire, and then he apprehends people who would light people on fire, and then he gets run over by a subway train)
3am: Spenser: For Hire (as the A.V. Club comments section once said about this show, Avery Brooks is one bad motherfucker)
4am: Harry O
5am: Mannix

SATURDAY
(The whole day is devoted to one show. Sleuth's recent all-Saturday marathons of either White Collar, Burn Notice, Psych, In Plain Sight, Covert Affairs, MacGyver or Charlie's Angels actually aren't a wack idea.)

SUNDAY
6am: Movie
8am: Movie
10am: Movie
12pm: Movie
2pm: Movie
4pm: Movie
6pm: Honey West
6:30pm: The Name of the Game

8pm: Columbo
9:30pm: McCloud
11pm: McMillan and Wife
12:30am: Peter Gunn
1:00am: Batman: The Animated Series
1:30am: Duckman
2:00am: Get Smart
2:30am: Sledge Hammer!
3:00am: Car 54, Where Are You?
3:30am: Barney Miller
4:00am: "The 4 O'Clock Movie" (I'd relegate the channel's frequent broadcasts of straight-to-DVD Steven Seagal or Jean-Claude Van Damme duds to this time slot and get a stand-up or some "Commander USA"-type figure to be the on-air host, so that she or he can make it a less grueling experience to sit through duds like that Van Damme movie that ends with him and Vivica A. Fox sharing one of the strangest-looking prolonged kisses ever filmed)

Star Blazers was light years ahead of Game of Thrones

(This post first appeared in a slightly modified form on Blogcritics.)

The HBO medieval drama's most shocking twist brings to mind a similar moment from a classic '70s animated series

It's been a long time since an HBO drama series has made me think to myself at the end of each episode, "God, I'm dying to see what happens next week." The last HBO drama to elicit a reaction like that from me was David Simon's Iraq war show Generation Kill. But that was actually a miniseries, not a drama with a not-so-limited run like The Sopranos, so the last non-Generation Kill HBO drama where I was really invested in every character was The Wire three years ago--until Game of Thrones came along.

(WARNING: Anyone who has never watched either of the two shows that are mentioned in this post's title can leave now. Spoilers right after the parenthesis.)

In "Baelor," the penultimate episode of its soon-to-end first season, showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss' enthralling adaptation of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy novels shocked viewers like myself who are unfamiliar with the source material--and have had a hell of a time carefully shielding their eyes from online discussions of spoilers from those books--by killing off its lead character Ned Stark (Sean Bean). I'm eager to see how the show will go on without a paternal figure who was as central to the first season of Game of Thrones as Tony was to The Sopranos or Bill Adama was to the Battlestar Galactica remake and was such a prominent presence in HBO's billboard and poster art (the face of the Game of Thrones promotional campaign was Bean, who, in a weird moment of life half-assedly imitating art, survived a stabbing outside a London bar on the same night that Ned lost his head on HBO).

There have been shows that have killed off leads during their first or second seasons before, either because the producers weren't getting along with their star, he or she wanted to quit the show or in the case of the ABC sitcom 8 Simple Rules, the star tragically passed away. Game of Thrones is one of the few shows that had its lead killed for narrative reasons.

"He dies for the same reason Obi Wan Kenobi, Dumbledore and Gandalf had to die," observed James Hibberd in his Entertainment Weekly recap of "Baelor." "It takes the Stark kids--who are all too young to face these responsibilities--and thrusts them into a struggle where they're forced to quickly grow as characters."

The Stark patriarch's decapitation is a risky move that immediately reminded me of the death of Captain Avatar at the end of the first season of Star Blazers, a redubbed and censored-for-kids American version of Yoshinobu Nishizaki and Leiji Matsumoto's Space Battleship Yamato, a serialized '70s Japanese cartoon about a crew of intergalactic war survivors who, in season 1, journey through space to find an alien device that will help undo the nuclear radiation that damaged Earth.

Star Blazers first aired in 1979, during the height of the first Star Wars film's popularity, but I first caught the show as a kid a few years later. (The Argo in the midst of combat was my favorite image to doodle on my schoolwork in first grade.) I had been enjoying reruns of the cartoon's first season during Syfy's Thursday night anime programming block last month, before Syfy took Star Blazers off the air permanently last week. Apparently, the network doesn't have enough spots on its schedule for seven-year-old reruns of Stargate: Special Victims Unit.

Ned's demise is undoubtedly one of the most shocking character deaths in TV history (some Game of Thrones fans are steamed about it and have expressed their displeasure to HBO). But the grizzled Avatar's long, slow death from radiation poisoning decades before Ned's execution is slightly more daring. What other space opera on TV at the time had the guts to kill off its captain? Also, the drawn-out death of the crusty old coot, who was called Okita in the Space Battleship Yamato incarnation of Star Blazers, is something you don't expect to see in an animated show from that era, even one that was made for adults like the original incarnation of Star Blazers (animation is taken more seriously in Japan than here in America).

Griffin-Bacal Advertising, the ad agency that revamped Space Battleship Yamato for America, made several changes to the cartoon, including Americanizing the names of the heroes and their ship, removing raunchy comedic scenes in which IQ-9 the pervy robot sexually harasses female officer Nova and eliminating all references to sake, the favorite libation of goofy but competent medical officer Dr. Sado, who was renamed Dr. Sane (Sado was like a Japanese Foster Brooks, back when alcoholism was cute and funny). But Griffin-Bacal didn't tamper with Avatar's death. I'm still amazed that Griffin-Bacal didn't wuss out like Voltron, another American redubbing of an anime show, would later do in 1984 when it rewrote a heroic character's death in the original Japanese version as a long stay in the hospital.

While rewatching Star Blazers on Syfy, I noticed some elements haven't aged well--particularly the dated-looking animation, the lame attempts at comic relief and the sometimes stilted-sounding American redubs--and it's occasionally difficult to take Avatar seriously now because of his resemblance to the Sea Captain from The Simpsons. But Star Blazers, which, in its original incarnation, was an allegory for Japan's struggles to recover from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, still holds up as a largely serious, pre-Galactica sci-fi drama about the costs of war. Its willingness to sacrifice Avatar is an example of how seriously the animated series took the subject of war (just as how the loss of Ned is an example of how far Game of Thrones will go to maintain the brutality of the Martin novels' milieu).

When I was six years old, I was disturbed by Star Blazers' flashback sequence of young Derek Wildstar's discovery of his parents' deaths from an alien bomb attack. It's a loss that fuels Wildstar's commitment to seeing the Argo's mission through as he inherits the captain's chair from his dying mentor Avatar. I've seen much more depressing and grisly images since that Star Blazers sequence, so when I rewatched it a few weeks ago, I didn't get choked up like I did when I was six, but the sight of Wildstar as a kid, alone and grieving in the rubble where his parents once stood, remains a powerful image.

Yamato's impact on Japanese viewers during moments like that flashback to the parents' deaths and Okita's deathbed scene is so immense that the series got the ultimate tribute in 2010 when director Takashi Yamazaki remade it as a $23.9 million, J.J. Abrams Star Trek-style live-action feature film (beating to the punch a mired-in-development-hell Star Blazers movie project that currently has Usual Suspects and Valkyrie screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie attached to it). In America, the series is nothing more than a cult favorite, so it's not surprising that hardly anybody recalled Avatar's demise when Game of Thrones lopped off Ned's head. Both televised seasons of Star Blazers (plus an additional season that never aired nationally like the previous two and is the only season I've never seen) are available on DVD and worth checking out if you're curious about why its fans are still gaga over the Argo's badass Wave Motion Gun (YouTube it) or if you're curious to see how a cartoon managed to get away with presenting grown-up images of wartime despair and sacrifice to American kids in the '70s and '80s. The decision by Griffin-Bacal and the series' American distributor Claster Television to not drastically alter Yamato's storylines is more admirable than what took place on their later military cartoon G.I. Joe, where the stories were so often watered-down and corny (in comparison to both Star Blazers and the Marvel comic book version of G.I. Joe) that its series tagline "A Real American Hero" should have been replaced with "Gee, Kids, Ain't War Fun?"

Now that's a line you'd never hear on either Star Blazers or Game of Thrones, where its most shocking episode conclusion yet is a Star Blazers-like way of saying "The stakes are high and no one's safe, not even the star of the show." God, I'm dying to see what happens this week.

"A Fistful of Soundtracks can be a blast to listen to. Duck, you sucka!"

We interrupt my work on a drawing of the three members of De La Soul for my currently-in-the-works, to-be-self-published book to bring you this special bulletin.

I don't know what Crutchfield is--the name sounds like a Syfy Original Movie(*) ripoff of Cloverfield--but I'd like to thank the site for a mostly positive review of the Fistful of Soundtracks channel that it posted a few weeks ago.

(*) Speaking of which, Battle of Los Angeles? Really, Syfy? Next time you run out of title ideas for your original movies, how about you take a cue from your own station tagline and imagine greater?

I've seen so many blogs with kind things to say about AFOS--and I always appreciate that--but they always get one or two tidbits about AFOS or me wrong. Crutchfield's review has none of that "every now and then it plays a random old movie trailer" bullshit. The reviewer actually did his homework and took the time to listen closely and note that "they aren't placed at random. If you hear the trailer for Big Trouble in Little China, you can be sure that the next selection will be from the soundtrack of that film." (However, for some odd reason, he never once uses the word "score" in his review to distinguish between "soundtrack" and "score.")

The reviewer wishes my channel had a better-quality bit rate and is probably wondering why it's just 32 kbps. Lengthy answer: I'm broke.

The Palace: Like Stuff It, White People, Chapter 5

Previously on The Palace: Is Wayne Brady gonna hafta choke the bitch who told him to appear in Crossover?


The Palace: Like Stuff It, White People resumes Monday, August 23 and concludes Friday, August 27 here at afistfulofsoundtracks.blogspot.com.