Television has grown more and more competitive these days, putting it up to Hollywood to keep their standards high. If you snooze you lose, and right now Hollywood’s threatening to take a long doze into hibernation.
This is due to fantastic shows - Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Wire and The Sopranos – breaking onto the scene in recent years. Sure, HBO dramas are garnering a lot of attention, but do any comedies deserve mention in that same list? Yes, actually. Louie, for one. And Curb Your Enthusiasm. South Park, It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia and Arrested Development. And perhaps my favourite show of them all. Community..
Known for it’s pop culture references and ability to adopt other television shows’ styles and tropes, Community has become a favourite to comedy fans everywhere. After two and a half seasons, however, NBC decided not to include Community in its mid-season line-up, instead opting for the almost-as-funny 30 Rock. The remainder of season three’s episodes will be played after the mid-season line-up, but for now the long-term future of the show is unknown.
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The 80s are fading into myth faster than we, who lived it, could imagine. Let these terrible TV shows someone thought were a good idea, possibly after snorting a shoebox full of cocaine and driving to work in a DeLorean, remind us that we probably shouldn’t try this again. This decade we mean. Yeah. It was worse than the 90s, and bicycle shorts were in style in the 90s. For guys.
Disclaimer: These aren’t all the terrible TV shows the 80s vomited into existence. Rather, we chose to vary our sampling based on the many different types of shows including sitcoms, dramas, and a spinoffs. We also– Seriously though, bicycle shorts! They were basically tights with the pant legs missing. And men wore them! Even when they weren’t going to be bicycling! It’s just wrong. And you know it’s wrong. Dad. Sorry, sorry, we’re getting way off topic here. Please enjoy the article. We’re, uh, going to fix ourselves a stiff drink and pray the nightmares don’t return tonight.
1. Mr. Smith
In the history of TV, there have been many shows about things that talk that shouldn’t: horses, cars, dogs, Snooki, but it turns out America draws the line at monkeys. In 1983, Mr. Smith debuted in September and was cancelled by December, with 13 episodes somehow being made before God intervened and sealed all evidence of its existence into the Ark of the Covenant.
It will melt your face.
What made Mr. Smith such a piece of excrement? It’s hard to pinpoint exactly. The show featured an orang-utan named ChaCha who first becomes separated from his trainer after a car accident, and then ends up in a research lab. Which he escapes from. Then, probably just for the hell of it, the monkey finds an experimental serum that increases human intelligence.
Despite being a commercial failure upon its initial release (that’s what you get for going toe to toe with Half-Life 2), Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines is still growing strong. Despite ostensibly causing developer Troika Games to go under several months later and containing a notorious amount of bugs (although the Troika crew did work unpaid on a patch attempting to fix these), the game was well liked by critics and continues to have a faithful cult following to this day. One of the things Bloodlines is best known for is arguably its writing, and with such a large cast of highly memorable characters it’s easy to see why. But which NPCs really drew you in (or, alternatively, repelled you), making the game all the better for it? Read on for a tentative top ten.
The 20th century was a great time period for speeches. There were many unbelievably extraordinary speeches delivered between 1900 and 2000 that will live through the ages. Some of the absolute best are listed below.
Lou Gehrig – July 4, 1939
Farewell to Baseball Speech
Baseball fans thought that Lou Gehrig’s career would never end. The slugger was called the Iron Horse because he was so durable and dedicated to baseball.
The Carina Nebula.
In this week’s “around the web” segment, ThisBlogRules ventures out into the furthest reaches of our galaxy, and other galaxies, by way of a trusty telescope; it turns out our universe can be pretty spectacular. We also take a look at some creepy abandoned water parks, one particularly nasty tattoo, and we examine the undying connection between nerds and spectacles. It’s all right here in our “around the web” special; just don’t stare at that tattoo for too long – it’ll give you nightmares.
