Summer>Torrent

BY HENRY OLIVER

Okay, so summer is generally pretty great: the sun is shining (duh), friends get together more frequently & generally do more interesting/funner stuff, it is socially acceptable to drink earlier in the day, and people generally seem happier and more fun to be around. So what’s the rub? The rub is that TV sucks in the summertime.

(Yeah, so what if it’s summer? I still want to watch some TV alright? I mean how much time can you really spend at a beach? And who feels like reading a novel after a 4AM Iron Chefesque cocktail competition? Not me. And sure, BBQ’s are fun and all – and delicious! - but everyone has their limits.)

First, the kids are off school so there is all the 7:30 family orientated movies to contend with. Second, most of the shows are reruns, so if you missed what happened in Ugly Betty the first time round you’ll be glued to the set but if you didn’t care last year your remote will remain firmly in hand. And third, there’s the Writers Guild of America Strike.

If you’ve been living under a television for the last few months, it basically boils down to this: all the people who write TV shows are pissed because they want to get paid residuals (continuing payment) for use of their writing on the Internet, they want a bigger percentage per DVD sold, and writers of reality shows (yes, The Hills is scripted) want the same basic contractual rights as the writers of any other TV show. The Man (the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers) doesn’t want to pay up and has hired Arnold Schwarzenegger’s campaign manager to try and reverse the inevitable rising tide.

Anyway, THERE’S NOTHING GOOD ON TV. In an effort to comfort to comfort my short attention span, I’ve turned to the three most ironic (under the circumstances) sources of Television: the Internet, DVDs and Reality Television.


Undoubtedly the best source of television on the Internet is BitTorrent – a file sharing system where you download a torrent or ‘seed’ file from a website that when opened with a specific program puts you in touch with other people who send you tiny parts of the file while you send the tiny parts you already have to others. The key to the whole thing is that the sites that provide the torrents are not breaking any copyright laws because the file itself is not a TV show, movie or album at all. It’s just a birdcall to those that have what you want telling them that they should give it to you should they wish to.

My Current Torrent Obsessions:

The Wire Season Five
The last season! Wholly Shit this show is so good. If you like television and you like drama you will like this. In the realm of HBO, this is the Charles Dickens to Deadwood’s William Shakespeare. This season is a pungent cocktail of mayoral politics, financial misappropriation, drug dealing, and the death of the newspaper. Has the same Decline-of-America/Good-VS-Evil/Crime&Punishment bent as The Sopranos but substitutes the zippy one-liners for gritty realism (when I drove around Baltimore it was pretty scary). I can’t believe it will all be over soon. Please Sir, can I have some more?

A Daily Show/Colbert Report
I never seem to be at home or watching TV when The Daily Show plays on C4 so I download it and watch it back-to-back with The Colbert Report, just like it’s meant to be watched. Having been off air for sometime due to the strike, they are back with The Daily Show being renamed A Daily Show for the remainder of the dispute. Now, the both these shows tried to come to interim agreements with the Guild, like David Lettermen et al, but the Guild put the kibosh on it quick and now both shows are back on air without writers. You can tell. The funniest thing about these shows at the moment is how un-funny they are without the writers. It seems almost like a statement of solidarity: “See how much better our show was when we had writers? Pay the damn writers for iTunes downloads, okay?”

Project Runway Season Four
The best guilty pleasure on the VLC these days is Project Runway - the best reality game show since the early days of Survivor. This show is Fucking Funny. I can’t really talk about this too much because I wouldn’t want to give too much away, but if you’ve seen this show before and liked it, you are in for a continuous treat. The clothes are so-so but the freaks are fierce!

When the torrents are too slow (I’ll save the NZ Internet snail race rant for another time) I reluctantly visit my old friend Video Ezy Ponsonby for some sweet box set action. This will definitely go down as the summer of Deadwood. When I actually had a HBO subscription Deadwood never appealed for some reason but Amber and I watched the entire run of the show in two weeks over the New Year period. AMAZING! Al Swearengen is the best character in recent television. He’s hard to keep up with but his iambic hailstorm will knock you to the cold, hard floor.

What lets the show down and holds it back from Best Show Ever raves is some unfortunate scenery chewing from Timothy Olyphant (as Seth Bullock) and the utterly unconvincing romance between Bullock and widow Alma Garret. But, despite these major flaws from major characters, Deadwood utterly succeeds in ever other facet. The show was not officially cancelled but the actor’s contracts were not renewed, though two movie length episodes were planned in lieu of a fourth season. In October last year Ian McShane (who played Swearengen) told a journalist that the show’s sets were to be dismantled and that the episodes will not be made. HBO however is in denial.

We can only hope.



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