'thirtysomething' DVD Release Garnering Lots O'Attention

Everybody's got thirtysomething fever. I tell ya . . .

The thirtysomething gang of seven reunited on the set of Good Morning America to talk about the impact of their insightful, moving drama on pop culture as the first season of the show has now been released on DVD this week.

NPR's Talk of the Nation featured five members of the cast in a lengthy interview. It's a really great chat which I recommend.



A writer likened the Melissa Steadman character to a pre-cursor to Carrie Bradshaw. Hmm. . .

The Los Angeles Times mused on the Baby Boomer juggernaut.

The Washington Post, in reviewing the DVD set, said the show "still works remarkably well as a piece of relatable, well-acted and adult television, a program that -- contrary to popular opinion -- was more than just a whinefest."

The New York Times had a long Q&A with thirtysomething crew members, saying the show "perfectly captured the intimate details of the baby boomer lifestyle in ways no network series had previously, and sparked intense debate about its merits."

Entertainment Weekly gave the DVD set an A.

The Associated Press interviewed several of the stars (see below):

'Mad Men' Reviews, 'Morning Joe' Cast as 'Mad Men,' Plus Hamm's Early Acting Gigs

Mad Men season three premiere reviews are starting to roll in -- for those lucky folks who got advanced media screeners -- and the reviews appear to be really good, as good as I expected they'd be. Which only means my expectations for Sunday night's episode are now, oh, I don't know . . . sky high?

From the New York Times, Alessandra Stanley: "Even more than in the first two years, this new season, which begins on Sunday on AMC, stresses the less amusing side of that innocence, leading viewers to look back, aghast at, and enthralled by, a world so familiar and so primitive. Characters on Mad Men struggle in shame and secrecy with the very things that today are openly, incessantly boasted and blogged about: humble roots, broken homes, homosexuality, unwed motherhood, caring for senile parents."

Boston Globe, Matthew Gilbert: "Sunday's hour is, like many episodes of Mad Men, quiet on the surface. There are pauses in conversation, and almost no soundtrack music fills the silences and emotional vacancies. And yet the subject matter of this show shouts at you the more you think about it, the more the characters don't say what you know they are feeling. In even the smallest details -- watch how a stick pin travels through the episode -- Mad Men remains TV at its most artful. Like Don Draper, it's beautiful, stealthy, trouble, and, above all, addictive."

Entertainment Weekly, Ken Tucker (who gave the episode an A-): "The third-season premiere of Mad Men is chock-full of revelations about familiar characters and fresh details about newly introduced ones, as well as the sort of specifics and symbolism that creator Matthew Weiner layers into every episode like a top Top Chef. As with so much about Mad Men, some of it is overheated but never half-baked, and the opening hour rises like a nearly flawless souffle of sex and salesmanship." (I'm in love with that phrase, "flawless souffle of sex and salesmanship." Wish I'd come up with it.)

Los Angeles Times, Robert Lloyd: "That nothing much seems to be happening -- and happening slowly at that, to the frustration of some viewers -- means that small moments play large; it's television as Japanese tea ceremony. Characters are built gradually through action, not declaration, and that action might stray far from what is eventually revealed as the main point. There are those who find this all precious beyond belief -- with an average of only 1.8 million viewers an episode last season, this is a series that would not survive at all on broadcast television -- but I find it quite beautiful more often than not."

Meanwhile, people are having a bit of fun with all of this Mad Men mania leading up to the season three premiere, in particular, the folks at Mediaite who took the crew from MSNBC's Morning Joe and assigned them roles on Mad Men, casting the show's namesake, Joe Scarborough as Don Draper, Mika Brzezinski as Joan Holloway and Willie Geist as the slimy Pete Campbell. Of Scarborough, writers Rachel Sklar and Glynnis MacNicol observed:

"Scarborough, a former Congressman, is certainly no stranger to selling, nor does he lack for Draper-esque confidence. We've noticed he's traded in his zipper sweatshirts for dark suits of late, but that's not all it is -- of any character on Morning Joe, he's the one we can most easily see sitting in a darkened bar with a glass of something amber at his side. Besides, couldn't his book [The Last Best Hope: Restoring Conservatism and America's Promise] on the GOP just as easily have been called Meditations on an Emergency?"

Over on BuzzFeed, they must've taken a little visit to IMDB to look up Jon Hamm's acting roles and listed his top six acting gigs, including the time he was Lorelai Gilmore's most boring date ever on the Gilmore Girls and when he was a firefighter on Providence before the days of Denis Leary as an alcoholic firefighter with a death wish.

Image credit: Frank Ockenfels/AMC.

'thirtysomething' Coming to DVD in Late August, FINALLY!

For years I've been complaining. In columns. On blogs for various web sites (including this one). Why, oh why, hadn't the award-winning drama thirtysomething come to DVD yet?

On a pop culture blog I used to have, each week when the new DVDs were released I'd viciously mock what crappy, mindless garbage were being put up for sale while thirtysomething remained on the Buena Vista Home Entertainment shelves gathering dust.

When thirtysomething first aired, I was a college student, obviously not in the show's demographic. By the time I finally became a thirtysomething myself, as well as a mom, I really wanted to watch it from my new perspective. Yet it was never released.

Instead, to get my thirtysomething fix -- to watch how Hope handled her angst about being a work-from-home writer (as I am), how Michael climbed the corporate ladder after his company went bankrupt, how they dealt with Hope's miscarriage and the challenges in their interfaith marriage, how Elliot and Nancy separated and then reunited and battled Nancy's cancer -- I've had to go to YouTube where, several months ago, one (or more) thirtysomething fan(s) uploaded episodes into five part-installments.

I've been able to watch some of low-quality versions of the episodes and, aside from rolling my eyes at the late 80s/early 90s duds (the shoulder pads!), I've found the issues explored in thirtysomething remain relevant.

Now, less than a month after leaving my thirties, I read in the Los Angeles Times that my wait is about to end. The first season of thirtysomething will be released on August 25, the Times said, and there will be a delay of six months between the release of the other three seasons. (I never did see the fourth season as I was working at my university's student newspaper on the nights when thirtysomething aired and never got around to taping the show on my VHS tapes, so I'm anxious to see how it ended.)

If only the final season of the other genius Herskovitz/Zwick series -- Once and Again with the amazing Sela Ward -- would be released. One battle at a time I guess.

'Big Love's' Roman is Really Dead, Show Creator Says

Following Big Love's season three finale, I speculated in this space about whether the sinister, self-appointed "prophet" of Juniper Creek, Roman Grant had REALLY died after being smothered by a pillow at the hands of Joey Henrickson.

According to Big Love co-creator Will Scheffer, Roman (Harry Dean Stanton) is indeed dead, as dead as Lipstick Jungle.

"Roman is 100 percent, absolutely, completely dead," Scheffer told the Los Angeles Times' Show Tracker blog. "There's no trick in terms of, he was pretending to be dead, or it was a hallucination. He is gone. His spirit has left the earth . . . No one can bring him back from the dead."

Well, okay then, with that issue settled, what else did Scheffer have to say about season four? J.J. (Zeljko Ivanek) -- Nicki's first husband played by the same actor who's hunting down those folks with superpowers on Heroes -- will become a series regular. For those who wondered why the third Henrickson child, Teenie, was largely absent from the tail-end of the third season, particularly in the pivotal "Sacrament" scene in which the Church of Bill was created, Scheffer said, ". . . [When] we left her out of the sacrament at the end of the season finale, we were doing so on purpose . . . We will deal with that this coming season."

Over on Mommy Track'd, my column this week focuses on how watching Big Love, and the Showtime drama United States of Tara both make me thankful that my life bears no resemblance to the lives of the women on these shows.

Image credit: HBO.

'Lost Untangled' Deconstructs 'Namaste,' Plus 'Alice in Wonderland' is a Show Inspiration

Clarification on the current Lost time frame issue: According to Lost Untangled, the castaways Sun, Ben, Lapidus, Locke, et al are in "the here and now." Whatever that means, 2007, I guess. Meanwhile, Jack, Kate, Hurley, Sawyer/LaFleur & Juliet et al are in 1977.

The new ABC-generated Lost Untangled video, while not as snarky as the original ones, is still entertaining nonetheless, particularly when Ben's on the scene. (Link to video here.)



In other Lost news . . . in a story about books and their influence or reference on Lost and Mad Men, the Los Angeles Times' book blog Jacket Copy reported that Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof lists Alice in Wonderland as a major influence. When asked to name one book that influences the show more than others, Lindelof said: "To say there is only one is unfair, but we keep coming back to Alice in Wonderland thematically. That was a book that both [co-creator] Carlton [Cuse] and I remember very specifically as children. It was a gateway drug to sci-fi and fantasy in many ways."

This should come as no big surprise to fans of the show, particularly when one episode was called, "Through the Looking Glass." (Lostpedia has some good material on Alice and white rabbit references in the show.) I'm actually in the process of reading the book for the first time, if you can believe that. Never read it. Just saw the Disney movie as a kid. When I'm done, I'll weigh in here.

Is 'Lost' Too Complicated for Its Own Good?

In a column reminiscent of something Dave Barry might write, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll penned a sarcastic piece saying that Lost isn't as complicated as some of its fans may make it out to be:

"A large plane crashes on a Pacific island. Some of the passengers survive but most don't. After a time, the surviving passengers discover that other people also live on the island. They call these other people the Others.

After a time, a freighter happens by, and a helicopter from the freighter eventually rescues six of the survivors. The six return home -- most to the United States, one to Korea -- and resume their lives, somewhat chastened by the experience. The people remaining on the island try to create a viable society, but there are inevitable difficulties, like time travel.

And that's it."

Clearly, this was written with Carroll's tongue firmly planted inside his cheek because he then proceeded to detail some of the insanely convoluted details of the story. But the column is funny nonetheless and takes aim at one of the show's biggest criticisms: That it loses viewers because people perceive it to be too dense. (Or people are too dense to understand it, whatever the case may be. I don't get most of it, but I'm still an avid viewer.)

If ratings are any indication, viewers are fleeing the island odyssey faster than Hurley can hurl a microwaved Hot Pocket at Ben Linus. Ratings for its two-hour fifth season premiere last week were down 26 percent compared to its fourth season premiere, and ratings dropped "for every half-hour it was on" TV, the Los Angeles Times reported. Did the island time travel aspect -- which continues to befuddle me -- turn folks off?

What say you Lost fans, do you think the show gets an unfair reputation for being too complicated? Do you have friends who won't watch it because they say it's too confusing? Do you find yourself scratching your head after episodes?

Image credit: ABC.

Two Great Golden Globe Moments: Gervais and Fey

As promised, I've dug up the Ricky Gervais bit from the Golden Globes. Loved his snark. And the fact that he brought a glass of beer up there with him.



Then, there was the Divine Ms Fey givin' it back to the internet haters in her acceptance speech who, as is their wont, gave it right back to her on the Los Angeles Times web site where they've been hasslin' Fey. Ah, gotta love the internet (the trolls, notsomuch).