Word: networks
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...materialistic, mobster-driven world of eastern Europe in the 1990s. Klein slyly ousts the Chancellor from his government villa, then buys it himself and converts it into a shopping mall complete with brothel. The language makes light of democratic institutions. "A good leader must be surrounded by a good network of think tanks," Rieger says at one point, using the English for 'network' and 'think tanks...
...heavy equipment to heavy-metal sound tracks. But they're also a kind of riposte to the smirkiness and high-class problems of TV's upscale hits. You want an existential crisis? How about getting clocked across your freaking head with a steel oil-drill chain? And whereas big-network TV offers a fantasy of perfection, working-class TV offers a fantasy of authenticity. On NBC, an American Gladiator is a beefcake model in a unitard swinging his padded quarterstaff. (Read into "padded quarterstaff" whatever symbolism you like.) Cable's gladiators are paunchy guys with beards hauling ass to fell...
...consumer-electronics company called Roku, in partnership with Netflix, has just launched a set-top box that brings us tantalizingly close to my dream. The Netflix player by Roku ($99 at netflix.com is a black, palm-size device that connects your broadband network to your TV (wired or wirelessly). For as little as $8.99 a month, you can have unlimited access to Netflix's library of more than 10,000 movies and TV shows on demand. Watch what you want, instantly, for as long as you want. You can even start a movie on your home TV and finish watching...
Plotting its own demise was Lost's best innovation yet. Some big-network hits, like Mary Tyler Moore and Seinfeld, have gone out on top but not with an end planned years in advance. Others limp to the finish; next season is the last for ER, which began airing back when physicians used leeches to drain the body of ill humors...
...redemption depends on change, and traditional network TV depends on characters staying more or less the same for as many years as it takes for the ratings to give out. The time-bending sci-fi premise in Lost--certain characters become "unstuck in time" and can re-experience past events in their lives--dramatizes a human dilemma: Can you change your future, or are you fated to make the same mistakes forever? In a meta-way, that's the dilemma of traditional TV characters, who are damned to repeat the same patterns, trip over the same ottomans, forever. The revitalized...