My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Because you get stuff like this:

Yes, that is a bowtie-shaped Doctor Who cookie. Which I got and you did not.

Okay, granted, my editor ate it, but she did send me a picture of it and it was addressed to me, so it still counts.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Abuse of Playback, the technologically-derived drug made from distilled human memories, is sweeping the world – and Special Agent Fox Mulder learned too late that Playback was put forth on this planet by the Purity, seeking to condition humanity to their rule so as to better combat the Deadite incursion threatening the aliens’ homeworld. Now Mulder is missing, and it falls to his partner, Dana Scully, to re-activate secret protocol LXG-71, the “League of Extraordinary Gentlepersons” (protocol renamed 1993 for “sensitivity reasons”).

Scully swiftly collects Hong Kong Detective-Inspector “Tequila” Yuen, hyperviolent Wiccan practitioner Nancy Downs, the biological experiment/walking weapon known only as “Edward,” and a young high-functioning sociopath named Zack Morris who has the strange ability to stop the flow of time itself. Perhaps it is this last who attracts the attention of an enigmatic man who answers only to “Rufus,” and who asks Scully to “set history right” and see that two young musicians – that, so far as she can tell, never existed – be born anew, so that peace may flourish on Earth. But the Purity have never shown any signs of temporal travel capability… so who, then, altered history?

If you’re interested in checking out other work Davinder and I have done together, you can start with Al’Rashad or, alternately, our “Introduction” strip for Brainiac Five.

For those interested in obtaining a print of this fine piece of artwork, go here.

And of course, all due props to Sims and Shackles.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

And I strongly advise you watch that Honey Boo Boo trailer. If only to know the future. The horrible, horrible future.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Your guest judge this week is Christina Applegate, which – okay. She was much better than many other celebrity guest judges.

Tiffany and George: hip-hop. This was quite good and reasonably hard-hitting, and weirdly Nigel complains that the hip-hop routines aren’t “grungy” enough on the show, which – well, that’s quite true, but come on, Nigel, you didn’t say anything last week when Christopher Scott was doing routines that were only moderately hip-hop at best. Tiffany hit her moves harder, but George hit his more crisply. This was good.

Amber and Turk Brandon: jazz. Amber got plaudits from the judges for dancing her “best yet” (true) and “superbly” (not really, no) – she was fine, after a couple of disappointing performances to start off, but a couple of her transitions were just kind of rough. (Okay, I’m more than a little irritated with the judges giving her subpar tango performance last week props after Nick simply carried her to a good performance.) Brandon was very good, both as a forklift (he’s an excellent forklift) and as a partner, and I was impressed with him.

Janelle and Dareian: cha-cha. Dareian’s performance last week in hip-hop was natural and unforced and just very good, so I had hopes this week, but… no. He was complaining beforehand that he didn’t have a natural feel for the hip action, which was pretty obvious, but even his basic was rough. Of course, give him a big trick and he pulls it off smoothly and effortlessly in the routine, and then falls right back into his bad basic action, so it’s not a lack of ability per se but (I suspect) a lack of comfort with Latin dance generally. Janelle was very rough as well and didn’t compensate with smoothness in the big tricks.

Lindsay and Cole: contemporary. A very good routine danced very well. I’m getting a little tired of “Cole, you’re a martial artist, how are you doing this” comments from the judges when we all know he’s cross-trained in multiple dance styles; it’s like hearing judges gush over Russell in season 6 all over again.

Amelia and Will: jazz. The good: Amelia and Will dance well and have good chemistry. The bad: the choreography (boring, awkward, just unpleasant), the costumes (ugh), Mandy Moore Revisits Her High School CD Collection Vol. 23, all of it. This was just bad on so many levels and Amelia and Will – who did their best with it – got the blame.

Audrey and Matt: salsa. Just awful. Louis Van Amstel clearly made the choreo as straightforward as he could manage for these two (right down to replacing ballroom spins with contemporary pirouettes), but even dancing at practically half-speed and given as much leeway as possible they still completely blew it. This was dreadful: no chemistry, no technique, no nothing. The Janelle/Dareian cha cha (which was not good) was miles ahead of this; hell, last week’s not-very-good Cyrus/Eliana jive was miles ahead of this.

Witney and Chehon: contemporary. Look, I am as big a Stacey Tookey homer as there is, but this was derivative, an “every contemporary routine set to a sweeping ballad and where the performers wear pyjamas” that utterly failed to surprise me in any way. Witney and Chehon were both fine, but this was just a choreo fail for me, and worse than the Mandy Moore fail previously because I expect more from Stacey Tookey.

Eliana and Cyrus: hip-hop. This was pretty damn good, actually (and when was the last episode of SYTYCD when the hip-hop dances were easily the best of the night? Season four, maybe?). Cyrus was predictably great in a routine that catered to his skills, but Eliana danced to, if not quite his level, the level where a classically trained dancer can hang with a hip-hop dancer and look completely credible. Nigel claims that Eliana outdanced Cyrus, which – no, Nigel. Just no. But her performance quality was superb.

And your bottom three for each are: Dareian, Brandon and George for the guys (buuuuuuulllllshiiiiit), and Amber, Eliana and Lindsay for the girls (only one who deserves to be in the bottom three), with Brandon and Amber (thankfully) going home. THIS IS WHY YOU CAN’T BE TRUSTED WITH NICE THINGS, AMERICA.

Starting when I was nine or so, during the summer and on weekends I would try to stay up as late as possible. This is not unusual for kids, of course, but I was moderately creative about it: I would read in bed with a flashlight, and then, when I heard my mom go to bed, I would wait a while and then I would sneak downstairs, since the TV was in the basement. Then I would watch late-night TV with impunity. Of course, I soon found out the hard way that the air conditioning vents would act like string telephones to my parents’ room, but this did not dissuade me since I quickly figured out that stuffing cushions into the vents would effectively mute them.

I can’t say that the late-night TV at that time was particularly engrossing. My mom usually didn’t go to bed early enough for me to catch anything earlier than the second half of Late Night With David Letterman (e.g. “the not as good half”). But there were sitcoms: episodes of Check It Out! (which started getting late-night airing soon after it debuted, never a good sign), Alice, Gloria, and One Day At A Time. There were plenty of movies airing from one to three: the first time I ever saw Night Shift was by staying up late. Ditto The Great Train Robbery, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, A Shot In The Dark, The Omega Man, The Dream Team, The Seven Per Cent Solution. Probably I was too young to be seeing a lot of these, but so what.

However, at a certain point even TV would give up the ghost; this was the 80s, and 24-hour channels were a thing of the distant future. I, of course, being a irrational kid, wanted to stay up as late as possible, because dammit if I was going to stay up then I was going to stay up. But, inevitably, come 4 a.m., there would be only one thing on the air. Night Drive. Night Drive was Global Television’s late-night programming stroke of genius, because Global recognized that there were people at 4 a.m. who wanted to watch something on television that wasn’t static or a test pattern. Granted, most of these people were drunks. But they still wanted to watch something. Global figured out that, since nobody else aired anything at that time of night, they could therefore air anything and some people would watch it.

Hence, Night Drive. The entire show was three hours of pretaped footage of somebody driving around in Toronto, and it was set to soft jazz. That’s the whole thing. And here is the fun part: there were commercials! In later years I would find out that Global would either sell the ads on Night Drive for a pittance to companies too cash-strapped to buy commercial time anywhen else, or offer ad time on Night Drive as a bonus for companies buying ad time when people were actually watching TV (“if you buy space on ALF, you get Night Drive for free”). Its largest audience was supposedly prisoners who loved watching scenes of sweet, sweet freedom, but I have trouble imagining, in retrospect, that prisons would let prisoners in the TV room at 4 a.m., so I think that must have been an urban legend.

Watching Night Drive now makes me almost nostalgic for Toronto-that-was. You can see a lot of old Toronto here that no longer exists – the original Sam the Record Man, the arcade strip on Yonge (which is long gone, the last of the great arcades now over a decade dead and gone, and the buildings which housed them bulldozed for larger, more modern, multi-story commercial developments), Maple Leaf Gardens before it was retrofitted to become a Loblaws. (In New York, they had the good taste to call Madison Square Garden’s replacement Madison Square Garden, because they appreciate history. Maple Leaf Gardens’ replacement is the Air Canada Centre, which is soulless and sad and everything that is shitty about pro sports today.) Now, Toronto is gradually becoming a more brightly-lit city, which generally I welcome – it’s both safer and prettier – but there is that mood that a dark city brings that is not duplicable in the modern age. It feels like pulp.

In any case, Night Drive was far more successful than it had any right to be. So what did Global do?

It did what any good television channel did: it created a spinoff.

My weely TV column is up at Torontoist.

Witney and Chehon: samba. That opening pirouette by Chehon made me think that they were aiming for a redux of Lacey and Danny’s samba from season 3, but unfortunately Chehon isn’t quite comparable to Danny’s level when Danny did ballroom: he dropped in and out of the samba basic repeatedly and the hip movement wasn’t there, and given that this entire routine was choreoed at beginner level half-speed (as compared to other SYTYCD ballroom routines, e.g., the good ones) that does not bode well. On top of that, Whitney and Chehon have very, very little chemistry together. Witney was excellent, of course, as expected, but not enough to carry this to what it needed to be. Disappointing opening.

Tiffany and George: contemporary. Quite a lovely piece of work from Sonya here as she avoids her usual tics and had some really brilliant moves worked into her piece (the paired kicks en pointe while hand in hand? Daaaaaaamn). The only criticism I can make here is a minor one: George’s sense of balance is a bit lacking (he tends to fall out of his pirouettes and overcompensate on his aerial spins). This is a very, very minor criticism, however. This is a good pairing so far.

Janaya and Brandon: hip-hop. Oh, a Tabitha and Napoleon piece about a man overcoming his addiction to alcohol in the name of true love? Been there, done that – and it was better choreo and better dancing the first time. Nigel actually mentions that NappyTabs choreoed the thing so that it was much less hard-hitting than traditional hip-hop, which is to say “like most hip-hop on this show.” Brandon was fine. Janaya was acceptable but nothing special. Meh.

Alexa and Danny: jazz. I’m gonna go ahead and say the artistic decision by Sean Cheeseman to choreo a piece using scaffolding was kind of a bad idea because about a quarter of the piece was, uh, climbing – and when they first came down off the scaffolding, they were off the beat for at least another five or six seconds until they recovered. I suspect if they had been on time for the entire routine I would have been “kinda liked it,” because their dancing was quite good when they were in sync. But they weren’t, so I didn’t.

Amber and Nick: Viennese waltz. So I guess they’re going for the “first week, every non-contemporary dancer gets their own genre” plan again? (Oh, poor Cyrus.) Anyway. The rise and fall in this (and I think good waltzes live and die by the rise and fall) was a little bit inconsistent – I would have liked to see a tiny bit more, particularly from Nick – but the spins were both incredibly ornate and perfectly executed, and the general grace of the piece was there. Nigel references Dance Moms in his critique, which – don’t do that, Nigel.

Amelia and Will: hip-hop. Never mind, then: they’re letting people dance out of genre – oh, wait, no, this is just a jazz dance with a few brief hip-hop sequences thrown in. Granted, it was a fun routine, and Amelia and Will danced well (although they did not dance hip-hop well – they danced through the isos and there was no pullback where it needed to be) and have excellent chemistry together, but good lord, this show will call literally anything hip-hop, won’t it? If they had just called it a jazz or Broadway routine I would be less irritated. I mean, even Nigel said it wasn’t hip-hop, and Nigel has praised some of the least hard-hitting hip-hop I’ve ever seen as being exemplary of the genre.

Janelle and Dareian: Afro-jazz. This felt lacking. Both dancers hit all their marks and in time, but for me it lacked energy, especially in the middle – I like Afro-jazz when it feels wild and barely contained, and this was just not that thing. Perhaps it was too intricate for the pair of them, perhaps they were taking it easy of Janelle after her rough start and her injuries – but I was very meh on this. Good chemistry between the two of them, though.

Eliana and Cyrus: Broadway. Actually, I’m glad to see Cyrus not dancing hip-hop, because he’s not a classic hip-hop dancer and when he didn’t murder it he would get shit on for not dancing well “in his genre.” Instead, he gets to dance a boring Tasty Oreo Broadway and the judges go apeshit over it because… I have no idea. Eliana was really quite good. Cyrus was at the bare minimum of acceptable and I suspect he got pimped more than he deserves so that the judges don’t have another Cedric in season 3 situation on their hands.

Audrey and Matthew: contemporary. Very meh choreography which the judges pimp because it’s Travis and they can’t say their golden child is boring, after all, and they praise Travis for doing things like “choreographing kicks to the cymbal crashes” which is sort of like praising him for setting a routine to music, when you get down to it. Audrey and Matthew are perfectly good. But yeesh.

Lindsay and Cole: paso doble. I wasn’t terribly wild about Jason Gilkison’s choreo in this (even he can have off nights – I felt the choreo didn’t build to a climax as effectively as a good paso routine on this show should), but other than the choreo not being quite what I would have hoped for, this was basically – well, Lindsay and Cole danced somewhat imperfect choreo perfectly. Flawless chemistry and I really am looking forward to see what this partnership can continue to produce.

Probable bottom threes: BOYS: Chehon, Danny, Nick. GIRLS: Alexa, Janaya, Amber.
Should go home: Chehon and Janaya.
Will go home: Chehon and Alexa.

Someone a while back, I forget who (hold up your hand in the audience if you read this, I guess) asked me how I would book the WWE given the chance. Now, the traditional internet-smark thing to say here is “well I would bury John Cena and make the fans care about Tyson Kidd and then I would book Dean Ambrose to win every title on his first night and also every wrestler I like would be a cool heel again.” I would do none of this. Well, I would try to make fans care about Tyson Kidd, because he is really great. But not the rest of it.

I also know that, after last night’s truly dreadful RAW, the obvious thing to do is decry it as being horrible wrestling and say “I would do the opposite of that.” But, unfortunately (from my perspective, anyway), the fans in attendance clearly had a great time last night. John Cena’s fan support has not been this strong in years (when was the last time you heard a really strong “Cena Sucks” chant?). There are lots of people out there who want to see Santino Marella in silly slapstick sketches and want to see Michael Cole get beaten up. (I am not convinced that anybody wants to see Hornswoggle the midget, though. Sometimes that sort of thing is just the result of Vince McMahon thinking midgets are inherently funny.) Saying that these people are wrong to want to watch these things is, frankly, not good business. So you don’t just cut them off.

But at the same time you want to also make them care about the wrestling, which is what drives the program and the narratives. So you need a vehicle to do that. I would do it this way:

Recently the WWE has been running a “who will be the next General Manager” angle, bringing back all of the old former general managers. (For those not following: the General Manager is a sort of authority figure for the show who, story-wise, is the one who makes matches happen.) Now, all of the options are basically dreadful because the General Manager concept is so played out in wrestling generally at this point that it makes Jersey Shore seem underexposed in comparison: we’re on our seventh or eighth iteration of an imitation of Vince McMahon’s heel act by now and Vince McMahon knew well enough to get off the air before he got so stale himself that the fans would no longer cheer when he intermittently showed up. Every General Manager is the same: make matches, abuse authority against the people they don’t like (face GMs abuse heels, heel GMs abuse faces), generally be a waste of space otherwise. Nobody actually cheers Teddy Long, after all. He’s just sort of there.

So I would kill it. Not get rid of the GM position outright, but when Vince or HHH or whoever assembles the candidates, I would have a new character come out as well. Maybe he grabs a microphone and interrupts Vince as Vince is about to decide between Vickie Guerrero and Mick Foley or something. (“How did you get a microphone?” “Vince, your sound techs will give pretty much anybody a microphone.”) This new guy who we have never seen before would come down to the ring and make his pitch: he’s a guy WWE corporate recruited for an interview, but Vince has been blowing him off for weeks, et cetera. (Ideally we would get some vignettes of Vince blowing off the guy first so that the internet could go “wait, who is this guy?” But that is not necessary.)

And the new guy basically makes his case. Every GM Vince has hired has been a failure because he keeps hiring from within the business, and outside of the WWE you wouldn’t hire Teddy Long to manage a McDonald’s, much less a major sporting organization. But New Guy has sports management experience, and alternative dispute resolution experience, and most of all he doesn’t have any grudges towards any of the wrestlers. His strongest point is that, if Vince fires him, he’ll just shrug and go work somewhere else for half a million dollars. And that’s why he’s the guy Vince should hire. So he gets a tryout show, nails it, becomes the new GM, and thereafter his onscreen role is extremely limited: no speeches, maybe one appearance per RAW to set up matches or address a wrestler’s complaint in a completely neutral tone.

The New GM makes the following rule changes:

1.) From now on, one title – let’s say the US title – must be defended at every TV show and PPV. This is an old tradition going back to the early days of WCW and their TV title, and it’s a good one. Plus if it’s the US title we can get some amusement out of Santino in the ring before he finally drops it. To make it “fairer to the champion” who has to constantly defend the title, all of these title matches have a ten-minute time limit. Presto: the US title matters again. (You can even merge it with the Intercontinental title if you like – after all, WWE’s roster isn’t much larger than when they only had two singles titles. Right now they have four, which is the equal of WCW at its peak, and that organization had a roster of nearly 100 wrestlers at that point!)

2.) Second change: blatantly steal the Bound For Glory Title Series idea that TNA is currently doing, because fuck it, it’s a good idea and it turns non-title matches into important marquee matches, and the first rule of wrestling booking, I think, is that Every Match Should Matter As Much As Possible. You can have wrestlers competing for the opportunity to have a title series match, even – this would be a great way to put newbie wrestlers into matches that would have some appreciable stakes for the fans to root about, even if the next week they just get trounced by Established Superstar in said title series match. And the point of the title series is to get the other title shot at WrestleMania – you know, the one that the Royal Rumble winner doesn’t get.

3.) Final change: if you want a title shot, you have to win a lot of matches. No more heels or faces coming up and demanding a title shot just because – New GM will say “well, tough, you lost your last X matches except for this one, and that was only a DQ anyway. I’ll give the title match to Mister Winning A Lot Lately.”

That’s basically it. I don’t see the point of altering the booking much more than that; maybe make the comedy bits a bit less obviously dumb, make Cena’s character a bit less of a dick and more of a Superman-style face, and write angles more for the long term, but those are relatively minor things, much like bringing back King of the Ring (which I would also totally do). The important thing is to kill the authority figure angle as dead as possible, and to make individual matches on what is soon to be a 3-hour show matter in and of themselves so that viewer interest is retained.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.