So I finally got some time to myself this weekend, after about three weeks of going to the office every day. I’m happy to say that my backlog of about 20 TV episodes has been whittled down to around 8, after today’s fairly serious binge. A quick rundown is in order:

HEROES (Season 1, Episodes 3 through 5)
Tim Kring’s series about ordinary humans that begin to manifest superhuman abilities keeps getting better and better with each episode. The killer sequence for me was the cliffhanger ending on Episode 3, where a battle-hardened Hiro Nakamura appears before Peter Petrelli and tells him that he’s from the future. It implies a much deeper and richer storyline than we are perhaps giving the show’s creators credit for.

In the most recent episode, we finally begin to understand what Peter’s ability really is: he’s a mimic, which is why he can’t fly without his brother near him. This is an extremely cool kind of ability because it will have really interesting consequences for people like say, Nikki the internet porn star (whose ability involves some kind of physical transformation) or Hiro’s time-bending powers (would they be able to bend time together? was that how they were able to talk on that train?). The show’s one weak area is in the rather inane cheerleader subplot, mostly because this is the one area where everything kinda reverts to type (i.e., rival cheerleader grabbing all the glory, arrogant quarterback who thinks he’s God’s gift to women, etc.). Hopefully, the next episode will be the last time we see or hear from any of the high school-related supporting cast, so we can get down to the real meat of the show.

LOST (Season 3, Episodes 2 through 4)
Jack, Sawyer and Kate are being held captive on (what turns out to be) a totally separate island from the one they crashed on. Locke wakes up after the big hatch implosion, and decides that he is a hunter again. His first mission, following a curious drug-induced hallucination with Boone in it, is to save Mr. Eko, who has apparently been spending the last two episodes being ravaged by a polar bear. Sayid, Jin and Sun try to lay a trap for the Others but misfire badly and end up losing their sailboat. If you’re keeping score, this is now the second boating mission that has failed miserably for our friends. Sawyer dutifully fulfills the one-beating-per-episode-minimum clause in his contract. Jack discovers that one of the Others is suffering from a tumor in his spinal column, but he doesn’t know which one. (It’s probably Ben/Henry Gale, but whatever.) Speaking of “Benry,” he did say one interesting thing in the fourth episode, i.e., that he had spent his entire life on the island. Very interesting indeed.

I’m not quite as excited about Lost as I am about Heroes at the moment though, just because Heroes is still in that initial discovery stage where every new episode is a step forward. Lost is still very well-done of course, and the test for Heroes will really be when the principal characters have finally all met, and have understood what it is that they are there to accomplish. How that particular resolution will be handled will say a lot about the tone that the rest of the series will take.

JERICHO (Season 1, Episodes 1 and 2)
Skeet Ulrich’s big TV debut is a post-apocalyptic, small-town drama that has more than a passing resemblance to Stephen King’s “The Stand.” I’m not a very big fan of small-town dramas unless there’s some kinda ritual homicide mystery involved, and Jericho hasn’t really shown me much in its first two episodes that seems worth hanging around for. The premise is pretty simple. Skeet Ulrich’s character arrives at his hometown after a long absence, right on the day that the United States becomes the target of multiple nuclear strikes. We are led to believe that only the small towns have been spared, and even they are obviously in danger of fallout, scavengers, etc., etc. It seems like it should be more interesting, but so far it just feels kinda gay. All I can honestly remember from the two episodes that I saw are copious slow-motion shots of people crying and/or hugging each other with (what sounds like) Bright Eyes playing in the background. Ugh.

THE NINE (Season 1, Episode 1)
On the surface, this new ABC series looks like yet another bank-heist-gone-wrong kinda deal: two rookie bankrobbers hit an average-sized bank and take everyone inside hostage. 52 hours pass. Then everything is chaos; the SWAT team charges the place, immediately dropping one of the bankrobbers. One of the nine remaining hostages is bleeding on the floor with a gun shot wound to the chest. The rest are in various states of shock. The entire series looks like it revolves around what happened during the 52 hours in the bank, and how it affected the 11 people involved. There’s a very distinct support-group kinda feel throughout the last 15 minutes of the pilot, which left a bad taste in my mouth. Still, it’s an interesting take on a familiar concept and I’ll probably check out at least the next 2 episodes just to see if there is, in fact, something worth viewing here.

A couple of months back I heard this nasal, whining voice on the radio quietly singing "They say the devils water it ain’t so sweet / You don’t have to drink right now / But you can dip your feet / Every once in a little while." It was, as it turned out, the refrain from this song called "When You Were Young" and I remember asking my girlfriend, "I thought Meat Loaf had given up his music career?"

"When You Were Young" was, of course, the first single off of The Killers’ sophomore effort, Sam’s Town (named after a casino hotel in their native Las Vegas). Now I should probably disclose that I’m a big Killers fan, and it took the arena-rock drivel of Sam’s Town for me to realize exactly why I’m a Killers fan. It wasn’t because they were startlingly original (they weren’t) or innovative even (not really); it was because their music was about girlfriends that looked like boyfriends, or smothering some chick named Jenny, or what it feels like to stalk an ex-lover. It was pseudo-romantic, pop candy in pretty, new-wave packaging.

Sam’s Town, on the other hand, is the sonic equivalent of doing laps in a kiddie pool. With lyrics that wail about highways and hurricanes and clouds falling from the sky, Brandon Flowers and company cross so far into Bruce Springsteen territory that they’ve emerged on the other side as a kind of "Slippery When Wet"-era Bon Jovi.

There are a few smatterings of Hot Fuss Killers here and there (which are undeniably the best parts of this new album), but they are too few and far between to make up for the heaping dollops of self-indulgence on everything else.

Leopold Tolstoy begins the classic Anna Karenina with the wonderfully sticky line "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." (If you’re wondering how I came to be reading an Oprah’s Book Club selection, I wasn’t. I was reading Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, which mentions this line as well.)

The line basically means that in order for a family to be "happy",
it must approach perfection on every front which, when viewed from the
proverbial 50,000-foot level, makes every happy family virtually identical. Conversely, it only takes failure in any single aspect of familial relationships in order to make you all categorically unhappy.
Because this single point of failure is often unique to every family,
you could say that each unhappy family is distinct or "unhappy in its
own way."

As I was ruminating on this wonderfully concise nugget of wisdom, I
realized that you could apply this reasoning to practically anything in
life, but particularly in business. In order for a company to succeed,
it must get many, many things right. In order for it to fail, it only needs to get one thing wrong. It’s like a minefield out there; it only takes one misstep to get your leg blown off.

The upside is that every decision you make that doesn’t kill you (or hurt, maim or paralyze you) brings you one step closer to business success. I’m a firm believer in the fact that perfection is inevitable on a long enough timeframe.
Granted, not every judgement call has immediate, obvious repercussions,
so you could be dead for a long time without really realizing it, but
generally speaking, if you made a call, and you survived the backlash
(if any), then congratulations, it was very likely the right one.

I think about this now in the context of the next few months (which,
believe me, is one of those subjects that can really keep you up
nights), and have a million questions on my mind. We’ve already
established that our financial situation is not particularly stable at
the moment, so our options are self-limited.

syndeo::media exists to build its own, internally-spun web
products, but we’ve come to the conclusion that our current resources
will not be sufficient to properly support all our ideas. The strategy
now becomes fairly obvious: over the next few months, we continue
looking for client work and refining our process. Once the appropriate
resources present themselves, we can apply all our learnings to our own
brands.

It’s a long-haul kind of strategy, but I can fake patience as well
as the next guy. Certainly, funding from a third-party would be very
helpful and we’ve already got a long list of things we want to try if
and when an investment is manifested. For now though, we’re a young
services company with a very thick idea folio. Feel free to hop on anytime :)

Following the events of the last two months, our little startup has decided to overhaul its structure and identity, and has reformed under the name Syndeo Media. We haven’t had a lot of time to put together the "identity" part of the company yet, but so far we have a very spartan front page, as well as a one-entry company blog. An excerpt:

There’s a certain allure to starting over from scratch, when things have gotten all muddled and nerves are frayed and ideologies have gone off in completely different directions. Logically, it makes sense to just tear it all down and rebuild, but emotionally, it’s another story entirely. Our previous startup, a social software design house with dreams of world domination, was just barely getting off the ground when we collectively decided to call it quits, and to say that we were upset about the whole situation would have been a major understatement.

Read the rest of the entry, rather dramatically entitled "The End, The Beginning", here. 

Development on mobiuslive.net has been trundling along at a decent clip over the past two weeks. We debuted our photo gallery module yesterday and have gotten a small community gallery going already (I screwed up the tag-cloud caching code though, so no tags are showing up as of yet). Site activity has slowly been picking up, after a couple of hardware failures had caused us to be offline for some time.

The Queso page has been particularly heartening, with testimonials coming in from all of their fans and friends after winning the local Battle of the Bands heat. If we can get this kind of near-real-time feedback from fans in regards with the other artists on mobiuslive, I think we may have a real winner on our hands.

Here’s an interesting new NBC series that recently got the nod to broadcast a full season based on the strength of its initial pilot: Heroes. As you can probably guess from the title (and the skyward-gaze of the ensemble cast in the photo), this is a series about ordinary people who begin to manifest extraordinary powers. The premise doesn’t sound particularly original, but as with many shows, the difference is in the execution.

Comic book fans will instantly recognize the name of one of Heroes’ executive producers, Jeph Loeb, the Eisner award-winner who wrote such modern classics as Batman: The Long Halloween and Superman for all Seasons. He’s also been a supervising producer on Smallville for the last two years, so you can rest assured that the guys behind this show do know a thing or two about telling good superhero stories.

I’ve seen two episodes of Heroes so far (the third episode is coming out tomorrow), and it’s been pretty entertaining. The size of the cast is such that they’ll be introducing new characters until tomorrow’s show at the very least, and few of the current characters get more than a few minutes of screentime per episode. So far we’ve got a flying male nurse, a heroin addict who can see the future, a time/space-warping Japanese geek, an indestructible cheerleader, a psychic cop, and a Banner/Hulk-like adult entertainer (the hottie on the show).

The show itself is very slickly-produced, and has a lot of the subtle elegance of the original X-Files, where more of the story is told via conversations, than by in-your-face action sequences (so yeah, don’t worry, it ain’t Mutant X). I guess my only real gripe is that the powers I’m seeing so far are fairly mundane. It’s a great, mainstream attempt at bringing alternative superheroes to the masses, but The Authority it ain’t.

This is probably just conjecture at this point, but as far as I can tell, there is some kind of conspiratorial, government-related undercurrent floating around on the show, which would explain the sudden appearance of these individuals’ powers. (This particular superhero cliche involves some secret organization performing genetic experiments on unwitting human test subjects, and I’ve already caught some evidence of it in the two episodes I’ve seen.)

Because of the serial-style of this series’ storytelling, the stage has already been set for two big conflicts, one of which will probably be resolved mid-season. The first conflict will probably be with so-called Patient Zero, a super-powered serial killer who has (I guess) been driven mad by his abilities. (There’s already alot of fan-generated theories about the identity of Patient Zero, and the mysterious symbol that appears on a lot of the show’s props. This one is pretty well-done. Abrams, Lindelof and Cuse should send the Heroes creators their bill.)

The second, larger conflict will occur when the heroin addict’s prophecy of a nuclear bomb going off in New York comes to a head. I’m not sure when this particular conflict will be resolved, but from what I’ve gathered, the characters have just under 5 weeks of story-world-time before the big bang.

Good show. Check it out.

So I finally got to see Lost’s season 3 premiere this morning, after attempting several times to watch it yesterday to no avail. I loved the opening sequence with the new character Juliet, which was a nice allusion to season 2’s first few minutes. Lost is pretty much THE best weekly piece of pop entertainment out there today, and this new season looks like it may be the one that ties it all together. (I can dream, can’t I?) A couple of purposeful anachronisms and interesting implications throughout:

1. Juliet owned a lot of CDs, the implication being that our villagers have had access to all sorts of modern gear. (Later, they confirmed this by tagging Sawyer with a taser.)
2. The book Juliet was reading was Stephen King’s Carrie (thanks, Media Player Classic frame-by-frame!), which was disappointing because I gathered from their conversation that they were talking about Dreamcatcher, which would have zeroed in on the show’s timeframe fairly accurately. “Carrie,” meanwhile, was written in ‘76, so anyone would have access to it.
3. The Others are leaving in a fairly developed little village, with plumbing and electricity and (maybe even) gas lines. They have access to fairly modern things, so you get the definite sense that they are on the island because they want to be there, not because they have to. The idea that was foremost in my mind during those first opening scenes was M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, to be honest.
4. Henry Gale (now known as “Ben,” the former host of the book club and by implication, Juliet’s ex-lover) is clearly the leader of these people. In the opening sequence, he knows exactly who to send to infiltrate the plane crash survivors. It’s interesting that there’s not a single one of them who are visibly shocked to see a plane being broken in two just a few miles above their village, so the other implication is that this has happened before (indeed, we have a few other examples: the Black Rock, the Nigerian drug plane, Desmond’s yachet, and the ship that brought Rosseau’s team to the island).
5. Sawyer gets put into one of those Pavlovian-type animal-experiment cages, where one animal presses a button and another animal nudges a switch (later we find out that it was in fact a bear cage). Could these be the cages they used for Season 1’s polar/albino bears? I didn’t find this plot point particularly interesting, other than it was a chance to show Sawyer get slapped around some more. I swear to God, more than half of all the injuries and mishaps on this show have been applied to everyone’s favorite con man.
6. Another kid, Carl, was in the cage next to Sawyer. He was neither from the fuselage or the tail-end, so he must have been one of the villagers. There is a definite “new life” kinda vibe with this place (Juliet actually verbalizes it when she says, “It doesn’t matter who we were, it only matters who we are.”) and my interpretation of this Carl character was that he was a misfit who was not “getting with the program.”
7. This line of thinking eventually brought me to another character who was possibly not 100% committed to the utopian life, i.e., Kelvin (the ex-CIA spook whose head Desmond accidentally bashes in last season). He was fixing Desmond’s yacht in a hidden cove, which seems to imply that he wasn’t particularly happy with the situation they were all in.
8. Regarding Jack’s rollicking past: Unless they build this storyline up somehow to tie in with the occurences on the island, I’m rapidly losing interest in whatever emotional baggage it is that the good doctor is carrying. Sure his wife was cheating on him, and sure, his dad was a drunk, but for chrissakes, you’re on an electromagnetic island with polar bears and black smoke and Amish villagers from Hell! Get over it already!
9. And lastly, I saw this absolutely brilliant image today on the 4815162342 forums:

LOL.

Another season of total mind-fuck entertainment, comin’ atcha.