The best TV series of the 00s. I'm sad to say my record is 24/30, including the entire top fifteen. Via @drbluman.

Wednesday catchup 2.

* Duke University researchers have proven that Barack Obama kills Republican boners.

* Also in Republican news: only 1 in 5 Americans now identify as a Republican. These numbers are terrible. It's hard to believe, but could we really be seeing the end of the GOP?

* An interview with the prop master for Mad Men.

* Chasing down the earliest common ancestor and the secret of abiogenesis. More at MeFi.

* From universal literacy to universal authorship?

* The House Next Door reviews The Yes Men Save the World, saying it's everything Capitalism: A Love Story wasn't.

With delightful wit, the Yes Men are saying, “Yes, we can!” to the making of a better world, doing what’s right on behalf of the corporations that do so much wrong. Instead of the Moore strategy of passively shaming, they actively participate in change, as when Bichlbaum, in the guise of a Dow Chemical spokesman, goes on the BBC in front of 300 million viewers to announce that the Bhopal catastrophe, the largest industrial accident in history, will finally be cleaned up by his employer. This simple act is a million times more radical and risk-taking than Moore’s noisily wielding a bullhorn in front of AIG headquarters. Moore may be responsible for the highest grossing documentary of all time, but not one of his films ever led to a two billion dollar drop in share prices in 23 minutes as this Yes Men stunt did!

* Lionel Shriver: "I sold my family for a novel." I had no idea this market existed! Obviously this is why my novel has stalled.

Dollhouse fandom can't figure out if it's getting good news or bad news. With DVR numbers, it turns out Dollhouse's ratings are 50% higher. But this only puts the show's total viewership about even with the live viewership during mid-season last year. Fox is promising to air all 13 episodes, which is also a good sign—but a strong "And that's it" seems to be fairly loudly implied. And Stargate Universe beat it again.

At least last Friday's episode was decent—best of the season so far, though not near the heights of episodes 1.6-1.11 or "Epitaph One."

Elsewhere in televised SF news, ABC is so happy with Flashforward's ratings they've ordered 9 more episodes. Who mourns for Bill Simmon?

Late Sunday links.

* Rachel Maddow kicks ass on another visit to Meet the Press. They should just give Rachel Meet the Press; I hope eventually they do. It's the only version of the show I could imagine actually watching.

* The networks are apparently afraid of SF; Day One has apparently been downgraded to a miniseries and the V remake is rumored to be forbidden to use the world "alien."

* Octavia Butler's papers will go to the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA, joining Christopher Isherwood's, Charles Bukowski's, and Jack London's.

* Playgrounds of the 1970s. A version of the Officer Big Mac at right was active in Ledgewood, NJ, well into the 2000s. (Is it still there?)

* Judith Butler: Save California's universities. My only quibble is that she appears to be writing in the wrong country's newspaper.

* More Nate Silver: That the conservative intelligentsia reacted giddily to news of the Americans losing is telling. It's telling of a movement that was long ago knocked off its intellectual moorings and has lost the capacity to think about what people outside the room think about. Flagged by Bitter Laughter. More thoughts along the same lines from Cogitamus and Contrary Brin.

* My happiest time was after Mao came into power. Our social status improved. People were allowed to express their views. Before, people had no right to speak out. After the founding of new China, the first parade, I was on the front row during the first parade. Foreign journalists from America and the Soviet Union took lots pictures of me. I was carrying a flower basket, walking down Huaihai road, it was very festive, and there was much excitement. I went out during the parade every year for many years, rain or shine. Why the Chinese support the Communist party.

I want to give a tentative endorsement to Flashforward, the latest entrant in "the next Lost" sweepstakes. I've heard complaints that the pilot was dull, but I didn't find it to be—and the talk from the producers suggests something like a coherent long-term plan has already been sketched out. I'm a notorious sucker for time travel plots but I think it could be good.

The pilot is on Hulu; give it a whirl.

The thing that makes "The Walking Dead" unique and interesting is that it's a zombie movie that never ends—that's the log line or whatever. To do a zombie movie that's based on that? Kinda dumb. The whole idea behind the book is that it's a long-term exploration on the characters and their situation and how they're dealing with these problems over a long period of time, the different things that happen to the characters and how it affects and changes the characters. You can do that in a series of movies, but it's not ideal. It's not really common for people to go, "Oh, I'll buy this thing and commit to making 10 movies based on it!" So, the TV show makes way more sense to me for all of those reasons. Robert Kirkman talks The Walking Dead at Comic Book Resources. Via io9.

Up too late tonight.

* Because you demanded it: MTV has greenlit a Teen Wolf pilot.

* Contrary to what you may have heard, the appendix has a function.

* And if you aren't sick yet of the Disney/Marvel mashup meme, you can find a bunch at Super Punch.

Friday!

* 'Decision to end Reading Rainbow traced to a ‘shift’ in priorities during the Bush administration.' That bastard!

* "Too big to fail" is so 2008. Via Ezra Klein.

J.P. Morgan Chase, an amalgam of some of Wall Street's most storied institutions, now holds more than $1 of every $10 on deposit in this country. So does Bank of America, scarred by its acquisition of Merrill Lynch and partly government-owned as a result of the crisis, as does Wells Fargo, the biggest West Coast bank. Those three banks, plus government-rescued and -owned Citigroup, now issue one of every two mortgages and about two of every three credit cards, federal data show.

A year after the near-collapse of the financial system last September, the federal response has redefined how Americans get mortgages, student loans and other kinds of credit and has made a national spectacle of executive pay. But no consequence of the crisis alarms top regulators more than having banks that were already too big to fail grow even larger and more interconnected.

* No Senate Democrat has gone on record as opposing the public option. More and more I think the public option will pass using reconciliation. I haven't heard a single persuasive counterargument to doing it this way, and Obama and the Democrats are too all-in to let health care die altogether.

* Also in health care news: Steve Benen announces the death of the public option and the rise of the free pony option. Sounds a little bit like socialism to me.

* WAKE UP SHEEPLE. THE OLIGARHY IS REAL.

* Snow Leopard reviews. I've installed this on both our Macs and so far everything appears to be almost exactly the same as before. Disk Utility works much better, which is nice. And a few menus that used to be white are now black. Believe the hype.

* And io9 has your TV science fiction themes by the numbers. We are truly in the dark age of televised time travel.

When [Larry] David approached [Jerry] Seinfeld about a reunion plot on Curb in spring 2008, the comedian wasn’t terribly worried about mucking around with the legacy of his beloved nine-season show. “The idea of working with Larry was just too overwhelmingly appealing to me, and [Curb] is such a great show,” he says. “There was a little part of me that said, ‘Do we really want to tamper?’…But to hell with it. How much damage can you really do?”

The DVD has only been out a week, so no real spoilers, but I have a few thoughts about the two unaired episodes of Dollhouse.

* "Epitaph One" is as ambitious and as amazing as promised—definitely my favorite episode of Dollhouse and one of the top Whedonverse episodes of all time. It is, in every sense, just great, laying out a blueprint for the future of the series that is so compelling I'm not sure we need to actually see any of intervening episodes. (As far as I'm concerned they'd just be killing time before we get to "Epitaph Two," which is what I really want to see.) Joss and his co-writers have been pretty open with the fact that the episode came out of the assumption that there wouldn't be any more; people reference "Objects in Space," but the comparison to the season one finale of Sledge Hammer! seems much more apt. Have they written themselves into a corner? It'll be interesting to see if Joss & Co. can make the second season work when the real story now seems to be happening in 2019. Will people really sit still for john-of-the-week episodes with the stakes raised so much higher? Or will season two be more like Lost seasons four and five, with flashbacks and flashforwards that meet somewhere in the middle? Honestly I think I'd be most happy if they stuck with the "Epitaph" frame for good and did 2009-2018 just in flashback. It's not like we're getting a third season; don't leave anything on the road.

* Speaking of 2019: Was that a Dark Angel shout-out? The episode definitely had a post-Pulse vibe, and Joss and Dark Angel have something of a checkered past: widely understood as a Buffy rip-off, Dark Angel was unceremoniously canceled in favor of Firefly, which was later (you may have heard) unceremoniously canceled...

* The unaired pilot is, I think, probably a little worse as a pilot than the actually aired pilot—a rare case of network interference not being all bad—but it's pretty clear that Joss bitterly prefers it. (I haven't listened to the commentary yet, but apparently he has a lot of thoughts along these lines there as well.) Not only did he make oblique references to the original pilot throughout the season and in Epitaph One *and* bring back the astoundingly unimpressive Chrissy Seaver for "Omega," but he ended the (aired) season on the same audiovisual image—a whispered "Caroline"—that the original pilot ended on. The implication seems to be that the whole of the first season gets us to the same place the pilot did in just one hour.

* The most interesting thing about the unaired pilot, I think, is the discovery that Eliza Dushku is actually pretty good at doing a series of drastically different characters when it happens in rapid-fire, three-minute bursts. It's only over the course of a full episode that she really struggles as an actress. The hints toward Future Caroline in "Epitaph One" look like the latest attempt to explain away the one-note-acting; we'll see how this plays out.

The seventh season of David's improvised HBO comedy, which returns on Sept. 20, will be centered around the TV version of David finally agreeing to do a reunion of the defining '90s sitcom. All four "Seinfeld" castmembers -- Jerry Seinfeld, Jason Alexander, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Michael Richards -- will play themselves in multiple episodes, and the season finale will feature extensive snippets of the show-within-the-show.

It should be said again: the premise for the new season of Curb Your Enthusiasm is truly inspired.

Three more.

* Big media hype for the new show from The State alums, Michael and Michael Have Issues.

* 'Smoke Monster From Lost Given Own Primetime Spin-Off Series.'

* Train v. tornado. Place your bets.

Abstruse Goose has a very fun map of how far various television shows have gotten from Earth. Via Bad Astronomy.

Could the tyranny of the Nielsen overnight ratings be over? If a network like Fox, which is not known for its sentiment and softness, renews a show like "Dollhouse," the paradigm has surely shifted.

Monday tidbits.

* Early polls out of the Senate race in Pennsylvania, post Specter-shuffle.

* An end to the Boston Globe? (UPDATE: No?)

* Bibles and scripts from your favorite TV shows: 1, 2. (Via Zack.)

* Condition your child the Darrow way. (Via Neil.)

Opening scene of the Ferris Bueller TV show. Don't miss the world's worst theme song.



Oh, 1990. How I miss you.

Devilstower tries to marshall the mighty power of Daily Kos in defense of Dollhouse's sagging ratings.

YouTube Thursday!

* 1988 Inside Edition report on Super Mario. Don't miss the cameo appearance by a marginally less evil Bill O'Reilly.

* The Diff'rent Strokes titles recut as a horror sequence.

* Star Wars/MacGyver mashup.

Believe the impossible: hope for Dollhouse? Airlock Alpha says Fox is "leaning" towards renewal. Are they really so desperate to erase our bad memories of Firefly?

It won't work.

Rural civil defense TV spots from 1965. Via MeFi.