While I don’t think it has acquired the viral oomph of “Dick in a Box,” the following outtakes from the “original” Japanese version of “The Office” are essential viewing for printculture types always on the look-out for high-carb fusions of popular culture and East-West discourse.

Another crazy week of houseguests, stimulation, and no time to put together something serious. So let me give you a few things to read or look at. 1. David Cook's cover of Michael Jackson's “Billie Jean” from a few weeks ago on American Idol. Lovely, in (I think) 3/4 time. In general this season of Idol is a pretty good one, with the unusual difference that the men's voices are much stronger than the women's. David Archeleta is pro...

Too much going on this week to manage something coherent; if you're in the mood I recommend reading the stuff everyone else is writing on the site, which keeps striking me as really good. 1. Big Love I gave up on Big Love this week. About halfway through an episode, I turned to my spouse, who'd already wandered into the kitchen, and said, “you know what? I'm done.” Ejected the DVD, put season 1's two remaining discs back in their N...

The Office, NBC’s single-camera comedy, is a meditation on boredom. Derived from a British miniseries, a mockumentary set inside a paper company, the sitcom transplants the concept and major characters from the original, but adds a number of fleshed-out officemates and warehouse workers. Manager Michael Scott, the attention-seeking buffoon, and Dwight, his authoritarian lackey, get the most screen time, but their antics are in many ways inc...

Once upon a time I wanted to be a journalist. The love affair didn’t last that long, but it certainly seemed like a big deal at the time –a typical college romance. In retrospect it seems only a transition from an amorphous collection of enthusiasms (politics, dabbling in various arts, a desire to travel) to something like a feasible career choice in academia.Still, initially it was the enticement of reading French journalism –not Racine or Pr...

The week has been much busier than anticipated, but in my exhausted stupor, I did manage to watch the Top Chef finale last night--a cook off between Marcel, the molecular gastronomist and show scapegoat, and Ilan, the beady-eyed, Marcel-obsessed instigator. It's hard to say anything original about the outcome or the episodes that led up to last night's season-ender. The show's successful because viewers feel compelled to weigh in, not only on ...

Originally the medium of film was expected to have scientific potential, as photography had with Muybridge's motion studies. Michael Apted's 7 UP series is one of the few films I know of which has tried to realize that potential. It is an epic documentary, like Shoah or The Sorrow and The Pity. Apted's series follows the lives of a disparate group of British schoolchildren as they grow up, returning to interview them every 7 years. The lat...

The three common characteristics I find in most children’s entertainment are mischief, animal friends and deparenting.

After a little prodding from our own S Shirazi, I broke down and checked out the new Tuesday evening network offering Friday Night Lights. For those who don’t know, it’s a t.v. show based on the true if mythologized story of a miracle high school football season in small Texas town. (The book was also the basis of a very solid movie a few years ago –more on that later). My initial reaction was ambivalent: as a spectator-fan of the game, I lov...

I once went to a SoHo art gallery opening with a friend of mine, a painter, who worked at the gallery by day as an office manager. After I had walked the length of the place and looked at the entire exhibit, he led me behind the reception desk and showed me a painting by the same artist which wasn’t in the show. “Look, isn’t it good?” he said. It was a shoddily painted portrait of a man’s head enclosed in a crude circle of red paint. All aroun...

I wanted to spread the word about Veronica Mars in the first season but it seemed too soon; now it seems too late.

Over the past few days Printculture's intrepid M Massino and I have been enaged in a conversation, begun here and continued telephonically, about the relation between a couple current television commercials and our culture. The first half of that dialogue follows; the second half will appear tomorrow.

A prolonged summer cold and road trip added up to my watching with a mixture of horror and fascination one of those oh-so-summery summer shows, ABC's “How to Get the Guy.” In case you aren't naturally a close reader, the hosts emphasize repeatedly: its not about getting a guy, its about getting the guy.

As I write this, I’m watching the 79th annual Scripps National Spelling Bee, which is being broadcast live on ABC, a big step up from ESPN2. That this event featuring middle schoolers, complete with peach fuzz mustaches, braces, and baby fat, has made it to primetime TV is a testament to the growing popularity of the bee as a cultural phenomenon. I even own the surprise hit documentary “Spellbound,” which did an impressive job of making the ac...

In yesterday's overwhelming discussion of Deal or No Deal, S Shirazi referred to a study that showed how losing makes people less risk-averse, rather than more, which explains why gamblers who lose risk more and more to get back to their break-even point. “Being unable to adapt when faced with a change for the worse,” he wrote, “people are often 'shattered' and grow desperate trying to return to their peak position, that irre...

There’s a new game show on NBC called “Deal or No Deal.” Here’s how it works: you pick one of 26 briefcases, each of which contains an unknown sum of money somewhere between a penny and a million bucks. One by one, you open the other briefcases, and after every few picks, you are offered a buy-out deal, a known sum of money in exchange for the unknown amount in your own case. If the cases you open contain large sums, then the chances that y...

Not too long ago my companion and I finished watching the final season of Six Feet Under. Unlike other favored shows that promise to return – Deadwood on May 23 with the DVD release of season 2, The Wire, eventually, and Lost, every week on broadcast TV (though it has lost some of its appeal for precisely that reason) – Six Feet Under is over and it is not coming back. It’s a show we have to mourn. (spoiler alert, but vaguely phrased spoile...

Last week I watched two new televisual accounts of the New China: “China Rises,” on the Times-Discovery channel, and “The Tank Man,” an edition of the PBS series Frontline. (“The Tank Man” is an hour long, without commercials, “China Rises” four, with them). Discovery-Times was a channel I didn’t know I had –a sort of joint production of The New York Times and the various Discovery channels. The title of their program is telling: “China Rises...

One of the things I've always really enjoyed at Slate is the product comparison articles; I'm exactly the kind of person who will read a whole article on which yogurt tastes best, which tobacco draws smoothest, or which $500 espresso maker is really worth the money, despite the fact that I don't smoke, eat yogurt, or drink coffee. The problem with doing that stuff around here is, sadly, the money. Last week I toyed briefly with the idea of wri...

Objectivity in journalism BEIJING, March 9 — China criticized the human rights record of the United States on Thursday, arguing that racial discrimination remained pervasive and that the American military abused prisoners held at detention centers abroad. In the choice of the word "arguing," as opposed to, say, "pointing out" or "reminding everyone," witness the patriotism of the American press.

While waiting, impatiently, for the next seasons of Six Feet Under and Deadwood to come out on DVD, I’ve been watching another HBO show, The Wire. It’s a cop show set in Baltimore, written and produced by the guy who wrote Homicide, the other cop show set in Baltimore. The Wire feels a lot like what Homicide would have been had it been on HBO – grittier, harder, not cancelled …

On vacation with my family last summer, I found myself being exposed to dangerous levels of CNN. I wound up watching several hours of their ongoing coverage of the second Michael Jackson trial, which as far as I could tell consisted of a steady shot of the outside of a small courthouse and a lurid hag in the studio screaming, He’s guilty! This was my first encounter with Nancy Grace.

Part of what makes Battlestar Galactica such an interesting show has to do with the way it invokes and works through the contemporary American political situation. The human race, under attack from a terroristic threat of robots that appear human, finds itself in a situation in which the difference between friend and foe becomes impossible to articulate. The war situation produces--as it has these days, and perhaps as it must inevitably--a gre...

In a paper on fast food and obesity in America, a student of mine described McDonald's as hocking "portions that would make a caveman sick." I circled the word caveman and punctuated it with a question mark, and this was enough to make the caveman not appear in the final version of the paper. Which is a little unfortunate, actually. While she later told me what she was going for, that, according to her, portion sizes are not based on any measu...

It might have been before I’d started watching Six Feet Under, at least in earnest, that someone I was talking with said she didn’t like the show because she didn’t like any of the characters. It wasn’t that the acting was bad, or that the writing was bad, or that the characters were flat exactly, it was just that none of them were people she would ever care about. After watching the show into its second season, I can see what she means. T...