Archive for November, 2008

Worst Week

Thursday, November 27th, 2008

Obviously the writer’s strike has taken a toll on things this season. New shows have been hard to come by, and good shows at that… I can only name one. It is an American remake of a British sitcom The Worst Week of My Life. It is about a guy, to whom an inordinate number of bad things happen, and through association, his fianceé and her parents are dragged into the bad things as well.

It is an interesting exercise in television writing as they start out each episode with a barely-there status quo where everybody has had enough time to cool down from the last horrible incident (normally shown in a short clip) and quickly builds motivation upon mishap upon excuse to bend the story toward a relatively believable yet insane ending. It is fairly predictable in the short term (something important is introduced and almost assuredly going to go wrong) but you swiftly end up far from where you could have imagined it going in the beginning of the episode. You definitely would not want to hear about an ending out of context but it would probably make you wonder how they got to that destination.

The acting is uniformly top-notch, especially last week’s episode with Fred Willard on it. Comic genius that guy, he was also recently on Pushing Daisies (a great new show from last year if you even remember it). And for those out there that think women just aren’t as funny as men, I’ve got news for you: Erinn Hayes is an incredible comic actress. I’m willing to see anything she’s in thanks to this show. Additional proof of her awesomeness here: Children’s Hospital, the Rob Corddry web series.

Worst Week is on Mondays at 9:30 ET on CBS, and a great companion to How I Met Your Mother at 8:30, although I would skip all two and a half of the men between the two.

Pearse Street

Saturday, November 8th, 2008

I now have a sweet new job a little outside of Boston called Pearse Street. It’s been great so far! They kind of got pigeon-holed as MySpace designers, but are definitely capable of doing incredible things. A lot of people are having them build their own social networks now, and they hope to branch out into motion graphics, 3D and all that crazy fun stuff I’m into. Right now I am doing a lot of Flash animation and programming for them, actually designing things of quality, learning new things, and feeling real support from all of my co-workers.

Everybody there is awesome, but just to give a quick sample: Fuchsia, the CEO, really cares about design and making people happy. She is so nice and enthusiastic it’s infectious. Andrew, the creative director, is tons of fun to talk to, and super talented to boot. He’s even a comic book nerd like me, so there’s plenty to geek out over throughout the day. There are even perks like plentiful Mountain Dew and a Foosball table! This place is great, and I hope to be with them for a long, long time.