90s Sitcoms and the NBC Multiverse

When I was a kid back in the '90s, my father would tape a plethora of sitcoms off TV to bring to the cottage with us, on account of the fact that our TV aerial up north got us literally one channel and there's only so much Saved by the Bell and Lost In Space one family can stand. On those tapes NBC's Mad About You and Friends were staple programming.

So, when I discovered that Netflix had Mad About You I watched an episode out of nostalgia - and to my surprise, it was pretty alright! I'd always been a bigger fan of Spin City and Fraiser when I was a kid, but as a man in his late twenties who recently moved in with his girlfriend I found myself now empathizing a lot more with Paul and Jamie Buchman. So I kept watching. Mad About You doesn't have the farcical, quasi-Shakespearean heft of Fraiser or the groundbreaking neuroses of Seinfeld but it was grounded and honest in its examination of coupledom and also pretty darn funny.

Anyway, I kept watching. I get to episode seven of season one, wherein Paul reveals to Jamie that he's still subletting his old bachelor pad despite them having moved in together. After some awkward relationship comedy, Paul affirms his commitment to Jamie by getting rid of his nostalgic safety blanket and heads over to the apartment to offer to sign the place over to his subletter...

...and his subletter is COSMO GODDAMN KRAMER.

Not just Michael Richards being Michael Richards. It's actually Kramer. The hallway is the hallway set from Seinfeld. Paul calls him Kramer. Paul asks how Kramer's neighbour Jerry is doing.

Apparently this was a marketing stunt back in '92 because they were both NBC sitcoms in ajacent timeslots BUT WHAT'S IMPORTANT is that we can take from this that Mad About You and Seinfeld take place in the same universe.

Which is pretty cool. But not as cool as realizing that from this we can also deduce that Friends takes place in the same universe as Seinfeld. Whaaaaaaat?

Lisa Kudrow played a waitress named Ursula on Mad About You. After she picked up the oddly similar role of Phoebe on Friends the weirdos at NBC decided to make Ursula and Phoebe twin sisters, and even based a B-plot of an episode of Friends around Chandler and Joey going to Riff's restaurant from Mad About You and being unable to tell their waitress is Ursula, not Phoebe.

So, Friends and Seinfeld both crossed over with Mad About You - which means they all take place in the same fictional universe.

OR DO THEY.

Late in Seinfeld's run there's a B-plot about George's girlfriend making him watch Mad About You and him hating it. Bu-whaaa?! But if Kramer was subletting from Paul, how is Paul also a sitcom character?

My theory is that the TV show Seinfeld is a separate universe in the NBC multiverse, where Mad About You exists as a sitcom, but that in the Mad About You/Friends universe there are also versions of Jerry, Kramer, George, and Elaine, who are presumably (due to the tone of their respective TV shows) kinder, decenter, and more relatable people - essentially making the universe of Seinfeld the "mirror universe" or "darkest timeline" of Friends and Mad About You. I presume in the Seinfeld-verse there's a version of Monica who has no arm and an eyepatch, and Ross was obviously murdered by that monkey.

Erin, on the other hand, presumes that there's only one universe and that Mad About You is reality TV in the NBC-verse.

I'm going to go do something productive now.

Some Very Good Christmas Pop Songs (That Won’t Make You Want To Shoot Yourself)

A couple years ago I assumed I hated Christmas music. I was pretty sure that that one Christmas in high school working at a Second Cup at the mall ruined the entire genre for me – there’s only so much Rod Stewart and Michael Buble one man can take.

Buuuut after I was gifted Barenaked Ladies seminal Christmas album “Barenaked for the Holidays,” (home of the fabulous, envy-soaked “Green Christmas” and pro-labour anthem “Elf’s Lament”) I discovered a subsection of Christmas music I really liked – thoughtful Christmas-themed pop songs, usually with slightly dark themes, usually sung by bands I already like. So, if you’re sick of saccharine mall music here are a few festive suggestions to add to your Christmas party playlist.

Don’t Shoot Me Santa Claus by the Killers

Apparently the Killers put out a Christmas single every year benefitting Product Red, and they’re all pretty fantastic. The best by far is Don’t Shoot Me Santa Claus which, if I’m not mistaken, is about a killer trying to justify his crimes to a telltale heart-style hallucination of Santa Claus (who talks like Elvis and wields a .45).

Please Daddy, Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas by the Decemberists

It's super dark but there’s something undeniably hilarious about Colin’ Meloy’s Oregan drawl (/speak impediment?) pleading as a small child to his alcoholic father not to ruin Christmas. Also, fun fact I didn't know before writing this post is that this was originally a John Denver song. Huh. Learn something new every day.

Christmas Lights by Coldplay

This is a breakup/longing-to-get-back-together song that’s built around a really great and Christmas-y Chris Martin piano riff and has a lot of melancholy, snowy London imagery in the lyrics. The video is fantastic, as well.

Another Happy New Year by Spirit of the West

Possibly my favourite band ever, as I may have mentioned. I think this was released solely as a bonus track on a greatest hits compilation, and isn’t really Christmas-y as it’s about New Year’s but whatever. It’s great and features John Mann singing as a disinterested (and harassed?) female partygoer. The rousing, Home for a Rest style chorus of “I could get drunk anywhere, so what am I doing here?” is awesome.

Wintertime in Ontario by Brock Zeman

Brock Zeman is a fan-freakin’-tastic alt-country artist whose been touring southern Ontario for years. I got to personally tell him he accidentally wrote one of my favourite Christmas songs (since this is more just a song about winter than Christmas) at a concert last year. It’s just a song about how ridiculous the snow is up north in Ontario in the winter (and how skating across the lake can actually get you to your booty call faster than driving the long way around).

Some honourable mentions go to the Civil Wars cover of I Heard The Bells which is considerably more foreboding than the Sinatra version (they’re reading of “God is not dead, nor does He sleep” has an oddly Lovecraftian tone), Christmas In Hell by NQ Arbuckle (similar thematically to Don’t Shoot Me Santa) and the decidedly not-dark Hurry Home by the Good Lovelies of their debut album “Under the Mistletoe” (you know you’re a tongue-in-cheek band when your first album is the Christmas album).

Speaking of albums, if anyone’s looking for a good whole Christmas album to pick up, I’d suggest “If Jesus Had Been Born In Canada, He Would Have Needed More Than Swaddling Clothes” (it’s free!) which is a Christmas compilation by a whole ton of Toronto bands on the Sound Vat label. Little City’s We’re Breaking Up Again This Christmas is particularly awesome, and Cai.ro does my favourite version of We Three Kings.

And, lastly, it’s a classic, but my all-time favourite Christmas song is by the Pogues. Give it a listen. (Stars does a pretty good cover of it, too).

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Fanboy Friday: The Personality of Peter Parker

So, if no one’s noticed by now I kinda like Spider-Man. Guy’s been my favourite super hero since I was very wee – I think there was about seven seconds when I was four that Captain America was my favourite super hero. But then Spidey showed up in the toy commercial and it didn’t matter that Cap had a sweet Cap-mobile with a battering ram. Spidey was my guy.

So, when Marc Webb’s Amazing Spider-Man came out last year, I was pretty disappointed. Thing is, I was raised on Spidey up through the Clone Saga BS in the nineties and I’ve got every trade paperback of Brian Bendis’ Ultimate Spider-Man. The Peter Parker portrayed by Andrew Garfield in ASM bore very little resemblance to the Pete I was used to from the comics I read. Comics Spidey was an earnestly good, kinda dopey nerd who might have a mouth when he’s beating up criminals but at home like is the pinnacle of a stand-up guy. Genuinely nice, unassuming, decidedly not bitter and while he might be angsty, he’s definitely not angry. Andrew Garfield, despite being a damn fine actor played a very different Peter – one who’s still a high school outcast, but appears to be an outcast for being counterculture rather than dorky. Garfield’s Peter has a palpable sense of anger radiating off him which I found off-putting – he was playing a teenager who is angry at the world for no good reason (which, to be fair, is quite teenagery). He was sulky even before Uncle Sheen (pitch perfect casting) gets knocked off, and snarky even when he isn’t Spider-Man – which I didn’t like because I’d always interpreted Spidey’s wisecracking as being a byproduct of the introverted dork Peter Parker only truly feeling socially confident when he’s got his identity hidden. So, suffice to say, I was unimpressed.

Until, that is, this past year when I started doing a systematic read-through of all the old Stan Lee / Steve Ditko Amazing Spider-Man comics from the early ‘60s. I’d picked up the first two Marvel Masterworks reprint trades of them at BMV last year because hey, history. Upon reading the original Amazing Spidey 1-24, I’ve rethought my opinion of Amazing Spidey, the movie. Andrew Garfield’s Peter Parker is significantly more accurate to the Lee/Ditko Peter than I’d thought.

While Peter is portrayed as a huge nerd in those original comics (who wears a suit and tie to high school? Huh? I think cool people. But jocks in the ‘60s obviously didn’t) he’s significantly more angry a character, even if it’s mostly in his internal monologue. An issue doesn’t go by without a panel of Peter, having just been mocked by Flash Thompson, thinking to himself “if only they knew my true power! I’ll show ‘em! I’ll show ‘em all!” like some kind of proto-Hayden Christensen. Come to think of it, Peter’s thought balloons in a lot of the early ASM comics reads a heckuva lot like the Superior Spider-Man’s thought balloons. There was a lot more of an angry, almost mad scientist quality to Peter Parker back in the Lee/Ditko books. Oddly enough this makes the whole “Peter Parker needs to learn to look out for more than himself” arc that is set off by Peter accidentally getting Uncle Ben killed a lot more prevalent because it’s an actual character flaw he’s working on eliminating rather than something that just disappears like poof when he learns “with great power there must also come great responsibility.”  

I always liked Peter Parker the Genuinely Nice Guy, but as I keep reading the Lee/Ditko books, more and more I’m getting to like the snarky egotistical kind-of-a-bit-of-an-asshole Peter Parker who will, eventually, grow up out of being a selfish teenager and become Genuinely Nice Guy Peter.

And, thus, I’m looking a little more forward to Amazing Spider-Man 2, and Paul Giamatti in a Rhino suit.

Oh, and one more thing – anyone ever notice that, despite supposedly being an irredeemable nerd, Peter Parker is swimming in ladies all the time? Not only that, he appears to basically be Archie Andrews. Though, in Stan Lee’s defense, at least he didn’t name the blonde Betty.

A Crash Course in Swashbucklery and Fisticuffs!

I started acting at a very early age, running around the forest near my family's cottage re-enacting scenes from The Princess Bride and Star Wars. Recently I decided that as a PROFESSIONAL ACTOR, I should take all steps necessary to prepare myself for the inevitable day I'm on set and someone expects me to be able to convincingly have a sword-fight.

Trying to look cool while catching my breath. PHOTO CREDIT: Erin Gerofsky

 Thus! Early in May I signed up to do a two-week intensive introduction to stage combat run by York University and taught by some of the wonderful humans from the stunt crew Riot Act. In the course, you learn the basics of sword, quarterstaff, and unarmed combat for stage and screen – and rehearse three fight scenes choreographed by the instructors. At the end of the two weeks you perform them, and if the adjudicator thinks you were convincingly badass enough, you pass, and get to put “can swordfight” on your acting resume.

The "Peking Opera" stance. PHOTO CREDIT: Erin Gerofsky

Every morning started off with a “warm-up.” It’s not a warm-up. It’s just a 45 minute workout that any other day I’d consider more than enough physical activity for one day. Ten minutes of non-stop calisthetics! Then run around the room a couple times! Now backwards! Now do a bunch of aikido rolls! Now do eleventy seven crunches! Now do some different weird crunches where you’re also doing yoga! All this and more – it was deadly but incredibly effective, and as someone who often ‘forgets’ to do core exercises it was a really great reminder how important they are.

This is a very awesome looking backwards aikido roll. Trust me. PHOTO CREDIT: Erin Gerofsky

Then, the scenes. Our unarmed fight was a scene from the Benecio Del Toro / Tommy Lee Jones movie The Hunted. I got to roundhouse a dude, choke a dude out, get tossed across the room and land in a roll – and knock a dude to the floor using my favourite move, what I like to call the “Captain Kirk Punch” – the two-fisted hammer-punch to the back, the core principle of Starfleet Martial Arts!

The quarterstaff scene was haaaaaard. I’ve had to do some unarmed stuff on screen before (I got slapped on Renegade Press, punched a couple times on Falcon Beach, etc) but I’ve never handled anything like a staff. Instead of being given dialogue for that scene our assignment was to build our own scene around the choreography and music we chose ourselves. My partner and I, of course, chose Europe’s The Final Countdown. Somehow our scene evolved into me playing an overbearing manager of a doweling factory (hence the staves) and my partner playing a lowly subordinate whose had enough of my hogging the radio in the storeroom. It was hysterical, even included several yells of “FINAL COUNTDOWN!!!” in the place of “HA-YA!”

"I cannot live in a world where you have everything and I have nothing." Loved this scene. PHOTO CREDIT: Erin Gerofsky

The sword scene was by far my favourite. We were taught basic rapier swordfighting, and the choreography was set to the dialogue from the climactic duel in The Count of Monte Cristo (Jim Caviezel and Guy Pearce do a fantastic version of that fight in the 2002 version). I got to play Fernand Mondego! I loves me a bad guy! I think my favourite move from that fight was something called “the Angelo” where I swatted the Countess’ blade aside with my off-hand and passed my own sword behind my back to bring her on point. So cool! So cool.

Thankfully I managed to pass! I can definitely put “can swordfight” on my resume – and I had a ton of fun, so hopefully soon I’ll have reason to call upon those skills! I’d recommend this course to any actor wanting to expand their special skills (and get a kick-ass two weeks of working out as a bonus!)

Fanboy Friday: The Old Republic Rises Again

Back when Star Wars: The Old Republic came out in the fall of last year, I was really really really excited for it. Knights of the Old Republic and its sequel are still pretty much my favourite video games of all time, and The Old Republic was being advertised as its sequel. I've never been attracted to MMORPGs because I hate people, but I was desperately itching for another KOTOR, and The Old Republic was being touted as very story-focused and amenable to curmudgeonly misanthropes like me who just wanted to play by themselves. So I tried it out.

I was very disappointed. However, not in the way I was expecting to be. I didn’t find the multiplayer aspect nearly as distracting as I’d thought, and the writing in the game was really strong – but what do you mean I have to grind through the same area for three more hours to level up enough to beat this story-end boss? But my character wouldn’t want to murder thousands more Sand People! Also I have things to do! Not cool, game. Not cool.

Also, the monthly subscription fee was insidiously making me not play other games or read books because I “wanted to get my money’s worth” - so I quit the game. I just wanted the story and to swing a lightsaber around. I’d read the Wookieepedia entry on the game’s story and be done with it.

However, The Old Republic recently went free-to-play. So I’d be able to play other games without guilt and I still reallllly wanted to have that KOTOR III experience. Also, the game sent me an email saying my R2 Unit missed me and it was emotionally manipulative and, and, and…

So I booted up the game again. Here’s what went down.

SUNDAY AFTERNOON, 3pm:

Alright, booting up the game. I’ve got a couple hours to kill so this... a gigabyte of updates are necessary? Ugh. I guess I’ll go to the gym and come back.

4:30pm:

Okay, time to bust out that lightsa- NINE MORE GIGS TO GO!? Update five of twelve?! COME ON.

9:30pm:

Five and a half hours to patch a game. Really. COME ON. Alright, now I’m booting up the game.

I decided to go with a dashing human Sith Warrior named Nyvaan. I wanted to call him Niven because I modeled his stellar moustache on actor David Niven, but unfortunately that name was taken and I had to Star Wars up his name with a ‘y’ and an extra ‘a’.

10:30pm:

In my first hour I killed some space bugs and decided the fate of three Imperial prisoners – sparing two of them (the light side option) and granting the last wish of the third - honourable death by combat. I find the idea of playing a good-guy Sith Lord appealingly contrarian, so we’ll see if the game tolerates this.

1:30am:

Welp, I obviously like this game. Got my first lightsaber, met a weird Sith Lord in renaissance armor, chose my prestige class – awesome. Until…

“After level 10, free-to-play players begin to accrue less experience.”

Really? Really. COME ON.

TUESDAY AFTERNOON, 4:30pm:

Belay that last order. You only gain experience at a -25% rate by being a free-to-player. That's not that bad. Especially because every so often you get quest rewards that boost your experience gain back to normal for an hour - which is good for people like me who like to artificially set a limit on how much time they sink into a game.

Still successfully playing a light-side Sith! I'm changing the Empire from within by murdering people quickly rather than needlessly! Am I not merciful?

THURSDAY AFTERNOON, NOON:

I'm beginning to be sold again. Not literally, I can't abide subscription-based gaming. I bought the game already! Let me play it! Thankfully, the free-to-play option gives me that right, and the restricted features for non-subscribers don't break the game and give me an irrational sense of self-satisfaction that I'm resisting them.

I'm still not a huge fan of the game's Warcraft style click-on-the-toolbar-in-the-optimal-order combat, but it's still kinda fun. At this point Nyvaan has ingratiated himself with his Sith Master enough that he can casually suggest that he try not being a total douche without fear of reprisal, and is a hero to the moderates of the Imperial military who just want to keep the peace with a semi-benevolent iron fist, rather than actively antagonize the citizenry with lightning hands. I really like that this play-style is an option.

Long-story short, it's entirely possible that I'll come up against an end-boss that my character can't handle and I'll quit out of righteous frustration, but for the moment The Old Republic is letting me have a lightsaber and pretend to be a Jedi in a very well written story without massively inconveniencing my experience by being an MMO. So I'mma keep playing. Again, until a Rancor stomps me out with one hit.

See you next week, nerds!

Shameless Plugs: My First Novel!

While many of you might be familiar with my work in the (mostly Canadian) film and television landscape, my tiny blogger bio in the top right hand corner of this page says I'm an actor and author. An author you say? Would that new button that's popped up in the sidebar in the past week have anything to do with that? You sure you betcha it does!

That button on the sidebar will link you to the iTunes bookstore, where, if you have access to any iDevice be it Pad, Phone, or Pod you can buy my debut novel, Archie Hartigan and the Frost Wolf!

The book is a tie-in novel based on the world of Seth On Survival, a web-series I starred back in ’09, created by Teri Armitage and Torin Stefanson. Since then, SOS has racked up over three million viewers and spun off a secondary, werewolf-based webseries Your Lupine Life which I wrote an episode of (and guest-starred in)! Teri, Torin and I have become good friends and collaborators over these past couple of years, and when they suggested a new attempt to monetize the SOS franchise by releasing a series of tie-in novels, I jumped at the chance to write one!

At the center of Seth On Survival is the character Seth Greening, who I portray in the series. He’s a supernatural survivologist with a web-show that teaches its viewers how to better prepare for a vampire attack and or how to zombie-proof their home. Seth (quite often) responds to viewer comments, so I figured a great way into a spin-off novel would be to have the book be the story of one of Seth’s viewers, and have Seth “transcribe, edit and annotate” the adventure. That way we were also able to take advantage of SOS’s awesome trans-media wheelhouse and “enhance” the eBook with pop-up annotation by Seth and inter-chapter video content where Seth weighs in on what he might’ve done in the place of the protagonist. Welcome to 21st century young adult fiction! Multimedia! The internet! iPods!

And so, the book is an adventure starring Seth On Survival superfan Archibald Hartigan, an amateur monster hunter who accidentally gets turned into a werewolf while investigating a number of mysterious disappearances in his sleepy and geographically nebulous Northeastern North American hometown. This, of course, leads him to finding out a bunch of his close friends were also secretly monsters, including a cyborg and a high-functioning zombie! Archie and his friends then team up to defeat the werewolf that turned Archie into a monster, and uncover the vast and ancient conspiracy said werewolf brought with him to town. Spoiler alert! There may or may not be universe destroying Lovecraftian monstrosities lurking just off-screen. Also, zombies and flying saucers.

The novel is (in my opinion) is a rollicking action-adventure-horror-comedy for kids aged nine to buys-the-adult-covers-of-the-Harry-Potter novels! The book has been out for two months, and thus far the highest praise I've received has come from my sister (who also created the beautiful cover-art). She read the whole thing in an afternoon when she was very sick. In her words, Archie is "like Harry Potter meets The Princess Bride! Insofar as it sucks you in, and is also very sarcastic." She also said it "totally made [her] forget [she] was incredibly ill!" High praise indeed.

And the book is only 1.99$ on the iTunes Bookstore! What value! Click here or the button on the sidebar to buy it now! Writing this novel has been incredibly fulfilling to me, and if you decide to check it out, I hope you like it (and tell everyone you know to buy it)!

Fanboy Friday: 'Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon'

So, I had absolutely no interest in playing Far Cry 3. But then this trailer happened. An action-adventure-stealth based shooter based almost entirely on aping the conventions of a dumb late 80s action movie? Wherein you play a guy with a cybernetic eye for no good reason? And there are giant Gila monsters that shoot lasers out of their eyes? And the soundtrack is mostly synthesizers and this? Anyone who happened to catch my post on my love of the music and iconography of American cinema of the 1980s can probably guess that this not only piqued my interest but was immediately up my alley, aesthetically.

I think this is the first time I’ve wanted to (and been able to) buy downloadable content for a video game without buying the parent game first. Those inclined like me to buy a schlocky neon-drowned stealth-action romp like Blood Dragon weren’t all likely to have already bought a grim-and-gritty jungle warfare stealth-action romp like the original Far Cry 3. So, thankfully you can buy Blood Dragon without having already bought the original game. It’s a really cool and to my knowledge unprecedented move on the part of the publisher! Blood Dragon was a cool, weird idea for a game whose marketability hadn’t yet been tested, but the publisher was able to give it a chance by building it on top of an existing game. By using the existing infrastructure built for Far Cry 3, Ubisoft was able to take a calculated risk on a weird, niche game that probably didn’t have a tested target audience.  They minimized the amount of work and money the game needed to get made, and thus were able to release an affordable (15$! Cheap compared to the 50$ of the original Far Cry 3) and aesthetically unique game that probably wouldn’t have got green-lit if it needed the bloated budget of a typical triple-A title. And it’s worked out really well for them! Apparently Blood Dragon has sold five times better than expected and has already been tapped for a sequel – and it certainly got me to buy the original Far Cry 3 after the fact.

Sure, the small budget doesn’t always work in the game’s favour – the jokey 8-bit animated cutscenes are a creative way around not being able to afford new motion-capture, but since the game is a loving homage to films like Predator and Megaforce, the decidedly non-cinematic 8-bit sequences seem out of place to me. Other than that, the game is a blast. The eighties are about has far away from us now as the 50s were to when Back To The Future came out – the eighties are ‘period’ now, and not only that they’re a period that 20-and-30-somethings are beginning to remember fondly. As someone who grew up with movies like Road Warrior and The Terminator, the idea of being able to play a video game where I could shoot cyborgs with a neon laser rifle to electro-synth music was immediately appealing. Sign me up. With the popularity of retro movies and TV series like Super 8, Drive, and the BBC’s Ashes to Ashes, I’m surprised no one in video games thought of tapping into this wave of 80s nostalgia sweeping popular-and-nerd culture before.

And have I mentioned how amazing and ludicrous the game’s soundtrack is? Powerglove, the electronic band that did the Blood Dragon soundtrack, also did a remix for an indie solo artist from Greece named Kristine whose Modern Love EP is my new favourite thing. Apparently writing retro 80s pop-rock is a thing for some people? Definitely added most of that EP to my workout playlist, “Traning Montage II: The Re-Bloodening.”

You can see why I’m Blood Dragon’s target demographic.