Join the affair

Anybody out there watching The Affair on Showtime?  Now in its second season, I'm still really enjoying it.

It's great to have a show about adults talking to one another about adult things (and not just sexual things), with a good bit of subtlety, nuance, and metaphor thrown in.  It's like the TV equivalent of a John Updike or Philip Roth novel, with the spirit of Robert Altman hovering over it all.

But I don't want to make the show feel like homework.  As thoughtful and emotionally complex as it is, it's also engrossing and often fun.

Anyway, give this a look if you want a break from all the police and crime plots on television, though the The Affair covers its bases and gives us a little cops & crime, too.  But just a little.

The Affair airs Sundays at 10:00 p.m., but do yourself a favor and catch up on the earlier episodes via Showtime On Demand first.  If you're at all curious about the show, you should jump in from the beginning.

Bloody good idea

This blog is supposed celebrate books and beverages, specifically adult beverages when discussing that second category.  But I haven't done much lately on the beverage front, and it's time to fix that.

To kick off that new commitment, here is a photograph of a terrific Bloody Mary I recently enjoyed.  It was served at the Beacon Diner in Hometown, Pennsylvania (diners with a liquor license are one of life's true pleasures).  Hometown is a few miles away from our weekend place in Pennsylvania's Pocono mountains.

The nice thing about this Bloody Mary- aside from the variety of neat and complex spices that created a really savory drink- was the addition of several pieces of folded-over pepperoni that were speared through the little plastic sword.  The pepperoni really served the drink well, making what's usually a tasty and substantial drink even more, well, tasty and substantial.  Great little touch, guys!

Beaming back

Someone must have liked my September 30 post wishing for a new Star Trek series, as today CBS announced that the network will be bringing Star Trek back to television in 2017!  Special thanks to the CBS executive who read my post and got things moving.

There's not much news beyond that as yet, but we were told that the new show won't exactly be on traditional television, as it will primarily "air" on the CBS streaming service CBS All Access.  I'm told that the subscription fee for the service is currently $5.99 per month, and that all the other various Star Trek series are already available to view there (they're also on Netflix and Amazon Prime, too, at least for now).  There will be "some" broadcast airings of the show, too, but it really is meant to be a draw for the streaming service.  Fair enough.

It'll be interesting to see the eventual news about the new show's premise, the time frame where the show will be set, and whether a season's worth of shows will be dumped- Netflix style- onto the service all at once or doled out one episode per week. And of course there are lots of other burning questions, but for now it's fun to just wallow in the general announcement about the show.  Fun as the movies have been, Star Trek really belongs on television, and soon it will be there again.

Fantastic old stories

I've been having a lot of fun with E-Bay lately, using it to reassemble different runs of comic books that I used to own in my younger days.  Pictured here are Fantastic Four numbers 196 through 200, originally published in the spring and summer of 1978 (click on the photo for a better look).  This five-issue storyline features one of the better Dr. Doom stories from that period, concluding with the double-sized issue number 200.

I was thinking of this story because of my disappointment with the recent Fantastic Four movie, which I thought was needlessly mediocre.  After seeing the movie, I had said to myself, "Why can't they just take inspiration from any number of great old FF epics from the last thirty years of comics storylines?  Kind of like the way the Marvel movies that Marvel actually controls (the Iron Man, Captain America, and Avengers movies, for example) do all the time?  And that's what got me thinking of this particular FF story, as Dr. Doom implements a particularly ambitious plan to both destroy his hated enemies and simultaneously assume control of the planet.

These issues originally cost 35 cents each back in the late 70's, except for the double-sized issue 200, which cost 60 cents.  That amounts to my paying two bucks for the whole epic back in the day.  Re-buying them in decent condition over the past month or so via different sellers on E-bay set me back about 25 bucks. A lot of that was postage, though. Still, it was nice to see that each comic book nicely appreciated in value (each one costing about three bucks minus postage), but happily not enough to make them prohibitive to buy now.

Anyway, the 25 bucks or so was actually not a lot of money to reassemble a bit of my youth, and I'm looking forward to buying a few more comics from the storylines I enjoyed as a teen.  And, yes, these five FF comics held up when I finally sat down to read them.  Many, many years after originally devouring them, I once again enjoyed a solid, entertaining story by writer Marv Wolfman and artists Keith Pollard and Joe Sinnott.

Hmmm, is it maybe time to look on E-Bay for some pages of original art from those comics, too?  They would look nice in some decent frames, hanging in a hallway or two.  I mean, who needs to eat, right?

Quick recommendation

The Intern, which we saw this past weekend, was an enjoyable, understated movie.  There were some light laughs and some light drama, and the movie didn't overstay its welcome.

It wasn't one of those broad comedies with all kinds of craziness or outlandish stuff going on (not that those can't be fun, too).  Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway are pros and set the right tone for this pleasant, gentle story about a senior citizen intern working at a hip and trendy online retail operation.  

Yes, the young people learn a lot from the older, wiser De Niro, and De Niro gets a new lease on life because of all the young energy and new ideas around him, but it's all done with a light touch and the movie even manages to work in a few surprises.

It's funny, though.  Knowing that they has De Niro on the film's payroll, the producers couldn't resist one over-the-top element: they actually worked in a heist sequence, with De Niro driving the getaway car!

Anyway, before you get all caught up in James Bond and Star Wars, you might want to give this graceful little American comedy a try.  I found it to be a nice appetizer for all the upcoming holiday blockbuster stuff, and you may, too. 

Quite something

Jodi Taylor's The Nothing Girl isn't my usual type of book, but a discount offer caught my eye just when I was ready to start something new. Very quickly, I was glad I took a chance on it. The Nothing Girl is a fresh, fun story about a group of eccentrics thrown together in a small estate in the English countryside, with the quiet, insecure Jenny the centerpiece of the group. As the story progresses, Jenny soon learns that she isn't as quiet and insecure as she and the people around her had thought.

Jenny gains her gradual, new self awareness amid many entertaining episodes, including animal rescues, an arranged (and later, genuine?) romance, frequent intrigues involving Jenny's relatives, and even, in the later going, a genuine mystery. Oh, also on hand is Jenny's imaginary friend, Thomas the Horse, but this element is done with a light touch and doesn't overwhelm the proceedings with whimsy. In fact, for a golden, talking horse, Thomas lent a good bit of grit and sense to the story when he showed up.

I actually listened to the audiobook version of The Nothing Girl, which is beautifully read by Lucy Price-Lewis, but I'm sure the book would be equally enjoyable in print or on one's Kindle. Ms. Taylor wrote a great little story here, and I'm going to keep an eye out for more of her stuff.

"The Nothing Girl" is easily available in any of the formats mentioned above.

To boldly go... once again?

I've been enjoying Blunt Talk, the new comedy series starring Patrick Stewart, now showing on the Starz network.  An occasional guest star on the series has been Brent Spiner, Mr. Stewart's old cohort on Star Trek: The Next Generation way back when.  Though playing totally different characters now (Mr. Stewart an effective television journalist with a train wreck of a personal life and Mr. Spiner a sympathetic piano player working in the bar Mr. Stewart's character often visits), it's been a lot of fun seeing the easy repartee these two actors still have with each other.

Seeing them also makes me want a new Star Trek series.  C'mon, how hard would that be?  Just get a new series going, assemble a nice cast, and set the whole thing in the 24th century, a couple of decades after the time frame of Star Trek: The Next Generation.  That last point would allow characters from that series, as well as from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager, to come and go as occasional guest stars, complementing the new series' regular cast.  It would be a lot of fun.  Watching Mr. Stewart and Mr. Spiner on Blunt Talk just reminds everyone that time is being wasted and these actors won't have an indefinite window to again play their classic Star Trek characters.

And as far as a premise for a new Trek show?  I say keep it simple.  Star Trek is best when embracing its classic structure: a ship traveling the galaxy having adventures, encountering strangeness, and addresssing challenges and moral dilemmas.  You don't need to complicate the premise with too much originality and cleverness.  Leave those things for the individual episodes' stories, and for the new characters created to populate the series.

Any, end of rant.  But if there's anyone at Paramount Pictures who reads this blog, could you please get on this issue at your convenience?  Time, as they say, is a wastin'.  Thanks.