Entertainment News - [TV Guide Online]: "WHERE'S THE HATE?: Ah, here it is: A music video for 'We Are Family' featuring whippersnapper faves ranging from SpongeBob to Miss Piggy is being distributed to more than 60,000 schools to promote tolerance of diversity — and of course, conservatives are freaking out. The editor of the American Family Association's journal has asserted that 'one of the differences being celebrated [by the project] is homosexuality.' And as everyone knows, gay kids are not to be accepted but rather mocked, cast out or beaten. Nice."

SFX - REVIEW: Doctor Who, episode one

Okay, I just saw the first episode of the new Doctor Who series and wrote an extensive, heartfelt entry about what Doctor Who means to me, and why I can't be objective about it or anything. And then freaking Blogger lost it.

So, instead, here's a review that pretty much says what I thought about the episode (almost verbatim, really), and I'll maybe try to reconstruct the blog entry later. Although it won't be the same.

BBC - Doctor Who - Homepage

Okay, the official BBC Doctor Who site has posted these tiny little teasers for the new series, and in them, we get a glimpse of the TARDIS interior (designed by comics artist Bryan Hitch). Which probably means nothing to most of the folks reading this, but I'm pretty excited.

Apparently, a copy of the first episode leaked out onto the Internet last weekend, and all sorts of negative reviews are being posted to Ain't It Cool News, clearing house for All Things Loser. Me, I've only read excerpts of one professional media review, which was apparently quite positive, and read the review Warren Ellis put out on his mailing list, which was also quite positive. (And he tends to hate everything; hated Farscape, hated the Battlestar Galactica miniseries, liked the first episode he saw of House, but doesn't think there's enough variety... I think he may have hated Firefly, too, but who knows?) Me, the impression I get of the great, steaming geek-fest that is AICN is that it's a bunch of fat, sexless losers who still live in their mothers' basements (all metaphorically speaking, of course), who are so desperate to not be seen as, well, what they are, that they try to put on an air of sophistication and disinterest by hating almost everything. Having said that, it's the crowd that loved box office (and, in my opinion, artistic) failure Sky Captain and the Pretty, but Dull, Plotless, Uninvolving, and Personalityless World of Tomorrow, so that shows how much their opinions affect the rest of the universe...

Last night was an HBO night: Season premiere of Deadwood and a new episode of Carnivale. Deadwood, of course, was insanely wonderful. It's almost like they've taken the success of the first season as license to go even further, and I don't mean with the coarse language and violence everyone knows the show for (although that's certainly there, and makes The Sopranos look like a tea party). No, it's like the dialogue is even more stylized and highly crafted, like some mutant old west hybrid of Shakespeare and David Mamet.

Carnivale is headed firmly into the final quarter of the season, which hopefully won't be its last (although I'm not holding my breath; ratings have plummeted calamitously... Crap, now David Milch has me talking like that...). This week featured a particularly disturbing tar-and-feathering sequence that I won't soon forget. Definitely like nothing else on TV, that's for sure, which is probably why so few people are watching it.

And they ran an ad for a new series coming this fall: Rome. From the brief clips shown, it looks gorgeous. Can't tell who's in it, don't know who created it, nothing, but it stands more than a chance of being great. (I mean, I'm not a fan of all HBO's shows, but I won't deny their qualities, even if they don't appeal to me.)

And I managed to download a couple of episodes of the New Captain Scarlet TV series, only to discover they won't play on my computer, or on the ones at work. They do, however, play on my DVD player. Well, sort of. One of them plays without sound, which is weird, because you'd think they'd both have that problem... Anyway, so I remain optimistic that I'll be able to watch the New Doctor Who fairly close to its broadcast date. Which is all I really want, really.

And I can't comment on the Captain Scarlet episodes, because I haven't actually watched them yet.