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Pilot roundup time! It’s leak season online, so on Thursday, I checked out the pilots for J.J. Abrams’ Fringe and the TV adaptation of Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse books, True Blood.

Fringe was rather meh. I might tune in for the second episode, to see just how sad an X-Files ripoff it’s going to be, but right now I’m on the “leave it” side of the “take it or leave it” conundrum. I really enjoyed the first part of the pilot, but when they started pulling in the big mytharc guns, it just felt silly. It was entertaining, certainly, but… While it’s easy to suspend one’s disbelief for crazy “fringe” science, it’s a lot harder to swallow when the stupid little details closer to reality aren’t believable. The whole show loses grounding. A dude’s skin is reduced to the consistency of Jell-o, but he still keeps his eyebrows and a perfect head of hair? The devil is in the details, writers. The ending kind of sucked.

Still, there were some aspects of the show that were pretty cool. I liked the way they floated the location cues in the scene. That was just neat! And Denethor was awesome in his role as a brilliant but insane scientist. The astral plane sequence was delightfully trippy, and all the other visual effects were very well done. WOO, ZOIC!

But yeah. While I imagine it’ll find an audience somewhere, that somewhere won’t be my couch.

True Blood was a bit more difficult to quantify. The pilot is quite faithful to the events of the first half of the first book, so good job TV creative team! Unfortunately, that meant that all the things that bugged me about the book were there in force. Though I’m probably letting my book-irk and utter lack of patience for Bill color my perception of the show, as the show actually did a passable job showing why Sookie was attracted to him. (For the record: Sookie/Sam, woo!)

They did a great job with Sookie’s psychic effect, though the vamp effect was utterly laughable. The guy at the convenience store looked like some dweeby vampire rabbit! Also, the sex was way more graphic and obnoxious than it needed to be. Stupid HBO.

I think it definitely shows promise, though. Anna Paquin’s Southern accent has improved considerably since the first X-Men. And it’ll be nice to have a vampire show on TV that isn’t all brooding angst and private detectiving. There’s a unique, quirky freshness to the novels that I think will do well on TV. I’m curious to see how it adapts.

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Eddie Izzard! WHOO!

He was absolutely freaking hilarious. In his delightfully tangential style, he delivered another spectacular series of ruminations on everything from religion to American politics to Wikipedia to soup. By the end of the show, I felt exhausted from laughing so hard for so long! I’m so thrilled that I had the urge on Friday morning to check if any tickets had been released. It had been sold out for ages! I WIN, UNIVERSE!

Though while I don’t want the utterly atrocious experience afterward undermine how fabulous the show was, I really have to vent.

I am not some entitlement snob that insists stars MUST come out afterwards and sign autographs and take pictures with every fan that asks for it. We pay our money to see them perform, nothing more. Anything else is just gravy. However, if a star is not in the mood to greet his fans (which I totally understand–I know how draining tours are), I ask that an official representative come out and tell the fans his decision early on, so they aren’t waiting for hours for nothing. It’s just common sense. When an official representative comes out after an hour and says he will be coming out through this door, if we’re willing to wait a bit longer, that’s just freaking unprofessional.

The fact that the heat index was in the eighties and I nearly fainted does not affect my opinions on this matter at all. Hey, I got a cute nickname out of it: Fainting Girl! Thank you, random waiting dude and random waiting woman for giving me your water bottle and cookie. They certainly helped sustain me for the two hours and forty minutes we waited in vain, before we were informed that he had left through the front door twenty minutes ago.

So yeah. Someone somewhere along the food chain of Eddie Izzard’s support staff deserves a piece of my mind and a kick in the pants.

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Yay, my LoudTwitter drivebys are working! Now all my silly one-sentence musings can be encapsulated in one daily post, so I don’t spam people’s flists.

So! Last night was kind of hilarious. Boy came over at 9 to cook me a flower pot chicken. I chopped up veggies and raided my leftover stash for rice while he took care of chicken-related duties. We stuck it in the oven, only to find an hour later that the deeper meat was still woefully undercooked. So we stuck it back in for thirty more minutes, to no avail.

At this point, it was 11:30, so we raided my leftover stash once more and had a feast of teriyaki chicken with sauteed onion and rice, thai chicken crepe, and cashew chicken. I’m a big chicken fan, clearly. It was most excellent! And by the time all the rest of the food had been warmed up, the flower pot chicken had been adequately cooked, so I’ll have some lovely leftovers from that. We win! I love getting free lunch delivered every day at work.

Check out the trailer for Bolt, Disney’s next offering. It looks like crazy fun!

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OOH! This just in from Joss:

ONE WEEK ONLY! AN INTERNET MINISERIES EVENT!

“Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” will be streamed, LIVE (that part’s not true), FREE (sadly, that part is) right on Drhorrible.com, in mid-July. Specifically:

ACT ONE (Wheee!) will go up Tuesday July 15th.

ACT TWO (OMG!) will go up Thursday July 17th.

ACT THREE (Denouement!) will go up Saturday July 19th.

All acts will stay up until midnight Sunday July 20th. Then they will vanish into the night, like a phantom (but not THE Phantom — that’s still playing. Like, everywhere.)

JOY OF ALL JOYS! Details here.

…which reminds me of a quote from earlier this week, when my mom sent me my big poster tube from college so Raoul could sign my massive Dresden poster.

Ryan: Is that your new Josh Whedon poster?
Me: Yeah. It’s advertising his shows Bunny the Vampire Slayer and Angle.
Alex: …I want to see that.

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HAHA, YES! Managed to snag a ticket to Eddie Izzard at Radio City Music Hall tomorrow night! They’ve been sold out for ages, but I guess they released a few more. I win at life!

Also, mah Summer Shows are getting cloooooser!

Middleman: Mondays, 10/9c (ABC Family)
Burn Notice: Thursdays, July 10 @ 10/9c (USA)
Project Runway: Wednesdays, July 16 @ 9/8c (Bravo)
Psych: Fridays, July 18 @ 10/9c (USA)

Obligatory linkspam:

In the past couple weeks, I’ve become a follower of the Big Picture, a blog that describes itself as “News Stories in Photographs.” Some are inspiring, some are moving, some are devastating, and all are in breathtaking high-res. Check it out!

Schedule of TV-related Panels at San Diego Comic Con.

I already adored xkcd, but… God bless you for giving me the phrase “Barack Me Obamadeus!” I laughed for like thirty seconds straight.

New trailer for the Repo Man rock opera.

An utterly brilliant entrant in Colbert’s “Make McCain Exciting” challenge: Vogue.

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Got to have dinner with Raoul and a bunch of the Vampire Cowboys (Robert, Paco, Qui, Theresa, and Abby) after the show. They’re such a great crowd!

Robert’s suggested caption: “A kinder, gentler Kirmani”