It’s that time again; Xanadu is on TV at 10:30pm EST. Family Channel, for those of you at home.*

I haven’t seen this puppy since high school, when I went to someone’s house under the promise of “the most stylish movie ever.”** (Said person may or may not have since become a drag queen; studies are inconclusive.)

At the time, I remember thinking:

1) The dude in this movie is Swan from The Warriors.
2) Rent was due for poor Gene Kelly.
3) That’s not bad for rollerskates!
4) FROM THE WARRIORS TO THIS. Oh, SWAN.

* Which keeps airing ads for “Sophie,” a show about a woman who gets dumped. For THIS you canceled The Middleman? WHAT THE HELL, ABC.

** This is not true. I will disprove this in picture form at some point when I am not watching Xanadu.

Yesterday, the Post reported the saddest TV exclusive in a long time: they’ve cancelled the Middleman. I sob about it over at Tor.com.

Middleman gone forever, Tin Man in the works. It is not a good week for TV.

Hint: Dear Sci Fi channel, PICK UP THE MIDDLEMAN. You already have all those CGI dinosaur effects you can use, and your expenses will drop a lot once Battlestar Galatica is over and you can start auctioning off all that memorabilia!

On Tor.com, I babble about how the Middleman DVDs are actually happening.

This makes today much cooler than, say, Monday, when the DVD promise did not yet exist. But if you give a mouse a cookie, she’s gonna want details on the special features.

My dream list of special features would be:

- Table readings for all the episodes. This isn’t as nuts as it sounds; from ABC Family’s own site, we know they filmed at least, what, five? I’m sure they shoved a camcorder in a corner most times.

- Episode commentaries with the principal actors – and without Javier Grillo-Marxuach. He can have separate commentaries, of course, but in my dream DVD sets the actors never have to compete with the director.

Best example ever: the LOTR commentaries. Peter Jackson and company talked about themes and planning and triumph and all sorts; the actors made fun of each other and talked shit about the dialect coaches.

- Screen tests!

- Behind the scenes filming. Waaaant.

- Storyboards or other information from the planned 13th episode.

- Bloopers. You know their bloopers are amazing.

- Things I know I am missing. What am I missing?

(YAY DVDs.)

1. TV departed – my list of Eight Reasons You Should be Downloading the First Season of “The Middleman” is live at Fantasy Magazine. Because if my weekly gibberings haven’t convinced you, then by god, a numbered list will!

2. TV present – I think weekends on the SciFi channel are designed to sap my will to live. The fact that I watched Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves WILLINGLY, THREE TIMES rather than watch the SciFi channel is proof of how bad the SciFi movies are; when I can’t sit through something, you know it’s bad news. The TiVo descriptions are like poetry, though. And by “poetry”, I mean “the poem Joey from third grade wrote about how he would use his pet dragon to burn up his little sister, and suddenly the teacher decided it was time for recess and sent Joey to the nurse”.

3. TV forthcoming – I will, of course, be following every episode of Eleventh Hour (for the four episodes I suspect will air before they can it). I will be reporting on it here. I need some kind of ASCII shorthand for “googly eye”, but otherwise I’m rarin’ to go on this one. Sewell, dude, you knew this day would come.

(Fun fact: I’ve written more about Rufus Sewell in this blog than I have about any other actor. That’s really bizarre to me, because if you ask me to give you a list of my favorite actors, he’s on it, but I’d probably give you a list of twenty guys and then I’d call you later and be like, “Oh! And Rufus Sewell. And that guy who played Roe in Band of Brothers. And Jim Boadbent.”)

4. High on that list would be Julian Rhind-Tutt, who I do like as an actor, but whose name I would put on the list regardless, because HIS NAME IS JULIAN RHIND-TUTT. This actually counts as TV, too, since he was on “Keen Eddie”, which I watched for all thirteen episodes until they canned it. This also means I got to hate Sienna Miller before it was cool to hate her.

5. Which reminds me, I’m ripe for disliking another “blonde and winning” TV lady! Marley Shelton, I’m looking at you.

My little pony, the season’s over already!

Wendy’s hiding from the truth, poor thing. It’s okay, Wendy! I loved it!

NOTE: There are two chunks of my episode that I’m missing. For spoiler purposes they’re under the cut, but my review can only comprise the 90% of the episode that did not get sliced off by mattress ads.

Come with me if you want to live.
Continue reading