Harry checks out the 1st two nights of the BATTLESTAR GALACTICA miniseries + Seymour Butts' FAMILY BUSINESS on Showtime

I don’t often write about Television, mainly because I just would rather dedicate my energies into talking about film, but today when a group of DVD screeners arrived… all of which were for TV stuff, I decided to go ahead, put em in the machine and give em a whir.

First up was a 2 DVD screener of Sci-Fi Channel’s BATTLESTAR GALACTICA miniseries’ first two nights. I’m not entirely sure why Sci-Fi Channel would be sending the show out in this state. With incomplete visual effects, and incomplete sound and score. What I saw was absolutely unredeemably BORING!

It starts off with a lame set up where the screen tells us that humans created the Cylons, that they were initially our servants, then our military, then they turned on us. Then there was a huge war, then there was peace and there was little po-dunk space station set up in the middle of nowhere, as a place for Cylons and Men to meet to discuss their problems. THEN – after like 39 years of not showing up, the Cylons finally show up. Then two cg Cylons walk through a door followed by a blonde… She goes over to the human representative, asks if he’s alive… begins Frenching him with extra tongue and dick massage (no kidding) then as the guy is about to blow his load, this Cylon Star Base thingee sends a missile to destroy the space station.

That’s right… Cylons have developed femme bots! And we see her all over the place fucking, crossing and uncrossing her legs, pushing cleavage at folks, massaging inner thighs… My favorite bit with her is when Baltar tears off her black cellophane panties, and robowhore rips off his pants and begins to do the grinding cowgirl on him as she begins to take off her black cellophane bra, the camera goes around back to see her writhing back… she’s moaning about how HOT she’s getting, how incredibly HOT he’s making her feel… and that’s when her spine begins to do the Cylon red pulse. Honest… No really, that’s what happens!

Now, lest you think it’s just Cylons that are sex crazed. There’s sex all over the Battlestar Galactica. First off, this blonde they have playing Starbuck looks like some crazed Dirk Benedict breeding experiment gone wrong. With huge boobs and raisin nips and chomping a cigar, she has all the charisma of the typical PRICE IS RIGHT contestant. That may, in fact, be totally unfair to her. She’s got these big expressive eyes and this SMILEX smile, but she’s given utter dreck to speak… and has nobody to interact with.

The actor they have playing Apollo makes Richard Hatch look like the most expressive actor of all time. Jamie plays Apollo like a sore-loser with a major stick up his ass. He doesn’t really have any friends, doesn’t like or respect his father and doesn’t have that lone wolf kinda cool with which to pull that sort of loner existence off. Instead he’s played as cardboard.

There’s a history between him and Starbuck, as… according to a locker room photo, Starbuck apparently was boinking Apollo’s dead brother. There’s a beginning of attraction between these two, but you only really know that because she stares after him and the camera holds on her as if to say… “She Cares! She’s Human! She needs dick!” And we know that’s what it is, because about 5 seconds after we cut from her, we’re on either the Blonde fuck-bot or Bang Bang BOOMER -- who seems to have a love thing going on board the ship as well.

Gotta love the discipline on this BATTLESTAR! I mean, this is a MILITARY SHIP. On a MILITARY SHIP there would be sexual tension, but it would be held back for LEAVE situations, not for intra-ship corridor sex. Felt like everytime you’d turn your head, there’d be some character pushing some character up against a wall to devour.

Mary McDonnell is playing her scenes like a dried up shrew. She’s got cancer and wants computers on the ship. She sits down with little kids on straggler ships and gives them comfort before abandoning them to Cylon missile attacks, which… oh btw, they’re just gonna cut to a WHITE SCREEN and not show the explosions, the terror, the fear. Matter of fact, you won’t even see the impacts… Ultimately, you’ll see more tongue wagging than space battles in these first two episodes.

I’m sure the visual effects will look good when they’re done, at this point, they’re very rough, but the sounds are limp, of course they’re temps, and the soundtrack is temped with atonal crap. If you watch the space stuff and start whistling the original music, you might… for a second or two fool yourself into thinking this shit don’t stink… but then you’re back to characters that don’t work, badly lit interior sets that look and feel cheap, costumes that are flat and unappealing, and zero atmosphere.

Everything about this show is about emphasizing the “sexual” nature of the show, as opposed to the desperation of their situation, the tragedy that befell their world, there really is nothing to communicate the cool rag-tag vibe you got from the original show. Also, this thing is drab and lifeless. When they sit around and play cards, it’s on a tiny set… no singing, no bar, no real size to it. Feels like they took the actors and a card table to a back office and shot it as an insert. Hell, Starbuck’s cigar isn’t even lit.

OH… and that’s another thing, the jargon on this show is just all sorts of fucked up. In Night 2, when Adama is looking for weapons on a space station in the middle of some nebula that fucks with Cylon circuitry… As they dock, Adama tells his crew to get on that station and get him some “BULLETS!” Bullets? Yeah, Bullets. More like Bullshit to me. Oh and that’s another thing… This show also seems to relish cussing anytime they get a chance. So watching Starbuck talk about higher ranked assholes… well if that floats your boat, you’ll probably love this shit.

What about Edward James Olmos? I love this actor, but here… here he’s sleepwalking. Of course he’s surrounded by substandard acting and ludicrous dialogue. The “poignant” scenes between his son and him just play like bad Day-Time Soap Opera filler shit you’re stuck watching in a hospital room while a doctor probes for nodules where nodules sometimes grow.

I will tell ya what though… This crap show did do one thing for me. It made me instantly buy that big ol box set of the originals. In the format that I saw it, there was absolutely not a single redeemable feature. The effects were not done, so I can’t say… “well it looked cool” and the sound effects were lame and unfinished, so I can’t say… “well it sounded cool” and the score is claimed to be temp… so that atonal shite definitely wasn’t doing anything for me.

A complete waste of time.

MEANWHILE… SHOWTIME sent me an episode of FAMILY BUSINESS, which is apparently coming out on DVD and is a reality television show about the life of the infamous Porn Guru – Seymour Butts. Specifically the episode they sent has Seymour Butts making his kid breakfast and a sack lunch with a cute cartoon character. Then we see him scoping out babes on an internet dating service. He’s got two blind dates this day, plus he’s got to screen some girls to see if they’re Porn material.

The show features explicit nudity and sexual situations without ever going hard hardcore. On this episode there is never any penetration or that sort of thing, though you will see some fucking on the show. More than that though, this is about Seymour and how he (real name ADAM) gets through the day. His first date is terrible, as soon as he tells her what he does, she gets indignant and judgmental, yet lets him pick up lunch. The second date is weirded out, but goes along with him for an emergency editorial meeting, where she watches him basically deal with his editor, who has a problem with the material not being hot enough. She’s stunned, and you get the idea that she’s never seen porn before. It’s not her thing and he drives her back to her truck.

Poor Seymour. The thing is… the show shows that people in the Porn industry seem to have a more professional and real nuanced sense about themselves than the characters in the BATTLESTAR GALACTICA series… and while none of the blondes fucking on this show have a glowy red spinal column, you do get to see their tits, so it’s all up to you… Glowy red spinal column or various nude breasts?

Seymour Butts would be a better Apollo than the actor those nimrods hired. I really can’t believe I liked a reality show about a Porn Star looking for love and respect more than I did BATTLESTAR GALACTICA. God they fucked up BATTLESTAR GALACTICA!

Next I’m off to watch something else SHOWTIME sent me about a Soldier falling in love with a Transgendered Stripper. I don’t get SHOWTIME, but is this what is on SHOWTIME these days? So weird.