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Can’t Wait 11 Lousy Days?? You Can Watch NBC’s Four New Fall Hourlongs NOW!!
SPOILER ALERT !!
I am – Hercules!!
The official premieres of NBC’s four new fall dramas are still at least 11 days away, but the network is determined you see them early.
We’ve known for a while that Blockbuster has been renting the pilots of “Bionic Woman,” “Chuck,” “Journeyman” and “Life” to its customers.
I got an email late Wednesday telling me that cable systems carrying something called HD Showcase On Demand are also making the pilots available. (I get On Demand and HD via Time Warner here in Studio City, Calif., but my customer care rep just assured me that I don’t get HD On Demand in my area for at least another seven months.)
Finally, those who crave instant gratification (but don’t want to risk NBC Universal and the MPAA suing them - or their parents – for hundreds of thousands of dollars over bittorrent copyright infringement), can currently also rent the pilots via Unbox, which apparently works with both computers and TiVo. Click on the photos to watch. All are FREE!
I recommend starting with “Chuck,” which is a sci-fi comedy actioner created by “O.C.” mastermind Josh Schwartz. It co-stars “Full Metal Jacket”/”Firefly” vet Adam Baldwin as an angry government goon.
For those content to wait, the NBC premiere dates:
Chuck: Sept. 24
Journeyman: Sept. 24
Bionic Woman: Sept. 26
Life: Sept. 26
SUPERMAN: DOOMSDAY
Also Stars Adam Baldwin!!
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Giant Emmy Sale!!
Babylon Five Less Than $24 Per Season!!
Giant Emmy Sale!!
Babylon Five Less Than $24 Per Season!!
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Bionic Woman is the worst one. Talk about dull. Life suprised the hell out of me and is really good-Journeyman is a little slow but intriguing. Chuck is by far the best and is a lot of fun.
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I'd rank them Chuck > Life > Journeyman > > > > > > > > > Bionic Woman, as well.
BW is just flat out bad. Horrible dialogue, forgettable plot, flat characters and lame action. Not a good recipe. -
Then you'll be pleased to hear he's being touted for the role of 'Thor'...
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I will watch all 13 episodes. Way to complicated and confusing for a bigger audience. Life is promising, but it would be better with a darker tone. Chuck is charming, but nothing special. NBC's only shitty new show is Bionic Woman...so that will be their hit.
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If you have amazon unbox you can download it for free even better if you have tivo. You can send it from unbox to your tivo. Watched Journeyman and it look interesting. The pilot is ok hopefully it will get better. Now onto the Bionic Woman and then I will check out Chuck as recommended.
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I see you quiver, with antci... pation.
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It's still edited awkwardly, like they filmed a 2-hour pilot and got cut down to 1 hour.
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Damn AICN search, it's useless. I've used AICN search, Google, and others, and I STILL can't find that great article where he list all the start dates for the shows this fall organized by name and date. Anyone have it bookmarked? They should just stick that to the AICN homepage until mid october.
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Cameron Diaz you need the to check again. ;)
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I give it till its midseason report- before they replace it with reruns of Heroes..
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Looks so stupid... so stupid!
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except a Mac... bah.
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A list of the premiere dates http://tinyurl.com/2wbkuv
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And for a new pilot I really liked it. It's a good mix of action and comedy.
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First you get uppity about pricing structure ($4.99 an episode might be a bit much, ya think), then you switch to a format that 10% (and growing) of US computer users can't access. Thanks, fuckheads. iTunes appears to be the only format that works on Macs AND PCs. AND they try and protect their consumers. Funny that Amazon's pricepoint is kept low so that they can compete with Apple's. You get nothing extra. Eat it, NBC. Eat it all day long.
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But Reaper is superior. And I am a Kevin Smith hater.
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I liked it okay. The blonde woman that plays the "first" BW isn't really all that great of an actor, though. The sooner they kill her off, the better.I sure liked it more than the finale of Heroes, though. Michelle Ryan is a Bionic Piece Of Ass.
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I really hope Journeyman and Life make it but I doubt they will. Journeyman has the best chance, being on after Heroes, but they both deserve at least a season to see where they're going. I can't remember the last time there was a crop of new shows that I liked so much.And I agree, the Australian chick in Chuck is oh so goddam hot.
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Are you talking about Katie Sackoff?....cause she can act circles around the entire cast of BW....it's sad to see her talents wasted on that shitty script.
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Is it the same pilot which has been out for a while with Mae Whitman as the deaf sister? Cause I've seen that, not great but with its cast it shows potential.
I thought Damian Lewis was very good in Life, although it reminded me a little too much of the thankfully shortlived Blind Justice.
Chuck does a lot with a very thin premise, the characters seem to click, it has good timing, but I'm not sure it will work as a series.
Journeyman didn't really make much of an impression on me, none of the performances stood out, and none of the characters really showed much chemistry. It seemed like a quick reboot of Daybreak, with a less serialized premise. -
Let me be clear: I am your target audience, television execs; and I have less than zero interest in ANY OF THE SHOWS that have been touted as the big new fall season. "Heroes" was apparently distilled to its soapy "let's-toss-sci-fi-concepts-at-Ma-and-Pa-Flyover" essence and cloned to give us schlock like "Chuck" and "Reaper" and "Dark Angel Redux: I'm Bionic Now." Here's a clue, people: put some actual honest-to-god money into the production/development of these shows instead of going for the obvious superficial aspects of last season's (s)hit. All of these shows look like that ill-fated 6th season of "X-Files" when every episode was apparently filmed in a tan cookie-cutter subdivision. Oooh, "Heroes" does comic books (badly) without the spandex. I know, let's re-tool the wacky spy hijinx of "Alias" with a male Best Buy drone nerd-hunk, sprinkle in an unrealistic, helium titted female lead and mix with your standard government conspiracy plot. Voila, that might sell some ad time before it's inevitable cancellation at the holiday break. Hey, I know, let's do "Ghostbusters" in the 'burbs, but with Satan!! Have Kevin Smith direct. He'll sucker in . . . er, I mean, attract the ComiCon audience. No, no, no, wait: Let's shamelessly turn the Bionic Woman into a retread of Buffy!!! These mix-n-match shows demonstrate nothing but a time-crunch exacted on a tired-ass writing stable who clearly spends too much time "brainstorming" amidst its grey-walled cubicles. Give us something to care about execs. Give us something that at least shows you gave it your best "college" try. Give us wonder. Give us serialized transcendence. Give us something more than simply 52 minutes of arbitrary filler between feminine hygiene product spots. This new season blows - OUT LOUD. I highly anticipate the unprecedented sacking of each and every one of these shows by late-October.
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Am I the only one who actually thinks the caveman show might actually be great? I mean, sure, there's potential to screw that one up royally, but the ads are about as funny as ads in the States get.
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Couldn't get past 10 minutes into this show before turning it off. Does it actually get better?
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You're quite the little optimist aren't you? We may be all suprised, but I bet Cavemen will follow the way of Anchorwoman and Emily Explains Whatever Show, a one episode run. As far as the NBC quartet, I caught the BB DVD, so I didn't see Bionic which now looks to be a good thing. Liked Chuck most of all, with the BestBuy/40-Year-Old-Virgin vibe mixed with the spy genre. And suprised that McG directed it. He usually has the subtle touch of a sledgehammer.And I could only get through 5 minutes of Life, before I quit, realizing that its just a House ripoff with cops. You get Damien Lewis doing an American accent, being the quirky smartest guy in the room, and its been there done that.
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New actress actually looks related to Ryan. Show still needs work. Pilot packs too much plot at the expense of character development.
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Bwahahahahahahahaha!
Sure, I'm going to download and use unbox. It has so much going for it. Let's see. Proprietary video that will only play on unbox. Spyware that connects to the web the moment you boot your computer and reports all the media on your system to Amazon. Of course you can't disable the program or unbox won't work. If you read the contract it also grants Amazon the right to delete media from your computer any time they want to and to download media to your system whenever they want. So I suppose if you want to buy movies and tv shows that Amazon can remove from your system if they don't like the other things you have on your computer. If you like having commercials placed into your computer for you to experience through the miracle that is unbox. If these things thrill you then by all means try unbox. Amaxon made a big mistake with this one. Hopefully they didn't sink too much money into it. -
Sep 13, 2007 11:35:57 AM CDT
Saw: Life and The(Extremely Derivative) Bionic Rip-off
by jimmy rabbitte
...Show last night on Comcast On-Demand...
BW is the more well edited show; but it rips off every significant sci-fi property of the last 25 years. Most notably: Blade Runner, The Matrix, a bit of Aeon Flux, not to mention the original BW show, a little bit of Spiderman and a couple of cast members from BSG. The show is well put together enough to survive for awhile; but it definitely is not breaking any new ground. 2 1/2 stars out of 5...
...As for Life... Damian Lewis is a decent actor who has never gotten as good a role as the one he had in Band of Brothers. There are some good performers in the cast, (Adam Arkin from Chicago Hope, and Robin Weigert from Deadwood); but the pilot serves strictly as a set-up for the show's premise. While watching it I definitely saw way more questions than answers; and the subplot of Crews (Lewis) and his
partner solving a murder seemed almost superfluous. Life may or may not survive, that will depend on the strength of future episodes. If the show doesn't make improvements over the pilot, Life could end up an early cancellation... especially in this day of quick cutting network execs. 2 stars out of 5. -
I liked "Chuck". It was funny, and has a lot of potential. Bionic Woman was okay. I'm not writing it off yet. "Life" and "Journeyman" were both terrible.
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Then go out and watch the DVDs of "Quantum Leap." They may as well have just made "Quantum Leap: The Next Jumper" or something.
As for "Bionic Woman"? Turning Jamie Sommers from a pro-tennis player into a bar tender is raping my childhood... -
Doesn't exactly roll of the tongue, but I'd like her to roll off mine.
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Bringing up the spectre of risking copyright infringement charges for using bit torrent??? It almost feels like a backhanded response to Apple when they wished NBC good riddance when they pulled out of the iTunes store. Apple cited the various other places consumers can get the material, including bit torrent (http://tinyurl.com/2q45be).
So, what's happening now? Is NBC threatening to sue me if I bit torrent an ep of the Office? -
There aren't any new shows that I'm really looking forward to. All the sitcoms look formulaic and crappy, all of ABC's new shows are strictly for people with vaginas and the sci-fi seems mostly lame. I'll check out Journeyman and Life because I like the lead actors and probably Bionic Woman but other than that, the pickings are slim.
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Duh, no shit sherlock. It has some guy time travelling and 'helping' people in the past, that makes Journeyman as much of a rip off of Quantum Leap as Lost is of Gilligan's Island. The tone and characters are completely different.
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gruntybear said,
"Give us something more than simply 52 minutes of arbitrary filler"
52 minutes? What fantasyland world have you been watching commercial television in? Pretty sure your lucky if it's 45 minutes these days. In fact now they "Tout" commercial free like we should be happy, oh yeah but they don't mean those, invisible things at the bottom of the screen. They'll still do those, except maybe they "might" not play noises when they swoosh onto the bottom of that 50 inch you paid 2G's for. -
Like "Pushing Daisies" is something that I think makes a charming pilot but a supremely irritating series. "Ed," anyone?
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I think Quint was mentioning the torrent thing not as an endorsement but as a wink wink letting people know that its available to do that. You would be surprised of how many people that dont know about torrents yet.
http://tinyurl.com/pv8do -
Hayden Pantierre will in ten years. The similarity was so striking it was actually distracting for half of the pilot until I figured out who she reminded me of.
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BW was ok, the rest were very good.
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Mighty kind of you, brother!
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...at least the first two episodes are. Fuck you if you think otherwise. Especially if you haven't seen it. Which I know you haven't.
Good day. -
I really enjoyed chuck. It dident take itself to seriously and the action was pretty sweet. I feel like the creater of the O.C has a hard on for Adam Brody because he cast his lead who looks exactly like him. Hes pretty good though. I liked his friend morgan. Definitely a show i will tune into this fall.
I watced Life as well and it was Okay. I only watched it cuz Damian lewis is a bad ass. Hopefully the rest of the season gets better.
-peace -
i may watch just for him
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i love always watchin shows about crackas. makes my day to see how cool they are in their own eyes, and how the world revolves around them. i mean got damn, STOP THIS SHIT ALREADY! take a show like Chuck and give it a minority cast that has nothing to do with the fact that they are minorities. what the fuck is so hard about that? damn crackas
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there are some black shows on CW, and you got BET stop complainin
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Sep 13, 2007 7:55:42 PM CDT
it doesn't matter if these shows are any good or not...
by twitchinmonkey
Look at the schedule
Chuck is going up against Dancing with the stars
Journeyman is going up against CSI: MiamiBionic Woman is going up against the Grey's Anatomy spin offLife is going up against CSI: New York
It'll be a miracle if any of these shows are still around at Halloween. -
Bad acting, boring dialogue, bad puns, no character development, AND it's basically a rip-off of Quantum Leap. Blech.
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I have no interest in any of these shows. Nothing new this season looks more than marginal, and I'll certainly wait to hear buzz, then wait to hear the show was picked up before I start watching anything new. If you're desperate for new TV, Mad Men is on tonight and all the old episodes are on OnDemand.
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Don't mess with a mad black woman, but everything will turn out alright because we are family, and God will be there to help us unite.
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No, I haven't seen them; but I know they're crap.
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I remember a lot of bitching and whining over a stupid, sure to be short lived pilot called HEROES last year. I wouldn't count any of these out just yet. I've not seen them, and I'm not watching them on the computer monitor either. I'm holding out for the HD broadcast baby.
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It is in fact the reshot pilot of BW. The running effects are still worse than smallville. Sister character is now a cardboard cutout, score and sound fx are a bit distracting. Still alot of exposition for little gain, but it will be interesting to see for where they go with it.
The cavemen pilot I saw was by far the worst thing I've ever seen on TV, worse than any current sitcom, worse than the unaired live action justice league sitcom from he late nineties, just absolutely awful. I haven't seen the reshoot, but quite frankly, unless they scrapped everything about it, there was nothing to salvage. The ads weren't that funny to begin with, once they dropped the host trying to make amends. -
Fucking Amazon and not playing insantly.
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I was SLIGHTLY interested in Bionic Woman because of the BSG connection. Slightly. I was a little less interested in the Quantum Leap rip off because well, QL was so cool. But this UNBOX bullshit? Forget it. I won't even bother to bit torrent this stuff NBC. I won't follow your shows, I won't know anything about them, I won't invest time or money into any of them. ON THE OTHER HAND - If NBC had offered these free on iTunes I know for a fact I would at least follow 2 of the new shows. YOUR LOSS NBC.
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Stupid and not worth my time. Screw Unbox! When Amazon wises up and starts providing content that actually works on both PCs AND Apples, then I'll waste my time on crap like this.Seeing as how Apple practically created every major user-friendly innovation in laptops and desktops available today — not even mentioning the iPod and iPhone revolutions — you'd THINK Mac users'd get a helluva lot more respect and usable material from vendors.All this does is tick off a whole LOT of customers.
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I hate the commercials for these shows so much I don't think I could watch them. Has there ever been a talkback that even mentions "John Safran vs God"?
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Now every network wants one.
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if I can't watch this at work, I'm not watching it. Greedy NBC bastards.
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Not bad, but you can literally see where somebody went - "Cross Buffy with Alias." Plot moves too fast - seems rushed. Within first ep. she goes from average girl to trained killer? C'mon... I was actually thinking at one point that it would be part Greatest American Hero, where she would have abilities that she didn't know about and just stumble upon them, but I think they showed us almost them all. All I know is if she starts "interfacing" with other machines/computers, they will lose me for good.
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..but I was totally into the Bionic Woman pilot.
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Well that's just dandy.
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and so did Journeyman... gots my Tivo season pass!
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Finished watching the pilot about 2 hours ago, gave it some time to sink in, and now that I think back on it I have to admit that I really liked it. As a matter of fact there really was not 1 part of the episode that I had any major problems with. The plot was intriguing and moved at a brisk pace, the actors did their jobs fine, with special recognition going to the Bionic Woman herself & Starbuck, and the overall action & special effects were solid. I'll definitely be sticking with this one to see where it's going down the road.
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I really wanted to like "Journeyman" because of the love for "Rome", but it didn't work for me. But it's just the pilot, so who knows. I don't think I'll give "Bionic Woman" a second chance. "Life" surprised me at first because i didn't realize the main character was going to be one of those weird "House"-type characters...but the strong supporting cast really helped it, and the actor from Band of Brothers is great, too. That last scene when he asks "You want to drive the tractor" was great and had me laughing a lot.
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And I agree with everyone here, the pilot was WAY WAY WAY to crammed in. The first half up to her throwing him into the wall the first time could have been expanded into 1 hour alone.
Also was stupid to keep the sister character in. The whole point of her was the fact she was not only without the parents, but deaf as well. Now shes just going to be a annoying nag every episode.
And I feel so sorry for Katie. She is such a good actor and they threw her such shitty lines. Not to mention lets make Sommers even dumber by dragging out the realization that the woman who killed her child is sitting right in front of her (despite the fact that through flashbacks we SEE she knows who she is, and there is the whole drawing her face bit)
Unless they clean up the second episode there is no way this is going to stay on the air... which is depressing to say the least. -
I managed to get Chuck and Journeyman off of Amazon Unbox before it decided we needed to pay for the other two "free" shows. I loved Chuck. Have yet to watch Journeyman but love Kevin McKidd (aaah L. Vorenus...How I miss you!)
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Sorry but, from what I've seen in the previews & judging by how rediculously stunning Michelle Ryan is in the lead, I'm eagerly looking forward to BIONIC WOMAN's debut next week. I know that the pilot has left something to be desired by many that have seen it already, but I'm willing to give it a couple/few eppies to "find itself". I mean, hell. After three episodes last season, I actually gave up on HEROES for a couple of weeks until internet buzz & good notices in the papers brought me back, so I'm willing to stick with BW for a while.
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I mean Bionic Woman's English, Journeyman's Scottish and Life's Lewis is a posh Englishman. You guys need to sew up that border security, you got immigrants taking all the jobs!
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