Since it’ll be a while before Cole’s got new Game of Throne episodes to anticipate, NYMag‘s Vulture.com offers a ninety-minute video clip of a “very Australian interview with George R.R. Martin, Lena Heady, and Michelle Fairley… packed with incest jokes and Martin making fun of how vast the book’s universe is…”
And the Washington Post‘s TV critic, Hank ‘IDOANGEDDIT’ Stuever, links to the celebrations planned for another beloved scientifantastical series:
… Even if you’ve never seen the show or long since concluded that it’s not your cup of tea, BBC America has several specials and retrospectives scheduled this week, offering ample opportunities for the casually curious to share in the anniversary mirth. It all leads up to a much-anticipated special episode of the current “Doctor Who” saga that will be globally simulcast on Saturday, Nov. 23…
“An Adventure in Space and Time” is set in the BBC’s “Mad Men” era, when a hyperbolic and creative network executive, Sydney Newman (Brian Cox), gropes around for a quick fix to an empty half-hour on his programming grid…
Newman promotes his ambitious assistant Verity Lambert (“Call the Midwife’s” Jessica Raine) to helm the series; it’s her first crack at running a show.
But Lambert and her ethnically Indian director, Waris Hussein (Sacha Dhawan), run up against the Beeb’s prevailingly chauvinistic and mildly racist culture. Their production budget is deplorably low and their deadlines impossibly tight; their soundstage is cramped and outdated; the scripts are dreadfully wordy; the art department sloppily throws together a mod look for the extra-dimensional interior of the Doctor’s police box, which writers christen the TARDIS (“Time and Relative Dimension in Space”)…
The Doctor himself provides a sobering (though not exactly teetotaling) presence, as Lambert and Hussein coax an aging stage and TV actor named William Hartnell (David Bradley) to star in their weird little show. “He’s C.S. Lewis meets H.G. Wells meets Father Christmas — that’s the Doctor,” Lambert tells the actor…
Bradley (you may know him as Red Wedding host Lord Walder Frey on HBO’s “Game of Thrones”) plays Hartnell as a lovably sour and embittered grump who signs on mainly for the paycheck. A rough cut of the pilot episode flops in the front office; Newman orders Lambert and her crew to rewrite it and reshoot it. Rushed to the airwaves, “Doctor Who” premiered disastrously — steamrolled by news from the United States of John F. Kennedy’s assassination the day before….
The BBC orders a full season and then another; Hartnell brightens and accepts that this part — not Shakespeare — will probably be his permanent legacy. His health fails and he forgets his lines and before we know it, the makers of “Doctor Who” come up with one of the show’s smartest innovations: The Doctor, being an immortal Time Lord, can regenerate his body when faced with death (or contract renewal). Thus, by 1966, another actor took over the part — as would 10 more Doctors, and counting….
Which fans here got their tickets for the global simulcast next weekend?
What other tv, sf or otherwise, are you all watching this weekend?
Saturday Night Open Thread: TV Geek KulchaPost + Comments (168)