The Middleman - Complete Series

The Closed Caption Conundrum

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Middleman Middlereview Middlemaddness

My copy of the Middleman DVD box set from Shout! Factor finally arrived yesterday, and after much anticipation (and drooling over the intricate packaging) Nadia and I watched the first episode (“The Pilot Episode Sanction”), and it was greatly enjoyed… By me. She also liked it, but not quite as much as I did. Not because she didn’t enjoy it, or think it funny or a great show (she compared it, favorably, to Firefly, which is bot a major plus and some major nerd cred right there), but because of the language barrier.

Which brings me to the point of this posting: Why is it so damn hard to get Closed Captioning working while playing back a DVD? Shout!, for whatever reason, decided it would be better to have the captions on this set as Closed Captions, instead of subtitles. I’m not sure why this is – subtitles are simple to use from a consumer standpoint, and universally supported from a player standpoint. But CC? Not so much.

The PS3 will not pass CC through HDMI – in fact, a quick bit of google-fu shows that this is a pretty standard, known problem. So, my $400 media monster won’t allow my girlfriend to know everything that’s said on this show.

You Microsoft fanboys can just shut the hell up now too – it also will not pass the CC information through. Or, if it does, it does so in a very odd, unintuitive way – which is basically the same thing. So that’s another $300 well spent.

Thankfully, my Mac mini, which I use for a media center anyway – not only has DVD playback baked into the OS (why any modern OS wouldn’t have this feature I’ll never understand), but it does fully support CC. Which is why we’ll be watching Middleman on a computer via DVD…

The box set is great – the package is great, with lots of neat touches, the picture quality is freat, the sound quality is wonderful… But the fact that so much work had to be done just to get the damn CC working (Total time spent dicking around: half an hour… on over a $1000 worth of equipment) makes Shout!’s choice of captioning a fail in my eyes.

I would still reccomend this set to anyone who likes fun, unless they were deaf. In which case, it’s just too much of a hassle.

Seriously, Shout! – Get your act together soon.

Sunday I watched BSG while Nadia napped – and I’m wondering just how the hell they plan on wrapping up the series, and just how much more depressing things are going to get. It’s really getting bad.

I also – over the course of the weekend – managed to re-watch the entire run of The Middleman, my favorite show of 2008. Turns out it’s available for free watching on the ABC Family website – you just gotta dig for it a bit.

I also stumbled across the new Batman cartoon, Batman: The Brave and the Bold. Damn fun stuff, that. Kind of light hearted, very much just for fun… and it made me realize that Coldiron is Aquaman.

Wendy Watson - Middletemp

Middleman!

Yes, this is from last weeks episode – so the hell what? WHY ARE YOU PEOPLE NOT WATCHING THIS SHOW?

Tonight’s episode was awesome: Dr. Gil (A Dr. Phil clone), hunting aliens… The whole episode was filled with BTTF references… WHAT IS NOT TO LOVE?

Yay!

Tonight the second episode aired, and it was just as much fun as the first one. But I don’t want to talk about the episode – naw, I’m here to bitch about a commercial that kept airing during the show.

ABCFamily kept airing commercials for some new show called “The Secret life of an American Teenager”… from the makers of 7th Heaven. So, you already know it’s going to be ham-fisted, schlocky and super-conservative. The basics that have been showed so far: A teenage girl makes a “mistake” by having sex, gets knocked up, then has to deal with it…

They make it look like sex is a bad thing, that her being pregnant is something she must survive and endure only with the help of her friends and family… How much you want to bet that the words “abortion” or “morning after pill” are never brought up? That no one even begins to question her lack of using any sort of contraception?

I swear, that kind of television is totally unacceptable and irresponsible! Making sex seem like something that should never be done, that should be feared and kept away from is a horrible, horrible thing. To make it seem like there is nothing that can be done to prevent a pregnancy, or to end one if it’s unwanted and destructive is just false. Hell, the very act of presenting it as a horrible thing to have happen to someone is just mean…

I’m not being coherent right now, and I apologize. I’m a bit tired and out of sorts.
But this much I know: People need to wake the fuck up and start being more reasonable and responsible. Sex is normal, it’s going to happen, and for fucks sake it should do – contraception should be a hell of a lot easier to get at than it currently is, and it should be taught at every fucking chance.

And anyone who portrays pregnancy as a punishment should have their right to reproduce revoked – retroactively if need be.