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I don't think I'd be alone in holding the idea that Joss Whedon has been away from TV for far too long. Firefly's unjust demise was in 2003, and all we've seen from him on any screen since then was Serenity which, though fantastic, at about two hours running time was hardly a replacement for the glory days of two hours a week of Whedonism. Incidentally, if anyone wants to try to make a pun relating the phrase "glory days" to season five of Buffy that's actually funny—a feat which escaped me—feel free.

Lede well and truly buried, I wanted to mention Dollhouse, Whedon's new show starting in January. It stars Eliza Dushku (True Lies), making it automatically worth looking at watching for an hour a week. The show is about a house full of improbably attractive people who are given new personalities in order to perform missions for customers—anything from a date to becoming an assassin. Then the memories are wiped to make way for the next customer. As the phrase "improbably attractive" may have given away, Dushku plays one of these "Dolls".

It starts in January on Fox. No news yet of any Irish or UK stations picking it up, but if it does well we can probably count on Sky and RTÉ to do the right thing. Interestingly, Fox is planning to show it with far fewer ads than usual so every episode will be 50 minutes instead of the now common 42 minutes for an "hour long" drama.

Already established as the place to get news of the show is Dollverse.com, who as of now have the first trailer online.

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I've been thinking (always a bad idea). There's loads of scope for different stories that all use the same premise as the movie Groundhog Day—reliving the same day repeatedly until you do something right or find a way to fix whatever is happening. There's the movie itself; the Stargate SG-1 episode where Jack and Teal'c continuously relive the same day; the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode with Kelsey Grammer and the temporal causality loop; and any number of other stories that have and haven't been written.

It's a setup that works with any character in any setting. There are tons of possibilities for ways that different people would deal with the situation, adapt to it, and ultimately try to solve it. It could be an entire genre unto itself.

Imagine if you had to keep reliving the same day until you wrote the best story in that genre.

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Some links don't need commentary. Here, pushing the edges of Youtube's ten minute video limit, is a collection of outtakes from the Crystal Maze:

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David Attenborough's new series, Life in Cold Blood, starts soon on BBC. It's the last of the Life on Earth series and is about reptiles and amphibians, the only major animal groups not yet covered. Nature has a feature on the new series and its host:

Attenborough is very much as you would expect from his on-screen appearances—knowledgeable, eloquent, a consummate storyteller and extremely excited about wildlife. He is as happy enthusing about a turtle mating frenzy as he is about the grisly habits of the caecilian, a burrowing worm-like amphibian whose young feed by tearing strips of fatty skin from their mothers. And what about the most interesting thing he’s eaten himself? “Big moth caterpillars in New Guinea. You put them on a fire and they come out like Twiglets.”

His latest subjects, including snakes, lizards and frogs, might be less of a draw for some people than ‘meerkats and monkeys’, but he seems to relish the challenge. “In a way, it’s a great advantage because it means that a lot of their stories haven’t been told. It’s a measure of what, in my view, public service broadcasting should do. It shouldn’t just be about making programmes about popular animals.”

I read the last sentence of the article with particular joy.

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Via Back Off, Man; I'm a Scientist comes the news that Stephen Fry will be following in the large footsteps of Douglas Adams in making a 20 years on follow-up to Last Chance to See.

I also find it interesting that Fry and Richard Dawkins are apparently in at least occasional contact on the subject of rationalism. Face it, folks: we have all the best people on our side.

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Remember a few years ago when it was the in thing for literature and cultural studies students to write dissertations and theses on the subject of Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Ever wonder where they are now?

Five years ago, Wasserman believed that Buffy was a "uniquely nuanced cultural text", a view she now believes was prompted solely by her enthusiasm for the popular TV show. "I thought that Buffy was a new type of cultural apparatus that could establish the co-ordinates of a more fluid, less repressive form of gendered identity," she says. "But looking back, I think I just had the hots for Giles."

(Yes, people actually did this. Yes, this particular case is satirical.)

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The cable company is going through another of its too frequent snafus. This time they've managed to replace BBC Two—the pinnacle of all the creations of the British Empire; thoughtful, provocative, entertaining, educational and funny—which right now should be showing University Challenge, with Dublin's City Channel, which is currently airing an episode of Better Health covering the ever-important topic of non-contact massage.

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I bet Matt LeBlanc looks at what he's managed to achieve on TV since Friends and then looks at what Matthew Perry has done and then cries. That's what I'd do, now that I'm not completely out of the loop and actually know what Perry has been up to.

What he has been up to is Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, a new show about the production of a Saturday Night Live–style live comedy sketch show. I've just seen the first two episodes (back to back on TV3) and, without exaggeration, it's my new favourite show.

I first heard of it from Jane Espenson's blog. Espenson was my favourite writer for Buffy whose name didn't rhyme with Moss Peed-on, so I trusted her judgement enough to at least set aside two hours of my Thursday night that, frankly, I was just about to piss away on the Internet anyway. Good move.

In retrospect it's not surprising that a writer would be a fan of this show. It's a very dialogue-driven show; it's largely about writers; and it's even written by professional television writers, so they know their stuff. It's snappy, it's funny, and it's clever. I encourage you to check it out. TV3, Thursday nights at 10.

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I'm in the middle of clearing some of the old junk out of my bookmarks for the first time in what I imagine is well over a year, maybe more. Buried in there is a folder named "to blog" which miraculously actually contains at least a single bookmark that's still worth talking about despite me having forgotten about it for so long: The 25 Best Futurama Moments Ever

I'd personally have difficulty narrowing down the top 25 moments in any one Futurama episode, but this list is an admirable attempt to scrape the cream off the top of the best animated show ever.

There is no possible way to explain how funny a poor, Jewish space crab/lobster monster doctor dressed as Jesus Christ is. And there's no possible way to improve upon it. It's Zoidberg's greatest moment, and Dad bless him for it.

Also, I challenge you to maintain your composure in the face of this guy's number one pick. Here's the full scene on YouTube. Get the tissues ready before watching. (No, not like that, sicko!)

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Anyone else watch this yesterday? I really wish I had enough confidence in other people to be able to sit back and laugh at Liddle in the comfortable knowledge that no-one could fall for his deranged ramblings, but unfortunately I don't.

Nearly everything he said was wrong in at least one important respect. But I really got quite annoyed when I realised this simple truth: Liddle interviewed a number of prominent atheistic intellectuals, including Richard Dawkins and Peter Atkins. He must have posed them the same questions he spouted in his commentary, including questioning how science is supposed to provide moral guidance. This is such a frequently raised question, and so easily answered by any thinking atheist, that they cannot have failed to provide a satisfactory answer. That he continued to pose the question, and left it unanswered, in the show means that he is either too dumb to grasp it--which I find highly unlikely--or deliberately ignoring it and knowingly broadcasting a deception.

I won't try to talk about all of the rest of the show, but it was all similarly absurd. You can watch it online at The Richard Dawkins Foundation.

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