"Battlestar Galactica" and J.R. Ewing

Coming your way this week: Sex in the '30s vs. Violence in the '90s.

But first, in honor of my favorite show just getting better and better as it gets ready to phase out forever, I wanted first to share this excellent article on the death and resurrection of plotlines in TV, based on "Battlestar Galactica."

Excerpt from "Kill Your Television" by Mark Holcomb at Museum of the Moving Image online (http://www.ammi.org/)

Has there ever been a more death-haunted TV show than Battlestar Galactica? From the culture-annihilating sneak attack on its human colonies in the inaugural 2003 miniseries, to the appallingly routine "deaths" of its ostensibly villainous Cylons, to the various revenge murders, mercy killings, and quasi-suicides of its incidental and crucial characters, BSG is saturated in mortality.Including, now, its own. The gruelingly drawn-out hiatus between the two halves of its final season finally ended with the premiere of new episodes in mid-January, but they marked a bittersweet return. This batch of 10 or so entries is the series' last gasp, and an opportunity for creators Ronald Moore and David Eick to make good on their assertion that the show had a beginning, middle, and end built in from the start. Such concessions—that fictional narratives, like life, operate on a limited timeline and have an unavoidable endpoint—are rare in American TV, and wrapping up BSG's arc once and for all (or revealing the "'Who Shot J.R.' of it all," as Moore recently put it) is a final nose-thumbing step for a series that's thrived on them.That doesn't make the looming prospect of a BSG-less TV landscape any less painful, but it's not like we weren't warned; Moore and Eick have been laying the groundwork for its climax for some time. By Season 4.0, which ended last June with arguably the bleakest cliffhanger in television history, and in the SciFi.com "webisodes" that bridged the gap until Season 4.5 began, a new and intense sense of urgency prevailed...

Full article: http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/kill-your-television-series-20090129

Geek out!