Arctic Light

We are now into the Profitt arc (second half of season one). No spoilers in comments past the first couple episodes of the arc, please! Here, have a completely frivolous poll. (Actually knowing who these characters are is not a requirement to vote.)

I'm watching Wiseguy with rachelmanija and scioscribe. It's a first watch for them, but a rewatch for me. We are just through the end of the first arc (the Steelgrave arc). If you've seen it before, please, no spoilers past the last episode of the Steelgrave arc (1x09) in comments!

If you haven't heard of this show, it's good! The general premise is that the protagonist is an FBI agent (well, TV-FBI-knockoff, I think) and goes undercover in organized crime, making connections with people and then having to betray them; the show also deals extensively with his family/friends, his FBI handlers, etc. Featuring a much younger but strangely not actually that young-looking Jonathan Banks, Jim Byrnes in the first role I ever saw him in (long before Highlander), a brief appearance by a very young David Marciano, and (in a future arc) Kevin Spacey; I'm sorry, but at least he's evil so you can hate him.

I think I'm continually surprised on rewatches how good it still is. The one area where the show feels really dated is how it handles its female characters (NEEDS MOAR WOMEN) but otherwise it's smart and well-written and compelling, with great character arcs; you tend to forget you're watching an 80s show instead of a modern Netflix crime show until you see the cars or the women's hairstyles. It was one of the first primetime shows to do complicated multi-episode story arcs rather than one-off episodes, and it's interesting to watch it from that perspective because on the one hand, it's part of what makes the show so good, but it's also interesting to watch them kind of figure it out, and remember that we're still in the Jurassic period for ongoing serialized TV, as opposed to the DVD/Netflix era when it's all like that now.

I first watched this show when it aired on TV from about 1987-1990. I was quite young then (early teens) but it really made an impression on me. I didn't enjoy it as much as I do now because the show was really too twisty, complicated, and dark for an 11-year-old, but one thing that DID make a huge impression on me was some of the h/c and found-family aspects of the show, which I still remembered clearly (and fairly accurately, as it turned out) when I finally dug it up and did a full rewatch back in 2009.

For a long while this show was really hard to get, but it's now available on Amazon Prime (minus one story arc in season 2 that they couldn't clear the music rights for). Most of the episodes are also up for free on Youtube, though I couldn't find a playlist where they're not at least a little bit out of order, so pay attention to the episode numbers if you watch it that way.

Season 1:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfXgaTPBYt0&list=PLFtpZ659RpvG6FIm1t5rjw-k9f2QNL-ZZ

Season 2 (has the 1st and 2nd eps reversed; I'm linking to the 2nd one which is actually the first one):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3x81CHMOP38&list=PLK6gxVQHNBHbMVrKAWEcCvdI6cGrnNGGR&index=2

Season 3 (COMPLETELY out of order; Youtube why - though again, they're well labeled; linking to ep 1):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9uR8P4HIS8&list=PLK6gxVQHNBHZxI5ZpjHjMcesJUWjd_qZO&index=3

There is a season 4 but it's terrible. They completely changed both the setting and the protagonist, and it's a whole different show. I decided to rewatch the first episode of season 4 the other day for the first time since probably about 1989, just to see if it's really terrible or if it's just the betrayed feelings of wee!me coloring my impressions of it, and ... NOPE. Wee!me wasn't wrong. Stop at the end of season three.

And again, no spoilers past the Steelgrave arc in comments, please!

Song: More Than Fine
Artist: Switchfoot
Fandom: Wiseguy
Summary: The life & times of Dan Burroughs, a.k.a. Lifeguard.
Download: Zipped MP4 (26 Mb)
Streaming: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_fFOCONACg

For those Highlander people who might be interested in seeing Jim Byrnes in a different role, this vid contains few spoilers - no major story-arc spoilers, just a handful from individual episodes.

( Embedded under cut )

So somehow, going back and rewatching Jim Byrnes' Wiseguy episodes turned into making a vid about his Wiseguy character, Lifeguard. I still can't quite figure out how that happened.

Also? It's rather challenging to make a vid about a character who is basically a voice on the radio in four out of five episodes. I have lots and LOTS of clips of Lifeguard on the phone, Lifeguard in the communications loft, Lifeguard looking things up on the computer ... not really a whole lot of him actually doing anything, though.

Hmm. Anyway, a few more HL fanfic recs! All but one are older stories on the Seventh Dimension archive. 3 Alexa stories, 2 Richie stories, 1 long gen story.

( Recs under the cut )

You know, I'm pretty sure that the "Eeee! Little [actor] was so cute back then!" reaction is not supposed to happen when the actor in question is forty. But ... well. *g* He's just so young and adorable!

Highlander reawakened my old Jim Byrnes crush, so I've been going back to the show where I originally fell for him - Wiseguy - and watching a few episodes for nostalgia's sake. Which, incidentally, is reminding me all over again that Wiseguy's DVD releases are the MOST FRUSTRATING THING EVER. Why, why, why is "People Do It All the Time" not included in the "complete" DVD collection? I can understand why the Dead Dog Records arc isn't, because they couldn't secure rights to the music, but I am utterly at a loss for why they'd leave out "People Do It ..." (and frustrated, since it's one of the only TWO episodes in the whole series that's basically all Lifeguard all the time). At least Amazon has it streaming.

What's fascinating to me on the rewatch (besides how adorable Jim Byrnes is with long, dark hair) is how different Lifeguard is from Joe Dawson. ( Cutting the rest of this to avoid inadvertently spoiling people who haven't seen one or the other show - mild spoilers only - as well as not subjecting the rest of you to my ramblings *g* )

Grarrr. I really have never encountered an officially released series that was as screwed up as the official release of Wiseguy. It's frustrating because I love the show, and I want to buy it and push it on all my friends, but it's difficult to do that when the company or companies that own the rights seem to be determined to make it impossible to watch!

Thus far:

( Cut for non-spoilery whiiiiiiine )

Seriously, WHY? I adore this show; I would totally go out right now and drop the money for a nice boxed set of all three seasons. Instead, I'm stuck struggling through versions of the show that would be irritatingly sub-par even if I were downloading them for free, let alone paying for them.

Obsessed? Me? No, of course not. I wrote and then deleted a much longer introduction to this vid, because really, who wants to listen to the vidder yakking on and on? I'm drawn to the connections between the main characters, and the ways that they cling to their convictions and beliefs and humanity in the face of a dark and corrupt world; that's what this is about.

Song: Closer to Fine
Artist: Indigo Girls
Fandom: Wiseguy
Footage/Spoilers: Contains clips from seasons 1-3; minor spoilers but no major ones (at least none that should be recognizable out of context)
Notes: Thank you very much to gnine and greyias for beta'ing this for me despite not having seen the series!

Download WMV (31 Mb) (zipped)

As usual, please let me know of any problems with downloading or playback.

Step one: Hang out with other fen! I had lunch yesterday with livrelibre and thingswithwings, who are very nice and very fun to hang out with; we had a good time and then livrelibre took me to the campus art museum to see a talk on Japanese surimono prints, after which we hung out at the museum for a while looking at the Asian art wing. Among other things, we talked about SGA and fic and things of that nature, and it really helped a lot to remind me what I loved about the fandom and the show in the first place. (Which reminds me that I haven't posted *anything* about the completely awesome and happymaking NYC excursion with derry667 and tipper_green earlier this month! Derry has pictures up at her journal. Fangirl tours FTW!)

Step two: Squee!

( Contains big spoilers for the Volchek/Lynchboro arc of Wiseguy )

I love the way this show deals with physical disability.

I hadn't really thought about it until their second double-amputee character shows up. But it's kind of awesome, really. One of the main characters is missing both legs from the knees down (the actor is Jim Byrnes from Highlander, if any Highlander people are reading this), and the way they deal with it is wonderfully matter-of-face and casual, where it's neither the defining feature of his character nor ignored completely. It comes up in small, everyday ways -- you'll see him putting on his prostheses, or having a little trouble navigating stairs, and there's the nifty little detail, not remarked upon but visually apparent, that there are no chairs in his apartment (since he uses a wheelchair at home). But in general, he's just *him*, a laid-back ex-hippie-ish sort of guy with a sharp sense of humor and a slow-burning fuse; we've seen him camping, getting into bar brawls, making love to a woman, fighting with his friends and family, and of course doing undercover work, as they all do.

And one of the major recurring characters in the arc we're now watching is a guy with one arm and one leg -- and it's the same deal, really; his character is the nosy reporter poking around our guys' investigation, and that's who he *is*, disability optional.

It's really cool, and awfully sad that it's so rare on TV that I notice when a disabled character isn't just used as a plot point.

Before I forget, my story "Night Ops" was nominated in the Isis Awards (SGA het awards). It's in the Rodney/Jennifer category.

In other news, a new show seems to be walking off with me. Well, an old show, actually -- "Wiseguy". I watched it back when it was originally on TV (1987-90 or so) but I was, well, 11 at the time, and it was so dark and heavy that I never enjoyed it all that much as a kid.

But this is a seriously awesome show! It's fantastically well written and well acted. The characters are likable and yet ambiguous enough that you never quite know what they're going to do in the morally difficult situations in which they're constantly finding themselves. It's the story of a guy who goes undercover to bust organized crime, and the ways in which his job and his basic decency come into conflict as he's forced to do increasingly horrible things in order to make his cover convincing -- as well as becoming close to the people he's trying to bust. The show operates in long story arcs, so you have time to get to know the cast of each new arc, as well as the ongoing characters (the main character, his FBI "handlers" and his family).

I remember bits and pieces (including a couple of really lovely character scenes; this show has some awesome friendship and h/c moments) but I really don't remember major plot points and I'm just now through the Steelgrave arc (mainlined over the last two days) -- plus a couple of episodes from a later arc that I remembered well enough I just *had* to jump forward and watch them -- so please don't spoil me for any major plot events or character deaths!

I suspect this is a show for which fandom and fanfic are going to turn out to be virtually nonexistent, which is too bad because it has some wonderful story potential.