Drop Dead Diva: If only it were horror

DROP DEAD DIVA: 1.03 “Do Over”

I watched this episode on Sunday, but I’m still having trouble with my thoughts on it. It’s a cute show. It really is. But there’s something amiss in my book. Like, why is Deb going along with being Jane? Why doesn’t she cart off and just move on with some other life entirely? Why isn’t she spending all her time in the gym to get back to the model size she likes?

There’s no part of her that’s rebelling against her new life. Whether she’s considered good or bad at the gates of death really has little to do with it. It would be a natural tendency to go back to the familiar, so why is she so comfortable falling into Jane’s life? Taking cases without much of a fight? Going into work every day? I’m just not sure I get it.

Is it because her old boyfriend works there? Not really. She spends little time with him, and you’d think that if that were the thing pulling her in, she’d be talking about it more to Stacy or Fred. But it’s not really mentioned.

It makes the show just a little less believable, and while I like Jane, she doesn’t have the adorability factor–or even whacky factor–that Christina Applegate did in Samantha Who?. Sure, she’s a likable character, and I think I could really get to like her a long time from now, but I just think she’d be stronger if she didn’t have the Deb baggage–the same baggage that makes the premise of the show.

But about this episode. The part that intrigued me the most were her dreams. Could Jane really be hostile about Deb’s taking over her body? Well, it’s an interesting situation isn’t it. Jane had a chance at life (at least we’d assume), and Deb stole it from her. If I were Jane, I’d be mad too.

Which really makes me want this show to be a horror story. I mean, think about it. Some supernatural event allows one soul to take over another and then the original ghost comes after her? It was an accident the whole time, I swear! Friends being killed left and right. And poor Grayson. Well, methinks that they’d end up being the happy couple in the end, but it would add a little more drama into the show.

I don’t know. I really want to like this show. I think it has a lot of potential, but it’s almost weighed down by the fact that Jane is a lawyer. I mean, I could see Deb taking over Jane’s life more if she worked somewhere else–a magazine, a shop, something like that. But a lawyer. Now we’re adding cases into her struggle, and it’s just…too much? So much that we can’t develop what needs to be?

It’s still a cute show and I think it has potential. I love watching Jane and Fred together. But there’s still something wrong. Hopefully, that fixes itself soon.

Thoughts On Hulu

JC here, with a few thoughts on the popular TV streaming site, Hulu.

I was thinking about Hulu.com today.

I really like Hulu a lot. It’s got a great interface, and is very easy to navigate, which is more than I can say for most of the major networks individual sites. Furthermore, it lets me watch shows ON MY OWN SCHEDULE, which is huge for me. While I generally watch my favorite shows on their broadcast time, I do resent being tethered to the screen if I have something else that I could be doing. And don’t get me wrong, I love my DVR, but I’m always forgetting to record shows, or delete old ones ot make room for the new ones, and so on. Best of all, you can just navigate to the site and begin watching; you don’t have to go through the hassle of signing up for anything.

I saw this post at Lifehacker today. It’s just a bunch of random tips to make your life easier, but one of them instructs you on how to install a plugin for Firefox that will automatically skip Hulu commercials.

Anyone out there who is listening: Please ignore that little tip. Do not skip the commercials!

Hulu makes money through those ads. Those ads are the only reason why Hulu continues to remain free. Skipping commercials on Hulu is especially disturbing to me, in light of two recent developments:

1. Disney’s effort to charge people for the privledge of watching their crappy TV shows online.
2. Rumblings, found here, and a few other places that I can’t seem to pin down at the moment, that Hulu may start charging for content in the future.

If Disney proves that they can make money charging online, don’t you think they would consider importing that business model onto Hulu, given they are partners in the venture with the other networks? I’m sure the powers that be would be even more happy to charge us fees if they’re aware that a large number of people are finding ways to work around watching the advertisements present in each show.

All of this talk of ad skipping is especially galling because the ads on Hulu are SO less intrusive than the ones on regular television. There seem to be fewer interruptions for advertising on Hulu, and each interruption is only 15 to 30 seconds. As far as I’m concerned, this is so much more bearable than the long commercial breaks we have to suffer through while watching live. Hulu lets you watch many of your favorite shows, for free, without any special hardware, software, or registration, on your OWN SCHEDULE at ANY TIME. All you have to do is sit through 2-3 minutes of commercials per hour of programming.

It’s encouraging to me that most of the commenters in the Lifehacker post I linked to above share pretty much the same view as I do. I really don’t know if the Hulu business model is a workable one. I sure hope it is. One thing I feel fairly certain of is that if Disney’s experiment with charging fees for watching online content is successful, the free ad-supported Hulu as we know it will probably quickly go down in flames.

In the mean time, though, as end-users, let’s not push it out the door and faster than necessary. Hulu is a great value right now. Don’t skip the commercials; if you do, I promise the networks will try to find another, more painful and inconvenient way of squeezing money out of your pockets.

Stay tuned… Reviews of Drop Dead Diva, Merlin, and In Plain Sight are coming soon