The new season of “Slings and Arrows” starts tonight on Sundance, 5pm PT/8pm ET (and repeated). I caught some of season one by chance yesterday. Having never seen the series, or heard of it, I was bowled over. It was so funny, all about a quirky cast of professional actors and all their trials – well, their slings and arrows, along with their often exquisite delivery of Shakespeare’s great lines. Season One centered around a production of Hamlet; I think Season Two is anchored by a production of MacBeth.
I just got a notice from Frontline PBS: “The Insurgency” airs on Tuesday night. The blurb about this new Frontline is below the fold. OPEN THREAD!
– This Week: “The Insurgency” (1 hour),
Tuesday, Feb. 21 at 9pm on PBS (check local listings)
– Inside FRONTLINE: Rare access to the enemy
– Live Discussion: Chat with producer Matt Haan Wed. Feb. 22 at 11 am ET
Anyone wanting to report on the insurgency in Iraq faces an obvious
obstacle: it is very dangerous. FRONTLINE asked veteran producer Tom
Roberts (“A Company of Soldiers”) how he would go about it. As a matter
of policy, we did not want Tom or co-producer Matt Haan and the team to
try and meet the insurgents, but as Tom and Matt discovered when they
went to Iraq, there are a small number of journalists who have
interviewed some of the insurgent leaders. One of them in particular,
Michael Ware, Baghdad bureau chief for Time magazine, has done some
superb reporting on the insurgency. His access is rare. But there is
more. Ware has his own personal videos, and he made some of his footage
available to FRONTLINE.
In “The Insurgency,” airing this Tuesday, you will meet Ware and see his
footage for the first time. And, listening to the insurgents in their
own words, you will get a sense of who they are – from the foot soldiers
of Al Qaeda to the strategists directing the fight; you will meet an
intrepid Iraqi photojournalist who has risked his life to report on the
foreign fighters pouring into Iraq to give up their lives in the battles
for Fallujah; and you will hear from officers in the U.S. Army who are
seen in action against the insurgents and who give their perspective on
the counterinsurgency battle.
Co-producer Matt Haan remembers a particular incident from their time in
Iraq: “Filming was finished. We were traveling aboard a Blackhawk back
to Baghdad to connect with our flight out when we heard that the Al
Hamra Hotel had been hit by a car bomb. We had left the hotel – our main
base during our time in Iraq – less than 48 hours before. We had been
lucky.”
We hope you will join us next Tuesday for “The Insurgency” and after,
explore FRONTLINE’s Web site for more about this war and analysis of
the U.S. strategy and whether it can work. And, take the opportunity
to watch our report again online and express your opinion about it at
Insurgency.
Louis Wiley Jr.
Executive Editor
Medicare D(isaster) Big Rx and Band-Aids
And thanks for the link to the NYT article susan.
for another season?
HBO was going to begin it next month or so but has pushed up the bigamy series, and then Sopranos starts in March.
So I’m guessing we’ll get Deadwood in the summer.
This shuffling has caused some consternation in the susanhu sphere.
Good news: Showtime’s “Huff” Season 2 starts in April. And i’m praying that they bring “Sleeper Cell” back… some of the cast survived :):)
Just a quick post here to let you know that Al Gore’s recent speech on global warming will be aired tonight on Link.TV (ch 375 on DirecTV) at 7:00, 1:00 a.m and 7:00 a.m CST (please adjust time for your own zones).
Susan had mentioned that other great show they had the other night on Abu Ghraib, tough stuff to watch. But since I just checked the schedule tonight, I thought some of you might want to know about this and tune in to hear the real president tell it like it is.
I’ll check my schedule in a bit! THANKS for the reminder!
I watched LINK TV all evening last night … they’re doing a fundraiser so they ran Noam Chomsky and Greg Palast documentaries, with Amy Goodman and Greg Palast in the studio for live interviews during the breaks… and they don’t annoyingly beg for money too much.
I remember being so surprised to learn that LINK TV (and Free Speech TV) are entirely subscriber-dependent. They get nothing from the satellite companies that air them, as I’d naively assumed.
Do you get Free Speech TV? They air INN World Report, which is a fantastic 1/2-hour daily news show … http://www.innwrorldreport.net (their videos are up on their site) it’s a little more “far out” than Amy’s show, which is cool by me.
These programs are why I’d never go back to cable.
Yes, that Abu Ghraib program was tough to watch. I didn’t realize it was only a 15-minute segment from the Australian Dateline show … but it was fantastic how LINK TV provided the viewpoints of Middle Eastern news correspondents for the rest of the hour.
Unfortunately, we don’t get FreeSpeech TV, but I’ve heard of it from others. Al’s speech was NOT the recent one, I was mistaken there, but rather from June 4, 2005, but still … his presentations of what was likely to happen relative to hurricanes was eerily prescient of Katrina, which hadn’t even happened yet.
His presentation is all it’s cracked up to be, with some sly Al humor thrown in, while clearly demonstrating to even the truly ignunt why this is a problem that needs to be tackled now. I really recommend catching this presentation if you can. I for one am looking forward to the upcoming film about him crisscrossing the country doing this presentation.
This, my friends, is the man who by all rights should have been President, with a capital P. And there, I shall quit preaching to the choir. Just see this talk.
An exquisite adaptation of this intriguing Dickens novel is running on Masterpiece Theater. The screenplay was written by Andrew Davies, who scripted the matchless A&E adaptation of Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” in 1995.
Dickens is so often treated as quaint comedy, what a joy to see a complicated and insightful denunciation of Victorian England brought to life so vividly. Scary how much of it is relevant to what is going on in our lives right now.
The series concludes in the next few weeks, but it will be available on DVD of course.