Puppies and television don’t really go together. Not so much in a freakish Heston Blumenthal recipe kind of way – though no doubt that’s yet to pass. I mean the furry scamp my partner and I have invited into our home, who has been disturbing our regular viewing schedule with a series of whelps and bodily functions, like an erratic alarm clock where the default sound is set to “heinous puddle of diarrhoea”. My recent screen time has therefore been of the more disruptive, YouTubey kind, which explains this first entry.
The good: Saturday Night Live in 360°
Top of the pops for me this week was the Celebrity Jeopardy sketch from Saturday Night Live’s 40th anniversary. The cast alone is six good reasons to watch: Will Ferrell, Jim Carrey, Norm MacDonald, Kate McKinnon, Alec Baldwin and Darrell Hammond. What’s particularly riveting about the clip, uploaded here, however, is its use of 360-degree footage.
As the likes of Sean Connery and Matthew McConaughey are sent up by the celebrities inhabiting them, you can rotate the camera view seamlesslyto your every human whim – making for an entirely different appreciation of the show. Turn around and gaze the audience in the eye, or selectively take in specific members of the production team – burly camera guys, the young cue card operator feeding lines – and staff scurrying around, getting Baldwin off and ushering Carrey on while the camera’s on Ferrell’s Alex Trebeck.
What has always looked like an effortless finished product suddenly becomes a nerve-wracker to watch. The 360 degrees offer valuable insight into one of the biggest comedy institutions in TV history. They were also used to good effect a few months ago when Vice News reported live from a rally in New York with the same technology.
Soon television and movies won’t be worth watching unless you can turn away from the action whenever you choose . That’ll make networks’ jobs harder: to ensure Game of Thrones fans stay titillated, they’ll have to make sure there’s a true coital panorama so that you can’t look away and accidentally see a table that’s being used for cereal instead of even more pointless shagging.
The bad: Married at First Sight
Yup. It was as bad as we all thought it would be. And when I say bad, I mean plummeting to a level of needlessly awful that almost touched upon the profound. At one point, when I had to leave the sofa to clean up my puppy’s latest attempt at a Jackson Pollock , I ended up staring at the mess and enjoying it more than what was on my TV.
Not that I was expecting to be pleasantly surprised by Channel Nine’s MAFS. In the second episode of a show that never needed to be made, the experts once again assume a few shared interests are a good basis for binding people together in a contract where death is the only escape. Somewhere, a TV executive has far too much faith in Tinder. It’ll be Snapchat Chapel next: who can have the most fun in a marriage that gets annulled after 10 seconds.
The future binge: Sense 8
Coming to Netflix on 5 June, the Wachowskis’ Sense 8 looks like it could be a more enjoyable distraction. Eight people become linked and able to communicate with each other telepathically, but they can also switch out their individual abilities too.
It’s somewhat convenient that one of them is a police officer, another a martial arts expert: this octet might prove more boring if each one could only switch between the skills of seven underslept Guardian writers. “Wow, suddenly I know how to swipe between catch-up apps while scooping up some poo in a bag … not quite what I need to get out of this heavily guarded, secret fortress.”
