Netflix Jumps The Shark

So I'm at the Thrift Store the other day, and they have the second season of Alias on DVD. It's at a good price, but not a great price. Off the top of my head, I couldn't recall if I liked the second season. I remember the first season was brilliant, and the third season was painfully bad. But I couldn't remember when it started getting stupid. Rather than risk throwing money away on something I might regret buying, I decide to check my netflix ratings for the second season when I get home, and should it prove to be a worthy season, I'll swing back and pick it up.

Get home, log in to netflix, and attempt to look it up. I expected to see the five seasons rated individually. Instead, to my surprise and horror, they've consolidated all five seasons into one entry. They applied my rating from the first season to all that followed. I'm 100% certain I gave Season 3 a single miserable star, but now it's merged with Seasons 1, 2, 4 and 5, and the whole lot are rated with five stars. A quick glance about the site shows me that they've done similar mergings for nearly all TV series.

Honestly, I've been hoping that someday Netflix would allow further differentiation of ratings within a series, and instead they've reduced it. I've repeatedly wished over the years that they'd allow me to rate per disc or per episode of a show, and not have to generalize about entire seasons at once. Then when a new disk shows up, you could skip the episodes that all of fandom gave a one star rating. Just imagine how cool it would be to look at a list of all theTrek episodes, and be able to separate the dozen groundbreaking and mindbending sci-fi classics from the crappy Romulan Yahr invasion plotlines and the hundreds of mindless holodeck episodes just by how many stars the public gave each individual episode. That would be sweet... and so very very useful.

Instead, they've pushed the other way, making us give a single rating to an entire series. Given that the "jump the shark" phenomenon is so pervasive in series programming that there's even a catchy turn of phrase to describe it, it seems ridiculous that netflix would pretend it doesn't happen. Of all the series I've ever watched from beginning to end, only a precious handful didn't suffer from some sort of dip in quality after a certain point.

How could this simple truth escape Netflix, a company whose entire focus is on not just renting films but on compiling your ratings of them and using those ratings to suggest what other films you'll like. And they take the same amount of money from you regardless of how many films you watch in a month, so there's no conflicting financial incentive for them to make you watch crap. Giving you good recommendations and good customer service is in their obvious best interests. Failing to warn you that your new favorite show turns to crap after the star leaves in season four does them no good. What are they thinking?

Now I have to redo all my TV series ratings.  Shall I rate Alias based on the taut and byzantine first season, the painfully predictable third season, or the regurgitated fifth? How do I reflect that The IT Crowd starts dry and slow for its first 5 or 6 episodes, but is worth muddling through for the incapacitatingly funny second season?  Is there a way to note that LOST season 5 ends with one of the crowning moments of awesome in TV history, but season 6 ends with a let-down? How do you draw the hard lines where Ritchie Cunningham joins the army, the Great Gazoo lands in Bedrock, or when Sherman T. Potter replaces Henry Blake? More importantly, how can I trust a Netflix rating on a TV show ever again? Every series is now a potential mine field.

I'm a little annoyed at this, so I decided to send them a complaint email. Maybe it wasn't too late to reverse this change.  I knew it would be hard to rally the Netflix fan base this time, because there's no longer any sort of netflix community. They eliminated all the social networking tools from the site a few years back, so you can't readily contact other netflix customers. I have no delusions about being a great leader or organizer, so I figured if I could at least send an email complaint to netflix itself, I'd be doing my part.

Complain once, and move on.  Such complaints could actually work if enough people took part, because such complaints worked last time.

That was a couple years back, when they almost eliminated the "profiles" feature. The profiles function is what allows you to maintain multiple queues on one account, useful if the various members of your household have different tastes. They tried then to merge all the profiles into the main accounts, but backed off from it when the customer base rose up in complaint against the notion. Nobody wanted to have to re-rate hundreds of films, or have their account suddenly start recommending for the whole household a muddied mix of slasher films and Dora the Explorer.

So, I'd just drop a quick email and...

You ever try to email Netflix? It's impossible. Not just a little tricky, but completely impossible. It's amazing that a so thoroughly online company can have completely forsaken email and text-based communication. As it turns out, ever since shortly after the whole "profiles" rebellion, they've eliminated all incoming public email addresses. They replaced them with a 24-hour phone center. Which would be okay, I guess, if I didn't have spasmodic dysphonia and a pay-by-the-minute cellphone plan. So I searched a little online, because I figured they probably at least needed an email address for deaf people to contact them. As it turns out, no, the deaf community is up in arms about Netflix eliminating email, not training call center staff on how to take relay calls, and even not putting captions on most streaming content (including most films that have captions on the DVD).

What was I just saying about "good customer service" being "in their obvious best interests"? Netflix clearly doesn't agree.

Godwin's Law and Fox

Not that any of our readers are likely to be the types to take Fox News at their word... but I still found this dismantling of Fox hipocrisy and BS (by Jon Stewart) to be particularly amusing.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
24 Hour Nazi Party People
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog</a> The Daily Show on Facebook

There's plenty of other politically-themed things I've been tempted to blog about lately, but they'd all come across as bitter and cynical and paranoid bordering on alarmist, seeing as how I've largely transformed into a bitter paranoid cynic in my old middle not-quite-middle age.

Prison Comparisons

Because, lately,  movies and TV seem more plausible than the events of the real world...

Prisons in Sweden, according to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo trilogy: You're kept in a small room, but otherwise it's a cake walk. You get reading material, and can access your laptop. You get to wear whatever you like, even if that involves about 18 different piercings and your hair up in a 'hawk. You don't have a cell-mate.

Prisons in London, according to The Tutors: What's that moving under the pile of straw I've got for a bed? Big freakin' rats. This place will drive you insane.

Prisons in the US, according to... just about every prison-based movie or TV show ever made: The guards and crooked sheriff or warden beat you up, and the prisoners rape you. You're sprayed down with a hose, and they routinely search you for anything contraband, except for cigarettes. Your nazi cellmate tattoos a swastika on your ass. Then one day you get shivved, and die.

Given the alternatives, I can only assume that Julian Assange really doesn't like Pickled Herring.

Staggering Evidence of Voter Fraud in the US

This is a really under-reported story from earlier this summer. It documents obvious evidence that the Primaries in South Carolina were rigged and stolen. It should have made repeated national headlines, but I just heard about it today despite being 2 months old.

In South Carolina, the majority of votes are placed on electronic voting machines at the polling stations. Machines that have no transparency or safeguards, so you can't be certain that your vote was tabulated or reported accurately. As near as I can tell, that's why Alvin Greene won the Democratic primary.

Greene is unemployed but somehow came up with the $10,440 filing fee to get on the Primary ballot. He's currently indicted on two criminal counts - one a felony - and was arrested for them both 6 months before the Primary. His master plan to save the South Carolina economy is to create jobs by making and selling action figures of himself. As I understand it, he had no TV ads, no website, he neither scheduled nor attended any campaign rallies, did no fund raising nor any campaigning of any recognizable sort. He had no political background at all.

Watch this downright bizarre interview where Keith Olbermann asks Alvin Greene about how he campaigned:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

His chief opponent in the primary was a four-time State legislator who did lots of campaigning.

Despite those many handicaps, Alvin Greene won the Primary by a landslide victory at the polls - with the electronic voting machines in some precincts reporting more votes for Green than total ballots cast!  In most precincts in South Carolina, the only paper trail left after an election is the absentee ballots. Traditionally, absentee ballots tend to have similar results ratios as polling-place ballots. However, in this case, Greene got only 16% of the absentee ballot vote, but got 59% of the non-traceable, non-verifiable electronic votes at the polls.

Read more about his ridiculous logic-defying win at:
The BRAD BLOG
RAWstory
mainstream media's feeble attempt at pretending they care whether or not an election is stolen by their secret masters

The best case scenario seems to be one of State-wide election-machine error, and the more chilling yet more likely scenario seems to be systematic fraud and rigging of an election. Right here in the USA, not in some rinky-dink third-world banana republic.

Jack Bauer is running for Senate?

Okay, I have to give this guy high marks for making a very clever political spot that's far more entertaining than most campaign ads I've seen...

...even if I disagree with his message and platform. "Vote for me because I can shoot a rifle while I fix my roof" is just a bit odd. I can't help but wonder how exactly it is that mowing lawns and throwing grenades prepares one for being a Senator. I don't suppose it'd go over well if you tried doing any of those on Capitol Hill. I was likewise amused by his flippant remarks about Miranda rights and due process, and by his choosing to compare himself to a fictional character that tortures people on an hourly basis. Seems like maybe, just maybe, he just might have a little trouble distinguishing between fantasy and reality.



There's also something a little amusing about this not terribly manly-looking guy trying to real hard play up his manliness in these ads. He focuses on his military service, but tells stories about ducking for cover, not heroics. That's realistic, and refreshingly honest, but kind of sends a conflicting message. Even his military photos made him look like a scrawny goofball in uniform. Not that there's anything wrong with that, I used to hang with some Airforce SP's who'd play D&D while on night patrol. They were good guys, but eager to prove themselves, and he seems cut from the same cloth. In that light, he'd just be drawing the connections to Jack Bauer to let us know how manly he is, because it's always in question when you're the runt of the platoon litter. The message he's declaring so emphatically is that the only way you'll see him anywhere near a log cabin is if he's fixing the roof of it.

And then I think of the 24 references again, and I realize he might also use the log cabin as a place to hold foreigners he intends to torture.

Maybe in a few years he'll show us how he prepared to run for President by blowing up the Death Star and kissing his sister. I think that would play to a wider audience.

Mmm... brains....

Saw this photo today, and thought folks here appreciate it.

Cherry buttercream frosting brains - I hear it goes well with a can of Slurm.






source: serious eats

Airplanes are not baseball stadiums

We ended up getting bumped on the flight back from NM, and transferred to a Frontier airlines flight. Frontier has those little TV sets in the back of the seats, so obnoxious jerks in seats near yours can pay money to force you to be a captive audience for shows you'd never watch normally.

On this flight, at least half a dozen people were watching some ball game, and they kept forgetting they weren't in a stadium, or a sports bar, or someplace else that's populated by nothing but baseball fans. (Instead, the cabin lights were off, and everyone else was trying to sleep.)

Every time a big play was made, those 6 jerks would scream and hoot and clap as loudly as they could. Every time, that ruckus would wake up and/or scare at least 2 of the 3 sleeping babies that were within a row of my seat, and they'd start crying. A freakin' lovely flight this was.

It got so bad, I asked a steward how much I'd have to bribe him for him to spill a cup of hot coffee in the laps of each of these screaming fans as he refilled their drinks. Much to my relief, the steward approached the cluster of screaming jackasses and told them that if they screamed again, he'd have police waiting for them upon landing. As you can imagine, it got a little quieter after that.

The Prisoner

They have a one in six chance of pulling this off. Otherwise it's just a big number 2.



Be seeing you.

New episodes of Futurama!

Futurama Returns:

Animated comedy show Futurama is set to return to TV screens six years after it was canceled.

The show, created by The Simpsons mastermind Matt Groening, was axed in by FOX in 2003 reportedly due to low ratings.

But now more episodes of the show have been ordered. 26 new episodes are expected to air on Comedy Central beginning in 2010.

To celebrate, I'm gonna get a digital converter box, and extended basic cable, with blackjack and hookers! Except, without the converter box or the cable. So, probably just Netflix, plus blackjack and hookers. On the moon!

Every Series Should Have An Exit Plan

I've been meaning to write this since last Thursday. Honestly, I've been meaning to write it for several months, but until late last week I kept holding off because I feared they were going to screw it up. Even if I'd told you, there'd be no way you could have gotten up to speed to catch it while it was on the air.

Season 5 of Lost freakin' rocked like nothing else I've ever watched.
The four seasons before it were awesome, too, but the fifth was something special. I love the way the show reinvents itself every season. Spoilers in white text.

• 1st Season is about being a castaway on a haunted, monster-infested island full of psychopaths and con men, spiced with flashbacks about how everyone's life sucked before they crashed on the island.
• 2nd Season is about mad science experiments on the haunted island.
• 3rd Season is about the mysterious and creepy fanatics who run the island.
  
• 4th Season is about a war and rescue, and the flash-backs become flash-forwards.
  
• 5th Season is about time-traveling to the freakin' garden of Eden so you can murder God.
  

I kid you not about that 5th Season plotline. It just blew me away. It's a show known for it's bizarre mythology and surprise twists*, yet the 5th Season went way above and beyond even that reputation.

Plus we're getting answers. Every season of Lost raises about 100 questions, so at this point, 500 questions have been asked. Even sharing the questions here would be a spoiler. What's the Monster? Where'd the Polar Bear come from? Are they all dead? What's in The Hatch? What do The Numbers mean? How'd that Pirate Ship end up on the mountain? What happened to the Dharma Initiative? How come food keeps being dropped? What's with the giant foot? Who or what is Jacob? Charles Widmore? Why doesn't Richard age? What did Kate do with Aaron? Are Bernard and Rose going to be Adam and Eve? Are they the two corpses in the cave way back in Season 1? etc., etc., etc. The list goes on.

In season one, we got like 2 answers. In season two, we got about 6 new answers. season three about 18 answers, and I was starting to dispair that they'd never resolve anything, because I hadn't noticed the math of what was happening. Season four gave about 54 answers, which is when I noticed it trippled every season. And yes, season five answered more questions than any single season had asked, about 162 questions answered this season.

My faith has been resored. By my math, season six will answer 486 questions, for a grand total of 728 questions answered, but only 600 asked. The Age of Aquarius is upon us, my friends, and the path to true enlightenment lies with Lost. Watch the show all the way through, and 128 questions about your life and the nature of the universe will be made transparent to you. This is not some silly joke. It makes sense, because they fucking time traveled to the garden of eden and killed God! It's my new religion. In fact, I'm going to speak what once was blasphemy - I predict that by the end of the sixth season, I'll even prefer Lost to Twin Peaks.**

What makes all this possible is that a couple seasons ago, they got the network to sign a contract, giving them a guaranteed run of six seasons. Prior to that, the writers kept building up the mysteries, dragging their feet, and avoiding giving any answers. They didn't want the wind to escape their sales, or to jump the shark. Once they had that contract, they were able to work out an exit plan, and fine tune the rate of plot revelation. They were even free to resolve the entangled love triangles, and ditch the usual network-mandated-tropes. Season five could have just been more regurgitated Sawyer-Kate-Jack-Juliette angst, with everyone cheating on everyone else, because some jerk in a suit thinks that's what put butts on couches week after week. Instead, this season just made a nod in passing to the complicated back story between them, and then said loudly "they've grown past that". Thank you, JJ Abrams and company.***

Of course, one can only imagine what Twin Peaks would have been like if the network had signed a 6-season contract with David Lynch and Mark Frost and just left them to work their magic. Every serious series drama should be allowed to follow this model.

---

*: In Zack And Miri Make A Porno, there's a scene where the cast is distracted. They should be watching sex, but instead they say something to the affect of: "I missed it this week. What happened?" "They're off the island. Then they're on the island again. I don't know what the fuck's going on." "I think they're in Hell." They're discussing Lost, and that's a pretty good summary of the 4th season, which was airing while Zack and Miri was being filmed. The first several seasons you spend a lot of time just wondering what the heck you're watching. Eventually it all comes together.

**: Unless they drop the ball. Time-travel is generally problematic in film and television, full of plot-holes and fridge-logic, so there's some tiny fear that some glaring flaw in the sixth season could still marr all that went before it. But if they keep it on the course that Miles (one of the characters) thinks it's on (namely, that the A-Bomb fulfils destiny and creates the time loop), they'll dodge that bullet. And even if they screw that up, they can still save it by just showing us a Richard flashback episode (that reveals his origin story to be Captain of the Black Rock ) and explicitly revealing that Jacob and that guy who played Adams in Deadwood are the smoke-monsters, or God and Lucifer, or Anubis and Set, or some combination of the three. And if they get all of this right, then, with tears in my eyes, I'll say that yes, it's better even than Twin Peaks.


***: Which means now I'll probably have to go catch his version of Star Trek on the big screen. Which, by the way, everyone tells me is much better than they expected.

Charybdis Sings

It's not often that the commentary track of a DVD puts you in that mental space of "should I laugh or cry?". Even rarer when that commentary track itself is a musical comedy (wait, has there ever been one of those before?). But Commentary! The Musical! did just that. I cried as I laughed. Twice. The rest of the time, I was just laughing, but 2 out of 14 songs really moved me.

For those not in the know, Commentary! The Musical! is one of the commentary tracks on the DVD release of Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. Mostly it's a laugh riot, with the heart of it being a trio of songs explaining how Nathan Fillion and Neil Patrick Harris hate each other. Hilarious stuff.

The tracks that really touched me were Track 2: Strike! and Track 11: Heart, Broken. Joss Whedon pours his heart into them.

My favorite passages:

HOMER’S ODYSSEY WAS SWELL
A BUNCH OF GUYS THAT WENT THROUGH HELL
HE TOLD THE TALE BUT DIDN’T TELL
THE AUDIENCE WHY
HE DIDN’T SAY, HERE’S WHAT IT MEANS
AND HERE’S A FEW DELETED SCENES
CHARYBDIS TESTED WELL WITH TEENS
...
IT’S BROKEN BY THE ENDLESS LOADS
OF MAKING-OFS AND MOBISODES
THE TIE-INS, PREQUELS, GAMES AND CODES
THE AUDIENCE BUYS
THE NARRATIVE DIES

That's pretty fuckin' ballsy for a writer/director to be singing on a DVD commentary. My hat is off to you, Joss.

Just wanted to share that with you, since I mostly bitch about things on the net, and rarely remember to praise or make recommendations. Of course, I'm praising and recommending something that itself contains an awful lot of bitching. Hmm...

For those of you too cheap to spring for the DVD, here's the rest of the lyrics.

A suggestion for making the Superbowl better.

Damn, looks like someone else had the same idea I did...

Station says porn clip interrupted Super Bowl

Tucson station says Super Bowl interrupted for some viewers by porn clip

MARK CARLSON
AP News

Feb 02, 2009 02:18 EST

A Tucson television station's broadcast of the Super Bowl on Sunday was interrupted for some viewers by about 10 seconds of pornographic material, the station said.

Turns out they just did it for 10 seconds. Wimps.

• I'd have done picture-in-picture for the whole thing, or maybe just replaced it entirely.
• For maximum comedic impact, every time the teams are huddled, you could superimpose porn in the middle.
• Or, porn could be a reward linked to touchdowns. Then we'd all root for the home team.
  

There's lots of potential here, I just don't think the studios and cable companies are pushing the envelope far enough. They should think outside, inside, or just about the box.

PBS probes NSA's role in 9/11

Interesting topic coming up on NOVA in February. A PBS investigation into what the NSA knew about 9/11 before it happened...

Supreme Court of Nipples

Following the slightly mangled oath of office administered to Barack Obama by Chief Justice John Roberts -- in which the single word "faithfully" was misplaced -- discussion of the flub has become a minor online obsession.
...
On a more serious note, constitutional experts like Jonathan Turley are suggesting that it might not hurt for Obama to settle any doubts simply by retaking the oath. "He should probably go ahead and take the oath again," Turley stated. "If he doesn't, there are going to be people who for the next four years are going to argue that he didn't meet the constitutional standard. I don't think it's necessary, and it's not a constitutional crisis. This is the chief justice's version of a wardrobe malfunction." [emphasis mine]

So, he should get like a fifteen-million-dollar-fine, right?

I think the FCC's codes and standards are a crock of something you can't say on TV - but, on the other hand, if they exist to protect me from accidentally seeing Justice Robert's man-boobs, maybe it's not all bad after all.

I may not know what the definition of obscene is, but I know it when I see a Supreme Court Justice doin' it.

Plane Crash in NY

Very exciting story in the news:

All Survive Jet's Splashdown in Hudson River

Airbus Carrying 155 People Apparently Hit Geese Minutes After Takeoff From New York

"You'd hear thump-thump-thump-thump, and then the pilot came on, and all he said was, 'This is the captain speaking. Brace for impact,'
...
Thus began the drama of US Airways Flight 1549, which was apparently crippled by a midair encounter with geese and ditched into the Hudson River within minutes of takeoff from La Guardia Airport. Facing life-and-death choices, the pilot steered away from a catastrophic crash in the Bronx or in northern Manhattan, but the 155 passengers and crew soon faced new peril as their 80-ton aircraft began to sink in the river's frigid gray current.
...
Most of the passengers stood in shirtsleeves, fleeing without their life jackets, and a few fell into 36-degree water on a day when the air temperature barely reached 20 degrees. Some passengers began to wail, but witnesses described a scene of level-headed teamwork to rescue the weak and infirm, including an infant and an elderly woman in a wheelchair.

Due to the valiant efforts of heroic crew and passengers, not a single life was lost, and the elderly woman discovered she no longer needed her wheelchair once she washed up on the shore of the mystical island of Manhattan.

This momentary sense of victory and accomplishment was short-lived however, as less than an hour after the crash, a monster ate the pilot. Later that night, shoeless transients attacked the survivors, and kidnapped all the children. Police are attempting to locate the missing children, but the investigation has been seriously impeded by the fact that over half the passengers are con-men or fugitives. The only clues left at the scene were a fake beard, a polar-bear-suit, and a pregnancy test, all with a tags reading "Dharma Novelty Corp".

For up-to-the-minute coverage of the the survivor's ongoing plight, tune into ABC on January 21st.

Rob Roy

For some reason, I always have the hardest time keeping Roy Schieder and Rob Schneider's names properly assigned in my head.


...and lemme tell ya, it's pretty disturbing when you're expecting one and get the other.

Of bathroom breaks and DVD menus: Futurama vs Doctor Who

On the disks of Futurama, Volume 3, if you sit for a few moments on any menu, the voices of various characters from the show start heckling you. "As captain of this DVD, I order you to choose an episode... or else." It's cute, but it can get a tiny bit old if, for example, you're waiting to start the next episode till your wife gets out of the loo.

It's no where near as annoying as what happens if you wait for your wife to get out of the bathroom before you start the next episode of the most recently released season of the new Doctor Who. Fucking idiots*! Leave the menu paused for a minute, and they spoil a major plot point from the last episode of the season. You patiently wait all these extra months so you can support the show financially instead of download it, restraining yourself from reading spoilers on the net so it can be fresh and exciting the first time you see it... and the bastards blow one of the major surprises on the menu of disk 1. So very sad.

To those who design DVD menus: Not everyone who's watching your DVD has already seen the entire season (or entire movie). Please don't put things in the menu (or the background sound or visuals) that ruins the plot.

*: Don't get me wrong, I love the show. But whoever designed that DVD menu (or rather, whoever chose the sound clips playing in the background when you're on the menu) deserves to be mauled by overweight sci-fi conventioneers.

Snow Dalek

Photo source.


Almost makes me miss the snow.


Almost.

All Apologies

Thank goodness for breach of YouTube terms of use! That means I can fuck all the worthless American TV shit and instead watch worthless British TV shit.

Hurray!

Marshal Willenholly (Updated)

Man I hope they don't screw up that new Land of the Lost film.

Oops, I forgot:

"Fuck you. Whoever you are. For whatever reason. (No offense intended.) Now that I no longer have to worry that I might offend you, I can talk about any subject freely..." (Click on it for context)

Yeah, that's gonna get old, real quick.

Anyhow, back to subject: Land of the Lost. Man I hope they don't screw up that new Land of the Lost film. Will Ferrell is playing the part of Rick Marshall. I'm not sure how I feel about that.

He was soooo good in Stranger Than Fiction, so it might be a good thing. Maybe he loves the show, and has fond childhood memories. Maybe he's trying to branch out in dramatic roles, but wanted to start with another one that wasn't super-deep so the transition was smooth. Maybe he's a sci-fi fan, and I just don't know.

But it could also be a clue that they're going to do a terrible spoof that ridicules the original. The way Starsky & Hutch or Brady Bunch or Underdog weren't very kind to the old shows they "reinvented". And since I really like Land of the Lost, that would be a real bummer.

Updated: Crap. I was afraid of this:

Will Ferrell stars as has-been scientist Dr. Rick Marshall, sucked into one and spat back through time. Way back. Now, Marshall has no weapons, few skills and questionable smarts to survive in an alternate universe full of marauding dinosaurs and fantastic creatures from beyond our world—a place of spectacular sights and super-scaled comedy known as the Land of the Lost.

Sucked alongside him for the adventure are crack-smart research assistant Holly (Anna Friel) and a redneck survivalist (Danny McBride) named Will. Chased by T. rex and stalked by painfully slow reptiles known as Sleestaks, Marshall, Will and Holly must rely on their only ally—a primate called Chaka (Jorma Taccone)—to navigate out of the hybrid dimension. Escape from this routine expedition gone awry and they’re heroes. Get stuck, and they’ll be permanent refugees in the Land of the Lost.

[emphasis mine]

What's up with making Comedy versions of old shows that weren't comedies?

A modern, serious, dark and moody sci-fi film version of Land of the Lost would be awesome. Look at those Sleestacks - creepy.

So would a mildly campy version that is lighter family fare but stays true and close to the original.

But a satirical version? That seems pretty stupid.

Can you imagine if Peter Jackson had a comedic vision in mind for LOTR?