How About Leaving Some Mystery?

So, after roughly 435,000 promos over the last couple of weeks, the new series Justified premiered on FX the other night. Now, I typically enjoy Timothy Olyphant's work so I thought I would watch the first episode. It turned out to be an ok show. Not the greatest show I've ever seen, but it beats a lot of what passes for original entertainment these days. I'll watch a couple more episodes before making a final decision, but as of right now I wouldn't mark it down as appointment television. My bigger issue is that I felt like there wasn't much suspense to the show because there had been so many promos with so many different scenes from the premiere episode. As a result, if you have seen more than seven of the commercials you have pretty much seen the entire first episode. That's what will happen when you start showing promos for a show eight months in advance of it's premiere (that's why seeing a promo for Sons of Anarchy, which won't start new episodes until next fall, has me worried). Much like when movies are hyped for a year, after a while the trailers start to reveal too much.

There is nothing worse than seeing a trailer for a movie, getting really excited for it's release and then seeing "Coming Summer 2014" at the end. It drives me crazy because that just means slowly but surely the trailers will start to get longer and more details will come out, at which point I could just keep my $10 and wait for it to come out on video because there will not be any mystery left in the movie. Honestly I'd rather go into a movie almost blind to the details and just figure it out as I go. I find it's preferable to be blind sided by a movie that I thought was going to be all action actually being a chick flick, then to go into an action movie where you know during the previews that the lead actor's partner is going to turn out to be the villain. [Sidebar: Pearl Harbor was the worst for the blind-side-chick-flick phenomenon. Coincidentally, Pearl Harbor also had the greatest teaser trailer in history. I remember seeing that trailer a year before the movie came out an immediately making plans to see it opening day, completely unaware that I was walking into a movie that would see absolutely no action for the entire first hour. There were two sneak attacks that day.] I just think sometimes networks and studios are so desperate to overload us with the fact a movie is on the way that they fail to realise that curiosity is what will get us into the theatres or tuning in, not knowing the plot before our popcorn is gone.

-After a couple days to think it over, I'm actually pretty pleased that Brady Quinn was traded to the Broncos. Obviously, as he is a former Notre Dame player I want him to succeed and I feel like he has a better shot of doing that with the Broncos. They run a similiar offense to what the Irish ran under Charlie Weis and he should be pretty familiar with it. Plus, they have a much better receiving corp that what the Browns had, especially after the Browns traded away Braylon Edwards and Kellen Winslow. Clearly the Browns had no faith in Quinn, which is what a young quarterback needs most of all. (There is a limit, however. The Raiders continued trust in JaMarcus Russell is severely misplaced.) Plus, it's not like Kyle Orton has ever put together back-to-back great years, so Quinn could see some playing time. And as the final factor as to why I like this deal, now I can go back to rooting against Eric Mangini because rooting for Quinn to do well but Mangini to fail was getting hard to pull off.