Laszlo Kovacs and Vilmos Zsigmond met at film school in Budapest in the 1950s. When Soviet tanks rumbled into the city to crush the reform movement in 1956, the two friends took to the streets to document the horrors of the crackdown. They understood the importance of the footage they had, and volunteered to smuggle it out of their repressed country.

The two filmmakers eventually settled in Hollywood, where they did all sorts of odd jobs before getting opportunities to work on low-budget horror and biker films. Over the next 40 years, they created some of the most indelible images in the history of film. Kovacs got his break when he was tapped to be the Director of Photography for the seminal film Easy Rider in 1969. He went on to be the cinematographer on some of the greatest films of the 1970s, including Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces, Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon, Hal Ashby’s Shampoo, and Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York. In the 1980s, he worked on films like Ghostbusters and Say Anything.

At the same time, Zsigmond was creating his own masterpieces, the first of which was his work on Robert Altman’s classic McCabe & Mrs. Miller. He went on work with Steven Spielberg on Sugarland Express, and most notably Close Encounters of the Third Kind, for which he won the Academy Award. His credits also include Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter, and Heaven’s Gate. He received his fourth Academy Award nomination for his work on The Black Dahlia in 2006, and he is currently at work on his third film with Woody Allen.

The work of Laszlo Kovacs and Vilmos Zsigmond practically defined the American New Wave of film in the 1970s. They remained lifelong friends until Kovacs died in 2007. No Subtitles Necessary does a terrific job of telling their story through commentary by cinematographer peers like Owen Roizman, and Vittorio Storaro, directors including Dennis Hopper, Peter Bogdanovich, John Boorman, William Richert, and Bob Rafelson, and actors Karen Black, Jon Voight, Peter Fonda, Sharon Stone, and Tatum O’Neal, among others. The film also features an abundance of clips from their most well-known — and some lesser-known — films, and reminiscences from Kovacs and Zsigmond themselves. The film does jump around in time a little bit, but director James Chressanthis, himself a cinematographer, does a nice job of holding together what is clearly a labor of love by all involved.

The golden age of American film that began in the late 1960s and continued well into the 1970s marked the end of the studio system, and the rise of independent filmmaking. It’s my favorite era, and the contributions of Laszlo Kovacs and Vilmos Zsigmond to the most memorable films of the era were unparalleled. No Subtitles Necessary looks at the work of two great artists, but more importantly, it tells the story of two great friends. Don’t miss it.

Andy Barker, P.I.

Richter stars as the titular character, a nerdy accountant who has always succeeded in life. When he opens a private practice in an L.A. strip mall, Andy expects business to take off. It doesn’t. Instead, he waits patiently for the hours to pass before returning home to his loving, perky wife, Jenny (Ellen’s Clea Lewis). At the strip mall, Andy quickly befriends Simon, the manager of a video store (played by the hilarious Tony Hale, late of Arrested Development) and Wally (Marshall Manesh) an Afghani restaurant owner.  In the pilot, a woman mistakes Andy for Lew Staziak, a retired private investigator that used to occupy the storefront where Andy now runs his office. Although he tries to convince the woman he’s no private dick, the money she slaps down in front of him — and the intrigue of being a gumshoe — is too thrilling to pas up. Simon, a walking encyclopedia of old movies, comes along as Andy’s sidekick. Eventually Andy runs into Lew Staziak (Fargo’s Harve Presnell), and the retired tough as nails P.I. becomes Andy’s mentor.

Richter seems to have two types of characters: the lovable oaf right out of Mayberry and the snarky jerk who’s only out for himself. Fortunately in Andy Barker he plays the former. His “aw shucks” charm goes a long way and the naiveté he brings to the character helps him in all of the ridiculous situations Andy Barker gets into. If Richter is the straight man, Hale is the wild card and the perfect compliment to Richter. Together the two comics seem to be having a great time and possess the kind of on screen chemistry that makes a great comedy duo. The same goes for Lewis, who plays the dutiful wife at home. She and Richter are believable and funny as a married couple. I love Presnell in the role of Staziak, too. He approaches the role like he was in one of the detective classics Andy Barker is sending up. If at times Staziak seems out of touch, or even out of time with the modern world, it adds to the comedy. Ed Asner and Amy Sedaris guest star in the final episode, making it one of the strongest of the series and an indication that the show had potential to carry on.

With its likable, goofy and sweet cast, intelligent scripts and a quick pace full of verbal and visual gags, Andy Barker had all the hallmarks to be a classic series. If memory serves me correctly, NBC promoted the hell out of the premiere, offering the pilot free on iTunes and having it available on their website. For whatever reason the show did not catch on, a great disappointment for those of us who watched it when it aired and rewound our DVRs to catch new jokes during repeated viewings. The sting of that disappointment is finally alleviated thanks to this collection by Shout! Factory.

Included in Adult Swim in a Box are: Space Ghost Coast to Coast, one of Adult Swim’s original hits. In it, the Saturday Morning super hero Space Ghost was re-imagined as a talk show host and the end result was often hilarious. Volume Three, the collection included here, contains 24 extended episodes including appearances by Beck, Rob Zombie and the always unpredictable Andy Dick. The success of Space Ghost in the late ’90s led to several spinoffs, one of which was Aqua Teen Hunger Force. I like Aqua Teen Hunger Force a lot. Despite its limited animation and strange setup (its heroes are an angry milkshake, a box of french fries and a mass of ground meat), I find the writing and performances biting and funny. Volume 2 contains 13 episodes, commentary, deleted scenes and a feature on the creation of the series.

Another one of the “classic” Adult Swim series included in the box set is Sealab 2021. Like Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Sealab 2021 incorporates stock animation footage (from a series called Sealab 2020) and new dialogue written for the old footage. The season 2 set has 13 episodes and several bonus features including commentary on all 13 episodes and a tribute to the late actor Harry Goz, voice of the show’s deranged “Captain Murphy.”

As I said, Adult Swim in a Box also contains several of the new voices in Adult Swim, including Morel Orel, a clever sendup of those stop-motion Christian shows I knew as a kid. Orel is a gullible do-gooder who gets into predicaments like raising the dead. I like the series’ stop-motion animation a great deal, yet I wasn’t always laughing. Mostly I sat watching with a smile of admiration. Metalocalypse is nicely drawn, but it’s not my taste at all. The show follows the misadventures of extreme death metal band Dethklock. I liked the character design and the artwork, but the gratuitous violence felt pointless and the show in general rather unfunny. On the other hand, this box set includes the uncensored Season 2 of the sketch series Robot Chicken. Loose and rapid fire, Robot Chicken throws so many jokes at you that even when one fails completely, there are 20 more right behind it. Robot Chicken is critically loved and has won many awards. This show is a winner and holds up the tradition of Adult Swim.

The bonus of the box is the disc full of Adult Swim pilots. There are six pilots total on this special DVD. The two I thought stood out were Korgoth of Barbaria and Welcome to Eltingville. Adult Swim in a Box contains a great deal of entertainment. The nice thing about this collection is that it’s priced under $70, whereas you could pay over $160 if you were to buy all of these collections individually. For fans of Adult Swim, it is a treasure trove of goodies. For the casual fan, like me, it’s hit and miss.

Adult Swim has also released seasons 1 and 2 of their popular series Xavier Renegade Angel on a separate DVD collection. This series, which uses motion-capture CG animation, is one of the most surreal mindfucks I’ve seen in some time. In it, Xavier, a bird-beaked, blond-haired freak who walks around in a loin cloth and tennis shoes and has a snake for a hand, attempts to be a philosopher out to help people. Instead, he’s more of a bumbling egotist who only makes matters worse in any situation. I hated this show; not once did I even crack a smile. The combination of new agey b.s. and pointless violence (with a dash of bestiality thrown in) really turned me off. But what do I know? The show is a hit, placing in the top 10 of key demographics for late night programming. For the life of me, I don’t know why. Perhaps one of you out there reading can explain the appeal. Mind you, I understand the talent that goes in to making this show and obviously they’re doing something right to garner such popularity, but I am definitely not the intended audience. For those of you who are fans of Xavier, the 20-episode collection is available now.

Most people don’t think much about design. We touch and use hundreds of items in a day without giving a second thought about who made them, or why they look and feel as they do. Fortunately, there are people who give a lot of thought to design, and those people are the subjects of Hustwit’s film. Through in-depth conversations with people like Paola Antonelli, the design curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Chris Bangle of the BMW Group in Munich, Bill Moggridge co-founder IDEO (who designed what may have been the first laptop computer, which he demonstrates), and Jonathan Ive at Apple, Hustwit gets to the heart of creative design and thinking.

Along the way, we learn that the advent of the microchip has changed everything for designers, in that form no longer needs to follow function in many products. The ongoing dilemma of introducing new products in a world that is already buried under mountains of waste is also addressed, along with the idea that perhaps it’s time to enjoy some of the things that we already have, things that may be lurking in our closets, before buying new things. There’s an environmental and social price to pay for the creation of all of these products, and here it is weighed against the need for new things, and the theory of planned obsolescence.

Objectified gives us a look at the creative process that drives industrial design, and the bigger picture thinking that moves it forward. What could have been a dry intellectual treatise on a subject of little interest to most people instead becomes a thought-provoking film about the concepts that shape our physical world. I’ll never look at my toothbrush the same way again.

A man named Michael wakes up in a strange place known to its inhabitants as The Village. He has memories of his past life in New York City, but no idea of how he got to The Village. Everyone there has a number instead of a name, and our hero, played by Jim Caviezel, is referred to as 6. At first glance, The Village appears to be a bright cheerful place, with a few idiosyncrasies. The only television program seems to be a soap opera called The Wonkers, and the only food available comes in the form of wraps filled with various ingredients.

The man in charge of all of this is called 2, and he is played by the wonderful Ian McKellen. 2 appears to be some sort of benevolent monarch, but he is, in fact, a paranoid, scheming dictator, who employs “undercovers” to spy on the populace, and keeps his wife in a drug-induced dream state much of the time. The citizens who present the most danger for 2 are the “dreamers,” because they know that, despite 2’s insistence to the contrary, there is another world beyond The Village. 6 knows there is an outside world. He sees it in his dreams. He remembers living in it. He fights a running battle with 2 to retain his identity, proclaiming loudly that he is not a number.

Little by little, 6 begins to remember what led to his arrival at The Village. He recalls resigning from his job as an analyst who watched people on close circuit cameras and asked too many questions. Characters from his past and present blend together like something out of a (more) trippy Wizard of Oz. Things come to a head in the final moments of the series, but I found the resolution a bit unsatisfying.

I’m not much of a fan of remakes. They’re rarely better than the original, and that’s the case here. That said, The Prisoner would seem like the perfect story to re-imagine. It’s themes of alienation, individuality, freedom, and paranoia have taken on greater importance than ever in the post 9-11 world. The problem is that the new version tries to be too clever by half, resulting in a muddle. The sense of humor that characterized the original is sorely missing. The series is not without its moments, particularly when Ian McKellen is on screen. There is also a fine supporting performance from Lennie James (fans of the tv series Jericho will remember him fondly) as 147, but there aren’t enough of these moments to justify the series’ six-hour length.

This is television we’re talking about though, and everything is relative. When compared with the dross that passes for programming on the broadcast networks, The Prisoner is a home run. Only when held up against some of the finer cable network programming does it come up short.

In the 1930s, Christian missionaries came to Borneo, and were successful in converting many of the island’s tribal people. When the Japanese occupied the island at the start of WW II, they murdered the missionaries and their families, which caused a great deal of anger among the indigenous people of Borneo. That’s why they were only too willing to assist the airmen when they arrived on the island.

By 1945, the tide of the war had turned in the Allies’ favor, and they were re-taking many of the territories that they had lost to the Japanese. The recapture of Borneo, a former British and Dutch colony, was high on their list of priorities. Toward that end, the British sent an eccentric anthropologist named Tom Harrisson to organize a guerilla war to coincide with the coming invasion of the island. Harrisson was only too happy to allow the natives to bring back the practice of headhunting which had been banned at the turn of the century, and the Dayaks were thrilled to resume the practice. Also employing poison blow darts, the Dayaks struck fear into the hearts of the Japanese.

In order to get an airplane onto the island to rescue the American flyers, a landing strip had to be constructed, but the ground was waterlogged, which would have caused any plane that landed to become mired in the mud. Harrisson solved this problem by organizing the Dayaks for the purpose of covering the landing strip with bamboo that would support air traffic. Within two weeks, the evacuation of the Americans began.

The documentary employs testimony from the one surviving airman, Dan Illerich, the Dayaks who protected the Americans, and the Australian commandoes who rescued them. On-location recreations, and archival film footage are also used to good effect. Secrets of the Dead is an intriguing series, and The Airmen and the Headhunters is one of the series’ most interesting episodes.

This program will debut on PBS on November 11. Check you local listings for time and date in your area.

Cleese created the show with his then-wife, actress Connie Booth (who also co-stars). The show follows the exploits of Basil, one of the most cantankerous, put-upon, non-people persons you’d ever meet. If ever there was a man who shouldn’t be interacting with hotel guests, it’s Basil Fawlty. The character was based on a real hotel owner named Donald Sinclair. As the story goes, while the Pythons were on a film shoot in the early ’70s, they stayed at Sinclair’s hotel, only to check out after just one night’s stay. Sinclair was so rude that the actors couldn’t stand him. However, Cleese opted to stay behind and study the man, fascinated by his behavior. When the time came to pitch a series to the BBC, Booth suggested to her husband “What about that hotel owner?” The rest is history.

Rounding out the cast of Fawlty Towers are Prunella Scales, who plays Basil’s wife, Sybil. Sybil is a modern woman, which irks the hell out of Basil, whose values seem rooted in the ’50s. Although he bitches about his wife, Sybil is the boss of this duo. I imagine Cleese could be an intimidating actor to work with because of his height and comedic stature, but Scales is the perfect foil. Booth portrays Polly, the cute waitress of the hotel, although she is often asked to do more than be a waitress. She gets sucked into the shenanigans of Basil and the hotel guests. The remaining main character is Manuel, a waiter played by Andrew Sachs. Manuel is from Barcelona and speaks little to no English. He is generally confused and often bears the brunt of Basil’s frustrations. Not an episode goes by in which Basil isn’t smacking Manuel in the head or about to club him with a heavy object. Guests come and go throughout each episode and there are recurring characters who act as the permanent residents at the Fawlty Towers.

Watching the first season, I was a little disappointed. It felt very rigid and much more like a theater production than a television show. I didn’t laugh nearly as much as I’d anticipated. I found Basil so damn rude and Cleese so immersed in the character that the charm and wit I’ve come to associate with the actor was missing. Not until the first season finale, “The Germans,” in which Basil suffers a blow to the head and deliriously leaves his hospital bed to return to the hotel did I find myself laughing out loud. Going into season two, I expected much of the same. I’m pleased to say that the second season is looser and more fun. I don’t know if it was the years between seasons or just that the actors felt more comfortable in the skins of their characters, but season 2 is much more enjoyable and the actors appear to be having a good time.  At least Cleese is, that’s for sure. By the end of season 2, I was left wanting more and disappointed that after just 12 episodes, Fawlty Towers was no more.

Technically speaking, these remastered episodes look marvelous. The ’70s video is clean and crisp and the film stock used for exterior shots not too grainy. In addition to the vibrant picture quality, every single episode contains commentary by the revered Cleese, who speaks quite fondly of his old show and each of his co-stars. It’s a joy to hear him laughing at jokes that are 30 years old, and to listen to him point out some of the wonderful comic timing of Sachs and Scales. His reflections alone make it worth checking out the show.  Additionally, the third DVD in this collection contains a new interview with Cleese and an exclusive interview with Booth, as well as profiles of the cast and outtakes. There is also a short documentary about the original hotel and the people who knew Donald Sinclair. Fans of the show should be ecstatic about this new collection.

You’ve probably seen that very raw two-minute clip of the Beatles playing “Some Other Guy” at the Cavern in Liverpool in 1962. That clip was shot by a filmmaker by the name of Leslie Woodhead. Twenty-five years later, while Woodhead was making films in Russia, he first became aware of the major impact that Beatlemania had in the Soviet Union. Now Woodhead has made a film that explores the lasting power of the Beatles in the former communist bloc.

The Beatles and their music were banned in the Soviet Union, but that did little to deter the fans of the Liverpool band. In the ’60s, there was a flourishing black market in Beatles music, which was recorded onto x-ray film, creating flexi-discs that were called “ribs” because you could often see the image of someone’s bone structure on the discs. After purchase, the music on these discs was transferred to tape recorders, giving it a longer shelf life. Tribute bands were formed. In St. Petersburg, Kolya Vasin built a “Temple of Peace and Love” to John Lennon. All of this was illegal and carried a high degree of risk.

In the film we meet Vasin and visit his museum. We hear from Sergei Ivanov, Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister, who nervously tells us that he learned English from bootleg Beatles recordings. Russian “rock commentator” Artemy Troitsky provides the context in which these events took place, and we see a number of the tribute bands in performance, for better or worse.

Of course the Beatles were never allowed to play in the Soviet Union, although a wild rumor is recounted that has their plane touching down in Soviet territory when they were on their way to Japan, and the claim is made that they gave an impromptu acoustic performance on the wing of their plane at the military airfield. It’s more of a fantasy than anything else. Rumors aside, it was a very big deal when Paul McCartney brought his band to Moscow’s Red Square in 2004. He was the first member of the Beatles to appear in Russia.

The point of all this is that the Beatles provided a glimpse of hope, a sense of freedom to the younger generation in the Soviet Union, and it was when that generation reached maturity that the “Evil Empire” unraveled. The irony is that billions of Cold War dollars were spent in an effort to bring down the Soviet Union while, according to Troitsky, “I’m sure the impact of all those stupid Cold War institutions has been much, much smaller than the impact of the Beatles.”

A Note on This Week’s Column: I’ve been sidelined by the Dreaded Deadline Doom this week, so there’s no new column, strictly speaking. But as a special treat — all right, to fill the gap in the schedule — I’m presenting here, for the first time, the very first How Bad Can It Be? ever written.

Jeff Giles first approached me about doing a column about a year ago — November 2008. We kicked around some concepts, knocking the premise into shape. To help me get a grip on it, I wrote a bunch of sample columns, including this one, about the then-current season of NBC’s The Biggest Loser. The start date for the column was eventually pushed back to January 2009, leaving this piece basically unpublishable — hopelessly past its sell-by date. And so it has sat on my hard drive until now. Hope you enjoy this peek behind the curtain — the Secret Origin of HBCIB?, if you will.

As this was to have been the inaugural column, it begins with a statement of purpose — one I find worth revisiting now and then…

I will not cop to charges of snobbery; I find my pop-culture thrills wherever I can. I freely admit, though, that I’m selective. Any consumer of media has to be, I think. There are only so many hours in a day, and so much to fill them with. It’s not so much that I’m actively avoiding anything; it’s just that there’s so much good stuff out there that I’ve not yet experienced — Infinite Jest, “Trout Mask Replica,” Kurosawa’s Rashomon — that I’ve got to be choosy with the little time I have above ground. And because I write about media from the perspective of an enthusiast, rather than a critic, I’m not obliged to watch or read and listen to anything in which I would otherwise have no interest.

In practice, that means gravitating towards a comfort zone. It’s a big zone, as these things go — I’m a pretty well-rounded guy — but in the great spectrum of mass media, it’s a relatively narrow bandwidth. Now, I can and do often enjoy myself when I venture out of that zone; but I always do so with mingled feelings of hope and dread. Part of me wonders, “Am I going to hate myself for watching this? Will I wish I could have this hour back?” And another part of me thinks, “Hey, you never know. This could be a keeper. And really, after all — how bad can it be?”

This column aims to answer that question.

So you can see why it was with some fear and trembling that I tuned in the new season of The Biggest Loser (Tuesdays, NBC). The show is basically a Survivor-style competition; each season, a group of morbidly obese contestants is whisked off to a ludicrously lavish “ranch,” where they are divided into two teams. Each team is assigned a personal trainer, and through a regime of diet and exercise they work to trim down. Each week, there’s a weigh-in, and one contestant is eliminated. The eventual winner — the “biggest loser” — is the contestant who loses the highest percentage of body weight over the course of the program, and he or she is rewarded, as is usual, with a cash prize and an assortment of consumer goods. So far, so Mark Burnett.

What makes The Biggest Loser so car-crash fascinating is the simmering brew of emotional issues and class politics bubbling under the surface. These people aren’t just fame-whores, or even contestants playing a game — they are sick people who are clutching for a chance to get well. Received wisdom holds that you can never be too rich or too thin, and The Biggest Loser promises to deliver on both aspirations — but thinness itself is rapidly becoming a class aspiration. As Greg Critser points out in his book Fat Land (a critical text for understanding the obesity crisis), government subsidies and agribusiness consolidations have overturned historical precedent; in 21st Century America, a diet of pre-prepared, calorie-dense foods is actually cheaper and more readily-available than one of traditional staples. And so obesity becomes a socio-economic issue, with the poor gorging on sweetmeats that would astonish Henry VIII, while the rich pay big money to eat like peasants.

The emotional aspects are even gnarlier. This season, The Biggest Loser has rejiggered its formula; instead of individual contestants, we get overweight family units. The two starting teams consist of four husband-wife couples versus four parent-child pairs. I’m having a hard time imagining this is going to end well for any of them. One fat person on his own is a medical issue; two fat people in a family relationship are a stew of guilt, recrimination, and enablement. Put ‘em in a high-pressure environment, under the ever-watchful eye of the camera — that’s a recipe for entertaining television! (Or possibly manslaughter.)

Struggling with all this, I sit down to watch, and we meet the trainers and the families, most of whom have been supplied, through the magic of editing, with some sort of relatable backstory. Trainer Bob is working with the couples; he looks a little like the guy from The Soup, but with a three-day beard. Of the two younger couples, the Orange team are relative newlyweds who want to get their weight under control before they start having kids, while the Brown team seem mostly just to want to win the game; they’re clearly being set up as the villains. The Red team is a middle-aged couple who’ve left their three kids — including an autistic eight-year old — in the care of relatives, while they ship off to the fat farm. Somehow, I’m not as sympathetic towards them as I think I’m supposed to be. Trainer Bob seems an amiable doofus, like Brad Pitt in Burn After Reading, until he starts snarling at his charges and calling them “bitch” while demanding push-ups in psychotic-gym-teacher fashion.

The parent-child teams are in the care of trainer Jillian. She’s got father-son cab drivers who come on like bit players from Gone Baby Gone; two sets of miserable twentysomething doormat daughters stuck living with their miserable overbearing moms; and a weepy girl who idolizes her father, a cop, who is so debilitatingly huge that he requires an oxygen tank about five minutes into the episode. Jillian is sexy ugly in a way vaguely reminiscent of Sandra Bernhard, and shows her deep emotional attachment to her team by screaming insults at them and smacking them upside the head.

The workout segments are the cheap thrill of the show; we get the sadistic spectacle of a toned, sharp-tongued quasi-dominatrix tormenting a pack of fatsos — for their own good! The rest of it, though, seems constructed primarily as a cross-marketing platform. We get a few perfunctory cooking tips, this week featuring chef Rocco DiSpirito, who of course has a TV show of his own; he briefly addresses the idea that healthy food must perforce be expensive, a throwaway moment that is as close as the show ever comes to addressing the class issues of obesity. And there’s relentless shilling for sponsor products, done with a blatancy not seen since the early days of TV, when Jack Benny would interrupt his own show to light up a Lucky.

The thing is, the damn show is two hours long, and even with the slack pacing, there’s a lot of time to fill and a lot of fake tension to build. And so the contestants are roped into idiotically contrived side bets and games. These segments are hosted by soap opera actress Alison Sweeney, smirking as she puts the teams through activities of dubious therapeutic value and questionable reward.

This week there’s a degrading debacle involving huge, color-coded Slip ‘n’ Slides, with the prize being a phone call home; for people struggling with a health issue related to their family dynamics, you can see where that may be counterproductive. The winner is the wife on the Orange team — that’s the couple getting ready to start a family, remember — and when she breaks down in tears while talking to her father, it’s hard not to imagine an unwholesome backstory. (But then, I have a vivid imagination.)

Then it’s back to more workouts, more yelling, more close-ups of sweaty fat people. My queasiness about The Biggest Loser, I think, reflects my ambivalence about the morbidly obese in general — an ambivalence heightened by the fact that I’m a big fat slob myself. But while I could surely stand to drop fifty pounds or so, I can still manage a five-mile hike without breathing hard, to say nothing of getting around the grocery store unaided. When I see folks at the market, too fat for the basic function of walking, tooling around in their electric carts, the thought occurs unbidden: You’ve crippled yourself, and it didn’t have to be like this. No one did this to you — you did it to yourself. In much the same way, you’re rooting for the contestants on The Biggest Loser, but watching them moan and perspire and weep, you can’t help thinking that, y’know, they brought this all on themselves.

But enough uncomfortable reflection: It’s off to the weigh-in, padded out over three (!) commercial breaks with fish-faced reaction shots and booming tympani. I’m unprepared for how much math is involved in this show. Immunity and the possibility of elimination are calculated on the total weight lost per team versus total starting weight; there’s also an over-under on the side wager, which automatically puts that team up for elimination. I wish I had a slide rule at this point. In the end, a bunch of people don’t do so good. Weepy Girl and Officer Porky have made a foolish wager early on, and lose badly; when all is said and done, though, the survivors vote to send the Car Talk guys home. Their reaction (paraphrased): “Meh, fuckit.” My reaction: roughly the same.

So how bad is it? Pretty bad. The ugly emotional explosions never arrive, which is a pity; they would have been a distraction from the deep and uncomfortable contradictions at the heart of the show. On the one hand, it The Biggest Loser Families wants to be empowering and heartwarming; on the other, it wants to serve up the red meat of entertainment — a suspenseful game, colorful challenges, and an endlessly-replayed clip of an old fat man falling off a treadmill.

And so the show constantly undercuts itself. Moments of naked calculation and strategizing — like the Brown team throwing a game on purpose because they “don’t want to be seen as a threat” — bounce up against tears and hugs played out against soaring strings; but the pathos ultimately feels unearned. When the Red team calls home and their autistic son — who seldom expresses emotion — tells them he loves and misses them, it actually makes them seem less sympathetic; after all, the reason they’re separated from him in the first place is because they’re off chasing cash prizes and a new RV.

Again and again, the games aspect is at odds with the goal of actually getting well — beginning with the fact that the players who are losing weight most slowly, who obviously would benefit most from staying in the program, are the very ones who get booted out. Jillian gets a lot of great reaction shots, looking convincingly disgusted at the way the producers contrive to set the contestants at each other’s throats; I think I know how she feels. There’s an ugly cynicism at the heart of The Biggest Loser franchise, in how it tries to have it both ways — purporting to help its contestants while simultaneously inviting the viewers at home to laugh at the fatties.

Bottom line: Watch at your own risk. It’s enjoyable enough, in a train-wreck kind of way, but if you’ve got a single spark of decency in your soul, you’ll hate yourself in the morning.

If you haven’t got a single spark of decency in your soul, of course, you can probably get your own development deal with NBC, if you hurry.

Blood Ties stars Christina Cox as Vicki Nelson, a former cop turned private investigator. Her partner is a hunky, ageless vampire named Henry Fitzroy (Kyle Schmid). The two of them are hired to solve crimes that are out of the ordinary (demons, cat people, etc) and sometimes get brought in by Vicki’s old police partner and lover, Mike Celluci (Dylan Neal). Although all three are “friends,” there are lingering feelings between Mike and Vicki, feelings that make Henry a bit jealous. Likewise, Mike isn’t too sure how he feels about his ex hanging out with a bloodsucking bo-hunk. This strange romantic triangle makes for some light moments in between the X-Files-esque cases that form the basis for the plots of Blood Ties.

Nelson is a no-nonsense, hard nosed detective; she’s not afraid of anything. It’s this quality in her that makes her attractive to both men. Of the two, she seems more drawn to Henry and seems open to the idea of living forever. However, Henry knows that should he give her the gift of eternal life, their love will evaporate; he will have cursed Vicki into watching her friends and family die. This makes Henry one of the most sensitive vampires I’ve seen since Brat Pitt bared his fangs in Interview with a Vampire (this show did come out long before Twilight and The Vampire Diaries). Henry is no pushover and is quite protective of Vicki, as is Mike. The tough guy detective draws many stares and places his career in jeopardy by constantly going to Vicki for help. Some begin to question his sanity as he lets slip his belief in the supernatural.

Considering the limitations of working on a basic cable budget, Blood Ties is able to create plenty of atmosphere and just enough spookiness to make it worth watching on, say, a Sunday afternoon when you’re curled on the couch with a bag of chips and a Coke. Cox and Neal have nice chemistry and a playfulness that makes them a pleasure to watch. And Schmid holds back on the vampire angst and gives Henry a friendliness that you don’t often associate with vampire stories. The writing is slick and the production is pretty smooth while the direction and editing is seamless. While the music can get a little clunky, this is a minor distraction in an otherwise decent series.

Unlike so many productions that shoot in Canada an try to pass it off as some locale in the U.S., Blood Ties embraces its setting and puts the landscape to good use. Sure, the plots can be a little predictable, pulling ideas from previous supernatural shows and the horror classics of yesteryear, but the key to this show’s success is in the characters and the actors portraying them. All three leads are likable enough that Blood Ties deserves at least a rental consideration the next time you’re looking for something to watch on a weekend afternoon.