It's Amazon Pilot Season

Periodically, the good folks at Amazon.com present a selection of new TV series developed by people like you and me (well, me anyway; your fantasy life is your own) at Amazon Studios for Amazon customers to rate and review.  I want to recommend one particular program currently up for audience review, Cocked.

Brian Dennehy plays the family patriarch and gun business founder Wade Paxson.  Jason Lee plays the elder son, heir apparent and perennial ne're-do-well Grady.  Sam Trammell plays his younger brother Richard, who has made a life and career outside the family business and industry.

Wade Paxson has built a solid business catering to the traditional "Fudd" segment of the gun buying market; rifles and shotguns for hunting and target shooters.  Grady Paxson has spent all the family's available cash designing and manufacturing a new product line for the company, a "semi-automatic revolver".  Revealing further depth to the Paxson family structure, Wade's brother Rayburn has his own gun company, and apparently has Wade's shop thoroughly penetrated with his own people, as he also brings a "semi-auto revolver" to market - at considerably less cost.  Desperate to save the company he spent his life building, Wade begs (and otherwise coerces) his younger son to help stave off the pending disaster.  High-larity, as they say, not to mention drama and more than a little comedy, follows.

Cocked airs most of the usual memes and catch phrases anyone familiar with guns (or just gun debates) is familiar with - but does so in a reasonably neutral fashion, and occasionally quite indirectly.  As example, the commonplace pro gun ownership expression "when seconds count, a cop is only minutes away" isn't spoken in dialogue, but following a violent attack on Richard, the responding cop notes there isn't much he can do to catch the attacker or prevent another attack.  In another scene, Richard's wife accuses the family of "selling fear", to which Wade responds that guns are "just tools".  In none of this drama does anyone come off as morally superior, nor does anyone get spared from a sometimes too-revealing look.

I hope Amazon produces this series, and you can help convince Jeff Bezos and the boys and girls at Amazon Studios to do just that.  Follow the link above, watch the pilot episode, then click on the little blue Find out more link, and Take the survey.  You don't have to be an Amazon Prime member, but I expect no one there would outright object if you did join up.  Also, the show is rated TV-MA because, titties, violence and grown people doing some fairly tedious stupid behavior in somewhat explicit fashion.  Nothing too outrageous (which may be more revealing of my standards than anything else), but expect to have to field some awkward questions from the younger set if you let them watch with you.

Finally, there are 12 other pilot shows up for audience review at Amazon right now; I also recommend Mad Dogs and The Man in the High Castle as being worth your interest, pretty much in that order of preference too (tastes vary; get your own).  There are some kid-oriented shows too, but mine are raising there own kids these days, so I don't have to develop an opinion you would want to read about any of that category of programming.

No Amazonians or actual pilots were harmed in the production of this post.

Political Strategy, In My Briefs

Louis Gohmert is my Member of Congress, so I'm not just some less-than-grunteled citizen here.  Let me further say that I support his declared intent to seek the Speakership of the House of Representatives (and as a general political principle, the intent of others to change the leadership - and thereby the direction - of the Republican Party in Congress, and presumably overall, as well).

That said, there is a cautionary aspect to this tale.

The Democrat nominee for Speaker is Nancy Pelosi.  I will not be at all shocked to click over to Drudge one morning soon and read that she is the Speaker-elect for the 114th Congress, and myriad stories quoting the RNC leadership loudly blaming "divisive insurgents within the party" (read: people opposed to their continued choke hold on control of the Republican Party) for that result.

I do hope Louis and the rest have given a good deal of preparatory effort to organizing their little putsch, as those who currently run the RNC are demonstrably willing to arrange a quiet little deal with the DNC just in the ordinary course of events; how much more likely are they to do so rather than give up control of the RNC entirely?

I'm not predicting this outcome, I just won't be at all surprised should it occur.  A profound change in political organization generally has been a building social pressure in the United States for many years now.  History documents just how infrequently that sort of shift occurs without similar disruption of domestic social structures as well.  Mostly, and fortunately, those societal and political changes occur in a generally peaceful manner; here's hoping that trend continues whoever the next Speaker of the House should be.