Monsters of Television

“I’ve never, ever heard smooth jams.”

“Please come to my fantasy island, now with less socialism.”

Can we go ahead and call this show Morgan already?

He’s all that’s left for me on this show, the only one that has any obstacles or intrigue. Sure, everyone’s story in this episode was vapid and trite but Morgan’s stands out because there exists at least a little bit of tension. Besides, I think Chuck and Sarah might work better as secondary characters.

Alas, the name of the show is Chuck so we watch these two idiots work a flimsy thread and carry it out to the its illogical end. I know I’ve said this several times before but I think I’m actually going to have to listen to myself this time: this show doesn’t want to be what it was. It used to be a spy show about a guy that tries to reconcile his stagnent yet contented home life with a fantastical, dangerous, and exciting one that abandons his family. Season 4 is far, far away from the life of intrigue and struggle (such that it was in the balance with the goofy and the cartoonish). Chuck this season would rather be a broad comedy burdened with an hour-long format and this mythology people seem to keep coming back for. It’s a romantic romp with this spy thread to push it along. Ladies and gentlemen, no episode this season has screamed it out loud more: the ‘shippers have won. And maybe it’s time I accepted that there’s nothing wrong with that.

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“We’ve created a monster.”

Don Draper Confidantes Unite!

How many times are they going to beat into us that Betty has the mind of a child? Short of giving her a rattle and a diaper, I’m not sure how much more obvious they make it. It seems almost like the only development we get on her anymore is just how childish she can be. Even though she’s graduated to bitchy high school cheerleader in this episode, we usually get no breakthroughs, no progress, no plot points with her except at the end of this episode but it’s only to get back at her daughter in some sick competition for a creep show.

You’re totally picturing January Jones in a diaper, aren’t you?

While Betty showed off more of her juvenile side, Don showed what makes him special but it’s so far out that not even his own partners can see what he did. To be fair, though, radical moves don’t look great to partners when the walls are caving in. You know who gets it though, 100%? Of course Peggy does! It was partly her idea!

Also: I want to be able to say “get me my shoes” and have people worried that I’m leaving the company.

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“Jenny-Sarah, how did you end up with such a goofball?”

It’s hard to be the only character working this season.

Dear People of Chuck:

What are you doing? I know that you’ve lost some writers, some good (Rosenbaum), some mediocre but affable (Adler), and that you’re entering this season with a new look for a story, but it’s like you’re running scared and low on inspiration.

Season 3 offered a lot of depth in character, given the duality Chuck has to suffer with the Intersect, not only losing his humanity to his career but also his sanity to his government-sanctioned affliction. Sarah wrestled with her identity as it’s defined by Chuck’s gaze (has she ever had her own identity?) and Casey found out he has a daughter. How is it, with all these interesting arcs, that Morgan is the only developing character left in the series?

I get the pressure you must be under, trying to limp through this season, hoping that the talent remaining can carry you through Four and make a go of Five (though, with multiple projects running at the same time, you might be hoping for some fall out to regain focus). I also understand that Three started just as weak (“vs The Three Words” and “vs Operation Awesome” almost turned me off the series) but came around in the middle just before the mini-season at the end (except for “vs The Honeymooners,” aka the “Stranger in a Strange Land” of Chuck). So maybe I’m being reactionary and I need to wait it out for a couple more weeks before making accusations. But, for right now, I have to tell you:

This season suh-hucks.

This episode is indicative of that. It leans on season three like a crutch and does nothing with it. The only person that seems to be working at all in this series anymore is Josh Grimes. And even the Buy More sequences are weak sauce. The Chuck and Sarah stuff, though only three episodes in, is already getting repetitive. But, the worst part about this season so far: there aren’t any stakes. Because you squashed any attempt at suspense in the first episode. So why do we care?

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“I’m not the solution to your problems. I’m another problem.”

Dude’s preaching.

I feel like every week I talk about how we’re one step closer to the inevitable downfall of Don Draper, that we are on the brink of black-hole levels of disaster, the entirety of his social and professional network sucked into the abyss left behind by his mighty supernova. I’m chasing beams of light I think I see from the not-too-distant explosion, forecasting to you, the reader, what has to be around the corner. It just has to be.

Noel covered Mad Men the week “Waldorf Stories” aired and pointed out that things that happen to Don are typically covered in plaster, the monumental errors of his ways typically forgotten, almost sit-com style, until they boil over later if they emerge at all. Last week’s episode featured a panic the level of which we’ve never seen Don suffer in the series. He was irrational and impulsive to a destructive level. But, in the end, it was all okay, his behind covered with the loss of (what turns out to be) a precious account. Though this is an obvious part of the series, I’m starting to become jaded to the fact that we might always be on the brink of Don’s collapse. He is constantly a dying star that finds new ways to slowly burn out while finding new fuels to burn off. The loss of Lucky Strike is a new catalyst for disaster, a new reason for him to make some bad decisions, to forget why he’s trying to rise from the wreckage, and to surrender to his overwhelming self-destruction.

What a weird thing to keep us watching, waiting for the catastrophic and wondrous implosion our protagonist. With the season coming to a close, you have to feel like those beams of light can’t be travelling from too far away now, that we have to see the bang soon. And God help us if it starts from Megan.

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“I think that deserves a consequence.”

Joel does his best Angelus impression.

This is the story of boy meets girl. The boy, Mike, a forklift operator in the shoe warehouse, is tightly integrated with the “scene” in the Bay Area despite his blue collar appearance. By day, he hauls pallets of shoes but by night he is the person who makes sure to walk the velvet rope and show people stuck outside that he’s getting in easily. The girl, Sarah Braverman, a single mother trying to connect with her daughter, has a checkered past when it comes to men and suffers a bipolar sense of confidence, brimming with it at times and then watching it needlessly empty out of her at others.

This is a story of boy meets girl. But you should know up front: this will probably end in some sort of horrible disaster.

While non-Braverman men deal with the Lorelai Effect, Julia actually has an honest-to-space-baby storyline (that paints her like a thick-headed jackass) while Crosby has his baby-daddy issues and Adam has adult onset impatience when it comes to his autistic son comes to a head.

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“Really? Because I overheard you today and you sounded like a bad episode of Saved by the Bell which is redundant.”

Clearly, dirty old man Math told Lux cleavage was necessary for JV basketball.

This week’s episode of Life Unexpected is brought to you by Lux’s boobs.

A lot of scoop necks and lean-and-squeezes for Lux as she navigates what is, essentially, an after-school special about cheating. Last season, I noted that one of the themes to this series is taking family sit-com tropes and deconstructing them and recasting the roles to accomodate the childish guardians and the sage adolescent. What they did this week was create a story comparing cheating to the slippery slope usually reserved for drug abuse and then toss in a red-herring-as-backdoor-escape so that Lux comes out of it smelling like a rose.

Sorry if I spoiled it for you, in case you thought Lux’s new penchant for being a Cheater McCheaterson was going to be the catalyst for her Don-Draper-like downfall.

Meanwhile, a lot of ridiculous things happen to the parents, too, including a celebrity golf tournament (lots of celebrity events in Portland despite a dearth of actual celebrities), some wacky trust issues, and a loaf of pot-infused banana bread.

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“Rumor has it that you’re pregnant. Is there room in that womb for two?”

Sarah, once again, caters to the male fantasy. And that’s okay.

I toyed with the idea of forgoing the entire plot of the show in order to tie in Bronson Pinchot’s all-too-short appearance in this episode to the major threads of the series. Like that Pinchot was reprising his role as Balki and that he was a Greek spy, his cover being a rural farm boy from Mypos. That was, in fact, the last surviving member of the Ring and a major player in the Russian syndicate Chuck is trying to topple. The knowing look from him being more than just blip of a homoerotic gaze. Oh, it was going to be grand.

Instead, I’m actually going to talk about the show and how, though some things change, the quality of the threads are still the same. Like how the most interesting is still Casey and Morgan. And how Chuck and Sarah are dangerously close to becoming annoying sit-commie blandness. And how the reintroduction of Jeffster will reinstitute the Buy More as what we all feared: the unrelated comic punchline to the series.

That being said, I’m glad to see those boys back, even after their Halo:Reach escapades. Read more »

“You will not live in between.”

I don’t think I even know where to really start. There’s just so much.

While my favorite episode of the season is still “The Suitcase” (with “The Rejected” being a close second) a ton happened in this episode. Myles McNutt said he tried to keep his review as concise as possible by only focusing on Pete and Joan in this episode. Honestly, I don’t think I have he strength to be so restrained. I mean, I feel like this episode is just as much about the people who are in it as the one person who is noticeably, painfully, perplexingly absent.

But I’m going to try to not effuse too much.

From the title you can guess that there is a lot of begging in this episode: begging for life, begging for mercy, begging for discretion. This week is a scare for what Don has coming and he is not ready. The collapse of Don’s life is foreshadowed here, if for anything because he’s become more careless about his secret identity.

Yeah, I just linked to opening to the old Jerry O’Connell series My Secret Identity. If I have it stuck in my head, you should, too.

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“That’s why they call me the Bart Simpson of Scranton.”

Do it, Dwight. Do it.

Jerry Seinfeld gave an interview to Time where he mentioned a few episodes he wished he’d done before the end, including an all-Claymation episode and an episode featuring all the secondary characters with the main character story happening in the background. It appears to me that The Office, hearing the death knell with the exit of Steve Carrel (even if BJ Novak just got a 2-year extension), is ready to go full-steam ahead on a train already barreling out of control from its roots, no regrets in the caboose. The cold open to season 7 is a lip-synched, fourth-wall-breaking (although the genre lends to fourth-wall-breaking anyway) sequence with all the people from Scranton branch involved in a choreographed single-take through the office.

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“It was real.”

Unjustifiably inappropriate

This week’s episode of Life Unexpected decided it was time to show the lighter side of an SVU episode. It’s not always about locking underaged girls in a basement or using a position of authority to permanently scar or continually reopen gaping emotional wounds in a fragile young girl. It has to start somewhere cuddly and sometimes it begins with a simple car ride with a stranger to an undisclosed location only to find out said stranger is in charge of all kinds of little girls. And then he takes his shirt off. At school. In a classroom walled with glass. Surrounded by your daughters.

The episode itself wasn’t all about pervy Mr Daniels and his “I wish I knew how to quit you” attitude towards Lux. The episode in general is about failure. Cate is a failure after being fired from the show that had her name in the title. Baze is a failure because he hasn’t chased his heretofore unspoken desires to be a financial advisor (what?). Jamie is a failure because Portland is no place for minorities so it’s time to write him out of the show. Seriously. The guy was unceremoniously written out of at least this episode by announcing he’s too poor. And I don’t see anyone else on the show that doesn’t have skin that could be described as either milky or pasty (even poor Natasha was flung far, far away from our oddly-named cast).

But, because if there’s a theme to this series it’s that we follow family sit-com tropes, not everyone is a failure for very long. No, the moral of this story: if you can’t win, settle. Also, Lux is a cheater.

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