Monsters of Television

“So if we’re going to figure out what’s going on now, we have to figure out what happened back then.”

I’ve already seen the episodes that follow this one, up through, as of this writing, “Faith.” While I was watching, I was tweeting little bits about my enjoyment (and I really love this run of episodes as you’ll see), and regular commenter on this First Watch, Charlotte Howell, noted that this run of episodes is where she no longer needed convincing about staying with the show. I was pretty sold after “The Phantom Traveler,” but “Home,” “Asylum,” and “Scarecrow” have me fully committed to Supernatural. In that spirit, each one gets its own write-up, starting with “Home.”

Which starts off this: Damn. Just damn. Read more »

“Every legend has a source, a place where it all began.”

“Sometimes bad things just happen.”

This post was inspired by the episodes “Bloody Mary,” “Skin,” “Hook Man,” and “Bugs” found on disc 2 of the first season DVD set.

So instead of doing a blow-by-blow of each episode on the second disc of Supernatural season 1, I’m going to do a sum-up post since my notes on each episode tended to be roughly the same due to the trends present in each of the episodes. I’ll try not to make a huge habit of doing this kind of a post since I think there’s some value in addressing each episode individually, or, at the most, paired, but I make no promises. (It’s also Christmas, so I figure one long entry may be a nice break from dealing with whatever you happen to be dealing with today, be it family or boredom or both!)

In any event, at this point in the season, I think I can address one of its big central premises: myths happening in every day life and most of us simply aren’t aware of it. More importantly though is that these myths aren’t occurring in big cities. Despite the claims of Toledo and St. Louis, we’re clearly in the suburbs of those cities, so how is it that the urban myth is now a suburban one? Read more »

“Was it good? Ummmmmmmmmmmmmm.”

According to IMDb, this is actually the ninth episode of Perfect Couples. Is the pilot that horrible that NBC needed to show the ninth episode instead? That cannot bode well. And, in fact, it did not bode well.

Perfect Couples is perfectly horrible in every horrible way. I mean it. If the ninth episode is this bad, I do not even want to think about how bad the pilot must be. Consider yourselves warned.

I mean, do you need to be warned? It’s not like you were going to watch it anyway. I mean, American Idol is on at the same time. And you know I think something is bad when I would rather watch American Idol. Read more »

Figures the very next episode would go and poke a hole in my emphasis on “the local” argument. But I’m okay with that because “Phantom Traveler” is terrific episode that deals well with a sense of a place and applying the horror genre within it, especially in a setting that doesn’t often get horror applied to it: airplanes.

Airplanes, and airports in general, are anxiety-filled places. There’s people rushing to make a flight, people nervous about flying, people anxious about getting felt up by the TSA (or looking forward to it), and then there’s just the massive amounts of waiting that happens at airports that can be anxiety-inducing in other ways (“Can I take a nap? What if I sleep through my connection?” “Why is a single beer $12?”).

Read more »

“Ma’am, I live in a world of rules.”

Death penalty stories are inherently manipulative. The stakes are clearly and easily defined, and since our protagonists are always defending an “innocent person”, we’re quickly caught up in their story. Said death row inmate will also have an estranged family member that our protagonists will convince to see their relative one more time. Pile on the ticking clock of a last-minute appeal, both legal and emotional, and you might as well just go ahead and toss us, the audience, into an emotional pressure cooker.

And it’s surely to the The Good Wife‘s credit then that while I was aware of its shameless deployment of the death penalty tropes that I didn’t really care that I was being manipulated (well, okay, twice I got a little annoyed). The episode is tightly constructed, suspenseful, and emotional, and it’s a real treat to get this before the winter hiatus settles in. Read more »

“So why do I feel outside of awesome looking in?”

The problem with “False Positive” is one of story perspective. While I appreciate it when the show neatly divides the episode into segments (it makes note taking  great deal easier), it also calls attention to when a character is given less attention. And in this episode, as is often the case, it’s Ted that gets the short end of the narrative stick.

Now, I’m as tired of writing about this as you are of reading it, but I’m going to give the show the benefit of the doubt that the emotional and symbolic heft that the episode sets up but then spectacularly fails to pay off for Ted will eventually circle back to us later in the season. Because this is his story, for better for worse. In this case, it’s the story of how Ted fixed everyone else’s life without reflecting that he needed to fix his own. Read more »

“Man, I hate camping.”

You get a twofer this week since I’m feeling generous. And because what I could say about one episode I could pretty easily say about the other, so it just made sense to combine the two into one post. This isn’t a bad thing, either. Both episodes reflect what I can only assume is the template for most of the upcoming episodes, and it’s a template I’m perfectly happy with. Read more »

“Sad quick Christmas song.”

I will say this up front so there will be no confusion: I was not looking forward to this episode of Community.

I have nothing against Rankin/Bass. I have nothing against puppets. I have nothing against stop-motion animation. In fact, I love all three of these things a great deal (well, I don’t love Rankin/Bass, but I do love puppets and stop-motion). But when I heard Community was doing a homage to Rankin/Bass Christmas specials, I immediately became a little queasy. I avoided as much in the way of reading and seeing anything about it as I could.

It was the equivalent, in my mind, of Glee doing episodes centered around one singer/performer: it was too much excessive pop culture humor that unanchors the show from its reality (well, Glee isn’t nearly as narratively consistent as Community, so this comparison is a mite unfair). As a result, I came to dread the day when this episode would air.

Am I still dreading it? Is this the episode of Community that will be the asterisk in my “Best series ever!” list (instead of “Basic Rocket Science”)? Or did it win me over with whimsy and commitment to its premise…? Read more »

“Ted, let me show you my harpoon collection.”

“The Mermaid Theory” is not a bad episode, but it’s not particularly great either. If anything, it’s a lazily funny episode of HIMYM, which seems to a trend the show keeps falling into (“Glitter”, “Baby Talk”) this season. The show has ideas, but they never really reach hilarious or emotionally strong heights that the show used to be able to achieve without a hiccup.

If anything, the episode’s three-plot structure only makes clear the its failings and its strengths. Read more »

Timothy Yenter alerted me to this article from the New York Times reviewing ABC’s Castle. While Timothy sums up what should be the general response to this article well, (“Nothing interesting to say about artifice. Random, unhelpful asides. Disdainful tone”) I felt compelled to chime in with something a bit more than a tweet.

I don’t review Castle here on the blog because I’ve never been happy with anything I’ve ever written about it. It’s not that that I have nothing to say about it, it’s just I don’t find anything I write particularly interesting. I know that Matt also watches it, but he doesn’t write about because, and I think this is correct, he likes enjoying the show on a purely non-critical level.

But this article isn’t just about defending Castle (and it’s worth defending), it’s about demanding smart writing about television, and not the wildly dismissive, bordering on elitist, dreck that the Times has passed off as television criticism. Read more »