Monsters of Television

“I’m one of the Steppenwolf Wives!”

I’m not going to get into a big navel gazing post about Community‘s role in the television landscape, what it means, what we’ll lose, how I’ve missed it. There’ll be some links at the end that tackle those issues.

Instead, let’s just talk about how nice this episode is. Because it is nice. It’s the kind of episode that I tend to enjoy more than the high-concept ones, one with a well-constructed core and a nice build to a great ending.
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“I don’t have to prove anything. Or, if I have to, I don’t want to.“

There seemed to be a good bit going on in this episode, but this could’ve been my sinuses/cold from a couple of weeks ago trying to stage a comeback influencing my perception of things. Said blahness is still trying to worm its way in today, so this will be a bit briefer than usual, even though there’s lots of good stuff happening in the episode. I’ll direct you to a couple of links at the end of the post for you to read to make up for it.

So, after the jump, I’ll address the two things that I really latched onto in the episode, which were the resolution of the Caitlin arc and Cary’s on-going struggles in the SA’s office. Read more »

“You’re truly running circles around me. How will I cope?“

It’s as if the show is reading my reviews and then writing to address my problems with the show, and that the episodes haven’t been done for weeks or months in advance!

“Coldhearted” executes a serviceable episode that shows how generally entertaining the show can be when it narrows its focus and tells a straight-forward story. While I would’ve preferred that focus on someone other than Kid Flash, probably my least favorite of the characters, the character is written strongly enough that he can carry the episode on his own, even if he doesn’t learn too much, or that we don’t learn much about him (except that his favorite breakfast is, amusingly, “heaps of everything”). Read more »

“Your will is the core my very being.“

This episode concludes what is essentially an hour-long premiere (which is how it aired as a tease late last year). As is often the case with two-parters, the second half is a more enjoyable time since there’s less need for setting everything up. It is, however, to the show’s benefit that the first part ended not only with a fine set piece, but a clear path forward to the next part, something I feel shows don’t always achieve.

But I feel that this episode is also stronger since it provides a nice and compelling surprise by the episode’s end, one that I genuinely was not expecting the show to do, but found it delightful (and sad, of course). And the episode, like the one before, also sets up the on-going concern of what to do with a problem like Razer, someone who doesn’t necessarily seem irredeemable, and what that rehabilitation process may look like is fairly promising. Read more »

I didn’t do a post about the pilot episode of Awake because, well, it had plenty of folks singing its praises, and I was also more interested in what the show’s second episode was going to be. (And because, months ago, I thought Nick and I had decided he was going to handle it, but whatever! Slacker.)

I wanted to wait for the second episode because Awake is a show that is juggling a lot of balls (all of which are actually very compatible in my mind), and how the show manages to keep those balls in the air is what will determine its success, not how well subsequent episodes live up to the pilot. This is also connected to the idea that Awake simply isn’t sustainable as a television program, an idea that was widely circulated by TV critics who had seen the initial round of episodes (4 of them, I believe.).

Even after the first episode, and after seeing this one, I felt that Awake was sustainable just as it is. But then “The Little Guy” has to go and do something idiotic. Truly idiotic. Unnecessarily idiotic. And while I don’t think it’ll kill the show, it’ll certainly detract from what the show is ultimately about. Read more »

“Nature abhors a vacuum.“

Are we still doing place setting? “After The Fall” feels very much like we’re still organizing the chairs on the deck before we set sail for the concluding episodes of the season. It’s not that “After The Fall” is a bad episode, but it’s just also kind of there, an episode that doesn’t feel completely essential apart from a few specific beats.

But thank goodness for those specific beats as they helped salvaged what might’ve been a truly lackluster episode. Between the (sadly) unengaging case and the fact that Will’s sisters, while amusing and helped fill in Will’s life a bit, didn’t feel themselves filled in.  Read more »

“Billy Batson has the courage of…BILLY BATSON!“

As you may know, I have a pretty checkered history with Young Justice. I find its lack of perspective create a show that is overly generic, and when the show attempts to earn emotional moments, it cannot execute those moments very well (this episode is really no exception to the second point). As with “Targets” before, I rather liked “Misplaced,” but I’ve come to distrust my reaction to episode I like as I’m sure that I’ll get something truly horrible in a week or two.

But before allow myself to get too bogged down in dreading whatever may happen next, let’s talk about why I liked the episode. Read more »

“Spent the rest of his long life making sure his ring was charged.”

I’m not a big Green Lantern fan. All-powerful rings, like all-powerful aliens from Krypton, mean big cosmic villains that steadily have to be one-upped to maintain stakes and threats to the heroes. On the upside for Green Lanterns, their rings run out of energy, meaning they have complete the mission in a set time frame.

But I’m not so much a non-fan that Green Lantern: The Animated Series is a non-starter for me. In fact, the episode is pretty solid, apart from the animation, which is more a matter of personal taste. The story has a nice balance of exposition, humor, adventure, and the action sequences are well-choreographed. Read more »

This was me. I was just as adorable, too.

I was sick this past weekend. I had a sore throat that made it difficult to swallow even saliva, let alone food. I was, paradoxically, suffering from both a stuffy and a runny nose, I had chest and head congestion, I had a fever, and by Saturday night, was pretty much unable to maintain a lucid conversation with someone over the phone. I had somewhat improved by Sunday, thanks to different over the counter medications, though the fever remained.

As is the case with some people when they’re sick, I turned to television to be my nursemaid, particularly on Saturday during the worst of it, to keep me company, to tell me that I was, very likely, not going to die as a result of teh_sick. Typically my habit is to watch stuff I have on DVD, with my normal standbys being Sports Night and Batman: The Animated Series. Both shows are comfort foods of mine, and I know the episodes by heart so that if I zone out or fall asleep, I haven’t “missed” anything.

But thanks to advances in technology since the last time I was this sick (which has easily been at least 5 years), I didn’t have to drag my sick and feeble body off the couch or out of bed to change the discs of whatever I was watching. I could just hit ‘Next episode’ on Netflix and remain curled up in blankets, cats, used tissues, and mugs of tea.  It. Was. Wonderful.

So here are thoughts about what I watched over the weekend. I watched, by the way, entirely too much stuff. Really. It’s kind of pathetic. Read more »

“The only problem is that he never fought the Jews. We’re Mossad, baby.”

Rather thankfully, this ham sandwich is better than last season’s. And while I have little quibbles, mainly with Wendy, the episode as a whole is a great success, paying off the season’s overreaching plot of the investigation into Will’s judicial conduct. I mean, any episode that ends with Will and Diane dancing together because they appear to be goddamn bullet-proof is pretty impressive, yeah?

So while I’m going to talk about the episode a bit, I’m also going to address other reviews of the episode, as “Another Ham Sandwich” has prompted a slight resurgence in the “The Good Wife is doing cable drama on broadcast!” idea that gets circulated every now and then, and annoys the hell out of me. Read more »