Monsters of Television

This week’s The Vampire Diaries was a vast improvement over last week’s episode. First of all, there was more Damon. More importantly, Damon was being less the whipped puppy dog and more the snarky, somewhat dangerous Damon we all know and love. Keeping it real for Damon is sort of crucial for this show, something they acknowledged rather openly when Damon told Elena to stop trying to make him into Stefan. We already have one Stefan, and his goodness is so annoying that only his rare sparks of confident power keep him bearable.

Vampires are sexy because they can break all the rules (Ric seems to think this is a problem, but I disagree). Vampires need to be bad to be awesome.  This fact has never been proven more true than when Eric on True Blood became an emasculated, lobotomized loser attached to Sookie’s “fairy vagina.”
Here’s the lesson: childlike and naïve Eric = boring.
Sorta evil, kinda a dick Eric = sexy.
I know this is somewhat problematic as we like to believe the good guy wins and that evil is merely a cover for an inner goodness. And certainly Damon’s affection for Elena could be viewed as an indication of his own inner goodness. But it also could be read as pretty rude, considering that Elena is his brother’s girl [serious party foul].

I’m a Damon fan, but I gotta be honest that the spark in this character derives from the fact that he will do the unexpected, that he’s untamed, that he’ll always make a bad joke in a bad situation. If Damon gets too cuddly, his menace (and therefore his appeal) evaporates.

So—hooray!  Damon is being a jerk again.

In other news, Klaus is still boring, Rebekah is as annoying as one might expect, and Katherine adds some much needed spice to the mix.  In fact, almost every scene that advances the plot this week involves Katherine. She makes things happen.  Thank God for her.  Let’s see if she can get Damon out of his rut further.

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“Try it. I hate monkeys.“

Well, they’re at least steadily moving away from seriously offensive back to blandly generic, I’ll give them that. Sadly, blandly generic is way less interesting to write about, which makes “Alpha Male” just kind of there, with a couple of bright spots thanks to Rob Lowe’s well-executed work with Captain Marvel.

The episode also picks up immediately after the events of “Homefront,” carrying through with the rest of the team reacting to the information about the mole (predictably poorly, petulantly, and unprofessionally) in a decent enough manner, but the show delays any direct development on that front by having the team go to India to investigate some vague attacks on Mayor Hamilton Hill in India.

Did I mention bland? Read more »

“Your love is weird and toxic and it destroys everything it touches!“

This episode isn’t going to help folks who feel that Community needs to move beyond exploring what it means for these seven people to be a group, family, whatever they are.

I haven’t had a problem with this so far. Being funny gets you a long way, and if you’re not grooving on the plot of an episode, you can at least enjoy the episode’s jokes and humor (2001 references, parallel Earths in an absurd model U.N.-off). But even without humor, I think that the group exploring what they are to each other and as a whole, after the events of last season, is valuable.

But it needs to be better than this, fresher and more illuminating.  Read more »

“I rest my case, Nancy Grace.”

It’s sob story week here on Dancing with the Stars and the celebrities don’t disappoint in trotting out the waterworks for everyone. From the misty eyes of the former soldier to whatever acid Nancy Grace leaks to the Kardashian family dead-behind-the-eyes stoicism, we danced all over the spectrum for an emotional evening. Well, except Kristin Cavallari who did a Beyonce impression. Oh, and Hope Solo but she had to deal with several people telling her she’s not sexy so that’s upsetting, too.

The contestants had to choose a year of their lives that was important to them and the choreographers had to create a routine for that. Unfortunately, everyone knew what year JR was going to choose so, really, whatever they planned on doing was like competing for second place. Why? Because (a) JR’s a good dancer, (b) he has a really good partner, (c) every other person there has more than half a face. Throw in some good old sad-sack country and Nancy Grace dancing to “Moon River” later is like watching kids dance at a high school social: basic dancing and the problems are for babies.

Really, if Dancing with the Stars was sports and I was at the stadium rooting for not-JR, I would be going home right now to beat traffic. This is his competition to win; everyone else is just biding their time to elimination.

Let’s break it down: Read more »

Do you think the contestants wanted to come for “fun” before or after watching JR dance?

While I know many of the dancers have been saying all along that they came for different reasons (weight loss, post-booze redemption, because Ryan O’Neal was unavailable), winning not among them, you have to assume you join a competition to win. I know the show focuses more on contestants “surviving” to dance another week, but I can’t help but take notice that more people are making sure to convince Brooke Burke and the audience that they’re just glad to be here. Glad to be on a national stage wet with the tears and sweat of our most spotlight-addicted. Well, not this physical stage. BECAUSE IT’S BRAND NEW AND SPECIAL!

Even Hope Solo, a painfully competitive athlete who talked about wanting to win before the competition, who the show put in front of the media to sell the season (ostensibly selling her as the front-runner), conceded a little bit last night. By choosing this year as the year that is most important in her life, the one where her team came in second in the World Cup and, in her words, taught her the lesson that it really is about the journey, her path in this competition is paralleled with her athletic achievements this year. Competing may not be an issue anymore. It’s more about not getting knocked out early.

And, let’s be honest, despite all the contestants bringing their A-game (at least to the judges’ overenthusiastic praise), the competition so far and this week in particular, has the odds stacked against anyone that’s not Chynna and Ricki, but particularly JR. In a week where contestants dedicate their dances to their most memorable years, who is going to compete with “Hi, how about the year I got my face blown off fighting for your country?” No one. Especially if you pick your song to be the one Fletch sings during a rectal exam. Someone should vet these things before they go on the air.

Complicating matters is that JR is a really good dancer and his partner is a really good choreographer (and they put on a clinic last night). He is the mark of the elite class in this batch (with Chynna, Ricki, and maybe Kristin) who overshadows the middle class (Hope, Rob, and maybe Arquette). Then there’re those just waiting for their inevitable early exit: Chaz and Nancy.

Of everyone left, I can only imagine that Chaz is the next to exit. Not only is he a complainer (one of those people that whines about “doing the best [they] can” when missing steps) but there’s just no way he can keep up with these other young bucks. Don’t worry, buddy. It’s a mercy killing, euthanasia really. Everyone is else just waiting for JR to eliminate them. They just don’t know it yet.

My partner has a little game he plays when we watch CW shows—each time sensitive, sad pop music starts to play in the background, he shouts, “CW show!” since this embrace of contempo-pop is a CW trait. (Note: he does this for other shows with a strong CW influence, like ABC’s Revenge). Another common trait–this time of the genre of TV vampire programs—is the flashback episode. Typically, these episodes resolve a sort of conundrum—a mystery that drives present-day action or character motivation–a mystery about which the audience is unable to fill in the blanks on their own. For example, learning that Damon did not want to complete his transition to a vampire after he was turned by (and abandoned by) Katherine helped viewers better understand why he’s such a prick to his brother. Thus these episodes work best when a long-standing question is resolved in a satisfactory manner.

There is, also, another type of flashback episode—one that introduces an entirely new mystery by rewriting what viewers think they know of the past. My partner refers to this as a classic soap opera move since it is largely dependent on a present-day character having an amnesia of some sort to justify the new information being delivered. This is a cheaper form of plot development because it lacks grounding in the foundational mythology of the text, adding new information that may or not push the suspension of disbelief too far.

I write all this because my evaluation of this particular episode depends on my understanding of when the flashback works well and when it does not. In “The End of the Affair,” we get a cheap flashback, and I’m not sure I yet buy it. Now, I use the word “yet” because if TVD embraces this new narrative thread to such a thorough degree that it gradually incorporates other characters (like Damon) and then becomes integral to our understanding of this season’s central plot, this episode may become a new classic [really don’t believe what I just wrote, btw, but I’m trying to be a “glass is half full” person]. Until we get further into the season, I will remain somewhat hesitant to embrace the show’s reveal of Stefan’s past friendship with Nick (see how I did that, those of you that have already watched the episode? I just hid the spoiler). More about Nick and Rebekah and another new, as-of-yet nameless, big bad after the jump.

At the moment, though, I found myself issuing annoyed comments throughout this week’s reviewcap. If you read regularly, you know I am already annoyed by Klaus being sort of a pathetic bad guy–not scary enough by far. I’m also struggling to understand why Stefan remains with Klaus. They better find a more convincing motivation for this than, you know, his word. If we are going to keep taking a trip down memory lane with Stefan, let’s see some true evil that haunts him—such that he no longer feels fit for Elena. A real crisis of self would perhaps motivate Stefan in a more believable way. We are seeing hints of this—the cut up bodies, the gross blood thing this week—but it needs to connect back more fully to Stefan’s view of his own worth. Some of this may be operating under the surface, but one thing that TVD is not great at is subtlety. So let’s make Stefan’s journey a bit clearer, huh?

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“I don’t know when or how, all I know is it’s going to happen.”

Good grief, how intense were those last 10 minutes of “Crawl Space”? It was a pretty wild episode, but those last 10 minutes. I had goosebumps, folks, I was unable to sleep for a little while after the episode, with Walter’s laughter ringing in my ears (and that virtuoso shot that closed out the episode).

So that leaves “End Times” to set the stage for the finale. Which is incredibly exciting for me. Nick gave me the option to watch The Good Wife tonight (which is delayed in my market because of the NFL) while he took this week episode, but I declined. For one reason, I just wanted to watch The Good Wife tomorrow (I have nothing else, really, to watch), but for the other reason, well, it’s the penultimate episode of the season, and if Breaking Bad does anything well, it’s the episode before the finale (even in the event of a shortened season).

In essence, I wanted what I suspected would be the craziest episode of the season for myself.

And instead I got this.

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“Yes on the Red,  no on the Tornado!“

I don’t have too terrible much to say about “Homefront.”

It was a better episode than last week’s “Terror,” but there isn’t much about “Homefront” that is terribly remarkable either. It’s a pretty standard chase episode with two of the show’s more interesting characters, Robin and Artemis, at the center of it, which gives the episode stakes. As the only two non-super-powered members of the team, they are, as Artemis becomes fixated on, far more at-risk than the others.

But there’s also some a little bit of fleshing out of the characters, and I will say that the episode, at least, does a nice job of giving Artemis some development in a more organic way than what they attempted to do with Superboy last week. And that I can appreciate. Read more »

“How progressive of you to have a multi-cultural evil twin.”

“Geography Of Global Conflict” is a fun, enjoyable episodes that I doubt many folks will remember on down the line, except for me since it serves up a delicious dish of Greendale insanity that I have been missing. Model UN-off! Britta being the worst! Chang abusing his power! Twinning! It was all very season 1-esque, and I really appreciate that.

That said, the episode is a little too busy to give itself the time to do some stronger character work that it’s interested in doing (particularly with Jeff and Annie). And it’s not even really that interested in doing it though, either, since much of it, like Jeff’s beats last week, are focused on relatively familiar ground. Read more »

“Any connection that had with a jive was a coincidence.”

Here’s where I commend Dancing with the Stars: give the contestants three weeks to prepare for the first episode with some, more or less, basic steps (flourishes added by the dancers) to establish some confidence then hit them with a choices that basically demands these noobs spin their legs around like Snoopy at a holiday party to crush their spirits. And then they take those crushed spirits and make a montage of all the whining like American Idol has perfected with sobbing sobsters of middling talent. Beautiful.

No more limping in with a basic Viennese waltz or a stiff by-the-book cha-cha. It’s time to get serious. It’s time to get dangerous. It’s time — for hooker gloves.

Okay, really only two contestants wore hooker gloves but that’s two more than last week and, apparently, the jive and the two-step called for such a thing. Hooker gloves, pandering to the judges, and gimmicks (which I’m pretty sure Goodman told them was not his favorite thing). And lots of confused decade time warps. The whole thing was kind of a mess. Except for a couple of dances. And you already know who they are. Let’s break it down. Read more »