Monsters of Television

“I’m in no mood for lesbian weirdness tonight, Pam.”

The wait is finally over! After 9 months True Blood is back and wasting no time jumping right in. The first few minutes were dedicated to “remember this character and what they were doing?” which is always an appreciated season premiere tactic. But it wasn’t just story we were being reminded of, also tone and style. “Remember how much True Blood loves violence and tits?” As if we could forget. From a group of werewolves chowing down on Vampire Bill to Eric’s 6 hour sexcapade with new Fangtasia dancer Yvetta (6 hours!?) it didn’t take long for us all to say “Why yes, I remember you, True Blood. Welcome back.” Read more »

“It’s more efficient to use him as a resource.”

This is a step forward.

Last week I talked about how I felt Burn Notice needed to exploit its arc more often, dedicating full episodes to it, as opposed to book-ending it during an episode, with a Client of the Week (CotW) story sandwiched in between. So you can imagine how pleased I was that the show integrated its two story structures — arc and CotW — into one unified plot. I don’t think “Fast Friends” is a great episode by any means, but it is something of an improvement of over last’s weeks almost perfunctory offering. Read more »

“A huge dork getting into a car full of hot chicks. If that’s not a sign of hope, I don’t know what is.”

After the kind of arc heavy episodes of the past couple of weeks, “Joel Munt’s Big Deal Party” slows things down a bit, doing a very solid stand-alone type episode. Sure, we have the sex-happy Happy Relation Syndrome Casey and Henry back together, looking for ways to fool around all night, but their relationship isn’t the focus this week. Instead, Roman’s past comes back to haunt him, giving Martin Starr a chance to really shine, though I feel this season has done an exemplary job of giving Starr lots of good material (how does he not have a sitcom pilot…?) Read more »

Lie to Me is back!  I don’t know how many in the audience share the enthusiasm represented by that exclamation mark, but I have been looking forward to its second season. This show is a pleasant procedural with a strong central actor and enough surprises to keep things interesting. But I saw a glimpse of something in the episode last night, “Beat the Devil,” that provided a vision of…something more. Until this week’s episode, I never knew I wanted more. Now, I’m not sure I can turn back.

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“So watching a baseball game at a sports bar makes me a girl?”

Perhaps it’s been the lack of quality programming since the end of the fall season, but this week’s The Good Guys was a significant improve over the pilot. It was funnier, more self-assured, the lack of chemistry between its leads was happily gone (though the chemistry between Hanks and Wade is struggling to work, as is Wade’s character), and while the narrative still didn’t fire on all cylinders, there was less happenstance and more forethought in its construction than in the pilot.

The show still has a little bit more growing to do, but I’m more optimistic than I was last month about the show’s prospects. Read more »

“Always use the mike.”

I don’t really like watching stand-up specials on TV. Listen to them? Absolutely. But watching them? Yawn. It’s something about the pacing of the special (often interrupted by commercials), a 90 minute set boiled down to an hour kills the momentum. Now I remember why I stopped watching Last Comic Standing atfer Jay Mohr left. It’s boring. Really boring.

Early on, host Craig Robinson ponders why this show happened. I know why: NBC needed some really cheap summer programming, and no one is cheaper than stand-up comedians who haven’t produced oodles of cash for a network.

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“It’s the best damn Chinese food I’ve ever had. I could eat it everyday.”

A group of strangers awaken in a deserted hotel in a small, creepy ghost town and have to figure out who has brought them there and why. That is the premise of Persons Unknown. I’m normally a sucker for stories like that (see: Lost or (based on the trailer) Exam) so I was pretty excited going into the pilot. But much like the characters in the show I found myself wondering who the hell brought me here and why were they making me watch this? Read more »

“I’m sorry for needing you.”

Don’t cry, Hugh Laurie. Not every finale can be a homerun.

Seriously. If you liked this episode of House, I’m not sure we can be friends anymore.

Season finales on this show are events, the showrunners’ opportunity to fully utilize the talent they were blessed with in actors/characters, all the budget they can muster, and forward-thinking writers/producers. For instance, the big hullabaloo about this episode, from months ago, is that it was shot on a consumer-expensive DSLR, not a big honking HD camera. Interestingly, that was all anyone wanted to talk about when discussing the episode. Not the inevitable monkey wrench the finale would toss into the well-oiled machine that is the House formula, not what would happen to some of the characters. No, no. It was only about the Canon 5D. And I can imagine the reason was because no one wanted to talk about the actual content at all.

Because it stinks.

We’ve come to expect cliffhangers (a serious rarity on this show that we’ve come to expect) and heavy distortion of House’s vision of reality. Recall the episode where House was shot and he slipped in and out of subconsciousness or the one where he’s trying to figure out how he got on a bus with Amber (you know, the one with Fred Durst) or the one where drugs were making him hallucinate going through withdrawls with Cuddy by his side. I suppose now that he’s clean, we’re supposed to accept that these forays into the surreal would be obliterated by sober reality.

But who knew House’s actual life was so juvenile and miserably melodramatic?

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“They can’t send me to jail. I’ve been on TV. I’m a superstar.”

Lazy. If there was only one word to describe this week’s episode that’s what it would be: lazy. Adapting from previous works and basing things off of real events are great ways to tell a story, but to copy something word for word, shot for shot, is just plain uncreative. In usual Boondocks fashion the episode was jam-packed with social commentary, but nothing that couldn’t be gleaned from the episode’s source material. For the first time this season, I am disappointed. I guess TV shows are a lot like albums. You can love it as a whole but there are always gonna be tracks that you don’t like. If The Boondocks is Thriller, “Smokin with Cigarettes” is “The Lady in my Life.” Read more »

“I’m going to sing now.”

“Adam, stop doing your Taxi Driver impression. No one is talking to you.”

I had a hard time picking out an opening quote for this episode. There were so many choice lines from Max’s celebrations of Haddie’s new hair color (“You look like a panther. Or a vampire from Twilight.”) to characters asserting series theme-summations (“You be a man, dad” or “I consider myself too big to fail”). One of the goals when writing television/film is to temper realistic dialogue with dramatic substance. If it’s all “realistic,” it might come off “banter-y” (and, at times, robbing the emotion of a scene). If it’s all dramatic, it turns out to be a Nic Cage flick. A balance is necessary and has been a goal for this show from the beginning.

We’ve discussed the “Robert Altman scenes” between siblings in this series, scenes where the characters (typically the adult Braverman siblings) talk over each other, have natural cadence, and laugh at each other (a crime many shows commit, especially sit-coms, where people will say something funny but no one will laugh diegetically). The comfortable, conversational tone between them is often tempered by dramatic, sometimes poignant, scenes from the characters when they’re without the other siblings. This is a balance the series has been hoping to hone throughout this half-slate and this season finale is the culmination of that practice, an execution of character and narrative that shows real potential for next season. Although, I’m not sure where next season is going.

I think they might be writing Julia off.

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