Monsters of Television

“It just means I have more people to hate.”

“Razer’s Edge” isn’t so much a fresh new episode as it the epilogue to the 2-parter that the show premiered with. We get Razer’s backstory, and Aya is given something to do besides steer the ship. It’s actually not a bad epilogue, but I’m eager to see where the show intends to go from here, now that we’ve established the team (a team without, thankfully, Goggin, or whatever that one-eyed mynock was named).

It’s another episode, like part 2 of “Beware My Power” that says more the show’s potential than it does about the show itself. But like that episode, there are promising signs of a good show here. Read more »

“This is myself! This is who I am!“

So when I wrote last week that I was hoping “Image” would “…push [M’gann] in a good direction” I wasn’t expecting, well, this. The episode, as a whole, is a little uneven, but there’s just so much good in it that I don’t care, and I feel like, for once, the show has had a legitimate breakthrough in terms of character and plotting. It just took 21 episodes.

Of course, now, comes the follow through, and whether the show can properly pay off what it has done in this episode (including set up a potential new team member, however covertly and cleverly). While I’m not sure the show has demonstrated that skill (remember that mole hunt?), the last three episodes have all been decent to good, so I’m feeling cautiously optimistic. Read more »

“First things first: I will be starring in a brand new
Tyler Perry sci-fi epic called I Ain’t Gettin’ on No Rocket.”

Shawn must've took The Miz's belt.

I don’t know about you but I like my melodrama best when the women are catty, the problems are trivial, and the men are sensitive and subject to the whims of the chaotic women in their lives. So I don’t watch much WWE.

But I have been following Mike Mizanin since he was a young buck trying to play out his aggression fantasies and desperate need for human contact on men and women alike when he starred on The Real World: Back to New York. So many MTV competitions, so many opportunities to be in the spotlight and to show the world The Miz. As he’s grown up, his character has grown, too. He’s more defined. More confident. More — good lord, is he on steroids? What happened to my All-American Midwesterner?

I don’t know how The Miz was introduced into the WWE but he was credited in a particularly hilarious episode of Psych as “WWE Superstar The Miz.” And I can’t speak to whether John Cena plays his wrestling character when he stars in terrible action movies, but we definitely got The Miz and not Mike Mizanin as a contestant in kind of a crafty version of The Bachelorette. To be honest, this episode might be the jewel in the crown of what’s been a very solid season of Psych. It’s everything this show wants to be. And Shawn chases Gus around with another dude’s underpants.

Read more »

“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.
Read more »

“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 »