Monsters of Television

“We were the only real family you had, Nikita, and you betrayed us.”

Percy. Did you really think that this would hold Nikita? Really?

Karen and I have been watching Nikita all season, though neither of us on a super-regular basis. I know I had to marathon the series twice, missing  three or four episodes at a time, never exactly sure when it was on (and when I would try to watch it live, it would be a rerun!).

The most recent episode is perhaps the best way to check on the series, and make the case for tuning in, or going back if you stopped after a few episodes, like I nearly did. While “All the Way” provides for nice plot and character advancement and the episode also nicely raises the stakes of the series, eliminating some aspects of the show that would’ve eventually gotten worn out. 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?”).

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“I am preventing a nightmare.”

Super Sniffer at work.

There are several ways television likes to elicit the inner-workings of a character without having to demonstrate it in a natural way. One is to get them hammered. Another is to bring in a documentarian.

Scrubs did it early on in their series (“My Bed Banter and Beyond”) with unseen psych students. Dawson’s Creek used its eponymous filmmaker to draw out character development. There’s even an entire genre of sit-com based on the practice (see The Office, Parks & Recreation, Modern Family). So when I saw Lassiter’s distractingly attractive little sister armed with a camera and that the show was going to oscillate between conventional footage and what she shoots, I groaned a little bit.

Happily, though, we didn’t get the deep internal struggles of these characters that they just needed a medium through which to vent. Instead we got what these characters would actually act like on character. That I can appreciate. If anything, what this episode demonstrated wasn’t a crutch to develop our characters but a study into how Psych as a procedural clashes with other, more conventional, procedurals and even touches on the nature of the procedural in general. Yeah, I know. Deep for Psych.

And we got to see April Bowlby without having to watch Two and a Half Men. I say that’s a win all around.

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“Are you dating Dwayne Wade? That doesn’t even make sense. He’s with Gabrielle Union.”

Love or hate this episode, you have to be happy that this happened.

USA has been celebrating this epsiode for months, even making sure to name-check it in the early press releases for this season. The It’s a Wonderful Life episode. Surprising with so many theme episodes in Psych‘s oevre (Halloween horror movies, Jaws, Hitchcock, Twin Peaks) that it hasn’t hit on this before for a holiday episode. Maybe it’s just that we’re at a point in the series that it feels it can do surrealism and the audience will follow.

What’s interesting is the way they decided to do this. This wasn’t the same as A Christmas Carol or the movie that keep on giving to Frank Capra’s estate. Except for a heavy-handedness Psych affords itself when discussing anything serious for its characters, Shawn’s journey of self-discovery shared very little with the visions of the lesson-learning protagonists of the time-honored holiday fare. You might call it too hokey or too goofy, too parodic of It’s a Wonderful Life for it to make sense. But I’m actually going to defend the perspective.

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“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 »

Quickly becoming TVD's most sympathetic character--who knew?

I cannot believe I am writing this, but here goes. Tyler is my new favorite character on The Vampire Diaries. I know, that is completely crazy, right? He’s a self-proclaimed dick. But among all the various happenings in the most recent episode, his storyline is the most effecting. The performance by Michael Trevino as Tyler is quite strong, and the character may give Damon a run for his money in the clever jackass department. If you read my posts about this show regularly, you know I am a big fan of Awesome Vampire Caroline. And now it seems I have found the best match for her greatness. Really hope the show continues to depict Tyler’s transformation with such honesty and rawness.

It isn’t possible for me to express how moving was Tyler’s transformation and Awesome Vampire Caroline’s refusal to leave him. He was terrified and experiencing shattering pain; all she could do was be with him, but you admire her compassion. I’m super nervous about how Tyler will react when he learns Awesome Vampire Caroline has lied to him (about Mason, about the Salvatores), but I am loving these two as a duo. I should also note that the visual and aural elements of his change were executed in impressive fashion by the program’s technical people—really good work for a show I don’t imagine has a huge budget.

As for the rest of our merry band of warriors, Elijah continues to improve upon his initial awful introduction—he’s becoming a real frightening bad guy. Elena got sidelined for the most part, but even trapped in her home, she proved herself a capable negotiator. And the best news? Someone I hate got bit by a werewolf. What excellent news!

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“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 »