Monsters of Television

“Who the hell is that?”

“In the future, we’ll all be happy despite our rampant alcoholism, self-destructive natures, and our short-sighted family planning. Yay!”

Tomorrowland the Ride is ultimately flawed. The idea of the thing is theoretically interesting and, if you really believe the crafted displays of the future really are visionary, then I can see how you might enjoy the ride. But, of course, as the ride aged and the people starting to live in the years to which the ride makers predicted the change to occur, it became a relic of a bygone era. Instead of being a vision of the future, it was really just a reminder of how silly we were in the past.

And that’s because futurism by amateurs is also horribly flawed: it doesn’t account for cultural development. Usually, these things assume we’ll think the same and we’ll be the same in the future, just more advanced. But that’s not the way evolution works: every part adapts and, while there are threads of constance, the way we consider things will change over the course of years, decades, centuries. While flying vehicles in the past were thought to be the way of the future, the first thing that comes to mind for us when considering the same thing are the various media properties that have since used it to sell us on the future. It’s isn’t science fact; it’s the Jetsons.

Don Draper has his own little Tomorrowland going. The moment he walks into the restaurant and sees his family in the booth, he looks at it almost like a model of his future. This is the paradise, the peace, the comfort he seeks. And while there are differences from what he knows, ultimately, this is just a relic from the past he sells to himself as the utopian future. So while you think about how Don’s actions in this episode are sudden and without motivation, consider his discussion with Anna when they first started discussing Betty in the Christmas flashback sequences. Seem relatively familiar?

When Betty handed him the key to his house, she might as well have said, “Congratulations. Here is the key to the detritus of your past. You can match it to the building blocks of your future.”

Read more »

“My memory has Seinfeld money.”

While I think Noel’s summation to the 30 Rock live episode is pretty accurate, I think it’s worth looking at the show in a different lens. To me, the jokes worked (on par with the rest of the season so far at least — which may or may not be good) but I also feel the jokes they planned for this episode would have only worked for live (like this opportunity is something the writers have been waiting for).

Noel mentioned the tremendously underwhelming live episode of E.R., attempting a vérité style for a show predicated on drama. Why the episode failed is that nothing particularly “live” happened: the whole show went as planned and the only thing to come out of it was the accomplishment of getting everything off without a hitch despite the pressure of one take. Drama is the incorrect format for live television (soap operas did it out of necessity with their grueling schedules). Comedy is the only sane lens to view live television. And the modern example of this, and the one closest to 30 Rock in attempt, is The Drew Carey Show.

Read more »

“Exciting mishap! This is live!“

I wasn’t keen on a live episode of 30 Rock since live episodes of television shows today tend to feel over-rehearsed and, dare I say it?, stagy (in the worst meaning of that word) since no one wants to screw up. Saturday Night Live avoids this feeling since, well, they’re not too rehearsed and because the writing is pretty horrible. I can remember, for instance, the live E.R. being incredibly dull and lifeless: mimicked vérité style seems to work better than a semi-actual vérité style in fictional television programming.

“Live Show” more or less lived up to those expectations. It was still a funny episode of 3o Rock, but the liveness kind of sucked all the liveliness out of the show’s humor.

Read more »

“It’s so primitive. I like it.“

What’s the difference between a giant robot tearing through the city and a souped up Cadillac? Answer: not a whole heck of a lot in the long run, but it makes a difference. I’m not a car guy, so racing stories don’t do a whole lot for me. And while my question above was largely rhetorical, it does speak to some very fine lines in what constitutes enjoyment. I mean, both the robot and the car are still mechanical objects that do quote-unquote cool things. I just happen to prefer those cool things performed by a robot.

I wasn’t sure if I was going to really respond to “Roar of the White Dragon” or not for that reason. But as the Titan finally appears at the end of the episode, I found myself extremely disappointed that it even showed up at all. Which shows how effective the story within the episode was. Read more »

“You’re wrong again. If my superpower were arrogance my name would be Dr. Arroganto.”

The Big Bang Theory made great strides this week in overcoming some of the issues people take with the show. It featured serialized story, developed a character and remembered there are other characters on the show than just Penny and Sheldon. However, some gags that can only be described as “overly sitcomy” hampered the progress the show was trying to make.

The episode was funny, very much so, but after looking at the whole episode it feels as though it’s right back where it started. You do the math, see where we end up.

Read more »

“Hard to believe I’m not really not really in space.”

A lackluster episode of Community is still better than most comedy on television, so I can’t be too disappointed in “Basic Rocket Science” even if I do think it’s one of the weakest episodes the show has done in a while.

Like “American Poultry” and “Modern Warfare,” “Basic Rocket Science” is a high concept episode doing a full on riff of a particular film genre (in this case, space movies). I remember one of the critiques around “Modern Warfare” was that it didn’t serve the ensemble very well since they were dispatched so quickly (“Troy made God angry!”). My contention, that they needed to leave for the actual character impact to occur, Jeff and Britta having sex on the study table, would end up paying off in the end actually came true in the finale of last season and the premiere of this season.  Like the folks who were iffy on “Modern Warfare,” have the same quibble with “Basic Rocket Science”: where’s the character beat in this episode, because I’m not really feeling it. Read more »

“Dark hair. Bedroom eyes. Moody demeanor. I totally get it.“

When I reviewed the pilot episode of Sym-Bionic Titan, I figured that would be the only episode I covered, short of some really great episode on down the line. However, the review has garnered some really impressive numbers recently (for our site, anyway),  and even though we don’t generate revenue from the site, clearly there’s an interest in the show so I thought it might be a good idea to fill in some of the obvious gaps in the Web.

Now, page views aren’t the only things motivating me here. I quipped that Titan was the best new show of the fall if you liked giant robots. However, after having time to digest more of the offerings from the fall season, I can drop that qualifier a bit since Titan is still performing very well, with smart episodes so far (though I found the second episode a less than a fine follow-up). With Terriers, I think it’s probably my favorite new show.

That I like both Terriers and Titan probably says more about my tastes than anything else (I like giant robots and neo-noir (needless to say, I dig The Big O)), but I do think that Titan is a very very good show, one that appeals to all ages (though I think it’s a little less audience universal than Samurai Jack) and also has a clear sense of itself and what it wants to do, and on a base level, that’s a really a good sign for any series.

Read more »

“Just the sight of a man and a bottle of Two-Buck Chuck and I start ovulating.”

“Oh, good. You look just as uncomfortable on my show as I do.”

Ladies and gentlemen, this was WB/CW meta-porn.

Obviously from my many mentions of Gilmore Girls and fewer (but important) mentions of Dawson’s Creek and Felicity, I was a fan of the late-90s/early-00s music-with-lyrics-fueled, fast-talking, youth-exploitive, hour-long dramas of the WB. In fact, what appealed me to start watching Life Unexpected in the first place was the constant comparisons to those dramas, particularly Gilmore Girls and Everwood. Sadly, when I arrived at the pilot, I realized that the only thing it shared with those shows is a mother who had a child at 16 and a bunch of adults that didn’t want to grow up. Maybe some fast-talking, definitely a singer-songwriter crooning lyrics over dialogue, but Life Unexpected hasn’t really lived up to the series to which it was compared.

You notice that I never mentioned One Tree Hill as one of those series I adored as a high school senior through early college. Because that show bugged the crap out of me. I liked seeing Tristan from Gilmore Girls (aka Chad Michael Murray) but he’s always had trouble picking roles that suited his abilities. One Tree Hill almost fit him if it wasn’t hampered by elementary dialogue, ridiculous overacting, and characters based almost exclusively on archetypes or stereotypes (like Lucas’s best friend, Skills).

Cringeworthy this show was. Maybe is. I haven’t watched more than an episode a season since. So, imagine my confusion (although I’d heard about it from various places) when I learned the show was flung forward in the future where Nathan and Haley have a writer’s soapbox of a child (you know, the kind that are wise beyond their years and announce the inner-workings of the characters around them) and I didn’t recognize anyone else (except Mouth who looks exactly the same). I don’t want to speak to how the series is telling its story but this particular episode seemed to dispense with typical structure. “Nobody Taught Us to Quit” felt more like walking into a soap opera with stories that are constantly ongoing, so much so that they have no need for intra-episode arcs. Instead, each scene is written like the conventional coda of a WB-series (cue the singer-songwriter, discuss interpersonal issues in overly-articulate platitudes, swell the emotion). It made the episode so. Long. And there really wasn’t much here for the crossover.

So all that WB torch-passing stuff was left to Life Unexpected.

Read more »

“Can’t go 10 feet in America without having your death recorded.”

With everything from the finale now neatly taken care of last week, I feel like the show can properly start getting to work on telling this season’s stories. Yes, of course, the show is a very subtle serialized character drama so this season’s stories are connected to last season’s stories. But there are new stakes now and thus new stories to tell in relation to this serial.

But, as if to also take a narrative cooldown lap, “Breaking Fast” is largely one of those procedural episodes that the show excels at balancing against its character serialization. This, of course, isn’t a complaint. If you’re a regular reader of the blog, you already know that I love procedurals, and that I love serials. So I like when a show manages to execute both well, and I get very frustrated when the balance is thrown off in ways that simply don’t work for me. Read more »

“Turns out college is just high school with more expensive books.”

That is the smartest thing Serena van der Woodsen has ever said. And it’s so true too.

We have seen these characters move from high school to college and not much has changed. They’re all still petty and vindictive and selfish and wiling to walk all over one another to get what they want. They still fight over the same girls or boys, they still lie to one another, they still stab each other in the back. Nothing has changed.

Maybe that’s the point. Life doesn’t change much after high school. Sure groups of people may change and you’re setting eventually becomes a boardroom instead of a classroom, but you still deal with the same bullshit. God forbid we follow these terrible souls into the real world, I’m sure we’ll still find Serena and Blair competing with one another, Vanessa still vying for Dan’s affection, and everyone will still be sleeping with each other.

Life is just one long high school experience. Hope you guys enjoyed your time at Constance Billard, you’re gonna be stuck there for a long time. “Goodbye, Columbia” proved that much.

Read more »