Monsters of Television

“You’re a star. It’s just obvious.”

Three words for you: demographics, demographics, demographics. But more on those three words in a moment.

If the entire competition essentially boils down to who has the best pilot, and it seems to have done that, I must wonder why the show just didn’t do a tournament style pilot structure, showing pilot after pilot to focus groups, with the last pilot standing being the winner. I know that past performance weighed into the decision, but I’m willing to bet that the response of the focus group gave weighed in even more. Read more »

“Did you get pears?”

This might be the funniest/most telling/allegorical/best/most fourth-wall-breaking/funniest again frame in the entire series.

WARNING: The following post never really discusses the nudity in Mad Men that probably didn’t need to be disclaimed. Reader discretion is advised.

The masks are slipping a little for Don and Peggy, more for the former than the latter, but they are quick to recover in the privacy of their own dominions. And while Don’s story with Allison is interesting, and I’m finally glad to see Pete in the line-up again, it’s Peggy that provides the most intrigue here.

I make it no secret that I have a penchant for the our gal copywriter but I’ve mentioned that, just as Don is being set up for The Big One (where Don finally falls on his face rather than his feet) that Peggy is headed for a fall herself, at the very least a tipping point. Don and Pete have big pieces of this episode but it all feeds into her. And that doesn’t even count the big L word they never even drop.

No, the other one.

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Look, he's not just rich--he knows about food.

Now that we live in a Steven Slater world, perhaps I should not be so surprised by the prominent discourse of dissatisfaction on the new series, Master Chef. Yet I am surprised.  The contestants on this show act as if their very life depends upon gaining approval to continue in the competition.  Their glaring unhappiness becomes frighteningly apparent through their tears, their begging, and, yes, their spontaneous hugging of scary Chef Ramsay from Hell’s Kitchen.  Why is America so unhappy?  Or, rather, why does Master Chef depend upon a narrative of dissatisfaction to fuel its program?  More about this after the jump.

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“I see unstable minds think alike.”

Burn Notice, why do you keep doing this to me? Better still, why do I keep thinking you’ll change? I know that you don’t bother devoting episodes to your seasonal arcs until the end of the season (and sometimes not even then), so why do I keep expecting you to do it before that? It’s frustrating, especially when the procedural element you elect to focus on is, well, dull and relatively stakes free.

A part of the problem is that, oddly, I bought into the USA promos, which basically showed every Simon scene (really, it did), and thought that Michael and Simon dueling for information would be the episode, not the cold open and the tag. I don’t know what caused this sudden bout of naïveté, but trust me when I tell you that I don’t have high hopes for seeing a lot of Robert Patrick next week.

…Okay, so I do, but it’s only because I love Robert Patrick. I mean, who doesn’t? Read more »

“I’m bored. Take off your clothes.”

Oh my.

The sex and violence contained in the last 10 minutes of “Night on the Sun” alone should be enough to convert any former nonbeliever. The beauty of it (besides all the naked bodies) is it’s not just for spectacle. There is shock value, sure, but there’s real story progression and character development behind it. And probably the most unbelievable part of it: it made Sookie likable. For 10 minutes anyway.

Let’s be honest: Sookie sucks. She’s whiny and stubborn and impossibly, idiotically impulsive. However, this season has managed to do a great job in getting characters and the audience alike to really want to know what the hell she is. While I too find myself staring up at my ceiling as I lie in bed on Sundays night pondering “Just what are you, Sookie Stackhouse?” it doesn’t make me like her as a character. Put a pair of scissors and a shotgun in her hands and then she gets a little more interesting.

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“I had it coming.”

Ah, the incorruptible Lane Pryce. One night with Don Draper and you’re now just one of the boys.

Lane’s relationship has been somewhat tenuous for the length of his time on the show. He started off just as much a caricature as the rest of the limeys (limies?) that took over Sterling Cooper last season, a cup of tea and an elitist football reference short of a stereotype. While he was the most willing to accept America as his home (to his wife’s chagrin) and seemed the most sympathetic character in the new cast introduced in season 3, he has pretty much held on to the stuffy, stiff-upper-lip, moneyman type.  But he’s fallen on hard times, particularly in his marriage with his cold and “severe” better half (she is English afterall — which media has taught me is par for the course unless receiving a Joni Mitchell education), and wants a break. And who’s back just in time to drag a man of scruples into the tarpit that is his own existence? Fresh off his own stint of jackassery, it’s Don Draper, expert in swallowing pain and then drowning it in brown liquor and quasi-anonymous sex.

He really should wear a cape or a pencil mustache or something, just to warn people.

In other news, Joan finally gets a storyline this season.

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“You are all my mortal enemies.”

A couple of a weeks ago, I skewered FNS for doing a supper club challenge because I don’t perceive Food Network as being a foodie channel. This week, they decide synergize their programming (this show is pretty good at it, I have to admit), with a Iron Chef America challenge. This makes sense for their penultimate episode, as well as a way to plug a new episode of ICA that follows it. However, where the super club challenge was a mistake as a branding issue, an ICA challenge is a weird challenge to throw at people who aren’t established and sure of themselves chefs.

It’s certainly a way to test someone’s mettle, but I feel like it’s a little unfair to the chefs, and it’s a poor way to decide who your final three are. Read more »

“FROM ONE PAWN TO ANOTHER.”

“THEY HIDE IN PLAIN SIGHT.”

Rubicon thus far, is an interesting study in just how much genre and style matter. Its slow burning, methodological pace and meandering characters reminded me of Mad Men in a number of ways (no idea if this is an AMC thing since I haven’t seen an episode of Breaking Bad, but now have plenty of time to catch up on it). Mad Men‘s high modernist-influenced slice of life approach infuriated me to no end because it wasn’t that nothing happened, but that so little happened that I cared about to characters I couldn’t care about, and it happened very slowly.

Rubicon, on the other hand….well…there’s nothing to spoil because nothing has happened, also kind of like Mad Men (consider that my comment on Matthew Weiner’s idiotic mentality toward spoilers). But I find myself engaged with these two episodes even though very little happens, and the characters are not exactly complicated or willing to say things out loud. From it’s set design to its sound mixing (which has been accused of looking cheap, but I say is very purposeful) to the drab costuming and opaque plot developments, Rubicon embraces the 1970s spy thriller film, and doesn’t look back (or at least I hope it doesn’t). Read more »

“Knowing when to walk away is harder than you think.”

This episode was a little bit like Christmas. Vaughn comes back to do something shady, and the lovable FBI duo of Lane and Harris also return, asking for help. All this episode needed was Barry and/or Larry Sizemore, and I would’ve been a very happy camper. On the character front anyway. On the plot front…well, meh.

“Center of the Storm” kind of dropped the ball a bit this week, with a lot of interesting elements that ultimately get bogged down by the episode’s hitman with the heart of gold plot. And I can’t decide if this was quickly re-written to accommodate the shift in episode counts (though I don’t think this was the case), as next week’s episode seems like it could’ve been the mid-season cap episode, or that the writers simply decided to let the serialized elements stay too far in the background, but it made for a bit of a messy episode. Read more »