Monsters of Television

“The Suit’s here with Island Suit. It’s a double-barreled suit!”

“Wait until you see my Mothra suit.”

On the carpet of his office in his penultimate season, Gregory House stared at the ceiling and considered a decision that would be snap or less than snap just a few months prior.

The issue was that House could either lie to his girlfriend or let a person die. Even to a person with romantic principles, he would seem ethically-justified to betray Cuddy’s trust. But the heart of “Office Politics” is that he is put on a decision and that he’s not really mulling these options as much as he is debating whether his relationship with Cuddy is making him a lesser doctor. It was. House was being a punk.

I bring this to your attention only because White Collar has its own romance, if a little less mushy than Huddy, that raises a question of whether the participants are better or worse for their coupling. The events of last season’s finale raises the stakes but also unabashedly pushes Peter and Neal over the edge from being merely affected by each other to being changed men.

But is it for the better? And when are these crazy kids just going to do it already?

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“Do you want to play golf or do you want to fuck around?”

It’s really all Charlie’s plan to check “ruin a show with principles” off his bucket list.

Swashbuckling. That was the word Aaron Sorkin used to describe the show to Piers Morgan in a stuttering explanation for his fiction in an excuse laced with so many ums it makes you feel better that someone so famously eloquent has just as many issues with elocution as the rest of us. But the terms he threw out there for The Newsroom were important, particularly while he looked at one of the most recognizable faces of CNN, a network his show could be accused of lambasting. It’s a romantic comedy, he says. Sorkin only operates in fiction! Jeff Daniels helps him by emphasizing The Newsroom is over-the-top idealistic! Swashbuckling, however, is the word that struck me the most.

It is the most apt in a couple different contexts. For one, the denotation would have this cast on a romantic adventure and no one could argue with that. But the connotation reminds us of pirates or some similar rogue and manly profession with a heart of gold and charged with saving damsels in distress. Why does every damsel on this show need so much saving?

Swashbuckling aside, the episode is interesting since we fast-forward through months of news in tandem with an inevitable meeting with the money side of the idealism, creating an Inception-level of metaphors. But how do you put a price on a dream?

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“I keep letting myself fall into bad patterns.”

So I’ve fallen way behind on watching Dallas. A lot of this was due to just feeling tired on Wednesdays for some reason, and a little bit of it was just forgetting that the show was on Wednesdays in the first place. But I’m all caught up and ready to go.

Except that I’m kind of yawning a bit. The structural issue with Dallas was laid out in the premiere when it established pretty much everything it was going to do, all the schemes that were in play. The rest of the reason was always going to be how it all unraveled, and there’s something a bit dull about watching plans collapse as opposed to watching plans come into fruition. Read more »

“That’s — not Spanish.”

“So how do I do it?” “All you have to do is relax your face and make your eyes go dead like you’ve been lobotomized and wouldn’t put up much of a fight. It’s like playing a sexy possum. That’s Munn-Face.”

When Aaron Sorkin moved to paid cable, we had no idea that what we really needed for him to do was stay on network or ad-supported cable television because those advertisements, the time we waste looking at products we’ll almost certainly never buy but fully support their presence in the middle of our programs so we don’t have to shell out unnecessary dollars on content and, instead, spend them on shoes and snacks and drugs or whatever else we please, the lapses in between the “arias” of dialogue, were essential so we didn’t feel the crushing weight of paragraphs with unpronounced punctuation that are now the mainstay of a series on which no one from studio exec to writer’s assistant seems to say no to Sorkin, which enables him to lay down as many soapboxes as can fit within the same amount of time Game of Thrones entertains several enclaves of characters spread across continents but Sorkin barely has time to tell the story of one or two or less than two characters and do it with poor, sit-com-worthy gimmicks while filling all the negative space with an incessant volley of letters that run together like a traffic jam in a commercial for his and her body spray and, by doing so, possibly torpedoing a decent premise for a show the same way he crushed a promising show about sketch comedy five years ago that turned into something political and too serious and, if I may say so, icky when it came to the Jordan/Danny relationship, an act for which he apologized to the crew, the network, and Matthew Perry in GQ (scroll down past the bad CMS garbage) so he at least insinuates that he has to know what he’s doing now, what mistakes he’s making, and how to improve on those mistakes after going down with two busted ships and one that sailed into the history of television, all of this information begging the question:

Are you in or are you out?

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“Why are you looking at pictures of bald, fat men?”

Let’s set up a profile for my mom! Wait. Do you know anything about my mom? I don’t. She’s an English teacher so she likes — art? And stuff? This profile needs more dead animal parts.

I didn’t think I was going to do a review of Pretty Little Liars this week but something needs to be said about things that are happening on this show, particularly how the show is trespassing on my faculties of reason.

You and I both know this show isn’t supposed to stand next to Breaking Bad or LOST or any show to be acclaimed by critics outside of Us Weekly. But I also once attributed subtext and whiffs of an aspiration to complex narrative for this show, even saying this is the best show you’re not watching. So that’s on me.

The thing is that Pretty Little Liars may indeed try their hand at revelatory storytelling in the shadow of LOST but they also have to consider their target demographic won’t hang on without some reveals and may be too impatient for the answer-longing that kept fans tuning in for Whiny Jack and Tag-along Kate. You have to let them have a piece of the story every once in a while, maybe more often than you would for the wider 18-49.

I’m getting it out there that I don’t hate Pretty Little Liars for dumping more information into each episode and picking up the pace a little (a lot — a lot a lot). It’s the execution that troubles me. Don’t insult me or the young girls of America. You can do better.

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“Seriously, though. I have a blog?”

It’s not the greatest show in the world —

I’m sure this will all sound glib. But that might be fitting for the subject.

Aaron Sorkin brings another series showcasing the wild, emotional chaos happening beneath a shiny veneer we as a public consume, ripping the facade off something polished and well-oiled to show all the moving parts that makes everything tick, especially if those moving parts are near clinical in self-importance and neuroses. If The Newsroom doesn’t work out, maybe Sorkin will pitch a series about how sausage is made with the most pedantic and fervent meat-handlers Johnsonville has ever put to work.

But he wouldn’t do a show about sausage workers. The shows he wants to do are about higher, shinier offices that have direct and immediate sway over a large swaths of the public. The shows he brings to series all seem to be ones that focus on vanted elements of our society, humanizing the faces and talking heads we tend to detach from the rest of us in order to get over the fact that they rose from our depths. It’s heady stuff.

But does anyone else get the feeling Sorkin churns out shows because he’s still dealing with his disappointment in Sports Night?
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“Fate caused us to collide.”

That was a big roller coaster now wasn’t it?

I’m going to keep my thoughts pretty focused on just these two episodes since I have a wrap-up post over at TV.com (and if you’ve been following along here, you generally know what I’ve been concerned about and also enjoying). Which is good since there’s a lot of stuff to talk about just within these two episodes that this post might’ve gotten a little unwieldy if I tried to incorporate season ending thoughts as well. Read more »

“I didn’t know.”

It’s weird to write about The Killing in this space, not because we haven’t in the past (we have), but because when I think about this finale, and the season as a whole, I don’t separate it from the first season. I think of both seasons actually as a single, 26-episode season. Like, you know, on broadcast TV! Exactly what Veena Sud didn’t want!

This is a little unfair, of course. The Killing strode for something slightly more ambitious than your normal crime melodrama in its effort to show the ripple effect of this single girl’s utterly pointless murder. It wanted to explore the ramifications on the police, the victim’s family, power brokers, and, at least the first season, other people who knew the victim. It most cases, the show was wildly unsuccessful in its attempts to do this as it saw these ramifications as not only subplots but as red herrings into a murder that it, ultimately, never really cared about.

So I’m going to talk about the episode and this season, and then some brief thoughts on where the show can possibly go from here.

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“I made it very clear: I don’t know how to drive.”

Action-heavy episodes like this one are among the worst things to write about it. I can highlight the excellent direction by Joaquim Dos Santos (aka Dr. Fight) and Ki Hyun Ryu, but you already know they’re excellent. And you can’t not mention the storyboard artists who routinely deliver dynamic work that is then brought to life by Studio Mir and their animation director Han Gwang Il.

And it’s all great. Action sequences on Korra are never incoherent and show a knack for cleverness (how awesome was it when Mako re-directed the mecha’s electrical charge back to it? Answer: Very awesome) that I really don’t think any show matches it (if there is one, please let me know so I can watch).

It does mean, however, that there’s not too much to dig into, so if this is a little short, I apologize in advance. Read more »

“Don’t believe me, do you?”
“Excuse me, brother, but no, I don’t.”

I’ve never seen a single episode of the original Dallas. I was only six years old when it ended it’s 14 season run in 1991 (plus various TV movies and reunion specials), and the series was never really on my syndication radar (I don’t think I’ve ever seen it in syndication, though it has been syndicated in limited capacities). I’m familiar with it, then, only in reading TV histories, clips of the series in “TV’s best [whatever]…”, and pop culture parody and homage.

Which doesn’t exactly make me the best person to talk about the show since TNT’s Dallas is more of a continuation than a reimagining or reboot of the original series. But that doesn’t mean I don’t recognize its influences. Dallas popularized the use of the season-ending cliffhanger after the “Who shot J.R.?” season finale, and as we’re all aware now, the cliffhanger is pretty much way to end lots of shows, even sitcoms sometimes, these days (his likely explains, by the way, the show’s lack of syndicated presence following its conclusion).

As a result, I’m more likely to discuss ways in which this new Dallas feels a lot like other shows that are, in turn, likely indebted to the original Dallas. If anything, this version of Dallas perhaps represents the final segment of a snake eating itself. Read more »