If the older show was about using death as the gateway to a more fulfilling life, then the new model is about taking that idea, reifying it, coating it with a romantic glaze, and serving it to the audience in a pie tin with a side order of Kristen Chenoweth’s boobs.
At this rate, they’re going to have to start giving out an Emmy award for best fake accent in a leading role.
All I want to do is watch Tim Gunn give catty people advice on how to make pretty clothes, is that too much to ask?
I finally broke down and picked up a TV set. I may have to finally learn about the difference between S-Video and Component or whatever, and why HDMI cables seem to be so expensive.
Still no TV, and I often have to kick-start some of these streaming viewers that the networks run, but nothing will keep me from vegging out in front of the TV in one form or another.
I don’t have a TV in my new apartment yet, but I did finally manage to get the Internet hooked up, so I was able to spend the weekend bingeing on some of the fall premieres that I’ve been missing.
Lost, Heroes, and the confusing, convoluted shows that came before them.
Do TV shows have a gender? Of course they do, but sometimes it’s hard to tell what that gender is.
If anyone was ever the poster child for the noir tragedy, ever paid all the costs for doing the right thing, it was Veronica Mars.
Instead of having to spread clues and red herrings out over 22 episodes, TV shows can treat the broken-up season as two separate mini-seasons, complete with mysteries that get solved, red herrings that get deboned, and in Lost’s case, more of the usual non-answers to lingering questions.
I’m afraid that Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip may have permanently ruined Aaron Sorkin’s writing for me.
Notes on the final Project Runway 3 collections. There are spoilers, natch.
It’s nice to see that House is even crankier than I am.
Josh’s OCD breaks down.
Who would have thought that a show about fashion designers would resonate so much with a game developer?
It’s not hard to find a TV show with an uninspiring premise, shaky writing, and a flailing cast. Sometimes, though, you can’t help but like it anyway.
Lost is a television show that doesn’t ignore new media, or work against it, but sits at the center of an entire constellation of media artifacts.
It wasn’t until ABC announced the show’s cancellation that the writers finally gave in and accepted the fact that “sense” was simply never going to be a part of their legacy in the way that dysfunctional families and bright red wigs would be.
Even if the producers underestimate their audience’s mental capacity, Prison Break remains one of the most watchable shows on the air.
Veronica Mars will have to give up on being considered perfect, and settle for being the best show on TV.
Oh lord, have I really sunk this low?
The burning question of the 2003-2004 TV season was this: “Does the world have room for two shows about young women who are visited by voices from a higher plane that tell them to help people?” The answer was “not so much.”
Spring filler makes me cranky.
Thank goodness for beer and livebloggers; how did I ever manage to sit through award shows without them?
When watching TV is difficult, but worth it.
While the return of watchable television means I can spare myself the pain of Skating With Celebrities or Get This Party Started, it comes too late to save me from most of the new shows the networks have rolled out this winter.
Yes, I know “podcastosphere” isn’t a word. At least, I hope it isn’t.
It’s not like I had anything but the lowest expectations for this show, but for some reason I was hoping that the last premiere of the Autumn would provide me with some kind of satisfying closure, a lesson that I could take away from all this pilot-watching.
Martha Stewart has become a sort of modern-day Confucius, encouraging us all to observe traditional rituals and relationships in order to ensure a harmonious, tastefully-decorated world.
Despite its constant efforts to kill itself, the three-camera sitcom just. Refuses. To. Die, already.
Entering the last leg of the race to watch all of this season’s premieres, running out of things to say about mediocre-to-bad TV shows.
Beyond an extra helping of paranoia, there’s little to distinguish Close to Home from any other suburban-hell, crusading-lawyer or working-mom show on the air.
Beneath the thin layer of forensic technobabble and buddy-cop banter that most procedural crime shows ostensibly revolve around, there lies a nasty, insatiable appetite for images of mutilated bodies and terrified women. Why watch that when you can watch Gabrielle Union instead?
Geena Davis is pitch-perfect in the role of President Allen, trying to manage her cabinet and her family all at once while taking in stride the hostile forces that press upon her from all sides.
If the two lead characters had an Odd Couple-y, joker/straight man dynamic going, that would be one thing, but they seem to pull the center of the show back and forth between camp and drama, and it suffers as a result.
If nothing else, The Ghost Whisperer has made me more appreciative of other, better shows. That’s something, I guess.
Do I really need to post something about this show?
Three takes on making the world a better place: the saccharine, the salty, and the acidic.
It’s too early to say for sure, but it doesn’t feel like any of these shows have captured the unconventional, genre-busting Lostyness of Lost. But zombies will trump fish-people or body snatchers any day of the week.
Dennis Hopper realizes what a bad show he’s on, and delivers his laughably awful lines with his usual gusto.
The networks keep pumping out legal dramedies, and I keep watching them, possibly as some sort of penance for unspecified sins.
CBS and Fox must have been playing some weird game of one-upmanship when developing How I Met Your Mother and Kitchen Confidential.
If there’s any potential for the show, it’s in the cast.
If you’re going to ask me to follow your characters through twenty-some-odd years of their lives, then you need to give those characters some potential and set up stories for them that are more than just the chaff lying around on the floor of a daytime soap’s writers room.
As they travel from town to town in search of scary demons to purge, Dean and Sam have their fair share of male-bonding moments, most of which seem to involve calling each other “bitch.”
The big problem with Bones is that the writers and producers don’t seem to trust the actors to convey any of the characters’ qualities, and they don’t trust the audience to pick up on them, and so the script ends up being as ham-handed and overly obvious as possible.
Nowadays, The Simpsons is considered a comedy emeritus; a respectable, even gentle show when compared to its coarse neighbors.
Michael has potential for development, not only because he’s the main character, but because he’s so insufferably smug about his grand schemes that you just know he’s due to be taken down a peg or two while in the joint.
A minute ago, I was trying to figure out why my throat was sore. I think I’ve figured it out.
In a way, Alias just can’t win: its viewers have been trained to expect twists and betrayals at every turn, to the point where the only way to really surprise them would be to not do the shocking thing. (Spoilers within, but they’re pretty much exactly the spoilers you would expect.)
It’s not a great series by any stretch of the imagination, but it keeps managing to find a balancing point between procedural crime, family drama, and psychic weirdness that I still can’t bring myself to believe exists.
Only a few of the program’s many, many major questions were answered, and without fail, they were answered with more questions.
It went from being a weird, campy, semi-satirical look at suburban life to being a ludicrous, kitschy, not-at-all-satirical soap opera.
After watching the last couple of episodes, I’m wondering: was Rory always this much of a spineless weasel?
Characters and plot points that seem like walk-ons and macguffins turn out to be incredibly important, sometimes months after they’re introduced.
The tone of the show has shifted from a nondenominational vagueness that permitted the viewer a range of readings to an ever-more doctrinaire line that starts to read like “Liberal Catholicism for Dummies.”
Rather than being a numbing morass of brainless candy, pop culture (video games, TV, etc.) is instead a stimulating experience that requires active participation on the part of the audience.
It’s a neat trick, taking characters who can only be described as “unsympathetic jerks” and making them not only objects of fun, but of affection.
I didn’t think it was possible, but Season 2 of Alias actually makes Season 1 look straightforward and sensible.
It’s profoundly weird to watch a revival of a show that went off the air fifteen years ago, and was more than a quarter of a century old when that happened.
The problem came when I sat down to start writing about them: after I filled in the “formula” line for each show I watched, there was nothing left to say.
Notes on the final season of Angel. There are some mild spoilers, but none of it ever made any sense anyway, so reading on probably won’t hurt too much.
One of the best moments of the evening was songwriter Jorge Drexler walking up to the stage and actually genuflecting to Prince before singing his acceptance.
A day late and a dollar short, here is a scorecard of some of the series that have premiered since the new year.
So now there’s a spy club even more evil than what Sydney’s used to, although it’s not the spy club that Zoe from Firefly works for. You’re probably thinking this post is full of spoilers for the first season of Alias, and you’re probably right.
The Super Bowl is about much more than football, and there was plenty of extra entertainment to be had; I didn’t skip over any of it, no matter how much I wanted to.
Even though the show contains plenty of po-mo formal trickery and became popular in the closed format of DVD, it exhibits some very traditional traits of television shows.
Channel surfing is not just a matter of mashing on the clicker; it’s a skill that requires years of practice in order to keep your attention span as short as possible without losing your ability to concentrate on what you’re watching.
Ok, so “loving” fanfiction is an exaggeration, but seriously, the stuff is crackalicious.
Zerg played a very conservative game, avoiding gambles and mostly just concentrating on making enough to stay in the game. Jennings, meanwhile, couldn’t put her away.
In what seems to be a shout-out to the recently-deceased Jacques Derrida, Jon Stewart recently appeared on CNN?s Crossfire and attempted to examine oversimplified binary oppositions in American political discourse in order to expose their underlying structures, as well as the inherent instability of those structures — or something like that.
either debates nor schedules nor poor reception nor gloom of the Twins getting their asses handed to them by the Yankees will stay this courier from the swift completion of his appointed rounds. More reviews of new TV shows.
Load the tapes and check the TiVo, fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la; ‘Tis the season to watch new shows, fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la.
See PBS air a two-hour documentary on video games. See Josh read a lot of TV-related critical theory for class. See Josh nitpick.
The Olympics are over, leaving a hole in my heart. Or maybe that’s just a gap in my television schedule.
I like watching television.
I am an American male between the ages of 18 and 34, and therefore am a part of SpikeTV’s target demographic. Pardon me while I curl into the fetal position and weep for a while.
While watching my semi-annual dosage of television over the last few days — time mostly spent trying watching reruns of one of a dozen different Scooby Doo series — I made the following observations.
As if the end of Buffy’s run wasn’t bad enough (both in the sad-to-see-you-go way and the boy-this-show-sure-went-downhill way), we lose another serial friend this week: The Brunching Shuttlecocks are shutting things down.