Monthly Archives: June 2008

June 10, 2008 · 3:27 pm

60th Emmy Awards Preview – Supporting Actor in a Drama Series

[Leading up to the announcement of the nominees in mid-July, Cultural Learnings will be delving into each of the major categories to highlight a major theme or a certain selection of potential nominees.]

As far as categories go, they don’t get too much more wide open than this year’s race for Supporting Actor in a Drama Series. It’s long been a category dominated by the show of the moment: both The Sopranos and The West Wing saw multiple nominees on multiple occasions, and Lost was added to that list in recent years. So, for a show like Lost, the question isn’t whether one of its actors will get a nomination: it’s which one, and how many.

This goes for other series as well, as this is certainly a year where there’s a lot of shows that probably have multiple deserving candidates. These types of races are always difficult because of two competing phenomena: vote-splitting, which implies that these candidates will struggle to break into the final five or six nominees, and tape-sharing, where the tapes screened for critics could potentially overlap between candidates. The latter, for example, pretty well won Terry O’Quinn the Emmy last year, as he was in Michael Emerson’s submission almost as much as he was in his own.

This year, it’s three competitors from Boston Legal, four from Lost, and two from Damages that will either be fighting more with each other or working together to multiple nominations. And, well, let’s not forget everyone else, too.

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June 10, 2008 · 2:27 am

Season Finale: Greek – “Spring Broke”

“Spring Broke”

June 9th, 2008

Most series set in college would end their first season with the end of the school year, but Greek is operating under a really weird schedule – it took only ten episodes to complete the first half of the year, but only got to Spring Break (Woo!) in its last twelve.

The argument you could make, though, is that a show that has nothing to do with academics should probably climax in the throes of the party period as opposed to the exam one. I don’t say that to degrade the series, a solid entry into its television category, but rather to point out the obvious: if you came in expecting no drama or theatrics surrounding love quadrangles or hijinx, you went to the wrong Spring Break.

For the most part, the show follows its traditional patterns: Ashley is shallow and immature, Casey is self-righteous, Cappie is humorous but unfairly treaded on, Evan is pathetic, and Rusty has every possible bad thing that could happen to him, well, happen to him. But they’re comfortable patterns, and just like an ideal Spring Break in a television season swimming with less and less options.

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June 10, 2008 · 1:06 am

The Mole (2008) – “Episode Two”

“Episode Two”

June 9th, 2008

Last week’s premiere of The Mole’s fifth season (if we’re counting the celebrity editions) was one of those episodes where you could see some growing pains, but beneath them was the core of the show we enjoyed before. There was the unique tasks that brought out the worst in the competitors, the wonderfully cheesy music, and a game that was more about the mind than anything else.

However, it’s not an easy sell for new viewers: I made a quick guest appearance on the /Filmcast last night, and guest GreatWhiteSnark (From his eponymous site) really didn’t understand all of the hype after last week’s episode. I tried my best to explain it, but it isn’t the easiest thing to do in thirty seconds and ABC.com’s synopsis is fairly useless. However, I stand by my assertion that as a mind game it rises above most reality shows, and that we’ll eventually get to that point.

What’s funny about this, the season’s second episode, is that it’s one step forward and one step back. While I am pleased to report that host Jon Kelley was much improved the second time around, especially with his voiceover work, the end-of-episode quiz was dumbed down to the point that it felt like the game was a mockery of its former self. While it might be the same on the surface, if this is seriously all they expect of these people they must not be a very smart group.

But we could have known that from the wheelbarrow.

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June 9, 2008 · 12:36 am

Mad Men – “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes”

“Smoke Gets In Your Eyes”

Season One, Episode One

[As part of getting in the groove for the second season premiere in late July, figured that CTV’s decision to air Mad Men’s first season in Canada this summer is as good an excuse as any to revisit this fantastic summer series. (For those who don’t know, AMC (A U.S. Cable network) aired the series last summer). I’ll only get so far before the second season premieres on AMC, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.]

When the Emmy nominations roll around in July, one thing is for certain: the Mad Men pilot will be responsible for many nominations, although not for the people we see on screen (who have more showcases later in the series run) but rather the people who created the look and feel of the series.

This is not to say that “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” is a poor episode for any of the series’ actors, as I’d argue it’s a great showcase for almost all of them, but this is a pilot that’s all about setting: in time, in place, and to a certain extent within the psychological mind frame of these people. Although Freud gets a bum review from the people that matter in the episode, psychology largely serves as a way of orienting us to the way these people think and why they think that way.

What the episode does is create this setting, the smoke-filled and complicated sixties where tobacco is only recently a bad habit, where African Americans perform only the most menial of service-based tasks, and where women are never executives or able to act like them. We watch the characters weave in and out of these concepts: those who enter into them with a naive world view, those who have become inhabited by them for the sake of fitting into this world in which they seem uncomfortable, and those who are them.

On these levels, Matthew Weiner and Alan Taylor and their team have created a masterpiece.

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June 7, 2008 · 12:21 pm

Battlestar Galactica – “The Hub”

“The Hub”

June 6th, 2008

[I’m filling in for fellow blogger Todd VanDerWerff over at The House Next Door this week (Thanks to Todd, and Keith, for making that happen!), so here’s an excerpt of this week’s episode review and a link to the site. Enjoy!]

Say what you will about “Sine Qua Non,” nearly unanimously considered the fourth season’s worst episode yet, but the dramatic undercurrent that has propelled the rest of this season was present in certain aspects of the episode. The episode was too blatant with its plot movements, no question, but there was also tantalizing hints of the story we weren’t seeing.

While there was dramatic purpose in keeping us in the dark to reflect the fleet’s confusion in the wake of the “Guess What’s Coming to Dinner?” cliffhanger, we were really waiting for “The Hub.” Written by Jane Espenson and directed by Paul Edwards, this story of the basestar’s quest to destroy the Cylon Resurrection hub and unbox D’Anna (Lucy Lawless) is the one that we wanted to see last week, which made those brief hints more frustrating than intriguing.

This is not the first time the season has done this – Espenson’s last episode, “Escape Velocity,” was coincidentally itself a divergence from the Cylon Civil War and the Demetrius’ search for Earth in favour of building Tyrol and Baltar’s interesting, but less pressing, storylines. Here, however, Espenson trades off, drawing the gig of writing the payoff for a change.

For the most part, she succeeds – it’s hard to screw up what the show does best, an intersection of human and Cylon combined with meaningful action sequences and a spiritual journey for humanity’s dying leader. There’s a certain diversity in the episode’s tone that could turn some off, with some strangely humorous or laid back sequences, but when much of it was given to Mary McDonnell and James Callis it was at least in good hands. By grounding itself in both the ongoing plot and the series’ central characters and themes, the episode can’t help but provide momentum into the final episode of the year.

Continue reading @ The House Next Door.

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June 6, 2008 · 10:45 am

The Wire – “The Target” and “The Detail”

“The Target” & “The Detail”

Season One, Episodes One & Two

In my year and a half of television criticism here at Cultural Learnings, I have run into a number of roadblocks due to my lack of knowledge with a particular era of television. As I noted back when The Sopranos was finishing, I never got into the HBO drama – not only am I slightly too young, but my TV addiction is still a relatively recent phenomenon. I am a network television viewer of the Lost generation, and sometimes that hurts.

No better example of this than was earlier this year, when David Simon’s HBO series The Wire was entering its fifth season. I couldn’t go to any of my usual TV criticism sites without hearing about how amazing the series was, and how wonderful the fifth season would be, and how there was absolutely no way anyone could jump into this novel-like series in its fifth season. I, knee deep in thesis work, was unable to commit to watching four seasons in the spring, and as a result I had to be the odd man out when it came to the powerful conclusion to this epic Baltimore tale.

But I’ve come to make amends: just as the magic of DVD is allowing me to revisit Six Feet Under (Which I’ll probably save for when I complete the series), The Wire has officially entered into my rotation. Normally, I might keep such an old catalogue title to myself, but Alan Sepinwall is currently revisiting the first season as part of his summer blogging schedule. And while I’m going to have to stick to his “Newbies” posts in favour of keeping myself free of serious spoilers for what’s to come, I figured that the more people talk about what is (thus far, and by all accounts) a fantastic series the better for my readers, readers everywhere, and maybe even the show’s long-shot Emmy chances.

For now, however, time to dig into the first two episodes of the series like I’d dig into an order of Chicken McNuggets.
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June 4, 2008 · 4:31 am

Did Lost’s Flashforwards Spoil Its Own Finale?

As you may have read, earlier this week I had the privilege of being a guest on the second episode of the /Filmcast, the official podcast of SlashFilm.com. It’s quickly making a name for itself as one of the most thorough and lively entertainment podcasts around, largely due to the dedicated of Dave, Devindra, Adam and Peter to making it an interactive and enjoyable experience – it was an honour to only briefly be a part of it.

The episode is now available for download @ Slashfilm.com (Or should be soon, I’ll update the link later), or you can subscribe via iTunes (Link will take you into iTunes to do so, FYI), and I had the pleasure of discussing the Lost finale with the fine gentlemen in the show’s first quarter (Starting at about 14m, but listen to the whole thing folks). And, well, it got me thinking (What doesn’t?).

In a third season episode of How I Met Your Mother, Barney Stinson (played by Neil Patrick Harris) finds out ahead of time that his friend Marshall plans to slap him (as part of a “Slap Bet”) during Thanksgiving dinner. At first, he chides Marshall for this childish error: now that the element of surprise is gone, all of the suspense is taken away, and the slap has lost its impact. But then the anticipation gets to him, tearing apart his emotions and leaving an empty shell of a man who (eventually) gets the slap and a celebratory song to go with it.

Now, I doubt that the writers of this particular episode were necessarily thinking in these terms, but I find great meaning in this storyline in lieu of a re-engaged question of “spoilers,” a four-letter word in a lot of internet circles. I am part of these circles, an adamant believer that spoilers need to be marked extremely carefully if not excised entirely. For example, I’m okay with a spoiler being found in a review of an upcoming episode, but not on the front page of a popular entertainment site (Not that Zap2it has ruined countless episodes of Survivor for me, or anything).

I raise this issue for two reasons: first off, Entertainment Weekly’s Ken Tucker recently fired a shot at people like myself. In admittedly his harshest pullquote, he ends with the following:

Knowing the way something turns out shouldn’t ruin anyone’s pleasure. Hey, it’s a 24/7 media world. The best way to kill spoiler culture, if you don’t like it, is to say one thing to both spoilers and spoiler ”victims”: Grow up.

Admittedly, this is bound to upset a lot of people, myself included – yes, it’s a 24/7 Media World, but that doesn’t necessarily excuse unlabeled spoilers within 12 hours of an episode airing. However, Tucker’s point gained more clarity through something he said earlier:

I admit that if someone tells me who won The Amazing Race before I’ve seen it, I may gnash my teeth a little. But chances are, it will make me want to see how those people scored their victories and how the producers edited the game even more.

First off, if anyone ever ruins The Amazing Race for me, I might have to hurt them.

Second, after discussing it with the folks on the /Filmcast on Monday night, one of the things that came very clear was that Lost Season Four had one problem for quite a few people: it had been spoiled. We knew how it ended, knew that our castaways would get off the island and that they would be called the Oceanic Six and that there was a whole lot of fishy things about their departure. It wasn’t just that we presumed what might happen (Like Chekhov’s gun, for example), but that we actually knew the end result: we just had to, as Tucker seems to argue, enjoy the journey and how the producers take us to that conclusion.

So when we all sat down to discuss the Lost finale, and we all kind of agreed that the ending being spoiled had a profound impact on how we viewed the season, I wondered whether here we have a microcosm, a perfect test for Tucker’s thesis and the argument of spoilsports around the globe. And while it is certainly open for interpretation, I tend to believe that it both proves and disproves this concept that knowing only makes the heart grow fonder.

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June 3, 2008 · 9:15 am

Greek – “Barely Legal”

“Barely Legal”

June 2nd, 2008

Last week, you might remember that I instituted a new rule where I wouldn’t complain about Casey Cartwright.

However, anyone who’s taken a practice LSAT has come across the toughest logic problem of all: when a central character of a series has a lot of screen time in every episode, and a television critic is planning to review the episode despite a desire to no longer speak of his frustrations with said character, what kind of review will he write?

The answer, of course, is a short one. As a result, perhaps to no one’s surprise, the rule is ending. This isn’t to say that the episode is an especially awful one for Ms. Cartwright, but rather that it demands I actually care about her storyline for it to be anything even close to engaging. However, by episode’s end, I actually had some positive things to say, so maybe I didn’t even need the rule!

At the end of the day, though, it’s a weak effort for the series: Rusty and Cappie are busy circumventing the law, Ashley is busy learning the harsh law of credit cards, and Casey is busy learning how to get into law school while ignoring the laws of her new relationships.

And, unfortunately, this episode does little to elevate the series above “barely enjoyable,” something that can’t be said for some of its more accomplished segments.

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June 3, 2008 · 12:56 am

Season Premiere: The Mole – “Episode One”

“Episode One”

June 2nd, 2008

For the sake of not repeating my excitement from yesterday’s blog post, let’s get right to it: ABC’s new season of The Mole has a lot to live up to, and there’s a lot of unknowns. With a new host and with a new format, watching this first episode is all about keeping an open mind to a show that is similar but certainly not quite the same.

This really hasn’t happened with a reality show like this before, so it’s interesting to see how much the producers have tried to follow the original show’s structure. Starting with the opening music, it is clear that this is at least similar to the series we once loved.

When the first task hits and they’re jumping over a waterfall after one contestant is singled out to make the decisions for the group, the flashbacks hit: it was the second season all over again, and all of a sudden we’re literally plummeting over the waterfall of suspicion. We want to figure out who the Mole is, what tasks will follow, and what these people have in store.

And this is enough to float this return: I have some issues with the hosting, issues with a few changes, but at the end of the day the game is almost identical to before. And with real people as opposed to celebrities playing the game yet again, the balance between silly and serious is back on the right path, and I am once again excited to learn who, precisely, is The Mole.

And that’s really what I want, in the end. And since that’s what I got, who can complain?

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June 2, 2008 · 2:21 pm

June @ Cultural Learnings: A Preview

As far as TV months go, you’d think that June would be pretty dead.

All the finales have ended, there is largely still a lack of quality in summer network offerings, and enough major films release that it seems that other media formats are outweighing my personal favourite.

However, at the same time, June is a month in which I have a fair amount of time: summer is here, DVD prices are continuing to drop rapidly, and after pontificating to great length over various finales there is a desire to continue on the same path. As a result of this, perhaps even more than last year, I have every intention on keeping busy during this month.

Most pressing is tonight’s guest spot on the /Filmcast, the official podcast of SlashFilm.com. My old pals from The Watchers have gone corporate, but with good reason: /Film’s a great site, and the podcast remains a great community in which to discuss film and television. I’ll be on for the first half hour of the show or so to discuss Lost’s season finale, so tune in @ the live uStream Channel at around 10 EST to listen to me attempt to condense 5000 words of analysis into quippy contributions to a group discussion!

Elsewhere, however, there’s plenty of other things to chat about.

First off, I’m in the process of what I’d like to call “Myles Meets HBO,” a chance for me to catch up on shows that aired on a cable network I didn’t get, and to a certain extent pre-date my interest in television. First and foremost, I am now 2+ seasons into Six Feet Under, a show I picked up on DVD and have been enjoying greatly (I’ll probably talk about this later in the week, maybe once I hit the official halfway point).

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