January 23, 2010 · 2:48 am

Last Night with Conan O’Brien: Goodbye to the Tonight Show

I’m sorry, Conan.

I didn’t watch your Tonight Show. At 11:35, I’m more likely to be writing about television than watching it, and for that I truly have to apologize. I was part of the problem, part of the group of people who celebrated Conan O’Brien’s rise to the Tonight Show but who never bothered to keep tuning in. I watched a few episodes early on, and enjoyed the feeling of pride that “my” host pushing out Jay Leno, but then when push came to shove I was content with knowing Conan was there.

I know it’s not my fault: even if Conan’s ratings had been incrementally better, chances are that NBC still would have made the decision to push his show back, and this whole mess would still be happening. And considering that Conan is walking away with an enormous severance package and will likely be back on our televisions within a year, it’s not as if the man himself is truly losing his job and left without a chance of success.

But there is something tragic about seeing someone robbed of doing what he loved, and robbed of doing it on the stage he always dreamed of. He left this job because he felt as if NBC was disrespecting its legacy, and like the consummate professional he is Conan showed an enormous amount of respect for both the Tonight Show’s legacy and his time at NBC in the midst of his final goodbye to the network and the show he feels he is leaving a decade too early. While no one is crying for Coco, considering the severance he received, I don’t think any of us can deny him the right to cry: his tears felt genuine, a love letter to the people who brought him to where he is and a final curtain to a run at NBC that took him from comedy writer to national sensation.

His final episode (and mine) of The Tonight Show was one hundred percent Conan, one hundred percent heartfelt, and hopefully just a small percentage of what’s to come.

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January 22, 2010 · 8:49 pm

Burn Notice – “A Dark Road”

“A Dark Road”

January 21st, 2010

Did you remember what happened last year on Burn Notice? Because I didn’t. Luckily, the show offered a nice bit of catchup to remind us about the end of the Strickler arc, and even more importantly the show jumps onto its next story point with vigor so that what happened before is a nice bit of shading as opposed to something we have to remember.

“A Dark Road” is a really compelling hour of television in a lot of ways, but it’s also a lot of fun: the show is at its best when we’re just sort of hanging out in this universe, and I thought that this was a really enjoyable re-entry into that world with both a strong episodic story and some nice hints at the newest initially unseen antagonist to enter Michael Westen’s life, plus the best material that Sharon Gless has been given all season.

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January 22, 2010 · 7:19 pm

Friday Night Lights – “I Can’t”

“I Can’t”

January 20th, 2010

If you’re one of the people who are holding off watching Friday Night Lights until it debuts on NBC, you received good news this week: the show returns on April 30th. And I’m going to be really interested to see how viewers respond to “I Can’t” when it airs in early July, because the episode has the show headed in some potentially controversial directions in terms of both cultural and narrative taboos.

It’s perhaps no surprise that the latter are my only real concern, as the show continues to demonstrate a deft hand when dealing with sensitive subjects. However, I don’t know if the same kind of sensitivity could possibly rescue the show from itself in its other major storyline, which is creating some compelling television now but is creating far more concerns than I would like heading towards the end of the season.

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January 22, 2010 · 6:10 pm

Reminder: Caprica debuts tonight on SyFy and SPACE

“Pilot”

January 22nd, 2010

It’s been eight months since I reviewed the pilot, so I’m interested in whether anyone out there is really watching Caprica for the first time tonight as the two-hour pilot makes its television debut on SyFy and SPACE (In Canada) at 9 ET.

For those who are, or who want to get some idea of what to expect, Todd VanDerWerff and I had a spoiler-free chat over at Media Elites about the show and our thoughts on its unique position trapped between various preconceptions. It covers a lot of the ground I would have covered in a preview (such as how SyFy’s new brand identity feels almost hindered rather than aided by Caprica’s connections with Battlestar Galactica), so it’s a good reflection of my attitude towards next week’s “real” first episode.

So, feel free to click through to read more of my thoughts on the series, and I’ll see you here next week.

Review: Caprica – “Pilot” (May 2009)

Both as a singular piece of filmmaking and as a pilot, Caprica ultimately works: it has some strong performances (I was particularly impressed with the strength of work coming from the teens involved), a solid balance of callbacks to Galactica and newer material, and a central premise that captures the kind of power struggles which made BSG so captivating. That comparison is always going to hurt Caprica, as it isn’t aiming as high in terms of science fiction nor does it have the benefit of slowly revealing the complexity of this world (considering that we already know how this story ends), but by giving it a compelling human face they’ve convinced me the series should prove an intriguing extension of the BSG legacy.

thirtysomething with robots sound good? Watch Caprica (Media Elites)

As SyFy prepares to launch Caprica, a series which has always been considered a spin-off even though producers are now wary of the term, it is very quickly discovering that the show fits nearly into neither category. While the audience who enjoyed its parent show, Battlestar Galactica, may be anxious to see more content from that universe, the show doesn’t resemble Galactica as much as they might want it to, and they are also fairly small in number. However, because of the show’s connection to Galactica and its reputation, those with no experience with the franchise are convinced that they couldn’t possibly enjoy the show, despite producers’ claims that foreknowledge is not required.

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January 22, 2010 · 2:32 pm

The Office’s Bait and Switch: The Irrelevant yet Attractive TV Clip Show

The Office’s Bait and Switch

January 22nd, 2010

Last night, many of you likely tuned into NBC at 9pm ET to enjoy what the network was billing as a “new” episode of The Office. And, sure enough, the episode began with a cold open that tied into ongoing continuity, as a banker (played by David Costible) stops by the branch to do some due diligence in the early stages of the company’s restructuring. We find Michael Scott up to his usual tricks trying to make the office seem more exciting, having Dwight play a sentient computer and riding a Segway for no discernible reason, and we have Pam there to help guide us through his insanity (fake accounts are okay, but Pam is not on board with Fake Stanley).

It sounds like a solid setup to an episode of The Office, but “The Banker” wasn’t actually an episode: as soon as the Banker went back to talk to Toby and asked a question about any potential liability issues, the spidey sense was tingling, and sure enough it was right. Toby began flashing back to previous events, and the episode revealed itself to be a clip show in disguise.

What I find so fascinating about the clip show as an episode structure is that it is becoming both increasingly irrelevant and increasingly attractive in this modern age. While television economics and concerns over lengthy delays between episodes results in a desire to have more “original” content to keep viewers engaged, the clip show seems less necessary when viewers can catch up with previous episodes on DVD or on Hulu, and where “clips” are a part of our everyday lives as opposed to some sort of novelty.

And yet it’s not going to go away entirely any time soon.

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January 22, 2010 · 2:53 am

30 Rock – “Winter Madness”

“Winter Madness”

January 21st, 2010

Jack Donaghy has had many relationships in his time on 30 Rock, and while some of them have been adventurous or novel (Isabella Rosellini as his ex-wife, Edie Falco as his congresswoman girlfriend) the rest have been remarkably dull. And while Alec Baldwin is technically capable of elevating any material, and the show has always hired potentially funny actresses to play the roles, his relationships can be a black hole for the show at times. While Emily Mortimer is a great actress, Phoebe the bird bone fiance was painful, and Salma Hayek’s nurse had one decent episode (“Generallisimo,” although I liked the McFlurry story) but never amounted to anything else. And yet, because they’re major guest stars and represent Jack’s main storyline, the characters stick around longer than any other character with such little potential ever would, and the show suffers for it.

I like Julianne Moore, but her character on 30 Rock was a one-joke one-off that should have never developed into anything more. While there was potential in the story for Jack to tap into parts of his past (the episode in which Moore didn’t actually appear but Jack and Kenneth broke into her house actually did this better), the story has spent too much time on her character’s divorce and not enough time on Jack himself. There are some fun bits in “Winter Madness,” and I’m sure the episode was quite enjoyable for Bostonians, but the stories felt as if they weren’t actually creating enough comedy to form anything close to a cohesive episode.

Although American Historian Tracy Jordan can hang out on my television anytime.

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January 21, 2010 · 11:41 pm

Parks and Recreation – “Leslie’s House”

“Leslie’s House”

January 21st, 2010

One of the things that I find so interesting about Parks and Recreation’s second season comeback is that the show hasn’t fundamentally changed its stories. I can very much see how the show, in its infancy, might have brainstormed an idea about Leslie’s house looking like a crazy person’s garage, and the idea of Leslie trying to host a dinner party and using her connections with a city program in order to pull it off feels like something that could have gone horribly wrong in the first season.

I didn’t think “Leslie’s House” was amongst the best episodes of the season, as it felt as if there were just a few too many things going on at once, but the fact that the core of the episode didn’t implode with all of those elements present is a testament to the control the writers have over the universe right now. Despite technically presenting only a single story, the episode started to weave in a lot of recurring stories to complicate things, and it resulted in quite a few fun gags and just enough resonance to keep things from seeming overwhelming.

It’s a funny episode, and an impressive one considering the degree of difficulty, but I almost feel like there’s an extra ten minutes here that could have given some of the storylines a bit more time to breathe that would have really made the episode click.

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January 21, 2010 · 10:32 pm

Community – “Interpretive Dance”

“Interpretive Dance”

January 21st, 2010

After a particularly noteworthy return last week, where the show played with some very dangerous material with Jack Black and came out of it funnier than ever, there’s no question that “Interpretive Dance” is a step backwards. This isn’t to suggest that the episode is unfunny, and if we’re judging purely on the level of character development there’s some nice stuff going on here.

It seems like a bit of a sudden turn for the show, however, especially since a lot of the issues it is working with here haven’t popped up in a while. I like to see shows like Community engaging with more long-term character arcs and development, but the show has to avoid seeming like it is just going to stop in on occasion: there’s some subtle stuff here which indicates that this is not necessarily the show’s strategy, however at the same time they stayed away from these stories long enough that it felt like the show had to take some time to rediscover the rhythms of those interactions, leading to a weaker episode if one that could prove beneficial in the long term.

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January 21, 2010 · 11:53 am

Human Target – “Rewind”

“Rewind”

January 20th, 2010

Airing out of order, “Rewind” is either trying to complete the trains, planes and automobiles trifecta for Christopher Chance’s various missions or trying to simply put the show’s best foot forward in its second episode out of the gate behind American Idol. I’d be worried if it was the former as the show can only go so far when Chance is trapped on a moving mode of transportation with no chance of escape, but I think the latter is their primary goal here.

And it works really well, because the hour is certainly an improvement over the already solid pilot. Not only does “Rewind” feature one of the most extensive uses of in media res storytelling I’ve seen in television for a while, but it also taps into both the potential comedy and the potential mythology present in the series. It is a ludicrous hour of television from a physic perspective, but in terms of delivering action and suspense while maintaining a light-hearted sense of humour and revealing some deeper shades of Christopher Chance and the work he does the episode is quite successful.

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January 21, 2010 · 12:17 am

Republic of Doyle – “The Duchess of George”

“The Duchess of George”

January 20th, 2010

Shows like Republic of Doyle may present themselves as fairly straightforward, but in reality there is a lot of nuance to how they portray their characters and their stories. The exact same story could be told in very different ways, and the same characters could interact with that story in completely different ways. The characters could remain detached from the story, largely observing the behaviour of others, or they could become wrapped up in the story to the point of being placed in harm’s way.

There is no “right” way to make a show like Republic of Doyle, but “The Duchess of George” has the show the closest it has come so far. The show still has some problems in terms of its characterization, but there is a sense of clarity and direction this week that was lacking in weeks previous. It may not initially seem to be a different show, but the show has replaced narrative burdens with character burdens, simplifying its storytelling while complicating its characters to counterbalance.

The show still has some room to grow, but I think it actually delivered something of substance in its third week out, which is at least one step in the right direction.

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