Tag Archives: Comedy

June 30, 2008 · 4:50 pm

Assessing the Contenders: Entourage – “The Day F*ckers”

[As the Top 10 Comedy and Drama series contenders have been released, and since Gold Derby has been kind enough to grab us the episode titles, I’m going through each submission judging its quality and its potential on the panel. As I prepare to write about the second Comedy series in contention, you can check out some great Spy reports gathered by Tom O’Neill and Boomer over at Gold Derby (One, Two & Three).]

Entourage (HBO)

Episode: “The Day F*ckers”

Synopsis: With both lovelorn Eric (Struggling to get over his ex-girlfriend Sloan) and Turtle (Who’s never been very good with dating) in slumps, Vince and Drama turn their rush to get laid in a casual fashion into a contest; meanwhile, Ari (Jeremy Piven) struggles to get his son into a private school despite his poor reputation.

My Thoughts: I’ll let my thoughts back when the episode aired to do a bit of the talking for me, although I’ll break into further analysis after the break.

That’s not to say this was a terrible episode of Entourage; as far as these really light and inconsequential episodes go, this one wasn’t particularly awful. But it just had no purpose: Ari’s storyline has been drawn out and neither funny nor dramatic, Eric’s love life has never been entertaining (Although Sloan remains attractive), and Turtle and Drama’s antics were just as ludicrous as ever. The episode just kind of sat there, not doing anything except advance Eric’s love life that tiny little baby step forward.

And when reading over this, and watching the episode, I have to agree: in context of this race, the episode gets even worse.

Continue reading →

1 Comment

Filed under Emmy Awards

Tagged as Comedy, Emmy Awards, Emmys, Entourage, HBO, Nominations, Predictions, Submission, Television, The Day F*ckers

June 22, 2008 · 10:20 am

Review: My Boys Season One (+ 2 Episodes of Season Two)

For anyone who has been following my Twitter feed (Located both on the sidebar and at the link), you’ll have noticed that I’ve been watching more TV than I’ve been blogging recently. With the television season over, and with the summer shows trickling more than pouring in, I’ve devoted more time watching rather than writing about my favourite pasttime. As of this week, I’m into the fifth season of Six Feet Under, five episodes into The Wire’s first season, and while I enjoying them to varying degrees, there was a serious problem: I was getting a tad bit depressed.

You see, there’s a lot of death and harsh reality in these shows; Six Feet Under is literally a weekly funeral for hope and love, and The Wire is a cold picture of a structurally corrupt organization and the drug trade on the streets of Baltimore. And so, when searching for my next show to catch up on, I decided to go with a killer combination: light-hearted comedy, a recent DVD release, and currently airing weekly episodes.

And thus, along came TBS’ comedy series My Boys. And while I certainly wouldn’t place it in upper echelon of current television comedies, the show is everything I needed: familiar, comfortable, clever and funny enough to overcome some of its less inspired moments.

Continue reading →

60th Primetime Emmy Awards Preview: Lead Actress in a Comedy Series

In the Emmy Awards’ smallest acting category, there’s not much in the way of wiggle room. The small numbers should mean more of a chance of grabbing a nomination for newcomers, like Pushing Daisies’ Anna Friel or Miss/Guided’s Judy Greer, but it’s also one of the most tightly contested of the major categories. This is because there’s a lot of forces at play here: you’ve got the power of the four Housewives, the heritage of Seinfeld, Everybody Loves Raymond and Married…with Children, and the credibility of awards-show favourites like Mary-Louise Parker or Tina Fey.

Combine all of this with last year’s winner America Ferrera, and you have a category where making the Top 10 isn’t enough; you need to have something special that’s going to make you overcome the logjam that could lead to the category’s five nominees. On the one hand, this shuts out a lot of good candidates who probably deserve a shot, as they won’t rank highly enough in the popular vote to have a chance.

However, the one good spinoff is that for the candidates who do have that name recognition, it’s going to be a race that is decided by who has the best tape. The seven or so candidates who have a chance of cracking that Top 5 will have to put forward their best material of the season, and the result is a race that’s going to be very close even if there’s so many “real” contenders.

Continue reading →

1 Comment

Filed under Emmy Awards

Tagged as 2008, 30 Rock, America Ferrera, Anna Friel, Award Shows, Back to You, Christina Applegate, Clips, Comedy, Desperate Housewives, Emmy Awards, Emmys, Entertainment, Eva Longoria, Felicity Huffman, Judy Greer, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Marcia Cross, Mary Louise-Parker, Patricia Heaton, Samantha Who?, Submissions, Television, Teri Hatcher, Tina Fey, Ugly Betty, Videos, Weeds

May 19, 2008 · 9:21 pm

Season Finale – How I Met Your Mother – “Miracles”

“Miracles”

May 19th, 2008

For quite a few series, there isn’t much to go on as far as judging the show’s return post-strike – can we really fairly judge the quality of a series by only four or five episodes designed to either tie up loose ends or pump out content for their network before May Sweeps ends? However, in the case of How I Met Your Mother, you can’t really make the same argument.

We got almost as many episodes post-strike as we did before, and as a result there is a sense that the show got to tell actual storylines and to lay down important pieces for its (now confirmed) future. The biggest problem with this is that I don’t know if they actually told enough of those storylines, particularly the unfortunately absent Stella (Busy with Scrubs Sarah Chalke); if we are to buy this as the season’s big purpose, for Ted to meet this one woman, why is it that we still don’t really feel we’ve met her ourselves.

This isn’t to say that the show is falling apart at the seams, but rather part of me would have preferred a classic apartment setting to the hospital retrospective we ended up getting. It felt like too much of a cop-out, an admission that even with nine episodes post-strike they still weren’t able to build to the finale it feels like they wanted to write.

The result is a finale that is humorous, moderately eventful, and felt less identifiable as an episode of this series than the month’s other comedy finales.

Continue reading →

1 Comment

Filed under How I Met Your Mother

Tagged as CBS, Comedy, Finale, Neil Patrick Harris, No Tomorrow, Sarah Chalke, Season Finale

May 8, 2008 · 10:03 pm

The Office – “Job Fair”

“Job Fair”

May 8th, 2008

Earlier today, a feature I worked on with David Chen at Always Watching went live about how Michael Scott can often be a schizophrenic character, but that in many ways these many facets develop into an integral part of the series. When Michael is able to be a little bit of everything, who doesn’t fall into a single stereotype that overwhelms the episode.

Theere was no overwhelming The Office on this night, however – the show has been firing on all cylinders since returning from the strike, and it all came together for the second fantastic episode in a row. The show shows great touch in balancing three storylines, each with connections to recurring storylines but also with some solid forward momentum.

When you combine Ed Helms’ physical comedy, Rainn Wilson’s tattletale psychology, and Michael Scott in an environment where there are impressionable youths, the inevitable result is a great half hour of television, and perhaps the best of the show’s season.

Continue reading →

30 Rock – “Succession”

“Succession”

April 24th, 2008

I’ll be getting to Office and Grey’s Anatomy in the morning (Depending on how the last one strikes my fancy, same goes with Ugly Betty for that matter), but on this ridiculously busy night of television I certainly think that 30 Rock wasn’t on its game all the way through. I admittedly was a bit distracted by the thrilling conclusion to the Montreal Canadiens game, but something about “Succession” didn’t, quite, succeed.

The return of Will Arnett is certainly a strong development, and he was delightful as usual, but the storylines never quite clicked in this one: Tracy had nothing to do, Liz was totally out of character (And slightly too far for it to remain funny throughout), and the succession storyline was too predictable by half. And yet, then someone saved the day in a billowing cape.

It was Dr. Spaceman in a brilliant scene (And apparently a sendoff of Amadeus, I hear?)

Continue reading →

3 Comments

Filed under 30 Rock

Tagged as Comedy, NBC, Television

April 10, 2008 · 10:03 pm

The Office – “Dinner Party”

“Dinner Party”

April 10th, 2008

Although I don’t particularly want to watch last night’s episode of 30 Rock again before writing a review, I’m going to have to in order to find at least one good thing to say about it. In the meantime, however, the more positive note of the evening (outside of the Montreal Canadiens’ 4-1 victory – woot) is the return of The Office with a difficult task: how does one live up to what was finally the first home run of the season, the pre-strike finale featuring Michael and Jan’s boardroom standoff?

You could tell that they were returning from the Strike – there wasn’t a great sense of time, and the events of the boardroom were only vaguely mentioned. That is the real struggle of the strike, a loss of momentum amongst the storylines that often tie the series together. There was one area where they picked up the slack, though, which I’ll get to after the jump.

Continue reading →

2 Comments

Filed under The Office

Tagged as Comedy, NBC, Premiere, Television

March 25, 2008 · 12:42 am

How I Met Your Mother – “Ten Sessions”

“Ten Sessions”

March 24th, 2008

Ah yes, back finally with a real episode review. I didn’t get a chance to blog last week’s episode due to an impending thesis deadline, but it’s hard to ignore this week’s continuation of an alarming trend: we appear to be closer and closer to discovering who, in fact, is the Mother of the series’ title. After Ted picked up her yellow umbrella last week, tonight we got a distinct sense that there was something fishy about Stella, the dermatologist who steals Ted’s heart.

Of course, there’s a whole question right now as to what this episode was, and what it was intended to be. Alicia Silverstone was supposed to play the role of Stella up until a few weeks ago when, when Britney Spears was stunt cast as her receptionist. Silverstone’s three-episode arc, then, became a one-episode stint with now back to work on Scrubs Sarah Chalke filling in at the last minute. This leaves the HIMYM community with a burning question: considering the events of tonight’s episode, is Stella the mother? And, if so, doesn’t these events and Scrubs’ imminent renewal complicate things.

Well, in the end, I don’t think we have to worry – I don’t think she’s the mother.

Continue reading →

5 Comments

Filed under How I Met Your Mother

Tagged as Britney Spears, CBS, Comedy, Television

December 1, 2007 · 2:55 pm