Tag Archives: CTV

October 25, 2009 · 8:59 pm

Who Won So You Think You Can Dance Canada Season 2?

SYTYCDTitle2

Who Won SYTYCD Canada Season 2?

October 25th, 2009

Since I’ve been home this year, and since it has as a result been on every Tuesday evening, I’ve been following So You Think You Can Dance Canada where I didn’t last year. What I’ve discovered is that this is a show that can be really engaging for the reasons that any dancing competition show is, but that it constantly claims to be something “different.” It’s a weird cultural superiority scenario, wherein the mosaic we like to consider ourselves part of is somehow reflected by the decision to classify genres of dance more distinctly or how what the American show is claiming as progress (Tap Dancers! Krumpers!) was already achieved this season in Canada. The judges, as I ranted about early on during the competitive rounds, are also far too nice, often failing to critique routines that deserve some sort of constructive feedback.

It’s all part of the reason why I found tonight’s finale anti-climactic, as its celebratory tone was not that different from the self-congratulation that defines the show. I don’t think the show is misplaced in thinking itself to be entertaining or valuable to the development of Canadian dance, but there’s a point where that becomes the “point” of the show. And the result is that I actually don’t think we’ve spent enough time with these contestants for me to really suggest I am invested in them, or for that matter that the show is invested in them. The finale only further cements this fact, with some strange (if not entirely unjustified) approaches that indicate once and for all that this is not a show about dance so much as it is about how Canada is so uniquely situated to host a show about dance.

And tonight, Canada picked their ambassador.

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September 2, 2009 · 12:01 am

So You Think You Can Dance Canada: Sugar and Spice, and Everyone’s (Too) Nice

SYTYCDTitle2

So You Think You Can Dance Canada:

Sugar and Spice, and Everyone’s (Too) Nice

Any good judging panel is kind of like the Seven Dwarves (stick with me here).

The people on the panel all play their roles, either productive (Doc, the wise leader), or conflicting (Grumpy, the curmudgeon), or entertaining (Dopey, the goof). Throw in a couple of variations here and there, and you have yourself a unit. It’s not an exact science, no, but the most important quality of those groups is that sense of diversity.

And So You Think You Can Dance Canada loves to talk about diversity. Where the American show tends to dumb down its categories to fit into more general categories (very rarely do you see them step outside of Hip Hop, for instance, outside of Krump), the Canadian edition loves to single out Dance Hall, and to indicate more clearly where they are drawing their inspiration. I don’t doubt that Canada has a diverse culture of dance, but the connection between this question of classification and our perception of Canada as a cultural mosaic of dance is pretty slim (and yes, this is my thesis bleeding into my viewing of a reality TV show – consider it my productivity for the evening).

The problem is that the judging panel doesn’t have any diversity in terms of how the judges actually, well, judge. They might represent a broad range of styles, but during this early part of the competition they have been beyond nice. There’s a place for a nice judge: Paula Abdul, now departed from American Idol, was an important part of that judging panel at the end of the day, even if I never felt as if she offered any substance. However, for some reason, the panel on SYTYCD Canada seems to be categorically focused on building up these dancers, focusing entirely on their strengths.

The problem with this isn’t that they shouldn’t be nice to dancers, or that they shouldn’t have positive things to say, but rather that it throws off the critical balance. When the judges are nice to everyone, including some admittedly flawed couples, but then rain down on the final performers, it creates an unrepresentative gap between the couples – in being too nice to almost all, they’re actually being CRUEL to the few people who they actually pan.

I’ve got a few more things to say about the judging below, and don’t worry – I’ll talk about the dancing a bit too.

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January 13, 2009 · 1:57 pm

Uh, Breaking Up is Pretty Easy… – Ignoring the start of American Idol

idols8

Tonight is a big night for television, but I can honestly say that I care only indirectly about the start of FOX’s American Idol, starting its eighth season at 8/7c (airing at the same time on CTV in Canada).

I care because it’s a big test for the current Tuesday lineups – will The Mentalist remain the biggest new shows against television’s biggest show, can Scrubs fail to keep its sampling audience from last week with increased competition, and will Privileged get absolutely destroyed facing off against the Idol juggernaut,  (my vote is for yes on all three, in case you were curious)?

But in terms of Idol itself, I learned last year a fairly important lesson. Yes, American Idol remains a cultural phenomenon growing increasingly rare in television, and as a sort of background distraction remains an entertaining exercise in reality competition programming. But I no longer feel like I absolutely need to know what is happening. That desire to be constantly aware, my critical side outweighing the quality of the show in order to judge the talents of those twenty-plus semi-finalists, has dissipated in favour of sheer ambivalence. It is not that I am rallying against Idol as a sign of television’s pending doom (unless the ratings take a sizeable hit, at which point it will surely be the sign of some sort of apocalypse), but rather that disconnecting myself is almost too easy.

The show has done its best this year to try to recapture our attention: they’ve added a fourth judge (Kara DioGuardi, a songwriter, pictured above with the usual crew), and are promising a refocused attention on the middle rounds. They have a new production team, with Nigel Lythgoe off dancing his way around the globe, and they are promising the usual: best season ever, amazing talent, rainbows and puppy dogs, anything you could ever imagine.

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July 13, 2008 · 11:34 pm

Mad Men – “Babylon”

“Babylon”

Season One, Episode Six

In the world of Mad Men, normalcy is the goal: for Don Draper, it’s bringing his wife breakfast in bed on Mother’s Day. Of course, as he travels up the stairs, he losing his footing and everything smashes around him. Cue the flashback to his brother’s birth, and another sign that Donald Draper’s life is a giant lie just waiting to be smashed like the falling breakfast tray.

Yes, the opening of “Babylon” is not exactly subtle, but this is an episode that is all about the hidden becoming revealed, the secrets becoming part of common knowledge. The central attempt to commodify Israel into a tourism destination for Americans is about taking a secret and turning it into common knowledge, but there the ad men get to put their spin on it; the facts are one thing, but with the right treatment they can become something far more profound. This episode is about the people who need to spin their own lives, and the one person who’s about to start spinning for others.

And in the meantime, you’re stuck in exile; and as a series about people who find themselves searching to avoid such a position, Mad Men flourishes.

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July 6, 2008 · 7:01 am

Mad Men – “New Amsterdam”

“New Amsterdam”

Season One, Episode Four

[I’m a week late on this one, but forgive me: I’ll have a piece on tonight’s episode done sometime tonight, probably]

By the time Mad Men got to its fourth episode, it had filled in a lot of its gaps: we are thoroughly compelled by Don Draper, interested in seeing more of this world from Betty’s perspective, intrigued at the inner workings of Sterling Cooper, and curious as to how all of these people intersect in the historical mediation the show presents.

All except Pete Campbell, that is. To be honest, Pete Campbell was pretty much a snake before this point: a spineless, ungrateful punk at his worst, and certainly not the kind of character that any of us relate with. His insistence on rising the corporate ladder could be passed off as mere capitalist determinism, a selfish attempt to take for himself and to leave others in his wake.

What “New Amsterdam” provides is a new perspective, a glimpse into the fact that Pete Campbell’s life is just as complicated as everyone else’s in terms of the series’ primary characters. Over time, the show reveals the truth behind other characters as well (Joan and Roger Sterling are next up), but the familial and spousal pressures facing this character are some of the most eye-opening. No, it isn’t exactly surprising that he has some serious family issues, but it does explain at least some of his past behaviour while leaving plenty of qualities on the table that we as viewers will take issue with.

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June 23, 2008 · 12:48 am

Mad Men – “Marriage of Figaro”

“Marriage of Figaro”

Season One, Episode Three

One of the strengths of Mad Men is its ability to capture lightning in a bottle, taking moments or elements of the 1960s and building off of them. In the pilot, this felt clunky and forced, but as time has moved on things have changed: these small elements have become an important but not integral element of the story. The plot doesn’t rely on these little moments, but rather uses them to help explain and expand upon both story and characterization.

“Marriage of Figaro” is not yet in the shape of a normal episode of the series, still needing to clearly point out the show’s central divide: in a way that few episodes mimic, the action is split directly in half as we first follow Don’s life in the city before transitioning into his daughter’s birthday party in the suburbs. The only thing connecting these two parts, on the surface, is Don Draper, but little bits of information and intrigue follow (Whether it’s romantic entanglements or the impact of the Volkswagen ad that has everyone talking).

The result is that the episode is indeed a Don story, never quite fully diving into the series’ other various narratives. There are some pieces laid down here, though, that will become very important for the future; plus, when I say it’s a Don story, that’s not a bad thing in the least.

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June 15, 2008 · 11:01 pm

Mad Men – “Ladies Room”

“Ladies Room”

Season One, Episode Two

One of the complications of using a pilot as a piece of misdirection, in this instance not revealing Don Draper’s wife Betty until the very end of the episode, is that the need for exposition (a necessary evil in a series’ first episode) lingers on.

In that sense, this is Betty’s pilot, a chance to get a view into the life of a housewife in an era of uncertainty and confusion perpetuated by new-age psychiatry and the elusiveness of her own husband. Betty is a woman who just lost her mother and who feels as if she’s missing a side of her husband (or five) that he never shows to her, without knowing that a few of them remain hidden even to his co-workers and his mistress.

With her introduction, the narrative of Mad Men’s female characters comes fully into view, as Peggy’s struggles on the job reflect upon the challenges women faced during the era in a frank and honest perspective. When jumping into this series, you really need to get through the second episode before you can understand where Matthew Weiner is taking us, with a whole new side to the story and continued subtle hints at the stories to come.

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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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May 29, 2008 · 9:25 am

Reflections: Preparing for the Lost Season Four Finale

Preparing for “There’s No Place Like Home”

When Lost ends its fourth season tonight, it has a lot to live up to: not only is the show known for its mind-blowing finales, in particular its most recent one, but it is coming at the end of a season with a lot of momentum. It’s hard to deny that the show’s fourth season has been strong, and also that it has made the best of its shortened schedule. As a result, excuse me if I have high hopes for its end note.

Now, that’s not to say that I think tonight’s finale (airing at 9 EST on ABC, but I’ll be watching it at 6 EST due to the Canadian simulcast) will reach the heights of “Through the Looking Glass,” the stunning conclusion to last season. It’s the same logic I used in defending the slower pace of the season premiere, “The Beginning of the End,” to those who felt that it lost some of its momentum. This sentiment implies, falsely in my mind, that the only momentum the finale created was “OMG, Flash Forwards;” clearly, its success goes beyond that.

I love “Through the Looking Glass” because it feels like a high point in the show’s mythology while also feeling like the climax of a high-powered adventure film. As Michael Giacchino’s score ramps up, and as we get soaring helicopter shots of various travelers, there is something about it that feels epic and sweeping. In the weeks previous, they had set all of the moving parts in place: whether it’s the Looking Glass itself, the trip to the radio tower, the arrival of Naomi, Charlie’s sacrifice, Locke’s apparent death, or the beach ambush, a lot came to a head in that two hours simply on an action level. At the same time, of course, we ended on a realization that it was frakking with the show’s structure more than we ever bargained for.

Season Four, with only fourteen episodes, doesn’t seem like it should have had time to get to that point. After last year’s finale, there was a lot of questions, but the season has done a great job of developing a structure that best serves those questions on a dramatic level. No, they aren’t answering a question a week, but the future has done wonders for the show’s ability to create dramatic pathos. Flash forwards are intriguing in their own right, but their greatest benefit is providing build-in payoff to a season that (even shortened by the strike) that has every ability to feel like a complete ride in the process.

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January 8, 2008 · 8:59 pm

Gossip Girl – Season Finale – “The Thin Line Between Chuck and Nate”

“The Thin Line Between Chuck and Nate”

January 8th, 2008

[As you may be realizing, this is the review of Gossip Girl’s mid-season finale that aired in January. The show’s first season finale, “Much ‘I Do’ About Nothing” aired on May 19th, and Cultural Learnings has all the details in its full detailed review!]

While I can think of greater losses thanks to the Writers’ strike, Gossip Girl is somewhat unfortunate considering that it is still struggling to find its creative stride. Gossip Girl mentions that all a story needs to blow up is for an unexpected twist, but I really don’t think that this is the solution to the series’ problems. The O.C. didn’t become exemplary teen programming when it gave people pregnancy scares, but when it made us care about these people more than we were really intended to. And while Gossip Girl has made strides in this direction, there are important steps it seems to be skipping in its desire to raise the “with child” question.

But in the end the skipping of these steps was perhaps in the best interest of certain of the series’ characters – Chuck, Serena and Blair finally regained some of their humanity that has occasionally been absent. Nate is a lost cause, and Dan is pretty well consistent, which leaves these three individuals as the characters that need to be resolved. They are all over the map when faced with this crisis, but it also differentiates between their true colours and their affected personalities. The episode also returns Jenny to our central narrative, and signals a sign that Gossip Girl might be creatively on the right track when it returns post-Strike.

To discuss the thinning of the line, read below for the details.

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