Tag Archives: Entertainment

January 21, 2009 · 12:04 am

Fringe – “Bound”

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“Bound”

January 20th, 2009

When it takes four people to write an episode of television, it is easy to become suspicious: there is nothing about “Bound” that screams as if it needs to have so many cooks in the kitchen, and the show has enough trouble keeping a consistent tone as it is without having so many independent voices in the writer’s room.

But this is a huge episode for Fringe: it is the first to air behind American Idol, the biggest lead-in in television and, as a result, a real test of the show’s ability to draw in new viewers. As a result, I can see why four writers had enough of a hand in this episode: it has to introduce potentially new viewers to the universe while at the same time dealing with the fall finale of sorts which left Olivia Dunham in the hands of some dangerous people.

What “Bound” becomes is a prime example of why these types of mid-season reboots for the purpose of drawing in new viewers are inherently dangerous, if not why they are an entirely bad idea: the episode is not a complete disaster by any means, and its back to basics approach will probably help it draw in some of the post-Idol audience for a few weeks at the very least.

But the problem lies in the fact that they bring to head a long gestating question of double agency in an episode where they are treading carefully with serialized elements: it’s hard to feel the sense of finality or build-up we should have felt when everything felt too clean due to the episode’s lack of time to really get dirty. There was something about the episode that just felt a bit too clean, mouth slugs be damned, and while I get the reasoning I can’t help but feel it’s nonetheless a step back in terms of momentum.

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January 20, 2009 · 11:22 pm

Gossip Girl – “You’ve Got Yale!” and House – “Painless”

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“You’ve Got Yale!”

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“Painless”

January 19th, 2009

After starting the season seemingly boosted by summer buzz and showing positive growth, Gossip Girl has been on a ratings and creative slide for quite some time. It is not so much that the show was great to begin with, but rather that it was showing an odd sort of complacency: rather than trading a period of angst and contrivance (mostly surrounding young Jenny) the show rights itself by introducing a mysterious son given up for adoption and by insisting that its central relationship is worth testing even when I, as a viewer, am convinced that it was dead a long time ago. “You’ve got Yale!,” despite its usual movie title-pun charm, feels like the show just doesn’t get it: whatever fun we might get from Blair going back on the warpath can’t possibly overcome the idea we’re supposed to care as much about Dan and Serena as Gossip Girl’s readers.

The funny thing is that House is in many ways going through the same problem: for weeks, the show has been focusing on Thirteen as a central source of drama and interest in a series that has always been most interesting when focused on its eponymous doctor. While it is ostensibly an ensemble, the show is really about House, and while the show’s tendency to have patients who reflect their doctor’s problems can on occasion be frustrating I was just kind of glad to finally have a patient who is about House instead. What “Painless” does wrong, though, is feel as if it needs to pile on the drama: House’s pain is enough reason for the show to stop and consider his illness, compounding that with more drama for Thirteen and Cuddy’s complete and total breakdown seems both false and overkill.

Neither show is going off the rails enough for me to be disinterested, but I remain skeptical about whether they know what they are doing isn’t working.

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January 19, 2009 · 11:07 pm

How I Met Your Mother – “Three Days of Snow”

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“Three Days of Snow”

January 19th, 2009

There comes a time in the life of every sitcom that tries to be something different than your traditional sitcom that you stop thinking of its unique qualities as unique and start to view them as cliches, crutches the show uses to pretend that its storylines are something more than they really are. And considering that this is the umpteenth time that I will talk about how charming the show’s use of time in order to disrupt storylines, perhaps this is the time for How I Met Your Mother.

Now is not the time.

What makes “Three Days of Snow” such a strong episode is that the time-twisting trait of sorts was intertwined with the characters who hold this show together, returned to their simplest forms. Lily and Marshall use this three-day storm of the century to re-engage with the innocence of their married days, Ted and Barney try to pick up co-eds and investigate the futility of male fantasies, and Robin is forced to confront her robotic tendencies and perhaps open herself up to some sense of emotional connectivity in the future.

The result is, yes, the very definition of a sitcom episode: characters we know and love put in situations where they get to demonstrate why we love them. But HIMYM continues to shine when it uses these scenarios as a display for a unique comic voice and a unique sitcom structure that’s time is not up by a long shot.

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January 19, 2009 · 4:00 pm

Season Premiere: Battlestar Galactica – “Sometimes a Great Notion”

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“Sometimes a Great Notion”

January 16th, 2009

I had to wait over forty-eight hours to watch this, the beginning of the end for Battlestar Galactica as it enters its final ten-episode stretch. I logged onto Twitter in my hotel on Friday evening, as I am in Montreal for the continent’s longest running debating invitational; it was a force of habit really, but I found something I wasn’t prepared for. I saw a tweet that said the words “Final Cylon.” I paused, threw my hands in front of my screen, and immediately went on a self-imposed twitter ban (which failed miserably once I devised security methods to avoid spotting more spoiler material).

I was, regardless of my adverse reaction to spoilers in general, shocked by this news: here is this piece of news that we were so desperate to discover, so apparently integral to this final season that they changed the opening title cards, and all of a sudden we have the answer in this episode’s final moments. It all felt so counter-intuitive, so different from how we expected this episode to go down.

In that sense, it is almost exactly the opposite of the fourth season premiere last year, which felt like the very basic repercussions we had spent a lengthy time imagining. Here, the common trait was that everything was bigger than we imagined: while not outside of the realm of possibility and the breadth of internet predictions, the events which transpired had an extremist slant that never felt sensationalist and more importantly never felt as if they were ending or simply stalling for time. The “who” question for the Final Cylon is not really the show’s preoccupation: instead, their identity is a sharpening of focus, a lynchpin of identity for what we now know is a far more complicated Cylon mythology.

The world of Battlestar Galactica was broken open when we learned the identity of eighty percent of the final five, but what resulted was an isolation of their turmoil to an investigation into their psychological well-being. The irony is that here, as their identity becomes public and the entire fleet becomes part of their journey, their inner trauma only becomes more profound: these characters now have even more complicated questions about their identity, just as humanity does facing the scorched earth they believed and prayed was home, and they have new factors such as history or destiny to consider more carefully.

“Sometimes a Great Notion” feels like another stage of escalation in the season’s general purpose: it is not about who the Final Cylons are so much as who they were, who they are, what they are understood to be, and who they wish to be in the future. Answering those questions is not so much about naming them than letting them loose in a world now even more defined by their unique journey. The result here is an episode that, more than anything in the first half of the season, feels like we’re sifting through the denseness of this serious to the intersection of philosophical and personal interests that will define the series finale.

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January 17, 2009 · 3:11 pm

Season (Series?) Finale: Friday Night Lights – “Tomorrow Blues”

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“Tomorrow Blues”

Season Three, Episode 13

Leaping forward about six months at the beginning of the show’s second season nearly killed Friday Night Lights – there was a sense that all the time we missed had been eventful for these characters, and their motivations had changed in ways that were not something that should happen off screen. We found a Dillon, Texas that, in many ways, we didn’t know anymore.

What we find in the show’s third season finale, perhaps its last, is a show that has recaptured that time lost, given us a sense of who these people are again. We found a group of people we care about, a group whose futures are uncertain and will be our final goodbye to many of these characters. With the team’s State championship lost last week in the penultimate episode, the finale takes the risk of flashing forward five months to the moment when their present collides with their future.

The result is a finale that defines the ways in which this show is most successful, giving us those moments and emotional highs (and lows, to an extent) that the show is known for. But what is most strange about the finale is that it was less resolute than I imagined: characters we expected to ride off into the sunset (which the episode even ends with) ended up in their own sort of holding pattern. It’s as if, almost, we’re not saying goodbye after all, but to be honest I was so expecting definitive final moments that I almost feel sad about the fate of some of these characters.

I guess it makes sense, really: in what could be a bittersweet experience balancing the joy of getting a third season and the reality of a fourth being quite skeptical, it makes sense that as the show lays groundwork for a fourth season the balance of things would feel at least somewhat out of whack. It’s natural that we get the “Tomorrow Blues” as we transition from one moment to the next, but at least the tradition brings us another fine episode in a strong season.

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January 16, 2009 · 1:44 am

30 Rock – “Flu Shot”

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“Flu Shot”

January 15th, 2009

I know that it’s January, which means that we’re smack dab in the middle of two sweeps periods and thus in what would be a creative holding period for most returning shows, but it’s unfortunate for 30 Rock that as it delivers a mostly listless affair there’s all sorts of exciting shows premiering or about to premiere. There’s a lot of excitement swirling around the world of television right now, and this episode just doesn’t capture any part of that.

This isn’t to say that it’s bad, or to say that 30 Rock’s fate is dependent on this one outing: in fact, NBC announced today that the show is getting an unsurprising but still very welcome fourth season renewal. This show was on life support as early as this past October, so to see it thriving in the ratings and the award season enough for NBC to give it that vote of confidence is great to see.

Unfortunately, the show itself isn’t really living up to that reputation in “Flu Shot.”

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January 16, 2009 · 12:21 am

The Office – “Duel”

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“Duel”

January 15th, 2009

There are a lot of things to like about “Duel,” most of them related less to the episode itself (solid but unspectacular) and more to what it does to bring up some great memories from the past and to put to rest a storyline that seemed as if it was going to tear the office dynamic asunder in its resolution.

I don’t necessarily think that the episode was amazingly funny, with some sharp gags in the A-story somewhat undermined by a really quite uninteresting B-story, but what it did was establish a great deal of continuity and a deft hand for the show’s overall trajectory. Letting the love triangle between Andy, Dwight and Angela explode seemed like a really big risk to take, but with a little bit of finesse it has reached its worthwhile, if perhaps a bit overdue, conclusion.

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January 15, 2009 · 11:06 pm

Goodbye, Gil Grissom: CSI – “One to Go”

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“One to Go”

January 15th, 2009

The amount of times that I have stopped in to check on CSI has been slim in the years since I stopped paying much attention to the show – yes, there have been various character exits, numerous serialized storylines, and intriguing plots, but my Thursdays are chock-full enough as it is. But what I’ve gathered in my relative ignorance is that the show remains by far the most effective of the franchise, demonstrating character-driven storylines and weathering cast changes with subtle precision.

But the exit of Gil Grissom is a whole different story: while other exits felt like they were part of the ebb and flow of television procedurals, a changeover we deal with because Law & Order taught us to. But the loss of someone whose presence has always been the most central, whose calm and cool demeanor defined the very premise of CSI? This is an entirely different scenario, a watershed moment for the show’s durability and more importantly its ability to bring in a new lead actor.

In what is Gil Grissom’s final stand, his team has to band together to give him one last victory while at the same time getting used to seeing Laurence Fishburne walking the halls of CSI with his own brand of case solution. While the first half was defined by Grissom’s attempts to speak to and understand a notorious serial killer, the second half lets Grissom solve the case, along the way using many of his unique methods and saying goodbye to the people around him, while letting Dr. Raymond Langston be the one who faces off with the Dick and Jane killer.

The result is a rude awakening for Langston, and a solemn and fitting goodbye foor Grissom – it sets one up to want to try harder, and the other a chance to leave on good terms. The handling of the switchover is another reason why, if I’m stuck in a hotel room in the middle of the day with nothing else to watch tomorrow, a Spike TV rerun of CSI will continue to be a solid option even after Grissom is long gone.

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January 13, 2009 · 1:57 pm

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

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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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January 12, 2009 · 1:05 am

Credit Where It’s Due: The Golden Globes are not (entirely) Irrelevant

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Credit Where It’s Due:

The Golden Globes are not (entirely) Irrelevant

It is often very easy to discredit the Golden Globes for being one thing or another, or for not being one thing or another. It is not that these are all false: the Hollywood Foreign Press Association are not cinematic or television authorities, and it is often very clear in their choices that their criteria is both highly erratic and highly suspect on most occasions. The 2009 Golden Globes were in part a testament to this particular part of their mystique, with a variety of winners which felt like they were entirely unrelated to the film or television series beside their name.

But we have to admit that there are certain points where this type of crass favouritism can actually intersect with what we as both award show viewers and as appreciators of good film and television considering to be something approaching justice. While I could easily speak to how Slumdog Millioniare’s numerous wins are a result of its international production (Always a big thing with the HFPA, see Babel defeating The Departed), or how Tina Fey’s victory is only the result of her time in the mainstream as Sarah Palin, does this really override the fact that I loved Slumdog Millionaire and that Tina Fey is a comic sensation on 30 Rock?

While the sheer cynicism with which we view the subjectivity of the Golden Globes is not wholly unique within the major awards circuit, I nonetheless feel like it is sometimes overstated in the case of the Globes for the purpose of focusing on those winners that we don’t like while choosing to view good decisions as the exception to the rule. This isn’t going to stop me from attacking the HFPA for being irrelevant with some of their choices, especially as it relates to nominees, but when it comes to the winners I think it’s safe to say that they might have actually paid attention to what they were watching in the past year.

Even if it was, per usual, for the wrong reasons in some instances.

[For a complete LiveBlog rundown of the show, click here!]

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