Tag Archives: Natalie Morales

May 21, 2010 · 1:18 am

Season Finale: Parks and Recreation – “Freddy Spaghetti”

“Freddy Spaghetti”

May 20th, 2010

When I write about the Thursday comedies, I have to write about them after I finish watching them all, as there’s too many other Thursday programs recording on the common DVR which requires I watch them on a recording device-free television set. This is normally fine, but it seemed especially tough tonight, as every other show has to live up to the level of quality that Parks and Recreation has right now.

The best comedy finales are those which find elements of conflict within elements of stability, emphasizing the reasons that we love watching the show week-after-week and the reasons why it remains lively and eventful enough to keep from becoming too familiar. “Freddy Spaghetti” is the epitome of this type of finale, delivering plenty of evidence which captures the heart and soul of this show while introducing other elements that threaten that stability without necessarily overwhelming the positivity inherent to these characters.

It ends up leaving everything in a state of flux, with very little optimism about the future, and yet the show’s characters still seem so positive about their present situation that you feel like they can rise above any potential challenges. It doesn’t actually bring any of the season’s storylines to a wholly positive conclusion, but it complicates things in such an infectious fashion that it loses none of its momentum, and heads into a (sadly too, too long) hiatus with the best season of comic television we saw this year in its back pocket.

And no seven month break is going to change that fact.

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Tagged as Adam Scott, Amy Poehler, Analysis, Andy, Ann, April, Aziz Ansari, Benji Wyatt, Budget Cuts, Chris Traegar, Comedy, Concert, Episode 24, Finale, Freddy Spaghetti, Leslie Knope, Love Triangle, Lucy, Natalie Morales, NBC, Nick Offerman, Pawnee, Review, Ron Swanson, Season 2, Season Finale, Television, Tom, TV, Wendy

May 14, 2010 · 12:39 am

Parks and Recreation – “The Master Plan”

“The Master Plan”

May 13th, 2010

I hate to keep driving my “Parks: It’s the New Office!” comparisons into the ground, but I want you to think back to the start of The Office’s third season (which, not entirely coincidentally, picks up right after “Casino Night,” which I compared with last week’s “Telethon”). The show took a pretty considerable risk in introducing an entirely new workplace with Jim’s move to the Stamford branch, and the idea of introducing entirely new characters and “disrupting” the show seemed like a huge risk.

However, while these new characters (Andy and Karen, in particular) were brought into the picture to help emphasize the division within the show, the Stamford branch was comically consistent with the show as a whole. While it was a different environment, and their arrival in Scranton later in the season created plenty of conflicts, we accepted the characters because they fit in with what the show was trying to accomplish on the whole.

What Parks and Recreation did tonight, however, was perhaps even more impressive: they managed to not only humanize a character who is introduced as a point of conflict, but they managed to completely integrate a fairly big star into an existing comedy ensemble with remarkable proficiency. The credit at the start of “The Master Plan” may have jokingly read as “Introducing Rob Lowe,” but both the show and Lowe do such an amazing job of introducing these new characters into this existing group that any sense of conflict within the series’ actual narrative is non-existent, and we’re left to enjoy a pretty fantastic ramping up of both new and existing storylines without seeming distracted or chaotic.

Basically, I’m deep in the pot at this point, so if you’re at all not feeling the love I suggest you leave now before I lose all objectivity.

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Tagged as Adam Scott, Amy Poehler, Andy, April, Auditors, Ben, Benji Wyatt, Chris, Episode 23, Gerry, Leslie Knope, Mark, Mayor, Natalie Morales, NBC, November, Pawnee, Rob Lowe, Ron Swanson, Season 2, Snakehole Lounge, Television, The Master Plan, The Office, Tom Haverford, TV

March 13, 2010 · 6:32 pm

Season Finale: White Collar – “Out of the Box”

“Out of the Box”

March 9th, 2010

White Collar is what I would call a premise procedural. While it eventually falls into a rhythm of crime-solving like other procedurals, it starts with a central premise or setup that remains unresolved in order to provide the show its tension and its “added value” beyond the formula. For Burn Notice, it’s Michael’s never-ending quest to figure out who burned him, and for White Collar it’s Neal Caffrey’s quest to reunite with his beloved Kate. To some extent, both shows have their characters just killing time, waiting until the beginning and end of each episode where they will make incremental progress on their broader search.

What keeps White Collar from ascending to the level of Burn Notice is that, by and large, I don’t “buy” its premise. The same thing has happened with Burn Notice over time, as we reach the point where we wonder why Michael Westen doesn’t realize that he has a woman he loves, a mother who loves him, and a loyal best friend in Miami which give him more than enough reason to leave the whole “burn” mess alone. But with White Collar, it was sort of there from the beginning, with too many questions about Kate’s loyalty (and, frankly, her fundamental lack of personality) and the trustworthiness of Fowler’s plot to make it seem like we should be rooting for this reunion.

The show has always been at its best when Peter and Neal are friends, not enemies, and when Neal is a charismatic crime solver rather than a lovestruck idiot with enormous blinders to all sorts of logical concerns with his plan. As such, “Out of the Box” struggles to reflect what has made the show a pleasant experience over its first season, trapped in conflict and false goodbyes that we know will return us to the status quo, just as Michael Westen remains in the dark about who burned him.

At the least, though, White Collar seems to realize that things needed to be shaken up, and they’ve taken some intriguing (if predictable) steps to perhaps set the show on a better path heading into its second season.

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Tagged as Alex, Elizabeth, Entertainment, Episode 14, Fowler, Kate, Marsha Thomason, Matthew Bomer, Mozzie, Natalie Morales, Neal, Neal Caffrey, Peter Burke, Procedural, Season 1, Season Finale, Television, The Mentalist, Tiffani Thiessen, Tim DeKay, TV, USA Network

January 20, 2010 · 12:01 pm

White Collar – “Hard Sell”

“Hard Sell”

January 19th, 2010

Through the magic of Twitter, I’ve known for a few weeks that critics have been fine with how White Collar resolved its midseason cliffhanger, which I…well, let’s just say that I wasn’t buying what they were selling. So, going into “Hard Sell,” I knew that I wasn’t going to be writing an extended treatise on the show’s incongruous plot twist tarnishing what goodwill it had.

However, although I was able to put away that particular hat, “Hard Sell” remains, well, a hard sell for me. While they may negotiate the cliffhanger in a way that doesn’t damage the integrity of the show, it also does absolutely nothing to make the show more interesting. There’s some vague potential on the margins here that makes me wish this were an entirely different show, but as it is all this mid-season premiere demonstrates is that no matter the crazy ideas the show might introduce, it’s always going to revert back to a pretty blasé procedural with some charismatic leads.

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Tagged as Cliffhanger, Entertainment, Episode 8, Hard Sell, Kate, Matthew Bomer, Moz, Music Box, Natalie Morales, Neal, Peter, Review, Season 1, Television, Tim DeKay, TV

November 14, 2009 · 3:52 pm

White Collar – “Flip of the Coin”

WhiteCollarTitle

“Flip of the Coin”

November 14th, 2009

Now four weeks into its run, White Collar is about where it was in its pilot: a solid entry in USA’s lineup. The show has yet to really transcend to the point where I would say it’s really growing into something new, or where it’s establishing a more complex identity, which isn’t problematic so much as it is perhaps a sign of the show being unwilling to go to that stage so quickly.

There are some growing pains, however, in terms of how the episode wants its stories to work and how they’re actually capable of working. “Flip of the Coin” has a couple of nice set pieces in it, along with some high quality guest stars to help bolster the episode, but it struggles to make all of that come together. There are some scenes where Neal’s suave nature feels perfectly at home in the context of these investigations, and other sequences where the believability is stripped away for the sake of convenience.

Still, there’s a lot of enjoyment within this episode, to the point where some of the shortcuts are ultimately overcome by one development in particular that could help the show going forward.

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White Collar – “Book of Hours”

WhiteCollarTitle

“Book of Hours”

November 6th, 2009

I don’t have a whole lot to say about White Collar at this point, but I think it’s important to continue to acknowledge that the show is proving an engaging Friday night distraction of sorts. There’s nothing complicated about its narrative structure, and more than any other USA show it has isolated its mythology to the opening/closing of each episode, but the show has remained entertaining despite not offering anything distinctly new and thus demonstrates its solid execution.

What I want to focus on briefly is less what makes “Book of Hours” particularly compelling, as it was largely a stock hour of USA Procedural content, and more the elements of this episode that are helping (independent of the pilot) to unexpectedly offer a few interesting shades to this universe.

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Series Premiere: The Middleman – “Pilot”

“Pilot”

June 16th, 2008

ABC Family caught my attention with Greek, but the network has been making its own move in the cable television arena over the past few years. The network has had success with shows like Greek, Wilfire or the upcoming The Secret Life of the American Teenager, shows that most easily fit into their teen girl demographics, but they’ve also made a few leaps into genre television. It is in the spirit of Kyle XY, then, that they bring us The Middleman, a science fiction comedy with plenty to enjoy.

Of course, there’s a lot of pedigree behind this project; the series is based on a comic book by Javier Grillo Marxauch, best known to this TV writer as an Executive Producer during Lost’s first season. Here, he’s writing comfortably in a genre that seems to work for him, and one that feels simultaneously fresh and familiar. Yes, it delights in a certain amount of cheese, and its quippy dialogue feels like the director realized that Gilmore Girls and Juno were both big with the kids, but as someone who enjoys both of those things I was thoroughly entertained.

While there’s no telling whether the pilot’s quirks, from its dialogue to its use of roundabout redundancies and on-screen irony, will remain in the episodes that remain, but when you combine a winning premise, an enjoyable cast and a summer where the rest of my TV schedule is catching up on series much more dark and depressing, Chloe from 24 genetically engineering Apes to take over the mafia and being thwarted by a superhero and his art school graduate sidekick is more than enough to keep me watching.

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Tagged as ABC Family, Entertainment, Middleman, Natalie Morales, Pilot, Science Fiction, Series Premiere, Television, Wendy Watson