Tag Archives: Premiere

February 16, 2009 · 12:25 am

Season Premiere: The Amazing Race Season 14 – “Episode One: Switzerland”

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“Don’t Let a Cheese Hit Me”

February 15th, 2009

While we just ended the last season of The Amazing Race a few months ago, a lot has changed over the short break between seasons. The editing has changed, the maps have become Google sponsored, the font is different, and they even went and remixed the show’s classic theme song to give it a driving rhythm for some reason. Combine with a shinier opening title, and some shinier graphics, and you have a very different kind of Amazing Race.

Okay, that’s a lie: the game is actually pretty much the same, here in an actually even more frantic and challenging version that tests people’s abilities to travel via three modes of transportation plus complete two tasks that test both psychological and physical strength. There’s just a lot of room for people to make mistakes here, and while the episode actually felt oddly impersonal and detached for a few reasons that I’ll get into, the transfer of the drama from the airport decisions to the actual completion of the tasks gives us a better sense of what kind of racers, as opposed to just people, the teams will become.

And I like the group of people: there is some humour, there are some people who clearly are on an adrenaline rush the second they start the race, and there’s enough differences in strategy and personality that one can see themselves watching these people race around the world without wanting to throw things at their television. So for all of the changes (both cosmetic and, in one case, actually kind of offputting), this is really the same race in the end: a frantic, often heartwarming, always exciting, trip around the world.

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February 14, 2009 · 4:38 pm

The Glass Ceiling: How Dollhouse can Overcome the Friday Odds

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The Glass Ceiling:

How Dollhouse can Overcome the Friday Odds

When FOX first announced that Dollhouse was going to be placed onto Fridays, I wrote the following:

My immediate response: seriously, FOX? Are we going to go through this again? After Whedon’s last FOX show, Firefly, was destroyed by mismanagement by FOX, fans of the creator have already had reason to be slightly concerned about the show’s trajectory. Now, with the creative side seemingly together, comes the next blow – that even when it does air, its opportunity for success has shrunk dramatically.

Now, since that point, both creator Joss Whedon and FOX have stuck to the line that this plan actually works out for them: by creating a night of male-skewing Sci-Fi on a night where FOX has historically gone with either repeats or reality programming, the show will have low expectations and a certain security thanks to not having the same type of time period competition as it would elsewhere on the schedule. By keeping expectations low, essentially, the show’s inevitable failure to attract the kind of audience that FOX might be looking for went from a crushing disappointment to an understanding between creator and network that time might be necessary.

Unfortunately for FOX and for Whedon, the results are in and they don’t look good: the show debuted to just 4.7 Million viewers and a 2.0 rating in the key demographics. The second number isn’t half bad, good enough for second in its timeslot, but the first number is a pretty big concern for the series. It’s about the same ratings that sent Firefly to the television graveyard before its time, actually, and the plan to try to create low expectations and then spin these ratings into something positive is somewhat tough to swallow when you get trounced by Supernanny on ABC.

But there’s a fair few factors that we need to take into account here, at least before we start writing off Dollhouse as a failure. Much as I believe the jury is still out after writing my own review of the premiere, I believe there is still time for Dollhouse to turn it around. Unfortunately, the universe might well be working against Joss Whedon and his fanbase once again.

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February 14, 2009 · 12:50 am

Series Premiere: Dollhouse – “Ghost”

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“Ghost”

February 13th, 2009

According to logic, and the internal methodology given to Echo before an important mission, you can’t fight a Ghost. And, let’s be realistic, you can’t really pin one down either, trying to define it by regular rules of physics or biology ultimately proving a futile task.

In many ways, Dollhouse is a Ghost of Television, a show that is very tough to pin down and has almost no interest in trying to have this happen. The series, like the actives who are part of the Dollhouse roster, can be wiped clean after every episode, so it is very difficult to judge the pilot as we would normally judge a pilot. The point here is not to actually pin anything down, but to demonstrate for the viewer the types of things they might see and, most importantly, the types of things that we should keep an eye out for in the future.

And, as such, there’s something difficult about passing judgment on this as an actual series. All we can really do is take the parts that we’re given here that we know will remain constant and begin to judge them, but even then the show is going to be meandering all over the place and those parts might be able to rise to the occasion better than we currently realize. It makes all of this, well, a little bit inconsequential; I have a feeling that week by week I’ll be chiming in with another opinion that’s been altered from the week previous, something that with time could get a little old.

For now, though, I’m along for the ride, for two main reasons: because I think the show has some potential as a serialized procedural, and because I’m mildly afraid that the Whedon fans will hunt me down and break my legs if I don’t.

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February 13, 2009 · 12:12 am

Season Premiere – Survivor: Tocantins: “Let’s Get Rid of the Weak Players Before We Even Start”

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“Let’s Get Rid of the Weak Players Before We Even Start”

February 12th, 2009

Every year of Survivor is in search of two things: a gimmick and a character. These are the two things that have made seasons that could have been weak into something very fascinating, whether it was the introduction of Exile Island or even the Fans vs. Favourites format that didn’t feel like it should have worked but resulted in a very engaging season.

In terms of Survivor: Tocantins, this really isn’t a season about any gimmicks: while the show tries to start off with a big shocker, the game itself is its usual self, the location similar to what we’ve seen in past seasons. Instead, it’s going to be a question of whether or not there is enough character at play here, whether we can get the kind of intrigue that we got to see last season in Gabon. There, though, the intrigue was driven almost entirely by people making highly emotional decisions, something that cannot be predicted or manufactured.

But that isn’t going to stop the show from trying: from the word go, the show wants this season to be about first impressions, about baseless accusations and judgments that are not close to reality and instead ask them to cast aside actual human interaction in favour of cheap shots. As a result, I’ll provide my own fairly baseless first impression: there is no sign here that this season will be able to expand the show’s usual structure, and while I think there are some characters worthy of some interest I’ll just unilaterally decide that it’s going to be a pisspoor season.

And then I’m going to watch it anyways – I’m not all about first impressions, and I think even the show is aware of this.

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January 28, 2009 · 8:31 pm

Scrubs – “My ABCs” and “My Cookie Pants”

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“My ABCs” and “My Cookie Pants”

January 27th, 2009

I knew something was off when I was watching, especially, the first episode of last night’s Scrubs doubleheader. J.D. and Elliot didn’t seem particularly close despite getting back together last week, the interns were being introduced as if we had only first met them, and we got the genesis of J.D.’s Facts of Life name for his intern despite having already seen it pop up in the premiere episodes three weeks ago. And sure enough, my confusion was quite justified: reading Sepinwall’s review confirms that this was, in fact, a rejiggered episode likely meant to be the season premiere – you don’t go out and grab the Sesame Street muppets for just any episode, after all.

But what it created was a weird sameness to these episodes: they were never meant to run sequentially, and it shows in the fact that they have very similar structures and at times felt like we were just dealing with not only storylines repeated in previous episodes but also in the one that followed. This is already a season that is repeating past storylines in an effort to reclaim some past glory, so it’s not like this is out of place or even unwanted: I laughed quite a bit through both half-hours, so I’m not one to complain.

Just that when the show is already getting put on hiatus (until mid-March) and moving to a new timeslot (Wednesdays at 8pm), they could have used something that promoted continuity as opposed to disrupting it even in this subtle fashion.

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January 27, 2009 · 11:52 pm

Season Premiere: Project Runway Canada Season Two – “Episode One”

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“Fashion is a Battlefield”

January 27th, 2009

[If you’re looking to view the episode online, you can do so at Global’s website, but only if you’re in Canada. If you’re outside of Canada, well, be patient!]

My first experience with any sort of Project Runway was, for a brief moment, stumbling upon an episode of Slice’s Project Runway Canada wherein they were making dresses out of umbrellas. I only watched for a few minutes, but it looked intriguing enough. Eventually, I decided on a few recommendations that I should give the show a try, and I ended up going through three seasons of the U.S. edition during the first half of last year. The show is simply a strong reality competition series: there’s a reason it won a Peabody, after all.

But Project Runway Canada, which I went back to and completed as I was waiting for new episodes of the fourth U.S. season to begin, was in itself an entertaining project. Done on a fairly small network but featuring high production values, there were even things about this particular import that I preferred to the original version. It has a supermodel host (Iman, Mrs. David Bowie), it has a mentor who is respected in fashion circles and quite affable (Brian Bailey), and it has judges that, while not particularly famous, still have those kinds of quirks that make them the right people to be judging these contestants. The show at no point felt like a low-rate ripoff of the original, for one, but more than that had its own identity that kept me engaged until, eventually, Biddell walked away the winner.

It’s been a long time since that finale, and Project Runway Canada has made it to the bigtime with a primetime slot on National network Global. The parts are more or less still the same, but the location has been altered (the show moves from Toronto to the nation’s capital in Ottawa), and the new contestants have not yet really emerged with any sort of identities. The show had some lucky casting last time around, and while the jury is still out on that the things that made the show stand out for me remain: this is a no nonsense, straightforward, well-produced and entertaining piece of reality competition programming, Canada or no Canada.

And apparently, it’s also a show that was designed to break people both mentally and physically, as fashion really is a battlefield in the show’s first episode.

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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 11, 2009 · 11:34 am

Why I’m watching the Golden Globes instead of 24

globesFrom the title alone, this seems like it’s going to be one of my usual long-winded essays on the situation at hand, lengthy paragraphs on the sheer entertainment value of drunk Jack Nicholson heckling acceptance speeches and detailed analysis of my frustrations with season six of 24.

But when it comes to these two particular pieces of television programming, I have no powerful feelings in either direction: I do not despise 24, I do not love the Golden Globes, and yet I am deciding to watch the former.

The reason is really quite simple: the Golden Globes is capable of surprising me and I don’t really feel as if 24 is able to do the same. The Golden Globes, should the various awards go in directions surprising and different from expectations, have the chance to change the ongoing Oscar race, while 24 is unlikely to head in any direction that we would consider surprising (perhaps if they hadn’t spoiled their own “Yes, we’re desperate enough to resurrect a dead character,” this might be different).

I’m actually, by comparison, excited for the Golden Globes – I’ve obviously seen Slumdog Millionaire, so I’m rooting for it in its major categories, but there are some other big questions at stake especially in terms of acting momentum (where only really Supporting Actor (Ledger) is looking secure). Plus, with no musicals or comedies in contention for the eventual Oscar for Best Picture, it will be intriguing to see where the Globes go in terms of Musical/Comedy picture. And this is only on the cinema side, where my interest clearly doesn’t always lie: the television nominees weren’t that impressive, but I am nonetheless curious to see what hilarious impression of the current television landscape the HFPA comes up with.

24season7I have every intention on watching the seventh season of 24, but my priorities are for the things I know I will enjoy and that I know have some potential to be surprising. So tonight, I’ll be liveblogging the Golden Globes, and tomorrow night I will be watching How I Met Your Mother. If the seventh season gets off to as good a start as some of the reviews indicate, then that’s wonderful: I’ll be able to catch up later in the week when I’m not busy rewatching Battlestar Galactica Season 4.0 in order to prepare for Friday’s premiere.

However, if 24 is higher on your TV viewing hierarchy than it is on mine, I simply hope that it does not disappoint: I may be heading into this season with a fairly critical view of the show’s potential, but I would never begrudge anyone their enjoyment of what remains to an extent a well-produced piece of television with a solid central performance.

Season 7 of 24 begins its two-night, four hour premiere tonight, Sunday January 11th, on FOX (and Global, in Canada) at 8/7c, continuing at the same time tomorrow; the Golden Globes, meanwhile, start at 8/7c (with a red carpet special airing the hour before) on NBC (CTV).

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January 9, 2009 · 11:12 pm

Season Premiere: Damages – “I Lied, Too”

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“I Lied, Too”

January 7th, 2009

Damages is one of the few shows that, despite airing during the period when I began this blog, I have never honestly blogged about the show. The reason is simple: I wasn’t really doing episodic reviews back when the show first emerged, and it took me a few months to get to the final episodes of the season after losing interest in where the show was headed.

More accurately, I lost interest in the fact that the show had no idea where it was headed. The first season of Damages, for me, had two fundamental problems. First and foremost, I felt like the show was constantly battling the fact that its ostensible lead, Rose Byrne as Ellen Parsons, was far less interesting than her mentor, the fantastic Glenn Close as Patty Hewes. And secondly, it seemed like the show at its midpoint abandoned the nuances of that relationship for contrived, red herring storylines that never felt like they added up to anything substantial.

For this reason, the verdict on Damages Season Two remains out – the show knows how to start a season, and they know how to end one, but it’s going to be the middle section that causes them the most trouble. But what “The Lies We Tell” gets right has me hopeful that they are at least aware of his to solve their first problem: I never particularly engaged with Byrne in the first season, but here she is up to the challenge to portray a character who is exponentially more interesting.

With one of the most impressive supporting casts on a cable drama at the moment, the show has even opportunity to turn this strong start into a strong season: let’s just hope that there aren’t any contrived stalkers in the show’s future.

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January 4, 2009 · 9:09 pm

The 2008 Television Time Capsule: The Office – “Weight Loss”

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“Weight Loss”

Season Five, Episode One

Airdate: September 25th, 2008

If I had a time machine as opposed to a time capsule, I would go back in time and keep Amy Ryan from being nominated for that Oscar.

Don’t get me wrong: she was stunning in Gone Baby Gone, a film I watched for the first time recently and enjoyed a great deal, and she deserved that nomination and maybe even a win for her performance. But it made her an actress in demand, someone who could guarantee herself juicy supporting roles for years to come.

It also meant that Holly Flax, introduced in the great fourth season finale “Goodbye, Toby,” would eventually be leaving Dunder Mifflin. With her laidback style and willingness to ham it up with Michael, Holly was the best addition that the cast had seen perhaps since day one. Not only was Ryan quite hilarious in terms of her comic timing (the woman can do anything), but Holly as a character did something even more important: she humanized Michael Scott.

This was no more evident than in “Weight Loss,” what I believe to be the best hour-long episode the series has ever done. Using a unique structure that follows the office’s attempt to lose weight over an entire summer, the episode never plays out a single joke for too long, letting the episode tell itself in short stories and build naturally to its conclusion.

In the process, we get numerous highlights: Holly and Michael’s rap (which will forever go down as one of the most surreal, and hilarious, scenes of this show), Holly’s believe that Kevin is mentally challenged finally exploding, and…well, a lot of things involved with Holly. The show developed her and Michael’s relationship all within one episode: their moments of awkwardness, their moments of jealousy, and eventually that moment when it’s clear that they are both big dorks and made for each other.

The wonder of “Weight Loss” is that its compartmentalization works wonders on every storyline: Dwight and Angela’s trysts become even more hurtful towards Andy as they take place over an extended period, and what could have been (and eventually kind of did after the premiere) a contrived separation of Jim and Pam was helped by the illusion of time. When the time came for Jim’s surprise rest stop proposal, the episode felt more like a journey than the show ever has.

And while the season has had some strong one-off episodes (the end of the fourth season had quite a few that could easily have taken this spot), I feel as if this is the kind of Office I want them to move forward with: human, hilarious and worthy of the 2008 television time capsule.

Related Posts at Cultural Learnings

[For more details on the Cultural Learnings 2008 Television Time Capsule, click here!]

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