Tag Archives: Premiere

July 28, 2008 · 12:13 am

Season Premiere: Mad Men – “For Those Who Think Young”

“For Those Who Think Young”

July 27th, 2008

The breakout success of Mad Men has been a huge surprise – when I started watching the show last summer, it was a cable show from a network that didn’t do such shows. It had the pedigree of Matthew Weiner, and it had some positive kudos from the critics, but what person would have predicted sixteen Emmy nominations, two Golden Globes, and a cultural firestorm so powerful that it even compelled the Canadian networks with the rights to the series to air the second season premiere before the first season has even completed airing?

But the time for kudos, set visits, really fancy DVD sets and excessive hype is over: while last season’s finale seems like ages ago at this point, it’s time to see whether the emotional resonance of “The Wheel” can be rekindled as the show picks up fifteen months later and in a whole different critical context: once a show without expectation, it has become perhaps the most closely watched sophomore session of the year.

And the series is showing its age, to use the opening episode’s central theme: it is a show that allows its characters to feel all of their insecurities in a way that ages them. If we look back to each character’s trajectory, and the series’ central transportation back to another era, a lot of it is about time and the way it changes people: whether it’s Betty Draper looking back to her modeling days or Roger Sterling having an affair with Joan, the voluptuous secretary, it’s all inevitably about returning to a younger self, a younger identity.

As the show begins its second season, it strongly and intelligently hits on this note, framing a story of a Valentine’s Day where “Young” is in and where those feeling time slipping away from them are hoping to hang onto everything they can. With a large ensemble cast and a number of emotional cliffhangers to deal with, the jump forward in time brings new facial hair, new jobs, and new rumours; in the process, it’s a new season of one of television’s finest dramas.

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Tagged as A Channel, AMC, Canada, Elisabeth Moss, Emmys, Entertainment, For Those Who Think Young, January Jones, John Slattery, Jon Hamm, Matthew Weiner, Premiere, Season Premiere, Television

July 17, 2008 · 12:33 am

Season Premiere: Project Runway Season Five – “Episode One”

“Episode One”

July 16th, 2008

You may have noticed that I have never quite blogged about Project Runway in the life of Cultural Learnings, which is for two main reasons. First and foremost, I’m late on the uptake, having only discovered the series in its fourth season. And, second, the strange lack of a Canadian simulcasting means that I’m always delayed in getting my hands on the more recent episodes.

But I won’t let that be a barrier to the only reality competition series to ever win a prestigious Peabody Award. There is something about Project Runway that just clicks in this genre, primarily because these people are actually capable of creating interesting fashion design for both those who know what’s good (Not me) and those who have no idea beyond their own personal taste (That’s me, FYI). It’s got just the right balance of interpersonal conflict that’s expected from reality television and, more importantly, people being outright challenged to complete the tasks at hand.

And for the show’s fifth season, there’s no surprises: it’s the same Heidi, the same Tim, the same diverse/crazy group of contenders, and the same types of challenges and editing. All of that might change for the show’s eventual shift to Lifetime in the Fall, but for now? Familiarity is a darn good thing.

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Tagged as Bravo, Entertainment, Fashion, Heidi Klum, Premiere, Reality TV, Recap, Review, Season Premiere, Television, Tim Gunn

July 14, 2008 · 1:03 pm

Premiere: Generation Kill – “Get Some”

“Get Some”

July 13th, 2008

When watching Generation Kill, a miniseries event from HBO, it’s impossible not to draw the obvious comparisons to The Wire. While usually shows from the same creator bear moderate resemblance to one another, David Simon and Ed Burns have a style so distinctive that it’s hard to write a single sentence about this series without discuss the other. The Wire was a show about dropping the viewer into a world they didn’t understand without holding their hand about it, developing its own language, identities, and pacing. It wasn’t about telling a story about something, but rather telling the story.

That story, here, is the journey of a Marine Corps Battalion, and their embedded reporter Evan Wright (Who wrote the novel the series is based on), as they invade Iraq in the opening throes of the 2003 invasion. There’s a lot of people thrown around, and like The Wire you never really pick up their names so much as begin to identify them based on other characteristics. Although the first segment is not eventful in the traditional sense, the various bits and pieces we see give us enough of a background so that, when things do go down, we’ll know how people should or do react.

What makes Generation Kill compelling is not just Simon and Burns’ usual sharp writing and ear for realistic drama, or even the great cinematography/direction – rather, it’s seeing all of this play out in a context where we know the basic story at hand. In most stories, there would be attempts to shoehorn politics into this story; to not only show the wrong camouflage being sent to the army, but to show some stuffshirt politician making the decision so as to villainize. Here, the authority is a villain by omission – we as an audience have information they don’t, and that isolation is incredibly compelling.

It is also, however, intoxicating – when a show requires flow charts, you know that you’re not in for a normal television watching experience. Thus far, though? It’s a damn good one.

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Tagged as David Simon, Ed Burns, Entertainment, HBO, James Ransone, Premiere, Television, The Wire

June 24, 2008 · 10:37 pm

Series Premieres: “Wipeout” and “I Survived a Japanese Game Show”

“Wipeout”

and

“I Survived a Japanese Game Show”

June 24th, 2008

Tonight’s primetime lineup was almost to the point of parody: NBC trotted out Celebrity Family Feud (I’m questioning their definition of celebrities) and the second week of lifeless America’s Got Talent (Really? Are you sure?), and ABC countered with what on paper seems like two signs of the telepocalypse. “Wipeout” is an Americanized equivalent to Most Xtreme Elimination Challenge (MXC, for short) that has aired on Spike TV in recent years, and “I Survived a Japanese Game Show” is a more traditional reality series in the vein of Survivor but with challenges being on a Japanese game show soundstage and featuring various costumes and other such gimmicks.

And after a group of friends and I figured that there was nothing else to really do with our time this evening, we sat down and started watching. And, what can I say? We laughed a lot. And while I have no intentions of nominating them for Emmys or even suggesting that you as readers rush out and watch them, if you want something that’s silly and light-hearted in your summer lineup that you can watch with friends or family (With a disclaimer for impressionable youth about the realities of Japanes Culture) look no further than these two shows.

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Tagged as ABC, Entertainment, Game Shows, I Survived a Japanese Game Show, Japan, Premiere, Reality TV, Series Premiere, Summer, Television, Wipeout

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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Tagged as AMC, CTV, Mad Men, Premiere, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, Television, The Sixties

June 1, 2008 · 3:07 pm

Cautious Optimism: Awaiting the Return of “The Mole” to ABC

I loved The Mole.

It was a reality show that did a lot of things right, many of which I could list for hours on end (And that my Elder brother waxes nostalgic about in this old blog post, although the YouTube videos are dead), but there is one that needs to be highlighted: more than any other reality show, it made the viewer a part of the game.

When we watch Survivor, we are watching a social experiment from the outside looking in, judging these people based on a situation we can’t understand. When we watch The Amazing Race, we have the visual sensation of enjoying the sights and excursions but without the same sense of killer fatigue that has done in many racers. And, when we watch American Idol, we can vote as much as we wish but we will never have a deciding voice as part of the tens of millions of votes cast.

But watching The Mole, the viewer is a player in the show’s central game: discovering who, out of a group of 12 strangers, is the one hired by the network to sabotage their efforts to earn money for a group pot is something that the audience gets to enjoy just as its players do. Sure, we aren’t part of the games, and that ol’ “Parts not affecting the outcome were edited out” disclaimer means that we obviously don’t have the whole story, but at the end of the day the viewer is the 13th player in the game.

Perhaps its because my eating habits would keep my from surviving on Survivor and The Amazing Race, and that my voice is not quite good enough for a music competition series, but of all of my various non-options (Go Canada!) The Mole is the one reality show that I would actually want to participate in. And, after being seemingly canceled and seeing its host move on to a far shinier gig, Americans with my mindset have their chance: tomorrow night, June 2nd, The Mole returns to ABC.

And consider me cautiously optimistic.

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Tagged as ABC, Anderson Cooper, Jon Kelley, Premiere, Reality TV, Return

April 28, 2008 · 10:57 pm

House – “No More Mr. Nice Guy”

“No More Mr. Nice Guy”

April 28th, 2008

Of all of the shows who had set up extravagant storylines before the strike, House had perhaps the most to lose without returning: it had gutted its existing team, hired on new cast members, and had left at a point with nothing resolved. David Shore and company wanted to be able to see this to its end, whatever that end may be, so here we are with “No More Mr. Nice Guy.”

The episode is a fitting return: a central question of House’s lack of niceness, a chance to further indulge House’s relationship with Wilson and his new girlfriend Cutthroat Bitch, and a sly way to both reference the writers’ strike and find a way to add more of Cameron and Chase to the show all at the same time.

If I were to, like House, give the series a performance review, I’d say that it’s back on track: it’s hard to really analyze the various medical cases, largely interchangeable, but this one was smartly unmemorable in favour of allowing these characters to regain some space in the viewer’s mind. As my mother says, the new lineup wasn’t as favourable once it settled in beyond the entertaining reality show metaphor, so it is important that we get to know them more than we get to know a lovable oaf.

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Gossip Girl – “The Blair Bitch Project”

“The Blair Bitch Project”

April 21st, 2008

I was planning on getting to this earlier, but unfortunately CTV made a decision to (oddly) not even air the ‘triumphant return’ of one of their biggest non-reality American imports. I am fairly frustrated by this decision, considering that the show’s return has been much publicized considering the racy advertising campaign.

But that’s about scheduling – what about the show itself? When we last left the show (You can read my thoughts here), it was with a melodramatic pregnancy scare and a shift in power after everyone discovered Blair’s love triangle. Now, three weeks later, there’s hope that everything will just blow over.

It’s Serena who is seriously naive enough to make such a ridiculous decision, and she clearly has never watched television before. It may be three weeks later, but there are a lot of consequences to new lives and new environments. The people are still talking, Jenny has fallen further and further into the inner circle, and the men are certainly taking a back seat.

But can Blair, with Serena’s help, overcome his bitchiness? And can Serena survive living in the same apartment as Chuck? And, more importantly, is the show on the right track in the home stretch of its strike-affected first season?

Spotted – maybe.

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Tagged as Premiere, Television, The CW

April 21, 2008 · 1:53 am

Brothers & Sisters – “Separation Anxiety”

“Separation Anxiety”

April 20th, 2008

In my own anxiety of trying to figure out how to spend my time when I will have no consistent employment hours and no homework all summer, I apparently completely forgot that the ABC drama that I haven’t given up on is returning from its strike hiatus for a short few episodes. Brothers & Sisters has been fairly good this season, if a bit predictable at parts, but I’m glad to see it returning if only so we can get back more serial television.

This is one of the few shows that can’t act as if no time has passed, as it was embroiled in the Republican primary system when we last left it. Before we hit the title, McAllister is bowing out of the race and we’re flashing forward three months to a world where presidency is replaced with pregnancy in the grand scheme of things.

It’s a smart decision because it allows for a partial reset of some storylines, particularly the dramatic tension in Tommy’s life. Instead, we get to return to Walkers being Walkers as the family faces a crisis and a celebration: Rebecca’s birthday and Isaac (Danny Glover) inviting Nora to live with him in Washington. Needless to say, this creates plenty of drama for the episode to draw from.

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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.

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Tagged as Comedy, NBC, Premiere, Television