Tag Archives: Review

June 24, 2008 · 12:56 am

Weeds – “Lady’s a Charm”

“Lady’s a Charm”

June 23rd, 2008

When Nancy Botwin is wearing an extremely short dress, her family knows the score: she isn’t shopping for a bed skirt, that’s for sure. After we learned last week that Guillermo had plans for her that went beyond the “sales floor,” it was pretty easy to put two and two together that he had plans to exploit his muse to the fullest, so to speak.

The result is the usual theme for Weeds, as Nancy’s new experiences are told through an alarming sequence wherein she’s way over her head and where Mary-Louise Parker can continue to indicate why she’s so great in this role. It’s at least, though, more of a learning experience for Nancy than before, as she might just have some time to grow into this one without fear for her life…but probably not.

The second episode of Weeds’ fourth season is a lot like the first: a lot of setup with little payoff. This isn’t a bad thing, I’ll stress that point a lot, but it does mean that the most shocking thing about the episode was that Silas got a new haircut. This isn’t to say that Weeds needs to shock us, but it does mean that things are continuing at the snail’s pace the show can be known for.

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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 22, 2008 · 10:20 am

Review: My Boys Season One (+ 2 Episodes of Season Two)

For anyone who has been following my Twitter feed (Located both on the sidebar and at the link), you’ll have noticed that I’ve been watching more TV than I’ve been blogging recently. With the television season over, and with the summer shows trickling more than pouring in, I’ve devoted more time watching rather than writing about my favourite pasttime. As of this week, I’m into the fifth season of Six Feet Under, five episodes into The Wire’s first season, and while I enjoying them to varying degrees, there was a serious problem: I was getting a tad bit depressed.

You see, there’s a lot of death and harsh reality in these shows; Six Feet Under is literally a weekly funeral for hope and love, and The Wire is a cold picture of a structurally corrupt organization and the drug trade on the streets of Baltimore. And so, when searching for my next show to catch up on, I decided to go with a killer combination: light-hearted comedy, a recent DVD release, and currently airing weekly episodes.

And thus, along came TBS’ comedy series My Boys. And while I certainly wouldn’t place it in upper echelon of current television comedies, the show is everything I needed: familiar, comfortable, clever and funny enough to overcome some of its less inspired moments.

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June 18, 2008 · 12:48 pm

Series Premiere: Secret Diary of a Call Girl – “Pilot”

“Pilot”

June 16th, 2008

Billie Piper, best known to audiences as the Doctor’s first companion Rose on the rebooted Doctor Who, took her time away from that series to take on a very different role. Secret Diary of a Call Girl, a British series, is airing on Showtime after their acquisition of the show’s first eight episodes. As the story of an upscale female prostitute, one could draw a number of similarities with its lead-in Weeds, where a mother is forced into the drug trade to support her family. Of course, those similarities would be seemingly off-base, but only at first glance and if we take the narrator’s word for it.

What sets Hannah (or “Belle”) apart from Nancy (at first) is that she likes what she does: she did it by choice, certainly seems to relish in the life she has before her, and as we’re introduced to the character she seems to have everything figured out. Of course, that’s a rather blatant simplification: while the show’s pilot is admittedly quite slight, it does turn around our whole notion of her character by at the very least letting us know that her self-defined lifestyle is not quite as sustainable as she makes it out to be. And the pilot, and the series it launches, is better off for it.

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June 14, 2008 · 1:13 am

(Mid) Season Finale: Battlestar Galactica – “Revelations”

“Revelations”

June 13th, 2008

Since New Caprica, Battlestar Galactica has been a series defined by the intersection of two races – of their people, their beliefs, their actions and their futures. At odds with one another from the moment the Miniseries began, humans and Cylons have slowly but surely centralized into two groups of people who are searching for a greater purpose and a greater understanding. When the Cylons occupied humanity on New Caprica, Caprica Six and the other Cylon leaders felt that they were meant to co-exist – of course, one cannot force such a peace as easily as they had hoped.

No, it takes the right moment for that to happen, which is perhaps the very definition the show’s purpose in the first half of its fourth and final season. It seems as if the search for Earth is, in fact, that point of intersection: conveniently for the series’ narrative, the human desire to discover a new home on Earth requires the discovery of the Final Cylon models, the discovery of which is the goal of the current batch of renegade Cylons. And so we have spent nine episodes bringing these two groups together, now finally reaching the point where all the pieces are in play.

We started the season with a mysteriously untouched viper and four newly found Cylons, and they return here to ask the question of everyone on each side of the conflict: are you willing to accept the intertwined fate of these two peoples, or will old wounds win the day? As the driving force behind a tense showdown with an infinite number of potential outcomes, “Revelations” proves something we knew all along: that few shows on television can have us questioning everything as easily as this one, and that no show on television can measure up because of it. Plus, after all the questions are over, we’re left facing an answer we never saw coming, and a future that waiting seven months for will be, well, a frakkin’ bitch.

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May 1, 2008 · 9:27 pm

Lost – “Something Nice Back Home”

“Something Nice Back Home”

May 1st, 2008

Welcome to May, folks, and welcome to yet another new episode of Lost. If the trend continues, this week has the potential to upend last week’s momentum: if there’s ever a way to stop plot development in its tracks, the past has shown that Jack and Kate episodes are the most effective. So, when we flashforward to a time when Kate and Jack are in angsty situations, there are signs that we might be in the wrong territory.

But then, things got interesting: it wasn’t a Jack story at all. You start to realize that although Jack is the window into our flashforward and this episode, this isn’t about him: it’s about people haunted by their past, and haunted by its impact on their lives. Where is home for these people, when all of them are struggling to reconcile their new lives with haunting flashbacks from their past?

There’s a lot of questions this episode, and while they might not be as game-changing as last week they remain dramatically strong and certainly important to developing these characters as we march towards a finale.

WARNING: Spoilers, so don’t be clicking until you’ve watched it, or until you’ve decided to turn to the dark side.

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January 31, 2008 · 8:25 am

Cultural Learnings Prepares to get ‘Lost’: Season Four Premiere and LiveCast Tonight!

Okay, so I might not have time for a huge Lost-related posting, but I’ve got some relatively exciting news for this evening. Starting at 11 EST, myself and David Chen from The Watchers will be broadcasting live through UStream (That’s the fancy link to your right) about the Lost Season Premiere. I hope to be able to have a post up before that with some of my thoughts on the episode, but tune in for a lot more detail and some really cool stuff all around.

In the meantime, if you’re still craving for your Lost fix, I figured I’d take us back in time to Cultural Learnings’ coverage of the end of Lost’s third season oh so many months ago.

Where Does Lost Go From Here? – May 24th, 2007

Just a day after the mind-blowing season finale, a review of which you can find below, I posed the question which we still don’t have a definitive answer to. It’s clear that the island’s drama will remain the central focus, which is about what I had figured, but the potential balance between flashforwards and flashbacks remains an important question we will discover in the future. For now, revisit my initial thoughts on where the fourth season could go.

Reviewing the Finale Ratings: Lost, 24, Heroes – May 24th, 2007

One of the big questions still floating around Lost’s return is whether or not the series is going to perform in the ratings. As it stands right now, it remains totally up in the air, but with nothing else on television and only Celebrity Apprentice as competition, methinks that the juggernaut still has plenty of life left in it despite Heroes’ slight advantage back in May.

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November 22, 2007 · 11:00 am

Dirty Sexy Money – “The Country House”

[As with last week, the following is a brief excerpt of my review of this week’s episode of Dirty Sexy Money as posted at South Dakota Dark. Enjoy!]

Last week, there existed the potential for Dirty Sexy Money to run off the rails with an ill-guided love affair, but like any good relationship I was willing to stick around to see how they handled it. My greatest concern was not the relationship itself, really: rather, I was concerned that the Karen Darling we know and love would be lost.

The answer is a resounding “no” on that front, at least for a majority of the episode. The scenes in which she interacts with Nick and Lisa? I despise that Karen Darling, all she’s doing is being wholly delusional. It’s in direct opposition to her other character, a delightfully sardonic and acutely aware but slightly naïve wit factory. Luckily, the writers seem to know this: we got mostly the latter this week, with the former making only a brief appearance. If this is the balance they’re setting, its impact on the show as a whole should be limited.

While “The Country House” was the real title of the episode, referring to (what else?) a trip to the country house, I figure the real title should be “Three’s Company’. The episode was structured around a series of three-person relationships, and I’ll start with the one which was most isolated and, more importantly, gives this post its title (“Don’t look at me like that…three million was more than fair!”).

For the rest of the review, click here.

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