Tag Archives: Season 1

February 23, 2010 · 3:35 pm

Season Finale: Men of a Certain Age – “Back in the Shit”

“Back in the Shit”

February 22nd, 2010

“The grand essentials of happiness are something to do, something to love, something to hope for.”

I took a couple of stabs at making this introduction into a fairly elaborate discussion of how surprising I find Men of a Certain Age’s quality to be at points, and how glad I am that I sat down to watch the pilot despite being far outside of the show’s demographics, but I realized that I wrote about a lot of that the first time I tackled the show. The message, I hope, was received: this is a damn good show, and one that you should be watching.

But I was drawn into trying to recreate those points because the show continues to surprise me, and more importantly it continues to be really compelling. There is an honesty about this show that makes me like it more and more with each passing episode, and even when the show gets a fairly romantic sendoff (out of fear that this would be the show’s one and only season) it feels imminently satisfying because it leaves at least one of its three protagonists lacking in one of the above “grand essentials of happiness,” and leaves its others with work to do before they truly achieve those goals.

“Back in the Shit” is perhaps not the show’s best episode, rushing to take characters to dark places and rushing just as quickly to bring them a bit more good fortune, but it does so while retaining the subtlety that took the show from a middle-aged male version of Sex and the City (as it was once sold) into an adult drama series with heart, humour and good reasons I want to punch Ray Romano in the kidneys – the grand essentials, if you will.

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February 23, 2010 · 9:00 am

Battlestar Baggage: Why SyFy’s Caprica Deserves to be Judged On its Own Merits

Battlestar Baggage: SyFy’s Caprica

February 23rd, 2010

Early on in a show’s run, there is always room for improvement. Every show will take time to find its feet, and whether it’s a rough pilot or a case of pilot repetition or a character that feels underdeveloped, all freshman series will have points of contention.

This doesn’t mean that, from a critical perspective, we forgive the show these problems, but it also means that we don’t rake a series over the coals for them. The critic’s job becomes almost like a meteorologist’s, analyzing the storm patterns (the cast, the plot’s general direction, the world-building, etc.) that could eventually develop into a great series or fizzle out quickly. It’s still very much a personal analysis of the situation: Starz’ Spartacus: Blood and Sand was written off by many critics (myself included) as something which would never evolve into anything worthwhile, but I’m hearing from a lot of fans that the show (so long as you lowered your expectations based on the quality of the pilot) is surprising them, so this (like meteorology) is not a precise science in the least.

It’s not often that I’ll outright question negative responses to particular series I enjoy, but I’ll come right out and say it: I don’t get the tepid response to SyFy’s Caprica. Judged as a new series, Caprica has overcome a weak pilot with a series of episodes that demonstrate a clear sense of the world being depicted, offer a complicated moral tightrope for the characters to walk, and take their time in order to let the show’s fantastic sense of atmosphere sink in rather than be thrown in our faces. While it is not perfect in any way, it is subtle when it needs to be subtle, and doesn’t allow its more large-scale developments to deliver only large-scale consequences, making significant progress from its pilot even while taking the time to ruminate on key themes and ideas.

In short, it’s in pretty fantastic shape for a new series, so I really wish that everyone would start judging it as one.

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February 23, 2010 · 12:13 am

Life Unexpected – “Truth Unrevealed”

“Truth Unrevealed”

February 22nd, 2010

Maybe it’s just my imagination, but I’m pretty sure that something actually happened on Life Unexpected tonight.

Sure, the plot of “Truth Unrevealed” was just a delayed payoff from the pilot, so there wasn’t actually anything revealing – fitting, considering the title – about the episode, but it was the first story that felt like it went beyond the awkwardness surrounding Lux’s arrival in order to answer the question of “what next?” Yes, it didn’t particularly take the story very far in that direction, and it threw out a number of anvils on its way to its conclusion, but that conclusion feels like something that is actually going to change the trajectory of these characters, rather than just a rumination on a particular facet of having being a parent foisted on you.

And that is, if not particularly subtle, at least more revealing and more significant than some of the season’s early episodes.

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February 16, 2010 · 2:59 am

Life Unexpected – “Turtle Undefeated”

“Turtle Undefeated”

February 15th, 2010

Considering that Life Unexpected has been repeating its pilot pretty consistently since it began, I’m tempted to just repost my review of the pilot here and see if anyone notices the difference.

This seems harsh, and I really don’t mean that in a negative way: after all, I liked the pilot, so my willingness to repeat those thoughts indicates that I still believe them to be true. Similarly, Liz Tigelaar and Co. are repeating the pilot because it was a good pilot, and because the brand of sweetness that this type of story brings to the table is clearly what they’re trying to tap into.

However, because we know going into an episode how it is eventually going to end (with Lux struggling to straddle her old life and her new one, and Cate and Baze realizing they’re not perfect parents but they nonetheless fill important roles in Lux’s life), we’re sort of able to fill in the gaps more easily than might be advantageous for the show. Every time a character is faced with a difficult decision mid-episode, they’re definitely going to make the wrong choice, whereas if the same decision is presented towards the end of the episode they’re inevitably going to come around.

What the show lives or dies on, then, is whether the show that happens in between the initial setup and the inevitable sweetness is compelling enough to keep watching, with enough shades of something deeper than this nearly procedural structure that the show is operating under. And “Turtle Undefeated,” like most episodes before it, makes me glad that I didn’t just watch the beginning and the end of the episode and chalk it up as one more life lesson for everyone involved.

And yes, that’s praise.

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February 15, 2010 · 5:26 pm

Darkness on the Edge of Dramatic Satire: Showcase’s Cra$h & Burn

When I was on the train home from Montreal, I had with me screeners of the first five episodes of a Canadian show, Showcase’s Cra$h & Burn, that had never particularly been on my radar (primarily because I don’t actually get the channel in question). The reviews had been lukewarm upon its release, to the point where I had not included the show in my drive to watch more Canadian television.

However, watching the show on the train proved to be an interesting experience. If you had told me going in that the show would present itself as part Better Off Ted (Workplace Satire!), part The Wire (Corruption, and Clark Johnson!), and part Six Feet Under (People Die in the Cold Open!), I probably would have raised my eyebrow faster than ever before, but Crash & Burn is an interesting little dramatic experiment which plays with elements from all these shows. It is not as successful as any of them, struggling early on with the weight of having its hand in so many cookie jars, but it gets a lot of points for going for it, and achieves a sense of dramatic weight and purpose around the midpoint of its first season which makes me anxious, at some point in the future, to finish it.

Unfortunately, the period where I was putting my life back together after my 21-hour train ride took the life out of me, so I nearly neglected to write about the show in time for this post to seem, well, timely: the show’s first season finale airs on Thursday, February 18th, at 10pm ET. However, being a heavily serialized drama, I would suggest, if you get Showcase, you could perhaps wait and see if they start repeating episodes (or check them out at Showcase.ca), because in the end I think it’s worth seeing from the beginning.

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February 11, 2010 · 2:03 am

That’s Amoré: Modern Family and Cougar Town do Valentine’s Day

“My Funky Valentine”

“When a Kid Goes Bad”

February 10th, 2010

When a sitcom does a special “holiday” episode, especially in its first season, it’s the ultimate test of the show’s understanding of its character dynamics. For some shows, the show adapts to fit the holiday, while in others the holiday adapts to fit the show: it’s a subtle difference, and both can create entertaining episodes, but I tend to prefer the latter for two key reasons.

The first is that I kind of resent that holidays actually change people. There’s always that sense that holidays are supposed to change people, that in some way the days are “different” than others, but at the core of any real relationship is a bond which should exist whether corporations have decided that people should exchange gifts or eat chocolates on a particular day. So I want a holiday to feel as if it is being filtered through a particular show, rather than that the characters are in some way conforming to the traditions therein.

The second reason is that I find episodes where the show adapts to fit the holiday reinforce the most annoying elements of sitcom structures. Whatever adaptation happens isn’t going to last, and when it’s related to a particular holiday that structure becomes that much more transparent. Yes, every sitcom has episodes where new conflicts arise based on a particular impulse, but when it’s a holiday it feels particularly inorganic.

I make these points as a way to contextualize my (relative) annoyance with tonight’s Modern Family and my enjoyment of tonight’s Cougar Town, despite the fact that it was neither the worst nor best night, respectively, for the two series.

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February 9, 2010 · 2:41 am

Life Unexpected – “Bong Intercepted”

“Bong Intercepted”

February 8th, 2010

Ahead of the show’s premiere, Liz Tigelaar warned that Life Unexpected was going to suffer from “Pilot-itis,” in that most of its early episodes would play as restatements of the show’s premise in order to appeal to potential new viewers who might be tuning in for the first time. Her argument was that, while it’s a bit frustrating in that some viewers could get impatient, it at least makes creative sense in this instance: considering the complexity of the premise, and the emotions tangled up between these characters, the “plot” would continue to have an impact beyond a single hour. In fact, it might have been more problematic if the show had moved on too quickly without first plumbing the depths of the complications at play here.

The problem is that, with “Bong Intercepted,” we’re reaching that point where the show is staging some engaging scenes but keeps coming to the same conclusion, and the premise is starting to wear extremely thin. It’s job has been done: the show has some engaging characters, and I want to be able to see them grow and move on. Instead, the show is hitting the same beats over and over again, proving itself capable of creating some interesting dynamics but wasting them on stories that are doing little to help the show moving forward.

There’s a couple of things here that signal some momentum, but for the most part things are pretty darn predictable rather than unexpected around these here parts.

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January 30, 2010 · 1:57 am

Caprica – “Rebirth”

“Rebirth”

January 29th, 2010

I was warned ahead of time that Caprica’s pilot was not necessarily representative of the series, and that the two additional episodes sent to critics seemed to offer something very different. However, all of those people who had seen the episodes seemed excited but in a way that was at the same time quite cautious: when I chatted about the episodes with Todd over at Media Elites, he indicated that, while he was quite taken with the episodes, not everyone is going to fall head over heels in love with the show that Caprica has become.

I, however, have. What surprised me about Caprica was that it managed to resist diving straight into melodrama, despite a premise that lends itself to that sort of interaction. After a pilot that felt steeped in the complexities of holo-bands and avatars, “Rebirth” takes that scenario and investigates the human consequences: stories that are big philosophically, like the fate of Zoe Graystone’s Avatar, are small in the context of the story, while the stories which go public are those which are more personal and thus more devastating. Rather than focus on creating conflict between characters, the episode allows the characters to start developing independent of that conflict, discovering new ways to adapt to a world without a daughter or a family shattered by tragedy.

It’s an episode that manages to subtly investigate the show’s premise while also triumphantly proclaiming that Caprica is a place of great complexity, and a place that has no idea the changes that the next decade or two will bring; in short, it’s a damn fine start for the series at hand.

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January 26, 2010 · 12:12 pm

Life Unexpected – “Home Inspected”

“Home Inspected”

January 25th, 2010

Alan Sepinwall has a good review of this week’s second episode of Life Unexpected where he discusses the curse that is the never-ending pilot, where a network puts pressure on a show to restate/revisit its premise in early episodes in order to hook in new viewers (like, for instance, those who tuned in tonight when they found out the CBS comedies were in repeats). He points out that, at TCA, Liz Tigelaar argued this actually made sense for this show, as a situation this complicated would actually be quite unstable, and it would be unrealistic for it not to in some way repeat the initial tension we saw in week one.

I think she’s right, but I think that “Home Inspected” also manages to find a couple of intelligent shortcuts to navigate its way through the challenges of this process. I wouldn’t argue that the episode is perfect, or that some of those shortcuts aren’t a bit overstated/melodramatic, but the episode manages to maintain the show’s pilot momentum even in its redundancy, which is something any show in its position should strive for.

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January 21, 2010 · 10:32 pm

Community – “Interpretive Dance”

“Interpretive Dance”

January 21st, 2010

After a particularly noteworthy return last week, where the show played with some very dangerous material with Jack Black and came out of it funnier than ever, there’s no question that “Interpretive Dance” is a step backwards. This isn’t to suggest that the episode is unfunny, and if we’re judging purely on the level of character development there’s some nice stuff going on here.

It seems like a bit of a sudden turn for the show, however, especially since a lot of the issues it is working with here haven’t popped up in a while. I like to see shows like Community engaging with more long-term character arcs and development, but the show has to avoid seeming like it is just going to stop in on occasion: there’s some subtle stuff here which indicates that this is not necessarily the show’s strategy, however at the same time they stayed away from these stories long enough that it felt like the show had to take some time to rediscover the rhythms of those interactions, leading to a weaker episode if one that could prove beneficial in the long term.

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