Tag Archives: Television

June 11, 2008 · 11:21 pm

Summer’s Guilty Pleasure: So You Think You Can Dance – Week One Performance Show

“Week One Performance Show”

Season Four

In every television viewer’s summer, there are three things to watch: those shows that are actually good, those shows that are awful but are the only thing on at a given time, and those shows that enter into the category of “Guilty Pleasure.” For me, in this final category, that show is FOX’s So You Think You Can Dance.

The reason is really quite simple: the contestants on the show can honestly answer “Yes” to the titular question, and the result is often a compelling assortment of engaging dance routines. Unlike the painful to watch Dancing with the Stars, which derives its value from celebrities embarrassing themselves and occasionally a decent dance or two, this is a show that is about succeeding in one’s profession and not about creating a marketing machine. These people are forced to embrace multiple styles of dance in a way that American Idol singers aren’t forced to diversify, and the result is far more compelling in many ways.

So while in past summers I haven’t quite embraced these urges fully, this year I’ve decided to give in: my floormates for the summer are way into the show, and I can’t help but be sucked in by their enthusiasm. So, let’s do this, but with two ground rules.

  1. I know absolutely nothing about dancing.
  2. Presume that every paragraph begins with “SHUT UP MARY MURPHY.”

And with that in consideration, let’s do this.

Rayven & Jamie [Hip Hop]

Rayven is a ballet dancer, while Jamie is a West Coast Swing dancer with a supportive girlfriend, and are performing a hip hop routine from Napolean and Tabitha. While I have no idea if their moves were any good, they were at least convincing as hip hop dancers. There was some partial nudity, a lot of quirky humour, and ultimately some interesting little set pieces. Nigel enjoyed it but isn’t sure it’s memorable, Mary Murphy shrieks and compares it to cotton candy, and Dan thinks that there wasn’t enough funk (Modular funk).

Likely Fate: Early in the show like this, they’ll struggle to get votes especially when combined with their lack of coverage in the early parts of the competition.

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June 11, 2008 · 2:30 pm

Goodbye, Jenny? – Considering the Gossip Girl Spinoff

I was reading an interview with Josh Schwartz that Alan Sepinwall did around the time of The O.C.’s series finale, and I stumbled across this answer to a question regarding a potential spinoff for the series:

[Alan: ]Whatever happened to the Kaitlin spin-off where she was in boarding school?

I was about 17 episodes into the first season, and I was asked to go up into Rupert Murdoch’s boardroom. Rupert wasn’t there but all the head honchos at Fox were there, and I was asked, with a fair amount of pressure, to do another show. I was shown a schedule where, if I did this, “The O.C.” would remain on Wednesdays at 9 and the new show would be on Tuesdays at 9 after “Idol.” Who wouldn’t want to do that? It wasn’t wise of me to do that, I had plenty to learn about the TV business, but I said, “Okay, I don’t want it to be a spin-off.” I was worried about cannibalizing the show too soon, and spin-offs usually fail. Everyone signed off on that fact, I went off and worked on a pilot called “Athens.” It was a big honor, it was going to keep “The O.C” behind “American Idol.” Then I turned in the script and everyone said, “So how do we turn it into a spin-off?” It became a protracted battle not to make it a spin-off. Then I arrived at the upfronts to announce the new show and they said “The O.C.” was moving to Thursdays, that was a perfect storm of its own. When it felt that was the only version of the pilot that was going to move forward was one I didn’t believe in, I said, maybe as a compromise, we’d have discussions about a Kaitlin boarding school drama, and then Gail Berman went to Paramount, and those discussions ended.

How fitting, then, that I looked at this so recently, as now we’ve got the exact same situation with almost eerie comparisons to this earlier one. As it completes its first season, Gossip Girl is now being spun-off by its producers (Schwartz included, one presumes) as another hit series of books by the author of Gossip Girl is being optioned. And, interestingly, “The It Girl” series surrounds the character of Jenny Humphrey falling off the wagon at Constance Billard and being sent off to board school just as Kaitlin had once been destined under the scenario Schwartz described.

From The Hollywood Reporter:

Humphrey is a self-esteem challenged outsider who struggles to fit in. In the books, a series of public embarrassments (such as appearing in a teen magazine wearing next to nothing) results in Humphrey having to either repeat ninth grade or find a new school. She elects to enter a boarding school and reinvents herself as a popular girl. Her story is told in a series of six “Gossip” spinoff novels called “The It Girl.”

I don’t think it is so simple, however, to spin-off this character- Kaitlin was a nothing in The O.C.’s first season, and Jenny was anything but in Gossip Girl’s first frame. There are things about her character that are integral to Gossip Girl and might not be as expendable, and with no confirmed reports of them using Jenny’s character in the spinoff I’d have to think that they’ll figure this out as well.

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June 11, 2008 · 8:35 am

Emmy Awards Preview – Nominee Analysis: 30 Rock

While it certainly didn’t come out of nowhere, considering that it had nominations in both lead acting categories, 30 Rock’s Emmy win last year was still a bit of a surprise. However, it was a pleasant one, and signaled and onslaught of critical praise and accolades for a series that (at that point) seemed to be on shaky ground where it matters most these days: ratings.

But with a third season guaranteed and more hardware in the closet, 30 Rock has gone from the upset victor to the perennial frontrunner for the 60th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards. And with great power comes, well, great responsibility; in this instance, responsibility to pick the right submissions to reflect the season’s quality.

Outstanding Comedy Series

Submission: Unknown

My Suggestion: “Secrets and Lies”

It’s hard to pick a single episode to encapsulate an entire season: I think the show’s smartest segment has to be “Rosemary’s Baby,” for a lot of reasons I’ll discuss further below, while part of me gravitates towards “Greenzo,” featuring a fantastic David Schwimmer in the title role. However, I like “Secrets and Lies”: it has a great storyline featuring Baldwin and perennial Emmy favourite Edie Falco, a couple of great moments for Tracy Jordan, and the fantastic ending sequences as corporate republicans reveal their inner demons. Regardless of which they actually choose, however, the deal is sealed either way.

Chances: Definite Nomination.

Lead Actress in a Comedy Series

Tina Fey

Submission: “Episode 210”

My Suggestion: “Sandwich Day”

In this instance, my suggestion isn’t hostile: the last pre-strike episode may have been rushed, but Fey knocked both her initial interaction with and her late-night phone call sessions to the co-op board of her new apartment out of the park. In particular, the image of Fey on the phone while walking on her treadmill and drinking a glass of red wine while proclaiming that she bought a black apartment stuck with me for a long time. However, “Sandwich Day” had Fey doing what she does best: being neurotic and eating on camera (plus looking really attractive in the dress on the left. An argument could also be made for “Succession,” as Liz goes corporate, but something about that episode didn’t sit right for me.

Chances: Definite Nomination.

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June 10, 2008 · 3:27 pm

60th Emmy Awards Preview – Supporting Actor in a Drama Series

[Leading up to the announcement of the nominees in mid-July, Cultural Learnings will be delving into each of the major categories to highlight a major theme or a certain selection of potential nominees.]

As far as categories go, they don’t get too much more wide open than this year’s race for Supporting Actor in a Drama Series. It’s long been a category dominated by the show of the moment: both The Sopranos and The West Wing saw multiple nominees on multiple occasions, and Lost was added to that list in recent years. So, for a show like Lost, the question isn’t whether one of its actors will get a nomination: it’s which one, and how many.

This goes for other series as well, as this is certainly a year where there’s a lot of shows that probably have multiple deserving candidates. These types of races are always difficult because of two competing phenomena: vote-splitting, which implies that these candidates will struggle to break into the final five or six nominees, and tape-sharing, where the tapes screened for critics could potentially overlap between candidates. The latter, for example, pretty well won Terry O’Quinn the Emmy last year, as he was in Michael Emerson’s submission almost as much as he was in his own.

This year, it’s three competitors from Boston Legal, four from Lost, and two from Damages that will either be fighting more with each other or working together to multiple nominations. And, well, let’s not forget everyone else, too.

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June 10, 2008 · 2:27 am

Season Finale: Greek – “Spring Broke”

“Spring Broke”

June 9th, 2008

Most series set in college would end their first season with the end of the school year, but Greek is operating under a really weird schedule – it took only ten episodes to complete the first half of the year, but only got to Spring Break (Woo!) in its last twelve.

The argument you could make, though, is that a show that has nothing to do with academics should probably climax in the throes of the party period as opposed to the exam one. I don’t say that to degrade the series, a solid entry into its television category, but rather to point out the obvious: if you came in expecting no drama or theatrics surrounding love quadrangles or hijinx, you went to the wrong Spring Break.

For the most part, the show follows its traditional patterns: Ashley is shallow and immature, Casey is self-righteous, Cappie is humorous but unfairly treaded on, Evan is pathetic, and Rusty has every possible bad thing that could happen to him, well, happen to him. But they’re comfortable patterns, and just like an ideal Spring Break in a television season swimming with less and less options.

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June 10, 2008 · 1:06 am

The Mole (2008) – “Episode Two”

“Episode Two”

June 9th, 2008

Last week’s premiere of The Mole’s fifth season (if we’re counting the celebrity editions) was one of those episodes where you could see some growing pains, but beneath them was the core of the show we enjoyed before. There was the unique tasks that brought out the worst in the competitors, the wonderfully cheesy music, and a game that was more about the mind than anything else.

However, it’s not an easy sell for new viewers: I made a quick guest appearance on the /Filmcast last night, and guest GreatWhiteSnark (From his eponymous site) really didn’t understand all of the hype after last week’s episode. I tried my best to explain it, but it isn’t the easiest thing to do in thirty seconds and ABC.com’s synopsis is fairly useless. However, I stand by my assertion that as a mind game it rises above most reality shows, and that we’ll eventually get to that point.

What’s funny about this, the season’s second episode, is that it’s one step forward and one step back. While I am pleased to report that host Jon Kelley was much improved the second time around, especially with his voiceover work, the end-of-episode quiz was dumbed down to the point that it felt like the game was a mockery of its former self. While it might be the same on the surface, if this is seriously all they expect of these people they must not be a very smart group.

But we could have known that from the wheelbarrow.

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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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June 6, 2008 · 10:45 am

The Wire – “The Target” and “The Detail”

“The Target” & “The Detail”

Season One, Episodes One & Two

In my year and a half of television criticism here at Cultural Learnings, I have run into a number of roadblocks due to my lack of knowledge with a particular era of television. As I noted back when The Sopranos was finishing, I never got into the HBO drama – not only am I slightly too young, but my TV addiction is still a relatively recent phenomenon. I am a network television viewer of the Lost generation, and sometimes that hurts.

No better example of this than was earlier this year, when David Simon’s HBO series The Wire was entering its fifth season. I couldn’t go to any of my usual TV criticism sites without hearing about how amazing the series was, and how wonderful the fifth season would be, and how there was absolutely no way anyone could jump into this novel-like series in its fifth season. I, knee deep in thesis work, was unable to commit to watching four seasons in the spring, and as a result I had to be the odd man out when it came to the powerful conclusion to this epic Baltimore tale.

But I’ve come to make amends: just as the magic of DVD is allowing me to revisit Six Feet Under (Which I’ll probably save for when I complete the series), The Wire has officially entered into my rotation. Normally, I might keep such an old catalogue title to myself, but Alan Sepinwall is currently revisiting the first season as part of his summer blogging schedule. And while I’m going to have to stick to his “Newbies” posts in favour of keeping myself free of serious spoilers for what’s to come, I figured that the more people talk about what is (thus far, and by all accounts) a fantastic series the better for my readers, readers everywhere, and maybe even the show’s long-shot Emmy chances.

For now, however, time to dig into the first two episodes of the series like I’d dig into an order of Chicken McNuggets.
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June 4, 2008 · 4:31 am

Did Lost’s Flashforwards Spoil Its Own Finale?

As you may have read, earlier this week I had the privilege of being a guest on the second episode of the /Filmcast, the official podcast of SlashFilm.com. It’s quickly making a name for itself as one of the most thorough and lively entertainment podcasts around, largely due to the dedicated of Dave, Devindra, Adam and Peter to making it an interactive and enjoyable experience – it was an honour to only briefly be a part of it.

The episode is now available for download @ Slashfilm.com (Or should be soon, I’ll update the link later), or you can subscribe via iTunes (Link will take you into iTunes to do so, FYI), and I had the pleasure of discussing the Lost finale with the fine gentlemen in the show’s first quarter (Starting at about 14m, but listen to the whole thing folks). And, well, it got me thinking (What doesn’t?).

In a third season episode of How I Met Your Mother, Barney Stinson (played by Neil Patrick Harris) finds out ahead of time that his friend Marshall plans to slap him (as part of a “Slap Bet”) during Thanksgiving dinner. At first, he chides Marshall for this childish error: now that the element of surprise is gone, all of the suspense is taken away, and the slap has lost its impact. But then the anticipation gets to him, tearing apart his emotions and leaving an empty shell of a man who (eventually) gets the slap and a celebratory song to go with it.

Now, I doubt that the writers of this particular episode were necessarily thinking in these terms, but I find great meaning in this storyline in lieu of a re-engaged question of “spoilers,” a four-letter word in a lot of internet circles. I am part of these circles, an adamant believer that spoilers need to be marked extremely carefully if not excised entirely. For example, I’m okay with a spoiler being found in a review of an upcoming episode, but not on the front page of a popular entertainment site (Not that Zap2it has ruined countless episodes of Survivor for me, or anything).

I raise this issue for two reasons: first off, Entertainment Weekly’s Ken Tucker recently fired a shot at people like myself. In admittedly his harshest pullquote, he ends with the following:

Knowing the way something turns out shouldn’t ruin anyone’s pleasure. Hey, it’s a 24/7 media world. The best way to kill spoiler culture, if you don’t like it, is to say one thing to both spoilers and spoiler ”victims”: Grow up.

Admittedly, this is bound to upset a lot of people, myself included – yes, it’s a 24/7 Media World, but that doesn’t necessarily excuse unlabeled spoilers within 12 hours of an episode airing. However, Tucker’s point gained more clarity through something he said earlier:

I admit that if someone tells me who won The Amazing Race before I’ve seen it, I may gnash my teeth a little. But chances are, it will make me want to see how those people scored their victories and how the producers edited the game even more.

First off, if anyone ever ruins The Amazing Race for me, I might have to hurt them.

Second, after discussing it with the folks on the /Filmcast on Monday night, one of the things that came very clear was that Lost Season Four had one problem for quite a few people: it had been spoiled. We knew how it ended, knew that our castaways would get off the island and that they would be called the Oceanic Six and that there was a whole lot of fishy things about their departure. It wasn’t just that we presumed what might happen (Like Chekhov’s gun, for example), but that we actually knew the end result: we just had to, as Tucker seems to argue, enjoy the journey and how the producers take us to that conclusion.

So when we all sat down to discuss the Lost finale, and we all kind of agreed that the ending being spoiled had a profound impact on how we viewed the season, I wondered whether here we have a microcosm, a perfect test for Tucker’s thesis and the argument of spoilsports around the globe. And while it is certainly open for interpretation, I tend to believe that it both proves and disproves this concept that knowing only makes the heart grow fonder.

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June 3, 2008 · 9:15 am

Greek – “Barely Legal”

“Barely Legal”

June 2nd, 2008

Last week, you might remember that I instituted a new rule where I wouldn’t complain about Casey Cartwright.

However, anyone who’s taken a practice LSAT has come across the toughest logic problem of all: when a central character of a series has a lot of screen time in every episode, and a television critic is planning to review the episode despite a desire to no longer speak of his frustrations with said character, what kind of review will he write?

The answer, of course, is a short one. As a result, perhaps to no one’s surprise, the rule is ending. This isn’t to say that the episode is an especially awful one for Ms. Cartwright, but rather that it demands I actually care about her storyline for it to be anything even close to engaging. However, by episode’s end, I actually had some positive things to say, so maybe I didn’t even need the rule!

At the end of the day, though, it’s a weak effort for the series: Rusty and Cappie are busy circumventing the law, Ashley is busy learning the harsh law of credit cards, and Casey is busy learning how to get into law school while ignoring the laws of her new relationships.

And, unfortunately, this episode does little to elevate the series above “barely enjoyable,” something that can’t be said for some of its more accomplished segments.

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