Tag Archives: Television

May 8, 2008 · 9:08 pm

“Season Finale” – Scrubs – “My Princess”

“My Princess”

May 8th, 2008

It is, perhaps, the most confusing finale in recent years: Scrubs is ending its seventh season tonight, and NBC has no plans on bringing it back. So, there is the thought of series finale in the air, but this is not true: although it won’t be confirmed until after the show concludes its run on the peacock, ABC has already ordered 18 episodes of the series that are filming now, and that will air next season. The result is an episode that exists purely in limbo, a false goodbye for a series we’ll be seeing more of.

As I’ve noted, I really am not that enamoured with the series as of late, but the last few episodes have showed potential – if anything, their only major flaw is their decision to continue the forced march towards J.D. and Elliot reconnecting romantically. I like the sendoff given to Ken Jenkins’ Dr. Kelso, I’ve enjoyed our time spent with the Janitor, but with a certain lack of faith in the show’s central romantic storyline I certainly need to be convinced that those 18 episodes next season will be worth my time.

If there is any way to do it, though, perhaps this is it: Zach Braff’s second epic take-off of a classic fairy tale, this time cult classic The Princess Bride, and if his work on the charming Wizard of Oz episode that signaled the show’s 100th episode was any indication this kind of thing is right up his alley. Scrubs is a show that often works well within event formats (The Musical episode was a highlight dramatically, if not perhaps musically, for the sixth season), but has Braff managed to do the inconceivable?

Has he actually created an episode of Scrubs that cuts through my jaded cynicism for the future?

Not so much.

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May 8, 2008 · 3:11 pm

Introducing “Cultural Conundrums” @ AlwaysWatching.org!

Greetings, Cultural Learnings readers! Things have been a lot busier on this front lately, with a lot of episodes to analyze/review for a lot of my favourite series, and perhaps you’ve noticed a recurrent stream through many of them: a lot of retrospective thoughts on the ways shows are shaping up in this strike-shortened season. While Cultural Learnings has been definitely relying mostly on episodic analysis, there’s a lot of broad ideas that I’ve wanted to investigate, and with the school year over I had a chance to do so.

I also had a chance, however, to work with some great folks over at Always Watching, a fantastic film/TV site which features some great, well, features on a regular basis. I’ve spent some time on their podcast in the past, and was honoured to be asked to contribute a series of articles to cover the television side of things. I certainly view these as complimentary to this blog experience, so don’t think that it will keep me from pontificating on television here at Cultural Learnings.

Cultural Conundrums is a good chance to have video retrospectives and definitive analysis of the season that was, or the shows that I watch. The first edition is The Many Faces of Michael Scott, an analysis of the ways in which Michael Scott’s character on “The Office” seems downright schizophrenic at points. The end result, of course, is a character that is all sorts of different things, and that diversity allows for the humour and genuine character development to be heightened at a moment’s notice.

The Many Faces of Michael Scott @ AlwaysWatching.org

Special thanks have to go out to Dave Chen, who went through the ludicrously exhaustive trouble of retrieving the Hulu videos – we Canadians can’t access them, so he really deserves a co-author credit on this one. (On a related note: sorry to my Canadian/International readers who won’t be able to view the videos – hilariously, I’m in the same boat, so know that even the author feels your pain!)

You can also Digg the article, to help get the word out about Dave, Devindra and Adam’s great site (And, perhaps this one too, if you want) by clicking the Digg Button conveniently located to my right. But, please, make sure you head over to Always Watching too, it’s a great read.

Will be back tonight with thoughts on tonight’s episode of The Office, the Season Finale of 30 Rock, AND the NBC Finale of Scrubs. I will probably hold off on Lost until tomorrow, just to give the requisite time to the finales.

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May 6, 2008 · 1:05 pm

Gossip Girl – “All About My Brother”

“All About My Brother”

May 5th, 2008

It’s time for someone to be Outed – or, more accurately, for two people to be Outed. Homosexuality is one issue the series has not addressed in any broad strokes, and there is obvious concern when raising this that things will either fall into sensationalism or lack the emotional impact necessary to make this important issue resonate.

The series finds the perfect person to handle it, perhaps the show’s most sympathetic character. As everyone is busy being catty or bitchy, this character has never fallen into those traps, and it explains important things about his past and his future.

The result is an episode where homosexuality isn’t a joke, or a plot contrivance, but a real issue in a person’s life. Just as the show tackled pregnancy in the right way, I think they’re on the right path here as well…for the most part. The real problem is that while the end result might be fine, the way it’s used for the plot seems false by comparison.

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May 6, 2008 · 12:07 pm

Greek – “47 Hours and 11 Minutes”

“47 Hours and 11 Minutes”

May 5th, 2008

It’s “Meet the Parents” week on Greek, and I’ll admit that I wasn’t a huge fan of this one. Something about the various parents was just a bit too predictable: of course the Cartwrights are judgmental (Have you met their daughter?), of course Dale’s parents are overbearing, and of course Senator Logan is a cheating dirtbag because how else are we to start viewing his daughter as a sympathetic character?

The series is often mature beyond its appearance, but here it felt the exact opposite: an episode that appears on the surface to be a heartfelt realization of a parents’ love or a person’s own path is actually a validation of a vapid, twisted and totally unreasonable sibling perspective. I hated Casey in this episode, and by the end her behaviour was somehow “good” due to the end result. Call me a purist, but this “Ends Justify the Means” B.S. just isn’t going to cut it for me, not when the series already has issues with keeping her character within the likability window.

As a result, this episode was an exercise in my patience just as much as in the Freshmen with their parents in town.

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May 6, 2008 · 2:05 am

How I Met Your Mother – “Rebound Bro”

“Rebound Bro”

May 5th, 2008

After last week’s breakup of Barney and Ted, it’s not easy being Barney…or Ted. Or Stella, the delightful girlfriend we’ve seen too little of since only now was Sarah Chalke able to make her return. And really, it’s a spiral for all of them, as they struggle with various hangups.

They’re realistic hangups – whether it’s Barney’s search for a wingman who isn’t married or taken, Ted struggling with two months of no sex with Stella, and Stella attempting to overcome her concerns over not having sex for five YEARS. The first certainly provides the most humour, in a traditional sense, but the others provide a less neurotic but more charming/dramatic turn.

It might not quite be comparable to next week, but who can complain about Virginity 2: Electric Bugaloo and an unexpected number of testacles?

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May 5, 2008 · 12:12 pm

Brothers & Sisters – “Moral Hazard”

“Moral Hazard”

May 4th, 2008

There is no storyline in television more hazardous at the moment than the fatal attraction of Justin Walker and Rebecca Not-Walker. It is an incredibly dangerous storyline for the series to engage at this point in time, but the real hazard is very simple: it’s actually really entertaining to watch.

Way too entertaining, too – Dave Annable and Emily VanCamp are both fantastic, and the scenes in the episode that deal with this issue fly around in a way that is humorous enough to make me forget the huge psychological ramifications at play. Based on these scenes, the show clearly understands the dangers they face and are willing to take the right steps to make it work.

That’s not to say it’s not still frakkin’ creepy, but it’s not quite as reprehensible as it could have been.

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May 2, 2008 · 11:06 pm

Battlestar Galactica – “The Road Less Traveled”

“The Road Less Traveled”

May 2nd, 2008

After last week threw us into the psychological and religious conflict brewing on Galactica, it’s natural that this takes a back seat to the plots we really want to see: Starbuck’s struggles to find Earth and the Cylon’s internal conflict. We’re thrown right into the action this time around, with Mark Verheiden’s script starting with a definitive revelation for the Demetrius.

That was what was lacking last week, as to an extent “Escape Velocity” seems unnecessary by comparison: here, we get the kinds of reactions that we expected to find last week but didn’t. We get a glimpse of Baltar, and one that perhaps didn’t need such an extracted investigation as we saw last week. Similarly, did we really need last week’s events to explain Tyrol shaving his head and obsessing over his wife’s death? I liked last week’s episode alright, but it feels as if it was a lot of exposition without much comparative value.

Last week felt totally wrong when it comes to the central conceit of the season: the blurring of the line between human and Cylon is integral to defining the series moving forward, and this week we return to the concepts of shared destiny and identity within the context of the series. The result is a sharper episode, one that feels like we are, indeed, traveling down a particular road as the two storylines missing last week coincide.

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May 2, 2008 · 5:26 pm

Grey’s Anatomy – “Piece of My Heart”

“Piece of My Heart”

May 1st, 2008

It’s certain: we have missed Addison Montgomery. I never got into Private Practice, a show that I found too preachy and too talkative for its own good (A comment that Addison makes when trying to discern things from glances and eyebrow raises instead of the long-winded speeches of LA). This is a show that, for too long, has been decipherable: these characters have been acting out of character, scrambling around and struggling without really coming out and saying it.

Well, they’re coming out and saying it now: often it only takes one new influence for things to perk up, and Addison Montgomery is that character. It’s a cheap plot device on the surface, sure, but we create a sense of drama that we haven’t seen in a year. Something about her arrival, and the surgeries that surround it, influences our characters across the board. She is the person that they can talk to, someone who won’t be around for the drama and who wants to know how things will change.

The result is some great character turns, some drama being drawn from humanity and not chaos, and an emotionally charged hour of television.

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May 2, 2008 · 12:42 pm

The Office – “Did I Stutter?”

“Did I Stutter?”

May 1st, 2008

I’m in the process of preparing an article for Always Watching on what I consider to be one of the Office’s most definitive qualities, and I am always glad to see when something pops up to prove my point for me. In this instance, “Did I Stutter?” manages to portray a version of the Office where no one is an abject idiot, and things which were funny without being sensationalist or over-the-top. It was the best possible argument for a version of this series, and its characters, which resists caricature in favour of subtle, yet brilliant, development.

A lot of this is dependent on the version of Michael Scott that we see, and here he is at his most naive, desperate and yet also honest – this is a Michael Scott who of course doesn’t know how to handle an employee being insubordinate, but when tasked with addressing the problem searches for advice and inevitably comes across a decent, if eventually overused solution.

And if The Office can be both funny and logical while maintaining this characterization, I’m on board.

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May 1, 2008 · 10:40 pm

30 Rock – “Sandwich Day”

“Sandwich Day”

May 1st, 2008

If there was something that I was missing in the first batch of post-strike episodes of 30 Rock, it was whimsy: while there was plenty of humour, there were few instances where the show was moving at the same pace that it had in the past. It hasn’t been poor, not at all, but this was the first time that things were moving at the same speed as we’ve seen before.

This week, everything just felt lighter: Liz felt more silly (in a good way), Jack felt more panicked, and the storylines felt like they were on a level that matched the usual madness of the storylines. To this point, it felt like the plots didn’t match the tone, and here we are with an episode that seems right.

That’s not to say it’s better than what we’ve seen: Floyd’s return pales in comparison to Dennis’, there was nothing close to last week’s expanded Amadeus metaphor, and the drinking contest storyline was fairly slight compared to some of the others we’ve seen. However, it was a breezy and enjoyable half hour nonetheless.

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