Tag Archives: The CW

May 12, 2008 · 11:10 pm

Gossip Girl – “Woman on the Verge”

“Woman on the Verge”

May 12th, 2008

Last week, Serena van der Woodsen revealed something that had the potential to cripple the entire series. “I killed someone” isn’t something that a show can just ignore, or gloss over – or, at least, not quite so quickly that this episode should approach anything close to normalcy. For her to interact with any characters in this situation would drag everything down. Luckily, at this point in the story, only Blair knows the truth, so everyone else can presume that it is only a downward spiral in her usual vein.

It’s a certain tragic note that fits the series well enough, although on occasion Serena’s complicity in continuing the lie of why she fell off the rails, and destroying her relationship with Dan, feels too melodramatic by half. I’m never a fan of characters who, after admitting what happened to one person, ignores the logical course of setting things straight and instead chooses to hide things – it’s a teen soap cliche that just doesn’t work for me.

There’s a lot of chiches at play here, almost too many – whether its Lily’s past with Rufus giving her cold feet, or Dan falling right into Georgina’s arms after the breakup, things are at such a low difficulty level that the execution needs to be excellent for the episode to really click. Even after the truth of the incident comes out, and it is expectedly exonerative of Serena to the point of contrivance, it just feels like the show isn’t willing to pull punches when it counts.

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May 12, 2008 · 2:53 pm

Cultural Learnings’ 2008-2009 Network Upfronts Analysis

Last year, Cultural Learnings produced a lot of hits (And perhaps a few new readers) during its coverage of the Network Upfronts, a process wherein each network reveals the shows that will make it onto their Fall or Winter schedules the following year. There were a lot of surprises last year: Jericho’s cancellation and subsequent campaign couldn’t have been predicted, and as a whole there were a lot of shows on the bubble that squeaked through.

This year, we can’t say the same thing: a network like ABC announced most of its pickups a while ago, and is leaving little room for new shows, while NBC announced a version of its schedule a month ago so we already know its lineup (Or what it looked like in April). For anyone following the trades, there’s few surprises to be found in these announcements, so now the real drama will be how your Fall viewing schedule will emerge. And whether Moonlight, the show that has been dominating at sites like Hey! Nielsen, will be able to avoid becoming another Jericho (And if it does, in all seriousness, has CBS not learned their lesson?).

So, at Cultural Learnings I plan to focus on analysis of how the schedules align, and how each network has adapted or not adapted post-strike to accommodate last year’s freshman offerings and this year’s foreign imports (A certain trend). Below, you’ll find a nice combination of helpful links and, eventually, links to our Upfronts coverage.

Cultural Learnings’ 2008-2009 Upfronts Analysis

NBC – Analysis from April (Open Letter, Office Spinoff, Timed-Friday Night Lights)

  • We can expect Jimmy Fallon to be confirmed to be taking over for Conan (Already confirmed, in fact), along with potentially more information on the elusive Office spinoff and on some of the neetwork’s new series.

ABC – Full Fall Schedule Analysis

  • New Shows: Life on Mars, various reality shows, Scrubs, The Goode Family
  • Returning Shows: Eli Stone, Boston Legal, Private Practice, Dirty Sexy Money, Pushing Daisies, etc.
  • Canceled Shows: October Road, Men in Trees, Miss/Guided, Cavemen, Carpoolers

The CW – Full Fall Schedule Analysis

  • New Shows: 90210, Surviving the Filthy Rich, Stylista
  • Returning Shows: Reaper, Gossip Girl, One Tree Hill, Supernatural, etc.
  • Canceled Shows: Girlfriends, Aliens in America, Life is Wild, WWE Smackdown, Beauty & the Geek

CBS – Coming Wednesday May 14th

  • Moonlight has officially been canceled (Read Full Story)
  • Moonlight is a huge cult favourite, but could be gone in favour of Les Moonves’ personal choices. This would result in another campaign, this time with more than peanuts to deal with.

FOX – Coming Thursday May 15th

  • FOX’s pickups are pretty clear, with most returning shows confirmed and big budget shows from Abrams and Whedon already announced. Scheduling is the only real drama.

Links to Other Coverage

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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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April 28, 2008 · 9:07 pm

Gossip Girl – “Desperately Seeking Serena”

“Desperately Seeking Serena”

April 28th, 2008

It’s SAT time on Gossip Girl, as our heroes and heroines are obsessing over their futures. Of course, how can one study for the future when your past is haunting you before you can even get there? Georgina Sparks is a dangerous catalyst of the old Serena, a Monday night synergy moment where it appears that Serena has a case of associative regression: when she’s around, something clicks inside of her.

Michelle Trachtenberg (Buffy) arrives on the scene just as Serena’s life seems too idyllic for this drama-filled universe – we are to believe based on the hype that even being stepsiblings with Chuck Bass is a cakewalk compared to weathering the arrival of this character. Here she is, with her entire academic future on the line, and now she has to try to avoid waking up an angry ghost from her, still, mysterious past.

Smartly, the rest of the episode avoided the uber-drama in favour of romantic entanglements of the adorable and/or intriguing variety, along with Blair’s usual scheming and Dan’s usual neuroses. It’s a sign of a show finding its balance, a show capable of taking its storylines and making them into something that affects the entire cast. Much as the pregnancy storyline before the break didn’t break down into something dominating, so too goes Georgie’s arrival on the scene.

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April 22, 2008 · 8:13 am

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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January 8, 2008 · 8:59 pm

Gossip Girl – Season Finale – “The Thin Line Between Chuck and Nate”

“The Thin Line Between Chuck and Nate”

January 8th, 2008

[As you may be realizing, this is the review of Gossip Girl’s mid-season finale that aired in January. The show’s first season finale, “Much ‘I Do’ About Nothing” aired on May 19th, and Cultural Learnings has all the details in its full detailed review!]

While I can think of greater losses thanks to the Writers’ strike, Gossip Girl is somewhat unfortunate considering that it is still struggling to find its creative stride. Gossip Girl mentions that all a story needs to blow up is for an unexpected twist, but I really don’t think that this is the solution to the series’ problems. The O.C. didn’t become exemplary teen programming when it gave people pregnancy scares, but when it made us care about these people more than we were really intended to. And while Gossip Girl has made strides in this direction, there are important steps it seems to be skipping in its desire to raise the “with child” question.

But in the end the skipping of these steps was perhaps in the best interest of certain of the series’ characters – Chuck, Serena and Blair finally regained some of their humanity that has occasionally been absent. Nate is a lost cause, and Dan is pretty well consistent, which leaves these three individuals as the characters that need to be resolved. They are all over the map when faced with this crisis, but it also differentiates between their true colours and their affected personalities. The episode also returns Jenny to our central narrative, and signals a sign that Gossip Girl might be creatively on the right track when it returns post-Strike.

To discuss the thinning of the line, read below for the details.

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January 2, 2008 · 10:31 pm

Gossip Girl – “School Lies”

“School Lies”

January 2nd, 2007

In what has become a bit of a recurring trend with the CW series, Gossip Girl tried to do far too much while accomplishing very little in their first episode back from the Christmas hiatus, and the penultimate episode to air before they run out of fresh ones. There were a lot of gears turning in “School Lies,” as the show finally acknowledged that these people attend a school and do real homework. However, the series’ insistence upon juggling that reality with teen sexuality and parental drama results in an unfortunate lack of drive and motivation.

This is not to say that I think the parents’ storyline is a waste of time, or that the teen drama isn’t worthwhile. Rather, the series cannot be all of these things all of the time. This episode could have provided a great opportunity to focus solely on the personal concerns facing these characters, but all that emerged was a couple of haphazard conclusions and the sad if entertaining return of one-dimensional Chuck. And that’s really too bad.

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December 1, 2007 · 3:57 pm

New Media in the Old Media: Considering the ‘Supernatural’ Official Magazine

Although I am but young in years, I seem to remember an age where official magazines were all the rage when it came to certain forms of entertainment. For my brother and I, it was all about Nintendo Power, the official magazine about all things related to the video games we loved to play. It was where we went to figure out how to get through that tricky dungeon, or see a first look at an upcoming game.

And then the internet happened.

My experience as a fan of great television has taken place entirely within the internet age, and there is no question that in recent years such fandom has emerged in an extremely unique fashion. Message boards, blogs and social networking have fundamentally altered the level of interaction we have with our favourite shows. Within hours of them airing, we are online chatting with other fans, or even reading blogs or websites run by the show’s producers. It is perhaps unsurprising then, considering how engrossed I am in that community, that I was wholly ignorant to the fact that Titan Magazines has been creating TV-focused magazines for a number of years.

The latest two entrants into their lineup are Heroes and Supernatural. While Heroes is an addition to be expected, I want to focus upon Supernatural. In perusing my copy of the magazine, I think back to the time I’ve spent interacting with their fan community, which is certainly both extremely pleasant and extremely enthusiastic. Unlike Heroes, or other shows with magazines like Grey’s Anatomy or Lost, Supernatural is not one of the top shows on television. However, Warner Bros. Television has a lot of faith in the series, and its fans, and this magazine certainly reflects that.

[To Subscribe to the Supernatural Magazine, CLICK HERE]

There are a lot of reasons why this is an extremely positive step forward: not only for Supernatural’s fan community, but also for other fan communities for low-rated but highly-loved series like Jericho or Gossip Girl.

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November 27, 2007 · 9:31 pm

Gossip Girl – “Blair Waldorf Must Pie!”

“Blair Waldorf Must Pie!”

November 27th, 2007

You know that Gossip Girl is going to get really serious when its titular blogger takes a vacation (quite literally) and is only present over the episode’s introduction. Kristen Bell gets a break this week, which means that we’re left to sort through the drama without her deft analysis of the action at hand. To be honest, I didn’t really miss it – the show doesn’t really need to rely on that particular conceit, as its has established its characters and its scenarios well enough to this stage.

However, I shouldn’t speak in generalities – while some of the show’s storylines seem fairly on track, “Blair Waldorf Must Pie” most certainly presents a case for those which do work and those which most certainly do not.

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November 13, 2007 · 8:45 pm

Gossip Girl – “Seventeen Candles”

“Seventeen Candles”

November 13th, 2007

It has been too long since I’ve checked in with Gossip Girl, a show that has done a fine job of developing a series of likable characters and storylines with its early season episodes. It really hasn’t done anything noteworthy, but the show has embraced its guilty side to deliver a series of enjoyable pairings that have the intrigue ratcheted and the drama at a high point.

It should be less enjoyable: this week, Blair’s birthday party offers the weekly outlet for the show’s drama, a large gathering at which relationships come into greater focus. The result is wholly predictable, with the characters acting as we’d suspect, but it still popped off the screen. The show’s broad strokes could use some work, but as long as the core storylines work themselves out I’m willing to stick around until the candles are blown out.

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