Tag Archives: TV

May 9, 2010 · 8:03 pm

Cultural Catchup Project: “Beauty and the Beasts” (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

“Beauty and the Beasts”

May 9th, 2010

You can follow along with the Cultural Catchup Project by following me on Twitter (@Memles), by subscribing to the category’s feed, or by bookmarking the Cultural Catchup Project page where I’ll be posting a link to each installment.

Due to more Mother’s Day related traveling than I had anticipated, I actually ran out of time to watch enough of Buffy to make today’s piece as expansive as I wanted it to be. I watched “Beauty and the Beasts” earlier in the week when I went through the first disc of the season, but then I haven’t moved on since that point as a result of more excursions than usual. Accordingly, you’re stuck with a small capsule review rather something something a bit more substantial, but I do have a few points to make (as if running out of things to say is ever really my issue).

While not quite as momentous as “Faith, Hope & Trick,” this episode nonetheless plays an important role in starting off the season’s story arc. While it’s not the most subtle episode the show has ever done, the various parallels do a nice job of handling the reintegration of a certain character both in terms of the character himself and Buffy’s response to their return, and they have some fun with a couple of television clichés in the process.

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May 9, 2010 · 2:49 am

Saturday Night Live – “May 8th: Betty White and Jay-Z”

“Betty White and Jay-Z”

May 8th, 2010

I wrote yesterday that I didn’t think that Saturday Night Live could pull of an episode which lived up to the hype surrounding Betty White’s triumphant ascension to the position of host for this week’s penultimate episode of the season, but I’ll admit I underestimated the infectiousness of her personality and the amount of material they would choose to give her (keeping the returning alumni largely sidelined in favour of White). However, I was right in that the show didn’t really have much material for her, relying too heavily on sex jokes, her age (which worked for a while but felt overdone), and the incongruity of an old lady saying dirty/angry things for me to say that they really rose to the occasion.

As a celebration of women on “SNL,” the episode showed that there have been some funny performers from the show’s past who are part of an important legacy of comedy on television; however, as an episode of “SNL,” the episode indicated that they still don’t entirely know how to write for those women in a way which delivers on their potential.

For all of my thoughts on the episode, though, you can check out my complete recap of the show over at HitFix.com, where I run down all of the individual sketches, including the genius of the Digital Short. Here’s a brief introduction to that review, then head over to HitFix for the rest.

Betty White is an extremely funny lady, Jay-Z is a darn engaging performer, and when you start listing off “Saturday Night Live” alumni like Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Ana Gasteyer, Molly Shannon, Maya Rudolph and Rachel Dratch you can’t help but think back to some pretty darn memorable sketches and characters. In other words, on paper, this has the potential to be one of the strongest episodes of the series in a very long time.

However, the big question I had going into tonight’s episode is whether it will actually be able to properly do justice to this potential: White seems too old to be able to carry a full host’s load, and while bringing in a wheelbarrow full of past cast members allows her to take on fewer sketches it may also crowd out her contribution to the episode. The balance between the internet-appointed host and the likes of Fey and Poehler is not going to be easy, and I don’t know how Betty White fans will respond to Jay-Z as the musical guest.

Ultimately, the most-hyped “SNL” since the 2008 election delivers what it promises: with an absolutely journeywoman-esque performance from White and some energy from the returning cast members, the show turns in one of its most enjoyable episodes in recent memory even if the material never quite feels like it earns the talent who bring it to life.

[For my complete recap of Betty White on SNL, click here.]

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May 8, 2010 · 11:27 am

Cultural Catchup Project: “Faith, Hope & Trick” (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

“Faith, Hope & Trick”

May 8th, 2010

You can follow along with the Cultural Catchup Project by following me on Twitter (@Memles), by subscribing to the category’s feed, or by bookmarking the Cultural Catchup Project page where I’ll be posting a link to each installment.

As this project indicates, I didn’t exactly get introduced to the work of Joss Whedon in the traditional order: going from Firefly to Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog and then to Dollhouse is probably a little bit bizarre, but for the most part I was able to enjoy those series on their own merits without too much concern that a lack of previous experience was detrimental.

However, when I was watching Dollhouse, I didn’t really have any context for Eliza Dushku’s rather horridly weak central performance. To her credit, she improved as the show moved on (and Whedon moved Echo into a supporting role), but early on I was fascinated that anyone would ever think she was capable of carrying a television series. I was perplexed as to why Whedon had not cast Amy Acker instead, and frustrated that this project having been conceived “for” Eliza had become the deciding factor in casting. I had never seen Tru Calling, so I was just struggling to understand what anyone would see in Dushku that would recommend her for that role.

Whenever I would make these complaints, or read similar concerns, people would always say that she was “only good at playing Faith,” a comment which had very little meaning to me: I knew that Faith was a character on Buffy, and I knew that Dushku played her, but I had no other information. So as people kept returning to Faith as proof that Dushku is capable of being an action star, especially in episodes where Dollhouse allowed Echo to enter into that mode and the show was a whole lot better for it, I started to create this image of Faith in my head based purely on these stray observations.

I don’t think I ever really compiled these observations into a definitive image, but I’d like to believe that it would have emerged looking awfully similar to Faith’s introduction in “Faith, Hope and Trick,” the third episode of Buffy’s third season. Looking past the latest in a long line of inconsistent accents for the series, Faith is cocky without being immature, vulnerable without being weak, and strong without seeming indestructible; in this episode, Dushku shows confidence and range that was either buried in Dollhouse’s premise or has simply been lost with age.

However, what was lost has – through my rather odd way of making my way through the Whedonverse – been found, as Faith’s introduction is a breath of fresh air in an episode which manages to balance three different purposes and deliver on each of them in order to set up a foundation for the remainder of the season.

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May 7, 2010 · 9:59 pm

Season Four of Friday Night Lights debuts on NBC

Season Four of Friday Night Lights debuts on NBC

May 7th, 2010

Back in the fall, I reviewed the critically acclaimed (to be awesome) fourth season of Friday Night Lights when it aired exclusively on DirecTV – tonight, as I hope someone else made you aware since I was asleep at the wheel, the fourth season made its debut on NBC, so I figured I should direct you to my review from the fall. I didn’t realize that I had written 3500 words about it way back when, but it seems I did, so if you’re looking for some analysis of the season premiere I’ve got you covered for an inordinate amount of time.

Season Premiere: Friday Night Lights – “East of Dillon”

What becomes clear in this fourth season premiere is that the first season wasn’t an underdog story at all, but rather a story of a team recapturing glory that never really left them but for those brief moments when all seemed lost. The story of the East Dillon Lions, handicapped by a biased redistricting that we were once on the other side of, is a true underdog story because this team has nothing. Not only are they handicapped by the inexperienced nature of its players, but they are also crippled by their lack of that community surrounding them – they don’t have lobbyists, they don’t have an experienced coaching staff, and they only have a few storefront signs to bring them together.

All they have is Eric Taylor, a true underdog whose only weapons are his coaching ability and the words (and the emotions behind them) that inspired the Panthers to victory for three years. With them, he needs to build not only a football team but a community around it, the equivalent to Noah’s Ark more than a texas high school football team. “East of Dillon” establishes this challenge, and tells us two things: Eric Taylor is going to make this work, and the people who are going to help him are slowly lining up to be a part of it.

And I’m already in the stands to enjoy the result.

I’ll be posting links to past reviews as the season progresses (perhaps only on Twitter from this point onwards), and I’ll also be filling in some gaps (including, believe it or not, the season finale), so stay tuned.

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May 7, 2010 · 8:04 pm

A Grey Area: How Will We Gauge the Success of Betty White, SNL Host?

A Grey Area: Betty White, SNL Host?

May 7th, 2010

How will we gauge the success of Betty White as Saturday Night Live host?

It’s a question I’ve been grappling with for a few days: I’m going to be recapping the episode for HitFix (which I’ve been doing for a few months now, although I’m not sure I’ve mentioned it outside of Twitter), and since those recaps tend to run-down sketches rather than pontificating on the episode as a whole I have been struggling with how to boil my complicated thoughts down to just a paragraph or two.

I’m not going to argue that White isn’t an inspired choice to host the show, or that the fan campaign to get her the gig wasn’t a fine use of social media, but is the simple fact that the octogenarian is hosting the show enough to make this “successful”? NBC would certainly hope so: the show has gotten huge amounts of publicity, and “listening” to fans has given the network and SNL a certain credibility in circles where their key demographics hang out. However, if the show doesn’t live up to expectations for whatever reason (White being underutilized, White being given lame material, etc.), does this negate SNL’s willingness to listen to the fans? Are the 500,000 people in that Facebook group withholding their opinion of this event? And are they even going to watch it live?

I obviously don’t know the answers to all of these questions, but I want to talk a bit about how precisely the internet is going to respond to a much-talked about episode of a series which people are otherwise not talking about.

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May 7, 2010 · 9:00 am

Cultural Catchup Project: The Challenge of Clarity Amidst Chaos (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

The Challenge of Clarity Amidst Chaos

May 7th, 2010

You can follow along with the Cultural Catchup Project by following me on Twitter (@Memles), by subscribing to the category’s feed, or by bookmarking the Cultural Catchup Project page where I’ll be posting a link to each installment.

When I say that Buffy the Vampire’s third season gets off to a rocky start, your immediate response should be “of course it gets off to a rocky start.” The show completely threw a wrench into things by having Buffy leave Sunnydale behind for the bright lights of a rundown neighbourhood in an unnamed urban centre we presume is Los Angeles, and the consequences from that event are going to be significantly more damaging than the more subtle psychological impact felt at the start of the second season. You can’t expect “Anne” to feel like just another episode of the show, just as you can’t expect for “Dead Man’s Party” to quickly bring things back to normal now that Buffy has returned to Sunnydale.

However, I do think that there are elements of both episodes which feel just a smidge too convenient; while the situations may be messy and complicated, the metaphors and themes are all clean and concise. They represent necessary parts of Buffy’s journey, and the emotional conclusions to both stories (first Buffy rediscovering part of her identity and then the gang coming to terms with what has changed over the summer) are well played by all involved, but the linearity of this particular course correction feels odd when watched directly after the depth of the second season’s final stretch of episodes.

This doesn’t mean that the show is off to a bad start, but rather that “Anne” and “Dead Man’s Party” wear their purpose in their sleeve a bit too plainly for my tastes.

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May 7, 2010 · 2:09 am

Cultural Catchup Project: State of the Project Address

State of the Project Address

May 7th, 2010

You can follow along with the Cultural Catchup Project by following me on Twitter (@Memles), by subscribing to the category’s feed, or by bookmarking the Cultural Catchup Project page where I’ll be posting a link to each installment.

So, we are now two seasons and four weeks into this process, so it seems like a good time to check in on the progress thus far. I think I wanted to be through a bit more of the show by now, if we’re being honest, but my slow speed has resulted in more writing, and more writing has resulted in some more fabulous discussions, so I’m going to say that the project us off to a successful start.

However, there’s a few points I want to make as we head into the next stage of this journey:

1) Keep the Comments Coming

I am now starting to understand the reasons that Buffy fans are so devoted to this show by watching it, but your comments confirmed this long before I necessarily discovered it myself. While I am occasionally worried that my inability to participate in many conversations (due to fear over spoilers, or a lack of knowledge to be able to follow the sprawling conversation threads that have emerged), you have all been pitching in to keep conversations alive long after I expect them to be over. Every time I get an email notification about another comment on the pieces, it means that someone else has been inspired to talk about the show based on this project, and I have your great contributions to thank for that. I’m not used to getting a whole pile of comments around these parts, so it’s been really exciting and I look forward to more conversations in the future.

2) Quick Whedonesque Note

So, when I started this project, I knew enough to know that it would likely eventually get to Whedonesque, which is ideal: it lets a huge community of Buffy fans know I’m undertaking this project, which is sort of the point (I am writing this for myself and all, but the community element is certainly why I’m doing it the way I am). However, after two of the pieces went up on the site, the third was taken down due to what effectively amounts to oversaturation – at the site’s “Why was my post removed” blog, they noted that people are probably aware by now that I’m watching Buffy, and reminding them about it is unnecessary. This makes sense to me, so if you’re amongst those who’s submitted or considered submitting a piece (which, thank you), just let it rest and perhaps there’ll be a point down the road where a reminder may be acceptable (as this is going to be going on for a while).

3) The Schedule

Now, last week I was posting every day for a while because I happened to find a lot of episodes that felt noteworthy and that I had time to cover, but that sort of pace isn’t really going to work for me at this point. Also, I don’t want you to feel like you need to be constantly checking the site to see if a new piece is up: sure, if you want to visit and see what else I’m reviewing that’s wonderful and marvelous, but I want to try to stick to something of a normal schedule. As a result, my plan for the near future is to go back to my original strategy and post on the weekends: my goal is to write three pieces each weekend (Friday, Saturday, Sunday), so you know when to expect them and so that I’ll have time to pull the pieces together (since there’s, at least for a few more weeks, plenty of shows to cover during the rest of the week). When we get into summer, it’s possible this schedule will change and I’ll switch to Saturday/Monday/Thursday or something (to give more time for comment threads to play out on their own and to keep down the high volumes of reading), but for now this is what works best, and what will start tomorrow morning with my thoughts on the start of the third season.

I want to thank everyone for reading along: it’s been great watching along with fans of the series (plus I know at least a few people inspired to watch the series for the first time by the project), and I’ve been humbled by the response to the project to this point – I’m very much looking forwarding to continuing on with the series, and look forward to many great conversations to come (whether I’m involved in them or not).

Cheers,

Myles

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May 7, 2010 · 1:34 am

Community – “Modern Warfare”

“Modern Warfare”

May 6th, 2010

This episode is a triumph, so let me first make a note regarding its tremendous (or, if you prefer for me to actually complete the reference completely, huge) success – the various action movie parodies which run throughout “Modern Warfare” are expertly designed, tremendously directed by Justin Lin, and result in a really funny and successful episode.

However, I am sort of at a loss about what to really say about it, if only because I haven’t seen a lot of the action movies that the show parodied, and the brekaway narrative used by the episode (and most action movies) meant that the number of characters onscreen diminished as the episode went on. While the episode embodied the show’s propensity for pop culture references and for its meta-subversion of sitcom stereotypes, it also disrupted (as we saw in “Contempoary American Poultry”) the show’s traditional character dynamics. With only twenty minutes, the show rushed head first into the central dynamic between Jeff and Britta while largely “writing off” the other characters, which helped get to the various cliches the episode wanted to address but which kept me (who, as with the Goodfellas parody, was sort of left on the outside here) at arm’s length.

It still really freaking cool from my vantage point, but it wasn’t so much a high water mark for the show so much as it was an important test for the series’ future that it passed with flying colours.

Which were, you know, paint balls.

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May 7, 2010 · 12:29 am

Parks and Recreation – “Telethon”

“Telethon”

May 6th, 2010

The last time a Greg Daniels-produced series was ending its second season, the series’ star took a crack at writing an episode; the result was Steve Carell’s “Casino Night,” an episode largely comprised of a group of small moments for each character mixed in with some major developments with the two love triangles (Michael/Jan/Carol, and Jim/Pam/Roy) which were ongoing at the time.

“Telethon,” written by Amy Poehler and one of the final episodes of another Greg Daniels-produced show’s second season, is more or less the Parks and Recreation equivalent. You have a lot of small moments for all of the show’s supporting characters, you have movement on the two main relationships currently working their way through the series, and the end result (like “Casino Night”) is a really strong half-hour of television which embodies the series’ strength this year: it’s wonderfully odd, surprisingly sweet, and nicely balancing the line between awkward and hilarious.

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May 6, 2010 · 12:39 am

Cougar Town – “Feel a Whole Lot Better”

“Feel a Whole Lot Better”

May 5th, 2010

In Scrubs’ first season, J.D. and Elliot were two people who should logically be together: they were clearly attracted to one another, they were both young and attractive, and they were the male and female leads on a television comedy series. However, in the span of a forty-minute episodes entitled “My Bed Banter & Beyond,” the two characters decide to embark on a relationship after spending a day in bed having sex and chatting about the future of their relationship. The episode cuts back and forth between their time in bed on that first day and their attempts to make the relationship work in the real world, and at the end (spoiler alert), they realize it was all a mistake, and just as we finally see them part as young lovers on that first day we see them broken apart a few weeks later. It was a really fantastic episode of television in terms of breaking down and psychoanalyzing the show’s decision to not follow through on that pairing, and it was the sort of subtle and effective storytelling that would abandon the show and that relationship until the show’s eighth season.

I was just saying to my friend Colin yesterday that Cougar Town is shaping up into a spiritual successor to Scrubs in certain areas, so it’s fitting that the show would introduce its own play on that episode and its functions with “Feel a Whole Lot Better,” another in a pretty long line of really strong episodes for the show. Playing out the “Will They, Won’t They” outside of the thralls of young love and within the dynamics of two divorcees trying to keep from being lonely for the rest of their lives, the episode plays out the consequences from Jules and Grayson’s hookup last week by having the characters lie to themselves about the dramatic conflict apparent in the story. While the episode skips over some of last week’s subtexts that could have made this even more complicated, they manage to squeeze in a lot of story which transforms last week’s hookup into something definitive.

And thus the transformation from “What the hell is this” to “the new Scrubs” continues.

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