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2014 RANDOM TV THOUGHTS


RIPPA

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That's why this relationship isn't working anymore.  Leonard is a doormat to Penny that's basically just grateful a girl as hot as her is dating him.  When Sheldon got a hot assistant who was into him and really a better match for him, he's still in this destructive relationship with Penny.  She gets angry at him because he was hesitant to accept her drunken marriage proposal, after she got drunk and married a douchebag in Las Vegas?  And every time they have problems it's all because of Penny's issues and insecurities.  This relationship with Penny has always been a ticking time bomb.  The fact is, if you look at it, Leonard has a lot more going on for himself than Penny does.  He's got to stop being the doormat for all of Penny's drama.

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The writing with Penny has gotten frustrating.  I think they need to wrap the show up already.  All the basic issues have kind of been dealt with.  Wolowitz has moved out of his mother's place and got married to a decent woman.  Sheldon actually has a girlfriend that he is as committed to as a person like Sheldon can expect and he event went as far as saying he would have sex with her.  Raj can talk to women now and is on the verge of coming out of the closet.  

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For the first time ever, there is someting great on WeTV.  For the last few days they have been running a CSI: MIAMI marathon...and I'm ashamed at how long it's been since I've allowed myself to bask in the absurd glory of this perfect show.

 

Even without the cold-open memes, Horatio Caine is the greatest thing ever.  As the show became more of a personal jerk-off session for Caruso, it just got better and better.  His line readings are pathological and it's so much fun to just sit and imagine all the ways he thought about doing them...which words to nonsensically repeat, which words to pause in-between syllables on.

 

As they kept spinning his backstory in "mythology" episodes, it got more and more convoluted and he became an expert in more and more stuff...like he was a homicide detective, and a sharp-shooter, and an undercover narcotics guy, and a bomb-squad guy, and he was married to Jessie from SAVED BY THE BELL and had a son...and then a daughter..and then he was married to someone else...but not really because she was really his foster sister and he was protecting her from a serial killer...or...something.  And his brother was dead, and then he wasn't..and then he had a daughter..and then he didn't...and then he was Dean Winters...but then he was someone else...and then he was dead again...and the MALA NOCHES!!!! LOOK OUT FOR THE MALA NOCHES!!!!!!!

 

The stories aren't even stories...just fragments.  Bursts of absolutist moralizing and stunningly simplistic character types bouncing off of eachother bathed in crazy color schemes.  I love how they skip over all the actual police work.  Like, they find a fingerprint and then it's FLASH into some purple-colored office where they run a wand over it and a giant computer spits out a name and then FLASH...the guy is sitting in their bright orange interrogation cube which is entirely made out of glass and skylights. And then FLASH he instantly tells them the name of the next person in the chain and then FLASH that guy is in the green-colored interrogation cube and then FLASH that guy's wife is dating the pool cleaner and then FLASH the pool cleaner is dead and then FLASH the pool cleaner's boss is in debt to the Russian mafia and then FLASH the kingpin of the Russian mob is in the yellow-colored inerrogation sauna and then FLASH...it turns out the t.v. reporter did it.  What t.v. reporter?  Does it matter that there was never a t.v. reporter mentioned until the final scene?  Are you a fucking nerd?  Because it turns out the t.v. reporter is the pool cleaner's sister and the pool cleaner was abusing her daughter.  So deal with the weight of that motherfucker.

 

The technology is endlessly hilarious.  The inexhaustible supply of absurd computer mockups deserves a two-hour supercut.  And almost every episode has some "problem" arc with one of the other characters...they are gambling, or in an abusive relationship, or messed something up...and it never actually amounts to anything.  It's just some extra noise to throw on top of the tower of babble.

 

But the best part is how often instead of actually finding any proof, they just ask the suspect what happened in the final scene and he tells them in flashback...like, Horatio's sympathetic eyes just pulls it out of them.  And then...like if your story runs four or five minutes short...MONTAGE SLO-MO of people eing cuffed and other people walking along the beach...and Horation Caine falling to one knee...bowed by the weight of it all...of all of our souls pressing on his shoulders.  And slowly...he stands...and we are comforted...

 

and for all of the hand-wringing at the time over how dirty and violent and sexy it was, it was a deeply conservative show that traded in moral absolutes.  This was the same era that gave us THE WIRE and THE SHIELD, and THE SOPRANOS, shows with deeply flawed protagonists and a realistic view of the shades of morality.  Not CSI:MIAMI!  Horation Caine is essentially a 1950s -style unambiguous superhero.  Uncorruptible, self-righteous, never in doubt of what is pure good and what is pure bad.  You never ever have to worry about such things with this show.  It's like a field trip back in time, but with more titilation on the surface to make it seem "modern."  Brilliant..Stealthy and evil...but brilliant.

 

I read somewhere that the nonsensical, impossible-to-follow plotlines, and sporadic bizarre dialog were meant to make it easier to market to other countries...like it wouldn't matter if the translations were right or wrong...it never really made sense in English anyway.  There is something coldly brilliant about that.  Like, what was it like to get a gig directing one of these?  Like, your first meeting you would get an envelope with an insane plot outline and a lits of characters, most of whom would be in only one scene, and then a note that says:

 

"This week's color scheme: Turqoise.  Congratulations."

 

But you would also get a gian budget and access to a huge pool of fantastic actors to play tiny roles.  Just in the episode I'm watching right now, Darla/Rita, and the fat kid from HEAVEN HELP US show up for just like, one scene each amid a cast of at least 20-25 characters who drift through the story before you finally get to one they arrest, who in this case turned out to be some kid we saw in one scene earlier who it turns out is secretly the brother of the victim, who was a sex-offender, who was somehow responsible for the miscarriage of Julie Benz who thinks she was the sister of...you know what, fuck it.  Horatio is staring out a yellow window into the day or night or whatever...only not...he's staring out a window that leads to a yellow light that is maybe in a different room?  but it's not daylight.  It's the light of truth.  This week's was yellow.  Next week's might be..orange? or lavender? or ocean blue.  Some day, I'm going to parse all the colors and correlate them with types of crimes or general themes.  I'm going to crack the code of the goddamned show and it's going to fix a lot of things for me.

 

If I'm ever going to spring for a complete series on Blu-Ray...I think this is it.

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I've begun re-watching The Shield and it's as awesome as I remember, if not more so. I'm 4 episodes in on season 1, but there was so much I forgot. The very first episode sets up a ton of stuff that is consistently referenced or called back to throughout the series, like Vic's affinity for helping children while being a monster to adults, the Dutch/Vic rivalry, Claudette believing that Vic is a necessary evil, Aceveda being a sniveling little shit, Shane having a little too much conscience for the Strike Team, and Lem being the heart and soul of the team.

 

The interrogation scenes are nothing short of amazing and nothing on TV has come close to touching the dynamic of Claudette and Dutch working together.

 

It's also laughably dated at times. In the first episode a guy has a van full of stolen VCRs from Circuit City.

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Almost Human was very Saw-like this week. Best thing I can say about this show is that every episode of this show feels so different: One week it's robot sex slaves, then cyber terrorists, then its Die Hard. Oh, and a subplot about robot human rights.

 

There's a lot of crap going on in the future, clearly. 

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I've begun re-watching The Shield and it's as awesome as I remember, if not more so. I'm 4 episodes in on season 1, but there was so much I forgot. The very first episode sets up a ton of stuff that is consistently referenced or called back to throughout the series, like Vic's affinity for helping children while being a monster to adults, the Dutch/Vic rivalry, Claudette believing that Vic is a necessary evil, Aceveda being a sniveling little shit, Shane having a little too much conscience for the Strike Team, and Lem being the heart and soul of the team.

 

I love the show, but that third episode where they're keeping the basketball player in the hotel room may be the single worst episode in the entire series.

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Since CSI has come up, can someone verify a memory I have. It was an early episode, probably of the Vegas one. There's a dead chick on the autopsy table, and they mention that they can ID her based on her breast implants. Or some thing like that. It involved boobs anyway, because my memory is of the camera swooshing inside her body through her nipple. This was all pre-Janet Jackson of course, and the episode had a nudity warning at the beginning. I can't imagine the episode/scene gets re-shown in reruns. But what I want to know is did this actually happen?

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Since CSI has come up, can someone verify a memory I have. It was an early episode, probably of the Vegas one. There's a dead chick on the autopsy table, and they mention that they can ID her based on her breast implants. Or some thing like that. It involved boobs anyway, because my memory is of the camera swooshing inside her body through her nipple. This was all pre-Janet Jackson of course, and the episode had a nudity warning at the beginning. I can't imagine the episode/scene gets re-shown in reruns. But what I want to know is did this actually happen?

I watch a bunch of junky true crime shows (the missus likes em) and there are srual numbers on boob implants.

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The Following is coming back. I guess I'll give it a go, but I really hope they've tried to improve the writing.

 

I don't think this show has ever been helped by airing in (roughly) the same time period as Hannibal. You compare them and the gap in quality is astonishing.

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I watched Autopsy: Michael Jackson's Last Hours. Pretty trashy documentary (of course) and they really didn't have to show the pictures of him dead on the slab every five minutes .

 

Pretty frightening just what a state he was in. Guy would have surely been dead within a few years anyway.

 

.It did make me have some sympathy for Conrad Murray too. He should have been more responsible, absolutely, but his client was a rampant drug addict, long before they met. Jackson also lied to him about what he was taking and when (he had several other doctors.) Murray seems like a victim of circumstance as much as anything. He really should have gotten himself out of there instead of feebly trying to talk Jackson out of taking more and more pills.

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The Following is coming back. I guess I'll give it a go, but I really hope they've tried to improve the writing.

 

I don't think this show has ever been helped by airing in (roughly) the same time period as Hannibal. You compare them and the gap in quality is astonishing.

I was looking around the other day, trying to find out when the HANNIBAL blu-ray set was coming out, only to discover that it came out in September. They do such a terrible job of promoting this show. I've yet to see one ad for the new season, and it's only a month and a half away.

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No, stop, you're being ignorant.

 

Come on, do you really believe the narrative that Murray was forcing drugs on the guy?

 

I remember reading a Marilyn Monroe biography, and one the doctors (who got a fair share of the blame for her death) pointed out what a difficult position he was in: She'd ask for drugs. He'd tell her no, then find out later she'd gotten them from elsewhere. In the end he just decided to give her the drugs she wanted because at least then he'd know for sure what she was taking and that she wasn't getting massive amounts from someone else. Yeah, she was paying him but he was genuinely trying to help her.

 

No doctor can truly help a rich drug addict who doesn't want to quit and has an endless supply of resources to get their fixes.

 

Murray's mistake was not getting the fuck out of there when it was obvious Jackson was intent on sending himself into oblivion.

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The Following is coming back. I guess I'll give it a go, but I really hope they've tried to improve the writing.

 

I don't think this show has ever been helped by airing in (roughly) the same time period as Hannibal. You compare them and the gap in quality is astonishing.

I was looking around the other day, trying to find out when the HANNIBAL blu-ray set was coming out, only to discover that it came out in September. They do such a terrible job of promoting this show. I've yet to see one ad for the new season, and it's only a month and a half away.

 

 

It's on Friday's too. Maybe the idea is to take the pressure off (anything above a 1.0 on a Friday night would probably get it renewed)but considering the garbage NBC put on during the rest of the week, you'd think they'd want to show off their best programme. I mean, Sean Saves the World and The Michael J. Fox show are getting 0.8s and 0.9s on Thurdsay. Hannibal could do better than that, especially since it has had good word of mouth. 

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