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FEBRUARY 2015 TV THREAD


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Episode 2 of The Slap. I'm three minutes in. The evil rich guy has forced his minion who is stealing from him to work for free -- aka, enslavement. He also referred to the parents of the child he slapped as "Brooklyn boozebags." A+.

 

Evil Rich Guy should be punished for being an asshole.

 

But Evil Rich Guy being, well, an evil rich guy, doesn't change the fact that Hugo's mom is the shittiest mom in the world. (And, yes, I include Casey Anthony in that.)

 

This is like Freddy vs. Jason. Everyone is unspeakably awful.

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Y'all I am in love with Backstrom.  I just love how it's a "procedural" show, but it's really not.  They have the case of the week to involve the other characters, but it really is all about peeling back layers on the Backstrom character every week to discover more and more about why he is the way he is.  Show has exceeded my expectations so far.

 

Yeah, I'm really liking the show so far too.  Just watched the this week's ep a bit ago.  Backstrom's a fascinating mess of a person, and they've done a nice job defining the supporting cast.  Been surprised by some of the plotting.  Really thought the "hooded man" stuff would be a recurring theme and get drug out for awhile.

 

I'm already looking forward to seeing Backstrom Sr. make his inevitable appearance.

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Episode 2 of The Slap. I'm three minutes in. The evil rich guy has forced his minion who is stealing from him to work for free -- aka, enslavement. He also referred to the parents of the child he slapped as "Brooklyn boozebags." A+.

 

Evil Rich Guy should be punished for being an asshole.

 

But Evil Rich Guy being, well, an evil rich guy, doesn't change the fact that Hugo's mom is the shittiest mom in the world. (And, yes, I include Casey Anthony in that.)

 

This is like Freddy vs. Jason. Everyone is unspeakably awful.

 

I don't see one likable main character on this show at all. You've got:

 

Hector (who is lusting over his kids' babysitter)

Aisha (who made a gigantic scene at her husband's 40th birthday party because she has issues with his parents)

Connie (who is trying to seduce a married man)

Hugo's 2 hippy parents who still breast feed their kid who is now at least 5 or 6 and never discipline him despite his horrible behavior

Harry (who struck a child, enslaved an employee and terrorizes his own family with his bullying)

The grandmother whose name I forget, who doesn't seem to notice or just flat doesn't give a shit about her domineering behavior

and Brian Cox (I forget his name too) who allows all of this to happen when he could probably put an end to a lot of their behavior just by stepping in and putting his foot down

 

So far 2 episodes in it's doing very little to hold my interest. I'll give it another week or two to turn it around but I'm not holding my breath.

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I'm all-in on The Slap because I love awful television. I stuck through the entire first season of the completely ridiculous Tyrant. The shows are such interesting comparisons in things that, on paper, sound interesting but are completely awful.

TYRANT: It's a disaster of creative choices, with a clearly Caucasian man portraying the son of a Middle Eastern despot and awful acting and writing. It also has these "light" moments like the zany sister-in-law moving to a country on the brink of a civil war because she needs a "fresh start" after a failed relationship that are completely misplaced.

THE SLAP: It has a pretty great cast who are given the absolute worst -- WORST -- material. Voice-overs in general annoy me (show, don't tell) and these are the worst voice-overs ever written. The characters are completely unlikable in every way imaginable and they're making such a big deal about something that's not particularly all that important. On my old block, one guy spanked his next-door-neighbor's kid after he got caught egging their house. The kid's dad yelled at the guy and threatened to beat his ass. Tempers cooled and they never spoke again for the next 45 years despite living 15 feet apart from each other. (Not exaggerating.)

I mean, the dude shouldn't have slapped a child. But all any sane people would do is yell at that guy for a while, call him a creep, and then move on with their lives and never see him again. It's your friend's cousin who lives in the suburbs somewhere. The people on my block could see each other from their kitchen windows. Just don't go to that dude's birthday party next year.

It's SUCH a serious show about something anyone could just avoid.

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I liked Bosch, ran through the whole first season in about 24 hours. Yeah, it was a typical cop drama, but there weren't all that many ridiculous situations unfolding (compared to what you typically see in shows like this), the characters seemed pretty realistic, and it was nice and dark without being completely depressing

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God dammit. So...Togetherness is really, really good.

 

It's also really fucking painful to watch. At times, I feel like Jay and Mark Duplass based the moments with Mark and Melanie Lynskey off of my failed marriage, and that's when I realized that this is a way too accurate portrayal of a marriage that's falling apart. The husband is really sweet, frustrated with how things are going and confused why his wife is becoming distant. The wife hasn't realized it yet, but she's not in love with the husband and she just keeps growing farther away from the husband.

 

At this point, I'm just waiting for the moment the wife cheats on the husband and the husband finds out. It's that fucking real.

 

That fucking Christ for all the segments with the friend and Amanda Peet. It's a very interesting juxtaposition with the friend and Amanda Peet and all the hope they have going for them while Mark and Melanie's characters are just falling apart.

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Sleepy Hollow wrapped up season 2 last night.  Anyone stick with it?

 

I stayed caught up on it, but I haven't cared much for it since at least the mid-season break.  The two leads are fun together and have a lot of chemistry, but it didn't seem like the writers knew what to do with the rest of the cast.  None of the supporting characters had much direction this season, except for maybe the Horsemen and Katrina, and a lot of their character development felt like mistakes to me (esp. giving the Horseman back a head and letting him talk).  Nothing they have done with Katrina worked, so it may be best they leave things where they ended up last night.  Though it annoys me that

 

Katrina's death was as much as accident as anything. She kinda fell into the knife. The scene would probably resonate more if Abraham had been forced to make a more conscious choice.

 

I won't be sad if the show doesn't come back.  It seems to have no direction and no a lot of understanding of what made season 1 work.  Actually, I'm assuming it won't be back.  Fox seemed to stop promoting it back around December, other than to mention in Gotham promos that there would be a new episode after Gotham.

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I was literally just coming in here to talk about SLEEPY HOLLOW. My feelings are pretty much the same. Back half of the season was an absolute trainwreck. Killing off Katrina seemed like an attempt to course correct, but her heel turn was too abrupt, and ultimately it was all too little, too late to save the season.

And I don't think I've ever seen a show that appeared more disinterested in whether it continued or not than this. Abbie at the end was just like, "Yeah, we won, but, um, I think I heard something about another, like, super bad thing that's coming, so, um, we should probably be ready for that, I guess." Like, the writers were too busy updating their resumes to bother actually coming up with a hook for the 3rd season.

I feel like if the show comes back, we'll get more of the back half of this season than a return to the gonzo 1st season. The Fox execs at press tour said they wanted to make the show more procedural than serialized if it came back. I'm not sure I need to see that show.

As good as Mison and Beharie are together, the bizarre specificty of the show's mythology is what it made it fun to watch. I want bugnuts stuff like Hologram Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin's Franklinstein monster (and Ben Franklin getting beheaded!), not more generic supernatural plots about murderous ghosts in paintings.

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My girlfriend and I haven't made it to midseason yet, but we're finding it hard to keep watching. It's so formulaic and in a bad way. The first season was bananas and things kept getting more fucked up. Then came this season and it's one episode after another featuring some weird artifact and ghoul, some way of bringing about Moloch that gets foiled by the end of the episode. Hawley was a poor addition. Giving the headless horseman his head back was an even worse addition. Like, I don't want to see demons pining for lost loves. Every episode starts practically the same way too, with Crane having a fish out of water type experience. It's so damn lazy. This isn't Heroes season 2 level of bad, but it's not good either. It's all thumbs squarely in the middle and I find myself not caring at all about the characters.

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Didn't season 1 of Sleepy Hollow establish that the war with Moloch and the horsemen was supposed to last seven years?

 

I hadn't heard that Fox execs want it to become more of a procedural, but I'm not surprised.  Kinda wondered if network interference wasn't the reason Moloch was seemingly neutralized midway through the season.  Show became a lot more generic after that.  Yeah, I'm probably not too interested in a monster of the week version of the show either.

 

Poor Orlando Jones.  His character should have been interesting.  Instead, he ended up doing Blade cosplay.  I couldn't help but laugh at him in his black spandex with the sword strapped across his back.  Probably not the reaction the producers were going for.

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I'm pretty much in agreement with all of you. The last half of this season just brought things down so much. I think they fucked it up with defeating Moloch so early. As far as what happened on last night's finale, I don't think it was an attempt at course correction. It felt like from early on that it was likely the plan with said character, the execution was just incredibly poor.

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