2014 RANDOM TV THOUGHTS

[Randy]

Is she allowed to take a different taxi if he's on the other side of town and she needs to get some place quickly?

[Spritenaut 32]

You'd think, but.... the second episode had a scene where she's walking around Coney Island, apprehends a thief...  and then stands on the street with the perp while she waits for her cabbie to drive across town to pick her up and take her suspect to the precinct (he showed up with a fare in the back seat).

[Curt McGirt]

Watched the Ray Donovan marathon in order to catch the last couple eps that I either missed or forgot. I really like this show. Liev Schreiber is awesome in his role as brutal fixer, Jon Voight has a nice turn as an unrepentant scumbag father, Paula Malcombson beats both of them for cold-blooded hostility (which is well-deserved) and the major villain-du-jour was James Woods who was loveably scene-chewing. Everything is really complicated and you don't think they'd get away with a lot of this shit but I dig it. Next season we get Wendell Pierce and Hank Azaria! Of course Stephen Bauer is the sidekick, you just can't beat that.

[Casey]

Maron is an awesome fucking TV show. Am I alone in thinking this?

[Craig H]

I've started watching Sherlock as well and am two episodes into the first season. I really like it. It's a really fun show. I thought that the 90 minute long episodes would be too much to handle, but they're great as these little mini-movies. Can't wait to dive into the show some more.

[CSC]

So I was bummed when I got home from work yesterday when my girlfriend had decided that Scandal was going to be the next show we worked our way through on Netflix (because I'm conditioned to run from a Shonda Rhimes show like a sticky bomb just landed at my feet), but holy crap this is actually really good.  The first season started off kind of slow but I'm half way through the 2nd season and it feels like it's really hit its stride at this point.

 

Plus, anything that brings more former Sports Night actors back into my life is ok by me.

[Chaos]

I still need to watch the BBC's Sherlock, but I do highly recommend CBS'S Elementary for those of you that are just now starting that show.

 

The first few episodes are nothing great, but the series really finds its groove around the middle of the first season.

[Reed]

Elementary is largely a better show. Lucy Liu has improved so much as an actress it's astounding. 

[J.T.]

Why is Murder in the First fucking with me?  Blunt is such a dick that there is no way he could be the killer.

 

BUT WHAT IF HE IS~?

[Spritenaut 32]

I'm assuming Blunt isn't the killer simply because he's an unlikable douche & the show has gone to great lengths to make him the obvious suspect.

 

SWERVE!!!!

 

I'll agree with people who feel this is a reworked version of Murder One, focusing more on the cops.  Murder One had a better cast, though, even with replacing Benzali with Anthony LaPaglia.  So far, the subplots involving Kathleen Robertson's and Taye Digg's characters have been death (the dead wife, the blind dates, the abusive boyfriend shooting).

[Lawful Metal]

I also love his general indignation/shock if a defense attorney files a motion to suppress evidence or something along those lines. Isn't that what defense attorneys are supposed to do, dude? Fight for their client to beat whatever charges they're hit with? Why does this draw anger and/or surprise?

Because it's true in real life.

[Newb82]

I gave MURDER IN THE FIRST a shot, but the sub plots are so inane and the show is so obviously building to a swerve in the finale that will render the Blunt stuff meaningless, I'm settling for reading the episode recaps on wikipedia.

[Travis Sheldon]

Just hours remain until the debut of Extant. I'll be glad when it's over so I don't have to watch any more commercials hyping the damn thing. #CBSoverkill

[Stennick]

I'm not sure if its going to even be any good. Normally I would be all for alien impregnation and robot sons for astronaut women but I'll be shocked if its even watchable. 

[piranesi]

Finally waded back into SHERLOCK.  Season 3, Episode 1.

I kind of liked it.  But I get the hatred.  It really makes you confront the fact that the show isn't what maybe it started as, or what everyone hoped it would be.  But I don't think it was that out of line with season 2 in terms of goofiness and cartoonishness.

The adjustment I at least had to make was to give up on the idea that it was in any way going to continue to be a "mystery" show (which it was for the first season).  But is instead a kind of superhero show based not on the deductive power of a great detective, but the superbrains of two proto X-Men who happen to be brothers.

At that point the humour stops being annoying (for me at least it was just like the running jokes that start to pepper a series like LETHAL WEAPON by the time you get the equivalent of six features into it) and the mawkish plays on emotion and constant "applaud now, please" moments of fanservice and strutting about in slow motion become fun in the same way seeing any old favorite characters pop up to save the day does.  It also excuses the reduction of someone like Donovan to a kind of DC comics insane dithering side-buffoon and the maudlin adoration we are expected to feel over someone like Lestrade just because he's "an old friend."  I can see that stuff insulting the fans of the show, since some of those dithering idiots are clearly meant to be "the internet fans" and, yeah, that seems a little passive aggressive, no?  But, shit, man, Divas gonna' div.

Like, that's a big list of negatives for a mystery show, right?  But they aren't negatives for a superhero show.  There they're just conventions.

[Reed]

Moriarty, and to a lesser extent Irene Adler, brought a genuine sense of danger to the proceedings-- pretty much the only dangerous people in a show that, like you say, is very convention heavy.

 

I think the lack of either of them is why season 3 suffers so much, in addition to some not great writing.

[RonL21]

Just watched Pawnography on History.  It's exactly like Win Ben Stein's Money except with the Pawn Stars guys giving away an item if you can beat Rick in the 10 question trivia at the end.  

[ultimoDANK]

So Gang Related on Fox, that can't possibly be good right?

[caley]

Catching up on Season 2 of 'Homefront' now that its on Netflix and I have a question.  Why does Jessica call her husband 'Brody' when Brody is his (and her) last name.  Shouldn't she call him Nick, Nicky or Nicholas?  I just noticed this last night in Episode 5, but she always calls him "Brody": "Brody where have you been?" "Brody call me back."  What's going on here?

[odessasteps]

I have met a lot of army wives who adapted to the whole surname thing.

[piranesi]

Aaaaaand all caught up on SHERLOCK:

 

I can see the frustration with season 3.  When you only have three episodes, spending two of them on gimmicky, flashbacky, cutesy character worship episodes is frustrating.  I didn't actually mind the first two episodes until after the wedding episode ended and I realized "That's it...for the season...just two comedy jaunts and the finale?"

 

I felt cheated.  But only for this space of time it took Netflix to circle up the next episode.  It would have been worse, I'm sure, if I was watching in regular time.

But the final episode was so much fun.  The transformation from mystery to giddy droll action show is pretty well complete by the end of season three.  The last episode is just straight-up supervillain vs. Rainman-Bond.  No mysteries or deductions, just clever scheming and absurd twists.  

Utterly mindless (the "solutions" to the mysteries get worse it seems by the hour...and the finale didn't even have one), but such a larf.

There is still a part of me that laments what the show used to be, because I loved the first two episodes and whatever that was..is gone.  It's gotten dangerously close to the Robert Downey version with lots of action and absurd physical feats and GoPro slomo bits of dust flying and capes whirling.  But I like it a lot more than those movies.  It's just modest enough and I find myself impressed with the making of it all...doing so much visually with a probably rather modest budget.  It feels cleverer to do those things in this format.  So I find myself rooting for it and marking out when it goes big, which would usually provoke the opposite reaction in me.  I even forgive the endless bits of Michael Bey-esque (or if I'm going to try to save it, we could call them "John Woo-esque"?) emotional manipulation that strives to provoke a marking out moment almost ever few minutes at this point.  When you are "flashing back" you main character into child form just to pull at hearstrings when he's in trouble...you are a fucking sleazy charlatan of a writer....fucker.

 

Or, you are catering to an audience of addicts.  As the theme of addiction comes more to the fore, the show itself has that pattern.  It keeps getting you high, but next time you need stronger stuff...and eventually it's just a swirling concoction of chemicals and endorphins...so then you have to start bringing people back from the dead...and turning regular characters into assassins...and flashing forward within the flashbacks within the dream sequence within the narration...oh, and toppling governments...and having death spasms...and then what?  Something even bigger...Come on, I neeeed it!!!

 

And yet, I forgive.  It's so much more shallow than I was thinking it would be, and shallower even than it began being.  But goddammit it's shiny and sparkly and clever (and sometimes stupid, but fashionably so).  Turns out I'm a slut for how wildly it veers between stylishness and camp.  I feel dirty knowing how I'm being pulled in with such cheap tricks and costume jewelry...and how much I can't wait to come back for more sparkly baubles.

 

[piranesi]

aaand then we started HANNIBAL.  There were some big issues with the pilot that I assume are solved by every other episode not being the pilot.  

They just jumped through the character exposition so fast to get to Wil/Hannibal scenes that it kind of "exposed the business" (the business being the easy tropes of the disturbed/savant detective genre...man did they just dump them out like a kid's magic set).  The introduction of Wil in the mythical-but-ubiquitous "psychotic crimonology" class that always seems to be going on in every lecture hall of "Movie University" leaned so heavily on "they know that we know that everyone already knows what this guy is like because we've seen this so many times already" that it felt a bit shallow.

Wil, Jack, Caroline Dhavernas were all so formula that until Hannibal showed up I was pretty worried.

But the ending was bold and troubling and brilliant.  And Hannibal's casual instigation of bloody mayhem just to watch was also kind of a kick in the stomach.  And I'm guessing that once the unfortunate business of "trope intro 101" is out of the way, we can start getting on with the business of inventing something unique.

I have every faith in the world in Bryan Fuller.  And I already quite like how writerly the show is.  Hannibal (and Dhavernas) had some great lines that might seem hacky at first, but are really pretty great:

"I can empathize with anybody. It’s less to do with a personality disorder than an active imagination."

"Fear is the price of imagination."   I could see eyes rolling at that, but there's a reason that so many writers are paranoid, hypochondriac, OCD, or whatever.  Real imagination almost necessitates it.  You can't have a mind that so capable of visualizing the world without becoming pretty terrified of it.  There's already some nice projection going on between Bryan Fuller and his characters that I find kind of fascinating.

Hannibal brought that up too.  "Perception’s a tool that’s pointed on both ends."
 You have no protection from the things in your mind.  And the further your mind is capable of reaching, the bigger the monsters lurking inside.
 "No forts in the bone arena of your skull."
 
  Again, all too rushed.  But it's a perspective that I think has more potential for thinking through and making me uncomfortable than Rustin Cohle's faux bong-based babbled bursts of pessimistic inspiration.

[EVA]

You'll have to be patient with the next few episodes. Like most young shows, there's an awkward period where they're trying to figure out how this concept works episodic TV show, and some of the episodes work, and some of them are Molly Shannon's Murder Family.

The first season of HANNIBAL reminds me a lot of the first season of JUSTIFIED. Great pilots (I liked it a lot), followed by a rough transitional period, then a killer homestretch after they get everything figured out that sets the table for an incredible 2nd season. Which both also delivered.

I really think the HANNIBAL pilot is fucking master class in writing a pilot, though. Fuller does burn through character introductions and whatnot in the early going, and he does lean heavily on easy signifiers to help accomplish that, but when you're selling a network on a show called HANNIBAL, you kinda have to deliver them Hannibal sooner rather than later. I bet Fuller fought a war with executives to keep Hannibal offscreen until the 3rd act. The snippet of him preparing a meal just before the 3rd break reeked of a studio note. "People are going to think they're watching the wrong show if you don't get Hannibal on there sooner!"

So the first two acts were kinda the price of doing business. That said, even in a rush, Fuller communicates all the information you need clearly and efficiently. It would have been so easy to fuck it up, but he lands everything.

[piranesi]

You are probably right about that.  H probably toyed with the idea of putting Hannibal in a cold-open/prolog just to satisfy them.  But the way he did it, having to rush Hannibal into the episode worked well in one way: it ended up being like a side-by-side of these two completely similar but also completely different characters.

 

We get a stretch of Wil...frantic, terrified, barely functioning...and then cut to this perfect controlled and (seemingly) content creature who is his thematic partner/compliment.

 

It was primary colors, yeah.  Big bright swaths of obvious posturing.  But it was a neat moment.

[Bustronaut]

The main problem with Sherlock is that it caters to the same bad habits that Moffat has developed on Doctor Who, so most of the people who are bashing it are likely annoyed Whovians.