The Winter 2013 Television Thread

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Don't forget Downton Abbey!

Watched the first fifteen minutes of the first episode of Transporter.

Guys, Transporter is about two things. Jason Statham punching dudes and awesome car chases.

Obviously there was going to be no Jason Statham, given that it's a TV show and he's got a whole career of B-movies ahead of him. But they couldn't even do a very good car chase. I'm assuming they didn't want to have big stunts or catastrophic crashes cos it's a z-level cable TV series, with no budget, but there've been plenty of shows out there with good car chases, so I don't know what the deal was. And if you really, really can't do awesome car chases then maybe, just maybe, you shouldn't be doing a Transporter show.

Bones renewed for the 9th season.

Premiere date set for weird Adult Swim thing that Fox will be doing on Saturday instead of.....well, whatever the hell they've been doing since Mad TV went away. It's launching on July 27th with Axe Cop, something from Starburns (Dino Stamatopoulis - other shows from him include Moral Orel and Mary Shelly's Frankenhole), and a couple of other things.

Les terriers sont mes types favourites
Jolies, charment, pas de problem a maintenir
Ils donnest du joie
Quand tu es 'blue'
Les terriers sont a pier pres vingt livres

I'm pretty excited for The Americans but I keep thinking of when they discovered all those forgotten Soviet spies who had just been chilling in suburbia as sleeper agents, not that long ago. One of them was great at growing hydrangeas. Seems sort of along those lines.

I'm excited about Continuum. Every time there's a series like this out of Canada, you get to play the "Blank is the Canadian Blank" game. For instance, the werewolf on Lost Girl is the Canadian Chris Martin.

I want to watch this because Scott Thompson is in it, but it's a shame they didn't case him as Lecter and Mikkelson as the copper.

Is that some kind of French Limerick (assuming its supposed to rhyme)? A Fremerick?

Ok, the college football bowls are over and there's new stuff everywhere tonight (Tue, 1/8):

FOX: full comedy lineup, including new New Girl (woot)
ABC: new Happy Endings and Apt 23
NBC: that Betty White show, new Go On and New Normal
CBS: all new NCIS/LA/Vegas
TBS: Cougar Town season premiere
FX: Justified season premiere

Good stuff. I need Directv to give me that new Genie box that records 5 shows at once.

Le Meric

Deception - Sigh. In the first ten minutes, I had the following reactions:

1. Man, this looks like an episode of Law and Order.
2. An overdose? Of what? Punches to the face? Because that dead lady sure looked like somebody bounced her head off a curb.
3. "Come in - I just got dinner" she said at what sure the hell looked like four in the afternoon, while wearing what similarly sure the hell looked like half a robe and jeans, which is bizarre under any circumstances.

On the one hand, I want to praise NBC for its diversity in this case (the waspy patrician family is white, but, you know, they're a waspy patrician family - everybody else is distributed a little bit better across the rainbow), but it does feel just a teensy bit intentional on their part. Really, though, I think that the whole episode could best be summed up with this exchange:

Older Waspy Brother: Is it really a good idea to let a stranger stay in the house with us right now?
Younger Waspy Brother: Remember this the next time you're lying awake at night wondering why nobody likes you.
Older Waspy Brother: I don't lie awake at night because I don't do cocaine.

I might be taking some liberties with the first two lines, because I have no intention of backing up and watching this twice to get every word right, but that last line is verbatim. That's what you're dealing with here. It's lazy. Almost offensively so. This feels like a cash-in, trying to exploit the apparent enthusiasm the public had for stories about rich people cocking up their lives as of the ratings last year for Revenge (not so much this year), written entirely with fucking magnetic refrigerator poetry. Seriously. Because who fucking asks, "What's that pill you're eating?" You don't eat pills unless you're that nightmare version of the Cookie Monster I see when I eat too many chili dogs. This entire show is a ruptured colostomy bag of unnecessary adjectives, awkward arrangement, and complicated adverbial phrases all put in by a bunch of writers too scared that the cast of mostly experienced and entirely capable performers will fail to sell their transparent family drama to leave anything to chance. In the same week where one of the candidates for best dialogue on television returns, this monstrosity came lurching out of the cesspit of television mediocrity to spend forty two minutes of my life saying a story at me like your drunk uncle Frank trying to introduce you to his latest girlfriend Candy at three in the morning after you catch her shitting on your couch. That kind of sticks out. I mean, christ - if you're going to do this, do it in the fall when nothing famous for how written it is is happening. It's not the worst thing I've ever seen on television, but it might be the laziest, and I think maybe that irritates me more than anything else. These actors and this premise had the chance to at least be passable with even the slightest bit of effort or the first beginning of confidence in the audience. Instead, you've got the audiovisual equivalent of corn starch - bland, flavorless, calorific, and thick as mud. I can't recommend in good conscience that anybody deliberately spend time watching this when there are thousands of hours of great movies and games and other television shows you could be consuming instead.

And for a police, the lead sure runs like a damn spaz.

Over the holidays, thanks to the magic of free VoD, I had access to the two NBC pilots: 1600 Penn and Deception.

1600 Penn: It was nothing special, but not terrible, either. There's potential, I guess, but the pilot was just a B- at best. I don't think anyone will feel cheated if they watch it out of curiosity.

Deception: I realize there's no rational explanation for this, but I didn't get 60 seconds into this before I turned it off. I don't think I could even tell you why. Maybe something about the look and the vibe just made me feel like I wanted to be watching / doing something else and I just turned it off. Brian's recap makes me feel like I saved myself 41 minutes.

I wish I had better quality video of this outro tag from last night's premiere. *

THIS SEASON, ON COUGAR TOWN

*preferably one that didn't spoil part of the gag in the headline, and any idea how to embed it properly

Banshee is awesome so far. Alan Ball has taken all the good stuff with him from True Blood, including a version of Lafayette that's pretty great. It's Cinemax, so there's even more gratuitous sexcapades, but the rest of it is awesome.

A++ would watch again.

Edit: holy shit this show is fucked up but in an awesome way.

This. Also, bottle of steak sauce in the mouth during that bar fight. Fucking brutal!

Okay. 1600 Penn. The cast includes Bill Pullman (president, again), Jenna Elfman (Dharma), Josh Gad (Book of Mormon), Martha MacIsaac (Cera's love interest in Superbad), and a mix of other people whom you probably won't recognize, including a couple of child actors.

The Bad: There might be a lot of it to list out, but check the summary. Josh Gad is playing too big - gigantic surprise for a guy who's spent the past couple of years in musical theater, I know. Martha MacIsaac looks just a touch young for her alleged age - I suspect that could be corrected with some hair and wardrobe (some styling, not so straight, and if you can avoid shooting her feet you need to put her in some goddamn stripper shoes or something so that she's not a full eighteen feet shorter than literally every other human being on the screen). The youngest child actor is a small boy basically doing the whole smart ten year old thing, which he does better than his female counterpart for most of the two episodes I've seen, but it's still kind of grating. The other child actor is a young woman doing....well, that same nebulous middle sister role you've seen before, and she's a little more awkward in her part and she'll need some time to get into it. Possibly worst of all, it's single-camera, which I'm fine with, but NBC is not necessarily so big on, so it'll have a little bit of a steeper hill to climb.

The Good: Well, Bill Pullman's kind of done this shit before, so he's certainly not a liability, though he could stand to loosen up a little bit. Jenna Elfman is probably the best of the leads, which counts as something coming from me, because it took exactly one and a half episodes of Dharma and Greg before I wanted to choke her until she just stopped being at me. The supporting cast all do a capable job as they are required. All of that leaves me....

Summary: Cautiously optimistic. There haven't been a whole lot of comedies that worked right out the gate, and particularly not on broadcast. Comedies need some time to find themselves, and there's enough parts of this that work that I think they can do it. That doesn't necessarily mean that the show will - a lot will depend on whether the creatives can rein in Gad and make him the supporting player he needs to be instead of the big, loud, stumbling doofus he wants to be. It's also nice that the second episode was much better than the first, and didn't obsess over putting Gad in the absolute center of everything. As for whether it'll succeed or not, I have no fucking clue. There's enough broad comedy coming out of Josh to fit with the paradigm and for these mythical subomegulloid viewers that everybody seems to think CBS wins by default because watching Ducky make jokes about his saggy balls or whatever it is that happens on that show is all they want out of life, but that's also easily my least favorite part of the show.

Edit: And one more thing. This could turn out to be either very good or extremely bad, depending on how it gets played, but the 13 year old middle daughter? Lesbian. At least, as of the pilot she is (it doesn't come up in the second episode). I'm legitimately curious to see how that works out for them.

Please explain.

Google search (yes, sometimes these are required for a Brian Seiler post) turned up nothing.

I believe I thieved it from a Simpsons episode, but I can't remember which. The context in which it was used was that of a person who thought himself to be exceptionally intelligent describing his perceived inferiors in aggregate.

1600 Penn , has been really good so far. I really like the casting choices, and its comedy has been pretty funny.

So I caught the premiere of Continuum on SyFy last night. This is a Canadian television series airing on Showcase (in Canada) that SyFy has picked up. I don't beleive they invested in season one at all (it was all Showcase), but they may be funding at least part of season two which will be airing in Canada long before it comes to Syfy.

In any event, the first episode of season one was decent, and the teaser for episodes to come made it look as if it could pan out into something fairly good. Rachel Nichols is pretty good as Kiera, the lead character, a police officer from 2077. The plot is basically that Kiera is present at the execution of 8 convicted terrorists in 2077, and the prisoners spring an escape attempt that involves creating a portal through which they are supposed to travel back in time 6 years (to before they were caught so they can get a do-over), but end up 66 years in the past instead. Kiera is caught in the portal and brought back with them, and since she's the only person who understands how dangerous the escaped prisoners are she sets out to apprehend them all herself. Along the way she gets help from a local police detective (she poses as an officer from a task force hunting the fugitives) and from a teen who is a computer expert and inventor (and who turns out to be the future inventor of the tech from 2077 that Kiera is implanted with that helps her track down the fugitives). The actors are mostly decent and Nichols is attractive and nice to watch on screen as well. The effects are sparse but OK, it's likely they will improve as the series budget allows, and the plot has some holes, but is mostly solid. It will take several more episodes to really pass judgement, but at least the pilot was interesting and different enough to catch my interest, and even my wife enjoyed it, and she's not much for time travel sc-fi plots.

Continuum was a Lost Girl type of order - the first season was completely produced and SyFy bought the rights to air in the United States and decided to label it "original programming," despite the fact that it was obviously not originally theirs and entirely imported. Similarly, Continuum is being primarily ordered by Showcase. I don't believe that any money from SyFy will be directly factored into the budget for the season that I believe they're producing right now.

Man is SyFy going to be screwed when Defiance fails. I mean, I hope the show is fine, but the fact that it's tied into an MMO does not bode well, and I can't find anything else on their scripted development slate.

Yeah I like this show.

Like I said before, Continuum gets pretty good and gets good use out of its characters. Just ... there's a video game episode in the back half. Endure.

(Also, don't expect the effects to get much better.)

(Also, it took me like eight episodes before I realized that the show isn't set in Canada.)

Not necessarily: they may do with it what they did with Lost Girl, run all the episodes through to catch up, and then air the new episodes shortly after they air on Showcase.

The one drawback is since they're airing it at 8, they're bleeping the swears. Seems like a pretty decent show so far, I like the grey area with the "bad guys." And hello, kid from Jericho!

Video game episode isn't that bad. Mostly because there are parts of the episode that aren't about video games.

I can't figure out who thought it was a good idea to tie a television show to an online game in an era where so many online games don't even last beyond season two of a TV show. It's my understanding that they are going to tie events in the MMO to events in the series, so that when we see something change on TV, it changes in the game as well. Cool concept, but will it pan out or will it just seem forced? I'm really curious about the show, especially since it has a pedigree of people involved with BSG and Farscape, but I could care less about the MMO.

Hey, let's all get together and pitch some studios an idea for a Planetside 2 TV series! The main characters could spend every episode dying over and over again in increasingly frustrating ways, with the climax of every episode being when they finally pull some armor or a a liberator and exact some sweet sweet revenge...

I thoroughly enjoyed all of Continuum. The development of Kiera and the terrorists was done exceptionally well using flashbacks from the future. I also think it's a show that if the Occupy movement never happened, wouldn't exist.

Actually, they're going to go both ways -- events in the MMO can change the series, and events in the series will change the MMO. It's a bizarre concept, and I have no idea if Trion/Syfy can make it work, but we'll see.

Also, did anyone watch Hawaii Five-O last night? They had a choose-your-own-adventure episode where you could tweet which person (out of 3) you wanted to be the killer and they tallied all the tweets during the final commercial break to determine the ending. It's especially weird because one part of the country got one ending, and another part of the country chose a different person and got a different ending. So there are actually 2 episodes out there.

Aum shiva Borgnine necroso Carradine Waldenbooks........

Resurrection successful. The Killing will be back. The mayor of The Killing will not, nor will either of the parents.

Thumbs up for Banshee. It's not boring.

Less gratuitous sex scenes, more story, please. I'll watch porn if I want to watch porn.

Wait, it isn't? I watched the entire first season thinking it was set in Vancouver (present and at times future).

Alan Ball + Cinemax. When your T3 time is ten seconds, you just need to reconcile yourself to the fact that it's going to be in there.

Yeah, I know. It's just an idle wish!

Also why was I not informed that Bunheads was back?

BUNHEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAADDDDDDDDDDSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!

Just be careful with Bunheads. Things aren't looking great for renewal. They still had a panel at TCAs, which is a good sign, but it's not performing particularly well. For what it's worth, I'm strongly considering throwing it on my PVR list, but none of my numbers count, so that's not worth a whole lot.

And yet The Newsroom is allowed to continue its reign of terror unabated. What a world.

Watching Banshee.

Impressed that a show manages to have musical cues less subtle than Being Human, which I would liken to a dick in the earhole subtletywise.