The Winter 2013 Television Thread

I cannot disagree more. Didn't even make it to the first commercial break before purging the series recording. Elfman and the oldest daughter were ok, but the main son is trying way too hard and the other kids are typical "precocious, kids acting like tiny adults" American TV kids. And Pullman is about as funny as he is presidential, which is to say that just because we've seen him pretend to be the president before doesn't make it believable, because he was terrible the first time too.

Wait, you watched like 7 minutes, and based your opinion on that ? Its a 30 minute sitcom, and the first episode was "just ok", but I felt the 2nd one really hit its stride and I liked where they are going with the comedy and quirky moments.

O.o

Josh Gad will take some time to deprogram. He made his real bones in Book of Mormon, and you just have to be bigger in the theater than you would go on a television show. Okay - most television shows (maybe AHS would work with something that big, since the entire show is just so loud). Gad is on the EP list, so I'm not sure whether anybody will be able to force him to do what he needs to for the show to really work, but there's a show wherein he works. You might want to revisit in the second season (if it exists) to see if the proper changes are made.

Boom. Alphas done.

I honestly don't comprehend what SyFy is thinking at this point, since they've got one original scripted show coming in and this is two now that they've sent out. I know they're running that Being Human that I'll never watch because the first episode reminded me way too much of Grey's Anatomy, but otherwise....are they really just going to do second run Canadian imports? At least some of the stuff on their development slate looks like it could be interesting, although at this point that's all at least a year out.

Terrible news.

WTF Syfy, that was the best show you had.

Banshee - Okay, I was a little unfair. Actual T3 score is 63 seconds. That's still less than quite a lot of pornography I've watched, but it's larger than 10. The show could stand to be a little bit subtler (you don't need to lead Bates's story about selling his title belt with "In this tough economy," for instance), but it's a pretty common issue. The sheer blinding gratuity of some of the sex in the pilot is a touch offputting, and Alan Ball seems to really enjoy his flamboyant gay male characters, but New Lafayette is distinct enough from Original Lafayette that I'm cool with it, and it's a Cinemax show, so....I guess some of this just comes with the territory. I'm told that in Spartacus it eventually just sort of fades into the background - maybe that'll happen here.

On the whole, it's not a bad show. I do wish that it had done something actually substantive to merit its being on a channel with no discernible standards and practices (three sex scenes, only the most superfluous of which revealed anything, a handful of superficial "fucks," and one extremely odd "cunt" are the only things standing between this show and....well, really the 10:00 slot on CBS), but there's a season yet for the show to demonstrate to me why this is a thing that could only happen on Cinemax. I don't hate it, though I do feel a bit like I'm playing Tracy Jordan's porno game and enjoying it for its gameological merits.

Come onnnnnnnnnnnnn , Alphas was really good. :( Guess this just encourages me to watch more British Tv series, once I catch up on Dr Who, I might dip my toe into Torchwood.

No. Nooooo. Nnnnooo.

It's not The Wire, I'm pretty confident there wasn't something amazing going on that I just couldn't appreciate because I didn't let it develop. If a sitcom doesn't make me laugh and makes me actively uncomfortable watching it, I will turn it off. I have better shows I could be watching. 1600 Penn felt really hacky to me, and wasn't funny, and then I think the first scene with the two young kids in it is what pushed me over the edge. I don't hate all children, but I hate Hollywood children, and those two are pure Hollywood. Pile that onto a show that already has nothing to recommend it and yeah, it doesn't get a full episode. I don't think there's much chance that it suddenly stopped being hackneyed after the first commercial break.

Sure, I bailed on Parks and Rec pretty much immediately and then gave it a second chance when everyone said they'd turned it around, and now it's one of my favourite sitcoms. That's the exception though, most shows are changed for the worse.

So Torchwood isn't as good as Dr Who? :|

Heh. We talked about it a while ago, but no, it's uh... not as good as Doctor Who.

Ah I see , well I'll put it on my to do list, if I get realllllllly bored this summer.

I watched the Children Of Earth arc of Torchwood (not having seen any Doctor Who since the Tom Baker days), and I thought it was alright in a goofy British sci-fi way. But, if you're like me, you'll spend the entire five episodes wondering why Peter Capaldi isn't swearing at the aliens.

"Room 405. 9 o'clock. Bring coconut oil, a ski mask, and duct tape." - Rachael Harris

Yay Suits!

Kroll Show - Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. There's not much to say. Take Key and Peele, subtract most of the personality, and then run it through a blender and you've got the pilot. It's okay, but it's nothing special, and the seemingly random cuts between sketches and back and forth and out and sponsored and whatever was somewhat hard for me to take. One joke in specific seemed just bizarre to me (Wheels Ontario opens with the Canadian TV rating splash, which is only a joke for Canadians and people who steal television online, and one of those groups doesn't seem like a great target audience), but whatever. I can't recommend it, but I can't fault anybody for spending time with it.

It opens with a Canadian TV rating splash because it's a parody of Degrassi Junior High, dummy. And lemme tell you, that is an SCTV-level parody. I thought the rest of the show was pretty funny, but Wheels Ontario is genius.

Ripper Street finally made its way to BBCA, and it's pretty good. Jerome Flynn is basically playing Victorian Bronn, and Matthew Macfayden is great as usual.

Legit - Jim Jeffries is an Australian comedian playing a version of himself, sort of Louie style. Dan Bakkedahl is a guy you probably haven't seen in much before, but he wrote for the Daily Show and he looks like a guy you have seen. DJ Qualls (Memphis Beat, Supernatural, the skinny nerd in a bunch of stuff) is Dan's brother with severe muscular dystrophy. Hilarity ensues. The first episode is pretty much The Sessions, but, you know, funny.

I kind of love this show, at least through the pilot. So far as FX comedies go, I'd say that this is probably somewhere in the Wilfred level of actual funny (as opposed to the Sunny level, which is obviously always trying to be funny). I mean, I laughed at the pilot, but that's not why I like it. This is just kind of a nice show. It's still vulgar as all hell, but it's nice in sort of the same way that Unsupervised was nice, in that even when the people on the show are doing the wroong thing, they're legitimately trying to do good. This show is a little bit more sharp than Unsupervised is/was/whatever (Jim Jeffries does realize at one point that being best friends with a cripple will get him special treatment), but it still felt nice. At the end of the day, the pilot was about a funny man and his friend getting his friend's disabled brother laid because he really wanted that before he died, which could be basically anytime. I suspect that in the long run this will end up getting paired with Wilfred (and somebody, somewhere will doubtless confuse the guy who plays Wilfred with Jim Jeffries), and I'm cool with that. I like this show. I'm actually pleasantly surprised with how much I liked the pilot. I'd say it's worth checking out.

Peter Capaldi should not be allowed to not-swear.

I think Josh Gad's character on 1600 Penn has reached the same level as Steve Carrel's character, Michael Scott, for having me feel embarrassed for them.

Jesus Christ, but the scene in Shameless with Frank stumbling in with his friends is probably the closest I've ever been to getting genuinely angry at a TV show.

So glad when Debs finally snapped.

The Following.

Holy crap, am I watching the fuck out of this show.

I recorded it last night as it appears to be one of the few new shows that aren't all network-y. That and The Americans are the only new shows I have my eye on.

My recording died, so it might take awhile to catch up, but here's the thing - people either love or hate The Following. Because it's kind of a little bit really awful. It's just a slasher movie. And if that's all you want, you're fine. Kevin Bacon is suitably hammy and the mood is what it needs to be - it's right for that. It's also got a fair bit of pretty damn purple prose peppered about. I won't see it until I can remedy my recording problem, so I don't know where I'll fall, but just so you know, it's not really exceptional if you end up completely hating the show. Or extra loving it.

Up until here I was wondering 'so did he see it or is he just repeating what he's read'.

Answer key!

I was also pretty impressed with The Following, but only in the last 15-20 minutes. Things did not turn out as I had predicted earlier in the episode.

My only issue is:

Bitch done got yoinksed.

It's a little unfortunate. It wasn't my favorite thing on television, and the network was doing it no favors showing it wildly out of order when there was at least a little bit of continuity, but I still liked it okay, and if it weren't for that show I would never have known that Dreama Walker is apparently naked in that movie about the fast food clerk who got strip searched over the phone or whatever because the internet is apparently super duper excited about that.

Oh that's too bad, my wife and I liked that show.

Watched both episodes of Continuum last night, and aside from the horrid commercials on SyFy that are still horrid even in fast forward, the show was pretty good.

Though you'd think they'd make future police bulletproof smartsuits in more flattering colors.

Wow, I do not consider myself overly squeamish, but The Following is too gruesome for me. Mutilated dog? Please do not show me that at this point in time.

Can't believe this is on network TV though. If I didn't know better I would have thought it was on HBO or Showtime... until I noticed the lack of boobs, which are clearly too offensive to broadcast.

So, I got off to not one, but two bad starts with The Following. First my recording dies on the vine. Then Fox doesn't know dick about SEO and the first TWO videos that I link through Google to Hulu are clips. Hey Fox - the top video result when searching for your show needs to be YOUR GODDAMN SHOW. And if it's going to be a clip, don't make it a shitty clip, featuring some of the worst dialogue from the entire episode describing in the most inhuman terms possible how dude murders 'cause Poe.

A couple of random observations. First, did Iceman REALLY need to be named Michael Weston? Really? Not only is that an actual dude, but it's also a different fictional dude, and both of them existed when you were writing this script, so you've got no excuse.

Is it a good thing when you're directly reminded of that classic Lisa Simpson line: "I'm impressed that you were able to write so legibly on your own butt?" Though I should commend my local Fox affiliate for running that episode recently.

Now, making no judgments as to the show's other qualities, you have absolutely got to admit that this writing is pretty frigging awful. "He was teaching him how to become a serial killer." That's a line. There's one very obvious superfluous syllable in that sentence that takes it from a regular ass line to sounding kind of dumb (it's "to become" - that should just be the infinitive "to be,"). And that's just one case. A lot of this is, at best, awkward and fumbling. For instance, when Bobby Drake comes stomping in declaring how he really gets pissed off when you kill a dog. That's not the sort of thing that you say. That's the sort of thing that you show - maybe by having a short scene at the top of the episode where he's playing with his dog before work, and then show him getting visibly upset at the sight of the mutilated animal. Or how the show will not shut up about Poe. Jesus, show - we get it, but you don't have to keep explicitly calling back to it, particularly given how....I'm not sure I have the right term to describe it, but just how much Edgar Allen Poe is. Or the way the show just sort of awkwardly flops out Maggie Grace's tits about halfway through. There was a less exploitative way to do that. Specifically, rather than having her enter, lit from the back, standing in profile, and THEN going to her scars, you shoot from behind her and over the shoulder so that we see her face in the mirror and some of the marks on her back and then you pan around her left side to show the scars on the front, spending little or no time admiring her admittedly quite attractive but completely unrelated to your point bust. This, of course, is why I will never be a director of horror movies (or any movies, really), but when you're doing a show about a dude who murders hot college coeds, a little bit of good taste would help.

On the whole, though, the show is exactly what you would expect from the guy who did Scream. It's a slasher movie, right down to the jump scares and the exploitation. Which is fine. I won't minding watching an hour of this every week, at least for a little while (we'll see how it wears over thirteen episodes - I'm pretty sure that's the max, though, and I really hope that if this is the tone the show intends to take that it doesn't try for 22). I'm a bit surprised at the amount of critical buzz this show has, though. This feels like it might be another Homeland, where nobody realizes that it is the show that it actually is until the second season, and then they're all suddenly startled that it is exactly what it always said it was. But it does get the atmosphere right. It's a slasher movie, but it's still a pretty decent slasher movie. If you're into that sort of thing, here you go. If you're repulsed by it, you can probably give this a pass. I worry a little bit about what the fallout will be from this show for Cult (which is allegedly just awful, but Jo from Supernatural needs work, so I want it to succeed anyway), but I'm not particularly disgusted at the thing's very existence the way that some critics are.

I honestly didn't know what to expect. I was hoping that he wasn't taking a cue from his wife's work, or the director and writers weren't taking a cue from other serial killer shows (the awful Criminal Minds comes to ...mind), and it exceeded my expectations. I certainly wasn't expecting that level of gore or violence, or the willingness to kill off named actors.

The point wasn't that he got upset or that he's particularly a dog lover. The point was his reaction relative to human carnage. It was still clumsy and they could show it--including Bacon's reaction. However, that takes time an hour long episode with commercial breaks doesn't have. Anyway, I have that character pegged as a mole for the Poe killer. Someone in the inner circle of investigators likely will be.

But yeah, I could have passed on the artsy fartsy mastermind killer angle or at least not beat it to death like the episode did. However, considering the ending, their direction has some potential.

I think The Following will settle down and get better. They had to cram a lot into this first hour, essentially setting up not only the storyline form the past where Purefoy's character was first discovered and captured, but then also intorducing all the characters in the current timeframe and setting up all the relationships between everyone, while also unfolding the whole "this is bigger than just you and me" thing.

I think that now that they have established that Purefoy's character has been setting these events in motion for several years and has a much larger network than anyone could have suspected, things will get good. Many people have said that the last 15 minutes or so of the episode were the best part, and that is what the rest of the show should feel like from here on out as it's been made clear that Bacon's character is an unwitting pawn in Purefoy's character's twisted "plotline" devised over the time he's been imprisoned. I thought Kevin Bacon was great as the FBI agent, some excellent acting there, and Purefoy was also very good as the professor. Sure the writing was ham-fisted at times (man, they really went overboard with the "Poe equates death with beauty!" thing), but I'm going to give it a few more episodes to se if it improves a bit. It's certainly one of the more interesting new shows on TV in a year where we haven't seen much to be excited over.

So, The Taste, premiered last night, and I made it halfway through before quitting. In retrospect, I shouldn't have even waited that long. I am a huge cooking show fan, both the educational and the Top Chef variety. And I certainly don't mind Anthony Bourdain or Nigella Lawson.

But this show failed and failed constantly. And I think it fails because cooking is not singing and trying to copy The Voice does not make for a good cooking show.

Basically, the show (so far) consists of an interview with a contestant, a few flashes of them cooking, then a jump to the judges where each gets a single spoonful of what the person made. The judges then say a few comments, vote no (usually), then the doors open and the next 10 minutes are spent with all four judges realizing they just kicked a professional chef off the show. This happens EVERY SINGLE TIME.

IE, you cant tell how someone can cook from a single mouthful. I can make a decent mouthful of food, and I would be an absolute disaster when asked to do anything else, or produce anything in bulk.

I am just baffled as to what the point of this show could be? I love the team cooking competition idea, why not just do that? Why restrict it to a single spoonful?

Also, the single spoonful removes the most important part of a cooking show. THE FOOD PORN. I watch these shows to see awesome food made. I want to see how it was made, how hard it was on the chef, and how awesome or horrible it turned out. The producers of this really need to be tied down and watch Chopped. That show is horrible in many ways. I hate the judging, most of the judges, and the forced weird combinations of ingredients. But it totally embraces the food porn aspects of this type of show. The Taste has none of this, though its judging panel is miles more entertaining than Chopped.

Watched Following and my wife was done with it at the dog room. I'm still in, although the Poe stuff is sophomoric and the idea that a professor of English would be "seduced" or whatever by Poe at that level is just plain dumb. And they've got to keep clarifying all the Poe stuff for dumb people who watch Fox and haven't encountered any Poe since they were required to read The Telltale Heart in the 8th grade. It was particularly egregious when they found the NEVERMORE scrawled on the wall and Bacon started screaming some shit about how the killer was trying to embody death in Poe's work or somesuch and it just became "DO SOMETHING!"

Mostly it reminds me of Daemon where the guy, Matthew Sobol, was such a genius that the could predict everyone's likely actions for years to come and make a script that would react to and beat everyone's brightest ideas on how to defeat it. I can see episode after episode where Kevin Bacon saves the girl/dog/kid/world, only to find that Carroll wanted him to do exactly that in order to set his real plan in motion. So the bad guy will always win, even if he loses.

Then we watched The Taste, which would've been unwatchable in real time. By fast forwarding through the commercials and being really sloppy with when I hit "play" again, I probably reduced the running time by 45 minutes. It also really helped that I was punching X-Wing miniatures game add-ons and reorganizing my game while this was on. It really shouldn't demand more than 10-20% of your attention.

This is no more about cooking than American Idol is about singing. This is about the stories of the people who are on the show. Wader you missed the last woman of the evening because you turned it off early, and she embodies everything this show is trying to do. She's a home cook who lives in a double-wide in Mississippi, and she's got no training, and no real future, but her friends think she can cook. So there's lots of maudlin music and shots of her SO (who also lives in the same trailer park) and we find out that she's making a dessert for her spoon. This is a risk, because, well, bakers ain't cooks. She also thinks Nigella is the bestest and wants to be on her team.

All the judges like her spoon, but all the boys reject her because it's dessert (and maybe they've already got a full boat on their team, but the producers don't want you to think about that too much so they don't really focus on how many people are allowed on each team and how many each has). There's a plaintive moment when Ludo compliments the dish and then rejects her, but keeps saying how good she is, and the woman, tears in her eyes, says, "But then why didn't you pick me?" Finally we get to Nigella, and she seems kind of down on the woman. There is a pregnant pause... and YES, YOU ARE ON NIGELLA'S TEAM!

This show has nothing to do with the food. It's about stories, and tears, and tempers. There will be shouting, there will be bitchiness (both male and female), and there will be precious little talk about what they're actually cooking or why.

Last night's Mindy Show was weird. Have they ever shown an external shot? I know they've never shown the doctor's lounge. I never thought that their practice was in a hospital. I'd always assumed they were in a business park or something.

I mean, other than that the episode wasn't weird. Just that one part. Other than that, normal episode.

Uh oh - T3 on the latest Banshee is all the way up to 125 seconds. You're getting dangerously close to respectable, show. Well, for you, anyway.

Alan Ball also really loves his balding middle aged washed up runner up sheriffs, doesn't he? The first time somebody transforms into a panther I might have to be out.