The Winter 2013 Television Thread

No.

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I thought it was awesome.

Do No Harm - The pitch is modern Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde. So, Dr. Dipshit has Dissociative Identity Disorder, but he's convinced the entire hospital that he's the Head of Neurosurgery at that he only has diabetes which completely disables him and renders him totally incapable of working for twelve hours every day. Because doctors wouldn't know any better than that. We know that he's faking diabetes because, before he can do the incredibly difficult surgery that we're shown him doing to establish how bad of an ass he is at surgerying, he has to jam his finger into a machine the size of a 1980s defibrillator (despite the fact that mine fits in my pocket). We also know that he's got a raging hardon for Dr. Solis, who is subordinate in the department of neurosurgery, because she wears kind of impractical clothes under her lab coat and is, for whatever reason, concerned for the well-being of the weird recluse who is also her boss. While flirting with her at night, he deliberately disregards the watch alarm he set for his very conveniently scheduled transformation until he starts seizing (you know, like people with DID will do), runs out of the wherever the hell he was (where it sure sounded like the party planners were playing the extra-guitary party mix of Jump Around by House of Pain in this, the year 2013), injects himself with his special coma juice that knocks him out for the entire time that he's supposed to be the bad guy, it doesn't work, and then he wakes up on top of a classically arranged fuck pile. And this, we are led to believe, is a bad thing.

I really don't know where to begin. Everything about this show is the worst thing about this show. His alternate personality? It's apparently also The Incredible Hulk, but for ninjas, because at one point he deliberately places himself in a situation where he's fighting an abusive cop husband so that when it strikes 8:25 (that's when it happens, you see) Mr. Badass comes out and beats him into...I dunno, morality, because he apparently turns himself in for being a bag of shit. His hot subordinate whom he shouldn't be fucking because there is literally no place in the entire United States where it's not against the rules, with whom he has never so much as held hands? Mr. Badass not only calls her, but parlays that into just-close-enough-to-fucking that there can be a subplot where maybe he raped her or not, because all of her subsequent reactions to him are a cross between bursting into spontaneous tears and sprinting in the opposite direction in bald terror. This is, of course, infinitely confused and befuddled by the fact that the parts of the event that we're allowed to see in not-distorted-memory-o-vision, she is clearly extra-DTF, all the way to criticizing his choice of venue for the rendezvous and suggesting superior alternatives for a booty call, which makes the eventual revelation that what actually happened is that she decided at the last possible second between the weird red filtered memory scenes and coitus (so as to maximize the amount of titillating footage) that she was not, in fact, down, at which point he punches her directly in the feelings by "laughing at her" and acting as though their relationship "was a game," which seems to me would be more irritating and annoying than hurtful for the character we literally just saw getting ready to bone down (maybe I've completely misread this poorly fleshed-out, two-dimensional lady figure, but it seems to me that a smart, successful, beautiful neurosurgeon who's sexually liberated enough to not even be the slightest bit scandalized and clearly get turned on when her interaction with this guy that she's never so much as smelled particularly hard transitions into a letter to Penthouse Forum would not run off in tears when her potential partner reacted to some reasonable objection on her part with derisive laughter, but would instead kick the man in the balls so hard that his grandmother exploded, because she is strong and self-assured and independent and responds to deliberate disrespect for her with outrage and action instead of passive victimization). And what clever plan does Dr. Dipshit use to actually reign Mr. Badass in after he utilizes him to beat the shit out of Abusive Cop Husband? He schedules a surgery for that night. Because he knows, you must understand, that when he has to test his blood, it will show him to be ludicrously high (because adrenaline) at which point the doctors will force him to take an entirely unneeded dose of insulin, which will naturally send him into hypoglycemic shock. I feel like it's a waste of time and effort explaining this sort of thing to this show, but that sequence of events isn't even consistent with its own internal logic. If we're going to pretend that adrenaline shows up like blood sugar in the terrible, inaccurate infrared finger scanning test that you need to calibrate before you can do it anyway and is only really useful as an ongoing monitoring solution and not as a spot check, then the proper medical procedure at that point would be to directly test the blood with one of the other tests that wouldn't suffer from this bizarre problem. If, on the other hand, we're going to assume that somebody on your staff skimmed a short story that somebody who read an article this one time wrote and that what you actually mean to say is that the adrenaline rush would have caused the body to release a fat dose of glycogen so as to enable a lot of running and jumping and shit, then his blood sugar really would be elevated, which means not only would he be drowsy, logy, and constantly pissing, but the insulin would have very few deleterious effect on him, as it would simply lead to the actual sugar which had been released into his bloodstream getting reabsorbed into the outlets from whence it came. If administered intravenously (it wasn't) or with a proper gap for acting time (there wasn't), it's possible that you could cause a short-term insulin reaction (rendering him temporarily loopy, though probably not unconscious, unless it was a spectacularly large dose of fast acting juice and he denied himself food) as his otherwise normal body registered the abnormally low blood sugar and reacted, or he figured out that he needed to eat a goddamn peanut butter sandwich and took care of that himself, but what it probably wouldn't do is immediately render him unconscious like a needle full of roofies and Noam Chomsky lectures. And to top it all off, by the end of the pilot he's having conversations with himself via video blog, just like Christian Slater on that other show that was kind of exactly the same as this one, only better in a lot of ways, and how depressing is that?

But - and there is a but here - this could be fun to hate watch, if that's your thing. This show isn't bad in the Deception, middling, just basically underachieving sort of way that's nothing but frustrating to sit through. This show is bad in the ridiculous, patently awful way that feeds hilarious livestreams and forms the stuff from which Rifftrax are born. Make no mistake - this show is awful beyond all conception, and if you actually want to ingest quality, just don't bother, but if you're looking for something to make fun of, here you go. For three weeks or so anyway, because if it doesn't pull up its numbers, like, retroactively, NBC will basically be forced to yank it as soon as they can get Brian Williams back into the studio to do more of their shitty, underperforming news magazine.

Jesus Legit. It's kind of creepy when you do that with my life. And stop trying to make me cry.

I really do quite like this show.

So I was watching the most recent (before the Superbowl) episode of Elementary, and I noticed Johnny Lee Miller is tying his scarf just like Benedict Cumberbatch. I thought that was a nice hat tip.

So Young Justice has started back up and it looks like they're actually going to finish off the season in March. This show got so goddam good and it's too bad that I have zero hope for a season 3. Cartoon Network has treated it like they were angry it existed, randomly chopping up the season and then throwing out two episodes here and three episodes there. Season 1 of this show went from January of 2011 to April of 2012 and season 2 will have gone from the week after season 1 to March 2013.

I'll admit, this show started out pretty bad, but it got great as the continuity set in and Young Justice (the team) found their purpose as a strike force. I was uncertain about the five year jump (as I felt that a lot of info had been left off the table, but I did just, like just, discover that I missed a very important episode, so oops) but I love the new cast and I appreciate just how dark they've been willing to go.

Edit: Oh, yeah, it's confirmed that YJ isn't coming back. Which is funny, cos a video game based on the show will be out later this year. They're replacing it with a sequel to the old Teen Titans series. Fuck you, Cartoon Network. You actively worked against this show developing any kind of a fanbase. You want to see how a superhero series gains some traction? Ultimate Spider-Man showed its first episode on April 1st, 2012. Then they showed a new fucking episode every week, you fucksticks.

Cartoon Network's handling of Young Justice frustrates me as well. I expected nothing out of the show when it started, but season 1 slowly won me over, and then it kind of randomly came and went. When season 2 started, my DVR, set up for "Young Justice", didn't pick up "Young Justice: Invasion" (/facepalm), so I had to play catch up again, and I've never seen one ad outside CN regarding its return. Cmon, not even a Comedy Central spot once in a while? It's like they've gone out of their way to make sure no one sees it.

In other news, I've already forgotten The Following exists. I watched HIMYM last night (which was actually decent for the first time this year, it's been a disappointing season), and then it never occurred to me to flip Fox on between 9-10. Is it doing well numbers-wise?

No clue. I think that the ratings thus far have been perfectly adequate, but I have no clue what standard Fox is hoping it will live up to. Also, might be good to know that How I Met Your Mother will, for the third or fourth consecutive year, not be ending like it ought to. However, it has already been pre-cancelled for next year, which we are assured will be the end. The most annoying thing for me? That means Coby Smulders can't be a regular on S.H.I.E.L.D. for a year unless she really super wants to work herself to death.

I'll watch Monday Mornings tonight and bring it back. Early response that I've seen is that it's not as David E. Kelly as you would expect, which will at least be something different.

Shame about Young Justice, it wasn't JLU, but it was pretty good, decently dark. Speaking of dark, the Clone Wars, a series I have never really followed, but watched a random episode involving the Darth Maul bros (its-a-me, maulio!), Palpatine, Mandalorians,etc, got pretty dark.

Also, after watching a longer promo for that real steel boxing thing for syfy, I am a bit saddened, as it has some bits in it that look frickin' awesome! They actually hook up the players to some sort of getup that reads their arm movements. But, then the stupid, which is the silly spark effects they add to all the strikes. I'll still probably end up watching an episode out of curiosity.

Same here. I didn't put it into the DVR because my wife doesn't want to watch it, so I figured I'd pick it up on Hulu. I've actually had the TV to myself lately, and given a choice, I'd rather watch another episode of The Wire on HBO Go than deal with Following.

Finally getting around to The Wire was the beginning of the end of me watching Big Network Dramas and certainly police dramas. The Wire was soooo good that everything else pales in comparison. While I do not expect every show to live up to that, I realize that I wasted a lot of time watching crap and if after about 2 episodes a drama obviously is cliched and the dialog is miserable, even if the performances are good, I have no interest in wasting my time.

You are making the proper choice in going with The Wire. :)

I have become increasingly disappointed in How I Slept With A Bunch Of Chicks Who Weren't Your Mom, but I've come this far, I'll probably stick with it until the end of next season. And while Coby likely won't be a regular, she's apparently feels her commitment to HIMYM won't affect her ability to be the TV show.

I just finished watching the pilot, and it's pretty good, although it has a bit of a glacial pace. Alfred Molina's 3rd grader hair was distracting, but I enjoyed Ving Rhames as George Clooney's ER character, and Korean House.

Plus, Jamie Bamber (Apollo, to most of you) is always adorable.

Yea, Clone Wars gets dark sometimes, and doesn't pull punches about killing off characters that it can. It's been a meh season for me except for a few highlights earlier until this Sith/Mandalore arc over the last few episodes. It was great to see Palpatine take on Darth Maul and Savage Opress, and some good Mandalorian vs. Mandalorian fighting. I enjoy their take on Obi-Wan in this series.

One of these days I should just spurge and get the series on DVD. For my kids. That I don't have. (Yet.)

Yeah, I pretty much only watch light, fun network dramas like Person of Interest and Vegas. I'm not gonna bother with something like Motive (which we in Canada saw about 50 ads for during the Super Bowl) when there are shows like Dexter and Justified that I need to catch up on. Drama is now the domain of the cable channels, and to some extent comedy is going the same way. My favourite comedies are Archer and Sunny. And with the end of 30 Rock and the decline of Happy Endings, Parks and Rec is the only network sitcom I really get excited about. This is the golden age of television, but the networks are being left behind.

I wouldn't write them off just yet. Disney is moving heaven and earth pulling in sweet ass licenses that could turn into very high quality programming for ABC, CBS is still the two ton gorilla putting out quite frankly perfectly good television for people who want to watch television the way that I watched television in the nineties (intermittently, that is), and NBC just finally dragged itself out of the gutter, though it's doing everything in its power to get back there with a quickness I find slightly disturbing with their Winter series. Fox is the only broadcast network that's currently in a really bad place, with their one reality program so damned old that it's hard to get enthusiastic about it anymore and the other reality program getting its ass kicked by basically the exact same thing on another channel, but Fox is also the network that tends to take the most risks with new shows, so that could turn out to be a very, very good thing from a quality perspective. The CW.....eh. Arrow is one of my favorite new series in recent memory, so that's good. This doubling down on the already creatively strained Vampire Diaries (now they're looking at a spinoff about the seven original vampires in New Orleans, which is bad on multiple accounts, because the originals are, almost to a man, a bunch of sniveling, whiny, hatable little pricks that I've wanted to see die ever since they stumbled drunkenly onto the show and, more importantly, the bench on VD isn't quite so deep that I believe there are enough established characters to properly execute an Angel, and also New Orleans in general is a fun place to visit, but if I have to spend more than, say, ten hours a year there it's going to start to feel sticky and smell like barf and beignets). Cable shows have a few things going in their favor, but we should also remember that they mostly "succeed" because they started out with a lower standard of living than network. I think that Walking Dead is the first cable show to ever do broadcast-tolerable numbers (and that's with a little bit of cheating on AMC's part - broadcast shows only run once in a night, but most cable channels will do two or even three runs of an episode and then squash the numbers together). If the broadcast channels can slim down enough to actually live on the numbers that something like A&E does, they should be able to continue indefinitely and produce the same or better quality of shows than most of the networks, at least after the unofficial watershed at 10:00 PM Eastern. A lot of the force that turns all those broadcast shows from something you'd like into something you probably don't is the fundamental need to draw the mass audience, after all.

It's fitting that Walking Dead is the first cable show to pull network ratings since it's also shitty enough to be a network show.

I don't really care about the whys, I just care about the quality. I understand that the networks want to appeal to the mouthbreathing NASCAR fans in flyover country, but I'm not going to watch those shows. Just like I'm not going to reality shows no matter how popular they are. Except maybe Killer Karaoke, that show looks hilarious.

But I think Walking Dead would've been as just as successful if it's writing was better. It wouldn't even have to be Oscar level or whatever, it's just really sad that it manages to have worse writing than the comic book.

EDIT: Part of its success is just filling a void. Zombies on TV is an under served segment, much like Heroes, which was also a pretty shitty show.

I should have liked Person of Interest and I gave it three episodes, but it was blah. Walking Dead I gave one season and then the first few in the second season and the characters just did stupid stuff too often.

You know what is good that I just to catch up on, on Netflix, is Damages. Still a show where the performances are so amazing that the show can make missteps and still be good.

You're a bad person and you should feel bad!

. Caviezel growls, shorty limps around. Mystery is created and solved in 42 minutes. Yawn. Obviously, I am too cool for such lowbrow, network offerings.

Heroes was a perfectly fine show through the end of the first season, when Bryan Fuller left. It coasted after that, benefiting primarily from the fact that NBC has been in a terrible place for a very, very long time.

Monday Mornings - The Pitch: Dr. Sanjay Gupta wrote a book of the same title, mostly about the meetings that doctors hold (on...when was it again? oh, right - Morbidity and Mortality meetings wouldn't happen on the weekend because too many doctors are out, so...OHHHHHH) wherein a hospital brings its doctors into a room and talks about things they fucked up. Features kind of a lot of people you will recognize - Ving Rhames, Alfred Molina, Jamie Bamber, at least two actresses whose names I should remember but don't, that guy who never doesn't look creepy in stuff, and so on.

Jesus screaming christ, Alfred Molina's whole oversized hair yarmulke is extremely distressing. It's kind of hard to see anything else. There needs to be a fire at this hospital, or possibly a gas explosion. Something to get rid of that horrifying thing that he's got going there. I'll also be entirely up front here - me and Jamie Bamber do not get along. Some people came away from BSG liking him - I came away with the unshakeable sensation that he was a whiny, ineffectual twit, and any time he's not shot full length I can't shake the impression that he's also carrying fifty extra pounds of lazy about his middle.

This show is a little self-serious for my taste, particularly for something coming from Kelly, which shouldn't be surprising given the basic pitch. More importantly, this show, not unlike its executive producer and contributing writer, is occasionally bullshit. For instance, declining to perform a shit ton of tests on a runner who comes into a hospital complaining about hip soreness with no other symptoms who then never returns with any more symptoms isn't malpractice, and the doctor that gets thrown out of the hospital basically at the start of the show for doing that should not have been. There are ways to get to negligent malpractice that aren't that goddamn shaky. It bothers me that this show, in its first twenty minutes, gears up to play to the terror that fuels the very real problem of people not just expecting, but demanding unnecessary and expensive clinical tests "just to be sure." And, of course, they fuck up the medicine in entirely expected ways - for instance, while they do get the call right before hauling in the paddles (ventricular fibrillation, which you do shock), the monitor in the room is clearly showing a flatline, and you never shock a flatline. Yeah, it's television doing what television has to do because most people don't know proper medical procedure, but if you're going to staple a doctor's name on the top of your show (regardless of how occasionally shitty), this is the sort of thing that I would have hoped you'd get right.

Setting aside the science and medicine, it's not horrible, but there are some hitches. The musical direction in the pilot is extremely obtrusive, and it really needs to be reigned back in, particularly if we're going to drop bodies at this rate on a weekly basis. Some of the exposition is painfully clunky for a guy who makes his name so much on his writing (an exchange between Ving Rhames and one of the actresses whose name I should remember which includes the line from her "I don't consider six beers and sex with a stranger to be much of a breather" - this is bad dialogue because it's something you could easily show, and even if it wasn't, that's still clunky phrasing), but that could just be pilot problems. Kelly is still obviously involved, however - the Very Large Black Comic Relief Patient is clearly from him. The actual M&M meetings play out a little too much like aggressive cross-examination sequences from any of his other ten trillion lawyer shows.

It's an okay show. I wouldn't call it terrific, but it's a serviceable enough medical drama. It gets more medicine wrong than I would have liked to see, but it's still pretty okay in that regard. I'll be a little bit more interested to see the second episode than the first, because the one thing that I've always liked about Kelly is his dialogue and he had very little opportunity to really take that out for a run in the pilot, with all of the exposition that had to get squashed in, so I want to know how he's going to be week-to-week. I only hate Bamber as much as I always hate Bamber, so I assume that means he's doing an okay job, and I like some of the supporting cast (though the show really needs to get off the doctor that talks like Daniel Dae Kim on Lost, which the scenes from next week clearly show it's not going to do immediately). The show is kind of a downer, and I will absolutely guarantee you that it will continue to be a downer, because it's a show whose primary theme is Morbidity and Mortality meetings, so if that's something you'd rather not have in your life than by all means skip it, but otherwise, I'll at least give it room to see where it goes. Of the things that have debuted since the start of the year, I'd put it more in The Following box (this is perfectly fine as what it is and if that is a thing you want, then you will be happy) than the NBC midseason drama toilet.

Heroes was awesome the first season and then they were clueless and everyone got a bucket o' powers.

They pretty early wrote themselves into a corner just with the powers. Guy who controls time and space? Guy who can learn other peoples powers? Both of those were terrible, overpowered choices.

You are objectively wrong in every way.

Haha. That is entirely possible. It has happened before.

Okay, credit where credit is due - I don't love The Following the way some folks do, but that was easily the biggest and most impressive male gaying I have ever seen on broadcast. Hats off to you, show.

I'm not gonna try to sell you on Pinterest, like I said it's just a fun show. It's predictable and formulaic (though less so than House) but I enjoy the formula and the characters are likeable.

Damages was one of those shows where I can appreciate that it's really well done but because the characters were so unlikeable I just never wanted to watch it. I think I quit part way into season 2.

I gave up on Young Justice after four or five episodes of the first season, because SUPERBOY SOOOO ANGSTY which just did not work for me. After Derek Meister or someone talked it up a bit, and persevering through the excess angsting, it has become really good. A pity about CN dumping it so unceremoniously.
I liked Teen Titans, but Teen Titans Go! will apparently be "a more comedic take on the DC Comics franchise, dealing with situations that happen outside of saving the world." More comedic than the original Teen Titans cartoon? That's probably too comedic for me.

Outside of Teen Titans, CN's demonstrated little commitment to any DC property, so I guess it makes sense for them to bring it back. Between its two different versions the JL series was given five seasons, but at one point they started showing them at like midnight on Thursdays or something. Legion of Super Heroes (which was supposed to be a spinoff of JLU, but they decided to can that so they could use Superboy instead of Supergirl, and from what I read they ended up having to call him Superman due to legal issues about ownership of Superboy) got two seasons, but if it was treated better than Young Justice I wouldn't know since I never saw a single episode or saw it advertised. Green Lantern isn't even a thing I knew existed until after the first season, which, oh shock, is also the last season. I guess they did right by Batman: The Brave and the Bold, but man, Beware the Batman looks ugly as shit.

I wish that DC would get their stuff on Netflix. I'd love to watch all of Batman, Superman and JL again. Also, I never saw nearly as much of Batman: the Brave and the Bold that I would have liked.

Edit: Just looked it up on Amazon. Man. Fuck you guys for dividing seasons into 'part one' and 'part two' on DVD. OTOH, they have Justice League the complete series in one box. Noice!

Oh yeah, the complete series boxes for Batman, Superman and JLU are all great stuff. They have blu-ray as well, but honestly, not really worth it.

Smash's premiere was basically what I expected, though it did throw some interesting things into the mix. By "interesting," I mean, "they did this right but still so wrong." I like where they're taking the show as a whole, I like the new characters (except for the super-protective songwriter, but given that he's terrible and Karen is terrible and they're going to be together, I find this super acceptable), I think they realized a lot of their mistakes... but at its core, the writing is still so godawful that the show is still terrible. It doesn't help that the background music seems hellbent on ruining the tone of basically any scene.

I do like the actual songs a lot more than from the first season! There were, like, two songs from the first season that I would ever want to listen to again, but so far I almost want to look up all the songs from what we've seen of season two.

I'm good at television. At least, when it's obvious I am. So long, Do No Harm. I actually would have hatewatched you just for comedy material. SVU reruns for the next two weeks.

The continuing march of bizarrity continues for Up All Night - Christina Applegate just quit the show she's the star of. Granted, it was probably over anyway, but goddamn. Now I wonder if it doesn't get renewed just to shove further burrs up the ass of the original creatives.

I'll also put this in the other thread, but Community's ratings not only improved, but it lifted Parks and Recreation. It's a blip for now, but a good one.

Here's your pilot slate thus far. I won't waste everybody's time getting into the details of all of them, but there's some stuff that could turn out well.

Yes. I'm sure it will incorporate all of the mild thrills and somewhat rickety construction (the last time I was at Disneyland, anyway) of that mine cart roller coaster into the show.

Pirates of the Caribbean emboldened them in ways that Haunted Mansion could not hope to counteract. Bet they still never do anything with Splash Mountain. They really don't like remembering that movie.

Mostly just eww. Not much good in that list. Though a lot of stuff is all in the execution anyways, so there might be hope?

Do no harm was so bad, no loss there.

Not based on a theme park ride, but this reminds me of the old short-lived Hulk Hogan tv show "Thunder in Paradise". The one with the speedboat. They pretty much shot the thing at Disney World, which meant they could have the characters visit a wide variety of international locations...by shooting in that countries part of Epcot Center.