Tag: Teevee

Some cultural milestones make me feel old, but others do not. It doesn’t really bother me all that much to know that Star Wars is nearing 40 years old. But the fact that Friends first aired twenty years ago today? Now that hits me.

We didn’t catch onto Friends immediately. It was about halfway through that first season, maybe a little less, when we discovered it, because it wasn’t even on at 8:00 at that point. NBC’s major sitcoms at the time were Mad About You and Seinfeld, and Friends got sandwiched in between those two, at 8:30. I suspect we missed it initially because it was new and therefore we weren’t terribly interested in it, and Thursday nights were our night to go hang out at the local bar and have chicken wings. I’d set the VCR to record Mad About You and Seinfeld and ER, but it took a while for us to clue in that Friends was a decent show, too.

Once we did, though, I never looked back. To this day Friends is one of my favorite shows ever.

Here are a few random thoughts on Friends:

:: Obviously cast chemistry is important, and Friends caught that lightning in a bottle that eludes most ensemble shows. Maybe none of the actors are “great” performers, but there was chemistry between each and every one of them, and more as a group. It was so magical that the show could literally pair off any of its characters for some story or other. There were episodes that stuck Ross and Phoebe together, or Chandler and Rachel, or Joey and Ross, or Rachel and Phoebe, or…well, every permutation was explored and it always worked.

:: Friends did comedic misdirection better than just about anything I know. The best example of this is probably Ross’s famous wrong-name-at-the-altar moment, when after we’ve been made to believe that he’s really marrying Emily, that the door is finally and bittersweetly closed between him and Rachel, he says, “I, Ross, take thee Rachel….” That moment was an absolute stunner, and it was nearly equaled half an hour earlier in the same episode when Monica turned up in Chandler’s bed, or a year later, when Chandler and Monica, unsure of where they were in their relationship, find themselves impulsively at a wedding chapel in Vegas, ready to take the plunge, when the previous wedding lets out — and a very drunk Ross and Rachel, newly married, come bursting out. At its very best, Friends managed to make the punchline a delightful surprise.

:: Yes, Friends went on too long, but really, I didn’t care. It ended a season after it probably should have, with an ending that was somewhat bittersweet but still confirmed the sense that these six people continue being a part of each others’ lives, just someplace else, and that we weren’t watching anymore.

:: I saw somewhere recently — I don’t recall who or where, sorry — the question, “Why didn’t Joey succeed?” Joey was the spinoff show, after Friends, which actually debuted to good reviews and strong ratings but quickly withered on the vine and has now taken on a reputation not unlike AfterMASH. Frasier pulled off what Joey didn’t: take a single character from a just-ended, long-running ensemble show, move him all the way across the country, and tell stories about him in a new setting. Why didn’t Joey work?

Well, I don’t recall the same sense of being done with the whole concept when Cheers ended that was in place when Friends drew to a close, so there’s that — Frasier didn’t feel like so much an attempt to keep the notion alive that Joey did. Also, Frasier put Frasier Crane into a new job, talk radio, which allowed new types of stories to be told, where Joey was still a struggling (albeit less-so) actor. And then there’s the fact that Frasier was simply brilliantly written, and Joey wasn’t. Frasier created another brilliant ensemble, where Joey was just Joey-and-some-other-folks. Yes, Joey started off well, but it quickly petered out.

I do remember one very nice moment on Joey that was equal to anything on Friends. Joey lands two gigs at the same time: he’s the lead in Shakespeare’s Richard III, and the host of a musical cowboy revue. Joey worries and frets the whole episode, certain that he’s going to screw up the Shakespearean dialogue, certain that he has no place at all doing The Bard. But then, he takes the stage, and he nails that opening monologue, “Now is the winter of our discontent….”. He’s done it. Joey can do Shakespeare…and then the curtain rises to reveal the cowboy musical revue starting up behind him. He’s done the wrong role at the wrong place.

:: Yes, Chandler’s proposal to Monica made me cry.

:: Friends created a lot of wonderful recurring characters, from Janice and Gunther to Ron Glass as Ross’s divorce attorney, who was flummoxed to get so much business from a single client.

:: Friends had my single favorite Christmas-themed episode of all time, when Ross dresses up as the “Holiday Armadillo”.

:: My favorite Friend? Chandler. Or Ross. Maybe Phoebe, or Rachel. Oh, and Joey. And Monica! But seriously, Chandler. I think.

Here are some of my favorite Friends moments. I could watch some of these all day.

Share This Post

It was a Thursday night, my senior year of high school, and I sat down to watch the new episode of Cheers. It was a typically funny episode, focusing on dimwitted Woody and his equally-dimwitted girlfriend, whose name happened to be Kelly. Yup, just like me. In this episode, it was Kelly’s birthday, and Woody had to come up with a gift. Problem was, Kelly was filthy rich, and Woody just wasn’t, so he decided to come up with a gift that would be from his heart. So it was that at Kelly’s birthday party, the time came for Woody to unveil his gift to her. So he sits down at the piano, and then…[sigh]…this happened.

The moment wasn’t even over before my brain started screaming inwardly, “Oh crap. Oh crap crap crap crap CRAP.”

Next day at school, guess what everybody started singing as soon as they saw me. I went the entire day hearing that damnable song every time I turned around. And since Cheers was popular, the song remained in consciousness for a while…and it still has. To this very day — and it’s gotta be 25 years since that episode ran — I will still occasionally find someone whose memory will be jogged, and they’ll get this very specific gleam in their eye, and they’ll ask, “Hey, were you ever a fan of the show Cheers?”

To which I will sigh, and say, “Yes, I loved the show, and if you sing it I will break your arm.”

This threat is never taken seriously.

And that is the day a sitcom ruined my life.

(Via Ken Levine, who is, at the very least, an accomplice in this crime.)

Share This Post

The 2013-2014 teevee season is finally in the books (for us, anyway, since it took us a bit of time to get caught up!), so here are some random thoughts on shows and such.

:: As always, I’ll start with Castle, which is no longer my favorite thing on teevee, but that’s not to say I think the show has slid too far in quality. But in its sixth year, Castle is more the old, comfy, familiar thing now than the fresh thing it once was. And that’s fine. The show generally took a more screwball approach this year, and was for the most part quite entertaining after a bit of a stumble out of the gate, when they had Kate Beckett join the FBI in Washington for a few months of show time. Those episodes weren’t very satisfying, as they still had to find strange ways to tie in the cops from the NYPD back home; the whole thing felt really forced. It might have been an interesting direction to take Beckett as a character, but it was clear that they weren’t going all the way with it. To the writers’ credit, they did find a good character-based way to get Beckett out of the FBI and back to the NYPD, in showing how the FBI’s approach to law enforcement and justice isn’t the same as Beckett’s. As an NYPD cop, Beckett always got to find the killer and arrest them; in the FBI, she often had no real sense of the bigger picture of how her work fit into serving justice. That, I liked, but the first few episodes of the season just didn’t work. Luckily, once the show got back on its regular turf, it got good again.

And then, the finale, in which Kate and Richard’s wedding was interrupted when Richard was chased on the way to the wedding by someone in a black SUV…and then, cut to a bit later on, when Kate comes to the scene to find Richard’s car in the ditch and engulfed in flames. Obviously Castle isn’t dead, and the writers have come right out and said as much, so now the mystery is, where is he and who was in the SUV? Was it the 3XK killer? Was it someone involved with Castle’s father, who is in the spy biz? Was it someone else entirely? We’ll find out in the fall.

I’ll just say this: I’m glad the show is coming back, but I’m wondering if a seventh season might not be the best time to ride into the sunset. I’d hate to see Castle go the way of CSI, just limping along in duller and duller fashion.

:: So what did take Castle‘s place in my mind as the Best Thing on Teevee? Person of Interest, which I think is just a brilliant, brilliant show. The resolution to the HR storyline was utterly engrossing, and before it ended it took some really amazing twists and turns, culminating in the death of Detective Carter (thus freeing up the wonderful Taraji Jones for the inevitable screen adaptation of Princesses In SPACE!!! [not the actual title]!) and then the most satisfying bit of a hated villain getting what’s coming to him I’ve seen in a long time.

That said, PoI ended the season on a really strong note of bleak hopelessness. I hope they manage to find their way back a little, and restore some of the show’s always understated wit. The season finale ended and I thought, “Yeesh, where do they go from there?!” Again, we’ll find out in September!

:: Once Upon a Time continues to vex. It really does. Sometimes it is so good, and sometimes it is so corny as to make me reach for the maple syrup. The season split into two halves, with the first involving an extended trip to Neverland so the heroes (now including former villain Regina, played as wonderfully as ever by Lana Parilla, who is rapidly closing in on Stana Katic on my “teevee crush” list) could do battle with Peter Pan (who is a bad guy on this show). This all worked nicely because it took all the characters and shuffled the decks a bit, putting them all in unfamiliar territory; it helped that Pan was played very engagingly by young actor Robbie Kay.

The season’s back half, unfortunately, got a bit tough to swallow, as the gang found themselves tangling with the Wicked Witch of the West, as the show continued incorporating new fantasy realms into its overall universe. Now Oz is a part of things? OK, I guess…but frankly, I hated Rebecca Mader as Zelena (the Witch). She just wandered through her scenes for ten episodes with this annoyingly malevolent smirk, and it just sucked a lot of energy out the show. I was very glad to see that storyline end, as it involved the show’s worst villain to date and included what is absolutely the show’s single goofiest moment, when Snow White figures out how to save Prince Charming after his heart has been sacrificed. (I know, if you don’t watch the show, that makes no sense.) Couple this with the show’s most annoying cliffhanger yet (the final scene shows Elsa of Frozen fame arriving on the scene, in what may be the most brazen attempt ever to glom onto the popular-thing-of-the-moment), and…well, Once Upon a Time is on thin ice for me right now. Originally the show felt like an examination of the blurring lines between myth, story, and reality, but now it’s just starting to feel like a guided tour of the Disneyverse-that-never-was. Who will turn up next? Tune in and find out!

I did like the newfound chemistry between Emma Swan and Captain Hook, though. Hook was an incredibly lame character in Season Two, but he was very well done in Season Three.

:: The Big Bang Theory marches on. I’m still not totally thrilled with its lazy mocking of geeks and geek culture, but hey, we got to see Sheldon get drunk and then have his first kiss with Amy. And they seem to have finally gotten off the “Raj can’t ever have a girlfriend” bandwagon, so there’s that.

:: New shows? Not much, sadly…although we did discover Brooklyn Nine Nine just a month or so ago (which we then binge-watched), and it’s terrific. Seriously, I love this show. It’s got a terrific cast, one of the strongest ensembles I can remember right out of the gate. Brooklyn Nine Nine feels like Barney Miller re-made by the producers of Scrubs (without the latter show’s sentimental nature). I’m glad to have another comedy to love, although from what I’ve read of the ratings, this show might not be around all that long. Here’s hoping.

:: Amazing Race was fun, as usual. That’s all I have to say about that.

:: I never watched The Good Wife this year, but I might over the summer or at some later point, as I like the show and I’ve heard that this season was really good. Likewise, I never watched Two Broke Girls, which doesn’t seem like much of a loss to me, even giving my love of Kat Dennings, but I would definitely tune in if the show ever worked in a pie fight (seriously, this show is made for a pie fight — the lead characters are trying to launch their own bakery, for Pete’s sake!). Other than that, though…meh.

:: I’m saving Cosmos for when I can watch the original and immediately follow it with the new one. Hopefully later this summer, once we get the moving-dust settled. Ditto the new 24. And whatever else comes along that looks interesting and doesn’t get canceled!

Share This Post

Ooooh, my favorite summer teevee show, Master Chef, returns tomorrow night! Huzzah! I always enjoy the hell out of this show, even with its tendency to over-inflate itself (“One home cook will win the cookbook publishing deal, the cash prize of [six-figure amount here], and most important of all, the Coveted! MasterChef! TROPHY!!!“), when it’s really just a fun cooking show to watch. I’ve blogged about the show on occasion in the past a couple of times, so I’ll just relink my favorite two such items:

:: Gordon, the Fat Guy, and the Skinny Douche. This is mainly about Joe Bastianich, the “skinny douche”, although apparently Graham Elliot has undergone stomach surgery since last season and is no longer so much “the Fat Guy”. Time will tell if we have two skinny douches on the show now, although as I note in my post, since Season One, they’ve dialed way back on Joe Bastianich as the “douche” of the show. But still, he’s generally cast as the “mean judge”, which is really funny. Last year after one episode in which he really lit into one of the contestants, I had to laugh when someone commented on the show’s Facebook page, “Hey Joe, why can’t you at least be nice and respectful like Chef Ramsay?” That was hilarious — had they really never watched Gordon Ramsay on, well, anything other than Master Chef?

:: The Many Faces of Monti Carlo, my tribute to my favorite reality show contestant ever, on any show. You know what? If I were to name my own five favorite posts I’ve done for this blog over the years, this one almost certainly makes the cut. Monti herself discovered it, commented on it, and linked it from her Facebook page!

Bring on the Mystery Boxes! I, for one, would like to see a Mystery Box full of nothing but very cheap “starving college student” stuff. Let’s see what the home cooks do with Ramen noodles (preferably to unidentifiable “Oriental” flavor), boxed mac-and-cheese, and stuff like that!

Share This Post

We’re a little more than halfway through the teevee season, so here’s where things stand for me on the few shows I still watch regularly:

Person of Interest will be getting its own post. Suffice it to say that it’s become my favorite currently-running show, and I think it’s terribly underrated.

:: Castle continues chugging along. It’s a very comfortable show now, especially since it pretty much wrapped up the storyline about Beckett’s mother’s murder. Castle is, more than anything else, that warmly welcome show that I look forward to every week simply because it’s so comfortable. No real new ground is being broken here, but so what? I still like these characters and I like seeing what happens to them.

This season did get off to a rough start, with Beckett going to the FBI and Castle having to figure out a long-distance relationship. I did like how the marriage proposal wasn’t made into a long-standing plot point; I liked how Castle says “This isn’t my way of trying to get you to stay in New York; if we have to move for your job, then that’s what we do”. I liked the honesty with which the writers handled that, and I also liked the degree to which the writers clearly know their characters, in the way they wrapped up Beckett’s FBI experiment. They know that Beckett’s concept of justice – find the criminal, and put them away – doesn’t really work in agencies like the FBI, where often an agent’s day-to-day work doesn’t yield a big-picture view of where the “justice” is. That was well done.

Less well-done were the FBI-based episodes themselves, since the writers had to figure out ways to shoehorn our old NYPD friends into the stories, because they are, after all, cast regulars under contract. This was another example of the Castle writers being somewhat constrained by the realities of their show, as a mid-level show with decent ratings. No killer budget, but also the standard “rules” that come with being on a network. There’s only so far they seem able to push their storytelling, and there are times when you can really feel the Castle writers pulling their punches. The FBI episodes were a good example of that.

Still, love the show!

:: The Big Bang Theory is also becoming comfortable – maybe a little too comfortable. It still makes me laugh – the Thanksgiving episode was utterly hysterical – but short of actual character growth or some new way of shaking the dynamic, the show is often twenty minutes of “Let’s make fun of nerds!” and “Ha ha, Sheldon doesn’t realize that Amy’s been horny for four years” and “Raj is pathetic” and “Leonard and Penny love each other but make an awful couple”. I just don’t know how much more shelf-life this show has. This show needs something to happen. The last big thing to occur were the additions of Bernadette and Amy to the group, and since then, it’s pretty much been kind of a struggle.

:: We seem to have finally abandoned Bones, which became embarrassingly bad last year and started off this year even worse. They finally resolved the Palant storyline (that guy makes my top five of Worst Teevee Recurring Villains Ever), got Bones and Booth married, and then…who cares. This show was once good, but it’s awful now.

:: I honestly don’t know what The Mentalist is doing, and I wonder if it’s just playing out the string at this point. The Red John storyline limped to a pretty boring conclusion two seasons after it really should have ended (inasmuch as it can even be called a “storyline”, as few of its twists and turns through the years ever made any sense), but not before trying to muddy the water with some kind of secret society in the law enforcement ranks and then shifting half the cast to the FBI and moving the show from California to Texas. So now the main attraction seems to be watching a new set of law enforcement people try to figure out how to deal with Patrick Jane’s various quirks, which isn’t exactly a recipe for the show’s long-term future. Frankly, I’ll be really surprised if The Mentalist is still around come next fall.

:: Once Upon a Time had a surprisingly good first half this season. In previous years this show has been so inconsistent as to make me crazy. Sometimes the show is amazing, but other times the writers make me want to throw bricks at puppies. This year, with most of the cast sent to Neverland to battle the evil (!) Peter Pan, things were actually a lot more interesting. They did keep that storyline going on just a tad too long, and they still indulge their habit of too many scenes where the villains do nothing but twirl their figurative mustaches whilst saying evil things, and Red Riding Hood was nowhere to be found (nooooo!), but I really did enjoy this season’s first half. Most impressively, they actually made Captain Hook into an interesting character! Last year, he was just annoying.

I continue to crush mightily on Lana Parilla and Robert Carlyle. Love those two.

:: I tried to like Hannibal, and I even gave it more than my usual five or six episodes to grab my interest. By the eleventh episode, though, I had to admit that it just wasn’t getting there for me. Mads Mikkelson is amazing as Hannibal Lecter, playing him with a kind of “European weirdness” that contrasts with Sir Anthony Hopkins’s legendary portrayal. Mikkelson captures the fact that Lecter is, for all his depraved villainy, actually a decent person capable of some degree of caring, albeit on his own very limited and somewhat villainous terms. Mikkelson gives a Lecter who is vulnerable, horrible, calculating, sickening, and friendly.

Unfortunately, the rest of the cast is pretty bland. Hugh Dancy’s moods range from “mild brooding” to “maximum brooding”; Laurence Fishburne (an actor to whom I have never warmed very much) basically plays Jack Crawford the same way he tends to play everybody else. The rest of the cast makes absolutely no impression on me, and the show even manages to waste Gillian Anderson in a dreary turn as Hannibal Lecter’s psychiatrist.

At first I liked the show’s production design, which is often cinematic and spectacular, but as the series went on, I tired of this angle, and I started wondering why, in the show’s universe, the news media hasn’t taken notice of the incredible rash of deeply theatrical murders taking place in the Baltimore area. It started to feel as if the writers were trying to figure out a more spectacular way for the Serial Killer Of The Week to make his/her work known, so we have the killer who slices his victims’ flesh to make it look like they have wings and then poses them as if they are praying angels; then we have the killer who impales his musician victim on a cello; and then there’s the killer who builds an enormous totem pole out of corpses he’s buried on some beach someplace. This is ultimately what made me turn against the show: its events simply became less and less believable, and the characters weren’t interesting or well-portrayed enough (Hannibal himself excluded) to keep me interested in what was increasingly a bit of non-magical dark fantasy. I wanted to like this show, but it’s a miss.

:: That’s about all for network teevee! Aside from Big Bang Theory, there aren’t any comedies we watch regularly – How I Met Your Mother never really won me over (its lead character is insanely boring), and my love of Kat Dennings isn’t enough to sustain my interest in 2 Broke Girls. Also, no new show has come along that makes me stand up and say, “Ooooh, we gotta watch that!” So our non-network teevee watching consists of things like Sherlock, The Daily Show, Pawn Stars, and a recent plow-through of Arrested Development in its entirety. (That, also, will get a post of its own.) We’re on the lookout for other stuff to watch, so let us know what’s good! (Elementary and Sleepy Hollow are no-go. We tried both, although I may give the latter another shot on my own. I’m a bit gunshy, though, as I have not had very good experiences with stuff from the minds of Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci.)

That’s about it. I’m looking forward to the Neil DeGrasse Tyson revisit of Cosmos, and as always, there are a bunch of shows from yesteryear I need to either continue watching or start watching (Battlestar Galactica, Farscape, X-Files, Millennium). And you never know, I may hear enough interesting things about some new show to jump in at some point.

Share This Post

This ought to do it:

I have watched two episodes of Breaking Bad: the pilot, and the one from last week that had everybody rending their teeth and gnashing their garments. All I saw was a bleak, depressing show that made me feel bad about things, but hey, that’s just me. No, what really gets my goat is the undertone of nearly everything said about this show of late, that it is so good that if you don’t watch it, you are literally — and not “figuratively” literally, not the new OED literally, but really actually literally — deficient in some key aspect of your life. I’ve read tweets, more than once, that said: “I feel sorry for people aren’t watching Breaking Bad.”

And now comes Kelly Oxford with this. And I love Kelly Oxford. There are fewer funnier people on Twitter, and I loved her recent book, too.

It seems to me that there’s an awful lot of commentary that suggests, either through tone or just states it outright, a moral or other kind of failing on the part of those who might have a different view. I know I’ve been guilty of that, myself. But I’m going to try and stop.

And for the record, I don’t watch Breaking Bad, I am not going to watch Breaking Bad, and I am not a f***ing idiot.

Share This Post

How I feel when the entire Internet goes into "OMG BREAKING BAD" mode. Yeesh., originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

So a week or two ago I watched the pilot episode of Breaking Bad, figuring to finally catch up a bit on what is apparently, to judge by online reaction, the single greatest Artistic Endeavour in the history of the television medium. (And that isn’t remotely hyperbole on my part — that is an accurate summation of opinion.) My reaction? I didn’t like the episode, so I decided not to bother with the rest of the series. (Please don’t try to talk me into going back into it. I’m really not interested.)

Now, this goes into my general sense of ennui with pop culture’s current (and, to my way of thinking, disturbingly ascendant) fascination with villains and antiheroes — what I’ve come to think of as Awful People At Work And Play. But I’m also interested in this whole phenomenon of binge-watching teevee series. I see people online talk about watching an entire season of some show or other over a day or two, and my mind reels — after one or two episodes of something, I’m ready for something else. Even things that I really, really like, such as Battlestar Galactica or Arrested Development (which The Wife and I are watching now). I find that I am simply not wired for binge-watching.

I also discover that a common argument for teevee series is, “Well, you gotta give it five or six episodes before it hits its stride.” And that is true, to an extent — but when confronted with an entire series on DVD or streaming, my eyes glaze over at the prospect. “I gotta watch six hours of this thing just to know if I like it enough to keep going?” That can’t be right.

I’m encouraged by the existence of teevee series that are intended to tell a single story, instead of being open-ended unto an inevitable limp toward cancellation. But by the same token, a lot of such series constitute way too much of a time investment for me. With movies and teevee, I don’t get to control my rate of experiencing the narrative, and in any event, a teevee series is really built around a weekly schedule. Binge-watching just doesn’t feel right to me.

How about you folks? Do you binge-watch teevee series?

Share This Post