The X-Files debuted twenty years ago tonight. Wow.
I need to get back to my long-stalled rewatch, don’t I?
On Death and Villainy
John Seavey, one of the regular posters at MightyGodKing, writes at length about Norman Osborn, the human alter-ego of Spider-Man villain Green Goblin. I don’t much have a dog in that fight, but I did like two different side points Seavey made along the way.
First:
I have gone on record multiple times as saying that if contrived resurrections cheapen deaths, the answer is to stop killing off characters so frequently and not to have fewer resurrections. Killing off a character in a shared universe is generally an act of colossal arrogance and short-sightedness, a statement along the lines of, “Well, I can’t think of anything more to do with this character, and I’m the Most Creative Person of All Time! The only interesting thing left to do is kill them off.” It’s never true. There are always more interesting stories to be told with a living character than a dead one, and that’s what makes resurrections so inevitable no matter how contrived they wind up being. The blame should be placed squarely on the shoulders of the killing writer, not the resurrecting one.
I think death is kind of overrated as a narrative device. It’s kind of cheap, really, an easy way of amping up the stakes — just kill someone off, to show that everything is real, that we’re playing for keeps. I find that a lot of deaths in stories feel like they’re there more for narrative effect than for any other reason, and a lot of them end up ringing false when it’s obvious they’re supposed to be incredibly shocking.
Good examples of this can be found all over the place: A Song of Ice and Fire, for instance. (Game of Thrones, for you who know it by the teevee.) George RR Martin gets heaped with praise all the time for being willing to sacrifice main characters, but I’d posit that by the point we’ve now reached, it’s clear that he’s not sacrificing main characters at all; he’s just disposing of secondary characters at surprising junctures.
More oddly, though, is the odd notion that a character should develop only so much, and then they should die. This strikes me as deeply silly, and the two best examples I know are characters who didn’t die: Han Solo, and Martin Riggs (of the Lethal Weapon movies). Harrison Ford has gone on record in the past as believing that Han should have died in Return of the Jedi, because he’d reached the end of his narrative and because it would have given the story a lot more gravitas. And Lethal Weapon writer Shane Black apparently left the series after his intention to kill off Martin Riggs at the end of Lethal Weapon 2 — pretty much for the same reasons — was shot down by the producers.
The problem here is, our lives don’t end when we reach handy points in our development as human beings. Well, for some of us they do, but that’s just the accident of timing, not some existential thing about the Universe dispensing with us upon our reaching of our inner Zen. It’s a silly reason to kill off a character, and Seavey is one hundred percent correct: a character doesn’t run out of potential stories just because one particular writer does.
And besides, “Death as route to gravitas” is…well, it’s just plain overrated anyway. How many major, named characters among the protagonists die over the course of The Lord of the Rings? Two: Boromir and Theoden. That’s it. And yet nowhere in that entire story would I ever claim that the stakes don’t feel pretty damned high, nor that a price will have to be paid for victory.
(For the record: Yes, I do think that Joss Whedon overdoes death as well, but his deaths tend to be a lot more visceral, given his skills at getting me to care about his characters in the first place.)
And second:
(W)hen you go back and read the original Green Goblin stories, he wasn’t much of a villain. He was a C-list Kingpin wannabe who failed at everything he tried, lost pretty much every fight he was in, and whose only talent was in running away. He didn’t even really have a backstory, because Stan Lee and Steve Ditko couldn’t decide who he was going to be under the mask. (Ditko wanted it to be a totally unmemorable nobody, to show that villains didn’t always have to be someone important to the hero. Lee felt like they’d spent so long building up the mystery of the Goblin’s identity that the audience would be upset if it wasn’t someone they recognized. The dispute was one of the reasons that Ditko left the title.) Basically, the Green Goblin was by no means the most important of Spider-Man’s bad guys.
Now, I’m not sure about this, and a couple commenters in the thread over there take issue with Seavey’s description of Ditko’s views and departure from the series. But Ditko’s point here, even if it wasn’t really Ditko’s point, is a good one, an interesting one.
There was a very effective episode of Magnum, PI that did this to really extraordinary effect — so much so that it’s one of my favorite episodes of that series. Magnum receives a strange telephone call from a cackling guy who promises to kill and leaves Magnum bits of nursery rhymes as clues. This pattern repeats several times, and it becomes very clear that this killer knows Magnum well and has a very specific beef with him. It’s a very well-made episode — Magnum occasionally eschewed its Rockford Files-esque tone for a kind of “Hawaii Noir” mode, usually to very good effect — but what makes it stand out is the resolution. Eventually the killer stands before Magnum, unmasked and grinning and waiting for his sick payoff…and Magnum doesn’t recognize him. Even later, after the killer has been dealt with and the whole mess is over, Magnum doesn’t remember him at all. He has to go back into his own personal records to figure out who this guy is, and it turns out that Magnum investigate the guy’s wife some years back in a possible divorce case, but the case turned up nothing at all and Magnum didn’t even take the guy’s money. I don’t recall what caused the guy to spiral into insane killing, and there’s a good chance that the episode doesn’t even fill in that detail, leaving it a complete mystery. But that’s one of the things that makes it really memorable: that the villain isn’t some significant figure from Thomas Magnum’s past; it’s just some guy with whom he had a completely mundane association for a short time years before, so mundane that he doesn’t even remember him.
Of course, I can turn this back to Star Wars. One thing that really incensed fans as the Prequel Trilogy unfolded was the idea that at the very heart of the mystery that is Darth Vader is a pathetic teenager, a guy who couldn’t get over the loss of his schoolboy crush.
It’s a hard thing, explaining villainy. Sometimes no explanation whatsoever is the most disturbing way to go.
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All that is, or was, or ever will be….
EDIT: Video link replaced.
The Neil DeGrasse Tyson/Ann Druyan helmed sequel to COSMOS, which airs in 2014, has a trailer. I love everything about it, right down to the updated “spaceship of the mind”.
Now to find out when exactly it starts airing, so I can spend the preceding thirteen weeks rewatching the original COSMOS….
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Teevee Report
This is how The Wife and I look when watching teevee. Although we usually watch stuff on the laptop. When we’re sitting in bed at night. Often I’m wearing overalls. And in general, we don’t look very Nixonish. Other than that, we look very much like these folks.
So, the 2012-2013 teevee season is in the books. How were things this year?
:: As always, favorite show goes first. So, Castle: after finally ending a kind-of rocky season 4 by finally putting Castle and Beckett in bed together, where did we go from there? Well, it was very much vintage Castle. Some of it was predictable, some of it was surprising, and most of it was a lot of fun. Seriously, Castle had a really strong season, with only a couple of “meh” episodes along the way.
I think what I like most about Castle is the fact that it’s just solid, well-made and almost always well-written traditional teevee. It’s entertaining, its got a great cast playing characters who are all different and all likeable, and there’s generally a minimum of dank, depressing stuff. That’s huge. Not everything has to be really grim and feature characters suffering through joyless lives before succumbing to violent ends.
Anyway, Castle did a lot of fun stuff with the Castle-Beckett romance. (I refuse to call this romance “Caskett”, fandom be damned!) They did the standard “We gotta keep this secret!” thing, but everybody found out in reasonably organic ways – especially Captain Gates, who at the end of one episode just matter-of-factly states, “Yeah, I know about you two. I’m not a cop for nothing.” It was nice to see the two leads get to enjoy one another, and the writers generally kept this pretty fresh, after four seasons of cat-and-mouse stuff that was starting to get a bit long-in-the-tooth. But as much as I pounded on the writers last season for stretching things out longer than they should have, they really did redeem themselves by showing, once again, that the fabled “Moonlighting curse” is pure bullshit. As I’ve said before and will continue to shout from the rooftops, Moonlighting suffered after the two leads slept together because that was the only interesting thing about them.
Meanwhile, and more importantly, Castle also finally filled in all the blanks with the mystery of the murder of Beckett’s mother. This is huge. An ongoing mytharc central-mystery story is all well and good, but this one was getting pretty maddening with the constant peeling back of yet another layer of the onion. Now we finally have our culprit: a ruthless politician, currently a Senator, named Bracken. Beckett hasn’t managed to tie him directly to her mother’s murder yet, but she knows it was him. The storyline continues, but now it’s a different tale, a “How will they get him” instead of a “Whodunit”.
So yeah, Castle had a good season. I even forgive their use of the usually-annoying ‘clip show’ device, because the clip show they did was an extra episode ABC ordered late in the year so they had little time to throw an episode together, and they used it to set up some of the doubts leading into the show’s season finale.
Nice year, Castle!
:: And on the other side of that coin, we have Bones.
This show sucks. I’m sorry, it’s just crap. The only reason it gets play in Casa Jaquandor is that the Kid likes it, and even she is starting to lose patience with it. This show is getting truly terrible, and the season finale was one of the worst I have ever seen. And believe me, folks, I have street cred when it comes to identifying terrible season finales. I remember Emma Samms getting abducted by UFOs on The Colbys, for God’s sake.
Bones has in the past had a particularly nasty killer recur throughout an entire season, and this year was no different. The problems, however, were numerous: this guy, named Pelant, is first of all played by the least charismatic actor I have ever seen play a major villain. And believe me, I have street cred on that too (remember the name of the guy who played the main villain in the second and third Pirates of the Caribbean movies? No? Well, neither does anybody else). Worse, Pelant is written horribly. He’s one of those superduper computer geniuses who can do anything with a computer, so when we see him, he’s sitting in a room somewhere with a single keyboard and several monitors. And he does things like take over an aerial drone so he can destroy a town someplace, while at the same time emptying the bank accounts of one of the main characters, so their choice is: save the town or save the money.
Or in the season finale, when he was able to use his computer to literally bring several blocks of Washington, DC traffic to a complete standstill, immobilizing one of the main characters long enough for someone he’s been manipulating (oh yeah, he’s also a psychological genius) to kill him. Now, it seems to me that if the FBI knew that there was a guy out there who could do stuff like that, they would make capturing him one of the country’s highest priorities. There would be a massive manhunt, comprising nearly every federal, state, and local law enforcement body. Not Bones, however; after this guy strikes, the leads go for a picnic. Ugly, stupid writing. And worst of all, they didn’t even catch the guy! So the worst villain on teevee will still be kicking next season, and the writers have already intimated that he may well last quite a lot longer than that.
There is nothing worse than when a teevee show’s creative team falls in love with something that sucks.
:: And then we have The Mentalist, which just kind of ekes along, never really great, never actually bad. This show’s cast deserves much better writers, too. The show will quite often start to show signs that it’s about to do something very interesting – but then they rope it back in. It’s almost as if the writers are timid; I get the sense that they are literally afraid to actually go in the direction it seems they want.
There was one episode that had Patrick Jane hallucinating his dead daughter at the age she would be had Red John not killed her. It was a fascinating trip into the darkness that must lie at Jane’s heart, but the show stepped back from that brink just as it was getting really good. Later in the season, one of the CBI higher-ups was revealed to have a very grim secret of his own from his past, and it was frankly the type of dark secret that feels too gutsy for this show. So The Mentalist keeps on trucking. I like it and still watch it, but man, does it feel like missed potential.
(I’ve given up hope that they have any intention of ever wrapping up the Red John storyline. I think that will still be unresolved when the show gets canceled. We’ll never get an answers, because at this point, Red John is too mythical in his amazing status to really be dealt with as a criminal. This is a shame, because even A. Conan Doyle knew that eventually we had to actually meet Moriarty.)
:: I’ve already written about the frustrations of being a Once Upon a Time viewer. Needless to say, the show carried those frustrations right up to the season finale, which amped things up to a cliffhanger. No big deal, that – cliffhangers are the lay of the land nowadays – but one problem with this show has always been that the writers generally are not quite good enough to maintain all the storylines they have going at once. So of course they did what such writers tend to do: they created even more storylines. The show is still fun to watch and I still love the cast (although frankly I’d watch a show that consisted of Lana Parrilla and Robert Carlyle sitting at a table, reading the phone book to one another), but it’s constantly toeing the line beyond which the show will spin out of control into a giant mess.
:: Person of Interest had a terrific second season. This show seems to me fairly underrated…either that, or I just happen to not have any friends who like it, because of all the folks I know online and off who talk about teevee shows, none of them watch this one. A pity, that – it really is a good show. This season they injected more humor, as left to its own devices, PoI can be pretty dour. The leads adopted a dog, and they have a recurring screw-up/trickster character who has the dubious distinction of being the first person whose number came up twice.
This season they finally explained just why Harold is always limping, and they moved some of the other outstanding storylines downstream a bit. Best of all, PoI doesn’t so much introduce new storylines as find interesting ways of continuing old ones. I respect that, as well as the way the show deviated from formula on occasion this year.
:: The Big Bang Theory is still hilarious, although I’ve noticed a troubling trend in which the show is moving away from treating geek-culture with loving respect and gentle kidding and toward outright mocking. But it’s still the funniest thing, week-in and week-out.
:: Two Broke Girls is my go-to for stupid sex jokes and ogling Kat Dennings. I’m still waiting for this series’s inevitable pie fight. It’s got to happen, sooner or later.
:: We actually did not adopt any new shows this year. Nothing got sufficiently high reviews from people I know to make me want to start watching any of this year’s new stuff. (Actually, not quite true – I did hear good things about The Following.) I tried Elementary, and I found it boring. We did watch Sherlock, but that deserves a post in itself. I thought I’d try Mad Men, but the pilot did nothing for me. And I just don’t have a lot of interest in the “blood, guts, and gory dysfunction” that seems to me the main motif in any “adult” series on HBO or Showtime. And yes, I know that Game of Thrones is very well made. I read the books, I know what’s coming story-wise, and I don’t care to watch what I already didn’t like reading.
:: Reality shows? Less and less. Mostly the Gordon Ramsay stuff and The Amazing Race, which is kind of dull now. Still a lot of nice travelog stuff, but I think they need to find some ways to shake up format to stay interesting.
And, that’s about it.
The single best thing I saw on any teevee show this year? This bit from Jon Stewart and his merry cohorts at The Daily Show.
We still don’t know the Russian for “Holy s***balls”, which seems to me a gaping hole in our linguistic development….
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Why DO people like “Mad Men”?
I watched the first episode of Mad Men the other night, after a number of years of reading many, many folks whose judgment I trust insisting that it’s one of the best things ever. But after just one episode, I was really baffled. The show looks and sounds amazing, and yet, after a single episode, I wasn’t sure I liked any of the characters enough to keep watching.
Then I read this post by Ken Levine:
When I’m creating a show my first rule is that I’ve got to love my characters. They may be flawed – they should be flawed – but ultimately I love them and care about them. And hopefully, I can convey that to the audience and they’ll love them too.
Again, the characters don’t have to be particularly loveable. Sweet and earnest and always-doing-the-right-thing is also boring. The best characters are complex. They may have internal battles between good and evil. They may be scoundrels but deliciously so. Or they can’t get out of their own way. Or life’s dealt them a bad hand. Or Hitler was their nanny growing up. I dunno – there are endless possibilities.
And often times the more layers the better.
But lately I’ve observed a disturbing trend. (Now the rant begins) Series creators are making their characters so hateful that I stop caring.
So apparently over time, the characters in Mad Men with whom I was not particular impressed in the first episode get even worse? Well, that settles that, then. Real life offers crappy people a-plenty to deal with. Why watch more of them on teevee?
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Some random thoughts on “Once Upon a Time”
I like this show a lot. We watch it every week. But it’s a really maddening show, because there are times it’s so wonderfully written (thank God they’ve got Jane Espenson on the staff), and other when it is so…not (too bad they can’t clone Jane Espenson).
:: Snow White / Mary Margaret is kind of irritating. She reminds me of the way Mary Ingalls was always depicted in the Little House books: insufferably good. The current storyline, of forcing her to do evil, could be interesting, but so far all they can figure out what to do is have her roll around in bed as she processes her existential crisis.
:: Regina / The Evil Queen is, by far, the most interesting character on the show. And Lana Parrilla plays her magnificently. She’s the most three-dimensional character on the show, and Parrilla captures that beautifully.
:: The next most interesting character on the show? Robert Carlyle’s Mr. Gold / Rumpelstiltskin. He seems to get the best lines, and so far, the writers have managed to keep him treading the line between good and evil in exactly the way a good Trickster character is supposed to do.
:: Come to think of it: Lana Parrilla will sadly be too old to play one of the Princesses when the totally inevitable movie of Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title) gets made, which gives me a sad, because frankly, she’d be perfect for the older of the two. She has a very expressive face and a lot of range as an actress. (As opposed to Ginnifer Goodwin, who as Mary Margaret / Snow White seems to only have two expressions: happy smile and sad smile.) Robert Carlyle has a part waiting for him, too.
:: The worst character, by far, no competition, is Captain Hook. He is awful. The guy exudes zero menace, his sexual innuendos are embarrassing since he has no charisma or chemistry at all with anybody, he only serves to show up at inopportune moments to do something evil, and then he invariably gets his ass kicked. Hook isn’t a character, he’s a plot device, and a badly-acted one at that; every single time he shows up, any energy the show has gets sucked right out. The sooner the writers come to their senses and jettison this guy, the better.
:: I hope they never show August / Pinocchio as an adult wooden guy again. That was one of the creepiest damn things I’ve ever seen. Made that episode nearly impossible to watch.
:: I like the guy who plays David / Prince Charming, but his lips are distractingly red. Seriously, I’ve never seen a guy with lips that red before. Every time he’s onscreen, at some point during the scene I find myself staring at his lips. And I won’t lie — that makes me feel a little strange.
:: Some of the mining of old stories and folklore is pretty creative. Some of it, though…I don’t really know about. The last episode seemed to be going toward some kind of Asian lore, in a Big Trouble in Little China kind of way. I’m not sure where they’re going with that.
:: I’m honestly not sure how much longer this show can last — maybe one more season? My problem is that the worldbuilding feels increasingly tenuous. The town of Storybrooke can’t interact with the ‘outside’ world? Well, OK…but it’s a modern town, with all the modern trappings, so how do they get stuff? Where does the food at the store come from? How do they get gas for the vehicles they drive? It’s a town, not a separate world.
That’s about it. The second season starts winding down tonight…I think there are only three or four episodes left. I wonder how they’ll leave things hanging?
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NOOOO!!!!!
Here’s what transpired:
1. I learn of the existence of a BBC show called Sherlock.
2. I hear good things about the BBC show called Sherlock and make a mental note that it could serve well for viewing when our regular teevee shows are in reruns or hiatuses (should that be ‘hiati’? Look that up, self….).
3. In January all our shows go to hiatus or in reruns, so we need something to watch.
4. I say, “Hey dear, there’s a show I heard of called Sherlock. It’s apparently Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, simply moved into the modern day. I hear it’s really good. Wanna try it?” She says sure, so off we go.
5. I notice that the first episode is 90 minutes, roughly.
6. I discover that the second episode is also 90 minutes. Wow, BBC shows must be really long! And there are two entire seasons to watch! This ought to take a while.
7. I learn that each of those two seasons has exactly three episodes, and that having watched three episodes, we are halfway through the existing series.
8. I react accordingly, below the fold.
KHAAANNNN!!!!
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A brief teevee observation
Tonight is apparently the 150th episode of Bones, so they’re doing something ‘inventive’: they’re doing the episode from the viewpoint of the skull of the dead victim. It’s more than a little creepy…as in, I may lay awake tonight for fear that, well, what if that’s what death is like? We get to watch helplessly as people handle our skulls?
And consider: what if the Royal Shakespeare Company always uses the same skull for productions of Hamlet? Someone may actually be playing Yorick!
UPDATE: I think what’s really hurting this episode is the obvious problem that in order to work, the skull must always be facing whatever is most important in the scene…and we also have to see a lot of scenes of the Jeffersonian team actually talking to the skull. This episode just isn’t working.
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Starin’ at the Teevee
OK, we’re now far enough into the teevee season that I can opine a bit on the shows I’m watching.
:: Oh, Castle. Castle, Castle, Castle…I must say, it’s good to have you back.
Seriously: this season has been an absolute delight thus far. They could still screw things up, as the producers came scarily close to running the show off the rails last season, but starting with last year’s season finale, they really seem to have righted the ship in a big way. I love that the verbal flirting between Castle and Beckett has finally given way to an actual relationship between the two. I love that there’s still a lot of chemistry between the two, and that the writers are so far finding interesting ways to write for two people who are in love. I love that thus far there’s no hint of the dreaded (and overblown) ‘Moonlighting Curse’. And I love that the gradual way in which the supporting cast has found out about the relationship has (a) not been drawn out, Three’s Company style, over an entire season, and (b) has taken place in ways that make sense.
Plus, the episodes have been fun. They’ve had fun mysteries, a fun science-fiction convention show with all kinds of goofy easter-eggs and references to SF stuff (not limited just to a lot of Firefly in-jokes), and they had a heck of a thriller episode with the return of the X2K killer from a couple seasons back.
Most thankfully, the ongoing “Who killed Beckett’s mom” story is now at a logical point as well. I don’t think it’s resolved, because Beckett had nothing on the guy when she finally learned who he was, but she knows who he was. I do hope that this doesn’t give the producers an excuse to keep the plot stirring for another few seasons, but if it is going to go on a bit longer, I’m glad we’re done with the ‘peeling back more layers of the onion’ phase.
Kudos, Castle.
:: Also kudos to Person of Interest, which is absolutely riveting so far this season. I am loving this show more and more, and it’s getting to the point where it’s neck-and-neck with Castle as to what I love to watch most right now. PoI’s cliffhanger last year was really well done, leaving us not with Mr. Reese in peril, but rather Finch who was endangered, in a masterstroke that kept us guessing the first couple of episodes this year. We got to see some ‘fish out of water’ stuff as Mr. Reese had to work without his boss feeding him all the information he could ever want, and there have been some interesting developments in Mr. Reese’s background as well as Finch’s, and the background of The Machine.
And the show introduced a new character: Reese and Finch now have a bad-ass dog, which is comedy gold.
Person of Interest rocks. I’m loving it.
:: What of The Mentalist? I like this show less, but it’s been pretty good this year, too. The whole ‘Red John’ thing is still awfully long-in-the-tooth, and I do still wish they’d just have done with it. But one interesting thing they’re doing on that show is exploring more the mental toll the entire pursuit of Red John is having on Patrick Jane, who seems to be skirting the edges of madness more and more. I wonder if they’re moving him in a direction of insanity at some point. Still a good show.
:: Sitcoms? I don’t watch many at all anymore. The Office has become absurd to the point that I barely bother with it. New Girl has pretty much slid off my radar screen completely. Ditto How I Met Your Mother, and I’m sorry to say, Mike and Molly. I just haven’t bothered to this point, and don’t feel strong enough about them to get caught up. That leaves 2 Broke Girls and The Big Bang Theory.
I won’t lie: I mainly watch 2 Broke Girls because of my abiding love for Kat Dennings, and that’s really about it. It’s really not a very good show, but it does have one or two laughs per episode, and I still hold out hope that a show involving two young women trying to launch their own bakery business will, at some point, put Ms. Dennings into a pie fight. Hey, I can dream. (They’ve already had the other broke girl, Beth Behrs, dumping an entire bowl of cupcake batter over her own head. A pie fight can’t be far behind.)
As for The Big Bang Theory, wow, has that show ever been on fire this season. They’ve really focused on the comedy and not so much on the Leonard-and-Penny stuff, because I think they’re realizing that if those two are going to have a relationship, the show will never really work if they try to do it ‘Ross and Rachel’ style. There have been moments, but the show has really kept a tight lid on that relationship — which allows them to focus more on the increasingly hilarious relationship of Sheldon and Amy. That’s where the comedy gold is on Big Bang, and the producers seem to realize this.
A note on Sheldon Cooper: I’ve seen comments occasionally online that basically argue that he’s just too big a jerk to watch on teevee. Here’s the thing: Sheldon is really a very unique jerk, in that unlike a lot of classic (and not-so-classic) teevee jerks (like Archie Bunker, or possibly Red Foreman, if he could be considered a ‘jerk’ at all), Sheldon has no idea that he’s a jerk. Most teevee jerks know that they are jerks and revel in it. Sheldon Cooper, on the other hand, is simply not wired the way everybody else is. He is completely mystified by social mores and understands none of them, which makes watching him like watching a learning process. When a regular teevee jerk ‘learns a lesson’, it’s usually a ‘very special episode’. Sheldon’s lesson-learning is literal learning: the guy has no idea how he’s supposed to behave, and what’s more, he can often put forth some kind of logical argument as to the silliness of the social convention he’s being asked to follow. This makes him kind of sympathetic, doesn’t it?
:: Finally: Once Upon a Time. We started watching this over the summer, having saved it up over last season in order to have something to watch in the summertime. This is a really vexing show. There are things about it that I just love completely, and the show’s entire conceit — that there’s a town in Maine whose population consists of people who are literally storybook characters who no longer realize they’re storybook characters — is a winner. And the cast is just fantastic, starting with Jennifer Morrison (whose hair makes me insanely jealous), Lana Parrilla as the Evil Queen (chewing the scenery with almost Shatner-esque verve), and the always-fantastic Robert Carlyle.
Once Upon a Time has a pretty good mythology behind it, and it does a great job with tying the fantasy stories in with the ‘realism’ ones. The dialogue is also pretty good, a lot of the time. My main problem is that a lot of the dramatic situations often seem forced, with certain episodes having characters do things that are so bizarre that it borders on being an outright idiot plot. There’s a lot of good here, but wow, there’s some stuff in Once Upon a Time that makes me want to smack the writers upside their heads.
:: Oh, the one new series that we tried and rejected was Elementary, the CBS Sherlock Holmes show. The pilot episode was boring, dour, and humorless. There was nothing about it that made us want to watch it again, so we haven’t.
And that’s where we stand with teevee right now. Anybody got any other suggestions for good shows that we’re not already watching?
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I was always sort of hoping for a Downtown Brown spin-off
This comedy short (some salty language) just makes my inner-80s-child all happy and stuff. It’s the story of a remake of…the opening credits sequence for Simon and Simon.
The second I saw that this existed, I immediately thought, “Oooooh, I can’t wait until Rick crashes the backloader through the doors of the burning warehouse!”