April 2013
2 posts
5 tags
Hemlock Grove: Mildly Toxic
I’ve been enjoying House of Cards, Netflix’s most recent big foray into original drama. And my fondness for teen werewolf drama is regrettably well-documented. So Hemlock Grove, its new series from novelist Brian McGreevy, Lee Shipman, and tiresome goremeister Eli Roth, should be right up my alley. I’ve been looking forward to it for months, in fact.
Unfortunately, Hemlock...
8 tags
"Hannibal" Conquers Crime-Show Conventions
Network TV is thickly carpeted with corpses.
No. 1 network CBS has built the foundation of its ratings success on more than a decade’s worth of bodies, piling up by the week in its various procedurals; often female, often unclothed, killed in ways both improbable and somehow depressingly mundane. But along the way, network crime shows — and many of their cable counterparts —...
March 2013
1 post
6 tags
Mission to Mars
UPDATE: Well, that was fast.
Back in the day, I cultivated a regrettably well-earned reputation as TeeVee’s resident Veronica Mars superfan. And while time, Dax Shepherd, and sloth-induced hysterical crying jags have diminished my fanboy ardor somewhat, the show still easily ranks in my personal all-time TV top 10.
So I’m more than a little psyched to see that Mars creator Rob...
February 2013
2 posts
Revisionist History 401
David Guarascio and Moses Port seem like really, sincerely nice guys. Which, upon reflection, may be the problem.
See, they’ve taken over the reins of NBC’s brilliant Community — with apparently genuine reluctance, as befits their nice-guy status — from its stupidly ousted creator, Dan Harmon. And while Harmon is certainly capable of kindness, the persona he chooses to...
Getting Smashed
As a playwright and theatre producer type, I watched all of the first season of SMASH with amusement. It wasn’t “hate-watching,” it was “disappointment television.” The show survived, thanks to NBC’s ratings woes, but there was a regime change in the interim. They recognized that much of the show wasn’t working, and they moved to address that.
Details leaked out here and there. Main...
December 2012
2 posts
1 tag
An actor with an odd, intense face.
Sometimes, I picture him at a pool table, gone to his eternal reward until someone wants to play the best. No. He’s a side man, blowing his horn, hoping against hope that something will click, something will change. But it doesn’t. So he steps in front of a truck. No. He’s a low-level mob guy, he’s gotten a phone call, his son is dying in a war halfway around the...
Late to the Party: God Help Me, But MTV's "Teen... →
associatevidiot:
Shame has kept me silent until now, but I just gotta say it: MTV’s Teen Wolf is a pretty great show.
I know, I know. It’s a needless reboot of an ever-more-irrelevant bit of ’80s pop culture flotsam, given a heavy gloss of Twilight for the basest of cash-in purposes, airing on a network that has basically become a 24-hour advertisement for skin care products, poor life choices,...
May 2012
4 posts
Beware the Doppeldeaner →
associatevidiot:
Few great TV shows can continue to thrive without their original showrunners. The seasons of Joss Whedon’s Buffy and Angel that he entrusted to Marti Noxon and Jeffrey Bell are universally considered both series’ weakest. …
Intro to Television Adaptation
Sony expelled Dan Harmon.
Less than twenty-four hours in and there are already plenty of posts about it, not least of which is Harmon’s own account. All of them note that the new showrunners, Moses Port & David Guarascio, were more recently consulting producers on “Happy Endings.” Some wonder about how the tone of the show might change without Harmon at the wheel. Others...
A reprogrammed, debugged TRON.
Either Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz learned to write better at some point between their screenplay for TRON: LEGACY and now — an uncertain notion, given their cutesy-wutesy dwarves-hatching-from-eggs episode of Once Upon a Time — or it’s a lot easier to craft an entertaining story without studio executives breathing down your neck. Whatever the case, their pilot episode for...
Hoosier Daddy
It’s Thursday night. The 10 year old wants to stay up to see the season finale of one of his favorite shows. He sings along with the theme. ”Jabba the Hutt, Jabba the Hutt, Jabba the Hutt, Jabba the Hutt…” The 7 year old dances along.
Yes, yes, it’s a school night. But the 10 year old is a fan of “Parks and Recreation.” I can’t help that NBC...
February 2012
6 posts
The Name's Afoot
Having failed to come to an agreement to do a straight-up American version of the BBC’s Sherlock, CBS has gone in a completely different direction. They’ve greenlit ElemeNtarY, a pilot which updates Sherlock Holmes to the present day, but sets it in NY. (You see what they did there, yes?) They’ve cast Jonny Lee Miller, who just did a tremendous run on stage in Frankenstein,...
Learn from my mistakes: Why abusive TV...
Sometimes I wish I could forget that this pilot was kind of great.
My name is Serenity, and I have a problem.
I’m shackled to shows past their expiration date, even though I know they’ve gone sour and everything in my brain is screaming to stop the madness. Heck, even when I spend most of that 42 minutes of air time fiddling with my iOS device, playing Tetris or some other bit of...
Marketable Princesses, Assemble!
associatevidiot:
Last fall, ABC debuted Once Upon a Time, its umpteenth attempt to duplicate the success of Lost — this time, with fairy tales. Fans of Bill Willingham’s long-running comic book Fables quickly began grousing that the show was a cheap ripoff of a proposed, but scuttled, TV version of the comic. Willingham has since graciously doused those rumors, but I think his fans were half...
3 tags
The Objects of Lady Edith Crawley's Affection
(A Comprehensive List)
Patrick Crawley, her first cousin, fated to wed her sister Mary. Drowned on the Titanic. (Or did he?)
Matthew Crawley, her third cousin, utterly unmoved by the erotic power of local church architecture.
Sir Anthony Strallan, kindly fiftysomething refugee from a Monty Python sketch about absent-minded vicars.
That one farmer guy who was OK with her wearing pants and...
I’m amused by all the stories that borrow from the press release about Matthew Perry joining The Good Wife as “an attorney from Chicago,” as opposed to all the other characters in this show about…attorneys…in Chicago…
“Television is a medium because it is neither rare nor well done.”
– Ernie Kovacs 