BLUE MAG

My second pilot review is NBC’s “Life.” It was bold to start this series with Life solving such an oogy crime as the murder of a 12-year old boy (Note: For the purpose of this review, I’m going to call the main character “Life.”). But I think it ups the ante a bit and helps create an interesting balance of serious procedural crime and light quirkyness for this high-concept show. The concept: Life was framed for an as-yet-unspecified crime, and spent 12 years in jail. He is now out, exonerated, and he has millions due to a settlement, but his wife has left him. Also he read up about Zen while in the pokey and that makes him quirky. (I hope you’re enjoying my calling him Life as much as I am.)

Continue reading “Life”: Pilot

Am I the only one who dutifully downloaded the 4 early NBC pilots from my Tivo via the Amazon Unbox service? I will be delighted to review them for you here, starting with “Bionic Woman.”

Honestly, this was not good. I’m not sure I’d watch this again. First of all, it moved way to fast. I don’t think the Bionic Woman should have full knowledge of her powers at the end of the pilot episode. It should be noted that I am not relying on any knowledge of the original series in my watching, as I have no memory of it. Maybe it makes sense in greater scheme of things for the show, and maybe there is a tie in to the original series there, but this pilot felt more like a midseason episode.

Continue reading “Bionic Woman”: Pilot

For some reason, although it lets me down every single time, I cannot stop watching NBC’s realty comedy competition program entitled “Last Comic Standing.” I guess I have always been a fan of standup comedy since I was a kid, and so it has a nostalgic feel in that regard.

One of the things that lets me down most is that like all reality programs this suffers from the as-yet-untitled casting disorder whereby they cast Doppelgangers of previous contestants. I have written about this before regarding America’s Next Top Model. This show does it too — the big fat guy (Ralphie, Lavell from the current season), the abbrasive Italian woman (Tammy Pescatelli, Debra DiGiovanni), the surprisingly offensive 20-something girl next door (Bonnie McFarland, Amy Schumer), and the I’ve-totally-sort-of-heard-of-that-guy character (Bill Dwyer, Doug Benson). And this is where my post actually starts.

Continue reading I know they’re not funnier than: Doug Benson

Summer is usually the time of year for reruns and not much else. Since the networks started selling shows on DVD or making them available for downloading (off the interweb or whatever) there has been less of a demand (if there ever was such a thing) for seeing shows a second time around. Now we have a glut of new shows running exclusively during the summer to keep us drooling monsters happy until of fall season of bliss returns. Anyway here’s what I’ve been watching: Continue reading Summer TV

I’m still loving this show. But I have a problem with last night’s episode… don’t read on if you haven’t watched.

How could Juliet have known what was on the other side of the tape? At best she could have guessed at the message’s content, but since the tape player went from Ben to Locke to Sawyer, she could not have heard it. Last week, she had told Ben on the tape that Sun was preggers and that she still had to get Kate’s sample, but they were still on for the original plan for the raid. On the tape last night, Ben confirmed the first two points, saying there would be no time for Kate’s sample but then changing the timeframe of the raid. Correct? That would have been new, urgent information for Juliet, but instead she played it like she had heard that message already. Unless of course the tape player was a feint for Locke and Sawyer’s benefit, and that the real messages were being passed some other way between Ben and Juliet. But that would just be confusing at this point. They would have had to set that up. I think this was a flub.

So was what happened to Locke, but of a different much more serious variety…

Boo on you, CW, Amy Sherman-Palladino, David Rosenthal, Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledel.
Mark my words, the series ending of “Gilmore Girls” is going to go down in TV history as the biggest letdown. A picture of Lorelai will appear in dictionaries next to the word “fizzle.” Blech.

Recently I’ve noticed this show has/had a tendency to do sloppy cuts between scenes; a character would be in a scene, that scene would end, and then we’d cut… to the same character in another scene. This always seemed just sloppy. Lorelai is at the inn, daytime, talking to Sookie… cut to Lorelai walking on the street at night. Sloppy, I say.

But when you’re wrapping up a seven season show in 2 episodes, it becomes even more egregious. Logan breaks up with Rory after proposing on the eve of her graduation from Yale, and our next cut is… Rory packing up her apartment, only mentioning that sad situation in passing? That should have been an episode and a half.

I am going to go out on a limb and blame Lauren Graham personally. It seems pretty obvious that the two central Girls wanted out of this show. They easily could have worked out a “Friends” style deal giving them enough money to buy seven CW networks, but at the end of the day they wanted out. And since Alexis Bledel is still obviously only 13 years old I blame her elder. This blood is on your hands, Lauren Graham.

Blech.

So the past few episodes of “Lost” have been pretty darn good and this begs the question: why are these episodes better than the rest? I think I have an answer or at least a theory (and everyone knows this is a show with no small shortage of theories) in the form of a name: Brian K. Vaughan. Continue reading Lost 3×17: Catch 22

I don’t know but I always assumed season one of “Friday Night Lights” would end with the Dillon Panthers losing in the Texas state championship game, thus giving them an axe to grind for a potential season two. Brett Love of TV Squad says last night’s finale answered the question of whether Coach Taylor would remain in Dillon, and while I have to assume that he will, I don’t I agree that the question was indeed answered. Instead we got FNL’s trademark cutaway shot for our last glimpse of the show until … hopefuly next fall.

I’m feeling a little bit off about last night’s episode. The energy level of the halftime pep talk seemed low. The speech was too short. The winning play was anticlimactic. I doubt they had planned a cliffhanger ending before the game ended, but the episode seemed rushed to me once the game actually started. But man, what a season. I’m pretty sure Connie Britton and Kyle Chandler make the best TV drama couple since…since I don’t know. (What’s with all the elipses today?)

Even though I’m planning to do a full season ending award post, I’m going to go ahead and tip my hand right now: This was the best new show this season. Hands down. Here’s to season two.

Just in the interest of the few people who are reading and/or helping write this site who may not have seen this this yet, I’ll go ahead and only talk about the finale after the jump. Follow at your own risk.

Continue reading Battlestar Galactica: “Crossroads, Pt. 2″ (season 3 finale)

I’ve long held to the position that Terry O’Quinn is the reason to watch ABC’s “Lost.” This is no more evident than in last night’s episode “The Man From Tallahassee” which focused on O’Quinn’s character John Locke and how he ended up in that wheelchair. Continue reading Lost: “The Man From Tallahassee” (3×13)