Chic, IL Must see TV

Yeah!!! BBC America has picked up Torchwood!

Phil

 

Come back, Heroes. Come back!!

 

Sadly, "Heroes" and my accompanying walls of blacked-out text (who doesn't love redacted commentary!?) don't return until the end of the month. 30 Rock, on the other hand, has a new episode this Thursday. Can't wait.

-Le Penguin
"This is a really special day."

[edit: oh yeah, the beginning of the end of The Sopranos is this Sunday, so it looks like blacked-out text may be around sooner than I'd thought...]

 

THE SHIELD came back yesterday. Nuff said.

Bosh

 

Great start to the 3rd season of one of my favorite shows, Deadliest Catch on Discovery.

 

this actually is a pretty awesome show. i don't make it a point to watch it, but it falls onto the long list of "shows I watch with my father-in-law while we drink beers."

also on that list: pinks, which is also awesome, and various engineering shows on the discoverys, where an annoying American in geeky glasses ends up on the other side of the world watching some giant bridge or building being constructed with insanely huge equipment.

 

Sopranos - They've really decided to go out with a "fizzle". Worst episode this season, and this is the worst season in the series.

Bosh
"Here's to my health..."

 

you are so very wrong. so, so, so very wrong.

if you want to watch people being killed in amusing ways, rent Goodfellas.

 

One of the reasons I can't watch "Friday Night Lights", despite the fact that it's the one show Magda demands to watch "live" every week, is that every football game in the show comes down to some dramatic last-second miracle. In the creators' defense, they're probably pressured into that kind of storytelling cliche' so they can give NBC a cheap payoff at the end of every episode, leaving room for more genuine dramatic developments in the interpersonal plotlines.

The Sopranos had the same sort of thing in its first two seasons; but once Pussy was killed, the show took a much quieter and daring turn. The politics of the characters' relationships (in both families) were allowed to take the spotlight over the violence. The violence is still there, but it's intentionally made unglamorous and sometimes downright mundane. What people don't always realize is that Sopranos was never about violence any more than Cheers was about getting drunk.

I'll admit, I think The Sopranos would have had a much more emotionally powerful ending if it had stopped after the fourth or fifth season, but the more recent season or so has given Chase the time to reinforce a theme that a lot of people overlooked in the show's early days: Tony Soprano is an @sshole. He's not a gruff-but-lovable guy who swears and occasionally kills but does right at the end of the day. He's a full-on self-hating narcissistic prick, an unpleasant character whose position in life nurtures the worst aspects of his personality. Check out his argument with Meadow in Season 4's "No Show" and watch Tony completely miss the point of the conversation by only talking about what's on his mind and not listening to his daughter. And Season 5's episode "Cold Cuts" managed to do the impossible: viewers actually ended up feeling sorry for Janice. Seeing his sister begin to grow beyond some of her lifelong character flaws, he tears into her mercilessly at a family dinner. He makes himself feel better by making his sister feel bad. Any long-time viewer can attest to how f###ing horrible someone has to act in order to make the viewers feel bad for Janice (Janice, for poop's sake. I HATE her with as much hatred as I'm willing to devote to a fictional character.)

This week's pseudo-season premiere featured more of that kind of sickening character development, most notably in Tony's varying reactions to to the fistfight when he was drunk vs sober.

Is The Sopranos past its prime? Yeah, I have to agree there.

Is it fizzling? Only if you define "fizzle" as "less goombahs gettin' shot in the head every episode."

-Le Penguin,
still hoping Jamie-Lynn Sigler agrees to one brief and tasteful nude scene...

 

SOPRANOS SPOILERS BELOW
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Oh Springer, I totally respect your uncanny ability to analyze TV shows & movies on such an intellectually advanced level. Please let me know when there's more violence on the show so I can watch it and not be so bored.

Anyway, as good as the Soprano family dynamic (or stagnation) is a key element, so is the rest of the show. Sunday's installation IMHO would have been better had it not just been (mostly) a single hour of the four of them at the lake. The good parts were good, but most of it felt like filler. A lot of the first half of the season felt like filler. Like this entire season was made only to give the franchise another year of work. Despite the intriguing 45 out of 60 minutes we got Tony's birthday party, we aren't getting the Emmy Award winning material of the past (though I think that's been established). A lot of what made the Sopranos so awesome was interactions of the family with temporary side characters like Richie & Ralphie, especially when they warranted their own story-lines. The Sopranos deserved a whole season devoted to an end arc. Instead we got the "went-nowhere-did-nothing" Vito story for the first half of the season. So, due to pizz-poor planning (or contract negotiations) they're going to try to end the show in just a few episodes? I suppose Tony's going to go to prison for life on a lame gun charge a la Capone and taxes? Let's quickly write that in in the first five minutes of the mid-season premiere!!

Anyway Matt, you can continue to defend S6 as being so wonderful since you're obviously experiencing it on a level that me and the 2 million viewers that the show lost since first half of the season aren't.

D'
"Then there's the point that while I didn't mention violence in my original post but it seems to be on both of your minds you projecting pukes!"
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-Sopranos Spoilers Above

 

SOPRANOS SPOILERS YOU FREAKS!

so you liked 45 out of 60 minutes, but you're still calling it just "another year of work"?

pengy hit on the head exactly what this show has become--an unflinching character study of an awful person. what's fascinating to me now is that I think he may honestly think he is trying to be a better person since the attack by uncle junior, but he can't help himself.

then you layer in the supporting character levels--carmela, defending Tony to Janice even in the face of his absolutely abhorrent behavior, herself out to preserve her lifestyle just as much as Tony is. Bobby, who may be the most stable and centered character on the show, and his seasons-long transformation from bumbling henchman to confident gangster. janice, who carries the same baggage Tony does, just in different ways.

The TINY moments on this episode are better than a full hour of ANYTHING else on TV--including BSG, The Office, 30 Rock, Andy Barker, you name it. A.J.'s passing comment about how that's not how things work in "his neighborhood." Meadow's totally misplaced and unearned "righteous anger" about her dad's imprisonment. Tony sitting in a holding pen with the other thugs, the toppling kingpin, looking out emptily while a scraggly dude takes a DUMP in the background.

I'll put that up with the most resonant images ever shown on the series.

For me, this show has gone beyond being "television." It's some stunning new form of art that we may not understand for years. I'm sorta serious here. Ideas of "pacing," "plotting," "character development"--you can't apply the old TV models to this show. It really is a novel in moving pictures, with all the depth that implies.

RIGHT. because we both know the best shows on television are the ones with the best ratings.

 

You're right about your summary of the plot and character descriptions. That doesn't make it fascinating. And I was being sarcastic about liking 45 minutes of the show being devoted to the birthday party....completely sarcastic. The Sopranos, like the Simpsons was best when the writers had several decent plots going on at the same time. 5 years ago they could have taken that 45 minutes, handled it in 15. I remember one of the best things about the first few seasons is that they would end a scene at a point where you were BEGGING to see more, but didn't need to. Now it's the opposite, I find myself thinking....I wonder what's going on with AJ's party....What's going on with Chris? And defending this episode as development is an oxymoron as it'd be "static development" in the sense that no one's changed since last season at least.



Bosh
"You and Le Peng should go back a cake together."

Edit- I swapped Since for Sense....my wife pointed it out...really.

 

My Name is Earl - NEW!
The Office - NEW!
30 Rock - NEW!

It is gonna be a good night

AMIRITE GUYZ?!?!

 

I know nothing of these Sopranos that you all speak of, but I did listen to an interesting story on Friday Night Lights. It just recently won a Peabody award which is making me rethink my stereotype on football shows.

 

I heard it was gonna get the axe though.

 

The Shield - Still Great!!

Lost - Still not as good as it can be, but better than it has been.

Bosh

 

amen. i think there's an element of "oh crap, the season's ending?! we haven't gotten anywhere this season! time to start pumping out information and answering questions!" but i'm not complaining.

 

Now that was a good Sopranos episode! And not just for the awesome gangland slaying.

D'

 

The first two episodes so far have reminded me of a line from Watchmen:

Veidt: I did the right thing, didn't I? It all worked out in the end.

Dr. Manhattan: "In the end"? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.

 

Anyone who wondered what went wrong with Studio 60 during its short run need only take a quick look at the show through Conan O'Brien's eyes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMiGjSabTjI

 

I was reading a review someplace that talked about how the first episode of the season was really a slow-paced character study, sorta a "Where's Tony now" for this season, and then episode two really kicked the plot into high gear.

I totally agree. Both were great episodes, but there was so much great plot stuff in this second episode.

 

Earl and 30 Rock all new! TONIGHT! YEAH!

 

I started the 1st 20 min of the 2 hour premire of Drive on Fox so when I finish that I'll give ya my thoughts...but the only real reason why I wanted to watch it, was because Mel from Firefly is in it...plus the good look ladies.

 

I've started watching HBO's "Rome", which technically isn't running anymore but still feels new to me. I'm two episodes in (***, only two per disc??) and so far it's pretty good. Solid acting all round, good production values, and (from what I remember) fairly close adherence to history. It'll be interesting to see how far they'll extend their poetic license, seeing as how we're dealing with three of the most important individuals in human history (Caesar, Cleopatra, Octavian/Augustus.)

As a side note: there's a lot of skin so far. This show is for the guys as much as "300" was for the ladies. However, while I do believe that Roman women shaved their underarms (in fact, I think many Roman men did as well), I find it tough to believe that the ladies in question also went so far as to have landing strips...

-Le Penguin
"I want him fighting wild, wabid animals within a week!"

 

Rome is on my 'Flix queue on the recommendation of another friend. I understand it is quite addictive.

"The Black Crusaders are out to get Tracy Jordan!"