Why is this coffee being poured so hard that most of it is flying away?

I’ve been busy lately, so I fell behind on my Being Erica reviews. Apologies, readers. Instead of writing each one up individually, I want to talk about these as a group of episodes that have really responded to my problems with this season. They’ve all explored the mythology of the doctors and how Erica’s journey to become one is going to affect her life, which is the most interesting aspect of the show, and simultaneously the one that sets it apart from other shows about people having and ending relationships, friendships, etc. More after the break.

“If I Could Turn Back Time” deals with giving Erica almost-free reign with time travel/manipulating time and space powers. The structure reminds me of the Buffy episode “Earshot,” wherein she develops the ability to hear people’s thoughts. Brief summary: starts off using it for comedy (some choice quotes here), then over the course of the episode shows the way that having abilities and abusing them can hurt the people around you.

This is essentially what happens in “If I Could Turn Back Time,” which ends with Adam breaking up with Erica again, because she messed with his life, abusing her power. It’s a necessary lesson to teach when training people to be magic time traveling therapists, and the more Being Erica shows of that intriguing journey from patient to doctor, the better. Also, Adam was boring (in further comparison to Buffy, Adam on that show also was boring).

This episode shows the downside not only of abusing one’s powers, but also of being a Doctor. We see it two episodes later, in “Please, Please Tell Me Know” (or is it “…Now”? IMDB and other sites have it as Know, but seems awfully typo-ish), when Dr. Tom is out with his newest ladyfriend and runs into Adam. Unable to tell her what he does, Dr. Tom is risking alienating Amanda for a second time. The same thing could happen to Erica, and is foreshadowed by Erica revealing her desire to tell Julianne, or anyone, for that matter, about her secret double life as a time traveler.

Purposefully captured extremely awkward look

Let’s move on now to discussing “Being Ethan” and “Please, Please Tell Me Know” (ugh). “Being Ethan” focuses on Erica’s past, and the latter on her future (and a visit from Future Dr. Erica, who has weird Future hair!). Ethan is not a character that I like. I never understood why he and Erica were such good friends, while her connection with her other friends, completely absent this season, was always easy to understand. Regardless, this episode didn’t work as well as the other two in this trilogy of doctor-learning. It went back to the structure of the early episodes, where Erica helps someone, and everything turns out super-happy, because a couple chats with Erica make Ethan see the error of his ways and go back to his girlfriend.

It did feature Erica air-strangling Emmett, which was gold, but the rest of the episode played out predictably, and I don’t have much else to say on the subject.

Grrrr, Karpluk angry!

“Please, Please Tell Me Know” took a different turn, abandoning any kind of typical episode structure for full-out wackiness. We learn some really confusing things about timelines, revisit the “Erica dies in the future” plot to good effect, and see more of Brent and Julianne’s blossoming love. I enjoyed the episode focusing on another element of how doctor-training/being involved in time travel can affect your life. Erica thinks she knows when she will die, and panics, causing trouble at work and in her personal life. It was disconcerting, though, that this is only affecting Erica now. She’s known about it for a while, so it seems artificial she is only reacting negatively to it now. In any case, that plot winds down in this episode, so it’s likely the last we’ll hear of Erica-dies-in-the-future for now.

Future Erica comes out of left field, as I think most new elements of doctor training have. It’s thrust upon Erica with little explanation, just like when she first started the therapy, entered group therapy, and then finally told she was being trained. This works for the show; dwelling too long on the full-on craziness of multiple timelines for too long would likely drag down the show, just as when Lost really took the time to answer questions, the answers were never as fun as the questions.

There was no new episode this week, so let’s hope next week continues the mostly-solid streak of these three episodes.

The title sure is apt

Today, something different! Kevin Scott, a friend of mine, made his own TV show called APT. It’s a sitcom about three roommates and their apartment. It’s available on YouTube, and for Toronto residents, Rogers TV. He graciously allowed me to interview him about his show. We talk about the creation of the show, decisions made around the setting and plot, getting it on the air, and plans for the future. Enjoy, and go watch APT, starting with episode 1, to support Kevin! It’s free on the Internet.

Andrew: What made you decide to use your apartment as a setting? Is it because it would be expensive/difficult to shoot in the outside world?

Kevin: I used to do sketch comedy, so budget was and is always a concern. So I was thinking about possible ideas that could be done on the cheap, and I wanted to do something story-based not sketch-based. So I thought about locations I could use that wouldn’t cost much or nothing at all. And a typical sitcom uses an apartment setting, in addition to others, so I thought I would just use the one set, the apartment. And guess who had an apartment?

You did! Not many people have apartments.

Well, everyone does! Everyone could make a show in an apartment if they wanted to. So I thought I could tell funny stories on the cheap, so that’s why I decided to set it in an apartment.

Did you ever feel limited in your storytelling ability by your decision to set it in an apartment?

Definitely, I think from doing sketch comedy, you are always thinking about budget. So I’m so used to writing for budget that I will cut ideas out of my mind very quickly if it’s too expensive. The problem sometimes is that we have scenes where you think “That scene should probably take place outside the apartment, how do I get that scene to happen inside the apartment?” There are episodes that I watch now and go, “that doesn’t make sense that that scene would be in the apartment!” Sometimes it seemed contrived to get a scene in the apartment, which really should have taken place outside the apartment. That’s the biggest thing that comes up.

And you had to have a lot of stuff happen off screen, like the episode with the party and the sweater–you couldn’t see any of it happen because it wasn’t in your apartment.

That’s right. We had toyed with the idea of having photographs of the party, just quick snapshots. We were going to have a party, and we were going to take snapshots. But we ended up deciding that that would be cheating on the rule of not leaving the apartment.

The sweater in question

So was that actually a rule that you set up for yourself?

After a while it became a rule, yeah.

But you still had the lobby.

Yes, but that doesn’t break the rule because people are watching it on the TV from inside the apartment. The closest we came to breaking the rule was people outside the door, taking a shot from behind them looking into the apartment. We extended the rule to include looking into the apartment. Colin, who shoots the episodes, the cinematographer, felt guilty, like we were cheating on the rule by shooting from the hallway. But the rule became if you were looking into the apartment whatsoever, you were fine.

So what was the craziest idea you had that you had to cut out for any reason, budget, couldn’t be done in the apartment, etc.?

We had a lot of crazy ideas that were just too out there. One that we did that might still get made at some point is where we find a portal in the apartment, and one person goes through the portal. And the other two talk about what to do, do we go in after him, that sort of thing.

I immediately thought about having an alternate universe, with evil Kevin, and that sort of thing.

That was an idea that came up. That he goes through the portal, and it’s the same apartment, but all skewed and exaggerated. We talked about making everything the same except the opposite, but we would have had to move everything in the apartment. That might be what you’re talking about budgetary constraints. It would be a bitch to move everything around and back into place afterward.

That’s the kind of thing you can’t do because you have so few people involved in the show instead of a whole crew.

And we’d need an actual set, so we wouldn’t have to mess up where we live.

[Kevin tries to read my notes and questions that I had written down, pre-interview. I offer him the chance to read the questions himself, he declines.]

How did the process work, going from an idea for a TV show, or an idea of wanting to do a TV show, and making it, going from putting it on YouTube and then later taking it to Rogers TV? How did that process go from start to YouTube to Rogers?

I’m glad that you asked that. Good question! Well, it wasn’t initially conceived as a TV show, but me and my bro Curtis, who should get a mention, and Colin, were going to do a project that was very sketch-based at first. And we were pretty far along in the process, we had a bunch of scripts. It was going to be one of those deals where each skit ties into the next, like Mr. Show, with David Cross and Bob Odenkirk [who is Saul, from Breaking Bad, not Saw, from the Saw franchise, despite a slight misunderstanding]. We were trying to do something like that, and then right before we were going to shoot it, I just wasn’t that excited.

You just wanted to try something different?

I wanted to do something more story-based. More funny story-based, that wasn’t just a series of sketches that were just one joke, just get in get out. I wanted to use a three-act structure.

That lets you tell one story in a bigger, longer period of time, like the sweater episode, which stretches out the story of the sweater from beginning to end.

It was kind of like a Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm thing, where I wanted to have storylines intersect sometimes. That one has it more than others, but it happens in other episodes as well. I wanted funny stories, rather than just premises for skits where there isn’t much reality to it, just jokes.

Did you enjoy getting to work with the same characters, and trying to differentiate between them?

The portrayal of all the characters went like this: Graeme was the straight-man, who I refer to as the Paul Rudd, who reacts to everything, hopefully in a funny way. I was the fool, so nothing like my actual personality. And Roman is the wild card.

The best scene with Roman is in the episode with the gun where he’s sweating a lot while holding the gun.

Yeah, that was Colin’s idea. As soon as anyone held the gun, they would be drenched in sweat.

Roman's got a gun

So did you guys spray each other with water or go to the sink?

We had a spray bottle on set, actually. We shot another episode where there was a storm, and whenever someone would enter the apartment, they’d have to be drenched in water. So we would just get in the shower before shooting.

We got a bit off topic, let’s go back to talking about the process of creating the show and putting it online.

I set about writing, I wrote the first eight, I believe, and they were all 10-page scripts, 8-minute episodes. We started shooting them, and putting them online. [Kevin tells a "funny story" that we eventually decide is just a happy ending coincidence story. Also, the "funny story" happened right around two years ago!] I heard from a brother’s girlfriend’s cousin that Rogers TV was looking for new content. So we went to the Rogers TV website, where we pitched the show, and put a link to the YouTube channel. Then in December I heard back that they wanted to take a meeting. We discussed the project, and they committed to showing the first ones that we had, a special one episode with what we had. Then they committed to six episodes. [Kevin would also like to thank this cousin that mentioned Rogers TV to him.]

What was Rogers’ initial reaction to APT?

Well, when I went in to meet with Rogers, I thought I was going to meet with the original woman that I’d pitched the show to. But when I went in to have the meeting, it was with someone completely different, and I had to pitch the show all over again. I was pitching the show, describing the characters, saying that one is like Kramer, one is the buffoon, and Brian [the Rogers employee] said, “so he’s like the Costanza?” And so I knew he was alright. The swearing though was also a thing.

What’s Rogers TV, is that just network TV swearing level, you can’t say fuck?

I’m learning as I go, as to what they can and can’t show. Definitely your fucks, shits, motherfuckers, Carlin’s seven dirty words, can’t say any of those. We had already done 6 episodes that ahd swearing in t hem.

You probably had all of the 7 words in there.

The episode “The Cake Thief” involves us saying the word shit a lot, and it never aired on Rogers. For some of the others, we did some great, great dubwork. But this episode just had too many shits.

What did you change the swearing into, how did that work?

We tried to cut as much of the swearing as possible. We bleeped some swearing. One of the ones that Rogers bleeped is when we changed “motherfucker” to “motherfather,” and they still bleeped it!

I think they must have just not heard it right. Motherfather is just nonsense!

That was the packing heat episode, that had the most swearing. There was one where Graeme said “fucking assholes, both of you” and we changed it to “friggin hassles,” which I thought was great. Colin gets credit for that one, good idea! That didn’t get bleeped, but if you say friggin hassles, it sounds a lot like friggin assholes. Edgar Wright is really funny when he dubs stuff, he uses the same word for fuck every time for the PG-13 version. He actually wants to make the TV/PG-13 version dubbing as bad as possible, with no variation to make the words realistic in those versions.

One more thing on the censoring: we had an episode recently that I thought was okay, but apparently they didn’t. The premise of the episode was that I get handcuffed to my bed, and over the course of the episode, 4 days, eventually I have to go to the bathroom, so I pee in a bottle, and they wouldn’t show the pee in a bottle on the air. They blocked it out. They put a block over the pee, and the block was so bad that you could still see the pee! So why even bother censoring that if people could see it anyway?

So they were okay with you getting fake shot, and having a gun around the apartment, but no peeing in bottles?

Yeah, or just no pee at all on the air, apparently. We all do it. You pee, I pee. It seems like they should be able to show natural bodily functions. I never heard from them though, I thought someone would say “what’s with the pee?” but that never happened.

So they don’t give you a list of things you can’t put on the air?

Well they gave me an initial list, which included three things: no swearing, no violence, and no bloodshed.

But you had violence and bloodshed!

Well, there’s no actual violence and bloodshed, it’s all faked. They actually didn’t want to air that episode first, because they weren’t sure if they could show it. So they showed the episodes out of the order until they got the okay to air that one. I feel like we got away with one there, though. We came pretty close to violence and bloodshed. I feel like we won the battle. But there’s a lesson learned at the end of the episode, that guns are bad.

One more question: what’s the next step?

I just handed over the last episode yesterday, actually. Last night I went home and didn’t know what to do with myself, I didn’t have to worry about episodes anymore. The next step is to put together a nice DVD of all the episodes, some commentary, maybe a gag reel, and shop it around, make up some good pitches. The best part of the bitch is that we’ve already done the show, so it would be cheap. Maybe CBC, or the Comedy Network. The ultimate goal would be to get paid to have it on television.

What would your dream writing job be, on a show that’s airing now?

Either Parks and Rec or Community. I’d just like to get paid to write, though ideally I’d get to do this show, because it’s my own show.

What is this "party" I am apparently attending?

Well, I got what I asked for. Last week I talked about how this season of Being Erica was overly light-hearted and filled with happy endings. This week was another Dr. Tom backstory episode, as well as giving a bit more info on Dr. Naadiah, both of which were welcome. More after the break.Tom is one of the darkest characters on the show. He’s divorced, has no friends, a bad relationship with his daughter. All he has is patients. And what did he learn this week? That his engagement with Amanda fell apart because of his mistakes, not Amanda’s. That his father isn’t happy with the choices he’s made in life. That it’s possible to be a Doctor and have a life, as Dr. Naadiah showed him.

At some point, though, this moved away from backstory to the beat up on Dr. Tom hour, where he’s completely wrong about everything in his life. It was more than what was necessary to get the message across. We’ve seen in previous episodes, and especially previous Dr. Tom flashbacks, that he doesn’t really have a life, and maybe doesn’t even want one. It would have been nice to build on that, focus a bit more on his daughter, rather than introducing us to his father and his ex-fiancee all in one episode, which was a bit too much story to handle.

This episode also continues the trend this season of focusing on one character each episode, which means we get to spend a lot less time with Erica. Always unfortunate. Dr. Tom flashbacks are just not as entertaining as Erica flashbacks are–she’s got a much lighter, funny approach to getting the moral/answer out of each time travel. The other thing Erica-centric episodes have going for them is their furthering of her becoming a doctor storyline, which I had thought would be this season’s dominant storyline, just like last year’s group therapy plot. Unfortunately, that aspect of the season is progressing slowly, and not going into the interesting process of how someone becomes a magic time traveling doctor.

The episode’s B-story, Kai returning to the present, is something I’m going to reserve judgment on. He was mainly interesting in season 2 because he was the first person Erica met who was also in therapy. Now that she has Adam, and a bit more of an open relationship with Dr. Tom, I’m not sure why Kai needs to come back. He was never very interesting in his own right, and this thing where he comes back on a regret and just stays for a long time seems to go against how everyone else deals with going back on regrets. And why would his Doctor let him go back, after he refused to finish his regret when he was sent to the present back in season 2?

I just hope Kai’s storyline involves more than just him coming back to cause problems for Erica and Adam, who pulled a “don’t see him anymore!” jealous TV-boyfriend thing. Ugh. Give me more Erica-therapy-training, less letting Erica slide into the background for storylines that just don’t measure up.

Moment of the episode: Erica making weird screechy noises after giving Adam tickets to see The Thing.

Weird noises! Horns!

I hope Nathan Fillion comes back if the show returns

I don’t really like web series. I think the medium, overall, is inferior to 20- or 40-minute blocks of television. 2-10 minute segments are extremely short, and unless it’s a show going solely for laughs, such as NTSF:SD:SUV::, I just don’t think web series can be as involving as more traditional TV shows. So that’s how I felt when I started watching Husbands, a new series that just finished its first season, from executive producer Jane Espenson, who is famous for a lot of cool stuff. Full review and spoilers for season 1 after the break.

Season 1 of Husbands is 11 episodes long, at about 2-3 minutes each. So in total it’s around the length of a 30-minute show, if a bit longer (this is on purpose: I think they aim to sell this as a pilot to a network/cable channel). It’s about Brady Kelly and Cheeks getting drunkenly married and going through with it instead of having the marriage annulled.

Over the course of the series, Cheeks and Brady face the same problem in varied forms. They don’t know each other that well, and now they have to figure everything out all at once. Brady screws up, Cheeks screws up, and all of it is extremely personable and adorable, but repetitive. Part of the reason it feels more repetitive than a typical pilot is that you watch 20-30 minutes worth of story over a month, rather than straight through. So instead of getting all of the setup over at once, the installments are more repetitive simply because they have less show-time in a longer period of real-time.

Of the 11, “Normal People” is easily my favourite episode because it relaxes and doesn’t do the fight-make up-be scared cycle. It’s a lot funnier than the other segments (Cheeks: “Other than a national press campaign, what else do normal people do?”), and as Alan Sepinwall says, funny forgives a lot. The other episodes are very watchable, occasionally funny, and always great at showing how two people (gay or straight) would act with each other in the event of an unplanned marriage. But they all tell one story, and as something that’s broken up into 11 episodes, I found that structure frustrating at times. But I like the characters and the comedy, and that’s a lot more than I can say for most network comedy shows that premiered this year.

The other main character of the show, Haley, also adds to the funny and takes away from the repetitive drama (“I fucking love furniture!” she says, in “Normal People,” another excellent line from that segment). If the show becomes a traditional TV comedy, or even just goes on to season 2 of a web series, a lot of the problems I had with the show will likely disappear; they’ll make the show’s world bigger, give Haley more to do, and be past the initial setting up of the story.

The big gay elephant in the room

Obviously, this show has some politics to it. I am strongly in favour of gay marriage/equality rights, so on that level I am very happy that a show like this exists, and hope that it will gain a wider audience someday and give the world an excellent portrayal of same-sex marriage. And that’s all I have to say about that.

Erica doesn't even play golf in this episode

Being Erica has always been a mixture of a bunch of ideas. Sometimes it’s a strangely mythology-focused hour, getting into what happens in this mystical therapy (especially last season, with all the time travel and group therapy stuff). Other times it’s more a straight up dramedy, with a bit of a big-city Gilmore Girls-esque feel to it. This week was more of the latter, with a time travel story typical of the show. Spoilers and reactions after the break.Yesterday’s time travel story involved high school antics, which I always find amusing if only to see Erin Karpluk’s reactions to the ridiculousness that goes on. The flashbacks definitely have a more comedic feel to them, since these days Erica is more confident. You can see this in how she reacts to Zach, the douchey guy who “buys” her at the auction. And like most of Erica’s good intentions in the flashbacks, she messes up and probably makes things worse, while learning something about herself. No surprises there.

This week’s episode was also unquestionably a Brent-centric one, which makes me happy because Brent is one of the more entertaining supporting characters (better than Erica’s high-school friends in the current day). However, it’s always a bit awkward when Being Erica brings back a generally sidelined character (last week, Erica’s mom) and does an entire episode about that character, but I find Brent endlessly entertaining, so I don’t mind. This episode, combined with last week’s, have been too after-school-special-y, though. Last week ended with Erica’s mom meeting her long-lost son, and this week with Brent not agreeing to screw over 50/50 press.

I like Being Erica better in the small moments. How she deals with Dr. Tom in her weekly sessions, compared to earlier seasons (her first reaction to Dr. Tom bringing up the list: “Come on with the list, didn’t you hear what I just said?”), and how she genuinely tries to give people good advice, and take the advice herself, even if it often ends up doing more harm than good.

I hope as the season progresses that we get less “hey look how happy everyone is at the end of the episode” and more interesting conflicts. And of course, more completely unrealistic portrayals of publishing. (Full disclosure: I work in publishing in Toronto, and this show is very silly in that department.)

Random meta joke of the episode: The actress who plays Jenny was actually in Degrassi. As I’ve said before, meta-TV jokes make me laugh.

And my favourite moment of the episode:

Erica: "No." Zach: "Okay, Erica strangely boring."

Note: People have been getting to this post by googling who showed up at the end of this episode. It was Kai, the guy from the future who had a band and used to work at Goblins.

Matthew, and others, have different outfits in season 2

When I tell people that I watch Grey’s Anatomy, or Awkward., or The Vampire Diaries, I have to defend my reasons for watching. For Grey’s, well, I’ve been watching it for 6+ years and I’m not likely to stop until it’s over. Awkward. is adorable. The Vampire Diaries is much better than its title, subject matter, and initial episodes. One show that I don’t need to make excuses for is Downton Abbey. Sure, on the surface it’s got an Upstairs/Downstairs British soap coating to it, but that’s not what makes me love it. More after the break, including some general spoilers on season 2, but I’ll try to avoid anything specific.

Note: I’m watching on the British schedule, and this season won’t air on American channels for a while.

The first season of Downton opened with the sinking of the Titanic. That propelled the season forward, bringing one of the show’s major characters into the action. The historical backdrop that the writers chose is more than just a plot point that pushes the main story forward. I don’t know about you, but I don’t really have a lot of TV-watching experience when it comes to people losing their heirs on large boats that sank. Getting to see how this one death affects an entire family, and a large cohort of servants, is unique to Downton.

One of the best parts about the class-related drama is that it’s not limited to the obvious lower-upper class line. There’s a lot of conflict between the various levels of the upper and lower classes, as seen through Matthew Crawley and his mother, and the way different levels of servants feel about each other.

Downton also is not afraid of change. A ton of stuff happens over the course of each season, from technology to war to characters maturing and changing. The bits with technology are often played for comedy–there’s a scene with the Dowager Countess of Grantham (Maggie Smith) and a telephone in season 2 that is laugh-out-loud funny–but it is endlessly intriguing to me to see people react to technology that is nearly obsolete or at least taken for granted by people nowadays.

(Another great example of this type of storytelling, that is, introducing technology that’s new to characters but old to us, is the story of Tom Nuttall and his bicycle in season 2 of Deadwood.)

New look for Downton

Downton wasn’t content to sit on its laurels in season 2, which begins literally with a bang in the early goings of World War One. Even more so than season one’s Titanic-related plot, WW1 drives a great deal of the action, to great effect. Some of the more memorable and emotional storylines revolve around the following: (I’ll do my best to be vague and not give away entire stories, but if you want to remain pristine, don’t read the bullet points.)

• The idea of how best to support men going off to war, and the war effort in general, for various classes of people, and in various ways
• The breakdown of class barriers, though slow, in times of war
• Societal changes in wartime, and differences in expectations about what will happen when the war is over

I’m looking forward to the last few episodes, and I hope that if you’re not already a fan, that I might convince you to become one.

Eep

Note: I haven’t read the books. This post is solely based on the TV series, though I’m told the pilot matches the beginning of the book quite closely.

I’ve had this theory ever since I finished watching the first season of Game of Thrones that the first scene of the pilot was the most important in the whole first season. Why? Keep reading. Spoilers after the break.

The first scene consists of a bunch of the Night’s Watch getting slaughtered by the supernatural beasties known as the White Walkers. This sets the tone, and expectation, for the whole rest of the first season. Imagine the show started with Ned executing the deserter–all you’d know is that there was a deserter spouting theories about seeing something at night in a forest, and as viewers we wouldn’t know whether to believe him or not. Having the information beforehand–that the threat is real, and shit is about to hit the fan–colours our, or at least it coloured my, views on a lot of things from the season.

Seeing Dany and her dragon eggs, knowing that there was indeed some magical stuff going on the world, led me to believe that there was more going on than just a bunch of old petrified eggs. And while we learn later on in the season, and in the finale, that the eggs were clearly not just relics, knowing that the world of Game of Thrones was indeed supernatural changed how those early scenes were viewed. I knew more than that the eggs were important: I knew they were magic in some way.

Same with any scenes relating to semi-magical plotlines, such as characters denying the continued existence of the White Walkers, Bran Stark’s strange dreams about the weird crow, etc. I would have read each and every one of these scenes differently without seeing the White Walkers in the pilot. Bran’s dreams might just be dreams, the Night’s Watch might not have been as important as its members took it to be, I wouldn’t have known whether the deserter of the pilot was lying or not, etc.

Yep, that's damn creepy

I would have preferred not to have seen that scene with the Walkers in the pilot. Leaving the existence of magic or not up to the imagination of the viewers leads to more tension and suspense in scenes that related to the supernatural. When two characters argued about it, knowing who was right left those scenes slightly cold, as well as allowing me to predict that at some point in the season, I would see magic come into the world. It was as though I had been spoiled on future developments by the show itself.

Foreshadowing or spoiling?

The first scene could be considered just foreshadowing the supernatural elements of the season, but I think it did much more than that because of the certainty it provides viewers. Even though the White Walkers don’t appear again, knowing they exist changes the perception of many events throughout the season. But what do you think? Are you glad that scene exists, or would you prefer it didn’t?

Hi Quentin!

I’ve been following Ryan McGee’s Alias reviews over at TV Club Classic, and this two-parter was getting some hype from the comments section. People were saying things like “everything before ‘The Box’ just runs together” and how it was a high point of the season. I don’t entirely disagree with him or the commenters, but I found a few parts of these episodes disappointing. Spoilers and my complaints after the break.

Overall, “The Box,” parts 1 and 2 were pretty great. They managed to heighten what is essentially a two-episode long mission (very long for a show that sometimes has three or more missions per episode) with a few interesting twists:

• Not as much Sydney running through halls to techno music
• A charismatic villain (Hassan never felt like much of a character, he seemed more like a living plot device)
• Putting Jack, Sloan and Vaughn closer to the action and away from being people who yell at other people in offices
• Reminding the audience that the SD-6 agents think they work for the CIA, something that we’ve known but hasn’t been at the forefront since most episodes so far have focused on Sydney and Jack’s dealings with the CIA without really characterizing other SD-6 employees
• More of the slow introduction to the Rambaldi mythology that the show is doing really well (“Time Will Tell” is my favourite episode of the show so far, and the most Rambaldi-heavy)

So that’s what worked. What didn’t work for me was how the bad guys devolved into silly clichés in Part 2. Cole sending man after man to find the problem and fix it, yelling at them and just generally being ineffective made me feel like I was watching Archer rather than Alias. (Not a slight on Archer, but the spies in that show are often incompetent, thus the comparison.) This devolution took Quentin’s badass witty (he even takes the time to mention how Sloan decorates his office!) villain out of seriousland and into comical white-cat-stroking land. More Nerd Trio than Angelus, if you’d like a Buffy touchstone.

And in the end when Sloan took Cole to task for breaking under torture (“How many did you take?”), Cole just breaks down again, this time without being tortured. More wind taken out of his sails. I would have enjoyed the end of the episode more if he’d stayed more badass throughout, or at least if he hadn’t spent an hour sending one man/woman at a time to go after Sydney and futilely yelling into his walkie for a while before coming up with the plan of shooting hostages.

Then there’s CIA-guy who’s terrible at his job and hates Vaughn, Steven Haladki. His introduction and the accompanying attempt to make viewers feel as though he’s been around for a while just reminded me of Michael Gaston’s character from Fringe, Sanford Harris. He was a useless bureaucratic FBI agent who (minor spoilers for early Fringe ahead) tried to tell Olivia that she couldn’t keep doing what she was doing, then promptly was revealed as a double agent and killed. If Haladki ends up being a double agent as well, then this comparison is even more apt!

Overall, definitely an enjoyable episode. I didn’t find it as funny as McGee did over at the AV Club (some of the lines he quotes as being funny were lines I liked but did not laugh at), but the new interactions between the CIA and the SD-6 agents who are in the dark, as well as Vaughn, Jack and Sloan being more badass than usual easily made this two-parter my third favourite part of the series so far (past the pilot and aforementioned “Time Will Tell.”).

Pam! Jessica! Plaid shirt!

True Blood is not a good show anymore. It’s okay—more on par with Entourage than Game of Thrones. There are many silly characters with unclear motivations, tired plotlines, and are generally interesting. I audibly sigh every time a scene focuses on Tara, Sam, Jason, or Hotshot. Since I have been feeling pretty irritated by True Blood these days, I thought I’d go on the internet and write about how dumb it can be. Instead, I felt the AV Club review covered a lot of my thoughts, so instead I will put forth a few ideas on how I think the show could improve. Minor season 4 spoilers and ideas for improvement after the break.

(Obvious idea #1) Focus on the interesting characters, such as Jessica, Pam, and Eric. Take a lesson from Deadwood or Lost, figure out which characters are just damn interesting to watch, and give them good stories (from the aforementioned shows, Al and Ben, respectively).

(Obvious idea #2) Stop expanding, you don’t do it well. Adding more characters, such as Sam’s new ladyfriend with her different brand of magic powers, isn’t going to help in the long run. Pick some stories and run with them. Remember season 1, when an overarching story held the whole thing together, and we genuinely cared about the characters involved? Do that again. On a related note, having the characters altogether in one story would help. These days, there are five to six stories, and often only one or two characters in each one.

Take a road trip. When Sookie and Eric went to Dallas to find Godric? That was pretty fun. I’m not counting last year’s trip to Russell’s vampire mansion because it was too close to all the awful, awful scenes with Tara. Maybe the gang could go find Steve Newlin and beat him up. Maybe instead of vampire politics between a bunch of newly-introduced characters, the show could focus on humans who hate vampires and make them more than just a bunch of doofuses standing outside of Fangtasia, exercising their “constitutional right to be fucking idiots” (thanks Pam).

Give Eric his memory back, please.

Watch a few episodes of The Vampire Diaries and jot down some notes. Vampire Diaries is better than True Blood by a reasonable margin, and they can’t even show nudity. Why? Well, they keep concurrent storylines to a minimum (there were maybe three or four major stories this past season, and ran in sequence rather than all at once), for one. They’re willing to kill people off. Does anyone important die on True Blood these days?

The last deaths I remember were the vampire who wanted to marry Tara and Gary Cole’s character, both of which were minor, one wasn’t even recurring. I get that not killing Lafayette made a lot of fans happy, but maybe they could knock off Jesus or Jason or someone with a big part instead? It’s not like anyone except Sookie, Bill and Eric are really essential to the big plotlines in the show.

So True Blood, I will continue to watch you. I find occasional amusement when Pam yells at people, and there’s not a lot else currently airing. But I hope you’ll improve and return to a semblance of your former glory.

Press the button!

There’s no TV humour that I love quite as much as meta references. And I don’t mean when a TV show really lets you know that it’s a TV show, but when a show makes jokes or references to other TV shows or movies, either just for fun or because of a certain guest star. A few examples of this coming up after the jump.

First up is “Contract,” an episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent. This one’s pretty brief, and featured Mary McCormack from In Plain Sight as Mary Shannon. The joke? If I remember correctly, Mary says she has to be back in Albuquerque at 10, and the detectives question what there is to do in Albuquerque at 10. In Plain Sight, as you probably know, is set in Albuquerque and airs at 10pm, right after Law & Order: CI.

“Back to the Future IV: Judgment Day,” the episode of Spin City where Christopher Lloyd guest stars and the writers wink at the audience a lot with Back to the Future jokes. Okay, so it’s not quite a TV meta reference, but I have a soft spot for Spin City since I grew up watching reruns. It was great until Charlie Sheen took over from Michael J. Fox. After that, the show lost a lot of its pep.

The episode that inspired this post (and is pictured above): “Donut Run,” a second-season episode of one of my most favourite shows ever, Veronica Mars. I’m only halfway through Lost currently, so when I first watched this episode, the numbers obviously didn’t register as anything special. This time, however, I noticed the first few numbers on the fortune matched the ones from Lost, so when the episode ended a few minutes later, I went back and checked. Lo and behold, it was the same set of numbers! And even more TV-meta-awesomely is that at the time, VM and Lost shared a timeslot.

Another In Plain Sight-related joke: Allison Janney’s character, introduced in “When Mary Met Marshall,” used to work for the president. Given that I love The West Wing, as well as Allison Janney/CJ, this one made me grin like a fool, which is what I tend to do when TV does something really awesome.

Basically everything that happens on Community.

If you’ve got any other examples (and I’m sure there are hundreds upon thousands, but these were the ones I remembered off the top of my head), let me know.