Fall TV Shows

It's that time of the year again, the time where I'm in school and stop having time for watching / blogging about movies every day.  My time is broken into smaller pieces than it was in the summer, so I fill it with smaller sized movies.  That is to say, TV shows.

There are some big differences between TV and movies.  TV episodes have to be a very specific length, so they tend to fall into a small number of plot formulas.  These plots tend to rise and fall at very specific times, namely commercial breaks.  At the same time, the stories told on TV can be much longer than those in movies since they come back every week.  This again leads to a repetitive rhythm in stories as shows that do choose to have story arcs that last more than one ep(isode) tend to have high points at the beginning and ends of seasons, and during that one week in the winter where ratings are measured more than other times.  Not that is particularly bad for the medium as restrictions breed creativity, and sometimes the deadline of a season's end can make a show get on with it.  Remember the third season of Lost when they didn't know how long they were going to have to keep the show going, so they just dragged everything out as long as possible?  Yeah.  Bad news bears.  An ending for the show was great for them.  Could've helped The X-Files a lot.  Smaller plot threads can do the same thing, and a season's end can be a good way to make the writers wrap things up.  With an appropriate cliffhanger, of course.

Yes, TV is limited by the network system.  Blah blah blah Firefly comment blah blah.  Nothing to be done about that, though.  It's a shame, but we deal.  It's not like Hollywood doesn't have that going on.

Anyway, I'm going to start periodically updating my faithful readers on my current opinion of the shows that I watch.

WARNING:  ALL TV SHOW POSTS WILL HAVE MASSIVE SPOILERS.  READ AT YOUR OWN RISK (I.E. DON'T UNLESS YOU'VE SEEN THE SHOW.  ALL THESE SHOWS ROCK MY SOCKS OFF).

Now without further ado...

Fringe

WOOOO FRINGE!  This show just started its second season this past Thursday.  It's a show by J.J. Abrams, also known for his co-creation of Lost and Cloverfield.  I still struggle to find differences between Fringe and The X-Files beyond the fact that the buzzwords we're willing to suspend our disbelief for have changed since the 90s.  Instead of aliens we've moved up to anything with the word quantum in it.  Great show, though.  It's my favorite show on television at the moment, and it had me hooked from episode 1.  Here's how the pilot ends:

Bunch of dudes in white lab coats in a pristine white basement somewhere beneath ominous corporation Massive Dynamic.  A boss woman we've briefly met comes in to the lab, and we see that they have the body of an important dude who just died in a car crash on a gurney.

BOSS LADY:  Is he dead?
LAB TECH:  Yes.
BL:  How long?
LT:  About three hours.

pause

BL:  Question him.
smash cut to black

Yeah, bitches.  That's some heavy hitting right there.  Then there's the end of the first season where, well, I know some of you ignored my spoiler warning so I won't spoil it here.  Besides, it leaves me speechless - it's such a visual thing.

Then the characters are... actually, for the most part I like the supporting cast a lot more than the main cast.  The black dude is amazing, Astrid is fun and perky, and Nina is fucking sweet.  Walter is fun, though it seems like every ep they have to give him a new stupid line about food.  We get it, he's nuts.  It's a good way to introduce new viewers to his character, yes, but please.  You're professional writers.  You can come up with another way to quickly depict him and switch off episodes; you don't have to use the same joke every time.

Olivia is fine, though not amazing.  I'm a fan of Peter even though he feels like a 7 or 8 when he should be a 9 out of 10.  Everyone's better than Mulder at least.

Oh shit, then there's that one guy.  Mr. Jones.  What an awesome villain.  He totally gets a spot on my top 5 villains of all time.  So creepy.

Pretty much.  If you were a fan of The X-Files and don't like this show, it better be because you're squeemish.  There's a lot more downright disturbing ideas in Fringe I think because society has sort of upped the ante in what creeps it out.  You have to be pretty hardcore these days.

Dollhouse

It's not Firefly, that's for sure.  Probably the worst of Whedon's shows, but that still leaves a fuck-ton of room for goodness.  Oh, and the first 5 eps are complete trash.  If you want to get started on this show but don't want to deal with the horrendous beginning, here's what I recommend:  buy (or "buy" [by which I mean torrent]) the DVDs, watch the original pilot episode, then read plot summaries of the first 5 eps.  If you're really bored, watch episode 2 because I actually liked that one.  If you're really, really bored, watch the one where she's robbing a bank, too.  If you're really, really, really bored, still don't watch the rest of them.  They blow.  After that, watch episode 6 and just go from there.  It should be enough to hook you unless you actually need those first 5 eps to figure out what's going on, in which case the show is as good as dead.  Probably is anyway given the ratings.

If you can make it all the way through the season, the payoff is HUGE.  The end of the season is merely fine, but they filmed a 13th episode for the DVDs called Epitaph One.  It's awesome, though disappointing that the show is so close to dead that they had to essentially put 5 seasons of plot into a single episode.  I feel robbed of 4 years of setup and reveal.  4 years should be 4 years, not 43 minutes.

I think the biggest problem with the show in its first season is that there's no character you can really like.  Topher is sort of likable, but he's also creepy as fuck.  You're "supposed" to like Echo, but she by definition doesn't have a personality.  The doctor is likable I guess.  Everyone else is not up to empathy standards.  Epitaph One greatly implies that this will change, but still.  You want people to like your show in season 1, not season 5.  That first one is where it's most important.

Whatever.  Lots of faults, probably worth it if you follow my advice about what not to watch.  Hey, that gives me an idea...

Chuck

Oops, I'm out of time.  I'll be back later this week with Chuck, Castle, and any other shows I watch but am forgetting about.  In the mean time, check out Fringe season 1 on DVD.  It's awesome.