Here to celebrate New Year’s Eve with a list of my favourite episodes of TV of 2015. It was tough to narrow down my absolute favourites, and there’s certainly some fantastic episodes that deserve to be on this list, but this is the list that ended up feeling right. Please note that this list is ordered by date of broadcast and nothing more.
*This article contains massive spoilers
It’s been a while now since this show ended and I’d still like to get my thoughts about it out there. When I last wrote about Scream Queens, I expressed mixed feelings about the show as a whole, and I really haven’t budged from that stance. Like all Ryan Murphy shows, there are elements of brilliance and crap mixed in with this series, and thankfully since it’s so young, it hasn’t allowed the crap to overwhelm the rest of it yet. It’s still up in the air if this show is going to get another season, and I honestly hope it does because – Surprise! – I actually loved the finale. Believe me, I totally realize it had some pretty significant problems, but there were some elements in it that worked well enough for me to overlook the bad. But first though, let’s get the bad out of the way.
Continue reading “The Good and The Bad of the Scream Queens Finale”
Recently finished Marvel’s Jessica Jones, a series that can be best described as a stylish neo-noire with a compelling hero and an even better villain. Played by David Tennant, Kilgrave is without question the greatest villain in the Marvel Cinematic universe. He doesn’t want to control the world, or the city, or even a small building, his sights are laser focused on one Jessica Jones, and with the horrifying power of mind control (taken to its logical extreme in the show), this threat proves to be more engaging to the audience than anything Marvel has thrown at a hero before. To honour him, here are 5 of Kilgrave’s greatest moments from the series.
SPOILERS AHOY!
Hey fellas! Here’s my second VLog, this one on the often discussed show The Good Wife. Things for this show… they aren’t looking good. That’s all I gotta say on that matter here, hear the rest in the VLog.
Continue reading “VLog #2: The Good Wife Sure is Weird About Race”
The CW, home of both iZombie and Jane the Virgin, is proceeding with its mission to slowly take over my life with its great shows by introducing me to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, a charming comedy that deconstructs and analyzes the offensive stereotype that serves as its namesake. It’s solidly written and acted, but best of all, it’s also a musical and the songs are consistently great. I really do enjoy this show, which is why it’s a little sad and a little strange that my first article discussing it will amount to a criticism. The criticism is targeted towards its latest episode, “My Mom, Greg’s Mom and Josh’s Sweet Dance Moves!”, and how it dealt with the subject of parenthood and how it continues what I find to be a problematic trend in television and movies. I don’t know if this counts as a revelation to those readings, but there is such a thing as bad parenting that goes beyond domestic violence, something the media tends to completely overlook because hey, love exists.
Continue reading “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and the Problem With Bad TV Parents”
Death is meaningless. People can try to draw meaning from the end of a person’s life by doing something worthwhile afterwards, but the death itself means nothing. It is the ending of one’s life, either from what society would consider natural causes, or a random catastrophe that can come in the form of disease, nature, or a gun wielding maniac. Death is everywhere, and it’s always just something that happens to people, but when it is written about, suddenly things are very different. In real life, if it happens from something like cancer, it’s just a random stupid tragedy the universe doled out for no reason on someone that didn’t need to go, but when you write about death, it always has meaning, because whether you meant to or not, you wanted to convey something through your writing. You may have been trying to demonstrate that death itself has no meaning by writing a meaningless death, or maybe you just wanted to say something about the character that died in general, either way, death always means something when it’s written about. It’s almost a strategic tool writers have, because it can be used in a variety of ways, but I fear people may be missing that fact when they talk about it in Television.
Continue reading “To Kill or Not to Kill? – When Should A Show Kill Off Its Cast?”
Cary Agos feels as though something is amiss. It’s not the usual weight he feels working at Lockhart, Agos, and Lee, but something feels different. Perhaps it’s not weight he feels, but more the opposite. He feels a certain lightness in his comings and goings. Seeing as he was just recently made partner, that lightness would be interpreted by some as a good thing. It wasn’t. Cary doesn’t feel grounded anymore, he feels like a man that is fading away, and it terrifies him.
Continue reading “Cary Agos: The Important Client – The Good Wife Fanfiction”
What happened?
Two of the main actors on The Good Wife were in a feud. There is no disputing that, whether you want to dodge the issue and be super condescending about it like the show’s creators (Robert and Michelle King) have, or straight up lie about it (and get subsequently exposed) like the show’s lead actress has, you have to accept the fact that something went down between Archie Panjabi and Julianna Margulies. The characters they played haven’t shared a scene with one another in over two seasons, and when Panjabi left the show, her last scene with Margulies (which is absolutely pivotal to her character arc) was done with green-screen trickery. I’ve covered it before, and I’ll say it again, the Kings have allowed their show to be dictated by a dispute between their actors, which is pretty pathetic on their part, but also leaves one to wonder what kind of catastrophic event caused such a mess in the first place. Just for fun, here are some of my speculations.
Continue reading “Theories On What Caused The Archie Panjabi and Julianna Margulies Feud”
Continuing the discussion of Veep from my last post, I started thinking about this show’s best moments. Even though one of the show’s selling points is its satire, it is most certainly isn’t its strength. While it can be amusing at times, it’s rarely ever nuanced or insightful, however, the show’s greatest strength is in its cast of characters. While its ensemble can feel overstuffed, the show’s core cast (and even some of its reoccurring players) are why this has become the hit it is on HBO. There are moments from the show when a character, even one that should be a minor player, surprises you in a way that makes you laugh or, surprisingly enough, feel. Here is a list of moments in Veep that I found to have been the most hilarious, heartfelt, or both.
VEEP SPOILERS TO FOLLOW!
I recently watched HBO’s Veep, and for the most part I’d say it is a very enjoyable show, but its use of Gary Cole has been pretty lacking. For three of this show’s four seasons, Gary Cole plays the role of Kent Davidson, the ultra efficient and ultra impersonal senior strategist at the White House. Starting in season 2 as an antagonistic force for the titular Veep Selina Meyers, his debut episode showed actual hints at what he could bring to the ensemble, or more accurately, what he could bring out of the characters around him. These early hints of greatness however, have mostly gone untapped in the seasons that followed. This to me, is tragic, because Gary Cole is like a precious commodity, a natural resource that everyone needs in their lives, and one whose misuse should be greatly frowned upon.
The Kenpire 