TV slut update...
May. 27th, 2006 03:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatYEs, I watched the Lost finale and the House finale and the Alias finale, also Desperate Housewives and Greys and Veronica Mars. Not to mention Gilmore Girls and West Wing. Plus Smallville (sigh), Supernatural, and ER - the last half-hour.
Of the season finales, Veronica Mars surprisingly enough was the best. With Grey's Anatomy a close second. Smallville was hokey and I do not admit in public that I watched it. Although Michael Rosenblaum in dark jacket looking villainous over the burning city while Lana clings lovingly to him - was amusing. Housewives annoyed me -
with the possible exception of Bree's storyline and the flashbacks. If it weren't for the flashbacks, Zach's taking over his grandfather's empire and ditching his adopted dad, and Bree breaking out of the insane aslym she checked herself into to save her kid, I'd have given up on it. Marcia Cross's complicated MArtha Stewart on the rocks, is captivating satire.
The Innovative and somewhat trippy award goes to House - which if you didn't catch, highly recommend you do. House is the anti-procedural, unlike all the procedurals - it's more interested in the characters and uses the procedures merely as metaphors to explore them. Usually procedurals use characters as pawns to explain complicated procedures and solve puzzel mysteries.
This episode begins with House getting shot. Not a spoiler, happens in first five minutes.
But what happens next is not what you expect. And tells you a great deal about the character, not to mention a tour de force for Hugh Laurie to play.
The entire episode takes place in House's head in the minutes between his blackout when he was shot, to coming to, while on a stretcher. He comes up with the cure for his leg pain and the gun-shot in the interim and the patient is indeed House himself. The mystery is what is real and what is not and how House figures it out.
Life is going to be tough next year if I don't get a DVR. Because there is no way on earth I can choose between Veronica Mars and House. Although to be fair, House is more episodic. Yet, I see more potential with House next season. I just hope CW does what UPN did last year, and repeats Veronica on Sundays at 7pm. Doubt it.
Veronica Mars wins the reward for having a finale that visually reverses images from the season opener or shows them in new revealing way. The episode, while flawed in places, does stick within the conventions of the genre, while at the same time expanding on the genre. If you watch Veronica with the view that it is a replacement of Buffy or another Gilmore Girls, you are missing the point. Veronica isn't trying to be either.
Lost managed to put all the lead characters in jeopardy or rather the ones with an edge that the audience cared about. Yet, still satisfied by answering left over mysteries from the year before.
I watch Lost purely for entertainment, no interest in analyzing the themes or tearing it apart.
Sorry. Only got obsessed with one tv show in that way. And that phase is gone.
At any rate - was not surprised by the answers to the mysteries. Figured the Island was one big magnet a year ago and the button-pushing had to do with keeping the magnet aligned. I love the social psyche experiment gone haywire story line that seems to be piggy-backing on the magnet one.
Actually it may explain why the magnet is even there or been fiddled with to the point that they now have to have someone maintain it.
I also like the whole six degrees of separation theme going on, which apparently is something the writers are obsessed with since their new series is literally called SIX DEGREES. The writers apparently like the idea there are no such things as coincidences and we are fated to meet everyone in our lives and every person will re-appear at another point in a different way.
Which is an interesting idea for a tv series. Question is can they keep it up without losing the audience?
Am I the only person who finds Charlie and Walt creepy? Not overly fond of the Michael/Walt characters - but they do provide a good edge. Look - my favorites are: Hurly, Sawyer, Sayid, Jin, and Locke. I'm ambivalent about Eko, Jack, Kate, and Sun. I miss Ana Lucia and Libby. Desmond - Penn do however have potential.
Henry surprised me - didn't expect him to be the leader of the Others. Makes the Others more interesting. Also nice to see Clancy Brown again. In Lost - bad people do pay for the horrors they've committed, what's cool is you don't realize they committed something horrible off the bat.
Kelvin who taught Sayid how to torture and brought it out in him, is forced to push a button every 108 minutes and struggles to deal with what he did.
Will watch next season. Enjoy it tremendously.
Grey's Anatomy had a hokey ending, but up until the finale reel was quite enjoyable. Have to be honest, I'm not invested in who Meredith ends up with or cared very much about Denny.
I watched for everyone else. Alex, Christina, the Nazi, Chief, Burke, George, Callie, and Addison.
The finale started with a facinating voice over compiled of all the character's ruminations on the flight or fight response. It also did a wonderful job of exploring how people handle situations by either fleeing or fighting and deterioation of both. The other bits worth noting are two scenes with the Chief - one with Patrick Dempsey, where the characters have over-lapping monolgues that are not in response to each other - and they do not appear to even hear one another, even though they are talking to each other. Another is a series of monologues directed at the Chief in response to a question. Each revealing something about the character and something about the chief to the chief - showing how we often project our own issues on whatever someone is telling us or saying. Those three bits alone, make Grey's one of the best tv shows I've seen in a while. Uneven sure - but that's good writing. Last writer to try that was Joss Whedon in BTVS and ATS. Haven't seen it since.
West Wing - one of the few tv shows I've stuck with all the way through, although I did miss portions of the two seasons that it was on opposite Angel, which I preferred. The overlapping dialogue of West Wing is a rarity. Fast-paced, and realistic. West Wing did get bogged down at times with preachiness, but overall was great drama. The finale did two cool things - one a line from Stockard Channing regarding Jed Bartlett's transistion. The other, Allison Janey's response to both Jimmy Smits plea to continue on the West Wing and her response to someone lurking outside the White House when she leaves it. Not as melodramatic as most season finales, it ended quietly, with little cliche references, and a few smart one-liners.
The other shows...sigh. Not worth mentioning. Except that I hope Gilmore is better written next year or will give up on it and that Supernatural's ending seemed just a tad over-the-top.
Now half-watching a dumb chick-flick that I enjoy.
[Updated to hide anything that could possibly be considered a spoiler by any stretch of imagination. If I spoiled you prior to this, my apologies. Wasn't deliberate.]
Of the season finales, Veronica Mars surprisingly enough was the best. With Grey's Anatomy a close second. Smallville was hokey and I do not admit in public that I watched it. Although Michael Rosenblaum in dark jacket looking villainous over the burning city while Lana clings lovingly to him - was amusing. Housewives annoyed me -
with the possible exception of Bree's storyline and the flashbacks. If it weren't for the flashbacks, Zach's taking over his grandfather's empire and ditching his adopted dad, and Bree breaking out of the insane aslym she checked herself into to save her kid, I'd have given up on it. Marcia Cross's complicated MArtha Stewart on the rocks, is captivating satire.
The Innovative and somewhat trippy award goes to House - which if you didn't catch, highly recommend you do. House is the anti-procedural, unlike all the procedurals - it's more interested in the characters and uses the procedures merely as metaphors to explore them. Usually procedurals use characters as pawns to explain complicated procedures and solve puzzel mysteries.
This episode begins with House getting shot. Not a spoiler, happens in first five minutes.
But what happens next is not what you expect. And tells you a great deal about the character, not to mention a tour de force for Hugh Laurie to play.
The entire episode takes place in House's head in the minutes between his blackout when he was shot, to coming to, while on a stretcher. He comes up with the cure for his leg pain and the gun-shot in the interim and the patient is indeed House himself. The mystery is what is real and what is not and how House figures it out.
Life is going to be tough next year if I don't get a DVR. Because there is no way on earth I can choose between Veronica Mars and House. Although to be fair, House is more episodic. Yet, I see more potential with House next season. I just hope CW does what UPN did last year, and repeats Veronica on Sundays at 7pm. Doubt it.
Veronica Mars wins the reward for having a finale that visually reverses images from the season opener or shows them in new revealing way. The episode, while flawed in places, does stick within the conventions of the genre, while at the same time expanding on the genre. If you watch Veronica with the view that it is a replacement of Buffy or another Gilmore Girls, you are missing the point. Veronica isn't trying to be either.
Lost managed to put all the lead characters in jeopardy or rather the ones with an edge that the audience cared about. Yet, still satisfied by answering left over mysteries from the year before.
I watch Lost purely for entertainment, no interest in analyzing the themes or tearing it apart.
Sorry. Only got obsessed with one tv show in that way. And that phase is gone.
At any rate - was not surprised by the answers to the mysteries. Figured the Island was one big magnet a year ago and the button-pushing had to do with keeping the magnet aligned. I love the social psyche experiment gone haywire story line that seems to be piggy-backing on the magnet one.
Actually it may explain why the magnet is even there or been fiddled with to the point that they now have to have someone maintain it.
I also like the whole six degrees of separation theme going on, which apparently is something the writers are obsessed with since their new series is literally called SIX DEGREES. The writers apparently like the idea there are no such things as coincidences and we are fated to meet everyone in our lives and every person will re-appear at another point in a different way.
Which is an interesting idea for a tv series. Question is can they keep it up without losing the audience?
Am I the only person who finds Charlie and Walt creepy? Not overly fond of the Michael/Walt characters - but they do provide a good edge. Look - my favorites are: Hurly, Sawyer, Sayid, Jin, and Locke. I'm ambivalent about Eko, Jack, Kate, and Sun. I miss Ana Lucia and Libby. Desmond - Penn do however have potential.
Henry surprised me - didn't expect him to be the leader of the Others. Makes the Others more interesting. Also nice to see Clancy Brown again. In Lost - bad people do pay for the horrors they've committed, what's cool is you don't realize they committed something horrible off the bat.
Kelvin who taught Sayid how to torture and brought it out in him, is forced to push a button every 108 minutes and struggles to deal with what he did.
Will watch next season. Enjoy it tremendously.
Grey's Anatomy had a hokey ending, but up until the finale reel was quite enjoyable. Have to be honest, I'm not invested in who Meredith ends up with or cared very much about Denny.
I watched for everyone else. Alex, Christina, the Nazi, Chief, Burke, George, Callie, and Addison.
The finale started with a facinating voice over compiled of all the character's ruminations on the flight or fight response. It also did a wonderful job of exploring how people handle situations by either fleeing or fighting and deterioation of both. The other bits worth noting are two scenes with the Chief - one with Patrick Dempsey, where the characters have over-lapping monolgues that are not in response to each other - and they do not appear to even hear one another, even though they are talking to each other. Another is a series of monologues directed at the Chief in response to a question. Each revealing something about the character and something about the chief to the chief - showing how we often project our own issues on whatever someone is telling us or saying. Those three bits alone, make Grey's one of the best tv shows I've seen in a while. Uneven sure - but that's good writing. Last writer to try that was Joss Whedon in BTVS and ATS. Haven't seen it since.
West Wing - one of the few tv shows I've stuck with all the way through, although I did miss portions of the two seasons that it was on opposite Angel, which I preferred. The overlapping dialogue of West Wing is a rarity. Fast-paced, and realistic. West Wing did get bogged down at times with preachiness, but overall was great drama. The finale did two cool things - one a line from Stockard Channing regarding Jed Bartlett's transistion. The other, Allison Janey's response to both Jimmy Smits plea to continue on the West Wing and her response to someone lurking outside the White House when she leaves it. Not as melodramatic as most season finales, it ended quietly, with little cliche references, and a few smart one-liners.
The other shows...sigh. Not worth mentioning. Except that I hope Gilmore is better written next year or will give up on it and that Supernatural's ending seemed just a tad over-the-top.
Now half-watching a dumb chick-flick that I enjoy.
[Updated to hide anything that could possibly be considered a spoiler by any stretch of imagination. If I spoiled you prior to this, my apologies. Wasn't deliberate.]
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no subject
Date: 2006-05-27 09:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-27 10:21 pm (UTC)But what the hey, I'll hide it.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-27 10:49 pm (UTC)I didn't used to be such a suck, but I've learned I really really love the element of surprise.
Thanks for understanding. Roll your eyes at me, sure, I won't be offended, because I know it's kind of obsessive, but I always appreciate it when others help us out that little bit.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-28 02:16 pm (UTC)I guess I roll my eyes a bit, because I can usually predict most things in tv shows way before they happen, so it takes quite a bit to surprise me.
House getting shot? Not surprising, saw that coming for a while. What was surprising was how they chose to handle it. But then, hey tv slut.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-27 10:04 pm (UTC)But I agree with you that Veronica Mars was the real mind blower. They tied in a lot of story lines, and really opened up some questions for next year (I can't wait!). I hope VM isn't on against House again, it is too much pressure on Tuesdays!
no subject
Date: 2006-05-27 10:41 pm (UTC)Also agree that it's not a spoiler, but people are itchy over anything that even smells like a spoiler - I remember from BTVS days that folks would go so far as turn off the tv to avoid the possibility of being spoiled by commericials only to get spoiled by someone online innocently asking about it and they'd ream the person for spoiling them and get into a flame war with a bunch of other people over the definition of a spoiler. It was quite funny really.
At any rate - to avoid the reoccurrence - I've hidden anything I think that can be considered a spoiler by any stretch of the imagination.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-27 11:20 pm (UTC)The new, very promising Aaron Sorkin show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is going to be on Monday nights on NBC, as well as a new drama about superheroes starring Greg Grunberg from Alias.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-28 04:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-28 02:04 pm (UTC)(I'd end up having to choose between Grey's and it - bad idea for NBC, considering it's their most expensive and most anticipated show.)
no subject
Date: 2006-05-29 05:52 am (UTC)I actually missed the 1st 15 minutes of the House finale, which made it confusing even though I knew about the shooting from the previews. I was getting annoyed by the same things that I commented on in Scroll's LJ, esp. everybody psychoanalyzing everybody else, & then the final reveal that it's all been taking place in House's head turned the whole thing upside down--he's been psychoanalyzing himself while unconscious & working his way to a conclusion about what he wants. I haven't seen a turnaround like that since Storyteller on Buffy, which took the behavior that was making me sick of Andrew & showed us why he was doing it & that he was going to change it--except when the writers thought it'd be funnier if he didn't. I don't think the writers on House will have enough of an excuse to think they can get away w/that, so we may be in for some interesting character development next season (I hope).
And I loved how they meta'ed the way a script cuts to a new scene, when House is on the stairs w/the interns & asks something like, "What am I doing here? I was in the hospital bed, & all of a sudden I'm here. How'd I get here? What happened in between?" Of course, in an ordinary episode, "what happened" would've been that the story skipped to the next scene & left out the unimportant stuff that happened in between. And I have to mention how glad I am that disgusto-swelling-popping-parts guy turned out to be a hallucination. Yuck.
As for the Veronica Mars finale, I didn't notice the mirroring of the season's 1st ep, but then I hadn't seen it since it 1st aired. What I did notice was how it contrasted w/last season's finale. I found both finales unsatisfying, but for opposite reasons.
Last year, it seemed everybody was putting something in someone else's drink, to the point where it exceeded my ability to suspend my disbelief. And what had happened to Veronica at the party seemed to be implausibly innocent: the roofie wasn't meant for her, the rape wasn't really a rape, the incest wasn't really incest. (Oops--suddenly I suspect I'm combining the last 2 episodes into 1. But it still applies to the "solving" of that particular mystery.)
This year, I found it equally unbelievable that Cassidy Casablancas, Teen Mastermind, was behind everything that had to do w/the bus crash, plus Veronica's rape really was a rape after all & he did that too. It just wrapped too much up too neatly. Oh, yeah, & there was only 1 possible sequence for the transmission of the chlamydia? Almost like Woody, Cassidy, & Veronica were the only ones in town who had it. Right.
Well, at least this year Veronica had a chance to land an effective blow on the bad guy. That's been bugging me too, but I should probably go into it in my own LJ. One of these days.
Regarding Lost
Date: 2006-05-28 12:31 pm (UTC)I saw Henry coming a mile away, but what makes you think he's the leader of the Others? I'm thinking maybe a right-hand man at best.
Rufus...what's with the four toed statue?
Re: Regarding Lost
Date: 2006-05-28 02:12 pm (UTC)The numbers are connected to the magnet. Note once they became associated with Hurly - things fell around him - or into people around him, which drove him nuts because he was in the hospital for causing people's deaths on a platform that collasped when he got on it. The numbers act as a counter-magnet, keeping the balance between the two. Basically it's tv writer science.;-)
Because Henry took charge of them. He may not be the man behind the whole thing. But he is definitely in charge of this bunch, and they catered to his demands without question. Also their was a confidence about his demeanor showing that he probably was.
The four toed statue reminds me of Greek mythology.