Email Roundtable #20 – “I Take Thee, Rachel”: Our Favorite TV Weddings

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Our wonderful friends (and blog superstars) Jane and Ivan are getting married. In their honour we attempt to discuss our favorite television weddings. Congrats you crazy kids!

Kerri: This question was really tricky for me because I mostly hate weddings on TV shows (please note that I love weddings in real life because dancing and booze!). They usually serve to end whatever was interesting about a romantic relationship on a show, which is almost always the “getting there” part. There is no more will they/won’t they because the answer is “they will”. The two weddings that somewhat recently happened on Parks and Recreation are exceptions to this rule (see Katie’s post below for more on this). I found them charming and sweet and in keeping with the characters on the show without ruining any of the charm of the characters themselves. Because guess what, I love Leslie Knope without Ben. It’s kinda like that horrible saying about loving yourself before other people can love you. A fully realized character is and should be interesting in or out of a relationship. Continue reading

Channel Surfing – My Week in TV

A quick collection of things that I’m finding fascinating, frustrating and fun on TV this past week. 

Remember music videos? 

When I was a kid one of my favorite things to do was watching The MuchMusic Top 30 Countdown on the weekends. I wasn’t always all that interested in the music but I loved music videos. The 3-minute short films set to a pop song was a perfect venue for me to see some weird and beautiful filmmaking. Since MuchMusic has since gone the MTV route into perma-reality programming there is no longer a place that exists on TV where I can watch music videos on a regular basis (although apparently the Countdown still exists). But that doesn’t mean they have disappeared. The best place to find music videos now is on the internet and, in fact, that’s where they seem to be flourishing.

Continue reading

Unimpressed by Derek

I hated the finale of Derek. It made me angry. I was so angry that I fumed around my apartment for several minutes cursing Ricky Gervais. TV shows don’t usually inflict me with anger, but after I had a chance to calm myself down I realized what made me so mad: after watching the first three episodes of Derek (which I had been heartily impressed by), I had expected the conclusion of the show to be so much better. It easily could have been, but Ricky Gervais made some poor choices. Continue reading

Too Much Reality: Why I Don’t Dig Fashion Star

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I recently watched the first episode from Season 2 of Fashion Star as a homework assignment for this week’s round table. I thought it would be the perfect choice considering my love of Project RunwayProject Runway is one of my all time favorite reality shows and I will be comparing the two frequently in this post (that may be biased and unfair but I’m OK with that). Continue reading

Email Roundtable #19 – Reality TV Homework Challenge

Remember two weeks ago when I assigned us some homework? No? Well, I did. I asked us to find a reality show that was interesting/different so that we could attempt to discuss them. The assignment was entirely selfish but hopefully the shows below interest some of you too!

David Chang

What is the name of the reality show you discovered?

Kerri: The Mind of a Chef

What is the show all about?

Kerri: It’s a bit of a cheat to pick a cooking show for this reality show challenge but hear me out: The Mind of a Chef is ostensibly a cooking show that aired on PBS in late 2012. Continue reading

Email Roundtable #18 – Location, Location, Location

abandoned house

The living room on The Simpsons, Cheers the bar, Baltimore on The Wire. Settings are important on any television show. In this edition of the Email Roundtable we attempt to discuss different kinds of television settings. And because I think this is awfully cool and somewhat relevant there’s this

What is the television setting you find the most comforting/would like to live in?: 

Kerri: This one was actually the most difficult for me to figure out. I decided to think about the shows that I find most comforting and work from there. My comfort show is always Freaks and Geeks and I thought about talking about the Weir’s house which is sort of cave-like, with earth-tones and looks a lot like the childhood home that I and a lot of my friends grew up in. Continue reading

MUCH OLDER

by Raphael Saray

I ’m quickly becoming an old man. I’m taping golf pre-game shows (DVR’s are for the young). I travel to three different drugstores to find the proper flavour of milk of magnesia. As I’ve frittered away my twenties, I hearken back to when I was on the cutting edge of the culture. I was the youngest of four children in a household full of ethnic energy with live in Grandparents hovering over simmering pots of God knows what. I was raised with mature tastes. Rather than me bringing the house down with “family” fare, I was raised up. A little Raffi – but more RUN DMC. Continue reading