This week, and for a number of the weeks to follow, we will be doing Summer Television Secret Santa. We each randomly chose a name and were given the job of gifting a television show to that person. This week we will be discussing the person we drew, the show we chose for them and why. In the coming weeks we will be pairing down our roundtable to two and interviewing our Secret Santa about the show they were gifted (or forced) to watch. The rules state that you may watch as much or as little of the show as you like and that the gift giver must have seen at least a portion of the show as well.
Month: August 2013
No One Left to Root For
Episode review of “Confessions”, episode 11 of season 5 of Breaking Bad
There will of course be spoilers ahead.
As we get closer and closer to the finale of Breaking Bad, the world of the show is getting smaller and smaller. Once upon a time, Walt was concerned with creating an empire. Now all he can do is manipulate the people that are left in his immediate vicinity. Walt is circling around the inevitable time when all that’s left around him is himself. Continue reading
Email Roundtable #25 – The Friends (but not those Friends) Edition
We are all friends here at The Golden Age of Television. We spend a fair amount of time outside of this space together. This week in a “take home” Email Roundtable we decided to discuss our favourite TV friendships.
Kerri: When I was formulating the question for this week I didn’t give an awful lot of thought to my answer. I knew that I wanted to select a friendship between two or more women but that proved really difficult. Sex and the City presents female friendship in a way that has nothing to do with my own. In fact, I think a lot of shows use friendship (and especially female friendship) improperly. Continue reading
When I am Through With You There Won’t Be Anything Left: Why The First 5 Minutes of Damages is its Finest
For my summer TV binge viewing this year I devoured the entire 5 seasons of FX’s legal thriller Damages. Damages makes for excellent summer TV. It is dramatic, suspenseful, sexy, funny, incredibly well acted and for the most part the stories are well told.
I would argue that the first five minutes of the pilot episode is as good as any television pilot I’ve seen. Not only is it beautifully shot, it effectively introduces the characters, structure and themes of the entire series. Continue reading
Email Roundtable #24 – Corn on the Cob Edition
Welcome back to our weekly Roundtable, friends! We have been a bit slackerly over the past few months with these Roundtables (it is summertime with vacations, the lake and other wonderful distractions that aren’t TV related, after all) but here we are, back at it.
Kerri: Katie thought it would be a good time to discuss summer TV past and present. So, I suppose we should start by discussing what some of our favorite summer shows have been over the years and what makes for a good summer show.
How I Spent My Women’s Prison Vacation: The First Season of Orange is the New Black
Few “pilot” episodes of a TV show have ever made me cry. The problem with pilots is that they are supposed to cram a whole pile of information into 22 minutes or 42 minutes and don’t usually do a very good job of developing characters. I can think of three shows where the pilot made me weep: Freaks and Geeks, Enlightened and now Orange is the New Black. These three shows actually have quite a bit in common, but their biggest common element is that the pilot episode spends a lot of time introducing and then developing their central character: a nice, young, white woman who seems to have her shit together but doesn’t. I have to say after watching the whole season, I feel like I was duped in that first episode, and I’m all the happier for it.
The Golden Age of Television 