Author: kwoloszyn

Naughty Night: The Best Way to Watch Saturday Night Live

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As a kid, there was something delightfully naughty about watching Saturday Night Live. I can remember watching the show as a pre-teen and my grandma, who was babysitting me at the time, freaking out at particularly off-color boob joke. The show was on late, past my normal bedtime, and the zany, recurring characters were broad enough that it hardly mattered that I didn’t understand all of the punch lines. Yes, it was cool to watch Saturday Night Live as a 10-year-old.

And then, I got a bit older and slogging through the marathon session of television on a precious Saturday night didn’t seem worth it even if, as was most often the case, I didn’t have anything better to do. There was a long stretch of time that I didn’t bother with the show at all or would watch it on occasion or a few sketches here and there.

Well, I’m here to report that I’m back on the SNL bandwagon and it has little or nothing to do with the quality of the show. It has absolutely everything to do with the way that I am watching the show and having lower, or to be more precise, adjusted expectations (more on that later). And it has yet more to do with humankind’s all time greatest invention: the PVR.

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Homeland – Season 1, Episode 7 – “The Weekend”

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Best Episodes

We investigate our favorite episodes of our favorite TV shows. Be warned: these articles will contain spoilers!

“I figure we’re safe here” – Nicholas Brody to Carrie Mathison.

The idea of safety, who you are ultimately safe with and where you are ultimately safe, is central to “The Weekend” the seventh and best episode in Homeland’s stellar first season. Being safe and being at peace comes up several times in an episode that quietly explodes everything that has come before it and sets the table for the rest of the season.

But before we get into the episode, some background: Homeland was created by a couple of the folks responsible for 24. The show revolves around a CIA operative named Carrie Mathison (played by Claire Danes) who, during a stint in Iraq, finds out that an American prisoner of war has been “turned’ by Al-Qaeda. When Carrie finds out that Marine Sergeant Nicholas Brody has been released by his captors, he immediately becomes her number one suspect. Like 24, Homeland has many twisty, turny elements that make this kind of thriller exciting to watch. However, where 24 often employed shock for shock’s sake, Homeland stays more grounded and relies on character development to do its heavy lifting.

In the previous episode, after Brody and Carrie’s shocking back seat hook-up, Brody is interrogated by the CIA. During the interrogation, and at Carrie’s prompt, Brody is asked if he has ever been unfaithful to his wife. Brody says no. Carrie knows he is lying (and fooling the polygraph) but can’t prove it without outing herself to her colleagues.

“The Weekend” starts exactly where the previous episode left off:  Brody picks Carrie up in the parking lot of the CIA headquarters and they head to a bar that is improbably populated by a bunch of neo-Nazis. They get into a fight with a rather forward Nazi asshole and flea after they give him a beating. Then (and this is where the episode really starts) they take a trip to Carrie’s family cabin and settle in for the weekend. Continue reading →