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.
Author: kwoloszyn
Deal With It: Kid Nation and the Strange Case of the Television Oddity
As much as I love television for the way it often allows you know shows intimately and characters inside and out, as I discussed a few weeks ago, I’ve also been known to become obsessed with the television oddity. Shows that are too strange, too complicated, too expensive or too under-loved to last. These shows are on the air for a season or maybe, if they’re lucky, two and live on via DVD or Netflix or YouTube. And they also live on in memory where they often turn into something more special, more exciting, more daring than they ever were to begin with. This happened to me with My So-Called Life and Freaks and Geeks, which I’ve talked about ad nauseam, in those early days before I could re-watch them on VHS or DVD. It happened more recently with the incredibly strange, indelible and wholly unique Magic City, which I can’t bring myself to re-watch yet, the death of the show too new and my memory of it, almost surely incorrectly, too glowing. Or, even Ebert Presents: At The Movies, a show that attempted and failed at bringing back duelling film critics to TV (although I loved it), and one that I was reminded of this past week when one of the reviewers, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, published an excellent and sad take on the demise of the show. But these shows, despite their one-hit wonder and cult status in the world of TV-lovers, are not true-blue oddities in the purest sense.
A Very Special Episode: TV Tonal Shifts on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Louie
At their best and luckiest, television shows can do something that other most other art forms cannot: allow us to spend hours, days, weeks, months, sometimes years with our favourite characters, watching them grow, learning intricacies and patterns about them and the show itself that we often don’t even know about the people in our real lives. Television has the luxury of time. We learn shows rather quickly, we fall into the unique rhythms and patterns of these shows, we know how they should look and sound and feel and over time this solidifies and crystallizes our viewing experience. We find friends with these characters, we know their worlds, we begin to understand what makes them tick. Continue reading
Email Roundtable #42 – Game of Thrones, “The Children”
This week we put some of our favourite Game of Thrones fans to work in an attempt to discuss the Season Four finale, “The Children”. This roundtable pits frothing nerd-raging book reader, Will, non-frothing book reader, Kurz, lazy book reader, Graeme, against active book hater, Kerri. WARNING: SPOILERS, BOOK SPECIFIC AND OTHERWISE, GALORE!
Email Roundtable #41 – “Waterloo”
We have only made passing reference to Mad Men this season, so we thought we would attempt to discuss “Waterloo” the final season, mid-season finale. Is that what we call it? Warning: SPOILERS AHEAD. Continue reading
A Good Person: Musings on faith, lies and belief in Season 2 of The Americans
The actors gone, there’s only you and me
And if we break before the dawn, they’ll
Use up what we used to be.
– Peter Gabriel, “Here Comes The Flood” (as heard in episode 3, season 2 of The Americans)
Channel Surfing 3 – My Week in TV : Justified, Comedy Central’s Review, Music Videos and other odds and ends
A quick collection of things that I’m finding fascinating, frustrating and fun on TV this past week.
What the heck happened to Justified?
When I think about Justified in its prime I think fondly back to season 2 when a shrewd Mags Bennett and her bumbling sons tried to expand their marijuana business with Raylan Givens breathing down their necks. Season 2 expanded on the world of Harlan County while also creating a central, overarching storyline that all but did away with the more standalone cases of Season 1. Season 2 felt fresh, exciting and created characters as rich and complicated as the central ones. By establishing a criminal family that had a history in the area as well as a past that crossed Raylan’s own, the show found a groove that it hasn’t found since.
Email Roundtable #39 – Television Sick Days
Our good pal Jane isn’t feeling so hot this week and this endless winter has resulted in more than a few sick days for most folks. That got us thinking: what do you like to watch on TV when you are stuck at home or laid up in bed? Katie and Kerri chat about Television Sick Days in this week’s Roundtable.
The Long Walk Home: The humane zombies of The Returned
OK. Here goes: I’ve become obsessed with a show about zombies.
No, not that zombie show. I’ve only seen a few episodes of that one and didn’t have much use for it. No, this zombie show is different. In fact, I’m not so sure it is a zombie show at all (I’m using the term here for lack of a better word). In this show the zombies are as equally beautiful, smart, sexy and charming as their living counterparts just as they are dangerous, manipulative and insufferable. These zombies are awfully human.
The Returned (Les Revenants) is a French drama that aired on Canal+ in France and Sundance here in North America. The show is based on a movie called They Came Back and, rather curiously, has a very similar premise (dead folks coming back to life) as an American show called Resurrection that began airing last week. Even more curious, Resurrection is based on a book called “The Returned” but has no connection to the French show. It all has the makings of a head-spinny Abbott and Costello routine.
The Magic Tricks of True Detective
I love mysteries. I love secret codes. I love the thought of a hidden puzzle that is just waiting, begging to be uncovered.
The real reason I think I love a good mystery is that I’m a terrible detective. Mysteries work spectacularly well on me like a magic trick where I don’t see the sleight of hand. I’ve never met a red herring that didn’t throw me off the scent. I’m as gullible as all heck and take almost anything anyone tells me at face value. I pick up on clues but usually can’t put them all together until Angela Lansbury is halfway through her crime-solving wrap up with all of the possible suspects in the same room. I’m great at pretending I was clued in all along but I promise you I wasn’t. And so, when the murderer or thief is hauled away in handcuffs I am supremely satisfied, my brain thinking back on all the little clues I missed the first time.
The Golden Age of Television 
