Yesterday, Sarah Silverman posted the pilot episode of Susan 313 to her Youtube page. The pilot was made for NBC, but they didn’t pick it up. I was a big fan of The Sarah Silverman Program, so I may be biased but I was quite impressed by Susan 313. The show would have been about a woman in her late ’30s, who returns to her old apartment when she leaves an extremely codependent relationship. The big triumph in the episodes occurs when Susan figures out how to fix the water at her place (by calling the super.) Continue reading
Comedy
Email Roundtable #33 – Spaced
This week on the roundtable we continue with our Fall Television Secret Santa. Katie gifted Kerri the British comedy from 1999, Spaced. Below is their conversation about the show.
Katie: Well Kerri, was I right or was I right? Daisy is the best.
Kerri: You were so, so, so right. Not only is Daisy the best character on Spaced but she’s also now one of my favourite female TV characters of all time. She’s right up there with Liz Lemon in my books.
Katie: And Peggy Olson!
Before we get too far into details, want to give a brief description of Spaced for our lovely readers?
Kerri: Spaced is a show about two friends, Tim Bisley (Simon Pegg) and Daisy Steiner (Jessica Hynes, nee Stevenson), that pretend to be a couple in order to rent a flat. Once they successfully rent the apartment, they find that it is populated by a hilarious mishmash of characters, like the constantly drunk building owner, Marsha, and the disturbed artist, Brian. The show plays around with genre convention and there are an abundance of pop-culture references.
I was wrong, It’s Freaks and Geeks and The Wire.
A few months ago at the height of my love affair with Damages I proclaimed that “the first five minutes of [its] pilot episode are as good as any television pilot I’ve seen.” While Damages is darn good TV and its opening is stylish and well shot, I was completely wrong. After some distance and an obviously much needed cooling off period, I came back to my senses. I now proclaim that the first five minutes of Freaks and Geeks and The Wire are the among very best minutes that TV has to offer. For real this time. Continue reading
Email Roundtable #31 – Fall Television Secret Santa
This week, and for a number of the weeks to follow, we will be doing Fall 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.
Email Roundtable #30 – Happy Anniversary Edition
This week marks the 1st Anniversary of The Golden Age of Television blog. We thought we would take a look back at the past year of blogging and look into the future as well.
Continue reading
My Stories are Back!
Happy September everyone! Hope you all are enjoying the last warm glows of sunshine before the Canadian winter slips its cold fingers into your fleece onesie. September is a great month, no? It is the time for buckling down, falling into routines and squirreling away all those happy memories of summer. Also, it just happens to be the month where, one by one, old and new shows return to our TVs and PVRs. Now, while the promise of brand-spankin’ new TV has never did it for me, the return of my stories does warm the cockles of heart. So, in the spirit of the season, here are three short reviews of some of my favourite returning programs. Continue reading
How I came to love How I Met Your Mother
I began my journey through HIMYM because of my great friend with great taste, Aynsley’s, recommendation. She had been singing the show’s praises for some time and I decided to give it a shot. I mean, I knew I’d hate it. What’s to like about a popular sitcom narrated by an off-camera Bob Saget about the coming-of-age of wacky friends in their twenties? Continue reading
Digging Up The Dog Pound: Paul Scheer Reenacts The Arsenio Hall Show
When I was a kid I remember staying up really, really late at night on the weekends, watching my little black and white TV in my bedroom. I’d watch anything that was on: movies, re-runs, late-night talk shows, things that I shouldn’t have been watching on a specific Canadian cable channel (you know the one) – everything with the sound turned down so low that I could just make it out but no one in the rest of the house could. It was a specific type of watching television – a guilty one – half delirious from a lack of sleep so that I was never quite sure if what I was watching was real or dreamt. I had exactly one vice in those days and TV was it. I’d sit there, or more accurately, lie there on my bedroom floor, propped up by pillows and covered with a blanket and just watch and watch and watch. I could afford to do it as a kid because, most likely, I didn’t have anything to do the next day until the TV watching started up again. Just having the TV on was soothing and addictive.
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
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.
The Golden Age of Television 