Drama

Email Roundtable #28 – Orphan Black

/ kwoloszyn / 1 Comment

Orphan BlackThis week on the roundtable we continue with our Summer Television Secret Santa. Kerri gifted the Canadian sci-fi show, Orphan Black, to Katie. Below is their conversation about the show.

Kerri: Can I be a total pain in the butt and ask you to give our readers a brief summary of the show?

Katie: Orphan Black is a hour-long sci-fi drama that revolves around the steely and smart small time crook, Sarah Manning. When Sarah discovers a woman who looks exactly like her, Sarah’s world and identity is altered forever. Continue reading →

Email Roundtable #26 – Summer Television Secret Santa

/ kwoloszyn / 3 Comments

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. 

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No One Left to Root For

/ Katie Man / Leave a comment

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

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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

/ Jane Walker / 1 Comment

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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

/ kwoloszyn / Leave a comment

Corn_on_the_cobWelcome 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.

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How I Spent My Women’s Prison Vacation: The First Season of Orange is the New Black

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

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.

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BritFlix: British Television on Netflix to Accompany Your Tea and Crumpets

/ goldenageguest / 2 Comments

by Rob Ross

I love British television. Being weened as a child on Faulty Towers and Are You Being Served? has left me predisposed to favour the humour of our once imperial overlords. Nowadays, itʼs not so much the antics of John Cleese that have me returning to the annals of BBC as it is the distinctly un-North American approach to violence and sexuality (aka: less of the former, more of the latter). Lucky for us in Canuckia, Netflix is a trove of British programs and mini-series. While Peep Show and Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace arenʼt available (to my fist-shaking chagrin), there is still good many shows from which to choose. Let the secret Union Jacks of your hearts merrily flap in the flatulent winds of this beans-for-breakfast culture.

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Boy vs Girls

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girls-600x450The great thing about Canadian TV is its pilfering of American shows I haven’t seen. The Sopranos, Curb Your Enthusiasm, even going back to Dennis Miller Live and Dream On, I did not get to see on their first run. Canadian TV lifts them up so I don’t have to get HBO. I really should, but I like TV and HBO says they are not TV, so here we are. Continue reading →