This Season on TV
I’ve thrown a couple of TV reviews up here now and then, but really only when a show either makes me extremely happy or extremely upset. I certainly watch more than I’ve reviewed, most shows go by without a peep, not because they’re not good or not bad, but because they just don’t cause the extreme emotions that make me run to the computer and rant or rave about them. I thought it was about time to take a look at what’s in my “watch” pile for this year and see how it’s all shaking out. I’m limiting this list to only those things appearing on American television and currently on the air. Those things between seasons or on hiatus will be handled elsewhere.
Fair warning, there will be spoilers. Trust me, I know.
Bones - Take one tough FBI agent, throw in a genius physical anthropologist and her band of “squints” and mix in a ton of unique murders and you’ve got Bones. This is the fifth season and in general, I still like the show although I think they’re heading in the wrong direction. Yes, the show has always had a certain sexual tension between Booth and Brennan but once you actually act on that tension, you ruin the interaction between the characters. If they ever go through with it in reality, the show’s over because neither the FBI nor the Jeffersonian would allow the two to work together if they were in a relationship. Spend more time on the murders and less on the “he wants to get into her pants” nonsense. It’ll be a better show if they do.
(4/5)
Castle – My favorite show at the moment. As I wrote at the end of last season, it’s a detective show about a famous mystery novelist who works with the police to solve murders and, presumably, to get hands-on experience in detective work for his books. One of the nice things about Castle is that, unlike other shows like The Mentalist, Rick Castle has a life outside of solving murders. He has a mother and a daughter and a writing career that he can’t just ignore when a case comes up. This makes him a much more rounded character and more believable than thinking he lives in a closet somewhere and comes out when the cameras start rolling. This show is very, very highly recommended, don’t miss it if you like great characters and fantastic stories and a touch of perfectly placed humor.
(5/5)
Flash Forward – Probably my second favorite. The entire world blacked out and experienced 2 minutes and 17 seconds of a specific future date. Millions were killed as planes dropped out of the sky, cars plowed into each other, etc. Now, it looks like this is a plot and the FBI rushes to piece together the puzzle before the events of the future come to pass or worse yet, it happens again. I think it’s a fantastic premise, I just question the long-term survival of the show that “ends” next April. Do they do another “flashforward” to a new date for a new season? Hopefully they have a contingency plan. In any case, I highly recommend the show, it’s got good characters, an intriguing plot and it’s written extremely well. You never know what’s going on, you just see pieces of the puzzle and have to try to figure out how they all fit. The show is not at all episodic, it’s one that has to be watched in order to see where all the clues fit and that’s really my preferred show format. I want to see the overall arc develop, I want to see if I can fit the pieces together before the characters on-screen do and so far, at least, Flash Forward delivers.
(4.75/5)
Fringe – The FBI (why are there so many FBI shows out there this year?) has a special, secret task force called Fringe division, which deals with the odd and the unexplained, cases which the regular authorities are not equipped to handle. Olivia Dunham stumbled into the fray last year when she found out that her partner and lover was, in fact, a traitor dealing with unnatural events. Together with formerly-institutionalized scientist Walter Bishop and his son Peter, they seek out the strange and unexplained and find that there’s a massive conspiracy going on, one that is literally out of this universe. This is a JJ Abrams show and it’s fast-paced and fun, even when it’s being odd and disturbing. Yes, it’s a good show but it has issues. For one, I have a problem with one crazy old scientist being at the center, or at least being tangentally involved with every weird thing that has happened on the planet in the past 20 years. Walter Bishop has become the common link for just about every case they’ve done. He did an experiment or he knew someone who did an experiment that helps him solve every case they come across and it gets tiring. The show is leading up to something and when that event, whatever it is, happens, I don’t see where the show can stay on the air. I’ve never figured out if they have a plan for a certain number of seasons or if they’re just making it up as they go along. In any case, I wish they’d let up on the Walter angle once in a while and just have some good, fun stories that don’t tie into the extra-dimensional invasion. If you’re into the odd, give it a look.
(3.75/5)
Heroes – Originally about people learning they are special, it was a concept that I absolutely adore: putting ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances and seeing how they handled it. We got to meet a large and interesting cast of super-powered characters living in a world that would fear them if they knew about them. I keep trying to like this show, I really do. I absolutely loved it in the first season, then it started to fall because it lost direction and it’s never found it again. One of the reasons is because almost nobody ever dies in the show, even though they’re supposed to. The only one I can think of that has ever died and never come back was DL from the first season, otherwise we still have the full complement from the first season. I want to see change. I want to see excitement. Instead, I see a show that is still telling the same old story from 4 years ago. Please, can someone kill Sylar forever? I don’t mean stick him in someone’s head, remake his body, I mean kill him and get rid of him permanently. As much as I like Zach Quinto in some things, the role is dead, get him off the show entirely and let him go make more Star Trek movies or something. I suppose I watch in hopes of them actually doing something. We really need to get back to stories about heroes learning to be heroes and the villains they hate. Government conspiracies, mutant circuses and the like just don’t do it for me.
(3/5)
The Mentalist – Last season, this was one of my top-picks and while I’m still very much enjoying it, it’s slipped a little. It’s the story of Patrick Jane, a former “mentalist” and psychic who is now helping the fictional California Bureau of Investigation (CBI) solve murders. This isn’t at all a new concept, it’s been done many times before and is even extremely similar to another show on the list, Castle. So why would this show get a lower score than Castle, to which it is so similar? I really have some misgivings about Simon Baker’s portrayal of the Patrick Jane character. In Castle, Rick Castle is full of himself and it’s funny because he’s a clown much of the time. In Mentalist however, Jane is really full of himself and he’s rarely ever wrong. His ego is just insufferable. What’s more, I suppose to make him a bit ‘edgier’, they have Jane pushing the boundaries and stepping over the line. Sure, it’s one thing to violate CBI standards and ask embarassing questions of witnesses so he can get slapped later, but when he’s outright violating the law, looking for ways to blackmail people, etc., it stops being acceptable. Yes, Patrick Jane is a conflicted character, his wife and child were murdered by the serial killer Red John, but the lengths he’s going to in order to stay in the loop are a bit extreme. I don’t think any credible law enforcement agency, even if they did allow an outsider on their team, would keep him around regardless of how many cases he closes.
(4/5)
Mystery Quest – If you remember “In Search Of” with Leonard Nimoy from the 70s, you’ve seen Mystery Quest. Part of a line of “we couldn’t find our asses with both of our hands and a map” shows on History Channel, Mystery Quest sets out to wander around in circles and fall over into a heap. They never find anything. They never discover anything new. They start out with lofty goals and end up with nothing. This goes on in episode after episode after episode. So why do I watch it? Because, like other shows of this type, watching them fail miserably is sort of funny in a cruel sort of way. I’ve already been openly critical of the show precisely because it is so mindless in it’s execution. It would be one thing to give the historical background and scientific consensus on their subject matter but instead, they act like they’re on a mission to find the truth, without having any illusions that they’ll ever find anything.
(1.5/5)
Mythbusters – Mythbusters is the creme-de-la-creme of critical thinking science shows, wrapped up in a ton of fun and explosive destruction. Even though they’re obviously having a lot of fun on set, they’re passing on important information to the audience about reason, rationality and how scientific investigations are done. Because it’s done in an entertaining fashion, their audience picks it up and hopefully adopts some of it into their day-to-day lives. I love the fact that Adam and Jamie, especially Adam, have become so readily accepted into the skeptical community, he makes an excellent spokesman for critical thinking and rationality but he doesn’t let it go to his head. This is one show that I want to see go on forever and spawn many, many competent immitators.
(5/5)
Sanctuary - This show started off as a web-only, CGI-based series starring Stargate: SG-1’s Amanda Tapping. After 8 episodes, it got picked up by SciFi and started off with a somewhat altered retelling of the original online story and then moved on to tell other stories. It’s the tale of Dr. Helen Magnus, a doctor who infected herself with vampire blood to achieve eternal life, who, along with her vast network of Sanctuaries, tries to protect mankind from genetically-different “abnormals” and vice versa. It tries to put a more-or-less scientific spin on things instead of allowing magic and the supernatural to rule the day, for which it gets points from me. The only reason it got a little lower score from me, at least this season, is because I don’t know that they have a specific direction in mind. They did a whole raft of episodes about Ashley’s kidnapping and the Cabal destroying the Sanctuary network and then… it was over, Ashley was supposedly dead and the Cabal was destroyed off-camera and since then, it feels like there’s no direction, just a lot of random episodes that are less than cohesive. Hopefully this will change in the next couple of episodes, I want to see them doing something, not wandering around aimlessly.
(4/5)
Smallville – To be honest, I have no idea why I watch this show, it’s awful, it has been for years and they just keep getting worse. I suppose on some level, I’m watching to see how low they can go and every time I think they’ve hit the bottom of the barrel, they manage to drill their way through and keep going down. Last week’s episode was a prime example. Come on, the Wonder Twins? With rhinestone Gleek on their cell-phones? Couldn’t they have borrowed Wonder Dog from Wendy and Marvin? At least he could rip their throats out! As I’ve written before, this is a show that clearly no one knows what to do with, no one really wants to be on and no one can do much with because of the restrictions on the Superman franchise. Can’t call him Superman, can’t put him in the costume, yet they’ve drawn the series out so far that there are few other options. Please, let it die!
(1.5/5)
Stargate Universe – This is the third series in the Stargate franchise. Stargate: SG-1 is the longest-running modern sci-fi show ever, Stargate Atlantis ran a respectable 5 seasons and now we have Universe. It’s the story about a ragtag group of refugees who find themselves trapped on an Ancient starship tasked with travelling the universe seeding stargates on distant planets. I wanted to like this show. I really did. I even wrote about my initial impressions and it just hasn’t gotten any better. The problem is, there’s a certain something that we all expect from a Stargate series. Even going back to the original, tangentally-related movie, they haven’t taken themselves all that seriously. Even at the very worst, when things looked their darkest, the tone wasn’t so desolate and horrible that the viewer lost hope. That’s just not the case with Universe. As I feared, they’re trying to turn it into a dark series like Battlestar Galactica. The problem is, Stargate isn’t a dark concept, it never has been, it’s all about hope. Hope is exactly what’s missing and without it, the show just isn’t worth watching. I’m giving it another couple of episodes and unless they go hard to port, I’m going to let it drop. Unlike Smallville, it’s not so bad that it’s funny, but it’s just not good enough to be worthwhile. Here’s hoping they realize that they do have potential that to date, they’ve squandered.
(2.5/5)
Supernatural – As much as I started off liking this show, I think it’s gone entirely the wrong way, perhaps back as far as the late second or early third seasons. It started off as a road show, two brothers against the supernatural. It had great characters, fast cars and hard rock music, what’s not to like? However, as the show went on, it stopped being a buddy show and started being about an upcoming epic battle that the brothers had a front-row seat for, but were far too weak to actually deal with on their own. When you start talking about the apocalypse with Sam and Dean being little more than pawns, why should anyone care about them? They’re no longer the focus of the show, they’re just characters that the audience can see the end of the world through their eyes. That doesn’t mean that it can’t be fun, depending on who is writing the episode. Take last week’s episode for instance, Sam and Dean got stuck at a Supernatural convention and had to deal with fanboys. That’s funny. They have no problem poking fun at themselves and that’s when you can spend an hour laughing at the show instead of crying at what it could have been. It has moments of greatness, often buried under mounds of mediocrity and disappointment. At least this is the last season, it’s a show that needs to die.
(2.5/5)
V - Brand new and hard to make a fair assessment on, but so far I’m really enjoying it. I was a fan of the original V mini-series back in the 80s, although the TV series left a lot to be desired, so when this came along I was interested in seeing how it would be made. I was afraid that, like Battlestar Galactica, they’d turn it into a horribly dark show but to date, it’s been fun, there have been characters that are both likeable and apparently positive and it’s different enough from the original mini-series to make it interesting to watch, but not so far that it’s unrecognizable.
(4.25/5)
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