Last week’s Fringe was awesome. I can’t think of anything to say about it that wouldn’t be at least a bit of a spoiler but I can say, about the last several episodes, that I have been rather enjoying Anna Torv’s impersonation of Leonard Nimoy.
I just discovered this past Monday night that Stargate: Universe is back – has been back for weeks! I’ve missed almost the entire season. We haven’t been watching anything on siffy SyFy for a long while so I hadn’t seen any ads for it and never thought to check and see if it was back on. I’ve always been on the fence as to whether or not I think the show is a total waste of time but it looks like this season might have been better. Now I’m hoping for one of those catch-up marathons the cable channels have once in a while.
Is it just me or are the plots on Chuck getting increasingly forced and implausible? Two CIA agents, one of them the daughter of a professional con artist, get conned out of over 26 thousand dollars by a fake wedding planner? Whom they found on the Internet? Really? It is still a fun show in some ways; I just think the writers could do better.
It looks like we’re heading into TV land’s usual summer drought. Neither Castle nor Harry’s Law were on this week. The last Big Bang Theory was a rerun. (The local CBS channel, which had preempted it for storm coverage did show it later.) Other than those and the other shows mentioned above there’s been very little on lately that interests me. Once in a while there’s something on one of the cable channels besides Drama Queens With Chain Saws (Ax Men) or Drama Queens With Motor Bikes (American Chopper) or I Was Eaten By a Giant Shark (or snake or bear or jellyfish or mysterious monster) and Survived (just about every show on Animal Planet) or Spending Mega-bucks Fixing Up Over-priced Houses for Sale. (over half the shows on HGTV) Oh well… more time for reading, sewing and all that good stuff.
April 20th, 2011 - 11:04 am
My favorite line from that Fringe episode was “You’re BALD!” I’ve been going around using it all week.
April 20th, 2011 - 8:07 pm
That was a great scene. I also thought “Aye aye, Captain” was a nice touch. I love when one TV show contains a reference to another.
April 22nd, 2011 - 9:56 pm
Fringe: Been a bit uneven this season, but still good. Stargate: Universe? Lost me in the first season, and siffy has mostly lost me since the silly “SyFy” thing–not just because of the name change (which was almost as dumb as it gets), but the name change did seem to match the move toward less interesting fare. Harry’s Law lost me with its first episode, but I can see its appeal. Different strokes.
Chuck? *sigh* So much potential, only touches reaching it sporadically.
For fiction of any kind on TV, the real problem with most of the shows that have some potential for being interesting is that the writers (and producers and directors and actors) are very obviously not as intelligent as the characters they are writing (& etc.) for, and so they make “bright” characters seem as unintelligent as they are. Of course, most actors are just parrots, so they can’t do anything about the problem. This problem is most obvious when a character is supposed to be some sort of genius but cannot reason his/her way out of a paper bag, or at least seems to lack the knowledge and reasoning ability to make his/her way through an episode of “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?” (Probably, again, because the writers, etc., couldn’t either.)
And then there are the writers (&etc.) who get so caught up in a POV or agenda that they end up making a really stupid show, no matter how bright they are. Just telling interesting stories and telling them well seems to be something that even the best and brightest who produce TV shows cannot do consistently, or at least for very long, any more.