TV Things

[next_to_normal]

1. I'm now all caught up with Breaking Bad. OMG SO GOOD EVERYONE SHOULD WATCH THIS SHOW. And conveniently (well, sort of...) AMC is rerunning the entire series every day until the season 5 premiere in July... granted, they're generally at 1AM-4AM-ish, so it helps to have a DVR or be on a vampire's sleep schedule, but you really should watch it. I'd say it's among the top five best shows ever. Definitely one of the best-acted, and it is by far and away the most gorgeous show on TV. Those desert vistas, man...

Talk to me, BB fans! I am now unspoilable!

P.S. Dear Jesse Pinkman, I have a blanket and a cup of tea waiting for you. Let's cuddle. Love, me.

2. Mad Men season finale? I am surprisingly meh. Granted this was much more of a denouement episode after the HUGE events of the last two weeks, but the only thing I was really thinking after the finale is that I would totally watch a spin-off of Don and Peggy MST3K-ing at the movies. Also LOL at the number of times Pete Campbell has been punched in the face this season.

3. Anyone watching Bunheads? Stupidest title ever, but it's a very Gilmore Girls-y show from Amy Sherman-Palladino, with Broadway star Sutton Foster (whom I saw in Thoroughly Modern Millie and thinks she's adorbs). I've only seen the pilot (it premiered last night, but it's been available online for a while now) and I'm still very undecided. The first episode is very heavy on setting up the premise, so I don't feel like I have a sense of what the actual show will be like.

4. New web series to check out: WIGS. It's an ongoing project that produces high quality webisodes and short films, all featuring female protagonists. I'm really enjoying "Jan," about a photographer's assistant who's trying to break into the business, and "Blue," which features Julia Stiles as a call girl who hides her job from her teenage son. There's also "Serena," a short film with Jennifer Garner, but I haven't watched that one yet.

5. Dammit! Yvonne Strahovski (formerly of Chuck) will be guest starring on Dexter next season. Now I'm gonna have to watch it. In other news, apparently the Deb/Dexter thing isn't going away. FML.

6. Burn Notice is back this week!

For the most part, though, the summer is pretty light on TV. I have a TON of shows still on the to-watch list, so I welcome suggestions as to which should be next.

Comments

[beer_good_foamy]

Oh yeah, ghost!Brian was pretty much the one thing I liked about s6. (OK, Brother Sam was a good character, but they never did anything interesting with him - his function, in the end, was basically to supply Dexter with a bible. Because, y'know, bibles are so hard to come by.)

And yeah, the entire faith theme was among the clumsiest I've ever seen on TV. And I've seen some pretty clunky ones.

I would have been interested in a dark Dexter arc if the writers knew they were writing a dark Dexter arc. But at this point, I'm pretty sure their baseline is that everything Dexter does will always be justified, and that this is so obvious it doesn't even need to be established.

[goldenusagi]

It's like the baseline is also 'Dexter will never get caught because he's so brilliant', when we haven't seen evidence of that in quite a while. He wasn't careful this season, he was as sloppy as he's ever been. Letting Travis see him? Talking to Trinity was one thing, but at least Dexter got to know him under an alias. Trinity figured it out because he was a good villain and showed up at Dexter's workplace. But Travis was an idiot. And Dexter doesn't kill him, but talks to him, then lets him go, then turns up at his workplace, doesn't deny that he was going to kill him, etc, and wants to team up to get the other guy (Gellar?) now. WTF? And the only reason Deb caught him was dumb luck, not because she'd been suspicious or he'd been leaving clues that she'd seen.

And even when Dexter did go 'off the rails' with ghost!Brian, he what, stole some stuff and went on a joyride? Got a blowjob from a gas station cashier? Like, this is not what should happen when a serial killer cuts loose.

Also, the dead angel tableau was one of the most hilarious things I've ever seen. I don't think it was supposed to be hilarious. And THE most hilarious thing I've ever seen was Travis' mural with devil!Dexter.

Oh, and as long as I'm at it, the 'Travis was hallucinating Gellar' thing was the most ridiculous plot twist. Eowyn said it better than me in a comment on my journal, but it was ridiculous because it broke the established POV on the show. We were 'inside' the head of a character who wasn't Dexter, and Dexter is a show that has a realistic POV when other characters are involved (Dexter has a ghost!Harry and sometimes imagines things, but no one else does). Breaking the POV for a reveal like that was cheap. And it wasn't even a good reveal on top of that.

[beer_good_foamy]

And even when Dexter did go 'off the rails' with ghost!Brian, he what, stole some stuff and went on a joyride? Got a blowjob from a gas station cashier? Like, this is not what should happen when a serial killer cuts loose.

Yep. When Ferris Bueller would think your serial killer's dark arc looks wimpy, you're doing something wrong.

And THE most hilarious thing I've ever seen was Travis' mural with devil!Dexter.

Heee! Not to mention the way the cops let him take care of that. "We think there may be a dangerous serial killer inside this house. Let's send in the blood spatter analyst for 20 minutes before we even let the SWAT team do a sweep."

Oh, and as long as I'm at it, the 'Travis was hallucinating Gellar' thing was the most ridiculous plot twist.

Not to mention so ridiculously obvious that everyone I watched it with kept going "OK, so we know Gellar can't possibly be all in Travis' mind, since they're telegraphing that so hard that obviously they just want us to think that so they can surprise... us... Oh, they really thought that was a shocking twist? Really?"

I'm still convinced that the only reason they pulled Deb/Dexter out of their collective asses was because their abridged edition of Screenwriting For Dummies only covers one single type of relationship between men and women; if they're just brother and sister and she's not in love with him, they really don't know how to write it.

[goldenusagi]

Well, they seemed to know how to write it for five seasons. I'm honestly not sure what happened. Then they just 'decided' that she's always been in love with him. Way to ruin one of the best brother/sister relationships on TV. But it also plays into the the writers' trope (or cultural trope) that the most important type of relationship is a romantic one.

I went on at length about this here last year, lol:

http://goldenusagi.livejournal.com/459836.html