Friday Night Lights - Wind Sprints, 1.03

Explosions in the Sky over football players sloshing through knee-deep mud in the rain. It should be disgusting, but instead it's triumphant.

Dead Like Me - The Ledger, 2.02

Dead Like Me could have done so much. An incredible, attractive, bunch of actors, including Mandy Patinkin and Callum Blue, played with quick, witty dialogue. A quirky, Pie Hole-esque diner specializing in waffles served as their meeting ground. The premise was fascinating -- newly dead girl adjusts to being undead, finds herself employed as a grim reaper. Joins a motley bunch of reapers, each with their own story, while at home, her family copes in their own ways with her death. It explored of the nature of death itself, how the living deal with death, and most interestingly, the specific schematics of what Dead-Like-Me-death really is. Fantastic creatures known as Gravelings, only visible out of the corner of your eye, roam about killing people -- but why some people over others? George Lass was only eighteen when she was killed by a falling toilet seat meteor, but Why her?

Unfortunately, this question spanned far too many episodes. While it would be natural for her character to question Why at first, I feel this should have been, in turn, one of the first issues dealt with so that other stories could be explored. Or, it could have been pushed to the side, resurfacing with an emotional eruption or breakdown. Either way, it shouldn't have been a red button issue into the second season. "The Ledger" begins with George bursting into Rube's apartment and demanding to know Why she had to die, and it feels incredibly tired.

The last half of the first season, in fact, feels too long and repetitive. The reapers receive their post-it death assignments in the beginning of the episode, reap their stuff, question death a bit, and the episode ends with a George voiceover. In the middle somewhere there are a couple of boring scenes that feature George's mother and sister, being generally boring and argumentative. The story never goes anywhere.

What the show should have done was to continue questioning, through George's newly dead inquisitive eyes, the Why behind the post-its and Gravelings and rules of death from an unknown source. Less commentary about dead things and more exploration of what was surely a darkly fantastical dichotomy behind the scenes. The first season begins this way, with George even trying to cheat the system by not reaping, but she soon becomes uncharacteristically complacent with her situation and mindlessly reaps souls like the rest of her Waffle House cohorts. Overall, there is too much sitting around eating waffles not doing anything. Where are the dramatic showcases for each of the actors when they finally open up about their lives and subsequent deaths and subsequent after-death ennui? Dead Like Me should have been bigger, should have aimed higher. Instead, it was stuck in a diner.

The most fascinating part of the series so far was when Betty, a reaper, follows one of the souls she reaps into their afterlife. Rube warned George to never do this, to never break the rules. The episode ends with a satisfying, heart-pounding moment as Rube sticks a post-it on his door, a note for the higher-ups: "Where did she go?"

What happens when you break the rules? What are the rules in death, and who makes them? What are Gravelings? Where did Betty go?

Alas, all these questions are dropped after this episode, all consequences forgotten. Betty's departure took place in the fifth episode of the first season ("Reaping Havoc") which, incidentally, is the last episode Bryan Fuller was associated with. Had he been in charge the rest of the way, the rest of the season would have doubtless been propelled by these questions.

Things Dead Like Me should have done:

• Less Happy Time, less Waffle House.
• More in-the-field reaping, more creative wacky death situations.
• Spotlight episodes for Mason, Rube, Roxy, Daisy. Looking at their past lives and therefore motivations and current state of mind. Opening up to George, showing how broken they are about death and how they learned to cope, for better or for worse.
• A-Team, caper-style episodes in which the gang teams up to find out who's giving the orders, preferably with the leadership of George who is the least jaded.
• Give George's family something interesting to do, or omit them entirely.
• Character development. Any character development.
• Reapers bonding with their reaping targets before and after death. Learning lessons, moral-of-the-story, episode theme type of thing.
• A musical episode (they said they wanted to do one!) or some sort of deviation in the typical episode structure.

The League of Gentlemen, Louie

I don't watch shows on USA because they all feel the same. Matt Bomer's White Collar character could walk onto the set of Covert Affairs or Burn Notice and nobody would, well, notice. That doesn't mean they're bad shows, I just think they're all the same tonally. I watched the last season of Monk, and I watch Psych periodically, but the lite-crime schtick gets old after a while.

I've found that I'm really attracted to shows that have unique tone, direction or cinematography that makes me sit up and think, "Hm, I haven't seen this before." Because honestly, all Sherlock Holmes-esque detective shows are going to feel like House, all mockumentary comedies are going to feel like The Office, all mystery/suspense shows are going to try to emulate LOST. Because if something is proven to work, it will be copied, at the expense of originality.

So when I watched Louie for the first time a couple weeks ago, I was smitten. It was the second episode, "Poker/Divorce," that did it -- the first scene of the episode lasts about five minutes. Louie and his comedian friends sit around a warmly-lit table and play poker. One of the comics is gay, and one of them is homophobic. The guys discuss the use of the word "faggot" in an open, humorous, yet extremely real, way. The atmosphere was something I'd never seen before on TV. "Real-life" sketches like this one, alternating with scenes from his stand-up (also acted) make up the 20-odd minute show. Another plus is the fantastic incidental music.

Similarly (yet somehow completely dissimilarly...), The League of Gentlemen caught my eye. It aired on BBC2 from 1999-2002*. I checked it out for Mark Gatiss, because I wanted to watch a few things the co-creators of Sherlock did pre-Doctor Who (I also watched a bit of Coupling -- not bad! But my disdain for laugh tracks stops me from watching much more). The town of Royston Vasey has perpetual zombie weather -- that is, overcast and foreboding and generally creepy. Dark humor, outlandish characters (many played by three of the show's four creators), and nightmarish situations all come together in this horror-movie town. It's incredibly well-written (all at once screamingly funny yet disturbing) and well-acted, but the selling point, for me at least, is the uniquely nightmarish atmosphere in every episode. Delightful.

* So far I've only watched series 3. I'll go back to 1 and 2 once I get over my laugh track aversion...

Friday Night Lights - Pilot, 1.01

Overcast, and the first strains of First Breath After Coma transcend muted hoots and whistles and claps as cameras pan at varying distances across a grey field where a team scrimmages. Football is loud and brassy, with garish cheerleaders, mud, the muffled crack-ing of shoulder pad against helmet or abdomen or shin, torn-up grass and more mud. I don't like football. But I like Friday Night Lights.

I've raved about how much I adore overcast ("Sad is like happy for deep people," and its muted, worn tone), and that aforementioned scene is what sealed the deal for me. Brassy and garish FNL is not. Everything I hate about football is pulled inside out, and predictably I like this side better. Crowds are obviously loud, so FNL softens them. Instead of fanfare for a fight song, Explosions In the Sky provides an atmospheric backdrop for an adrenaline-packed game; there isn't a slow moment, and we don't need to be bombarded with booming declarations of Yeah! This Is Football! by way of noise or gritty close-ups. Art doesn't tell you what you already know, it shows you a different way of looking at life, at ordinary things like football culture in middle-America.

So, FNL is kind of like artsy, anti-football. Which I dig, a lot.

Thoughts:

• First Breath After Coma plays again in the hospital scene. First thought: Wow, this is awesome. Again. Second thought: Is this Grey's Anatomy?
• Love the handheld camera work. Organic. Very shaky, though. Even more so than BSG's 33, I think, which is saying a lot!
• Good use of music in TV really excites me. I freak out over this kind of thing. Usually for American shows it's the song choice and placement (like The Who on Freaks and Geeks, or Edward Sharpe on Community, or anything on Grey's Anatomy or Chuck), and on British shows it's more the way it's used dramatically (recurrence of Damien Rice's Delicate in Misfits; that subtle drone-y piece over Freddie and Cook's conversation in Skins). Not to say British shows don't choose good music, too.
• It's kind of funny how much the quality of writing on this blog has decreased. You can track the wax and wane of my writing finesse and lack thereof by checking the months I write a lot of posts, and the ones in which I don't. Yuck.
  

Sci Fi Marathon Day 1

So I didn't make it all the way through my marathon. It was tougher than I'd thought. I got about a third of the way through. Next time I'll start up with Ghost Light Pt. 2.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "Band Candy"

Being Human, "Episode 1"

Battlestar Galactica, "33"

The X-Files, "Field Trip"

Doctor Who, "Ghost Light" Pt. 1

· 12:15 Starting Band Candy now.

· So this episode was written by Jane Espenson. Of course it was.

· 12:26 “You’re a good mom.” “I’m the best.” YES SHE IS :’(

· 12:30 Angel doing tai chi in the moonlight. Buffy brings him butcher blood. Angel’s about 200, isn’t he? How old is Edward? Which one is creepier? The answer is: The Doctor, because he’s fucking 900 years old and preys on teenagers.

· 12:35 Xander and Willow are awkwardly playing footsie under the lab table. This makes me sad. And nostalgic.

· 12:54 Ethan was such a good character we could have gotten a lot more mileage out of. His dynamic with Giles was excellent. “You’re my slayer! Hit him!”

· Vampires in Buffy are bumpy, strong, gothic, often clad in black and deep red and leather, sardonic, pale. They go poof when they’re staked.

· 1:03 “I’ve got the SATs tomorrow.” “Oh, blow them off. I’ll write you a note.” “No, it’s okay.” Obligatory lesson learned. Seasons 1-3 were really incredible with the whole using demons as metaphors for growing up thing.

· 1:09 Now watching Being Human Episode 1. “Everyone dies” is the first sentence of this series.

· Vampires have sex too! How True Blood.

· 1:12 Alonso ass! Though I guess his name isn’t Alonso in this series, is it. Bad wolf mention, also. Cool.

· Cheery, Friends-y music over title screen. Establishing tone, weird contrast with the darker opening sequence with blood and sex and ass and death.

· Created by Toby Whithouse. Why does that sound so familiar?

· Oh yeah, because he wrote for DW.

· 1:26 Ooh, interesting werewolf design. Less wolf-y, more feral furry creature thing. Also established: Annie can walk through walls because she is a ghost.

· This is a pretty comedic show, it just happens to feature a werewolf, a vampire, and a ghost. Already excitedly anticipating the dark humor and dark/light contrast to come.

· These vampires are immortal, or maybe immortal until staked/killed? Or something. And they can be in sunlight because they can vampirize themselves whenever they want, it looks like. Similar to Buffy vamps in that they have pitch black eyes.

· 2:13 Beginning 33 now. This might be my favorite episode of the entire series.

· This episode is an interesting, if not kind, introduction into the world of BSG. First of all, there are a LOT of characters, all on different ships, all doing different things. Gaius isn’t even mentally present on the ship half the time. Oh, and Six isn’t real. And there’s another Six and another Sharon on a rainy planet with Helo. It was pretty hard to grasp at first. The guiding element that tied it all together was the jump every 33 minutes.

· 2:22 Seconds of the clock ticking away is the only sound you hear, and then jump to the amazing title sequence.

· 2:52 Since Being Human is 60 minutes long versus a typical 42, give or take, pacing is different. Build up and exposition of 33 is brilliant. Climax with the Olympic Carrier happening now. Gorgeous.

· 2:57 This ending is incredible. And backed by a McCreary score, it’s perfect. Billy tells Roslin she can add one to the population count, because a baby was born.

· 3:00 Starting Field Trip. Hey Roy Anderson. I think I’ve only seen this episode twice, which is unusual because it’s one of my favorites.

· Teleplay by Gilligan and Shiban, directed by Manners = instant win.

· 3:19 “Everything she’s said is textbook, down to the last detail.” When details are too perfect, too typical like that, it’s easy to call bullshit. The Fourth Kind movie, for one.

· Oh Mark Snow. How I’ve missed you.

· 3:39 I love this ending. M Night-esque for sure. I really dig the reality/unreality (which is real?!) theme that’s rather prevalent recently, a la Inception and Amy’s Choice. Are there more? Common for sci fi fantasy anyhow.

· 3:47 I’ve decided on the Seventh Doctor’s Ghost Light for the next hour. Companion is Ace.

· Victorian-era man mentions Ace’s state of “undress,” like how Rose was a wee naked child in Tooth and Claw. ”She comes from a less civilized time.”

· I predict much humor will come of a butler named Nimrod.

Stopping now in favor of watching Dead Like Me.

2010 Primetime Emmy Predictions

My scorecard. 1 & 2 as most likely and second most likely to win; asterisk denotes who I think deserves it!

Drama Series

* Breaking Bad

Dexter

2. The Good Wife

Lost

1. Mad Men

True Blood

The Good Wife is a strong network contender, but I don't think it can stand up to AMC's crown jewel; but as always, I'm rooting for BB.

Comedy Series

Curb Your Enthusiasm

2. Glee

* 1. Modern Family

Nurse Jackie

The Office

30 Rock

Glee and Modern Family are critic and Emmy voter favorites, but MF is more consistent; however, this is really Glee's time to snag a Best because I predict a sophomore slump (and maybe worse) for the uneven show.

Actor in a Drama

2. Bryan Cranston

Michael C. Hall

Kyle Chandler

* 1. Hugh Laurie

Matthew Fox

Jon Hamm

Hamm can wait his turn, he'll be in this race for a while; Cranston only if voters get lazy, though he was brilliant this season; Laurie deserves it for his showcase in the season opener, Broken -- six seasons of House and still no Emmy.

Actress in a Drama

Kyra Sedgwick

Glenn Close

Connie Britton

Julianna Margulies

Mariska Hargitay

January Jones

I honestly can't say -- I don't watch any of these shows except Mad Men!

Actor in a Comedy

2. Jim Parsons

Larry David

Matthew Morrison

* 1. Tony Shalhoub

Steve Carrell

Alec Baldwin

Shalhoub will win for Monk's final season; Parsons might upset -- he and the BBT have surged in popularity this past year; Morrison shouldn't have been nominated, frankly; Baldwin has won once too many; Carrell will win next year for his final season.

Actress in a Comedy

Lea Michele

Julia Louis-Dreyfus

2. Edie Falco

* Amy Poehler

Tina Fey

1. Toni Collette

Collette's role lets her show incredible range, putting her at an easy advantage over actresses like (my favorite) Amy Poehler; Falco is already known to be a terrific actress in any genre, so I wouldn't be surprised at a win for her, either.