Archive for the ‘r.i.p.’ Category

Extras Finale: Experiments in Liveblogging

Sunday, December 16th, 2007


This weekend marks the premature, self-induced demise of HBO’s Extras. Despite Ricky Gervais’s comments from over a year ago, saying that the show was already dunzo, he reassembled the team for a typically British Christmas Special send-off. And since Americans have better things to do on Christmas than watch TV, we get it a whole week early!

The 80-minute conclusion starts at 9PM Eastern on Sunday, and in honor of the show’s vast contributions to awkward humor and self-parody, I’m trying my hand at liveblogging. Occasions for such an activity are few and far between. Event television is a rarity and award shows are wretched. So what better excuse than this to make the jump into real-time criticism? If your Sunday night is looking empty (er, pathetic), bookmark this page and watch with me. I promise more booze-fueled candidness than you’re used to and a few celebrity guests of my own…

8:59 – I am not remotely excited for seven nights of the John Adams miniseries. Keep fishing, HBO.

9:01 – Alright, here we go. Six months of awkward setbacks are going to force Andy to go on Celebrity Big Brother. Here is the story of how it happened.

9:04 – Michael Richards jokes, however stale, are always welcome. British people making reference to Sanjaya are not.

9:08 – Dear Andy Millman, neither Doctor Who nor Hotel Babylon are “camp, frothy nonsense.” XOX – Mikey

9:13 – Bunny is cruising for elicit manlove in a London park. So is George Michael. There is self parody and then there’s just being pathetic. At least “Last Christmas” is in heavy rotation this week – a far more charming legacy.

9:24 – Clive Owen is very tan. And unlike every other celebrity guest in Extras‘ illustrious history, is not remotely interested in Maggie. Refusing to have him throw shit in her face, she walks of the set. Maggie’s OTD as an extra: 9:25.

9:27 – “Am I Bovvered” is so 2006.

9:29 – Darren’s OTD as an agent: 9:29

9:35 – Can’t this show just be funny? I realize that the whole desperately sad human struggle thing makes it better TV, but it’s really bringing me down.

**Brief intermission: our friend Dan at Ithaca Has Gorges will be taking the reigns…**

9:40 – Initial thoughts: This ep has been heavy on the tragedy and production value. The new agent is nefarious. This Moo Shu is going to be delicious.

9:42 – Nefarious new agent [NNA] said ‘Dr. Who’, then ‘Hotel Babylon’, and Mikey squirted chocolate milk from his nose.

9:46 – Andy’s shorts put the ‘short’ in ‘shorts’. This suggests that before his shorts, ‘shorts’ existed exclusively as the letter ‘s’. Someone please consult Wikipedia.

9:49 – OTD of When The Whistle Blows [Andy's sitcom]. Andy asn’t been aving any laffs.

9:51 – What’s not hotter than the What’s Not Hot list? Maggie scraping food [refried beans?] in her new job as dishwasher.

9:53 – “VERNON KAY!!” Number of notable TV presenters presented to an otherwise unaware audience = 1.

9:56 – Darren’s back at the carphone warehouse, and as much as we’re supposed to feel sorry for him, I get the feeling that he’s barely employable in his current job.

9:57 – The second clip of Kate Bush doing “This Woman’s Work” makes me think I’m watching ‘If These Walls Could Talk’, not the prequel to The Office. That’s what he said!

**End of Intermission. Thanks, Dan**

10:00 – How perfect! I’m back just in time for the David Tennant cameo. Andy shows up on Hotel Babylon too, but we don’t get any of the cast.

10:03: – Extras has always been self-referential to the cast’s real life careers… is Maggie thinking of moving to America? To star in Fugly Metty, mayhaps?

10:05 – What’s up with “The Ivy” anyways? Is there a British offshoot of the LA landmark? I’m getting really sick of Andy’s nemesis, whatshisface showing up. It’s too much.

10:07 – “Did you know that the number one killer of household cats is feline AIDS…?” God damn this is depressing.

10:10 – Ok, we’re up to Celebrity Big Brother. Andy has chosen fame over integrity. Maggie watches at home and frowns. The only British D-lister I recognize is that girl from that band. She’s doing that dance!

10:15 – Everyone does that dance! I am reminded of my awkward, childhood Brit-pop obsession.

10:21 – Andy makes his big speech about fame and apologizes, through the television, to Maggie. They’re crying. I’m crying. When did Ricky Gervais become such an incredible dramatic actor? Weirded out!

10:25 – Andy rejects fame and all that junk. Yusef Islam sings. Closing thoughts to come…

With less than eight hours of original programming under its belt, Extras was barely a blip on the TV radar. But in its brief tenure, it gave us more savvy humor and heart-tugging thoughtfulness than most of its longer lasting contemporaries. The extra bitter bittersweetness of tonight’s finale was justified by the uplifting nature of the last five minutes. Andy and Maggie, though not in the best of positions in life, have each other. And they’re finally free of the expectations that held them back for so long.

Posted in extras, hbo, liveblogging!, r.i.p. | 2 Comments »

Veronica Mars’ Sad Goodbye Hits DVD

Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007


“Tragedy blows through your life like a tornado, uprooting everything, creating chaos. You wait for the dust to settle and then you choose. You can live in the wreckage and pretend it’s still the mansion you remember, or you can crawl from the rubble and slowly rebuild. Because after disaster strikes, the important thing is that you move on. But if you’re like me, you just keep chasing the storm.” - Veronica Mars

Ok, ok… I’m not really comparing the trauma of a murdered best friend, a deadbeat mom or being raped by a stranger to having my favorite show canceled, but who are you to measure my grief? My relationship with Veronica Mars was a complicated one. It took me a while to figure out if I really loved her for who she was or if she was just my Buffy rebound. She was indeed the former, and that made her premature departure so much more devastating. The third and final season hits DVD today, and whether or not you agree with the way the show went out, your life will be better for watching it.

The third season of Veronica Mars was not its strongest. In fact, it was almost certainly its weakest, but I don’t hold it against them. Being given a vote of confidence from freshman network The CW, the blessing turned into a curse when the show came under constant scrutiny – forcing the creative team to switch gears and attempt to alter the format of the show at several points during the season. This unease over their position at the network, their fate and even their waning audience was apparent on almost every episode. Though it was by no means bad, the mysteries surrounding the rapist and the murdered Dean of Hearst College were just not as compelling as Lily Kane and the bus crash. Not only did we really not care about the new victims, none of our established ensemble (who became increasingly hard to incorporate towards the end) were implicated or truly affected by these crimes.

Week to week, Veronica was still entertaining, but it had clearly lost something between the second and third season. In some ways, it almost made the inevitable axing an easier pill to swallow. Then, as the season inched closer to the end, when creator Rob Thomas was supposed to turn VM into stand-alone mysteries (instead of increasingly shorter serials that had defined it), he chose to thumb his nose at the CW. The dense mysteries may have taken a back seat, but the sticky relationships between the characters, the references to the show’s rich geology (including one last dig from the family Kane) and the air of exclusivity for its die hard fans were all more prominent than they had been all season. We got some of the best episodes of their entire run, and then our hearts were crushed. It seemed like Thomas knew the end was nigh and wanted the show to go out on top, but did he have to make it so bleak? In the last episode (supposedly penned as a season finale and not a series-ender), another humiliation drove Veronica to betray those closest to her to once again reap some spiteful vengeance, her Achilles’ heel. She doesn’t get it, she trashes the wrong lives in the process and we last see her all alone in the rain. Her back is turned, but we’re almost certain that she’s shedding some extremely uncharacteristic tears.

It’s hard to leave our girl in that state. Seeing her just as broken and victimized as the day we met her almost takes away from the three years she spent charming us with her enviable wit and unparalleled resilience. But in the end, Veronica Mars was a flawed heroine and even a bit of a flawed show. There’s something in her melancholic send-off that seems right despite the endless questions it leaves us to ponder till we’re dead or senile. At least it’s a show worth remembering for that long.

Posted in r.i.p., tv on dvd, veronica mars | 2 Comments »

John From Cincinnati: Beached, Bloated and Bird Food

Tuesday, August 14th, 2007

Those vacant looks say it all. In the 10 mind-boggling weeks since The Sopranos left us hanging, John From Cincinnati did what it could to rebuild Sunday nights. And though it will surely go down as one of the more inventive attempts at serialized storytelling, there won’t be much to reference. Last night HBO confirmed what we already knew: JFC will not be getting a second season.

What few fans remain will now have to stalk creator David Milch if they want to know what the hell it all meant – assuming he even knows himself. He did offer a few tidbits on Sunday’s series finale (as did episode writer Zach ‘Joss’s bro’ Whedon) to Variety‘s Cynthia Littleton. You can read them here and here. Personally, I feel like I’ve been let off the hook. I watched John for watching’s sake, but my attention waned as soon as the opening credits ended – which, if you never caught them, were pretty effing awesome.

Posted in hbo, john from cincinnati, r.i.p. | No Comments »

The Sopranos: Made in America

Monday, June 11th, 2007

It’s so very difficult to remember life immediately before The Sopranos. Northern Exposure was still considered the creative masterwork of television, Touched by an Angel and Veronica’s Closet ruled primetime and Tim Allen and Jenna Elfman were considered quirky. Then along came Tony and TV critics the world over quite literally creamed their collective pants. When it was at its best, it set the standard for cinema caliber television, and when it was at its worst it was a little bit of a self-congratulatory tease. And now after almost a decade on air, with hardly as many episodes as you’d expect it to have under its belt, we say goodbye. (more…)

Posted in hbo, r.i.p., the sopranos | 3 Comments »

Veronica Mars: The Bitch is Back… Done

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007


Penning an “in memoriam” of my favorite show of the past three years (and, ultimately, one that will likely remain in my top five forever) is not an easy task. Nor is it one I was I really thought I’d have to write until just this last week. But last night’s episode was sadly Veronica Mars‘ last, though you’d never know from watching it.

Bloggers and critics billed last night as the show’s two-hour series finale, and the semi-functioning retards at The CW would have had us believe it was just another season finale through the last promo. In reality, it was neither. Two distinctly separate episodes glued together to send the show unceremoniously off into the sunset – that latter, as good as it was, giving the viewers absolutely nothing that they deserve from a swan song.

Having spent the last month solving some of the least dire mysteries of her brief stint in sleuthing, last night Veronica was thrown a curve ball in the form of a sex tape, featuring herself, leaked to the internet and emailed around campus. True to form, Veronica takes lemons and squeezes the juice into the eyes of her would-be oppressors.

A flawed heroine till the bitter end, Veronica’s underhanded tactics in her quest for justice cause the most pain to the people closest to her. Files in long-exiled Jake Kane’s hard drive give Veronica enough fodder to blackmail all of the secret society members who we learn were responsible for the tape and open a veritable Pandora’s box of potential mysteries for the upcoming season. Too bad her father loses his chance at being Sheriff, yet again, covering all of the tracks Veronica left while stealing them.

Saying last night’s episode was the season’s finest is an understatement. Though it’s nice to see a show go out on a creative high, it most definitely not nice to have our last shared moments with our girl find her plagued by melancholy yet again. This is the Veronica from first season. This is the Veronica we fell in love with. But this isn’t the way we were supposed to leave her. “The Bitch is Back” makes for spectacular lead-in to another season. It’s such a shame that it’s a season we’ll never get.

Posted in r.i.p., the cw, veronica mars | 3 Comments »

Gilmore Girls: Bon Voyage

Wednesday, May 16th, 2007

I was vehemently opposed to Gilmore Girls from day one. Back in the days when Buffy was still on the WB and high school afforded me even more time to devote to the tube, I was pretty much down with any new series. But not the Girls. Something about the original promo of a single mother fighting with her teenage daughter over whose boobs were bigger did not sit well with me. So I avoided the show like the plague for six of its seven years.

Then last summer I found myself inexplicably drawn to these fast-talking sirens and watched the entire first six seasons in less than two months. But just as fast as I’d fallen in love, I was out of it. The seventh season was largely a chore to watch, and I started to hate characters I had thought could do no wrong. Poor decisions were made – decisions I couldn’t see our girls ever making. This is unquestionably the fault of Amy Sherman-Palladino for jumping ship and leaving new series helmsman David S. Rosenthal stuck between a rock and the hardest of places. But this season was not without its bright spots, and in last night’s finale, everyone ended up more or less where they belonged.

How “Bon Voyage” could ever have been billed as anything but a swan song is beyond me. Everything that could have – came full circle, and each moment of the episode dripped with finality. In the opening scene Rory meets her long-forgotten idol, Christiana Amanpour in the last of Gilmore Girls’ awesomely random cameos. Lorelai and her mother share a moment that could have easily been schmaltzy but was instead exactly what it needed to be. Luke and Lorelai, though far from married, are back on the right track and share a heart-melting smooch. And in an almost unprecedented move, everyone in Stars Hollow got some screen time, with Mrs. Kim and the town troubadour the only notable exceptions.

Rory’s dismissal of Logan the week before the finale didn’t float well with a lot of people, but pairing her off for life seems a little unfair for a 23-year-old with so much potential. Gilmore Girls was one of those shows that was all about the ladies, so while it might be her mother’s time to finally get her knight in shining armor, Rory just doesn’t need one. What Rory got in the finale wasn’t a definitive conclusion but a whole lot of hope and possibilities. Giving the protagonists a choice of how to live their lives without us, and us the chance to imagine their future that suits us best, is one of the nicest notes you can end a series on.

There’s long been talk of Sherman-Palladino’s proposed end to the series – four words (most likely spoken by Lorelai to Rory) that she’d known would be the last line of the final episode from the inception of the series. Obviously, we did not get them. Instead, we’re left with a moment almost identical to the last scene of the pilot: a fade-out of Luke’s diner, the girls off on a quintessential, non-descript rant. In a lot of ways, this is better than any fabled last words. In true form, Lorelai and Rory are off in their own little world that we were never meant to fully understand but fortunate enough to be a part of for at least a little while.

Posted in gilmore girls, r.i.p., the cw | 1 Comment »

Life After Death

Tuesday, May 1st, 2007

A long time ago, there was a little program that saved my relationship with the tube. In the wake of the most devastating blow of my tv-watching career, came this low-budget cable dramedy, with an uninspired premise and a rag-tag cast of 90s refugees. It appeared to be just the latest in a long line of shows to try and capitalize on the commercial and critical obsession with mortality that had peaked about a year earlier.

But Dead Like Me was so much more. It perfectly captured the melancholy that comes from biding your time, uncertainty and the gap between youth and adulthood. Grim reapers as cosmic temps may have been a heavy-handed metaphor, but it worked. The frequency of absurd deaths allowed for a dark humor that made the frustrations of the protagonists more stirring than desperate, and each episode balanced the line between poignancy and hysterics flawlessly. Unfortunately our time in the sun with Dead Like Me was short-lived. After only 29 episodes, Showtime canceled the show, and as has been the case with so many others before and since, we were left with a disappointing finale and too many loose ends.

Naturally, this week’s news of its reincarnation initially prompted more excitement than anything, but the vagueness of this announcement compounded with the most unusual timing poses more questions than I care to think about. There has been no information on whether or not the cast will return or whether the story will be a retelling or a continuation – only that it will be told in a direct to DVD film and a director and writer have already been slated. Given all the time that’s elapsed, and the other projects that are being pursued by some of the cast-members, I don’t have the highest hopes. But stranger things have happened.

If Dead Like Me does get the treatment it deserves, with the bulk of the original cast and a chance to finish the story, it would serve as another example of how shows with loyal enough fan bases (however small) are more frequently being resurrected in different incarnations. If they go a different route, in the grand tradition of straight to video, and just try to bleed a little extra cash from an unrecognizable stone, I imagine I’ll keep it in my Netflix queue for a couple of months until I grow tired of pushing it back down whenever there’s a threat of really having to watch it.

Posted in dead like me, r.i.p., showtime | 1 Comment »

The Most… Devastating News Ever

Wednesday, April 25th, 2007

The glory of Alison Stewart might be lost on most people without a serious nostalgia for the mid-90s or the luxury of watching cable news for the entirety of every weekday afternoon, but let me assure you that she’s the darlin’est. Stewart used to be a correspondent for MTV News back in the halcyon days of Serena Altschul and Kurt Loder and covered their original Choose or Lose campaigns during the final years of romanticized politics. After almost a decade of other gigs and an Emmy for her September 11th coverage, she wound up on MSNBC.

An anchor since 2003, last year saw Alison get her own show, The Most. And amidst a five-hour block of nondescript broadcasting, she did her best to separate herself from the pack. Billed as a show that “reports on the most popular or sought-after information on the Net and in popular culture,” she filled the hour with “the most searched” stories of the day, arbitrary viral video and celebrity gossip. It was by far their softest hour of programming all day. I don’t know how or when exactly I became obsessed with The Most, but I did.

So you can imagine my alarm when this week saw the noon-to-one hour become another vehicle for boring Contessa Brewer and MSNBC Live. Since no one at the network cared enough to respond to my desperate emails, I had to consult the only blog that cares about these things and they confirmed my fears. Alison has jumped ship and The Most isn’t going on without her. I would be quick to assume that the decision wasn’t her own, but with the giant hole left by Imus just two weeks ago and Alison’s marital status with the vice-president of MSNBC programming, I can’t imagine anyone over there is eager to fill another hour of the day.

“You may have heard I am moving on… but not moving out. I’m diving into a new opportunity — stay tuned,” said Alison in an incredibly vague email to her coworkers. Whatever it is, I can’t imagine it will be as charming or distracting as The Most. There’s some slightly confirmed news that she’s doing an environmentally themed series for… The Sundance Channel, and given her apparent love of nature, I guess it would make sense. That’s all well and good, Alison, but it’s not going to spare me from now having to watch Meredith Viera’s saccharine Who Wants to Be Millionaire while I eat my lunch at work.

Posted in news, r.i.p. | No Comments »

Gillian Anderson is Trying to Break My Heart

Friday, April 20th, 2007

Scully, no!I loved everything about The X Files. I loved the show, I loved the movie and I loved this weird song about its stars. After The X Files ended, I continued to love Gillian Anderson and the precious few projects she chose to involve herself with – particularly the BBC adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, which is quite possibly the best TV movie/miniseries ever. So you can imagine how gutted I feel to learn that Gillian hates the very television that brought her into my life and thinks my watching it will bring about an end to civilization.

In an interview earlier this week with the London Telegraph, when asked whether she was considering any future television projects, Anderson had this to say: “Oh, shut the fuck up! Are you kidding me? My God, I don’t even watch television. I don’t like television. I never have liked it. The whole concept of sitting down in front of a TV feels like one of the things that’s destroying society, as far as I’m concerned.”

You’ve never liked TV? Not even when you won an Emmy for your work on one of the greatest shows ever? This is incredibly rough news for someone who’s watched The X Files movie on HBO three times in the last month and checks every week for any news of an actual release date for the complete box set of the series. I can handle her rejecting America, but I cannot handle her dissing my tube. Come back from the dark side, Scully!

Posted in news, r.i.p. | 1 Comment »

California! There We Went!

Friday, February 23rd, 2007

Ben McKenzieWhich came first: The OC or my love of Death Cab? Though I genuinely can’t recall, the answer is probably the most embarrassing. For the last four years, The OC was a weekly guilty pleasure and an even guiltier source of new music. Most talk of the show focused on the soundtrack and the cultural references – the storylines were irrelevant. So I was kind of surprised when news of The OC’s cancellation hurt much more than it should have – and would have, had it ended after its second or third season. Like two delicious Oreo wafers filled with bird poop instead of frosting, the first and final seasons of The OC were truly great, but the middle was shit. This season’s remarkable comeback made it that much harder to say goodbye.

Following the earthquake that shook (ha!) the last two episodes, only to have no real ramifications other than the destruction of the Cohen house, last night’s finale picked up six months later. Ryan and Taylor are no longer together; Sandi and Kirsten are expecting the birth of their child at any moment; Julie is pregnant with Kevin Sorbo’s baby but once more engaged to “The Bullet;” Seth and Summer are getting ready to move to Rhode Island together but television and their respective lacks of motivation have them in a rut; Mischa Barton is still dead and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Over the course of the hour, everyone makes life-altering decisions. Couples reunite, babies are had, people previously defined by coupledom choose independence and most everyone leaves Newport. Though the commercials seemed like they’d given everything away, there were still a lot of pleasant surprises, and their penchant for self-deprication was hilarious right up until the bitter end. Funny was always what The OC did best. Their attempts at sincerity and soap-scale drama always fell flat. The lighthearted and sappily romantic episodes were their bread and butter.

Good high school shows are hard to come by. As entertaining as The OC was, it never took anything too seriously, least of all itself. There haven’t been many earnest portrayals of high school since the late nineties triumvirate of My So Called Life, Freaks & Geeks and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Veronica Mars did a good job before she went off to college and kind of lost her direction, but as much as I enjoy it, it has never approached the relevance and honesty of Friday Night Lights – easily one of the most underappreciated shows on TV.
tear...

The OC did have one particularly surprising accomplishment during its run; it made me pull an unthinkable 180 on the lead character. For the bulk of the series, Ryan Atwood was painfully boring, and his insistence on beating people up for Mischa Barton was often too much to stomach. Even on television, on a teen soap, they couldn’t possibly rationalize someone repeating their mistakes that many times. But The OC did, over and over again. Though there was ample opportunity for the creators to shift the focus to Adam Brody, the story always revolved around Chino’s wayward refugee. And it wasn’t until this season that I felt he warranted the attention. Ryan’s finding his place in the Cohen family, and the world, probably would have happened a lot sooner if Mischa had the courtesy to die sooner in the series, but let’s just be thankful he made it at all. We leave Ryan 98% certain that his cage-fighting days are over.

Ratings show that The OC was never good at picking up new viewers along the way, so those of us who tuned in last night have likely been doing so for the last four years. And like many series finales, The OC makes a small plea to devotees to abandon the boob tube for more “gratifying” pursuits. Spellbound by the hilariously titled game show, Briefcase or No Briefcase, Seth and Summer have to break free from the bonds of television before they can find their respective destinies. Should we take this extra hour this gap in programming has left us with as an opportunity to fight complacency and declare our independence from TV? Thanks for the mixtapes and the memories, guys, but there’ll be a substitution before you know it. The Black Donnellys premieres next week, and I’ve never been one to underestimate the thrall of Irish-American stereotypes.

Posted in fox, r.i.p., the oc | 1 Comment »