Shows I'm Currently Hooked On

Ciao, tutti! I hope you’re enjoying the brief beautiful weather we’re having if you’re in BG. For the past two days I’ve been able to utilize my closet full of sundresses. Loving it!

            Anyway, due to my semi-recent commandeering of my father’s Netflix account and the discovery of Project Free TV (there is a god!), I’ve been on a TV show kick and I’ve actually been able to keep up with the shows despite not having cable. A couple of friends suggested a couple of shows, and just like that, I’m hooked. Some of the shows I’m watching today are brilliantly executed, some started out strong, and others are…well, guilty pleasures at this point. Unfortunately, I don’t often have people around to rant once I’ve seen the latest episode of HIMYM or Being Human, so I figured I’d pump out a list of reviews on Bite Me.

            For the record, I recommend all of these shows to my readers, if not for the quality, then for the entertainment value. Even bad shows are fun to watch!

            Also, needless to say, for those who watch these shows but don’t keep up religiously, there may be SPOILERS abound!

The Big Bang Theory

           

            Previously mentioned in my blog, BBT is one of my favourite shows. You’d think five seasons of geek jokes and Sheldon rants would get old…but it totally doesn’t. I’m halfway through Season 5 (thank you, Project Free TV!) and I still laugh about Howard living with his mother, Raj being unable to talk to women, and Sheldon being out of the loop with sarcasm and social conventions.

            Through all five seasons, BBT has been a brilliantly written show. The characters are very well-developed, individual personalities. Though many of the jokes and situations are similar bordering on formulaic (I’m looking at you, House), they don’t grow tiresome. No character has gone through a dramatic change of personality or life’s path, really, but you don’t mind it. You’re along for the ride of their day to day lives. Big things have happened lately, though. Wolowitz is engaged to a girl named Bernadette, who is very sweet, but her high chipmunk voice makes my eye twitch. Season Four, I think, also brought along Amy, who began simply as a female equivalent to Sheldon, but has since developed into a smart but horny drunk with bisexual tendencies.

            I’m not the biggest fan of Amy, honestly. The rest of the show I love, even Raj’s random sister coming into Leonard’s life. But Amy…bugs me. For one, Sheldon already has the market cornered on the narcissistic Vulcan of the cast. Amy’s character that way becomes very redundant. I think the writers may have noticed that and added the drinking and horniness to give her more entertainment value. But in my opinion, she still doesn’t work. Especially since she’s Sheldon’s girlfriend now. It just seems like a plot device move to give Sheldon a counterpart, and one who isn’t really a counterpart to him now with her crazy drunk antics, desires for copulation, and worship of Penny. It would’ve made more sense if they had gotten together when they were both Vulcans.

            Also, giving Sheldon any sort of romantic drive is just…wrong. That’s so not Sheldon. If he’d ended up drunkenly kissing Penny or something, that would’ve been hilarious, but giving him an honest-to-deity girlfriend is just…strange. But I’ll keep an open mind. The show itself is always so fantastically written, I can’t really see them making a mistake and not rectifying it in a way that’s both hilarious and makes sense with the central plot of the show.

            Anyway, I’m hoping to watch Sheldon, Leonard, Raj, and Wolowitz for many seasons to come.

…:knocks on wood:

How I Met Your Mother

            Yep, still watching and still loving it, HIMYM is firmly wedged into my heart. I could sum up the review of the entire show in a single word: Fanfuckingtastic.

            I always joke about Season 6 being “The Season Where Shit Got Real”, with big events like Marshall losing his father, Barney finding his and being monogamous, etc, occurring, it really contrasted with the incredibly light feeling of previous seasons. Yes, earlier on things happened like Ted getting left at the altar, but events like that were countered with multiple comedic moments to “soften the blow”, as it were. Anyway, getting off topic. If Season 6 is the season where shit got real, then this current season is the season where the writers tried to get the fans to commit suicide. It is so serious! With (again, SPOILERS!) Robin learning she can’t have kids, she and Barney cheating on their significant others with her and Robin completely ripping his heart out, Marshall and Lily moving to the suburbs (so happy they came back), this season’s been an emotional hell! I’m loving it, though. But truth be told, I was ready to take ice picks to the writers’ eyes when I found out Robin and Barney’s kids were imaginary.  Seriously…fuck you guys. That was just mean. Awesome, but mean.

So unfair! Why don't you exist?!

            It’s strange, though, this season makes me realize something…I’m getting really sick of Ted. No joke. I’m getting sick of the main character. He proclaims his love for Robin, again, which just made me and most of the fandom groan and roll our eyes, and while I appreciated the return of the Slutty Pumpkin and other references to past season shenanigans, I’m finding myself not caring about meeting the Mother anymore. Marshall and Lily are pregnant (that’s right, I’m one of those weird people who sometimes states that a couple is pregnant, as much as it bugs me, too), Barney’s monogamous (with Quinn, of whom I’m not a big fan), and Robin went through her own out-of-control helicopter of shock and change. Ted…uh, well…Ted finally moved out of the old apartment. Hoorah. So we’d better meet the mother or something, because Ted’s lagging in character development. Seriously.

            And for the record, I’m not one on the school of thought that the show has to end when we meet the mother. Yes, the title alludes to this, but we’ve gone through seven seasons of not meeting her. That’s seven years of crap Bob Sagget Ted’s been talking about with his future kids, none of which seems to have anything to do at all with meeting their mom except for a yellow umbrella and a roommate. I feel like once we meet the mother, the title will stay the same, but it’ll just be Ted telling stories about him and the mother when they were young, which parents do all the time. No big.  I’d like that, even. I wouldn’t want to meet her and then roll credits. I want to see what she’s like, how she and Ted develop as a couple, the wedding, even the pregnancies. There’s so much there, and I’m sure fans will forgive the writers for not keeping 100% true with the title of the damn show. Come on, people.

            I’d also like to state at random that the promised wedding at the end of the season had better be Barney and Robin’s. God dammit. I stubbornly cling to the prospect of them ending up together. They’re just so good for one another. A perfect balance. Sure, Quinn’s a stripper, and many fans find that perfect for Barney, but there’s something about her I don’t like. Maybe it’s that she has almost no character whatsoever besides being a little snarky. A snarky stripper. Too easy. Robin and Barney have grown into characters that benefit one another.

            And this has gotten too stuck on HIMYM. Moving on!

Being Human (US version, I’m not a huge fan of the UK version)

            This show…oy.

            Being Human is probably the rockiest show I’m watching nowadays. For those of you who don’t know the show—it isn’t as popular as the previous two I’ve mentioned—Being Human is about a werewolf (Josh) and a vampire (Aidan) moving into a house together in order to help each other live “normal” lives. They move in and discover that the ghost of a girl who died there, Sally, haunts the place. Conflict ensues as all three characters struggle to interact in the real world and understand what it is to “be human.”

            This show’s about two seasons in, and it’s already…well…odd.  It’s got a bit of a soap opera edge to it. I liked Season 1 a lot. I didn’t see the twist with Sally coming (I won’t say, don’t worry), and I loved getting to know Aidan and Josh and, through them, the cultures of werewolves and vampires in this particular “world”. I always love discovering the portrayal of vampires in a new series. The vampires in Being Human take a somewhat aristocratic, hierarchal approach, not new by any means, but it’s good, a comfort zone for the nightwalkers.

Oh, except they can walk around during the day in this series. Frick.

Digression.

Anyway, werewolves in the series are more isolated, often unaware of one another, or so it seems in the Boston area, where the show takes place. And ghosts…there’s a lot about ghosts. Ghosts have a “door” appear to them when it’s their time to move on, they can’t move things, but they can learn to, they can’t move on until some unfinished business of theirs is resolved or some epiphany occurs. There’s a lot more, but I won’t get into it.

In my opinion, Being Human started out very intriguing and promptly disintegrated into a supernatural soap opera complete with cyclic character development, transparent “twists” and cheesy plot trails.

And I still can’t stop watching it.

Unfortunately, the cyclic nature and two-dimensional characters in the show have gotten tedious pretty quickly. To put their characters into bite sized sentences:

Josh: I ran away from all my family because of the beast I turn into once a month. Woe is me! Is there a cure? Can I find one? Wait, it’s a curse? Oh, how can I get close to people when I’m normal for all but one night a month?! Woe is me!

Aidan: I’ve been in existence since the Revolutionary War, but I’m still a whiny teenager. I want to live away from my vampire brethren but I still want to go to their blood dens and fun parties and do some of their bidding and have them clean up my messes. And why do all of my girlfriends die? Woe is me!

Sally: (SPOILER!) I was murdered and I solved all of that at the end of the first season. Now I just sit around the house and now I’m going crazy in order for my plot line to continue. Now I have a stereotypical split-personality in a pathetic attempt to be interesting instead of just whiny! Woe is me!

On a side note, Aidan tends to piss me off the most. He’s gone back and forth between giving into the vampires and his “nature”, saying “goodbye forever” twice, and being right back the very next week. And his romantic interests just irk me. For instance, the girl in the first season, Sarah, literally began the pilot show as a one-night stand. Then she became a vampire when Aidan asked a friend to dump her body for him. When she reappears as a vampire, suddenly she’s his lost love and he’s been in love with her since the beginning and oh what a tragedy when she dies!

Yes, this scene was very sexy. Shirtless bloody Aidan. Rawr.

            Then there was Suren, the random vamp chick buried in the ground for 80 years. She’s the cloistered daughter of Mother, the apparent random “head” of the vampires who doesn’t show up until the second season. Aiden starts off as having nothing for her but having been a caretaker, then suddenly they had this long love affair for years and years and they love each other and they’re running away and oop, she’s dead. Look who’s back in the apartment with Josh and Sally!

            Well, Aidan was actually buried alive at the end of the latest episode, but you know he’s going to be back at that apartment, because that’s all the writers seem to know how to do.

            Like I said, the show has become simplistic and predictable and melodramatic, but I can’t lie to you and say I’m not looking forward to the next season. Hopefully it’ll be more like the first one, and not the gigantic ball of crap the second season ended up being.

            Oh, and btw, there’s this gigantic random moment that’s never spoken of again in what could possibly be the worst episode of the second season, Dream Reaper. The infamous Nostalgia Critic would call it a Big Lipped Alligator Moment. Basically, Sally has gone into a…ghost coma…and her…split personality, who’s…in love with her…has trapped Josh and Aidan in the house. Aidan is starving and Josh finally lets him drink his blood to survive. It’s been vaguely alluded to that vampires don’t ever drink the blood of werewolves.  You’d think that after possibly thousands of years of interacting, including vampires cage fighting werewolves against each other like cock fights, a vampire would’ve tried a werewolf’s blood and figured out what happened when they drank it. But no. Aidan’s explanation for not ever wanting to drink from Josh, even when starving is, “Nah…I can smell you and I just…know that won’t be good for me.” Well…he drinks from Josh, gets a meth-like rush for a second, and then, well…totally breaks down and starts convulsing and bleeding everywhere (I’d have a clip but all I could find on youtube was Josh/Aidan fan slash…yep.)

            And nobody talks about that. Ever. Again.

            Seriously?! It isn’t brought up ever again! Wtf?! Aidan was bleeding from all (visible) orifices! They just proved that werewolf blood does really bad shit to vampires. Given all the vampire enemies they end up having throughout the series, wouldn’t this be damn useful information? How about spiking one of Mother’s blood whores with it or something? Weaponizing it? Come on, plot! Are we to never remember that moment again?

Uh...so, what the fuck just happened? Aidan? Josh? Writers? Anybody? Hello?

            Okay…calming down and moving on.  For those of you who haven’t seen Being Human, I highly recommend the first season—it’s on Instant Streaming on Netflix. If the third one is any good, I’d say you just read a wiki summary of the second. It should be avoided, unless you like B-movie-type disasters.

Smash

            Blame GG for this one 100%. She got me hooked on this new show while I was visiting her in Pittsburgh. Smash, in its infancy right now with the first season, is a show about the business end of Broadway as a team of writers, a producer, their assistants, and performers struggle to create and put a show about Marilyn Monroe on Broadway. It specifically follows the lives of the two best friend writers (one woman whose marriage is on the rocks because of an affair, and one who’s a gay man with commitment issues), a producer struggling to produce her own play independent of her asshole ex-husband and ex-business partner (played by the fantastic Anjelica Huston), a 10-year veteran Broadway chorus member struggling to break into the spotlight (played by Megan Hilty, and all the Wicked fans squeal), and a newbie Iowan actress who pops into New York and serves as a sort of frenemy to Hilty’s character.

            I really like this show’s premise. Seeing what goes into creating and promoting a show to Broadway is absolutely fascinating, an entertainment resource untapped since The Producers. The cast is fantastic, though it took me a while to figure out where I’d seen the actor who plays the jackass director before…he was Norrington in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies! And I’m not a huge fan of Wicked (I like the book, bite me) so I’m not all drooly over Hilty’s character, Ivi. I understand her plight, but as far as the two actresses fighting over the role of Marilyn Monroe, my flag is firmly planted in her frenemy Karen’s camp.

            I watched the first five or six episodes fervently, eating up all the juicy details and catty asides and inner conflicts. However…the show’s getting pretty hard to predict now, and I’m not sure I’m on board with where it’s going. For one, the Monroe show itself has always been in a sort of limbo…unfinished and in a constant state of rewrites, which I’m sure is how things are in “reality,” but after a whole season of seeing teeny glimpses of the show and no congealing big picture, it’s getting a little annoying. I also found Ivi going off the druggie deep end as being way too easy to get her out of the way and focus on Karen, and the fact that Ivi is becoming more and more obsessed and therefore more “like” Marilyn Monroe is just...strange. We didn’t know Ivi well enough before she started turning into a bitchy Monroe, so her downward spiral is a little lost on us as an audience. The producer’s slimy assistant keeps promising double-cross and ladder climbing, but he rarely delivers, and Karen’s fallout with her boyfriend could’ve been seen from the second or third episode (there are no happy couples on TV.)

"...skinny bitch moving in on my part..."

            I must say, though, that I am thoroughly enjoying Julia’s story. Julia, one of the writers of the Monroe show, starts the series married with a teenaged boy, and the family is struggling to adopt a baby. It is revealed quickly that Julia had an affair with an actor in one of her shows five years ago, and the actor returns to the stage as a prospective costar in Marilyn, and the flames are ignited again. Her husband finds out, flips a shit, and leaves. Now, Julia’s son may be one of the worst actors I’ve ever seen on national television, but her reactions to her problems and her struggle with her family are beautiful and believable. One of my favourite moments of this show not copping out and doing something predictable came when both parents were called to their son’s principal’s office for a meeting. Apparently the son, due to the family breaking apart, started doing poorly in school, and the principal was concerned that something may be going on in the family. Julia’s husband, who has been living apart from her for a few weeks now, lies through his teeth, smiling and stating that nothing’s going on out of the ordinary, and that kids will be kids, and everything in the family is just white picket fences and apple pie.

            Julia looks at him, horrified, and says “Stop lying.” Then she tells the principal the truth as the husband sits mortified.

            Fucking awesome.

            Like I’ve said before, Smash is in its infancy and there isn’t a whole lot to talk about with it just yet, but I’m definitely looking forward to seeing the show grow and develop.

            Oh, but it’s already begun developing an obnoxious habit every episode that GG and I have dubbed “Gleeing out.” Naturally, since the show is about the production of a musical, there will be musical numbers in it…from the show. That’s just fine and in fact welcomed.  But lately Smash has been throwing in little musical numbers offstage…like in the middle of Time’s Square, for instance, or in Ivi’s daydreams or the asshole director’s fantasies.

            …Look, Smash writers. If I wanted shitty covers of shitty songs sung by ex-Broadway divas or random celebrity cameos, I’d watch Glee. Smash has a lot going for it independent of that godawful train wreck of a show, so don’t deliberately blend them together. Thank you.

            Well, those are the TV shows I can’t seem to stop watching. If any of my imaginary/invisible blog readers are fans of any of these shows, hit me up! I love discussing them!  I’ll end this post with a plug about not a TV show, but a web series with which I am completely and utterly obsessed, judge me if you will.

Jokerblogs

And I melt into a puddle of fangoo.

            I first came across the Jokerblogs a couple of years ago, and I am in love. It began as a low-budget youtube series between friends and has since blossomed into a very well-written fan series.

            The premise of the Jokerblogs is that the series is a stream of videos from various sources; Arkham Asylum’s records, the Gotham Police Department, eyewitnesses with cameras, or those kidnapped by or following the Joker upon his escape from Arkham. Like I said, it’s pretty low-budget, but the actors are immensely talented and the writing fits very nicely into Nolanverse reality.

            I said Nolanverse. It means the Batman universe created in the films directed by Christopher Nolan, ie, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and the upcoming The Dark Knight Rises. I’m a geek. Let it go.

            The series begins with therapy sessions with the Joker (played by the fanfuckingtastic Scott McClure) and his doctor, Dr. Quinzel (squeal!) You can see why I’m beginning to like this already. I won’t give a lot away, but Batman fans of all canons will probably enjoy this series, largely due to all of the cameos and references of other comic book characters/places (Dr. Hugo Strange, Metropolis, Jeremiah Arkham, Lex Luthor, Lyle Bolten, Stark Industries, and Killer Croc, to name a very few) made throughout the series. The basic storyline is that Mistah J, in part due to Harleen’s upcoming wedding to Guy Kopski (anyone who knows who he is without looking it up wins my soul) and in part due to his own plans that aren’t revealed til the end of the series, breaks out of Arkham and spreads his beautiful brand of mayhem all over the lives of those caught in the web of his (Joker voice) plan. It’s fantastically written and actually made me recant my previous insistences that Heath Ledger/Nolanverse’s Joker shouldn’t have a Harley Quinn.  Though I’m not a huge fan of the actress who portrays Quinzel, for the record. She falls flat a lot, and epically fails, in my opinion, during the otherwise jaw-dropping wedding episode.

            This series apparently isn’t for every Batman fan. Soon after my discovery of it, I showed an episode to Fratello, one of the only people in my life who comes close to being as obsessed with Mistah J as I am. He watched it, shrugged, and said, “Eh, it’s not great. I do a much better impression of the Joker.” And dismissed it. That made me incredibly sad, and it seems to be the consensus for most people I show it to. They see McClure’s portrayal as an impersonation of Ledger’s infamous and fucking exquisite Joker, see that it’s less than perfect, and believe the series to be a crappy fan impersonation. Not so. True, McClure’s portrayal is based off of and mostly impersonating HLJ. And for a non-Hollywood actor, it’s fantastic, in my opinion. But he’s not Heath Ledger, so naturally his Joker, especially through the length of a web series, is going to be a little different. The voice is a little different. The jokes and actions are a little different. But honestly, I feel it’s a beautiful homage to HLJ and incredibly accurate as to what Nolanverse Joker would do if he went to Arkham, met Dr. Quinzel, etc. This series is a fan-based continuation of the Nolanverse story of the Joker, not a professional sequel. Yes, the “fans” in question are professional actors and highly talented writers, and they’re doing a fantastic job, but don’t take it as an attempt to tell Christopher Nolan what he should be doing with the world he created.

I adore this series, simply adore it, and as you all know, I’m veeery particular when it comes to my Puddin’. It made me believe that HLJ can actually have a Harley and make it work, gave me my post-TDK Joker fix that probably won’t be satisfied in TDKR, and even gave me a new fetish (Joker in a tuxedo…:purr:) I encourage any and all fans of Batman and Mistah J to check it out. If it’s not your thing, that’s understandable…but series 2 is beginning, and I’d love to have someone with whom I can gabber about it like a couple of high school girls about the latest Twilight movie.

The shows I’m currently hooked on (or on which I’m currently hooked) may be some of the best shows on television and also some of the more questionable, but I can’t stop watching them. They’re a great thing to come home to after work when I need to unwind, and endlessly fun to talk and debate about with fellow fans.

See you next week, my loves.