Tag Archives: FX

Ranking the Shows That I Watch – 7: Archer

8 Nov

Archer is an FX cartoon by the creator of Adult Swim fixture Sealab 2021 about a super spy named Sterling Archer, voiced by H. Jon Benjamin, who works for a private intelligence company called ISIS, run by his mother, Malory Archer.  The other main super secret agent is his ex, Lana, and they work with accountant Cyril, HR director Pam, secretary Cheryl and mad scientist Doctor Krieger.  Archer is a giant unabashed self-centered asshole who everybody mostly can’t stand but who is constantly making hilarious sarcastic comments at the office and throughout his super agent missions.  Much of the humor comes from Archer’s dickishness, and it’s unquestioned that he’s the primary reason that the show is so high but the supporting cast is consistently entertaining as well.

I liked the first season or Archer – I watched it all in one day, but, with all due respect to Archer, it was more because I had absolutely nothing to do that day than because I was absolutely and wholly consumed by Archer.  That said, I enjoyed it.  It was funny, pleasant, fun, and starred the never overrated vocal talents of one H. Jon Benjamin.  I watched it, remembered a few jokes here and there, and put it away in my brain, figuring I wouldn’t think much about it until the next season started.

Some number of months later the second season started, and I started watching weekly, and at the beginning I felt more or less the same way.  But as the season got maybe a third of the way through, almost at once, I realized that the show had made a bit leap that some shows make around this point in time  (Parks and Recreation, yet to come on this list, might be the best other recent example of this).  It’s certainly not as if old Archer was bad, and I’m also curious if going back and watching the old episodes, they’ll seem better than I remember them being.  That said, this Archer has just reached another level.

My friend invented the phrase “hit the jukebox” to be an opposite of the internet adage “jump the shark.”  When “jumping the shark” refers to a TV going over the hill, like Happy Days did after Fonzie jumped said shark, “hitting the jukebox” in when a TV show (or anything else really) goes into overdrive and really hits its stride.  Archer hit the jukebox and has not looked back.

Why It’s This High:  It’s funny, and it’s quotable is which one of the best compliments you can give to a comedy of this ilk

Why It’s Not Higher:  We’re at the rank where there aren’t too many ways to bash these shows.  It’s pretty much a crapshoot, and I could change my mind any time,  It’s more because I had more reasons for the shows above it at the time.  I suppose if I have to say anything, it’s just because it didn’t quite hit its absolutely top form until a dozen episodes ago or so.

Best episode of the most recent season:  Looking over the list of episodes, I’m reminded of just how excellent the last season was.  Realizing I don’t remember more about each episode makes me want to rewatch the entire season, but just reading each of the descriptions make me laugh.  I wish I could take the three episode arc aired this fall about Archer’s capture by pirates as one episode, but that would clearly be cheating so I’ll go with “Placebo Effect,” about Archer’s dealing with his diagnosis of breast cancer.  After he finds out that the drugs he’s been on are fake, he goes on a rampage, dragging around his IV, to figure out who was responsible for the fake drugs.  He turns his rampage into a film with the working title “Terms of En-Rampagement.”

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Rankings the Shows That I Watch – 9: Justified

1 Nov

Justified is part of a two-some of shows, along with Terriers, which proceeded Justified on this list, that are examples of what USA shows could be without their inherent USA limitations.  They’re shows that very much feel like the “characters welcome” brand of USA show except unleashed to be a little darker, a little bit more serial and generally just feel like the creators have a little bit more control over them.

Justified is a show that grew on me over the course of the last season, which was significantly better than an already solid first season.  Part of what makes the show so enjoyable is the wonderful Timothy Olyphant, who yes, maybe always plays a type, as the tough, speak-softly-but-carry-a-gun honest guy with attitude, but plays it as well as anyone.

The show tries to posit as the second most interesting character Boyd Crowder, played by Walter Goggins, who was apparently in the Shield, a massively long show that I have not dared attempt yet.  Fowler was the primarily antagonist for most of the first season going from a work-a-day Dixie mafia leader to a crazy quasi-religious drug runner.  I knew the creators of Justified wanted to keep Fowler as a character long after the season, but I thought it would either seem forced or repetitive as shows often do when they keep around an interesting character past his or her expiration date (is Sylar still alive?), and to the show’s credit it hasn’t felt that way as Fowler has transitioned from someone seeking honest work to a gangster again, but one who ends up on the same side as Olyphant’s Raylon Givens at the end of the season.

The second season was greatly enhanced by the increased emphasis on a serial plot which was spread out over the course of the season.  The key antagonists in the second season were the Bennett clan, a Dixie mafia family who control their local county (fittingly named Bennett county).  Ma Bennett was the matriarch, and she had three sons, one of whom was the local police chief.  (By the way, I credit Justified along with Winter’s Bone for learning what the fuck the Dixie mafia is and being scared that these people could command police forces.)  The other two are mostly kind of moronic henchmen, one of whom is played by the always enjoyable Jeremy Davies, who is hilarious to hear in a southern redneck accent.  Ma Bennett is portrayed by Margo Martindale, who won an Emmy for her role (for whatever that’s worth) and actually deserved it.

Why it’s this high:  Olyphant is fantastic, the show sets a nice western tone, and Ma Bennett was a great villain

Why it’s not higher:  I greatly enjoy this show, but it lacks the scope and maybe a little bit of the depth behind Breaking Bad, Mad Men or Game of Thrones (not to give away shows coming up on the list)

Best episode of the most recent season:  “Bloody Harlan” – the season long plot more or less ends in the final episode of the second season and shit goes down.  I won’t reveal exactly what happens, but the ending is fairly final and satisfying without feeling cheap or implausible in context.

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Ranking the Shows I Watch – 10: Terriers

27 Oct

I several times almost forgot about the existence of Terriers when working on this list as it was crushingly cancelled after its 13 episode first season  on FX in December, 2010.  The best new show of last fall’s TV season by a long shot, it gained traction with critics, but never with audiences and fans like myself were left wondering whether the terribly non-descriptive name played a significant role in preventing people from tuning in.

Earlier in this list, there were a number of USA shows. USA shows, as previously mentioned, are good, but due to the strictures of the network, they genrally have a ceiling.  Terriers is at its heart, a USA show, with the strictures removed.   Donal Logue plays an ex-cop who is a recovering alcoholic and is partners with Michael Raymond-James (Renee from True Blood), an ex-con, in a private detective business in San Diego, California.  The two solve week-to-week cases while working on occasional long-term projects and deal with each other’s personal life – Logue’s troubled sister and the marriage of his ex-wife and Raymond-James’s possible engagement to his long-term girlfriend.

The primary two actors are where the core of the show lies and their chemistry is the engine that keeps Terriers moving.  The show maintained a relatively sunny disposition, giving it that great USA easy-watch feeling without the sometimes forced famed USA Blue Skies mentality. Things don’t always exactly work out.  Logue and Raymond-James were the underdogs you loved to root for (maybe that’s where the Terriers name comes from?).  With such a promising first season, it’s depressing to think where the show could have gone if it just had more time.  The concept sounds incredibly generic but the execution is pitch perfect.  When I read about it at first, it didn’t sound all that great, until I actually watched it and I was hooked.

Why it’s this high:  The actors are great by themselves, and the relationship between Logue and Raymond-James at the heart of the show is strong – about as good as a largely procedural show can be

Why it’s not higher:  This is pretty fucking high for a show with one season which is cancelled already

Best episode of the most recent season:  It’s hard to remember exactly, having watched the show almost a year ago but I’ll choose “Fustercluck” partly because I just remember it better; I don’t think there were any one standout that was so much better than the pack.  In this episode, a character they helped put in jail asks Logue and Raymond-James to steal back $250 thousand of his own money in exchange for allowing them to keep $100 thousand of it.  They take the case, but follow him after he’s bailed about because they’re suspicious of his motives.  They then learn a little bit more about the season’s long local conspiracy plot.

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Rankings the Show I Watch – 15: It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia

11 Oct

It’s frankly amazing how long this show has been on the air, and just how big it’s become.  The scientific factor I use to determine its popularity is number of green men, the green lyrca full body suit mascot that Charlie wears during a couple of episodes.  I see at Philadelphia and national sporting events, and on Halloween.  The actual suit only appeared in three episodes of the series, and yet it spawned a phenomenon as green men are everywhere.

The show has the potential to get tiresome. In each episode, the “gang” – as the characters are known find a topic, be it racism, terrorism, abortion, or sometimes less political and more random, and go off, offending tons of people in the process and coming out making fools of themselves.  Yet it stays relatively fresh, and the writers have done a pretty good job of thinking of material that is new enough to keep me laughing.  I really tried to hold off this comparison for as long as could, even though I wanted to use it all article, but Curb Your Enthusiasm really is by far the most similar show on TV to It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.  They’re both basically shows that apply a similar process to a new set of facts every episode. You can enter a situation into the It’s Always Sunny machine, and it’s pretty easy to figure out how things are going to go, but it still generally ends up being pretty funny.  Like in Curb, it’s all about the main characters, and everyone else is the world is just someone for them to play off of. While in Curb about equal times the other characters are crazy or normal, in It’s Always Sunny, they’re generally normal conservative folks who are utterly outraged by the gang’s lewd, selfish and inappropriate behavior.

Highlights of the last season include Dennis implying that Mac and he will bring some women onto a boat, and since they can’t get off, there will be an “implication,” which is disturbing even for Mac.  Another highlight is the gang’s drunken memories in flashback form of a Halloween party in which Dee may have gotten pregnant, and in which Dee is remembered as more and more birdlike, eventually ending up as an ostrich.

Looking over the episode list, there aren’t quite as many stone cold classics as there have been in previous seasons, though to be fair, my opinions could change, for good or ill, with a second viewing.

Why It’s This High:  No show generates more out loud laughs than It’s Always Sunny, even after six years; Charlie makes me laugh.

Why it’s not higher:  It’s a little bit hit and miss, a little bit repetitive, some episodes are better than others, some of the best ideas were used seasons ago

Best Episode of the Most Recent Season:  “Mac’s Big Break” – My friends and I became somewhat obsessed with this strange part of the episode in which Dennis uses a strange voice on his radio show asking about the US’s involvement in two wars – I can’t find anything on youtube, so you’ll just have to watch the full episode.

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Fall 2011 Review: American Horror Story

6 Oct

When I watched Homeland, I made the possibly too soon comment that I had just seen the best pilot of the fall 2011 season.  Well, after watching American Horror Story, I feel far more confident than that that in saying that I’d just seen the strangest.

Here’s the set up.  Connie Britton and Dylan McDermott are married with a daughter, living in Boston.  He’s a psychologist.  She comes home to find him cheating one day, and we find out later that she recently had a miscarriage, after which they had been distant emotionally.  They move out west to try to save their marriage and their family, and move into a creepy looking Victorian house because it’s twice the size and half the cost than the neighboring houses because the prior residents died inside, in a murder suicide.  We know the house is haunted already because, well, first, the show is called American Horror Story, and second, we saw a prologue in which a couple of mischievous twin pre-teen boys walked into the house to bust stuff up, were warned by a creepy girl that they would die inside, and then were brutally murdered by mysterious paranormal causes.

They enter the house and things are strange.  I’m going to engage in a bit of summarizing here, but this is as much for me as for you, because I need to write it down to have it all make sense to myself.  The mysterious girl from the prologue shows up out of nowhere, a bit older, telling Connie Britton she’ll die, and Jessica Lange comes into the house to take her, introducing herself as the neighbor, but she’s clearly also in on the supernatural.  A woman comes in claiming to have been the maid at the property for years and years, played by Frances Conroy, best known as the mother on Six Feet Under.  She’s hired, but oh, she’s in on the crazy too, in that she looks like a young attractive woman to McDermott but an old maid to everyone else, and she tries to seduce McDermott when she has a chance.  McDermott is treating a high school aged boy who has fantasies of murdering kids at his school, and who befriends McDermott’s teenage daughter who is having trouble fitting in and apparently also cuts herself.  McDermott begins sleepwalking naked (there’s a lot of naked Dylan McDermott) and starts playing with the flames on his stovetop.  Britton has sex with something a latex suit that she thinks is, but is not, McDermott.  McDermott runs into a mutilated Denis O’Hare (Vampire King of Mississippi from True Blood) who claims he lived in the house, which told him to kill his family, which he did, and now he’s only out of jail because he’s dying, but he’s warning McDermott, or maybe he’s just part of the whole supernatural business also.

It’s not just the fact that things are strange.  It’s that they are strange to the point of being extremely confusing (as you probably are if you read that whole summary paragraph), and I don’t mean that in a blatantly bad way as much just an extremely confusing way.  There can be a benefit to a certain amount of confusion in a show like this to get a certain feel, but that can be defeated if it goes too far and the viewer doesn’t have any idea what’s going on halfway into the season.  The style validates this confusing plot with frequent camera jumps and strange coloring.

Where do we go from here?  I’m not sure how this is sustainable for a long period of time.  Either they go crazy and die one way or another, or they get out of the house.  Those seem like the only two options, and though going crazy and dying can certainly take a couple of hours, it’s hard to see it taking more than that or they’d leave the house, unless they’re trapped or who even knows.

Will I watch it again?  Recently I said Pan-Am was the show that I said no to which was the closest to yes of all the series premieres so far.  Well, this is even closer, in that I honestly don’t know.  I’m leaning towards giving it another episode, because I’m curious where it could go, but it has the potential to burn out or get repetitive really quickly.  It may well be a game time decision.  I’m leaning towards watching it, but if I fall behind I can easily see just giving up.

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Fall 2011 Preview: Cable

5 Oct

Homeland – Showtime – 10/2/11

 

Homeland stars Claire Daines as a CIA analyst who obtains a piece of intelligence about terrorist activity that no one else knows, which is that an American prisoner of war has been turned by Al Queda.  She makes nothing of that information until a POW marine who has been away eight years is discovered alive in Iraq.  Hailed as an American hero, the POW, played by Damian Lewis, may be a terrorist, or Daines may be crazy.  Nothing but great buzz here, and it sounds more intriguing than any other new show as a layered psychological thriller.

Prediction:  Renewal – best buzz of the year, and that’s worth even more on a premium network, and even more on Showtime, which still wants to be HBO

American Horror Story – FX – 10/5/11

 

The preview looks insane, and about the only fact I know, other than that Dylan McDermott and Connie Britton and their kid move into a haunted house is that Britton has sex with a ghost in a latex suit in the first episode, and frankly that leaves me even more confused.  Ryan Murphy has an extremely hit and miss record (Nip/Tuck, Glee) and horror is a genre that you generally don’t see on television, because it doesn’t play well for the long run.  From what buzz I have read, a ton takes place in the first episode, enough to make the episode exciting in and of itself but to wonder where the show goes from there, and why the fuck the couple doesn’t just move out.  This’ll probably take a couple episodes of watching to figure out whether it’s worthwhile.

Prediction:  Renewal – I honestly don’t know what to think, but here’s a stab

Hell on Wheels – 11/6/11

Set during the building of the transcontinental railroad, the series features a confederate soldier determined to take revenge on union soldiers who murdered his wife.  Deadwood is the first comparison that springs to mind, due to the time period.  It looks at least interesting, and as a history major, I tend to be a sucker for historically-based shows.  Apparently reconstruction plays a part, and Native American attacks, and who knows what else.

Prediction: Renewal – I have just as little idea as with the show above, but since Rubicon’s been the only non-Renewed show on AMC so far, I’ll take the odds

Boss – Starz – 10/21/11

 

Kelsey Grammer stars as the mayor of Chicago who has been recently diagnosed with a degenerative neurological disease.  He keeps this from everyone, his family, friends and staff, who are generally too busy with their own priorities to notice him slipping.  Political intrigue and family drama are in play, with administration members shooting for higher office, and a relationship between Grammar and his wife that may be falling apart.  I’m not sure it will be good, but it certainly could be.

Verdict: Renewal – this is downright cheating – it’s already been renewed, which is admittedly kind of incredible.  I wish Party Down got this kind of support from Starz.

Enlightened – HBO – 9/10/11

Laura Dern portrays an executive with a public breakdown in this HBO comedy.  Buzz seems to be at least slightly positive.  Luke Wilson plays her ex-husband, and Diane Ladd playes her mother.  Creator Mike White wrote for Freaks and Geeks and wrote School of Rock, but also wrote Nacho Libre.  This preview is admittedly weak but after the varying and distinct dramatic premises of the shows above, it’s hard to find a lot to say about Enlightened, especially before watching it.  I don’t mean that in a bad way, just in a premise-is-a-lot-less-important-in-comedy-so-let’s-wait-and-see way.

Prediction:  Renewal – it’s absolutely ridiculous I’ve predicted renewal for all of these, though I feel anecdotally shows are more likely to get picked up on premium cable networks.

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Ranking the Shows That I Watch – 28: The League

25 Aug

I started seeing commercials for The League and thought two things.  First, that the premise of the show – a bunch of guys playing fantasy football – wasn’t really sufficient to hold up as entire season of a show.  Second, I thought that the show looked very bad.  I was right about the first, but wrong about the second.  The show is only peripherally about fantasy football.  It is a constant and recurring plot element in the show, and the writers do make a big deal to talk about it in almost every episode, but the show is more about five guys in their 30s with fantasy football just as a hook to make the show different from any other show about five guys in their 30s.  I have friends who enjoy the show who couldn’t name more than one or two current football players.   The show is actually pretty funny as well.  It’s often fairly silly humor – one of the funniest scenes in the show involves a character wearing a children’s character costume and carrying a knife, another involves Paul Scheer (of Human Giant fame) falling on his ass, and a third involves someone dropping a cake.

The second season got a bit absurd for my tastes.  During the first season, a couple of the characters are weirdos, sure, but the show more or less lived in the universe of reality. Second season plots include an episode which features Rob Huebel as  a ridiculous sex addict with a bunch of odd fetishes as well as a toilet seat used to smuggle in cocaine that one of the main characters is hooked on sitting on.  The show is funnier when it’s dealing with things in the realm of possibility, when one of the outrageous characters would do something stupid, and everyone else would make fun of it.  It’s kind of a formula, and it’s limiting, but it’s a formula that works.

The show gets a couple of cameos from NFL players.  Antonio Gates, Chad Ochocinco and Josh Cribbs all make appearances.  All the devotion to fantasy football though leaves you wondering exactly why the characters are so bad at it.  Many of the football comments made in the show make absolutely no sense to the average sports fan, and that’s even counting for the lead time between the writing of the show and its airing.  The best example of this might in the draft board for the second season, which they didn’t need to show, but show well enough that you can read all the players, and a lot of it makes no sense to anyone who played fantasy football last year.  Two of the stranger choices are Ray Rice falling all the way to 11 and Steven Jackson somehow falling to the fourth round.

Why it’s this high:  It’s a pretty funny show about guys giving each other a hard time and wacky antics, and Paul Scheer makes me laugh

Why it’s not higher:  It’s trending in a direction where the strangeness overwhelms the funny, and the episodes can be very hit or miss

Best Episode of the most recent season:  “The Anniversary Party” – Pete, played by Mark Duplass, one of the founders of the mumblecore movement, runs into his ex-wife, now with a new, older man, and the two have an extremely silly battle to prove whether or not her new man can keep up with Pete at partying

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