Tag Archives: True Blood

Six Shows I Stopped Watching, Part 3

1 May

Part 3 of a brief list of six shows I actively decided to stop watching.   Part 1 and a full intro can be found here, while part 2 can be found here.

Glee

Rocky Horror Glee Show

 

24 is the only show on this list that I even have to think about why I stopped watching.  Heroes and Glee are the two shows that I think had the least amount of actual quality content before they went off the rails.  For half a season, I actually went around defending the show, even outright supporting it, saying that, yes it looks silly, and I am often ambivalent about the singing (it had its moments (4 minutes by Madonna, for example), but sometimes was just too much), but Glee was high school parody done right for a short time.  There were central plots holding the show together, in particular, Will’s wife’s fake baby, and cheerleader Quinn’s real one, that anchored the show.  The show kept a consistent roster of character personalities and plot strands besides merely how the Glee Club fares through the Christmas break, where characters maybe showed gradual change, but were who they were.  And then it all fell apart.  It was clear there was no more meticulous planning, or honestly planning at all.  Instead, everything, including characters’ personalities and storylines, was at the mercy of what the writers decided they wanted for a particular episode, whether it was a message they wanted to send, or a particular musical theme.  Quinn’s cheerleader character was perhaps the biggest casualty of this let’s-not-think-beyond-the-next-episode policy.  She was friendly and helpful one episode, she was a total bitch in another, she was emotional and depressed in a third. Sure, people are complicated and change, but there was absolutely no coherence.  Consistent plotting and characters was simply no longer something those running the show were interested in.  I complained and complained throughout the end of the first season and the start of the second but the official end came when Glee took on Rocky Horror in the fifth episode of the second season to celebrate Halloween.  I didn’t initially intend to just stop watching, but the episode just sat on my DV-r for weeks and then months passed before I realized the inevitable.  I didn’t really like Glee at that point, and I had never much cared for Rocky Horror, and realizing I didn’t care about the show later passed on towards active dislike the more detached I was.

True Blood

True Blood

I searched my google chat logs to figure out when exactly I caught up on True Blood, which I did not start watching right from the pilot.  In fact, what’s ironic is that when I caught up, was just about when I thought the last good episodes were.  This was in September of 2009, when the second season was finishing up, and I watched both seasons at a furious pace, desperately trying to catch up in time to watch the Season 2 finale live.  I say just about because I think the beginning of Season 3 was pretty good as well.  The last few episodes of Season 3, however, were both anticlimactic and terrible, and I found my first official gchat complaint about the show just after the fourth season started, in June of 2011, when I tell my friend I haven’t watched the first episode yet because I didn’t think the last season was so good.  I’m not sure I ever turned on a show as quickly as True Blood.  I was very into when I was marathoning.  I thought the second half of the first season and the entire second season were riveting, addictive TV, and the third season built up in such a way that it seemed to have a solid chance of matching the first two.  But then the show just cratered, and I didn’t even finish season4.  I watched a couple episodes, and then just gradual faded out, noticing that I really didn’t want to watch anymore.  Most shows I’d give at least a full season to let them back on their path, or see if it was just a bad run of episodes that the writers realized as well and had time to correct, but I didn’t give that to True Blood, and history proved me right, as whenever I caught pieces of other episodes, they were terrible, and friends who were still watching told me as much.  The biggest culprits were that first, the universe just became too big too fast, and there were absolutely no natural limits.  Time travel, fairies, witches, it was impossible to keep up with, and more than that, I didn’t really want to.  It lost its fun trashiness quotient into just bad trashiness.  Second, the careful plotting of the early seasons disappeared; where there were smaller individual plots that coalesced into a couple of big plots in time for the end of the season, now every character had his or her own plot, and some of the characters had absolutely no business with one.  Jason’s werepanther plot was terrible (which was a shame because Jason was one of the best characters) as was the plot with Sam’s brother.  More of the plots were bad than good, and I found it harder and harder to pick out main characters that I really liked.  Recently, I’ve had friends describe for me the plots of the end of the last two seasons, and laughed and laughed at how ridiculous they sounded.  It’s possible in context they don’t seem as ridiculous but I enjoyed the short narrative recitation of the plot much more than I would have watching the show and that says a lot.

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Ranking the Shows That I watch: 2012 edition: The Outcasts, Part 2

25 Jan

This is my ranking of shows that I watched in 2012 – for the rules, see the intro;  so far we’re discussing shows that made my last list but not this one.

Here are some more shows that made last year’s list that didn’t make the cut this year.

Royal Pains

What a royal pain

2011 Rank:  30

And so the USA exodus continues.  Royal Pains isn’t bad.  It just isn’t particularly good either.  It’s probably not a show one would expect me to watch, unless they knew about my aforementioned USA mini-obsession.  I really have so little new information about the show; I watched with my friend, and when we lost our momentum, we both kind of stopped, and neither of us were too bent out of shape about it.  Every episode, main character doctor Hank Lawson solves a patient’s case, while other gradual progress is made on serial plotlines.  Henry Winkler plays his and his brother’s dad which is kind of cool.  Royal Pains is right out of the USA playbook, better than Fairly Legal, and probably better than several more USA shows, but worse than a couple others.  I bear it no ill will, but don’t watch it.

True Blood

Delicious

2011 Rank:  29

Here’s my long view take on True Blood.  I enjoyed the first season more than I thought I would.  I really liked the second season, which I thought was really focused and well plotted; there were two major storylines, and they were both resolved in the last few episodes, one before the other, allowing the characters from the second storyline to join the first just in time for the climax.  The third season then went away from that, giving nearly every character their own plotline, some severely weaker than others and completely unnecessary, and strangely had its climax less than 2/3 through the season, after which the villain, the Vampire King of Mississippi, one of the season’s strong points, sort of collapsed.  I barely started the fourth season, before I was done with it. True Blood has several problems, but scope is the biggest; it expanded too far and basically there was no reining it back in.  I enjoy hearing people tell me the plots because they sound so ridiculous, but I’m done watching it.  There’s a careful line between stupid trashy fun, and stupid trashy, well, trash, and this gradually shifted from the former to the latter.

How I Met Your Mother

How I Met Your Mother

2011 Rank: 27

Here’s a show that a lot of people like better than me, because it pushes a lot of my particular buttons.  I hate the narration, I hate the incredibly on the nose messaging and oddly old school moralism that I think is wisely absent from most modern comedies.  I do think the actors work very well together as a group, and I think that the funny parts, particularly provided by Barney and Marshall have been very solid, and that kept me watching for years, even as there were parts of the show that seriously bothered me.  So, I kept on, after I finished all my other shows, watching How I Met Your Mother dutifully, though ambivalently, until Season 7 episode “Symphony of Illumination,” in which the gimmick is that instead of regular narrator Ted telling the story to his kids, this time it’s Robin telling the story to her kids.  Only, it turns out that she can’t have kids, and instead she’s telling it to her fictional kids in her mind.  How I Met Your Mother has done gimmicks well in the past, but I just hated, hated this episode and it gave me the impetus to put down the show altogether.

Psych

Shawn and Gus

2011:  26

Almost out of USA shows, I swear.  Psych is actually the one I currently like the best, and still have plans on watching more of it.  Unlike most of the other USA shows, which are light hearted dramadies, Psych is much more explicitly a comedy.  Because it’s focus is on being funny and lighter, it’s much less of a issue to have generic procedural murders every episode without almost any serial element.  However, the lack of serial element is also what causes me to keep putting it behind watching other shows with longer arcs.  Still, Psych is an easy show to watch; it’s refreshing and enjoyable which makes it a great show to watch when tired, and I mean that as a compliment.  It’s like bathroom magazine reading; it’s hardly essential viewing, but it’s a great way to fill in some time, and I would rank this the highest of the USA shows if I actually watched it regularly.  Still I don’t, which I suppose says something about the show as well.

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Ranking the Shows That I Watch – 29: True Blood

23 Aug

I currently have this tired out feeling about True Blood – I’ll probably watch it when it comes back on (note:  this was written before the season started but I’ve added an addendum at the end with my short fourth season thoughts), but I can’t say I’m all that excited about it.  It’s hard to think of a show for me that’s gone just as quickly from something that had me glued to the television to something I really don’t care about.  It’s not as if it had made one or two big decisions which violated everything I believed in about the show, which would be the only reason I could think of for normally turning on a show so quickly.  It just got, well, bad, and not because of one thing, but because of a lot of things.

I caught up to True Blood while the second season was airing so I could talk to my friends about it.  The first season took me a couple of weeks, but the second season I really got caught up in.  I watched the last six or so episodes late Saturday night so I would be caught up for the season finale the next day, staying up til 4 AM, even though I was extremely tired.

The difference in seasons is easy enough to explain, though there are other factors I’ll cut out to get to the point quickly.  The second season had two main storylines which swept up just about all the main characters – the Church of the Sun (a church that was forming an army to take out vampires) plot and the Marianne (evil god-like beast who could sort of hypnotize everyone in the town) plot.  These were full season arcs, which built up compellingly and seemed to have a direction – the Church of the Sun arc wrapped up a couple of episodes before the end of the season and the remaining characters from that arc were swept into the Marianne plot, which worked itself out in the season finale.  This isn’t rocket science – it’s your basic plot graph – which is not for all shows, by any means, but there’s a reason that so many people use it.

The third season on the other hand contained a bunch of plots that seemed like they might end up coming together, and make the beginnings seem like mere build up, but instead these plots went nowhere.  For example, the plot about Sam and his family ended up having absolutely nothing to do with anything else in the show.  The plot with Jason and his lady friend and her family ended up having absolutely nothing to do with anything else in the show.  The one major plot, which appeared as if it could be compelling, involved the vampire king of Mississippi, ably and creepily played by Dennis O’Hare.  This plot built up well and seemed to be going somewhere until it reached its climax – (SPOILER) O’Hare appeared on a news show, biting and killing the news anchor and letting America know that vampires were out to take over and rule them.  It was a great scene – probably the best single scene of the series, and in hindsight I wonder if that scene was put in because it was good, without any context surrounding it.  The season pretty much went nowhere after that – the main characters eventually figured out a way to kill O’Hare, but it was thoroughly anticlimactic, and made it seem relatively easy to kill him after all the build up about what a great, old and powerful vampire he was.

Fourth season addendum  Actually, this is easy.  Just about everything I said still stands.  The season has been occasionally intriguing, and extremely trashy, but unable to recapture the rapt anticipation I had in the second season.  After each episode airs, I debate watching the next one, but then generally come around and watch it anyway.

Why It’s This High:  At its height, in the second season, it had everything I could hope for in a trashy soap with vampires

Why it’s not higher:  Everything good about the second season got away from the writers in the third – the plots were weak, seemed pointless, were anticlimactic, and generally less interesting

Best episode of the most recent season:  Episode 9, “Everything is Broken”, in which the climax for the entire season seemed to come, when, at the end, evil Russell, Vampire King of Mississippi shows up on national TV and kills a newscaster and announces war on humans…the season pretty much went down from there

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