I’d like to have ended the year with several posts on recommended viewing and
reading, but I should know by now that making plans is how you get the universe to laugh at you. Which actually isn’t a bad segue into talking about North of North.
The delightful series’ first season of eight half-hour episodes debuted in Canada last January and globally on Netflix in April. It’s happily been renewed for a second to bow in 2026. Pretty much every critical review or discussion I came across when it premiered all but apologized for pushing it, comparing its tone and/or environment to some of the brightest stars in the constellation of great television while cautioning that it was merely, to repeat my own self, delightful — and for those averse to the unfamiliar it might be a tough sell considering the only recognizable face in its cast for most viewers will be 24’s Mary Lynn Rajskub.
ABC will air Paradise, which bowed in January on its sister platform Hulu, over eight Mondays starting tonight at 10 p.m. ET.
I’m not sure I recommend it even to those who love everything in the pilot because,
for me, it all falls apart too much as the season concludes.
FX will air a marathon of Fargo Season 2 tomorrow starting at 10 a.m. ET/PT.
I can’t recommend it enough. Pretty much everything that TV does well, Fargo does very, very, very well. The cast is phenomenal; the score and soundtrack are just A+; the cinematography is outstanding. Even if the plot and dialogue were nothing special this would probably be captivating television.
But they’re quite special indeed. About half of the season’s scripts are credited to Noah Hawley, the novelist and former Bones story editor who wrote all of Season 1 — and who, given the copious love for the classic 1996 Coen Brothers film on which the series is based, was as bold in doing so as (it turns out) he was justified.
You don’t need to have seen the movie or Season 1 to watch Season 2. Really. I’ve seen and enjoyed the movie but, due to a low tolerance for Billy Bob Thornton, I opted out of Season 1 despite the raves. Hearing the raves for the second season and that it was set before the first, I caught up near the end of its 10-episode run last December, right in time for the finale.
NBC ran the pilot for Mockingbird Lane, Bryan Fuller’s revamp of The Munsters, last Friday. At this writing you can still watch it via that link.
I took in the hour-long episode as a Halloween treat after hearing positive word. The premise and talent involved definitely had me curious, despite rebooting or reimagining a familiar property for TV being a dicey prospect (Battlestar Galactica at one recent extreme, Wonder Woman at the other). Even after it was passed over for this season, Lane apparently had an outside shot at being picked up for 2013 if it turned out to be an October surprise. I’m not sure that a 1.5 rating/5 share in the 18-49 demo, 5.47 million viewers overall, is enough to do the trick but this was a Friday on a tentatively resurgent network.
Anyway, I’d like to see more.
While the original 1964-66 Munsters was a childhood staple in reruns, I’ve never watched the various spinoffs or revivals. Mockingbird Lane not only recast the parts; unlike the 1988-91 sequel series The Munsters Today it reworked the nuances within the familiar broad strokes of the concept. Its pilot introduces the Munster family as if for the first time, with Marilyn finding the perfect residence for herself, cousin Eddie, his mom Lily, his father Herman, and Grandpa in the form of a condemned mansion at 1313 Mockingbird Lane in Mockingbird Heights, California (I think). The Munsters need to relocate thanks to the unfortunate side effects of Eddie, unaware that he’s a werewolf, going through puberty: During the full moon he wreaks havoc on a scout-troop camping trip.
With its fifth and final season, Fringe has entered a new dimension. Or is that descriptor inadvisable, lest the senses of the word be confused? The series has, of course, built much of its mythology on travel to a parallel Earth: Over There, a.k.a. the Other Side, home to doppelgangers of our heroes and villains. Instead, Fringe’s future lies in the actual — well, the fictional actual — future, as viewers had already been made aware through advance promotion and was seen on Friday night in the Season Five opener...
I’ll get back to the future shortly. First I want to welcome any new readers by way of giving these writeups (and their names) some context.
I’ve had strong opinions about Smallville ever since its 2001 debut. My hope was
to share the long and the short of it all back in May on the occasion of the series’ finale — but I only managed the short.
Here’s the long.
What follows is chock-full of spoilers on the show’s ten seasons, as of last month available in their entirety on DVD. If you haven’t (a) seen this divisive, enduringly popular yet much reviled take on the the Superman mythos begun in 1938 by creators Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster, or (2) at least cared enough to keep tabs it through articles or conversations, then you’re awfully polite to keep reading.
Photo: Bob Mahoney © 2011 AMC Studios.
The Walking Dead begins its 13-episode second season tonight at 9 p.m. ET on AMC.
Its character work — the hallmark of AMC’s original series, born of brilliant contributions on both sides of the camera — makes Dead appointment television for viewers who can stomach the viscera and suspense-laden filmmaking that are endemic to a show set in a post-apocalyptic future (or present, really) overrun with zombies. You don’t have to be a horror enthusiast to enjoy it, though, any more than you have to know or care about the advertising industry or crystal meth to get hooked on the stellar storytelling in Mad Men or Breaking Bad. Sure, The Walking Dead is about survival in a world where a global outbreak has left living, breathing people the minority amidst hordes of shambling corpses whose only instinct is to feast on fresh human meat and transfer their disease, but the emphasis is on the stark reality of our protagonists’ existence.
You needn’t be familiar with the comics that are the show’s source material, either — created by writer Robert Kirkman with artist Tony Moore, now drawn by Charlie Adlard, published monthly by Image since 2003. Credit where it’s due, however; their work is what led Frank Darabont to develop the series (and serve as showrunner before departing this past summer).
For those who missed the 6-episode first season that debuted last Halloween, or want
to rewatch it, AMC is airing it in order today starting at 2:30 p.m. ET (1:30 p.m. CT). The 90-minute second-season premiere follows, repeating at 10:30, after which comes a live special discussing the show called Talking Dead. Extras — including behind-the-scenes videos and six brief “webisodes” — may be found at the above-linked site.
Related: ... in Thought • Panel to Frame • North Mythology
I find this post’s title most apt given the options, but Fringe’s Season Four premiere didn’t actually bring us back to the point at which the rewritten timeline we’re viewing diverged from the familiar one decades ago.
... picked up shortly after the Season Three finale, with Peter erased from reality due
to actions he undertook to save his native and adopted universes. Over Here and Over There both still exist; in fact, they coexist in the room that houses the First People’s machine — where members of each side’s Fringe Division meet to compare notes, as we see Olivia and her counterpart Fauxlivia do grudgingly.
Yeah, I’ve decided to write up some musings on the episode, despite the near certainty that I won’t be doing so weekly. Partly it’s an imperfect salve for the fact that I didn’t get to finish out the brief run that I began at the end of last season — not that there aren’t plenty of other unpublished or just plain unwritten posts in Blam’s Blog history whose absence irritates me — and partly it’s because if I do get to resume Fringe reviews I’ll likely appreciate having this as a foundation. In case you’re new to these posts, I should explain that having named my Lost analyses for Beatles tunes I decided to name my ‘Fringe’ Thinking installments for John Lennon songs (Beatles or solo); unfortunately, a few titles perfect for this post were already used for ‘Lost’ in Thought.
Here’s what got me cogitating:
I’d been planning to write up the last three Fringe episodes of this season, which reportedly form one continued story, to quell persistent requests made by friends and as practice for potential weekly reviews come autumn now that Fox has renewed the show. A few things conspired to convince me that it was a good idea to start early with last night’s episode. Here’s a bit of background to save us all from recap fatigue in future chapter-specific editions.
My initial essay on Fringe — an earlier post on its glyphs notwithstanding — came midway through Season Two. While I’ll run down some of the salient plot points that have taken center stage since then, it provides a good overview of my thoughts on the first half of the series to date. To folks reading this who are unfamiliar with the show: You’re going to be confused, for sure, and you’re missing an excellent television experience. I highly recommend catching up via downloads or DVD; both Fringe and Supernatural (which is nearing the conclusion of a welcome albeit weak-by-comparison season a year after many expected it to wrap entirely) are worthy successors to the very best of The X-Files and choice viewing not just for “genre” fans but for anyone who enjoys great character work played out through superbly inventive storytelling.
I watched the premiere of The Gates last Sunday, and caught up with the off-season repeats of The Vampire Diaries as well.
The Gates, which airs Sundays at 10 p.m. ET on ABC, barely kept me locked in. As a guilty pleasure to screen on a hot, lazy night, well, it’s more guilty than pleasure — not quite the melodramatic mash-up of Twilight and Desperate Housewives those making it might have hoped for, but probably engaging enough to keep anyone who enjoyed Eastwick coming back for its limited run.
A few weeks gone by, Nikki Stafford declared June to be Vampire Month on her blog, Nik at Nite. The primary topic of conversation — a TV show which I’m observing a moratorium on speaking about — had begun to eat itself, and Nikki had fangdom on the brain for at least two good reasons: (1) ECW Press, where she’s an editor and which publishes her Finding [censored] books, has a True Blood companion coming out. (2) She was preparing to attend Slayage — an academic conference devoted to the work of Joss Whedon in general and Buffy the Vampire Slayer in particular. I think there was also something to do with The Vampire Diaries in there.
I was surprisingly late getting into the adventures of Buffy Summers.
This post is currently down for maintenance.
J.J. Abrams and Joss Whedon each premiered a new series on Fox last season, to considerable anticipation from genre buffs and admirers of quality television in general. Fringe, created by Abrams with his Star Trek screenwriting team of Alex Kurtzman & Roberto Orci, has just gone on midwinter hiatus. Whedon’s Dollhouse ended its erratic run of just over two dozen episodes last week.
I began writing this post an entire year ago — the same month this blog launched.
This post is currently down for maintenance but I’ll point you towards Nikki Stafford’s recap and the literally hundreds of comments that follow including mine.
It’s about time.
The final season of Lost begins tonight with a two-hour episode starting at 9 p.m.
ET on ABC. You probably either know this already or don’t care; while casual viewers
of the program are rumored to still exist, at this point it’s hard to imagine they outnumber the Oceanic 6.
Lost was one of the first things I wrote about on this blog.
I’ve found recently that Mondays are getting crowded where my TV schedule is concerned. Used to be I’d check whether Castle and How I Met Your Mother were repeats, then either in-between or instead of them catch up with other shows on tape. Now that 24 and Chuck are back on the schedule, plus the new Life Unexpected, the night is more likely to feed the backlog than help clear it out.
Castle, which airs 10-11 p.m. on ABC, is basically the same show I reviewed back in August. Fine by me.
I saw the, um, original repeat of Glee’s first episode the other day and wish I’d been able to post a review before the encore encore tonight. Was it music to my ears? Not entirely, but I’m rooting for it.
Glee photos © 2009 and logo TM 20th Century Television.
Uneven but interesting, that pilot is certainly worth sampling before the series
finally continues next Wednesday, Sept. 9th, at 9 p.m. ET. It was previewed last spring — in prime real estate after American Idol — even though the show’s actual debut was always scheduled for this fall. Fox must have felt it had an offbeat winner and hoped
to stoke buzz throughout the summer; indeed, reception was generally favorable and songs from the series have been popular downloads on iTunes.
Leverage is a delight of a TV show whose second season begins tonight at 9 p.m.
ET on TNT. For maximum enjoyment you should record it and buy or rent the just-released first season on DVD, although I have a feeling you’ll get everything you need
to know from tonight’s season opener. [Update: Yeesh... Not their finest episode.]
When the pilot arrived as a screener last December I was impressed.
