What are you watching/Random TV thoughts

nikkifinke.com/emmy-snubs-kurt-sutter-feel/

Kurt Sutter wrote a bullshit post on him being "snubbed" by the Emmys, and wow the comment section..... Kurt Sutter a writing god? Yeesh.

Right so I'm near the end of the fourth season of The Shield. And I realize this is a spoiler Arthur Dent, but THEY CHANGE THE MUSIC FOR THE 'PREVIOUSLY ON' segment. About bloody time, the WAH-WAH of the horns the old music used was driving me up the wall (the new piece is mellower and nicer - not quite Justified nice, but good.)

I'm also just really surprised that, in its fourth season, The Shield is sticking to the 4:3 aspect ratio. It's kind of fascinating when watching older shows to see when they actually deal with the increased change to aspect ratios on TV - with X-Files moving to widescreen 16:9 as they relocated to California in season six - or new releases using the current aspect ratio (as Babylon 5's DVD releases were in 16:9 as the show was actually shot with 16:9 in mind.)

But The Shield is sticking to 4:3 in season four in 2005, years after the X-Files went off the air, years after the Sopranos and its widescreen cinematics started kicking up a fuss, and so on. I was beginning to fear that maybe there was something wrong with the Netflix version of the show so I did some googling - turns out the creators maintained the 4:3 for the first five seasons because they felt that made it look more like a documentary. Nothing marks Shield as a TV show of its time to me quite as much as the shakycam handheld docu-footage - the technique the Office popularized for fiction TV, seen also in Battlestar Galactica, Friday Night Lights and, eventually, Boston Legal.

MOVING ON I just watched the penultimate episode of Believe. The series went on hiatus for over a month for no particularly articulated reasons, as there was hardly anything to pre-empt it with (it airs on Watch, an obscure channel defined by largely cancelled shows - Almost Human, Crisis - and shows that trudge on anyway, like Grimm and Beauty and the Beast.)

And then I read the series finale is unavailable in the US and only available online in New Zealand, and the nature of NBC's abrupt burnoff of the series becomes clear. Watch will actually air the final episode on regular TV this Thursday, and since I watched this far (all the way to see Pedro Pascal die again! That's twice in one year Pedro) I'll see it out; besides the beguiling if a little tetchy The Honourable Woman and the sad-sack antics of Louie I don't have a lot going Thursdays.

While it had some strong performances - particularly the young girl, who has a natural chemistry with the actor playing her father - Believe has always felt more like an earnest idea for a TV series than one in actuality, with its need to hit certain emotional beats as predictable as clockwork. And yet it's been, for a network TV series, consistently above-par visually - if not the glorious blood-drenched macabre dance of Hannibal it's at least not the bland procedural lighting of Person of Interest.

This isn't a recommendation - it's not awful, but there's just never been a lot there, like the entire thing trundled forward with half a script at all times.

I also saw the first episode of Silicon Valley. Matt Ross's intense stare while doing charity work in Africa was the hardest laugh of the thing (but it was good really.)

Arthur Dent Wow, I really suck at jokes apparently.

And believe me, you've seen 4:3 before. If you watched like any 90s TV, you've seen 4:3. Classic Simpsons? 4:3!

For the record Shield was 4:3 by deliberate choice, so I guess seeing it that way is 'better' than the 16:9 that they deliberately didn't want (until they caved in the sixth season) so I'm good.

The funny thing that I've gone through since starting The Shield is that I think Sutter was possibly that show's consistently best writer, at least so far. He has his hands over many of the series' best episodes. And then I look back at SOA and wonder. Was Shawn Ryan just carefully moderating him, and/or extensively rewriting scripts like Milch did with Deadwood? Or did his worsts aspects just balloon over time? Especially considering what he wanted to be Dutch's resolution in the series finale. .

Shawn Ryan was totally able to reign him in. SOA actually was good, really good, in the first two seasons. Then it just went off the rails. I think Sutter can work well within a box. He can write you a script and make it great, but fall on him to be the guy who makes the major decisions and sustain a long story? It is going to go off the rails. It doesn't help that FX pretty much gives him anything he asks for, like half the season being extra long episodes.

Agreed about Sutter. He had a hand in some absolutely brilliant Shield episodes, and his episodes were consistently entertaining. Of course, he's also a pompous dick who gets butthurt over any criticism, and the later seasons of Sons have showcased how shitty of a writer he can be. I look forward to the 6 hour series finale of Sons.

There are two shows that my most recent ex insisted I watch that I will never quite forgive him for: the later seasons of SOA and The Following.

Arthur Dent Oh that was where I was last week!

How about that thing that went down, eh?

I just watched the season four premiere of Falling Skies.

What. The. Everloving. Fuck.

Now let's be clear: This was never a good show. But it never went balls-to-the-wall WTF like this before.

I knew that the show had a new showrunner (because the guy who ran the show for the last three seasons just got tired of TV apparently) but rarely have I seen a show so eager to throw out as much poor as it can and stuff in so many inexplicable new ideas, just throwing bad element after bad element to the point the episode seriously ends with an alien contemplating genocide of the human race over a case of mildly inconvenient hooliganism by an 'anonymous' hero who is also someone they keep in a cell only they somehow never notice that he leaves his cell to do these petty acts and I didn't even mention how an alien species that spent all of season one using harnesses to warp the minds of kids to control them has completely abandoned this idea in favour of reeducation schools for no clear reason at all (since we knew they'd used the harness on other alien species in the past) which is also just a dumb idea because of course some kids are going to resist and of course the Mason kid is going to be one oh and oh and did I mention that the maybe alien-influenced baby has grown up to shed her black hair for blonde for no other reason than to look like Daenerys while using god powers to make a peaceful city oh and over here are all the ghettos all the humans are imprisoned in but don't worry here's an ex-prisoner from Johannesburg who has been breaking out of the alien prisons only to be put back in the next one all over the world why would you trust someone with that kind of track record and and and and Daenerys USES lighting to strike down mechs and may also have mind control and and and MASON WRITES THE CONSTITUTION ON HIS CELL

So uh the new guy is David Eick, who you may remember as the guy who worked for four years on Battlestar Galactica though rarely on the creative end and when he did become creatively involved it resulted in some of the worst episodes of the series (like "Hero.")

Saddle up, this season is going to be a bumpy ride as I may incoherently try to summarise it here unless everyone shouts me down.

@taxman I bet season four will have more eps thananyothet season. I wonder if they will include one three parter arc entire they should.

Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if 3 and 4 got the bulk of the episodes. Though since the TV Club 10 does bend the rules a bit and not make it a top 10 by quality, they make it a top 10 by which episodes are most representative of the series. There will probably be some stinkers thrown in.

I ragequit with last week's ep, because fuck those wankers. But I will be pleased to read you Going Sims at the rest of the season!

Is it just me, or is this summer light on programming? Having finished the Americans, there's very little "live" TV on right now. Of course, logically I should use that downtime to catch up on shows I've not seen yet like Hannibal, Fargo, or maybe The Leftovers. It just seems weird that a few months ago, there was a four way pileup on my DVR on sunday nights, and currently there's nothing. Spread the love, guys!

I noticed this as well. It doesn't help that something like Halt and Catch Fire has turned out to be such a bore.