What are you watching/Random TV thoughts

Cable channels that care more about having a steady stream of content than actually producing anything good enough to merit an audience?

So I'm continuing to enjoy the first season of Arrow on Netflix and I'm starting to wonder if they even bother auditioning people for guest spots/new recurring roles on the show or just peruse the IMDB pages of nerd shows until they find a genre actor they haven't used yet.

Did anyone check out Married and/or You're The Worst last week? I figured I'd record both solely because of Ben and Kate love and Nat Faxon being on one of the shows. Neither did much for me, but supposedly they get better?

FALLING SKIES TRASH TALK TIME

In some ways the second episode of season four is kind of disappointing. After the demented potpourri of pure narrative excess that characterised the premiere, most of what it chooses to do is to pick up the half-dozen plots the new showrunners have established and begin to run with them. It abandons one hilariously quickly - the idea that Mason was escaping from prison to pose as an ineffectual vigilante the aliens nonetheless obsessed over - when they kick him put of prison into their wider 'walled' area they keep all the humans in so he and the other solitary confined prisoners can track the Ghost down or whatever; but really he then gives himself up so he can have the now-obligatory scene where he talks with an alien Espheni Overlord on their spaceship and then just gets to walk the fuck away. I mean, this guy is what, the third Overlord Mason has tussled with if I count Karen? You'd figure he'd look at the corpses of his predecessors and then just say fuck this guy - since he was considering genocide over his hooliganism last week - but noooo he has a plan, a stupid plan.

You know what, before I get to his stupid plan let us get to Karen. Karen, for those of you who don't know (i.e. you are not Post-Lupin) was a teenage girl who was the girlfriend of one of Mason's many, many sons, she was kidnapped by the aliens, had a mind-control harness strapped on her that warped her into one of their new worker bees, and for reasons I don't honestly remember (if there were any) she became the alien Overlord for the area Mason and company fought in during season three. That did not work out. Frankly I was never comfortable with how Karen was handled - sure, Ben, one of that endless parade of Mason sons I mentioned, he could be saved from the alien harnessing, but before long the characters acted not just as if Karen was beyond hope, but that she was actively malicious or something.

Anyway the new Overlord says that the reason Karen didn't work out was because she still had free will and hang the fuck on what does that even mean when you rip away her identity and turn her into your mind-controlled slave? And this new difficult to appreciate distinction bleeds into the 'innovation' in the Espheni plan: Their standard grunt alien race, the Skitters - who were mind-controlled from a young age via the harness, like how the human children were meant to be (the reveal that they were mind controlled and there was another more dangerous alien species behind them was one of the good twists of the first season) now have a distinction between those who were loyal because of harness mindfuckery and those who 'betrayed' them - they have taken to turning capture Skitter rebels into mindless drones... who have also been genetically engineered so that they can fly now. Why they don't make all their Skitters fly is an open question. I suppose were someone to defend the show they could argue it's the suggestion that heavy mind-fucking nurture doesn't beat the surety of pure brain dead mindlessness, but since the new Skitters behave basically exactly like the old Skitters I can't really buy it.

But anyway it feeds into their new plan for humanity! The harness is dead, they don't want to get your children anymore, now they want to turn your adults into soulless zombie soldiers (or willing soldiers whatever.) Our alien overlords have switched over from one method of domination to another because... well there is ANOTHER group of aliens out there they are fighting that the entire war on Earth is all about - no, not the Volm, the aliens who showed up as potential allies for the humans at the end of season two (and got frequent del Toro monster performer Doug Jones a steady paycheck as an alien named - and I shit you not this is his name - Cochise); nope, turns out there is some other group of aliens only unlike the Volm they are mean so Mason you should join up with the Espheni to help fight them.

It's a real come to Scorpius moment, only absolutely terrible and of course once again Mason rejects whatever damn scheme the Espheni have this year.

But hang on DRC! A perceptive reader is doubtless now thinking. Did you not explain last week that the Espheni had rejected their harnessing in favour of stupid re-education camps for kids? This sounds different from that! Well spotted hypothetical reader, as this episode reveals that the re-education camps are apparently the work of creepy alien-human hybrid baby who was grown up to be a super-blonde cultist leader. So Daen... Lexi on the one hand is a temperamental and easily swayed child and the mildly crazy doctor character from season three whose name I don't remember insists that she's probably seriously ill because aging to 21 in a year is like hyperactive progeria (my words, not his, I just like my way of saying it better.) Lourdes - who has apparently switched her faith from devout Catholic to devout believer in alien baby prophets - absolutely opposes any research into her illness because it would scare Lexi or something but mostly because fucking Lourdes. Hey Lourdes remember when you were kinda likeable? Yeah me neither.

So Lexi has some vague power of peace and stopping aliens and even has a Skitter or two on her payroll but dun dun dunn her brother Ben spies her conferring with a man in a monkish robe. But since this man is twice the size of a human it is blatantly obvious he is an Espheni but just in case you didn't figure that out he lowers his cowl for basically no reason. Ooo mysterious?

So what else happens. Oh yeah, Pope. Pope is a complete fucking asshole and unrepentant scumbag, thief and all-round drunken selfish prick. He was implied to be a rapist too at one point but I think in season three they retconned it as saying no just dead members of his gang were the rapists. Regardless, he has basically always been the best character on this show, perhaps because for all it's natural saccharine sentimentality it desperately needed a real toolbag. And in this episode, where people assume he is stealing a ton of shit but he isn't because here is nothing to steal but he implies he is because he has a reputation to maintain - is by far the best thing that has happened this season.

Oh and remember the guy who escaped from multiple alien prisons? He used some kind of titanium suit or whatever that he could just walk through lasers with. Sure, guy.

You and me, Pope. We're going to see this fucker through together.

I didn't know where else to put this, but I was binging Mad Men, as I often do, and I accidentally paused on this, one of the greatest possible Pete Campbell screencaps imaginable. If I recall correctly, here he's ranting about Ken being promoted over him in "The Grown-Ups." It is too wonderful not to share with the world.

At my work we're working a DVD set for a show called Spenser: For Hire, which I had never heard of before. It's basically Miami Vice, but in Boston. It's pretty much the best show ever.

And it's got Captain Sisko, doesn't it?

I always just heard that he preferred the shaved head look and had to grow back his hair before shooting started the first few seasons. The Spenser thing makes sense though.

I just watched The Shield's "Parricide", and I now have a very different definition of shit hitting the fan. What an incredible episode.

The Bridge - the original, Scandinavian one. The first disc in so far. It's good stuff.

The Late Night Big Breakfast - A New Zealand comedy program that is 2 episodes in, the basic concept being a breakfast tv show (or whatever they call morning tv shows wherever you are) that is aired late at night, and hosted in a furniture store. I had not realised the comic potential of having a bookcase pass in front of the camera before the interview. Other bit's enjoyed:

"Herpes - no fun for the fish, no fun for the fisherman"

"Our question of the day for the viewer at home: What's more embarrassing - catching your cleaner masturbating, or your cleaner catching you masturbating?"

Bookshelf's

The section where the presenters are selling their 'collectible' items on tv, including one selling a used tin of paint with a "good eighth" left in it (for $600) that the presenter starts sniffing, and the other presenter selling his unremarkable persian rug ($2,999)

"How many Persian cats did it take to make that?"
"Ahhh, ten. With a couple of moggys thrown in to keep it all together"


And the Commonwealth games on in the background for when the Sevens are on.

Maybe I should start a "what aren't you watching" thread but I crossed my unofficial "5 episodes on the DVR without even attempting to start an episode" threshold with Tyrant and since the reviews continue to be middling, I just deleted the lot of them.

I admit there are problems with that thought process, although Mad Men still had some strong critical buzz at the beginning, even if the viewers weren't there. The stuff I'm talking about is mostly middling would-be-prestige dramas.  Running with the Tyrant example, if had heard anything about the show in the month it's been on, I would have left it on my DVR to come back to someday.  Cable channels especially are playing the long game with their drama series now, if it ends up worth watching it will show up on Netflix to binge in a year, but I'm not going to watch a show that doesn't seem to be worth my time just on the off chance of saying I stuck with the next Breaking Bad from the beginning.  Life is too short for that kind of nonsense.

Same-ish here. The only season of BB I watched live was the back half of the last season. It kind of proves my point, you don't need to risk wasting your time on TV that isn't doing it for you in the moment, if it's really cream it will rise to the top and you can catch up so easily now. You lose a little bit of the in-the-moment discussion, but I think the benefits of not spending hours going "why am I watching this fucking show" outweigh that cost.