September was a rough month. These 5 TV shows got me through it.

Oh how irony always comes back to bite us. Here is something I tweeted on the morning of September 1:

The thing they don't tell you when you're a kid is that once you're an adult, September is the best month.

— Brendan Noel (@BrendanDNoel) September 1, 2016

Naturally, September 2016 turned out to be a pretty astoundingly shitty month for me. The short version is that I watched my job completely burn to ashes in the span of about three weeks, which is remarkable considering I spent ten months there thinking it was a pretty great place to work - until suddenly it wasn't. It was uncomfortable to work there knowing I was pretty close to escaping, and then unbearably uncomfortable after I gave my notice.

To be honest, if I hadn't had the distraction of fall TV premiere week and all of the rest of September's new TV offerings, I'm not exactly sure what I would have done with myself. Curled into the fetal position and cried maybe? Anyway, here are five TV shows that got me through a pretty brutal 30 day stretch.

My hypothetical 2016 Emmy ballot

In a stunning display of competency, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences actually managed to correct a long-standing error last year by finally awarding Jon Hamm with the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series for his work on Mad Men. Dare I allow myself to believe they're capable of recognizing more overshadowed greatness this year and nominate some real dark horses instead of giving the same people a fifth or sixth trophy? Nonetheless, today I get to have my say in what shows, performances, scripts, and what have you should be held up as television's best. The correct list of nominees, with some picks that no doubt were entirely ignored during the last two weeks of voting, after the jump. (Look, I love ya Mark McKinney, but there's just no way.)

Mediocre "Letterkenny" headlines a frustrating experience with Crave TV

The cast of the new Crave TV comedy "Letterkenny".
Photo Credit: Bell Media

(A caveat: I feel the need to preface this anytime I write about a Canadian series, particularly one about which I have a negative opinion : I do not begrudge any Canadian television show for being made; in fact its existence in at least one aspect makes me happy. More Canadian television needs to be produced outside of the CBC. I don't care right now if the programming is not top notch. I'm just happy someone is putting in the time, money, and resources to make it exist at all. More please, and stat.)

It was around last Christmas when my brother asked me something to the effect of, "so I guess Shomi is the new Rogers thing now?" I really had no idea what he was talking about - somehow I had missed being inundated with television commercials for Rogers and Shaw's joint streaming video venture that had launched a month prior. It didn't help that my mother seemed convinced that Shomi was actually a rebrand of the Rogers On Demand service (it isn't, though Rogers sure did a good job of burying their VOD platform in service of Shomi).

Before long though, commercials for Shomi and it's competitor, the Bell-owned Crave TV, popped up everywhere and it became all too easy for me to compare and contrast the services even without actually subscribing to them. Crave offered a deeper program catalogue even before signing deals for the HBO and Showtime libraries, for less than half the cost of Shomi, whose commercials seemed to always feature the same five popular series in every single commercial (i.e., the only ones they had streaming rights to). Neither service seemed "necessary," even as I recognized that I was basically spouting the Canadian version of, "but I already have Netflix, why do I need to subscribe to Amazon?". But they seemed harmless, and if the existing daily schedules of Bell's network and cable channels was deemed insufficient as an on-demand "Big Bang Theory" delivery system, Canadians were welcome to pay $4 a month for their hit.

My hypothetical 2015 Emmy ballot

If you recall last August, I was furious - legitimately furious - with the results of the 66th Primetime Emmy Awards, in which there were almost no original or inspired winners, and more statues were thrown at the overrated likes of Jim Parsons and Ty Burrell. I felt so hurt and betrayed I didn't even bother to dignify the telecast with any kind of writeup or even a review of my predictions afterward (it actually was slightly higher than normal, simply because of the repetitive voting patterns).

And yet here I am again, with the 2015 Emmy ballots released online, pretending the Emmys are worth giving a damn about. But the reason I'm so excited about this post is because this is my chance each year to list my dream Emmy nominations and winners - the names that would be read out on the morning of Thursday, July 16 in a just world where enough Emmy voters were aware that "The Americans" is a weekly program created for television and broadcast over the airwaves for consumption by a mass viewership. I swear, it is. It's on every Wednesday night. On the television. This is an actual television program, hand to God. I'm not just making it up.

So until the actual garbage nominations are released, allow me to put my fingers in my ears and say "la-la-la I can't hear you, here is the correct television". Join me after the break, won't you?

Year End 2014: Started from the bottom now we're here

The last two years in which I've written a TV top ten list (i.e., the only times I've ever done it), I ended the post with a question, or even a dare. The first one was "Whattaya got, 2013?" and holy shit, 2013 responded with perhaps the best year of television drama the small screen has ever seen. And then last year, I closed my top ten post with the suggestion, "Top that, 2014. I dare you." And dare I say that...2014 might have done just that. It's easier than ever to find quality shows with so many new outlets for programming, and that only makes it more difficult to parse down my ten to twenty favourite TV shows of the entire calendar year. But I've carefully selected the ten shows I feel represent the best in television for 2014. And those shows will appear to you by clicking the "read more" button below!

Year End 2014: Close, but no cigar

The annual best of the year series continues with a look at my "second ten" for the year in television. Much like with last year's second ten, almost all of these shows would be top ten worthy in a lesser year of quality programming, but given how many outlets we now get "small screen content" from, it seems unlikely we'll ever get another slow year. But hey, no complaining from me! (Just ignore any time I tweet about how hard it is to keep up with everything currently airing, like the two or three episodes of "Scandal" and "How to Get Away with Murder" currently sitting on my DVR which will be lucky to be watched even before they both return at the end of January).

To the list!

Year End 2014: My favourite TV episodes of the year

Do not adjust your picture, this is indeed a new entry over here on the ol' Blogspot! I continue a grand holiday tradition here at the blog (shut up, three years can be long enough for tradition) by kicking off  my year end series for 2014 with a list of my favourite episodes of television from this calendar year.

The list is extensive but still probably by no means definitive (I definitely slacked on keeping good tabs on it in the fall), but is still a reflection of some of the small's screen specific highlights over the last twelve months.


The full list after the break!

My hypothetical 2014 Emmy ballot

It's time for me to once again fill out a hypothetical Emmy ballot for the 2013-14 TV season! I always have fun doing these, but they can also create such a challenge in years where there's just so much good television (and these last two TV seasons have in no way been lacking for quality). So let's see where my preferences lie this year!

Of course, you'll notice that when the actual Emmy nominations are announced tomorrow, they will look nothing like the nominations I've listed below. That's because the Emmys are BAD and WRONG, but such is life. Also, something odd happened this year in terms of categorization - two of my favourite shows, Netflix's "Orange is the New Black" and Showtime's "Shameless," have submitted themselves in the comedy categories after seasons in which both were unequivocally dramas. Initially I worried this would affect how many nominations I would give each, but I think instead I'm just going to ask you to disregard the "comedy" and "drama" split below entirely. After all, it is and always has been (for example) "Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series," not "Funniest Supporting Actor".

Recognition ho!

Upfronts 2014: BREAKING: Shows renewed, others canceled; some move time slots

     The cast of "The Good Wife" at CBS's upfront presentation
     on Wednesday, May 14, 2014. I've already forgotten what
     exactly Alan Cumming sang and danced to, but no doubt it
     was amusing.

Time for my annual long-winded, overly complicated, and of course very late blog post in which I outline the 2014 upfront presentations, in which all the major television networks (and The CW) present their new fall schedules in front of advertisers in New York City. Below, I'll be breaking down the new network schedules, occasionally including unfair gut reactions to non-representative cutdowns of not-for-air pilots or hypothesizing as to the success or failure of a lineup. And as usual, wherever possible, I'll be hyperlinking to a trailer for new shows whenever they are listed (and when their YouTube trailers are not geofiltered).

Let's do this.

Hey, where'd you go?

Of my four or five dedicated readers, I'm guessing at least one of them has been wondering, "hey, didn't this blog used to be updated regularly or something?" The answer to that questions is: yes, kinda.

And it still will be! But now, probably even less often. I'll still likely be posting Emmy predictions/analysis or whatever here, and my year end lists, and anything else I deem should be filed under "old man yells at cloud" rather than actually published somewhere where people could accidentally see it. But I'm also focusing on some writing ventures elsewhere at the moment. For the past six weeks, I've been covering a really fun reality competition show on TBS called "King of the Nerds" for Rob Has a Website. Here are the links to the blogs I've written:

- Episode 3: "King of the Nerds": 5 Reasons Why Zack Belongs in the Reality Villain Hall of Fame
- Episode 4: The 5 Poison Numbers of "King of the Nerds"
- Episode 5: A Debatably Low-Key Week on "King of the Nerds"
- Episode 6: Titanic Missteps in the "King of the Nerds" Penalty Box
- Episode 7: Pay Your Respects at the "King of the Nerds" Memorial Service
- Episode 8: "King of the Nerds" Sprints to the Finish - And Faceplants (Again)

And in the meantime, I'll be blogging periodically about TV over at the new Post Show Recaps. Come check us out!

A(nother) rant against Global, and my frustration with the current landscape of Canadian television

     The stars arrive Sunday (January 19) night for "Global
     Presents The 20th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards
     Live Asterisk".

If you happened to have stumbled across these parts this time last year, you might remember me laying in to Global TV, truly a perfect shining example of Canadian television, for absolutely shitting the bed with regards to their telecast of the 19th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards. For viewers like myself watching on the east coast, the first 40 minutes of the broadcast (or roughly one third of the show) were spent watching a rerun of an ancient home renovation show called "From the Ground Up with Debbie Travis" while Global flashed a crawl on the screen telling us the SAG Awards would start soon*

(*Just as soon as the network frantically tries to figure out why they were not getting a signal of the show into the country).

Well this year, in a horrifying feat of spectacular trainwreckery, Global managed to outdo themselves.   Now credit where credit is due, they did manage to air the entire show this year (or so I am led to believe), which might make those two hours the most successful broadcast in the network's history. But this year they decided to air the show on a delay of 24 hours - the awards were presented, and aired on American cable channels TBS and TNT, last Saturday (January 18) night, while Global opted to air the telecast on Sunday (January 19) night.

Leaving aside the fact that, as someone pointed out to me on Twitter, E! carried a live red carpet pre-show on the Saturday night anyway (someone high up in an office at a Canadian broadcaster really did just decide at some point that we're all stupid and everyone else has run with that idea for years if not decades), the decision to delay the show by a day is really baffling to me. The idea was tossed around that Global didn't want to compete with CBC's broadcast of "Hockey Night in Canada," but to me that's a much preferable form of ratings competition than CTV's Sunday night broadcast of the NFC championship game. Global said in a statement that they were delaying the SAG Awards to air them on a night that was more convenient for their audience - which either means they felt it was more convenient to ensure their audience they would see the entire show this year (not a good reason in any way to delay the telecast), or decided that because we as idiots are used to seeing such an event on a Sunday night (or that there are more of us around to mindlessly gawk at them), we won't mind that the winners will have been known for 22 hours beforehand.

Global's continued butchering of the SAG Awards is just one symptom of a larger problem for Canadian TV nerds like myself, and it's this: yes, we get all (or at least most) of the programming we know and love - but we have no way of watching it in a non-bastardized form.

2013 Emmys roundup: W-R-O-N-G

     "Breaking Bad" creator Vince Gilligan accepts the 2013
     Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series.
     Photo Credit: Reuters, ATAS, CBS

Just as the title indicates, these Emmys were pretty much nothing but wrong, in a few senses of the word. As a piece of televised entertainment, this was an especially weak Emmy telecast, stuffed with bad, time wasting musical performances that only occasionally had some connection to television. And on the awards side, all of the trophies they gave out were either wrong in the "just plain wrong" sense (Jeff Daniels, Gail Mancuso, etc.) or were wildly pleasant, left-field choices that I imagine did an even bigger number on my yearly predictions than usual.

It was interesting to hear Grantland's Bill Simmons describe being in the theatre for the actual show. While the overly long and inconsequential Elton John performance was unbearable to those of us watching at home, the actual audience in the Nokia Theatre welcomes this sort of visual stimuli to pass the three hours they're stuck in their seats. While I felt the dance routine choreographed by the nominees in the Outstanding Choreography category to be an interesting idea that was poorly executed, I understand why that's a nice break from giving out trophies to the celebrities who actually attend the event, and especially to those who found out early in the night that they hadn't won.

Steve Levitan (and if there is one thing I am most furious about in this entire telecast, it's that we came so close to making it an entire year without having to listen to him giving ANOTHER speech upon his mediocre show being hailed as the second coming of Christ in 22 minute form) called attention to the somber, deathly tone of the show, and he wasn't wrong for doing so. I understand why people don't like the necrology because people are always left out and always will be no matter how many award shows we live to see. But paying specific tributes creates two problems: as mentioned, the repeated reminder of death casts a shadow over an event that is ultimately a celebration. There's nothing wrong with life being the thing you're celebrating, but the tribute segments meant the somber feeling was inescapable. If you pay all tributes during the "in memoriam" segment, you can fade to commercial and then come back with the wacky stars of "The Millers" and pretend that nothing happened. This made jarring tonal shifts a constant component of the telecast.

The second is that even more than the complaints of people left out of the necrology, this creates such a disgusting popularity contest out of death. Jack Klugman's son was understandably disappointed that the Academy chose not to give his father a specific tribute during the show, and Larry Hagman, arguably the biggest TV star of the 1980s, didn't get one either. For the Academy to give the thumbs up to creating a situation in which it was now a competition to see which lost icons were more worthy of attention than others is so ridiculous and dumbfounding that it could only come from the same organization that votes for the Emmy awards. And on the note of death as a popularity contest: I happened to catch Emmy host Neil Patrick Harris on "The Talk" late last week, where he specifically mentioned that he didn't like it when the audience can be heard clapping at varying levels for celebrities of varying levels during award show necrologies. He assured that any noise from the theatre would be muted during the actual telecast, and of course, come Sunday night, we got to hear about 6,000 people remember to continue clapping for agents and studio executives they didn't know while the applause escalated for talent who worked in front of the camera. Just a disaster.

Simmons also mentioned that during commercial breaks, clips were shown of past Emmy acceptance speeches. A nice tribute to television, which the Emmys seemed to be sorely lacking this year. I actually found myself missing the way the show used to separate the night by categories, if only because we didn't get the "Year In (Comedy/Variety/Miniseries/Reality/Drama)" montages of actual TV clips from the past year that we've gotten for the last few telecasts. I also understand why people didn't like that the extended tributes to James Gandolfini, Cory Monteith et al. also did not feature any clips of the actors performing (or in the case of Gary David Goldberg, clips from the shows he worked on), though if you couldn't tell, that's not my biggest gripe about how those were handled.

Neil Patrick Harris proved to be a somewhat problematic host. His reputation as a song-and-dance man who opens awards shows he doesn't even host (like that weird duet he did...by himself to open the Oscars that one time) precedes him, and I think it was an interesting idea to say up front "I'm not doing that this time." But all of the comedic bits about him saying that weren't funny in the slightest. Even his opening monologue, which wasn't intended to be all that funny so that the past hosts could berate him for doing such a bad job, never turned a corner into anything actually entertaining.

Show highlight: Even though she's great on "Veep," I wasn't all that happy to see Julia Louis-Dreyfus repeat. I would have much rather seen Laura Dern or Amy Poehler pull off a surprising but well-earned victory. But the moment of the night was easily seeing the "Veep" cast all in-character as Louis-Dreyfus accept her award, with fellow Emmy winner Tony Hale standing right behind her, holding her purse and reminding her what to say, while nominee Anna Chlumsky sat in the audience on her phone.

Show lowlight: "Hi, I'm Elton John. Here's my latest single. It kind of reminds me of Liberace, a guy who HBO made a movie about this year but has actually been dead for 25 years. Michael Douglas, Matt Damon, please stand perfectly still for these next six minutes as I play the song in its entirety. As I play, be sure to put your ear right up to the television. You might be able to hear all the speeches that will be cut off for the rest of the night."

The results of my predictions after the break...

Review: ITV's "Broadchuch" crosses the Atlantic to join a growing list of great crime dramas

     David Tennant and Olivia Colman star in "Broadchurch".

"Broadchurch" airs Sunday nights on Showcase in Canada (episode 1 already aired this past week - watch it here). In the United States, it premieres tonight at 10pm on BBC America.

It's time for those who make television to understand that the best "crime dramas" are not really about the crime.

When AMC's "The Killing" ended its first season in June 2011, viewers and critics were understandable frustrated that a show with thin characters and thinner plots failed to tell them in 13 long, slow hours whodunnit, despite a promotional campaign that leaned almost exclusively on the question "Who killed Rosie Larsen?" They grew tired of the blatant red herrings. They grew tired of the cliffhanger endings that almost always cleared a suspect in the first five minutes of the next episode. And after the finale, the conversation become one about tiring of the season-long, murder mystery format altogether.

Last year, I marathoned my way through "Veronica Mars" with a good deal of skepticism. Some swear by the show and in the end I was satisfied with its first season. But I couldn't help but feel like by the time I got to the end of hour 22, I was gonna be left feeling duped. I was going to have invested a lot of time into what would eventually be a twist ending that rang false based on what I had come to know and love about the residents of Neptune, California.

And thankfully, that didn't happen. What was most bizarre about the whole thing, though, was that I never even finished the first season of "The Killing". A show's supposedly horrible twist ending was so bad, based on all the terrible things I'd read about it, that even that was enough to leave a bad taste in my mouth about season-long mystery shows in general.

A statistic often tossed around in business classes, job training, and the Internet in general states that a customer who has a positive experience doing business will tell about three or four people. If they have a negative experience, they're more likely to tell about nine or ten. Yes, the Internet in general is loud and obnoxious and it's the only place where vocal minorities make even the tiniest waves. This isn't a new concept. They're the people who popularized the idea that "Lost" had a bad finale because it didn't answer every last question and tie up every single loose end (where did Kate's horse come from?!?!?!) ever presented in the run of the series.

But after so many people had a bad experience with "The Killing" and told nine or ten friends about it, they were able to watch three or four new similar dramas that were much better and tell three or four friends about each of those. A genre that was ready to be sworn off based largely on one show has thankfully been redeemed with superior outputs like Sundance Channel's "Top of the Lake," Netflix's "The Fall," FX's "The Bridge," and now "Broadchurch" (this could be reverse applied to how tired everyone was of serial killers on TV with terrible shows like "The Following," only for "Hannibal" to come along and remind us that there's still material to be mined from the genre).

On the Dorset coast of England lies the town of Broadchurch, population 15,000. It's a town whose local newspaper, the Broadchurch Echo, "celebrates the ordinary" according to its reporters. There's very little crime in the area - the occasional DUI is reported, along with some small drug busts. It's not a town where you'd expect anything to happen. Until 11-year-old Danny Latimer washes up on the beach - dead. And suddenly, no one is innocent, and no one is safe.

Detective Sergeant Ellie Miller (Olivia Colman) is returning from maternity leave only to discover that the job of Detective Inspector she was promised has instead been given to Alec Hardy (David Tennant), an investigator with a troubled past. The two are reluctantly paired together on the case of young Danny's demise, each attempting to reconcile the personal and professional aspects of the case. Hardy's desire to identify a killer lies much more heavily in demons from his past, while lifelong Broadchurch resident Miller knows the Latimer family well and finds that keeping her personal connection separate from the investigation is actually not as hard as she initially thought it would be.

"I hate what I'm becoming," Miller tells Hardy in the fourth episode.

"A good detective?" Hardy asks.

"Hardened," replies Miller.

When the eight episodes are over, you will learn who did what to Danny Latimer. But far more importantly, you'll learn what everyone else did to each other, and that's what makes "Broadchurch" worth your time. While a child is dead and police are trying to figure out why, a town virtually free of crime is dealing with an unexplainable outlier of a tragedy. Friends, neighbours, and even family lose all sense of trust as suddenly, this supposedly peaceful seaside paradise (which looks great thanks to director James Strong) has become a place where nothing is sacred and anything can happen. And none of it is played sensationally - the show remains simple, realistic, and at times unsettlingly relatable.

Also making "Broadchurch" worth the journey is its outstanding cast, led by Tennant and Colman. I had only seen a couple episodes of his work as "Doctor Who" so I wasn't overly familiar with him as an actor, but here (using his native Scottish accent), he sells the hell out of Hardy's damaged and unrelenting drive to bring justice not just to the Latimers, but for himself as well. And it's been quite a while since I was blown away by a performance as much as I was by Colman, who I had never seen in a dramatic role before. I've long known Colman for her work with British comedy duo Mitchell and Webb, playing a number of roles on their sketch shows "That Mitchell and Webb Look" on TV and "That Mitchell and Webb Sound" on radio - she also played the love interest, Sophie, for many years on their Channel 4 sitcom "Peep Show". More than anyone, Miller struggles with accepting that the bloom is off the rose in Broadchurch and by the last episode, she's just as much an emotional wreck as the viewer is from watch Colman play her.

It's always unfortunate when a show like this comes along on the heels of things that have pretty much all but poisoned the water. But it can also be very refreshing to be reminded that even a familiar idea can feel new if the concept is simple and the execution is done correctly. So consider this my way of telling three or four friends that I had a very good experience with "Broadchurch".

Upfronts 2013: What's new, what's dead, and what's weird

     NBC unveiling "Revolution" at their May 2012 upfront.
     How'd that work out for ya?

I've been busy the last couple days trying to get a few weeks ahead on my 25 Favourites list, and I completely forgot to write anything about last week's upfronts, in which the major U.S. television networks unveil their fall schedules in front of advertisers in New York City. Some scheduling decisions intrigue me, some seem utterly ridiculous. Let's go network by network: all the fall shows are listed in bold and new shows will hyperlink to a trailer whenever one is available.

Here's a fun thing I wrote about gender portrayals in the media

     If the Aerie Girls went to Neptune High, no doubt they
     would have tried their best to torment the kick-ass
     Veronica Mars.

The theme of the final assignment for the "Journalism and Social Change" course I just completed was simply "gender," which meant I was given another opportunity to get away with writing something fun for school. While catching up on "Veronica Mars" over the past several months, I came across some articles on The CW's dreadful "Aerie Girls" promotional campaign, and I used that as a launching pad to talk about some issues I've had with advertising lately. You can read the column I wrote here, and I would also encourage you to click here to read the features written by my friends and classmates. Or if you'd prefer, you can just click here and cringe at the vapidity of the Aerie Girls.

How will NBC's unaired "Hannibal" episode affect the show's reputation?

     Hugh Dancy as Will Graham on "Hannibal".
     Photo Credit: NBC

Early last Monday (April 15), Bryan Fuller, the creator of the dark, disturbing, and excellent new series "Hannibal," approached NBC with a request not to air an upcoming episode of the series, which focuses on FBI profiler Will Graham and his experiences with a pre-imprisoned Dr. Hannibal Lecter from Thomas Harris' series of books and their film adaptations. The episode, entitled "Ceuf," features Molly Shannon playing a disturbed mother (who has lost her own child) kidnapping kids and then brainwashing them into murdering their families.

Most of "Hannibal's" 13 episode order was filmed last year, before the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December. In light of the tragedy, Fuller was rightfully uncomfortable with the episode's "kids murdering other kids" subject matter and NBC agreed to skip over the episode. The announcement of the episode's removal from the North American market came last Thursday (April 18), and many sources initially reported (wrongly) that the Boston bombings last week were responsible for the shuffling. Most of these reports were later corrected, and NBC prepared to skip to episode five.

Small problem: while "Hannibal" does contain a case of the week (the Molly Shannon side of things), there's an ongoing arc involving the case from the pilot episode and how it has affected the main characters. Particularly, the unaired episode contains a good deal of development in the relationship between Hannibal Lecter and Abigail Hobbs, the victim of the pilot's antagonist. When critics were sent episodes to review earlier this month, they were sent episodes 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6, and in watching the "Previously on Hannibal" segment realized they had missed these developments from episode four. To help eliminate confusion, Fuller "cannibalized" the episode (haha, because you see, Hannibal Lecter...never mind) into six short webisodes, running in total for about 22 minutes. This way, fans could follow along with the arc in future episodes but not have to see whatever disturbing violent images (that were actually probably topped in episode five) from the case of the week.

While the episode has been eliminated from the U.S. and Canadian rotation, the full episode will still air overseas. AXN, a Sony-owned channel that holds the broadcast rights to the show in parts of Asia, aired the uncensored version of "Ceuf" earlier tonight in India and the rest of the continent is expected to see the episode on Tuesday. And because it's 2013, that means it won't be too long before the full version makes its way online.

Confused? You won't be after this week's episode of..."Hannibal!" (Actually, you might still be very confused. I wouldn't blame you.)

Catchup: 15-year-old Claire Danes stands out in the occasionally flat "My So-Called Life"

     Cast of "My So-Called Life," from L-R: Jared Leto, A.J.
     Langer, Wilson Cruz, Lisa Wilhoit, Devon Odessa, Claire
     Danes, and Devon Gummersall. Not pictured: Bess
     Armstrong, Tom Irwin.

The date? July 20, 1995. The location? Hollywood, California, where dreams go to die. The event: the Academy of Television Arts and Science's announcement of the 47th Primetime Emmy nominations. The category: Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series. Round up the usual suspects: Angela Lansbury of "Murder, She Wrote"; Sherry Stringfield of "ER"; Kathy Baker of "Picket Fences"; and Cicely Tyson of "Sweet Justice".

The fifth name on that list? 15-year-old Claire Danes of "My So-Called Life," a low-rated show that had left ABC's airwaves in January after only 19 episodes. By God, did the Emmys just get something right? Was there actually a time when these awards were able to recognize quality and not fall into slumps in which the Outstanding Comedy Series trophy has gone to two shows in the last six years, each winning three in a row?

It happened. It happened as much as "My So-Called Life" being loosely adapted into a German sitcom that aired for six seasons in the early 2000s happened. But more importantly, a pretty great and tragically ignored TV show happened.

Slate's ultimately sexist "Guys on Girls" column fails to validate its existence

     Lena Dunham and Patrick Wilson on "Girls".
     Photo Credit: HBO

This essay was originally submitted as a web feature assignment for my "Journalism and Social Change" class on February 28. That piece was capped at 1,000 words, but the version I've included here is slightly longer (I excised some unnecessary critical blather that made it extremely obvious how badly I was getting away with writing about a TV show for a school assignment). I also got some excellent quotes from Mo Ryan at The Huffington Post that unfortunately came too late to be included in the piece (my fault for leaving it so late, as well as making the piece so long that I wouldn't have been able to fit her quotes in anyway). Probably fair to point out that Emily Nussbaum did have something nice to say about the guys' discussion of Adam and Natalia's bad thing in the "On All Fours" episode on March 10. As for the others, who knows if they have had a change of heart re: the "Guys on Girls" feature, or whether they've kept up with at all. I know Jaime Weinman said he wasn't reading it regularly when I asked about it.

General disgust after the jump...

"Girls" - "Together": See you next fall

     Adam (Adam Driver) saves the day (I guess?) on "Girls".
     Photo Credit: HBO

I recently started watching "My So-Called Life" for the first time and I've been following along with Amelie Gillette's old-ish reviews on The A.V. Club. I haven't been as impressed with them as I have with some other things written for that site, but I do enjoy her reviews especially because she watched "My So-Called Life" when it originally aired on ABC back in 1994, and it provides her with an interesting perspective. Her review of the sixth episode, "The Substitute," notes that her opinion of it had largely changed over the years because upon first watching it as a student of creative writing, she felt it was an inaccurate depiction of the process - "I had an aversion to anything that made writing seem like something anyone could do if given an inspirational teacher and a few candles, as well as anything that reduced good creative writing to something that 'does better than make sense. It makes you feel,'" Gillette wrote.

I mention this because I'd like to highlight what I felt was the sole positive of the season two finale of "Girls" that aired this past Sunday (March 17) before I tear apart what was otherwise a disappointing conclusion to the season.

"Girls" has had its fun with Hannah's writing career this season (can I make one last mention of Murjashiway?) and as something of a writer myself, I can appreciate that the show doesn't attempt to portray it with any kind of glamour - I'm not sure how they would do that, but you get what I mean. I didn't necessarily love the story, but I did find her troubles amusing and thought that Lena Dunham got some Lena Dunham-y lines to read in her Lena Dunham-y delivery that were quite funny, such as telling her father that she was able to self-diagnose her scarlet fever by reading Louisa May Alcott. I would have probably really enjoyed an episode that was just a day in the life of Hannah the writer. Obviously "Girls" isn't the kind of show where she could have buckled down and cranked out her book in that one day, but I think I still would have enjoyed watching her fail at that rather than give up immediately and try to get her parents to bail her out as always (I know it's Hannah, but she should really learn how futile it is to ask them for money at this point).

We couldn't get that episode, however, because it was season finale time. Only this wasn't "She Did". It wasn't "Casino Night". It wasn't "Shut the Door. Have a Seat." Little to none of "Together" felt like it was happening organically, for any reason other than the show was going to be away for awhile and some things needed to be brought to a close. The Shoshanna and Ray breakup we all knew was coming happened, but wasn't brought about by any new developments in this episode. They might as well have broken up in any of the last two or three episodes, because in the interim we saw the same beats of Shoshanna realizing what a crummy relationship that was that we only needed to see once (probably in the Radhika episode where she makes out with the doorman).

I was also extremely disheartened by the end of the Marnie arc this year. Marnie has been making an ass of herself in front of Charlie all year and it's been at times quite painful, and at times quite funny (often both). But that arc doesn't end with her and Charlie together in a happy relationship where she's ready to have his brown babies. It ends with Marnie realizing that Charlie is making her do stupid things that she shouldn't be doing because he's just Charlie and she's not a good or prosperous person when she's around him. I had enjoyed this arc through the preceding nine episodes and was happy that character was given more to do than the first season made Allison Williams seem capable of. I trusted the writers to give her the wake up call she needed by the season's end, and they didn't give it to her. Marnie is just as much a screwup as Hannah in her own right, but she doesn't deserve that kind of shaft. If anything, I'd like to selfishly find some weird way for Christopher Abbott to return to "Enlightened" as a regular for season 3 (which, psh, is totally happening, duh) so that the temptation of Charlie can be eliminated for her altogether.

And while I was slightly amused by Hannah's earlier misadventures in writing, her final scene with Adam left me very confused about that relationship as well and what the show was telling me about them. I get that Adam is the person in Hannah's life who tells her to keep away from the broken glass, but I neither understood nor felt the apparent triumph or heroism that was him running shirtless all the way to her apartment through Facetime. I think the takeaway was supposed to be that in the end, Adam's a good guy and he's the one person she can really count on no matter what she might otherwise feel about him. But to me that's such a bleak statement about their relationship ("At least Hannah has one person she can always count on...oh, but it's...Adam") that I think sells short a lot of their history and the things that make them their most interesting when paired together.

To me, it felt like a strangely sad appropriate capper to a season that's seen higher highs and lower lows than the show saw in 2012. This season gave us some really tremendous episodes like the "Louie"-esque adventures "One Man's Trash" and "Video Games". But as good as those half hour standalones are, they're really detrimental to the overall arc of the season. There were 10 episodes in total, but only seven or eight of them lived within any kind of story continuity, a short amount of time to develop a plot on a television show ("Veep," the former neighbours of "Girls," produced only eight episodes for their first season and wisely opted out of any attempts at a running arc last year). That means when it's time to wrap everything up, it's hard to tie everything up in a nice bow the way a delicate show like "Girls" needs to.

I'm hoping the third season, which will consist of 12 episodes, will let them have their cake and eat it too by writing outstanding standalone episodes that don't cut into time that could be better spent on fleshing out and concluding the 2014 adventures of Hannah, Marnie, Jessa, and Shoshanna. In the meantime, I'm okay with "Girls" taking a bit of a breather to refocus - if need be, possibly get a whiff of a few candles.

"Girls" - "On All Fours": Can't get much wronger

     Marnie (Allison Williams) in the midst of the worst
     decision she's ever made.
     Photo Credit: HBO

Something happened on "Girls" this past Sunday (March 10) that I don't think has ever happened before: part way through the title card, the logo changed colour. When it first appeared, it was pink on a purple background, then transitioned to green on a yellow background. According to colour theory, pink evokes feelings of immaturity and silliness, but also of nurturing and unconditional love. Green suggests self-reliance, but also an unhealthy possessiveness.

I didn't look into previous title card colours as they aired, and I don't have the time to do it now. Who knows whether Dunham and co. ever take the logo colour into consideration. But the actual changing of those specific colours in this episode doesn't seem accidental. "On All Fours" was a fairly natural extension from last week, where we revisited Hannah's onset OCD in a much more horrifying form (personally, I'm pretty squeamish about things being done to my ears so that whole story was hard to watch). We knew from last week that Adam having a girlfriend would make its way back to Hannah at some point, and she took it about as embarrassingly as she could have, trying to think up reasons to like her only knowing her first name and nearly crying when Adam calls her "kid". Shoshanna continued to have no clue what she wanted out of her relationship with Ray other than knowing that she wanted it, which made it all the more disheartening for her to hear Ray described as an asshole by nature. I know the whole point of that relationship is that nothing about it makes sense and there's really nothing to it, but I'm starting to find it uninteresting and I hope there's some more serious development on that front in next week's finale.

I recently mainlined all 18 episodes of "Enlightened," which has its own cringeworthy moments. But show me the most hard-to-watch moment of "Enlightened" and I will show you Marnie singing "Stronger" at Charlie's party, which is maybe the most excruciating but simultaneously hilarious sequence ever televised. In fact, this was a really funny episode despite how dark things got at times. Hannah telling her parents about the 12-15 very close friends she had was a classic Lena Dunham delivery, and pretty much everything happening at Charlie's party (especially the douchebag talking about how restaurants are just a part of him and Shoshanna's reaction) was hysterical. Even as bad as things got between Adam and Natalia, Adam Driver got to work in some good physical comedy in their dance scenes.

So let's talk about Adam and Natalia and the thing she really didn't like, possibly the most excruciating and not at all hilarious sequence ever televised. Credit where credit is due, the show went for it. Nothing about this show is whitewashed, so why start with rape? The "too far" moment for me was the actual shot of Adam's semen. When you're paying a monthly fee to subscribe to HBO, you expect sex, nudity, and violence as a compensation. But I think I still would have understood just how horrifying that was without the borderline pornographic "evidence". If we're choosing to read into the logo colour, it seems like any break Natalia will be making from Adam will be as clean as the one Hannah made from him. I might have a better idea of where this would be headed in a 12 episode season, but with only 30 more minutes to go, my guess is as good as yours.

Season two of "Girls" ends this coming Sunday. Here's hoping I handle the breakup better than Marnie.