Reviews: HBO's freshman comedies "Veep" and "Girls"

"Veep": Take political satire at its finest and combine it with expertly crafted cringe-worthy comedy, and you get this fantastic series that is not only a great vehicle for star Julia Louis-Dreyfus, but a fantastic showcase for its ensemble, consisting of Anna Chlumsky and Tony Hale among others. The show's complete apathy for politics and anything associated with it is well earned in the misfit characters' low ranking jobs, and combined with Armando Iannucci's love of vulgarity, makes for great bits of absurd dialogue like "I'll redact your fuckin' face!" The show didn't always hit home runs in the laughter department, but its literal home runs, like the "Baseball" episode, proved the show was firing on all cylinders the more its ensemble cast worked together to make it out of a high-profile but low-status event without a scandal on their heels. Concluding this write-up is a paragraph from the notes I took while watching the pilot, which nicely sums up the series and its view of politics: "Vice President has her Chief of Staff sign card of condolence to Senator’s widow for her by making a writing motion in the air – all in front of the Chair of the American Foundation for Developmental Disabilities, who she is meeting with after using the word “retard” in a public address" Great show, can't wait to see it come back - and hopefully with at least a couple more episodes next season.


"Girls": As Lena Dunham pointed out, "Girls" in an appropriately ironic title for her show - its characters, despite having such a specific worldview, are so self-important that one of them may even feel as if they are, to borrow a phrase from Hannah Horvath, "the voice of [their] generation." Said specific worldview is not easy in the slightest do sort through and decipher. Meeting these characters and observing their world for the first time is very jarring, and upon first viewing the pilot of this show was certainly polarizing; as many people hated this show as the ones who loved it, and initially I counted myself among the former. Through the next couple of episodes, we were able to more clearly see what the series was saying about life, the universe, and its characters. In fact, there probably isn't another show, at least one this good, that had a better sense of self - what it was, where it was going, what it meant, and even why it meant. Through the ten episodes we saw the appropriate amount of growth in its characters - we learned that Adam is more than just a shirtless creep and that Shoshanna is more than just a ditzy cartoon that might actually fit in better with George and Tessa Altman in Chatswin. Hannah's growth throughout the season was also pretty much spot on, for her specifically but also for any person in that stage of their life. Hannah wants so badly to grow up, but the kind of life that comes with being an adult, and thus is able to provide material for her book, is the same one that so often comes crashing down on her and leaving her in desperate need of help. Real life is all she wants, but real life is so much harder than stealing money her parents left for the hotel's housekeeping or continually having Marnie bail her out on rent. The last few minutes of the finale, as Hannah heads home on the subway, has her purse stolen, and sits on the beach at Coney Island to eat cake, is just a brilliantly interesting bit of television, and man, did I end up liking this show more than I ever thought I would.

I didn't much care for the parts of "The Voice" final performance show I didn't fast forward through

If I wasn't totally sure the last time I checked in on "The Voice", I can now say with certainty that I won't be back for the third season of this show.

After 15 years, I finally got around to seeing "Titanic"

I was only four years old when "Titanic" was first released in theatres on December 19, 1997. As you might expect, a story about young love wrapped in an epic historical disaster is not exactly compelling to a four year old. Nor does such a movie that has eleven Academy Awards and was once the highest grossing movie of all time entice a four year old. So for the next fifteen years, I continued on in a state of ignorance about "Titanic" the motion picture. But on Thursday night, that finally changed.

How "The Voice" went from refreshing to unbearable

When NBC's "The Voice" premiered its first season on April 26 of last year, it was a surprisingly refreshing take on the singing competition series, and a very good alternative to the dreadful "American Idol". I started watching "The Voice" for two main reasons: I was curious to see if this was the show that could pull NBC out of the toilet, and of course there were those spinning chairs.

The second season premiered after the Super Bowl and the ratings were higher than ever. But the show has taken a severe plunge in quality this season and a show that I once found did everything right has now done almost everything wrong.

In which I defend a show I'm not particularly fond of at the moment

Every Monday, a video preview of that night's episode of "How I Met Your Mother" - be it a new episode or a rerun - goes up on the show's official Facebook page run by CBS. And every week, I continue to find the comments on those posts annoy me to no end. So allow me to vent about the ways in which other people vent: the weekly complaints follow.

1) "Another rerun??? Omg lyk u guys need to get it together, why is there only 1 nu ep each month? Gosh!!!!!!" (15-25 likes) - This is irritating to anyone familiar with how television works. There are 24 episodes a season and 36 weeks in the broadcast television season. That means that 12 times during the season, CBS cannot air a new episode of the show. It's always been that way. This is not a new phenomenon that's suddenly appeared this year. There are sweeps periods (periods in which television ratings are tracked to determine advertising costs on each show) every year in November, February, and May. Expect new episodes in the fall, but once the new year hits, don't look for them outside of sweeps. It's just how television works. Remember in the fall when we got 11 new episodes in a row? That's why there's reruns now. Accept it. Move on. Far better shows are not on the air at all.

2) "Omg finaly a new ep! It's been months since the last new episode!!!" (20-30 likes) - Same complaint, worded differently depending on a rerun or a new episode. Again, you're wrong, and get over it.

3) "This video is not available in your geographic region? That's sooo racist. Where do I live,, Narnia?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!? LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL" (5-12 likes) - People seem to think that CBS has it out for the international viewers of their shows by geo-filtering their material so that it can only be viewed within the United States. In reality, there are copious legal issues that prevent CBS from displaying video content in different countries. CBS does not hate your homeland, they just can't be bothered to sort out the legal issues of every specific country and different advertisers to display worldwide-viewable videos. Also, maybe this is just because I'm a Canadian and we get nearly every American show same day here, but why don't you just wait 10 hours and watch the episode? Is the preview all that necessary? And every person uses the Narnia joke. We get it, Narnia is a fictional location from a children's book hidden away from the rest of the civilized world. Someone on the page claimed the joke isn't funny anymore, but my response is that it wasn't ever funny. Finally, claims on the page that CBS doesn't care about anyone that isn't American or gives them money is also ridiculous - cock blocking you out of a 30 second promo doesn't give them extra bags of money to use as napkins. Any excuse to bag on the U.S. is a popular sentiment among those who are not American.

4) The show sucks now, you're going in circles, reveal the mother, end the show already (4-5 likes) - Okay yeah, can't argue with this one.

And if you continue to post such bullshit:

Review: "Paul": Pegg and Frost just make me feel happy

Let's end on a high note! This may be one of the few positive reviews on this blog to date. This was also a Writer's Craft assignment, and if I recall correctly, I did get 100 on this. But judge for yourself, after the jump.

"How I Met Your Mother": State of the sitcom address

My brother and sister-in-law started watching "How I Met Your Mother" a couple years ago, and seemed to really be liking it for the most part. So this past April, over the Easter weekend, I went back and began catching up on all six seasons. Conveniently, my aunt had bought the first four seasons of the show on DVD under the assumption she would start watching them at some point, but it turns out I got to them first.

It took me only a month to get caught up, and the fact that the show's early seasons felt so natural and fluid only encouraged me to watch at a rate of about eight episodes a night. Along with "The Big Bang Theory," it remains one of only two TV comedies with a laugh track that I watch - only "HIMYM" feels like a show that probably wouldn't have a laugh track nor be filmed with multiple cameras were it not aired on CBS. The structure of the show is such that it can't even be filmed in front of an audience because the number of flashbacks and cutaways on the show, as well as its use of narration, would make the show feel like a "hostage situation" for a live audience, according to its creators. More importantly, the comedy of the show is genuinely funny enough to make me laugh; the same can't always be said for "TBBT".

Somewhere along its run, however, "HIMYM" has lost its way. I know this because every TV critic has been saying it and writing about it for a while now. A friend who watches and loves the show and I were texting the other night about the current state of the show, as we've done many times before. And each time I feel like we're going to talk in circles again about the show's flaws, we always seem to find new areas of concern or trace problems back to possible origins that we hadn't thought about before.