Repo Madness

Hey, kids, wanna talk about something fun?

I watched Repo! The Genetic Opera last night. It wasn't... quite... the worst thing I've ever seen.

Now, I'd like to take this moment to interject: Of course I hadn't seen it yet; with everyone and their favorite aunt telling me that I simply had to see it, it's just amazing, can I really be blamed for avoiding it like the plague? Especially after I watched Rent under similar recommendations and was thoroughly disappointed. And double especially because Repo! has been referred to, in my presence, as "our generation's Rocky Horror."

Which I don't like, either.

But, hey, Repo!. (On a totally unrelated side note, the fact that I'm grammatically obligated to type the title with a ! every time... and then go on to properly punctuate is hair-meltingly annoying.)

Let's start with that most vital part of an opera: music. Now, I can be snobbily purist about a lot of things, and while opera is one of them, I can appreciate one that's not in Italian or German. That said, I really wasn't fond of this. For one thing, the singers veered wildly between a classic operatic sound and a more metal harshness for no apparent reason. It wasn't stylistically relevant and didn't add anything to the music.

The songs themselves are a mixed bag of the truly awful, the barely passable, and the simply wonderful. Thankless Job and Zydrate Anatomy are great songs, well performed; Gold and Infected are mediocre songs patchily performed; Mark It Up and Seventeen are glass-chewingly bad from start to finish with a bonus "WTF, is that Joan Jett?" (I wish I was kidding.)

There are some people who stand out: Anthony Head and Sarah Brightman. Yup, that's it. No one else is worth noting or watching at all. Don't get me wrong, they can all sing (minus Paris Hilton, though she got totally typecast and afforded me with a bit of meta-humor), but most of them couldn't sell it. Shilo is supposed to be our primary protagonist, but neither she nor the show ever made me care about her.

This show had some shining moments, but sadly they were all technical. Easily Repo!'s greatest strength lies in the creation of the world itself. It's fantastic; Darkly steampunk with a mix of Johnny Mnemonic and Orwellian dystopia, it fits the story (such as it is) perfectly. The director also made a brilliant choice by never showing us enough to be overwhelming, as such a thorough world can occasionally be. There were sweeping establishment shots, but they primarily showed us familiar things in new settings. Like the carnival-thing where we saw comfortable, familiar things like jugglers and fire-breathers lightly interspersed with the set pieces unique to the world, like the tent that Shilo hides in.

Which reminds me: Grave Robber. I have much hate for Grave Robber. Much. Hate.

We got off on the wrong foot from the start because he looks like every blood elf male ever (Deny it. Just you try).

At the beginning I thought that he was our narrator, which I was cool with. But then he was distinctly a character. Then he was a narrator again. And a character. And a character, and then a narrator.

-RAGE-

Yes, the narrator as character has been well done. That is one thing I'll give to Rent: Using Mark as the narrator through the guise of his filming their lives was brilliant and I've seen it done very well. You know who else did it well? Into the Woods, where the narrator is just a narrator until he gets eaten by a giant in the second act as a genius moment of fourth-wall-breaking awesome.

Grave Robber can't function as both a narrator and a character for one reason only: There's no framing device. Nothing to separate GR Narrator and GR Character from each other. This is annoying to no end and it break immersion every time he comes on screen. Every. Time.

On the whole: Repo! is alright. I'll never watch it again (barring the possibility of torture), but it was so well done technically that I'm reluctant to call it outright bad.

...

Well, that turned into a review rather rapidly, didn't it? Sorry 'bout that.

Skins

Hey, I know this is a bit of a radical concept, but how about a review?

I toyed with this one for a while. I wanted so much to be done with it and move on to The Vampire Diaries, but I didn't want to sink eight hours of my life into slides for the damn thing. I considered doing a live-action video review because that'd take substantially less time and still be a video. But then I decided that that was, in fact, a stupid idea. So for the sake of my own sanity, and to get this thing the Hell off of my to-do list, here you go.

The script to The Video That Wasn't: Skins

Okay, kids, confession time. I only made it through the first season of Skins. That’s nine episodes. Doesn’t seem like a lot, I know. But my first impressions after watching the first five episodes were so not good that I didn’t go back to it for almost a week, so even if I hadn’t decided not to watch past the first season, I wouldn’t have been able to anyway. But Skins, yeah.

I’m not really sure why Skins exists. It seems to fall into the same bizarre bracket of entertainment as those coming-of-age movies from the eighties, and similarly, I haven’t the foggiest idea what the plot is. There really doesn’t seem to be much of one, and every time I was asked what I’m watching this week I had to try to force some semblance of coherence out of the mangled mess of character interactions that define the show. Even in the pilot, the episode that is expected to attract the bulk of the initial interest, the first thirteen minutes was character introduction, and even then, the plot that I was introduced to was subverted, then abandoned, then revised, then abandoned again, in the same episode.

Also, the episodes don’t relate to each other, even when they should. There’s nothing wrong with a show that’s purely episodic with no connective plot threads, but when a main character attempts suicide in a dramatic fashion, I expect the next episode to contain at least a mention of it! Instead, I wait an episode and a half before there’s a single line telling me what the Hell happened! Even then, it’s a single line that, in the grand scheme of things, was clearly inserted to, ah, resolve, that plot line. It looked badly patched, as, in fact, it was.

Further, the writers’ grasp of foreshadowing is… okay.  It’s like there was a production meeting and one writer said to another, “Hey, things are getting kind of predictable, what can we do about that?” and the other replied “Hey, let’s have an episode set in Russia for reasons that we won’t adequately explain?” or “Let’s give Angie a fiancé who’ll arrive out of nowhere at an inconvenient time!” It’s appalling.

Skins really reminds me of a sitcom. All the characters are interesting, though predictable. They interact improbably, and anyone who’s not a protagonist is portrayed as an obstacle rather than as a person to a ridiculous degree. In this show the obstacles are parents and most of the teachers, which backfires pretty frequently in the beginning by disrupting my suspension of disbelief. It makes it difficult to sympathize with anyone when everyone’s a cartoon character.

The writing is appalling. It’s truly difficult to listen to. It seems as though the writers were trying too hard to write how people actually speak. Well, they overshot the mark. These characters stammer and repeat themselves, they have terrible diction, and they speak in so fragmented a fashion that I found it difficult sometimes to ponder out their intentions, though that was in significant part the accent and the vernacular. It did get easier to follow the longer I watched, so it’s probably a failing of my being American. Got to admit, though, it seems that the British vernacular contains far more interesting curses than the American does.

Apparently the producers keep the writers of Skins fairly young in an effort to make it more realistic and connect well with the target audience. The problem with that is that if you’re writing for an internationally broadcast television show by the time you’re sixteen, you’re probably not a great barometer of normalcy.

For a show that thinks it’s a comedy, it’s very unfunny. There would be brief, sparkling moments of humor, but they were so brief that by the time I’d thought to laugh, they were gone. The effort typically seems to be a bait-and-switch, where the writers use the levity of the joke to create a stronger contrast and therefore greater effect for a dramatic event. It doesn’t work. Ever.

The characters (and here I’m speaking of the protagonists), are wonderful. They are unique individuals with their own interests. Their interplay and changing dynamic is unfailingly interesting. That said, the acting and direction kept them from being sympathetic until the episode preceding the finale. Prior to that the only character I was invested in was Sid. Cassie held my interest briefly, but the writers used her as a tease and a cheap catalyst, so I lost that interest quickly.

As a whole, the characters (quality and sympathy aside) are disbelief-breaking. They’re all from shockingly dysfunctional families, which seems not only unlikely, but also a cheap way to attempt to drag some actual life out of them. Every time something came up that got me to expect an image of family life that I can sympathize with, the writers and directors took it too far and I was again disappointed.

The acting is great. I know, that sounds like a contradiction, so hold on a bit and I’ll explain myself; the quality of the acting is fantastic, it just doesn’t work. The actors and their personal styles clash with the style of the show, and the dissonance is not just jarring, it’s amateur-ish. The exceptions are, again, Sid and Cassie. Who, I think I can safely say, are wonderful from start to finish.

As for technicals, the only note I took the time to make was on the camera work. “Unfailingly competent.” I mean the structure of the show doesn’t allow for a whole lot of brilliance. They do some interesting tricks, but that’s what they are, and that’s what they look like: tricks. Nothing innovative or fantastic anywhere in sight.

All of that said, there was a meta-break in the show that deserves mention, kudos, and a ticker-tape parade, and that’s director Adam Smith. Remember how I found the first five episodes so distasteful that I decided not to watch too much more? Well, then I watched episode eight. And damn. The writing was still shit, but the direction was fan-fucking-tastic. Suddenly the characters had more depth, the actors performed better, the plot (such as it was) was gripping, and the atmosphere was fantastic. And the only thing that had changed was the director. He directed four episodes, all of them in season one, and they were the best thing about that season. Even before ep8 I had picked his episodes as the better ones, and to have the improvement confirmed (by the ever-trustworthy internet) as the work of a single person was incredibly gratifying.

No matter how good the rest of it is, though, the writing is still awful. There are episodes with legitimate drama and character development that are killed by the dialogue, and moments of dialogue that are rhythmic and witty but are killed by the delivery and context.

The main selling point of the show is the sex, but upon even a cursory glance the sex is a cheap gimmick. It’s filler (so to speak), and the writers keep returning to it in a blatant attempt to keep audience attention, completely disregarding the fact that boobs are endlessly interesting, but boobs on television get old quick.

Kind of like this whole show.

Maybe it got better after the first season, but the first season is all a show has to sell me on, and that certainly wasn’t up to par.

Bottom line: Follow Adam Smith, Mike Bailey, and Hannah Murray. Nothing else about the show is worth more than a mocking quip.

Articles of Quality

Okay, first of all, go read this. Seriously, go. This whole post is centered on that article, it's not that long, so I'll wait.

You done? Good.

I have some basic complaints about this article (aside from the pretentiously proprietary, "Hey that's my thing"). First of all, it's terribly written, with a thesis statement that isn't supported by the body of the article. Secondly, if LOST is the only example of deep, thought-provoking television that the author could come up with, perhaps she's not anything close the the authority she writes like she is. I mean, what about Studio 60? Babylon 5? Soap?

Deeper than that, though:

Sure, there are some astounding clunkers, but television is getting better and better. Writing is more compelling, better actors are becoming attached to televised projects.

What? Tell me, do you watch anything that's actually on, or do you only Netflix dead shows? Writing is not getting better in television. It's exactly the same as in any other medium: Primarily competent but bland with a few sparkling gems that stand out from the mire. And since Aaron Sorkin has departed from television for awhile with no return in sight, JMS is doing Superman (correct me if I'm wrong on that one), Joss Whedon's busy with the Avengers and Cap,  Andrew Marlowe's doing Castle (one of the aforementioned gems), and... no other great TV writers spring to mind.

Which means that we're left with Glee and (shudder) CSI.

What about that "better actors" comment?

Anyone who doesn't know who Richard Mulligan is should be ashamed of themselves. And from the same show, Robert Guillaume. From other great shows: Andreas Katsulos, Peter Jurasik, Alan Tudyk, Ed Wasser, Jewel Staite, Katheryn Helmond, Bradley Whitford, Matthew Perry (I'm forgiving him for Friends), Timothy Busfield, Thomas Gibson, Stana Katic, Emily Proctor (I don't forgive her for CSI: Miami, though), Richard Schiff, Dule Hill, Kathryn Joosten, Paul Gross, Nathan Fillion, Kelsey Grammer, Neil Patrick Harris, John Larroquette, John Lithgow, French Stewart, Robert Carlyle, Michael C. Hall. I'm sure there are more that I missed, but I think my point has been made.

The acting is as good now as it ever has been, the writing is the same. The trick is that most of everything is crap. Sturgeon's Law. It's not that the television is getting better, it's that there's so much more of it that it's easier to find the good stuff.

Television won't just "get better." Sorry, but it won't. As with any other medium, it's only as good as the people in it, and the people who pay attention to it. I can agree that television has been sidelined as an entertainment medium. I can't agree with... anything else in that article.

How will TV get better? Simple. We need to have higher expectations. There should be no "good enough," no "well, it's only a sitcom," no acceptance of the mediocre.

It can be better. But it always starts with the audience, and that, kids, is you.

-Gets off soapbox-

Feeding the Trolls

First of all, to those that care, I did not do well in the video contest. Three contracts were given out, none of them were to me, and I was granted the consolation prize of an Honorable Mention... me and thirteen other videos.

Yeah, I'm disappointed, but no more than I am when a video doesn't do well. I'm also disappointed that I won't be able to redo the video like I'd wanted with more time, and more breathing.

Here's what really upset me, though:

God, I'm so glad this didnt get picked up. Shes trying so hard to be ZP by deliberately nitpicking apart a wildly popular show. YOUR personality seems bland and uninspired. So please, whatever your name is. DO NOT I repeat, DO NOT QUIT YOUR DAY JOB. But you probably suck at that too.

--ToonLink 

Yeah. I got another troll.

I kind of love trolls in that yo-yo-ey way of being simply delighted that they've offered themselves for the stomping, but utterly crushed that they're simple enough to try to get a rise out of me.

Oh well, these days I must take my fun where I can find it.

I'll post my reply to him at the bottom, and you're welcome to check out the thread and see for yourselves, but right now I'm not going to go into the conversation and battle o' wits (such as it was). I'm more interested in the idea of trolling.

I mean, really? What the fuck?

When did basic manners become optional? Why do people go out of their way to malign the characters of people they don't know? I mean, I run my  mouth off on the internet all the time, but I try to stay polite. Even when I'm being mean I'm generally polite.

That basic conversational skill, the ability to say what you mean with manners and a smile, is increasingly rare these days, and I have to say, I miss it. You can say that it's two-faced. You can tell me that "being real" is more important. But we're all secretly delighted when someone puts someone else in their place with grace and charm. How about this exchange:

"It's not as good [a party] as last year."

"Yeah? What'd they have last year?"

"Standards."

 Shindig, Firefly

Bitchy right? But still, we laughed at that line even as we winced at Kaylee's discomfort, sympathizing with that feeling of being out of our depth. And we laughed even harder at the follow-up line, which did the same thing, but not to a protagonist:

"It must have taken a dozen slaves a dozen days to get you into that dress. Though from what your daddy tells me, it takes the space of a schoolboy's wink  to get you out of it."

I mean, burn. And here we mark the line between "nice" and "polite." Neither of those examples were in any way rude. They refer only obliquely to the issues at hand, but at the same time, allow both parties to keep face (if they choose) while drawing that "Don't Fuck With Me," line pretty clearly in the sand.

This is a lost art. It's easy to pick out in media, but how often does it happen in real life? Well, almost never. The art of conversation is pretty far into its decline, and the art of banter has followed in lockstep.

Which means that when people (especially people with the anonymity buffer of the internet) encounter something they don't like, they have only the skills to express their discontent in the most crass and yet banal of terms. In other words, they get mean and rude instead of one or the other.

I really don't know why this started. I could blame any of a dozen things, but any of them would be a cheap shot. I do know why it continues, though: We let it. We allow ourselves to insulate ourselves with that layer of pixels and data, never interacting with the people we speak to. We don't let ourselves view them as people. And if they're not people, they're expendable. They're just a name and an opinion on the other side of the internet, so we don't have to be polite to them.

I'm not going to pass judgment on that idea; I think you know pretty well where my opinions lie on the matter.

I would, however, like to pose a question. You don't have to answer me, but think about it.

Who is it "okay" for you to be rude to? Why?

I was okay with the negative comments. I put up with the comparisons. I waded through the shallowness and mire that is the general public to put something I cared about up for inspection by the unpleasable peanut gallery. Well and good, but now, dude, you've crossed the line. 

You can insult me, you can insult my critiques, fine. When you ascribe to me petty motivations, and a general ineptitude, though, I take some offense. 

As for my day job? I own a gaming store. I balance the professional and the geeky and handle people and companies regularly. I manage hard feelings and embarrassment, the shy, the outcast, and the forlorn. I run a nexus of asocial people at an intrinsically social activity. THAT is what I do with most of my time, and I wouldn't stop for the world. 

I make these videos in my spare time. I make them. I put my heart and my time and my skills into something that I actually care about. I didn't make this video for the contest. I didn't do it for the contract. I did it to express an opinion, to lend some credence to the idea that what is popular is not always good, and that a good concept does not good entertainment make. I did it because television is something that gets sidelined in terms of quality and effort, and I object to that. 

My name is Sharon. I'm the Opinionated Critic.

Tell me, who are you?

Happy watching, ya'll.

More Burn Notice

Sorry not to have anything new for ya'll. Partly it's that my review schedule has been shelved for a month or so, and partly it's that Burn Notice is just so bad that I still have a metric fuck-ton of stuff to talk about. And the topic of the day is... execution.

See, Michael Westen spends a lot of time talking about "When you're a spy," and "When you're a covert operative," and "If you work in the information industry," but he's not really a great spy. In fact, he's a horrid spy. A spy needs to be able to talk to anyone and everyone. Micheal Westen can only talk to the bad guys. In a room with the client or victim, he's invariably cold and distant, and visibly makes the characters uncomfortable. You'd think that a guy who's a jerk on the outside but secretly cares for children and puppies would be more invested in that whole "reassuring people" thing.

Further, Sam Axe, who's introduced as an "Ex-Spy" but later is retconned to "Ex-SeAL," can talk to people. He makes friends with everyone and easily comforts clients and victims alike. He can befriend anyone in minutes to the point of them lending him their stuff. Expensive stuff. Cars, for example. Further, in the three seasons that I watched Sam was the only one who shot anyone. He also did some pretty impressive sniping on a couple of occasions, including dealing a fatal abdomen shot on a guy with 3/4 cover, and one-shotting a surveillance camera from across the four-lane street and two floors up (twice).

(Not quite true. Micheal did shoot that one guy who's name I can't remember. That Agent to the Spies guy. But that was because AttS sold out Micheal's twoo wuv, so I really can't count it. It also wasn't an impressive shot. Fast, yes, but he shot the guy from fifteen feet away with a pistol. Some things should be epic, and the first time the protagonist kills someone directly is one of them. Also, that whole scene was shot and scored and lit like it was something epic, but the writing and the acting made it more melodramatic than moving. Say it with me guys: /epicfail.)

Also, The Girl. Good lord does she irk me. To start out with, she's really not that great looking, but the show treats her like she's a world-class beauty (before you ask, yes I did get the opinion of people who like women on this one. There was some discussion over whether the excessive muscles were scary or hot, but no-one said that she was a beautiful as the show and everyone in it seems to think). Also, for someone who's said to be a slightly psychotic, trigger-happy, gun-dealing, ex IRA guerrilla, she's surprisingly level-headed and tame. Yes, she talks about blowing shit up left and right, but someone with the character we're repeatedly told she has would have gone solo and blown up a bunch more shit than she actually does. Maybe it's the leash her twoo wuv has her on, but she's surprisingly open to reason and logic. Also, as you may have gathered, she doesn't ever shoot anyone. The show makes her out to be this amazing marksman, but she's the one that gets to miss things.

Yes, I know, the voice-over tells us at one point that it takes great skill to miss someone while making it look like you're trying to hit them. But if we've seen her hit anyone before, it's still an informed trait. That's the thing about extreme skill, and it's the reason that trick horse riders generally start out straddling the saddle like anyone else. Starting with the basics actually makes the exceptional more believable. It shows the range of skill that's required to impress the audience.

At one point (during the Great Sam Rescue at the end of season one), Fiona's got a sniper rifle and a great vantage point on Sam's captors and instead of sniping them off, she provides cover fire. With a sniper rifle.

Head? Meet Desk. I know you two will meet often and I hope you will become good friends.

So... yeah. I hope that clarifies some of my gripes on the characters. If not, feel free to ask questions here or send me an email.

Also: "Hell, I never even paid enough attention to the joiners to see all the bikinis, and yet we use that as an example of why the show was "atrocious." Criticizing that just makes you sound girl who is probably jealous of others in a swim suit and finding it borderline offensive." -- Sigma


I said the show was an abomination. I never said it was "atrocious," so you're kind of missing the point of "" there, bud.


And also? LOL.

'Nother Quickie

I'm bout's'ta go pass out for a bit, but here's the review on White Collar.

More when I'm capable of cogent thought.

Dr. Horrible

Got another dislike! I'm not really sure why the hatedom amuses me so much. Perhaps it's because they took the time to hit the dislike, but couldn't be bothered to tell me why they don't like it. Maybe it's because any attention is good attention. Maybe it's because I got an emotional reaction from someone even if that reaction is abhorence. (Oh, right, link. I'm an idiot)

Doesn't matter.

I thoroughly enjoyed this video. I never thought I would say that about a review that didn't show a lick of footage from the item being reviewed, save for still photos and title cards. Joss Wedon is the bane of my existence, along with J.J. Abrams and other auteurs who have one big hit and try to dictate the nature of entertainment with their own sense of pretentiousness. And they smell.

But like I said, I loved this video. ... You really have a lot to say and it's smart. I hope people get to hear it. Keep it up!

--Righteous Brian

Well thank you RB for fully vindicating me. I actually don't hate Joss Whedon, I just think that banter is the only thing he writes well. But he still produces some great stuff (I'm thinking Firefly), so I hold him to a higher standard than I do people I've never heard of. Purely subjective, there, but I'm'a stick to it. And who the Hell is JJ Abrams?


Okay I went and looked him up, and I'm generally not impressed by the filmography... but then that doesn't really mean anything. I don't watch much in the way of movies, and I gave up most television a long time ago as a useless waste of time.


Which then begs the question of why, exactly, I watch television most of my waking hours. But that's a story for another time.


Anyway, spread my videos, send them to your friends; I'm trying to get an intelligent critique of television out there, but I really cannot do it by myself.

Angry Reviews

Getting mad is fun. It's a fact. I'm not entirely sure why it is that people enjoy being angry so much, but we do. And that's part of the fun of being a critic as well. The desire to rail against inferior quality becomes almost a professional right when we can say, "I'm just the critic, you can't be angry at me." There're two problems with that sentiment, though, one of which I will probably never touch on.

The other, though, is what I've been fighting with all day. You see, I sat down to write the script for H:TABAtTE, and I couldn't do it. Oh, I'd pound out a paragraph or two, and then I'd catch myself just ranting about some personal pet peeve of mine. Some of them even made it into the review, albeit heavily edited.

You see, I could write a six page rant on the myriad problems with Heroes, bust out a video and call it a day. I could, but that wouldn't be much of a critique, would it? In order to call myself a critique, I need to be able to point out the good as well as the bad with a show, and usually that's not a problem, but with this one I'd divided it up so that any good I speak on this week will be suspiciously out of place. In order to call myself a critic, I need to make legitimate points with my criticism. And that's really hard.

It's difficult to set aside personal feelings in favor of a review unbiased, and every time I'd catch myself slipping into the tone of voice in which I discuss inferior subjects around the house, I had to stop writing. Like I said, I could write unGodly amounts about how much I hate Heroes, but it wouldn't be a critique. If I want to get nasty emails from fanboys, I'll post on a fansite.

I don't think I succeeded as well as I'd like to've in setting aside my preferences for a show. Next time I need to separate a show into multiple videos, I'll divide it differently. But in the meantime, I've got a script excise the bile from.

PS. Here's a little gem from my housemate: "You have these thoughtful, interesting opinions, and they go on YouTube and get maybe a hundred views. I get a 'Funny Cat Video' and it's got twenty thousand."

I chalk it up to Sturgeon's Law + People Are Pack Animals + Laughing Creates Endorphins = Instant Popularity.

Discuss.

Shameless Self-Promotion

The internal debate entitled "What the Hell am I Going to Put in My First Post" rages on, which isn't terribly surprising, since this blogging idea occurred to me perhaps ten minutes ago for the sole purpose of giving my review series more exposure. Oh, and also for some clarification of points I don't get to explain very well in the video due to time constraints. However, I don't tend to get much feedback, so maybe a format that encourages commenting will help? I dunno, let's see.

-Half an hour of browser flash games later-

So I was cruising the Escapist User Reviews forums today, and I noticed that I seem to be the only person reviewing television shows. I checked the index and there were only a handful of entries for tv shows (that aren't anime) and the most recent of them went up in May. This got me to thinking... why the hell is this such a niche thing? If there's a demand for critiques of other entertainment media, surely there's a demand for tv show critiques, too. Running under the assumption that there is, why don't more people review tv?

I speculated in my first Heroes video that part of the problem is the sheer quantity of stuff to pore through. I still think that's the case, but it does need to be qualified, as video game reviewers generally have fifteen to twenty hours (maybe not "generally" so much as "hopefully") of material to work through and criticize. Television on the other hand... well, if it's an hour long episode, then there's about forty-two minutes of actual show in it. Typical seasons have twenty-four episodes. Which means that a single season is eighteen hours of material that's created over a period of seven or eight months.

That usually (again, "hopefully") means that the show will evolve. Especially in the first season, which is why I always start with the first season of a show, since it's important to be aware of where a show started when you start tearing it apart. It's a great thing when shows evolve; in the first season, shows need to accustom themselves to their tools, so it's necessary that they stay out of strict episode formulas to fully explore the possibilities with their budget, crew, writers and actors. Later seasons, though, should evolve to avoid treading old ground. That's the whole reason that shows with a conflict-of-the-week have over-arcing storylines: without story arcs they get a little stale. And by "a little" I mean "stale enough bounce when thrown down on the counter in frustration because someone finished the peanut butter and put the jar back in the cabinet."

However, that kind of evolution makes a show difficult to summarize into an eight minute video. Premises are easily summarized into a sentence or two, but every statement that I could make about characters or inter-play or subtext (with I generally stay away from because nothing spells doom better than criticizing something so purely subjective as subtext) can be refuted with an example from any number of episodes or scenes that just don't fit the tone of the rest of the show. As happens pretty frequently with shows that have writing teams or cyclic directors. There's never a single person on which to blame a great wrong. Which is probably for the best considering the number of people that would leap to write terrible things in their livejournal.

You know, I think the primary deterrent is the quantity of material to look at when critiquing television. I mean, I watch these shows for ten to twelve hours a day and I can't ever just sit back and enjoy them. Even shows I love must be painstakingly picked apart for flaws that I then must weigh based on egregiousness. I know that it looks like fun, but it actually is work. I was rather surprised, since I'd set myself a schedule of one video a week and now I'm looking at that going "What the fucking hell was I thinking?"

Well, I could ramble in this vein for some time yet but I think I'm'a watch some more Heroes instead. If you watch my videos and have some feedback for me, feel free to comment here, or send me an email at opinionatedtvATyahooDOTcom.

And on Sunday the video for "Heroes, the All Bad, All the Time Edition" goes up on YouTube.