What Are You Watching

The Stand it doesn't hold up. Gary Sinise nailed it, but he was one of the few. You appreciate how far Rob Lowe came after seeing this in comparison to Parks & Rec.

Parker Lewis wasn't up to the task of playing Harold Lauder and seeing him pine over Molly Ringwald made me wish they had cast John Cryer instead.

Has anyone seen Drunk History on Comedy Central? I caught two episodes, one about sports heroes and another about the First Ladies. There was another one that I saw half of but I can't remember what it was about. It's a pretty funny show. For some reason the commercials turned me off but the show is pretty good. Do these people really get that drunk or are they faking it?

TiffanyNichelle wrote:Do these people really get that drunk or are they faking it?

Yes. There have been several episodes where the Derek Waters is talking to the story teller as they puke their guts out.

I LOVE Drunk History, and one of the reasons I'm confident the people are really drunk is that most actors are not great at faking that. There's no way that over the course of the web series and now TV series, they found the 40 people capable of convincingly playing drunk!

I've been watching nothing but Teen Wolf since Sunday. I had it in my Amazon Prime queue for a while but made it a priority after seeing Dylan O'Brien's cute and charming self at Nerd HQ at SDCC. Now I am obsessed. They're all so damn likable! And there's so much pretty! It's hella entertaining and surprisingly funny.

Yes, I am seriously 40+ and the majority of my summer tv has consisted of ABC Family and MTV programming. There is no shame.

I LOVE Drunk History, and one of the reasons I'm confident the people are really drunk is that most actors are not great at faking that. There's no way that over the course of the web series and now TV series, they found the 40 people capable of convincingly playing drunk!

One of the things I love is the actors that Derek gets to do the reenactments. I mean they are all great and there are the usual suspects you would expect but than your like "wait, that's John Lithgow!"

I just binge-watched The Fall on Netflix and it is gooooood. Gillian Anderson is perfection and Jamie Dornan is hot but unfortunately uber-creepy and a sociopath (not a spoiler).

I didn't realize the second season wasn't available yet, so I'm totally bummed I have to wait an unknown amount of time before I can continue with it.

Anyone else watching Satisfaction? I really like the leads, but I find the pilot so ridiculous because Neil catches Grace having sex with another man and somehow doesn't freak the fuck out and confront her right then and there. It just seems so improbable and unnatural to me that he wouldn't explode with anger and scream "WTF are you doing!" I know it leads to the premise of him becoming an escort, but it's so stupid. That said, I do enjoy the exploration of love and marriage and finding parts of oneself that had been buried or gone unexpressed for so long.

I watched "Forever" last night. About a guy who wakes up in the nearest body of water every time he dies, (he's currently in New York, so it's the Hudson River now) and has done for the last 200 years.

I have a weakness for the Immortal genre (loved Highlander, and I was one of the six people who watched New Amsterdam). I thought it was pretty good and will watch the 2nd episode which airs tonight. It looks like it'll also be a police procedural, as he's an ME, and is teaming up with a police woman.

I watched it too. I have a Ioan Gruffudd situation. And kind of an Alana de la Garza situation. The show was kind of silly, and reminded me of another shitty-immortal-solving-crimes-in-New-York show called New Amsterdam, which I just now remembered starred Jaime Lannister before he was Jaime Lannister. Anyhoo, I will watch and enjoy this show until its inevitable cancellation six episodes from now.

Long Island Medium is crack. That is all.

Watched the pilot for Red Band Society and I genuinely liked some aspects of it: cool shot compositions, fast pace, zippiness to the dialogue, that sort of thing. Octavia Spencer was great, and I thought the final shots of Jordi running for the last time before the surgery to remove part of his leg were really poignant and affecting. Sure, there were parts that were trying way too hard but overall, not bad. However, the thing that really bugged me was why in the world TPTB bothered with the whole hospital setting for the whole thing when it was so clearly being ignored by the story and nearly everyone in it. Cashing in on "The Fault in Our Stars?"/terminally ill teen trend that's going around? Maybe.

I mean, I don't expect realism from any genre show and I'm more than willing to suspend disbelief to a very great degree and still enjoy the hell out of something (helloooo Sleepy Hollow!) but I had problems with that here. None of the kids look even remotely ill, the hospital comes across like a luxury hotel (complete with the eccentric wealthy person living there), and the fact that the patients seemed to have complete free reign with respect to where they went and what they did (Hey, rooftop party tonight, woo!). It was just, "Dudes, if you wanted to turn The Breakfast Club into a tv series then that's what you should have done."

I think you have to give a nod to at least a few genre conventions in order to give some foundation to whatever wacky story you're telling within it: if you're at a damned hospital then maybe make the effort to have some of the patients look like they should be there, especially since a few appear to be long-term residents. Or spin out the story of the one kid who just showed up on his own from Mexico and after five minutes was able to get a leading cancer surgeon to agree to operate on his leg, seemingly the next day. I mean, what? Again, I'm happy to suspend disbelief but come on, you gotta make an effort to meet me halfway here.

Give me some context for all of this, some kind of reason and I'll go along with it. But the quirkiness of the rest of it wasn't enough to balance out the logistics of the setting. It's like saying you're writing a book on vampires, but the vampires won't bite people, they'll be able to walk around in daylight, and they don't need to drink blood to survive. But it's about vampires! No, no it isn't. You have to do more work than that to convince me of your world-building ideas, and the same principle applies here. I'll stick around for a few episodes to see where it goes (and again, Octavia is great) but yeah, mostly this one's a bit of a head-scratcher.

Person of Interest is back. Whoo! And everything is awful because the Samaritan AI system is up and running and is not as benevolent as the Machine is/was, so Reese and Finch and Shaw have gotten new identities and are supposed to stay under the radar. But of course, nothing ever goes according to plan.

I love this show. I love how it's changed from a crime of the week to this overreaching arc of two super-powerful computers, one good & one bad, using human agents to further their respective causes.

I'm currently marathoning The Blacklist with James Spader. A friend of mine likes it but it took my seeing the commercials on BBCAmerica that convinced me to watch it. I love watching James Spader chewing the scenery. And by marathoning, I mean watching an episode or two every evening. Though I totally love binge watching. Binge watchers are my people.

I just binge watched The Blacklist too! Got caught up in time for the premier and now it's freaking painful having to wait week to week for new episodes. Spader is so much fun in that show.

So, it hasn't officially started airing yet, but Virgin America was playing the full pilot of Jane the Virgin and I loved it. It was like Gilmore Girls meets Ugly Betty meets...Arrested Development? Not quite that absurd, but the omniscient narrator mixed with the telenovela vibe... I thought the concept sounded so silly - religious Latina who has vowed to stay chaste til marriage gets accidentally inseminated - but it works so much better than that! Gina Rodriguez is so so winsome, she really sells a plot that wouldn't work otherwise, and the rest of the supporting cast seems strong. It's a very sure-footed pilot, and I hope it continues to be good!

I haven't seen that yet, but I did see Gina Rodriguez in the otherwise unremarkable Go For It!, and she just owns whenever she's on screen in that movie.

How to Get Away With Murder, which was Legally Blonde meets Pretty Little Liars, ridiculously over the top and unrealistic and a lot of fun. Viola Davis was mesmerizing and the most naive law student of the group is played by Alfred Enoch aka Dean Thomas, so I like imagining the character experiencing the massive culture shock of life after Hogwarts. Annalise Keating would make a great DADA professor.

So I'm watching Gilmore Girls on Netflix, and it's really freaking me out that if they made this show today, Alexis Bledel would play the mom.  If I didn't know better, I would swear this show just went off the air a year or two ago, not seven.

I am surprisingly saddened by this.

I like John Mulaney and his stand-up but wow was Mulaney the show bad. So very very bad.

Yeah I heard. Critics have also seen five or six episodes and say it doesn't improve.

I'm mostly bummed for Nasim Pedrad, she should be the one with her own sitcom anyway.

The commercials made it look terrible, weirdly hokey like a 1950s version of Seinfeld, but I was hoping John Mulany would be able to elevate it. That's too bad that he can't.