2012 Primies: Best moments

By on Jan 21, 2013 in The Primies |

Continuing in on honoring the Year That Was on the small screen, here are the moments that only furthered my television-above-all prejudice. And yes, there are eleven, not ten. I make no apologies! WARNING: MASSIVE SPOILERS AHEAD! You may just want to look at the show names in the parentheses for each listing before anything else, just in case you were wanting to keep yourself pure. You’ve been warned! Breaking Bad’s entire fifth season so far. I realized I just couldn’t narrow it down: neophyte Todd shooting the kid who witnesses the gang’s heist, Skylar telling Walt that she’s waiting and hoping for his cancer to come back, Walt fatally shooting Mike and then staying with him as he dies, Hank finding Gale’s book and realizing that Walt and Heisenberg are one and the same. And that was the first half of the season. See you at the 2013 Primies, Breaking Bad. Deb...

TVs improbable seventh-inning stretches

By on Oct 13, 2012 in Raves |

Seven seasons is an awfully long run for any TV drama, particularly a serialized one. Procedural shows like CSI and Law & Order shows have the privilege of a different storyline every episode, and even semi-procedural shows like Fringe aren’t required to serve an overarching narrative with every episode. The TV graveyard is littered with the corpses of series that exhausted their creativity before their episode order. One recent example of such a show on the comedy front is The Office: the producers and NBC announced that Season 9 would be the final season, but that decision came after we slogged through disappointing Seasons 6, 7, and 8. Some showrunners do the dignified thing and set a definite and unyielding end date for their series, like the masterminds behind Lost, Battlestar Galactica, Breaking Bad, and even the British Office. I can’t speak highly enough of this practice:...

2012 Emmys: And the nominees are…

By on Jul 27, 2012 in Tinseltown |

This year’s Emmy nominees were announced as I was basking in the sun in Playa del Carmen, Mexico (shameless gloating, I admit), but you better believe I still checked out the list as soon as I could. Here are my thoughts on this year’s selections. Once again, HBO reigns supreme with an astonishing 81 nominations across the board. Just like HBO’s old motto touts, it’s not TV; nay, I’d argue that it’s super-TV. Camera operator Hector Ramirez and producer Sheila Nevins have earned the most lifetime Emmy nominations as of this year with 68 and 59 noms, respectively. If Mad Men wins for Outstanding Drama Series this year, it will have won that award five times—surpassing Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law, and The West Wing for the record. Modern Family is the most-nominated comedy this year with 14 noms, Mad Men is the most-nominated drama with 17, American...

The Prime Times: Shelly the Nymphomaniac Edition

By on Apr 30, 2012 in In Brief |

A hot, steaming cup of TV news, ready for you to guzzle: Anderson Cooper has had another one of his famous giggling fits on air, and it’s so unflattering but so adorable. Yes, I call Anderson adorable. Okay? Totes adorbs. Patrick Dempsey channelled his Grey’s Anatomy character’s heroism recently by pulling a Malibu teen from his flipped Mustang, waiting with him until the paramedics arrived, and even calling the teen’s mother to update her on her son’s condition. I’m loving Big Love right now, and I’m especially loving three leading ladies: Jeannie Tripplehorn, Chloë Sevigny, and Ginnifer Goodwin. So it thrills me to no end that Sevigny (who’s name I just had to Google to pronounce) will be a star of the next season of American Horror Story, playing a character named “Shelly the Nymphomaniac” who faces off with Jessica...

The Prime Times: Figure It Out Edition

By on Mar 9, 2012 in In Brief |

Here’s all the TV news you need to know (read: a dozen news items you don’t need to know but are fun anyway). A Baltimore man was arrested on a handgun charge recently, and he happens to share the same name as a notorious character on The Wire: Omar Little, Jr. FOX chose not to renew Terra Nova for a second season, but word on the street is that Netflix is interested in picking it up. Keri Russell has joined the FX pilot “The Americans,” as a KGB spy living with an arranged husband in Washington D.C. during the 1980s. Nickelodeon is bringing back 1990s game show Figure It Out, in which a panel of celebrities have to parse out the layperson-guest’s unique talent. Sigourney Weaver is set to play a divorced-First-Lady-turned-Secretary-of-State in a new series on USA entitled Political Animals. A&E is developing a series called Bates Motel, which provides...