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| Credit: Fox |
Such a shame that I was not able to blog anything after all the blog-worthy news in the past months. These are what happened since the last time I blogged:
1) FIFA World Cup. Yes, I followed it and even rooted for a team. Heck, I even lost valuable sleep watching those matches. If that wasn’t enough, I won our bracket. Lastly, the champions were a #WhyNotUs team
2) FIBA World Cup. Oh those memorable Gilas games. All of their games (except the Greece game) were reaction-worthy
3) LeBron returning to Cleveland. ‘Nuff said.
4) Mad Men. Because I am a fantard of that show. And with good reason.
5) San Antonio defeating Miami in the NBA Finals. #WhyNotUs Alert
6) Breaking Bad dominated the Emmy’s
7) The Viper and the Mountain duel happened. And broke the hearts of millions of people.
8) The Fappening
9) The Fappening Part 2
10) #GirlWithTheFlag
11) The first three weeks of the NFL season (blogging about my NFL picks would have been an extremely easy task)
12) Eraserheads released two new singles. And up to now, I still don’t have a copy of that magazine.
13) I am Groot.
14) Captain America 2 topped the first Captain America. Heck, I dedicated a blog writeup for the first movie and I did not even bother to write for the second one?
15) Pinoy Big Brother Season. Yes, I watched it. Kinda unexpected but I did.
16) San Mig Coffee Mixers won a grand slam. #WhyNotUs Alert (on a grand slam perspective)
17) UP Fighting Maroons finally won a Men’s Basketball UAAP game.
18) Gilas losing badly in the Asian Games
19) The ‘Never Say Die’ Ateneo Blue Eagles got the UAAP No. 1 Seed a year after they got eliminated.
20) The Fappening Part 3? Oh you know I wouldn’t be writing about it but maybe it’s good material for the ‘Eight Random Thoughts’ blog format that I use.
But because we live in the Twitter Age, I found it so convenient and quick to post my thoughts on current events via my Twitter feed. It’s instant, short and sweet. Plus, I have a larger audience.
Then, why don’t I just scrap blog writing?
Some things are meant to be written longer. You need to build up your statements to drive a point. Or if you want to illustrate a perspective or storyline, it sometimes needs to “breathe.”
I love to write. Or at least, express myself in some sort of way. Thus, I am ending my blogging hiatus and will try to write as often as I once did. I hope this is a good start.
Last week, a bunch of new TV shows were released. We know last year’s batch was very successful but following up from that seems like a tough task – at least, for the network shows. At first, I was not even keen to watch the pilots. After all, if I wanted to start watching anything, shouldn’t I just focus on the critically acclaimed cable shows? Life is too short for me to spend my time watching mediocre shows. (Says the guy who spent a lot of time watching nothingness happen in Pinoy Big Brother)
Some time last week, I was reading Grantland when I found out that “Lost” is celebrating its 10-year anniversary. I was flabbergasted. It has been ten freaking years since it started. It was probably the TV show that got me into this addiction. More importantly, it was one of the best network shows I have ever watched (it is 2nd best in my books since we are counting “Friday Night Lights” as a network show). That led me to think, why not try and find hidden gems on network shows this year? Who knows?
I sampled five new shows. I did not have any business watching some of them, but I still tried nevertheless. Without further ado, here they are:
Gotham (Fox)
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| Credit: Fox |
Sorry, I could not resist it. I literally sang “California, here we come!” when I saw Ryan Atwood, er, Ben McKenzie in my TV screen as this show’s James Gordon. If you know me well, that’s how corny I become when I see certain references.
It was pleasant to see Ben kicking some ass again with that signature look in his face. He does the role of James Gordon quite well too with his ‘all business’ manner way of handling things.
I have to admit that I was skeptical of “Gotham.” I love superhero stories. Ask me what my favorite blockbuster movies are and I’ll probably name some superhero flick in my Top 10. But when it comes to TV series, it is actually tough to pull off. The closest to successful for me would have to be “Heroes” and I even had a distaste to that show in its final stretch. Last year, we had Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD. I watched it for the first six episodes then gave up on it despite the fact that Skye was hot. Superhero shows are tricky because you need to have a story that would keep the audience captivated without over-relying on action scenes all the time. There is also a risk of it getting dumbed down for the sake of ratings. Because of these, I almost did not bother to watch “Gotham.”
If there was one superhero who was successful in making me watch superhero TV shows, it was actually Batman. I grew up watching the very old “Batman” live action TV series (the one with the action scene captions: “Pow!” “Thwack!” “Zap!” “KAPOW!”) and the Batman animated series. However, “Gotham” is not the same as those Batman series. It is more similar to “Smallville.” And, I did not watch “Smallville.”
To shorten the story, I still ended up watching “Gotham” because, what the heck, we have to try something different sometimes! It was a depiction of Gotham city before Bruce Wayne becomes Batman. It was more a story about James Gordon’s ascension to the top of the police department and how he handled Gotham’s criminals. The pilot featured him finding out who killed the Waynes. It was more a crime story than a superhero plot. Regardless, I actually liked how they pulled it off. I always liked storylines where people of power try their best to create perceptions that everything is alright to the common person. It is so realistic as we live in a world with morals on shades of gray. This was why I loved “The Dark Knight.” It was about the dilemma of taking the lesser evil or upholding one’s morals in the attempt of the Gotham police to prevent people from succumbing to further chaos. I think the series will have a better upside this way. I absolutely like it this way over having the same old superhero schtick.
“Gotham” was well produced as most blockbuster-type of TV series are. The Gotham setting gives you the perfect Dark Knight mood. Another plus the show has is that, it has the potential on providing deep backstories for the Gotham villains like The Riddler, Catwoman, Penguin and Poison Ivy. The audience will be able to understand how they ended up having twisted minds. It is pretty much similar as to how “Lost” portrayed how certain characters behave or act in such unconventional or unruly ways.
I do not see a lot of negatives for “Gotham.” Maybe if I had it my own way, I would have lessened the number of villains at the start (I’ll probably just have Penguin and Catwoman with the focus mostly on Penguin). It would have been better to build on the characters first because if they want this show for the long haul, we want the characters to grow. I would have preferred they show the society more (or how the people react to news) because the show will revolve a lot on that. Regardless, focusing on the internal moral conflicts (which the show did) is sufficient for now.
Potentially, this could be a hit or miss. Like what the Hitfix guys stated in the Firewall and Iceberg podcast, it is to the show’s detriment that they have shown a lot of indispensable villains like Penguin, Poision Ivy, Catwoman and Riddler as early as now. I see the point why the showrunners went to that direction though as this is the pilot episode.
Pilot Rating: B
Potential: B (can possibly be an A but I’ll err to the conservative side because there are lots of potential ways to screw this show up)
Red Band Society (Fox)
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| Credit: Fox |
“Red Band Society” is “Breakfast Club” meets “Scrubs” meets “Glee.” It is about kids in life-threatening conditions in a hospital. A kid in coma does a voiceover (is voiceover a thing for hospital shows?). There is a cheerleader, nerd and a jock in the group. Unfortunately, the coma kid isn’t Anthony Michael Hall. I love “Breakfast Club” and I like hospital shows (Grey’s Anatomy, Scrubs, House). However, this show felt more like Glee with a little less hope sprinkled in it. Sure, there were heartwarming moments like that last dance for the kid who was going to have his leg removed the next day. We also had that luck quote I posted above. I just did not like that we are stuck with a stereotypical cheerleader bitch. There were also a lot of moments that could have worked much better but just fell short because the actors were not able to deliver them.
In theory, this show should be good. There are several ways in making the characters grow despite the nothingness they experience while staying in the hospital (not completely true since they also study. Either way, they are stuck in there). There is potential for a lot of tearjerker episodes as the characters are in possible terminal conditions. I do not know if I will try more episodes, but I have to say there is potential here because the concept is interesting.
Pilot Rating: C-
Potential: C
Scorpion (CBS)
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| Retro look of the year | Credit: CBS |
The Good: Katharine McPhee (McPheever!). The Bad: Katharine McPhee (I can’t believe I watched the first few episodes of “Smash” back then).
Probability of me liking the show: 45%
“Scorpion” is about a bunch of geeks who were tapped by the Fed to do a secret mission to fix the computer upgrade bug of the LAX Airport. The bug was enough to eff up all the airport computers that there is a huge risk of airplane collisions occurring. The show is “Big Bang Theory” meets some action TV series. Led by Walter O’Brien, the team was able to fix the problem despite all odds (as their human calculator Sylvester quipped, they just had 1% chance of fixing the problem). The show is about insane nerd talk as they discuss in probabilities, efficiency and well-calculated moves. It is quite funny at moments but it does not seem organic as well. For instance, Walter is supposedly of low EQ (and he does have low EQ moments) but there were several times when he does show he has some sort of decent EQ due to his social observations and the emotions that he evoked. Something is just not consistent in his character for me to believe he is a guy who has an insane IQ and minimal EQ.
+/- number of episodes it takes for Walter to kiss Katharine McPhee’s character: 8.5
This show has potential because smartass minds fixing the world is a whole lot more viable (and cool). However, I had several concerns in the pilot. Since this show is about geekery, I am going on Geek Mode to analyze this. The main issue was about the bug caused by an automatic upgrade in the airport software. I know most people are aware of automatic upgrades these days but to have such in a very important business like aircraft, man, their airport IT’s got some dumb system. I am not going to explain this in IT terms, but there is a reason why websites go into server maintenance - they plan their upgrades.
Also:
1) The IT people could’ve tested for such bugs before they deployed it to their software. This is one of the largest airports in America we are talking about!
2) Upgrades have a backout plan. You do not deploy something without the option of reverting it back. No matter how sure you are.
3) Their IT’s backup plan/data restoration strategy has got to be the worst.
a. Just one backup and it’s gonna be overwritten in the next twelve hours? Come on. Our CCTV has a better backup strategy than that. Backups are frequent and they do not get overwritten that quickly.
b. Should they eff up the data from the data center, they could get a relatively older backup and should roll-forward from there (a way of restoring data to a certain point in time where the computers redo data to reach to that point).
Probability of me liking the show: 10%
Aside from which, I did not find the driving scene to the airport believable. He could fix the stoplight thing (and that was cool) but isn't the traffic near/inside the airport brutal too? (Especially given the fact that a lot of cars could've clogged the airport as zero planes have landed in the last few hours.)
Odds that you are annoyed by my snide comments: two-to-one
Sorry for being snarky. I actually have further believability issues with the series but I’ll stop here. This seems like the case of a TV show being less believable if it is about your profession. It’s like doctors hating hospital shows. Lawyers being unimpressed on law series.
Wait. I forgot to mention Federal Agent Cabe Gallo’s flashback scene. Man, that was some funky retro look there in the flashback. Has to rank in one of the funniest attempts for flashback.
Possible number of people who had the same sentiment: 104,377.
But if we will stop looking at this show in the serious side, it is actually entertaining. For what it’s worth, “Scorpion” makes a good “Sharknado” trolling impression. At least, they are not trying hard to appear blatant. Remember when no one bothered to pay the bills at the start? I guessed they missed calculating the probability that it might be more inefficient. The series can be funny that way and I mean that as a compliment.
Probability of me liking the show: 50%
All in all, it’s a good popcorn TV show. Let’s not get too serious when watching it. How many shows can you see a dude struggling to write in the chalkboard because he is too fixated arranging the chalk colors rather than picking one and using it?
Probability of me… oh, cut the crap!
Pilot Rating: C
Potential: C+
Transparent (Amazon)
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| Every family needs a clean and orderly person | Credit: Amazon |
The pilot circled around the family and it featured some good character build-up as the scenes change from one person to another but something about them gets revealed despite minimal dialogue. The pilot was more on the family dynamic more than the transgender concern (although of course it will eventually be tackled). I liked the slow and steady pace of the show. Great camera work and transition were also present especially on how they handle the scene changes when songs get played in the background. And the acting? Great. Dude has to play the role of a conservative father and a transgender and has to do a lot of role switching. Surprisingly, this TV series was really good.
One good scene in the pilot was their family dinner. It was great to see how similar and unique they are at the same time. I believe the same goes with any family in this world. You have the O.C. sibling who cleans up the messy stains on her brother and sister’s clothes even if they did not care. You have the happy-go-lucky guy who is satisfied on his unemployed life as he gets to have all the sex he wants with a blonde chick. And you have the depressed lady who is searching for the guy of her dreams.
Less is more as evidenced in the show. There were scenes where they did not feature any dialogue. However, the body actions of the actors/actresses reveal something about their character (i.e., Ali Pfefferman getting naked in front of the mirror analyzing how out of shape/not confident on her body she is).
I am not sure if I want to watch everything but I will surely give it a try. All the episodes are available so it is not a problem to binge-watch this.
Pilot Rating: B+
Potential: B. Not sure how they are going to do a follow-up on this after they have fixed the boundary issues.
Black-ish (ABC)
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| Credit: ABC |
Black-ish is a very promising TV show. It is hilarious because of the ironies in black culture. It may not be in the “Modern Family” pilot level, but “Black-ish” is very good in portraying family dynamics in a black household.
Pilot Rating: B
Potential: B
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