By James Furbush | October 29th, 2009 | 12:22 pm PDT
I jumped off the putrid 24 train after season 5, when it was quite evident the show was going to live out its days in an absurdly endless loop of Keifer Sutherland running around, doing stuff and preventing things from happening. I don’t think it’s too much to ask to throw in a bathroom or food break just to mix things up.
Anyways, I recognize that some people may still be into the show, so here’s a trailer for the new season. Action moves to NYC, so that should be fun.
By James Furbush | September 29th, 2009 | 6:20 am PDT
The season 8 premiere of Family Guy (”Road To the Multiverse”) sees Stewie and Brian travel all around the multiverse to different animated worlds. The episode was pretty good, if only to see all the different animation styles applied to the show. Besides Disney, Stewie and Brian became a Washington Post political cartoon, were depicted IRL, etc.
By James Furbush | September 25th, 2009 | 1:23 pm PDT
Anyone who stuck around with Dollhouse after the uneven first five or six episodes was rewarded with some classic Joss Whedon storytelling. Luckily for those peeps, FOX was kind enough to bestow a second season on the show — something they don’t normally do for low-rated sci fi.
Season two starts tonight and hopefully it’ll really find it’s sea legs. Based on the adendum episode “Epitaph One” we know the show is eventually going in the direction of a fullblown apocalypse with zombie human wrecking havoc on the world.
That’s where we are headed, but for now Alpha is still running wild, Echo is beginning to remember her life and hold on to her identity, Ballard is now working for the Dollhouse and given the way Joss Whedon tells stories it’s going to make for some juicy tv.
You would think that when Ron Moore, creator of Battlestar Galactica, comes to your network iwith another sci-fi show there would be no problems.
Unless, of course, you take that show to Fox, where they have a history of surrepititiously killing all of their quality sci-fi programming. Moore’s new show, Virtuality has been effectively killed before it was even given a chance. Instead of one season, the show will now be reduced to a single two-hour television event.
• It’s about a crew on a 10-year mission to another solar system.
• The crew is being filmed as part of a reality show.
• The Earth has less than a century left to support life.
• The crew spends most of their time in virtual reality devices.
• Someone (or something) is screwing with those VR systems and producing nightmares.
That might be one of the problems. That unlike his previous show, which was about robots hunting humans through space, this show seems to be packing too much into its universe.
Immediately, I could do without the reality show angle and almost feel as though a show about the 100-year death sentence for Earth would be more compelling to watch.
With only 12 principle cast members aboard the Phaeton ship, it would be impossible for any of those characters to die, which means the suspense from the runaway VR modules is rendered moot.
It’s hard to believe that the creator of FX’s disturbingly morbid Nip/Tuck has created this high school glee club show for FOX. But Ryan Murphy has done so and the show, at least in the pilot episode, is a funny and joyous endeavor.
The easiest way and probably laziest way to describe the show would be it’s a combination of Fame and Freaks & Geeks. In that, it’s about a bunch of high school outcasts, struggling with those commonplace high school problems and social anxieties, figuring out their way in life … through the school’s glee club.
The rest of the season doesn’t air until the fall, but I found myself ready to keep watching at the end of the pilot episode. You develop a certain fondness for the kids, particularly the two leads and certainly for the main teacher, Will, by episode’s conclusion.
The music number, Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’”, seems a bit trite. I think the word is pat, in that it’s too clever for it’s own good; but I guess that’s to be expected. The musical numbers in the show are going to reflect the emotional undercurrent of each episode. And though it might enduce a few eyerolls, for the most part I’m okay with that.
Fox really has faith in this show because each episode is rumored to cost upwards of $3 million dollars. Watch the episode below on Hulu. For those readers outside the states, I’m guessing FOX is going to give away the episode on DVD, if someone hasn’t uploaded it to YouTube yet.
Fox has renewed Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse for a second season. Changes are afloat, i.e. the budget will be considerably less, but this is good news for anyone who loves television that aims to push the boundaries of what is possible.
Maureen Ryan of the Chicago Tribune makes the observation that, “the campaign to renew “Dollhouse” probably wouldn’t have caught fire had Whedon never been allowed to make the weird, unsettling, unexpectedly moving and complex show that he ultimately came up with in the second half of “Dollhouse’s” season. When shows are given time to develop, when they’re allowed to be different, when they’re allowed to be ambitious and strange and challenging — all that can lead to the kind of fan passion that we’re talking about here.”
Fox has renewed Fringe for a full 22-episode second-season. Hopefully, next year they won’t tinker with it — you know not airing episodes for weeks at a time, etc.
“Fringe proved to be a notable addition to our schedule all season and it really has fans buzzing as it builds to a fantastic season finale,” said Fox’s president of entertainment, Kevin Reilly. “J.J. and the whole Bad Robot team have been phenomenal partners, and we look forward to years of making great television with them.”
It’s a solid show, certainly worthy of coming back. It’s nothing special, doesn’t quite feel like appointment television like it should be. Certainly John Noble as Walter Bishop has become one of television’s most fascinating characters.
What I’d like to see happen is they pair this show with Dollhouse and see if Dollhouse gains viewers at all.
Regardless, I’m curious at the direction the show will take. If they would open the plotlines and let it breath some. I know everyone wants to compare this to The X-Files, but the differences between the two shows is startling. It doesn’t help using Boston as a background and having every case take place there, especially if you are going to cut to “Roxbury” or some such city and have it resemble nothing like the actual place.
So, second season. Get a consultant from Boston and give our characters cases across the globe/country. Leave some plot lines dangling. Say what you want about Joss Whedon, but the man knows how to build/payoff a story arc better than anyone working in television right now. Fringe should follow his lead a bit.
Even if you missed the premiere episode of FOX’s new animated comedy Sit Down, Shut Up you can still catch it online before tonight’s second episode.
Created by Mitch Hurwitz, with characters voiced by Will Arnett, Will Forte, Kenan Thompson, Jason Bateman, Henry Winkler and Kristin Chenoweth, just to name a few, the show is fairly funny but seems to be still finding it’s feet. Which is to say it’s got potential – I just wish the character names weren’t so ill thought out.
Tonight, to celebrate the first day of spring, Miracle distributes flowers (at least she thinks so) to the staff. The flowers turn out to be hemlock, and Andrew winds up in a coma. Larry’s pragmatism causes Miracle to lose her hippy-dippy spirituality. As a result, Miracle becomes despondent, and it’s up to Larry to help her regain her faith. Meanwhile, Helen’s grudge against Sue puts the school’s spring fundraiser in jeopardy.
Sit Down, Shut Up airs Sundays at 8:30pm.
Update: Um, thanks FOX for giving me an embedded video to your content that doesn’t work… idiots. Anyway, it was a promising clip. Enough that I’m saying you should check out the show.
If, like me, you missed FOX’s premiere of Sit Down, Shut Up (almost wrote shit down, yikes) last night for one complicated reason or another you can still catch it.
Fox is posting full eps online for the animated comedy that reteams Jason Bateman, Will Arnett and show-creator Mitch Hurwitz; they of Arrested Development godliness.
FOX won’t announce it for another month or so, but Michael Ausiello at EW confirms a rumor first run by FMQ Inc., that little-watched (on actually realtime television anyways) Terminator: The Sarah Connors Chronicles has been canceled.
“It’s done,” maintains a source close to the show. “Everyone has pretty much known for a couple of weeks.” Adds a network insider: “Consider it canceled.”
For shame, too. Though I casually got sucked into Season 1, the show really found it’s footing about five episodes into the second season and grew into one of television’s best shows. It was legitimate appointment television, even if I was watching it on Hulu Saturday mornings.
Regardless, the show ended it’s second season on a very strong note. Last week’s finale was as good as they come – a satisfying what-if ending, that will have fans of the terminator mythology debating and theorizing for a while.
The real question now, however, is what is Summer Glau going to do?
We finally caught up on the last few remaining episodes of Dollhouse last night and while we’re not still hooked on it, it’s a fairly solid show, with an interesting premise. It’s also not a lawyer, cop or doctor procedural so that makes it practically apointment viewing.
Now, FOX just needs to take their hands off and let Joss be Joss. He’s done a good job of establishing the show’s universe and the big bad for Season One – known as Alpha.
And now that Alpha’s “identity” has been spoiled by the show’s set designer Leonard Harman, we’re definitely not giving up because of the actor portraying the first active to go completely screwbluey. MORE »
Joss Whedon says that starting with episode six, his new FOX show Dollhouse, might ascend to the heights of his previous efforts.
In a note to reporters (or “Newsly Types,” as he puts it) accompanying a DVD of “Man on the Street” (airing March 20) and “Needs” (April 3), Whedon says, “These two episodes represent a much stronger vision of what I consider the show to be.”
The show has been a decent enough effort, but not appointment television. My interest began to wain after episode three, not because the show was bad or anything, but because I don’t have time to waste my television hours on a ho-hum show.
Still, Whedon knows how to build a show. He’s laid a solid groundwork of characters, created an interesting universe, layered several mysteries to unravel and set up the season one big bad. Not bad considering I’ve only watched three out of five episodes.
With Battlestar Galactica ending next Friday, I’ll have room to replace that show with another. Will Dollhouse solidify itself in my television lineup? Hard to answer that question, but if Whedon is correct (and I trust him implicitly) then I may have to give his sci fi show another shot.
Says Whedon in his missive, “For me, the question isn’t just whether a show is enjoyable, but whether it’s more than the sum of its fun, whether it truly touches, surprises or connects with you. These [episodes] may do none of the above — I’m not the boss of your opinion — but I feel strongly that they, and the eps to follow, are pretty intense, and very much worth the watching.”
I get the sense that the first six episodes had FOX meddling in them, but since the show lasted beyond that point, hopefully afterwards Whedon’s fingerprints will be much more evident.
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