Rather unceremoniously, HBO announced that the dream is still alive. In my mind, HBO’s decision to renew the show for a third season has to mirror what happened two weeks ago when we last tuned into The Newsroom. Someone up top, high in the Manhattan sky at HBO’s midtown headquarters, loves the idea of The Newsroom. So much so that this person will forgo any mistakes the show made because they believe Sorkin and the crew will eventually get it right....
So I had to resort to doing what Office fans throughout the universe do every Friday after the initial broadcast of the show: I headed over to NBC.com and watched the streaming version of the show. You know something? It wasn’t bad. The video quality was good, the sound quality was decent, and the best part is I didn’t have to watch 1000 promos for the upcoming Dreamworks animated picture Bee Movie, starring Jerry Seinfeld and coming to theaters on November 2, 2007....
1.20 A Closer Walk With Thee In a show about the Mikaelsons, despite the missing sister and dead brothers, it was always only a matter of time before the issue of their father would crop up. We’ve already had revealing flashbacks and endless angry conversations about his lingering influence on the family as a unit and as individuals but, after this episode, A Closer Walk With Thee, the threat of being physically present in his children’s lives is once again a reality....
2.14 I Love You, Goodbye And the wedding actually came off with nary a hitch – unheard of in television-land – and I Love You, Goodbye was probably the most shamelessly romantic hour this show has ever produced. At every turn, the audience were expecting things to kick off, rivalries to surface and blood to be spilled, but instead we just got to see Hayley and Jackson get married, with friends and family gathered around....
2.16 Save My Soul Freya is a similarly huge opportunity for the writers to add a fleshed-out, sympathetic Mikaelson to the collection, and this was the episode in which most of the audience probably decided whether they were going to like her or not. We got backstory, one of those exposition-dump dinner scenes The Originals loves so much, and flashbacks to those years Freya has spent under Dahlia’s thumb. But is she as damaged as them, searching for her family and revenge against her captor, or is she simply Dahlia’s trojan horse?...
Every day I plan my escape. I dream of another life, free from the rules and responsibilities I live by. I’m constantly looking for a way out. But I’m scared, too. Scared of losing the cushy life I’ve built around me, the love of my family, the three squares a day. I may hate my humdrum life sometimes, but at least I know what’s coming. Out there in the unknown, terrible things could happen....
And so the mystery of just what happened between Rani and Sarah Jane’s gang continues with the ‘villain’ of the piece, a redhead that goes by the name of Eve, creating havoc in a teenage-angsty kind of way everywhere she goes. The youngster handles the material with great sensitivity and maturity, hitting all the right moments with the appropriate tone. Series 2 did suffer from the loss of Maria Jackson and her family (especially her gorgeously self-obsessed mother) but Rani has firmly placed herself not so much as a replacement for Maria, but as an equal to her....
The Simpsons: Season 29 Episode 11 Only the sharpest razors in the Halloween candy will survive the upcoming holocaust. Nostradamus predicted it’s coming soon and he’s never been wrong once. It should have been here already, the first sign of the apocalypse was when Fleetwood Mac reunited. Now that the anti-Christ is in the White House in The Simpsons season 29, episode 11, is it any wonder “Frink Gets Testy.” The man who controls the present is watching the documentary on the man who saw the future, the Prophet Nostradamus, who saw this episode in the past and wrote sixteen quatrains about it....
Sonic Extreme probably wouldn’t have set the world on fire – the poor old blue blur’s had a patchy few years, bless him – but a new video offers an insight into yet another game that withered on the vine. A racing game involving Back To The Future 2-style hoverboards, Sonic Extreme would have been a riff on the old Mario Kart (or Sonic Drift) template. Taking in familiar locations from the main videogame series – most strikingly Green Hill Zone – Sonic Extreme would have seen the famous hedgehog and his friends compete in a series of downhill races....
The Strain Season 3 Episode 5 This week on The Strain, it’s all about madness as our characters must overcome their own inner demons in order to push back against the strigoi now that the Master has temporarily been removed from the game board. It should be stressed that The Master is gone for now, reduced to a fat red worm hidden in the sewers of Manhattan (here’s hoping no one gets the old evil, primordial red worm of vampiric death up the pooper while they’re sitting on the throne and voiding themselves of a gyro at three in the morning)....
The Venture Bros. Season 7 Episode 6 “Are you fucking kidding me? THAT’S St. Cloud?” Along with time comes a reasonable amount of knowledge and experience. When The Venture Bros. has been on for seven seasons, it stands to reason that the characters within are going to pick up some lessons along the way. “The Bellicose Proxy” is all about putting these seven seasons’ of experience to use and helping out those that are new to the game....
Hold on, we’ll get started in just a sec. I’m trying to wipe all the blood off my TV set. Examples: we learned the truth about Gabriel last week, before he jumped into his long exposition tonight, when he ran away from the zombie church lady in that cellar. In the same way, we had a moment of conflict with Michonne, as she recovered her katana during the big slaughter tonight....
A film that features one young woman asking another “is this your sword” during the opening scene, Thoroughbreds is as dryly aware of its style as the girls themselves are of their posh upbringing in horse country. Their names are Amanda (Olivia Cooke) and Lily (Anya Taylor-Joy), and they’re such complements to each other that it’s hardly surprising they were friends in childhood before growing apart. That is until Amanda’s mother begs (and pays) Lily to reconnect with her wayward pal....
Timeless Season 1, Episode 15 Sometimes the historical time period in Timeless works to the story’s advantage, and sometimes it really doesn’t. Clearly this week’s episode was going for an unusual family relationship with the Capone brothers that would resonate somehow with Lucy’s search for her sister, but it just didn’t line up. Ultimately, the setting was simply a framework to deliver the information about the every-quarter-century meeting of Rittenhouse and place Rufus in danger for a cliffhanger....
I knew it was going to be tough to review the new series of Twin Peaks as if it were any other show. There was a period, in the original series, where it fell into clear rhythms—developing and twisting its various storylines about affairs, criminal activity, and supernatural gubbins—but this was also when the show was at its absolute worst. Its best episodes featured some of that stuff combined with unknowable David Lynch horror and oddness....
Veep Season 6 Episode 9 In Veep season 6, episode 9, “A Woman First,” ex-President Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) has the best day of her political career, and she owes it all to a screw-up by one of her staff, her press guy Mike McClintock (Matt Walsh), who loses the Presidential travel diary and it leaks all over the press. It gets compounded by Selina’s usually reliable-to-the-point-of-frenzy left hand Amy (Anna Chlumsky)....
4.9 Death All Round For instance, Ragnar Lothbrok and his nuclear family have been a very sterilised version of what the stories we have about the Vikings (and we must remember that, for the most part, we have stories about how the Vikings acted, not reports from the Vikings themselves on their actions) depict. The Lothbroks are not given to savagery, at least not without a point (the inflicting of the Blood Eagle on Jarl Borg served a specific purpose as did the emasculation of Einar)....
Voltron Season 7 Episode 10 Bonds. It’s a word that’s come to define this season. At first it was the bonds between the Paladins. They had to solidfy those before they could get to Earth. With that taken care of they can deepen the bonds with their lions. The human/Lion bond has been something the series has been fairly nebulous about. Besides Shiro fighting to bond with the Black Lion against Zarkon it’s all been pretty vague....
After swearing out loud at the sheer audacity at the game and upsetting my neighbours, in my drunken stupor I decided to have a go at the game. Kind of for the same reasons that Mary Whitehouse used to watch offensive telly programmes, to get really wound up. And you know what? It’s a Streets Of Rage rip off with the Watchmen characters in. You control both the Nite-Owl II and the Comedian, taking in 1960’s New York and Vietnam with the relevant character, with the other Watchmen characters popping up throughout the game in cameos of sorts....
Instead, she got What’s Your Number, an achingly-predictable romantic comedy, one the hinges on convolution and only occasionally offers glimpses of what could have been. The setup is pretty straightforward. Faris (who also executive produced the film) plays Ally, a woman who happens to read an article that tells her that 96% of women who have had twenty or more lovers can’t find a husband. A quick bit of fag packet maths later, Ally realises she’s up to nineteen, and makes a vow that she’ll find her husband from the her back catalogue of lovers....
