TV Reviews

Rescue Me: Season 7 Premiere

Written by Sunny Choi Friday, July 15, 2011, 10:55 AM

I’m going to be brutally honest. I’ve been relatively sheltered all my life. My friend last year created small avatars to represent each of her friends, and she labeled me as most innocent, with starry eyes and a perfectly circular mouth. I’m the type of person who prefers to play Clue with my friends instead of partying and watch Toy Story 3 instead of Saw VIII (or whichever one was most recently released). So you can imagine my surprise when I was assigned to review the final season’s premiere of Rescue Me, a series fraught with family deaths, alcoholism, pregnancies, and violence. I am more familiar with TV shows like Boys Over Flowers, where teens express angst over their troubled love lives, and life is hard, but not that hard (I concede that BOF is not the most culturally valuable material). So, please forgive me I’m not objectively partial.

Read more: Rescue Me: Season 7 Premiere

Alphas: Series Premiere

Written by Pam Glazier Wednesday, July 13, 2011, 7:13 AM

Television is glutted with shows about justice. Lawyers, Cops, Judges, Private Detectives, Black Ops teams, variously acronymed agents (i.e., CSI, NCIS, FBI, etc.), and even super heroes have each had at least one show dedicated specifically to them. This has been going on since before television existed. (Just last week I saw a silent short film featuring Sherlock Holmes). In any case, the justice-based drama has evolved into a specific animal. It’s slick. The locations, the gadgets, the lawyers/cops/judges/etc., their dialogue—all of it is slick. Unless of course, as in the show Numb3rs, they are intentionally unslick in order to appear even slicker than slick. Alphas has entered into the televised miasma of justice with an interesting take on the genre.

Read more: Alphas: Series Premiere

Warehouse 13: Season 3 Premiere

Written by Pam Glazier Tuesday, July 12, 2011, 6:58 PM

Warehouse 13, if you haven’t heard of it, is one part Antiques Roadshow, one part Indiana Jones, and one part Mission Impossible with a splash of Moonlighting (Oh yeah, that’s right, I went there. I just referenced Moonlighting. Bam! How you like me now?). Anyway, this show follows the agents that recover dangerous artifacts that have somehow or other become imbued with supernatural powers. Gandhi’s sandals, Abe Lincoln’s Hat, Hendrix’s Guitar—these are just a few of the things that wreak havoc on unsuspecting citizens.

Read more: Warehouse 13: Season 3 Premiere

Eureka: Season 4 Premiere

Written by Pam Glazier Tuesday, July 12, 2011, 6:51 AM

Season after season Sheriff Jack Carter (Colin Ferguson) gets his heart trampled on by the capricious and lovely Alison Blake (Salli Richardson-Whitfield). We were happy when they were married with children in that alternate universe. And even though Carter finally got what he had wanted for so long—married bliss with Alison—we understood that he had to sacrifice it all in order to save the multi-verse from the rift that would destroy all the universes (including the one he was pleasantly residing in). But that doesn’t explain why Alison gets to play him so hot and cold in every other scenario they are involved in. He’s constantly the stand-up guy, ready to “be there” when she needs him and he will always “do the right thing” while she just constantly walks all over him while being so damn moody about it (which makes things infinitely worse… the moodiness… it’s no good). When I was a child I used to root for Tom in the Tom and Jerry cartoons because Jerry was always such an abusive jerk. Half the time Tom deserved what he got, but Jerry still overstepped the acceptable boundaries of retribution. In applying this analogy to Eureka, one sees how awful it really is for Sheriff Carter. He’s somehow inherited the karma of Oppenheimer.

Read more: Eureka: Season 4 Premiere

Wilfred: Fear

Written by Matt Meier Monday, July 11, 2011, 1:35 PM

Season 1, Episode 3

"Fear has its use but cowardice has none."  – Mahatma Gandhi

When last week’s episode of Wilfred fell slightly short of the same extraordinary wit and insight that characterized the series premiere, I gave the show the benefit of the doubt: it may not have been as thematically or intellectually compelling, but the episode offered its fair share of laughs nonetheless.  This week, however, it appears that Wilfred has lost sight of its more truly compelling elements, and alas, I sense my initial enthusiasm gradually starting to wane.

Read more: Wilfred: Fear