Thursday, June 4, 2015

2014-2015 TV Wrap Up

Subliminal advertising, go about your business
#RenewForever
#SaveForever
The petition

All the seasons have ended, some quite a while ago, but now that the laggers have caught up, let’s take a look at a year that found me following far more shows than my gnat like attention span usually allows.

To begin with, the unchanging:

Doctor Who Season “8” (Or Season 34 for us old Whovians): 

Well, that was a weird one.


Love the new Doctor, enjoying Clara existing out of the “not Amy and Rory” shadow, lots of cool new and old enemies, but still- weird.

I have to wonder when those Christmas face crabs first showed up.

Hatching moons? Space Trains?  Magic trees? Robin Hood? Kid Doctor? Missy?

How much of this season was a dream?
And considering that they had no head wounds after the final wake up, how much longer will it go on?


Dancing with the Stars /


Face Off

I have to group these together, due to residual guilt of enjoying reality shows.

However, both sets of each show continued to document individuals who seem to develop stronger bonds of friendship between them than competitive feelings of animosity.

They also both keep thinking of clever reasons to bring back past popular contestants, and add new twists to liven up the games.

Plus, I’m a big fan of learning the ins and outs of any creative process to produce (admittedly very different) styles of art.

Not to mention it’s satisfying to see talentless know-it-alls (Face Off) or celebrities caught up in their own image (Dancing) get the boot in the early weeks.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. /
Agent Carter

If the Marvel Movies are like the “Summer Event” comics, these shows function as the monthly floppies, giving us ongoing peeks into the vast and nutty universe they’ve created.

Thrilled to see Agent Carter coming back, both as the father of a girl, and an old comics fan with a soft spot for the Golden Age.  Great to see the foundations of the crazyness get built.

The Inhumans have always been a favorite group of mine, and they’re filling in the “mutant” role in this Marvel Universe quite well. Now that Gordon’s gone, they’ll need a new teleporter.

BRING ON LOCKJAW!

I love the fact that the deeper down the hole we go, the more of a total villain Ward turns out to be.  Fake outs like this happen in comic books ALL THE TIME, and it’s been highly entertaining for me, not only watching the show, but watching fans of the show try to cling to smaller and smaller straws of evidence that he’s really a good guy.

Sometimes the cute guy really is evil.

You get the feeling that the writers of this show are geeky comic fans like us?

Daredevil
Daredevil, the same type of peek but into a darker side of that Marvel world, was equally awesome, but I’ve already talked about it enough already.  The ending held up to that level of awesomeness excessively well.

Unlike…

Gotham
Oh Gotham…

You make me so sad.

I had desperately low expectations, and you raised them up by doing all kinds of cool unusual things, creating interesting takes on a mass of characters, and weaving multiple cool threads in your dark little world.

But you just couldn’t stop.

The interesting threads dried up, more and more convoluted ones surfaced, and nearly all characters became blade wielding psychopaths.

Plus every single important moment in the final few episodes happened because someone accidentally showed up at exactly the right moment.  Any arrival a couple seconds sooner or later, out of way too many of them, and everyone’s dead.

Yes, I do realize there were a couple moments like that in the shows above and below, but
SHIELD had a precognitive dreamer to orchestrate them and
The Flash had a time traveler.

If you’re going to cheese out, at least build a cheese machine into the narrative.

Frankly, only the unbroken awesome of Sean Pertwee and Donal Logue is getting me to check out next seasons premier, but if it doesn’t do something, “Holy Bat-Amazing!” I’m out.

The Flash

YAY! 

Someone at Warner Brother’s live action woke up and realized they had been ignoring the untapped potential of entertaining insanity that the source comics have.

The animation guys never had that problem.

Sure the show had drama and tragedy, but it also had rampant powers, cool names, inside jokes about DC history, time travel, alternate universes and a talking giant psychic gorilla.

For a speedster based show, it also fell back on , "The main character forgets his powers so he doesn't end the episode too quickly," on very few occasions.

Bring on season two and the Legends of the Tomorrow.

Rory as Rip Hunter…Perfect.

The only downer being now that Amy is the daughter of Thanos, an impenetrable corporate barrier separates their universes…poop.

Hopefully the TV crazy awesomeness will spread to help out the dour looking future DC Cinematic universe.

Forever

We finally get an intelligent, well written, entertaining show with engaging characters and a clever way to use some of hour long drama’s oldest ideas in new and fresh ways.

Each of the stand alone stories had a couple of unique items in it.
I.e. The bad guy (girl) gets away with it.
Or a “who done it” where the answer among the list of obvious suspects is, “there wasn’t a murder.”

Plus it gave us an intriguing overall arc that raised the mystery and drama to another level.

Not quite a Time Lord, not quite a Highlander, but something similar to both, yet new and intriguing.

AND IT’S BEING CANCELLED!!

AAARGGGHHHH!!!


Honey Freakin' Boo Boo got four seasons, and this fantastically cool show doesn’t make it past one because everyone's too busy watching What Wedding Dress Not to Wear when  the Bachelor Bounty Hunter Whispers to the Long Island Dog Medium to view a show that requires thinking and complex emotions.


This is why we can’t have nice things.


There is some hope.

Netflix and other services have rescued shows before.

I already signed the petition…

Please click the link and add your signature too.


C’mon, you know you wanna see Henry come back one more time.


4 comments:

Chris said...

Still enjoying Flash and Daredevil thanks to your reviews. Glad I stayed away from Gotham.

Jeff McGinley said...

Thanx!

Happy to provide a useful service.

For varying definitions of "useful" I suppose.

Anonymous said...

Jeff,
As always, GREAT BLOG! Thanks. I'm frustrated, saddened and confused about the canceling of "Forever." I looked forward to next weeks episode all season. I haven't enjoyed every episode of a TV show since "Quantum Leap". How sad that the future of a show with so many layers in the stroyline is limited to my DVR. I can't understand why another network like TBS, USA or A&E can't buy it and air it themselves. Even the EWTN (the Catholic Church channel) could benefit from airing this show. We could learn a lot from a death and a resurrection almost every week. Thank you for mentioning Netflix. You've given me hope. I forgot all about them.
I've signed the petition. Gotta go for now. Keeping up with the Kar-talentless- dashians is coming on.
Cuz Michael

Jeff McGinley said...

Thanx for joining in. Hopefully Netflix will grab it. If not between Daredevil season two, and the pile of other Marvel series that go with it (Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist) I should be busy enough anyway.

thanx again