Lots of things got in the way of weekly television watching, much less writing. With the decks clearing off for the end of year slowdown, I've caught up on most of my original slate of shows...
Boardwalk Empire
As I've said frequently to friends, with too many characters and a void cipher as a nominal lead character, I'd prefer watching BE if it were just Chalky and Richard driving around the country while solving mysteries. That seems unlikely to occur now. On the positive side, though, we finally have a use for van Alden after four years? And we're also, possibly, rid of Gillian, though the impossibly long route they took to get the Pinkertons on her was credibility straining at best. Adding Tampa to the series' stretched geography isn't really doing it any favors, though.
However, the real interesting narrative thread this year was the belated move to center stage of one Chalky White. He's been an sideline or an afterthought in the three previous years, and I was happy to see him both survive the year and seem to have larger things waiting in near five. BE loves to troll Wire fans, first with their relative underuse of Mr. White and then finally giving him an arc which is essentially pitting him in a multi-season war between Omar and Brother Mouzone. Will they team up and take out Nucky? Can we hope?
Marvel's Agents of SHIELD
After a third-episode better outing all around, the show seemed to plateau at a slightly-better-than-meh level of quality. The major characters are bland, and Coulson, the ostensible center of the show, is a baffling personality vacuum. He was good in the films because he had to react to the larger-than-life; here with the budget dictating second-rate Count Nefaria (or third-rate Magneto) super-villains like Graviton, and the fx demanding a minimum of visually interesting super-powers, Coulson's responses shift from deadpan to anemic. The series hints at SHIELD overreach, which I have a sinking feeling is going to be kept on the back-burner marking time until The Winter Soldier is released and brings the issue to the fore. But then that Dark World "crossover" wasn't exactly confidence inspiring, was it?
Right now SHIELD reminds me of ABC's previously shiny, boring alternate-world series of yesteryear: Pan Am. And Pan Am seemed to be superior.
* see also: Telekinesis and like effects (magnetism, wind powers), telepathy, mind control, super-hearing, invisibility...
Homeland
What a trainwreck this once-fine series has become. It flushed all of the promise of last year's close out immediately, even though with the exception of a Carrie/Brody-on-the-lam status quo, there was plenty of fertile ground waiting to be tilled. On its continual tug of war between Rubicon and 24, 24 finally won, decisively.
It was the return of Brody episode Tower of David where the season began to disintegrate. Relying on the tiresome Lost-like strategy of shouting down others when they question you, Brody spends a full hour running in circles before he finally accepts his fate, having accomplished nothing but tease the audience with what-ifs for a full hour. . Any resonance his story might have had with the parallel of Carrie's own tribulations at the hands of her friends, family, and mentor are rendered moot when we learn shortly thereafter that all of her problems were to set her cover with Iranian interests.
Ultimately the season builds, sort of, to one of the possible status quos hinted at in last year's finale: Carrie running the Istanbul bureau, with the agency's #1 asset as her charge and finally rid of the Brody baggage. A good idea, but is it enough to have forced the audience suffering through hours in the sanitarium, with Brody's family, with rehabbing Brody himself from a strung-out heroin fiend to Delta Force assassin in one episode? I would argue no.
No comments:
Post a Comment