For all of its plot detours and stop-start storytelling, Girls does flirt with standard serialized TV structure more often than not, the best example of which being its characteristic placement of grand climaxes in the penultimate episodes of each season. Last season's "Leave Me Alone" culminated in the first of many dramatic fights between Hannah ( Read more... )

It may be by design, but Girls is never the best show at creating a completely realistic world. As I said last week, its world is similar to our own, but heightened just a touch in order to more easily create comic scenarios. What Girls is great at, however, is capturing the rhythms of everyday life. Don't get me wrong - that doesn't always make ( Read more... )

I basically live and breathe TV, so whenever I think about larger questions of art and culture, they tend to be coloured by that medium. And now that my long-term hobby these days seems to be feeling my way through the basic tenets of media criticism, I thought I should pull back a bit and consider TV's place in the art world. I think it's a ( Read more... )

Since I can now happily call American Dad a great show, and lord does that send a shiver up my spine, I've started thinking earnestly about its place in sitcom history. As a sitcom, it serves as a great commentary on a certain aspect of the form, one that seems to pop up again and again when discussing them: premises. Most sitcom pilots these days ( Read more... )

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In any serialized story, there are bound to be one or two hiccups along the way to the ending. This is true for even the best ones, like Enlightened's second season. This season has been impressively well plotted, achieving enormous developments with a light touch, but it too showed some contrivances along the way. Nowhere is this more obvious than ( Read more... )

Making a good TV show is hard. There are a ton of elements to balance at all times, and fumbling even one might make the whole show cave in. Girls' second season has been an interesting examination of this, the push and pull inherent in television structure. Despite the many different types of series that have been on the air, television is a ( Read more... )

Just a quick word about the latest season of The Shield I finished. As I watch more and more of it, I realize that it's never going to be one of my favourite shows. I was hoping it would break out of its season 1 rhythms a little more by this point, and while it's a great show to be certain, it just doesn't have as unique a point of view as I'd ( Read more... )

When I can't sleep, I make lists, so in honour of Community's worst-ever episode this week, I thought I'd list my five favourite episodes of the show. I'm sorry there's no showing from season 1 here, but "Romantic Expressionism," the show's first great episode, is my #6.

5. "Paradigms of Human Memory" (Season 2, Episode 21)"Paradigms" doesn't have ( Read more... )

Hey, I wrote a little thing about the Beach Boys' Friends for Encore. I might do it again, it was fun!