Welcome to part three of OCTV’s mid-year wrap up, where Nicole and SB go over what they’ve been watching all year and take a step back to look at the seasons (or the seasons so far) as a whole. If you missed part one, you can find it here, and part two is here. Gifs are generously rounded up by hockeybychoice, and as always, Nicole’s thoughts are in purple and SB’s are in blue. Enjoy and be sure to comment!

Modern Family

I … can’t exactly decide how I feel about Modern Family. I do really like it, and I almost always think it’s really funny. I care about the characters and I look forward to watching it, and I find it relateable and likeable, and it doesn’t really feel like a show that you should be able to find much about to criticize, but I still can’t bring myself to say that I love it without any sort of qualifications, the first being … goddamn, do I hate Manny! He is THE WORST. The good news is that I actually really like everyone else.

The second is that I feel like as this show goes on, it goes deeper and deeper into “sitcommy” territory. There’s always some sort of mix up or misunderstanding or “wacky hijinks” that make it feel like a screwball comedy, which is not normally my favorite thing. And this was starting to drive me a little insane, but I kind of learned to stop thinking about it and just enjoy the show, because, like I said, I do enjoy the characters and one-liners so much that it just really isn’t worth getting worked up over.

Man, that sounds like more of a downer than I meant it to, and I don’t want to end on that, so let me finish by saying that I’ve enjoyed this season a lot more than the last, and I LOVED the whole wireless printer gag, Phil and Luke continue to be hilarious, and Gloria ALWAYS cracks me up … but of course, my favorite character is Stella.

I have mixed feelings about the show too, and I try to adopt the same attitude as SB when I watch it because I do like most of the characters and there are some great jokes in every episode. But a lot of the times, the jokes feel like we’ve seen them before, you know? Gloria is hilarious and her accent can be used to great effect, but it loses its impact when every episode features a joke (or five) about her wacky mispronunciations.

You can practically predict the basic elements of every episode: Claire will be frazzled and annoyed with her family; Mitchell will be embarrassed by something that Cam does and will be kind of a dick about it; Phil will fall down; Jay will curmudgeonly complain about Manny and one of his fucking annoying quirks (valid). The only thing that seems to change from week to week is the ‘wacky setup’ that SB talked about, the situation that is basically contrived just to highlight same beats over and over again.

The show really works best for me when the show mixes up the characters in ways that we don’t see very often, because it forces the dynamic of the entire show to adapt and vary from the norm. Don’t get me wrong – those elements that they go back to over and over again are funny (well, except for Manny – as SB has already said, he is the worst) – it’s just that I’d like the show to find more ways to make us laugh or it’s going to start to get old. Take Luke – his character evolved from the hilarious dumb kid to the secret genius of the family. He’s still awesome, just in a new and different way. If the show can figure out a way to make the characters seem as well thought out as the jokes, they’d be on fire.

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Welcome back to part two of OCTV’s mid-year wrap up, where Nicole and SB go over what they’ve been watching all year and take a step back to look at the seasons (or the seasons so far) as a whole. If you missed part one, you can find it here. Gifs are generously rounded up by hockeybychoice, and as always, Nicole’s thoughts are in purple and SB’s are in blue. Enjoy and be sure to comment!

How I Met Your Mother

This show has really impressed me with it’s willingness to go places where most traditional sitcoms would be afraid to go. The most impressive and heartbreaking example of this is last year’s storyline about the death of Marshall’s dad which can still make me tear up if I picture Alyson Hannigan’s cryface and remember Jason Segel’s strained ‘I’m not ready for this’. The whole thing was so well done and they found a fantastic balance of humor and emotion to tell the story over the subsequent weeks. As someone similar in age to the characters, I appreciate the fact that the show will go there and show the funny and human side of all the shit you go through in life around this age.

This year, the drama has been about Robin and her inability to have kids, and how she feels about that considering that she was always the one that said she never wanted them. Again, I can totally relate to this. I’ve never particularly wanted be an Olympic pole vaulter for Team Canada either, but if the option was suddenly taken away from me, I don’t know how I’d feel about it. At this point, I appreciate this show for it’s ability to tell (mostly) good stories each week, and for making me laugh AND cry, and I don’t particularly give a shit HOW he met their goddamn mother. I stopped caring about that a long time ago. But as long as I feel connected to these people and the show is willing to take chances with stories and subject matter, I’ll be watching.

Yeah, you know, I read a lot of professional critcs’ opinions about this show and their increasing rage, and I’m always a little confused, like … REALLY? It’s not that they don’t make valid points, I guess, but I just kind of feel like what they’re getting worked up about isn’t that big a deal, and I pretty much feel like if you’re still watching the show with the actual expectation of Ted finding the mother, you’re just setting yourself up for disappointment every week. And I don’t know, it just seems weird to me keep watching a show that’s going to stress you out. But then, I’m not a professional critic, so if I don’t want to watch something … I just don’t.

Anyway, I agree with Nicole that this show has had a lot of really great acting, especially in the least year or two. Those episodes where Marshall’s dad died were excruciating, in a good way. I also got emotional about the Olympic pole vaulter episode, and how about Barney finding his real dad? All awesome.

My only real issues in the past year have been Zoey (how do you actually make Jennifer Morrison, of all people, insufferable?) and Kevin. I’m fine with Ted being single (also, I really don’t know why everyone hates Ted so much … I guess I wouldn’t say he’s my FAVORITE, but he’s fine, and he just serves such a definite purpose within the group–but I digress), but I’m not sure why we’re still keeping Barney and Robin apart at this point. The writers really fucked it up once, and I thought things were getting back on track. I’m okay with a short “choosing Kevin, pregnancy scare” detour, but I hope it’s short. Obviously Lily and Marshall have their happily ever after, and Ted is working on his … is it so unreasonable to give Robin and Barney theirs, when it’s so obviously each other?

But even the prolonged agony of Robin and Barney isn’t enough to keep me away from the show. I really like it–it’s funny, the cast has awesome chemistry, and it’s a nice half hour on a Monday. I’m in for the long haul.

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Well, it’s that time of year when we all spend time with loved ones and curse the TV Gods for the fact that there’s nothing good to watch until January. But have no fear! SB and I are here to guide you through a recap of the 2011 portion of the 2011/2012 tv season (as well as those shows that have aired complete seasons since our last Wrap-Up in June) and maybe even finally guilt you into checking out that show you’ve been meaning to catch up with on Netflix or DVD (*cough* Breaking Bad *cough*) while you avoid your racist relatives and drink too much gin and red wine, or maybe that’s just me. As always, my thoughts are in purple and SB’s are in blue, and big thanks to hockeybychoice for helping us out with gifs and pics for these posts!

True Blood

I think that it’s safe to say that I liked season four a lot better than seasons two and especially three, which was my least favorite of all. But I can also confidently say that my enjoyment of season four was increased by a factor of a thousand during the season finale with the elements that were introduced as a set-up for next year. So overall I liked it, but I LOVED those last few minutes and am super-pumped for season five.

First off though, kudos for ending that meth/gang rape/werepanther bullshit pretty early on (I really could have done without the scenes of young-looking sister-wives lining up to violate Jason though). It was incredibly disturbing and incredibly stupid. You can have one or the other, but not both (just look at Will Schuester on Glee for further proof of how terrible that combination is). I also liked the Jason/Hoyt/Jessica storyline a lot, but they’re my three favorite characters so that’s no surprise.

The best though was that last episode and the reveal of two amazing things: the return of Russell Edgington and also of VAMPIRE STEVE NEWLIN!!!! I have made no secret of my love for the Newlins, and I assumed that he was going to resurface because we’d been hearing little tidbits about the fact that he was missing all through season 4, but when he popped his fangs at Jason’s door, I died. Next year has to be great, right? All of that PLUS the fact that Chris Meloni is joining the show! I haven’t been this excited for a season of TB since the end of season one.

Agreed, I really can’t wait for next season. I was starting to feel like I could wait for the rest as it came out on DVD, but the return of both Steve Newlin AND Russel Edgington, the best, most badass, batshit insane villain this show has ever had? Yeah, I’m in.

This season had some real highlights for me, and several things that didn’t really work as well. I love, love, LOVED the show jumping ahead in time a year and more or less eliminating the fairy bullshit. Hoyt and Jessica’s relationship falling apart, while horribly painful to watch, was also really, really well done, and I enjoyed the Sookie and Eric triangle, particularly when Eric regained his memory. Marnie was a good Big Bad, and Lafayette kicked MAJOR ass channeling various crazy bitches. Oh, and Tommy’s death? HEARTBREAKINGLY good.

Now, for what I did not enjoy as much–pretty much everything involving Sam, up until the point Tommy died; Tara, but that’s nothing new (although her death made my life, temporarily, until I heard she’d be back); and the use of Jesus. It’s probably best that he’s dead too, because did anyone else feel like he just became the exposition fairy? Until, that is, Holly showed up as the exposition fairy, literally?

Bottom line, in typical True Blood fashion, it was both good and bad, but the entertaining parts generally won me over enough to make it worth it. True Blood seems to be on an every other season swing for me (much like Top Chef)–I liked S1, hated S2, liked S3 more, liked S4 a little less, and am looking forward to a kickass S5.

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So, I don’t know why I was expecting there to be a new episode on Friday, what with it being Christmas Eve Eve and all, but you can imagine my surprise when they reaired the pilot. Or maybe you can’t. Honestly, I should learn to check the TV schedule more often. Only myself to blame and all that. But… but.. but, y’all know we’re not going to have a new episode of Grimm until January 13, right?! OH THE HUMANITY! So to tide us (read: me) over, I thought maybe I would point you guys toward the fun that the folks at NBC have created on their Grimm site.

I’m not paid by the folks at NBC or anything (that’d be nice), so this endorsement is solely because I think it’s neat. It has some handy information that I’ve used on more than one occasion while doing my recaps (mostly when I’m trying to confirm how to spell the names of the creatures. My limited knowledge of German only takes me so far). Plus, it’s got some pretty cool features like a list of Real Life™ people who may be Ziegevolk, or a list of Wild Children throughout history. There’s even a Grimm Guide like the one that Nick consults in AM’s trailer. Obvs, it’s not that comprehensive, and it’s not like you can just flip through pages and pages of stuff, but it offers some insight, and gives some background information on the various creatures we’ve encountered. It’s pretty neat.

But the reason I’m writing is because of the game/quiz thing that I found Saturday morning while I was looking to see if they’d posted the video of the episode that they didn’t actually air. They’ve aired seven episodes and we’ve seen almost as many creatures. If you were a creature, which would you be?

I’m a… Read the rest of this entry »

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The time has come. American Horror Story has come to an end… for now. I apologize once again for missing another recap last week. I truly am horrible. The direction the season finale went in was totally and completely unexpected. I figured they would keep with the story and the entire episode would be based off all of the ghosts fighting over the baby. Don’t get me wrong, that happened, but very briefly. Instead, they introduced and dismissed a whole new family all in one episode.

The show starts with a quick flashback to Ben basically begging Vivien to move into the extremely low priced house with “personality” just nine months ago. Ironically, Vivien was totally against moving into the house. Imagine all of the trouble she could have saved if she would’ve fought a little hard… pft. And now we’re back to today. After the birth of Vivien’s two “children” and she was pronounced dead due to a loss of blood, Constance found a way to take away the baby that Tate fathered. Man, she is just so crazy. She even makes up a total bullshit story about where the baby could be to the police just so they don’t have to search around anymore. I mean, come on! Ben retrieves the baby from Constance and makes his way back into the house.

As we could all expect, Ben feels the need to kill himself in order to rejoin his family in eternity. Oh sure, after your daughter and wife are dead you decide to care. He almost goes through with blowing his brains out until Vivien and Violet show up and give him the speech we all expected them to. The baby needs Ben and Ben needs the baby. It all seemed good enough until Ben’s life was taken without his own consent. Hayden, the psychopath he once impregnated, comes back for her final revenge on Ben. She throws him over the balcony with a rope around his neck. I feel like this was a cheap way to get Ben to die. I mean, it’s nice that the Harmons can all be a family once again but I would’ve been much more satisfied if Ben got away and left them alone. We all could expect that he would be stuck in the house one way or another so in some ways I wish they would’ve went in the other direction. Oh well.

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Best thing about finale night? Seeing Schmidt in the audience. Second best thing? Melanie Amaro’s rendition of All I Want For Christmas is You. The girl can sing, y’all! By now we all know who the winner is and if you don’t I’ll leave it until after the break. First we need to talk about the performances from Wednesday night’s show. I’ll be brief, but I thought they were worth a mention. Read the rest of this entry »

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Now that both Vampire Diaries and the Secret Circle are on winter hiatus, I’ve asked Nicole to join me for a meeting of the brain trust to discuss The Secret Circle, which, for better or worse, is nearly inseparable from Vampire Diaries at this point. Now that we’ve reached a our first break, it seemed like a good time to step back and take a look at the show so far as a whole. As always, SB is in blue and Nicole is in purple.

I’m going to get it out of the way first. Secret Circle is definitely not as good as The Vampire Diaries. And honestly, I’m not sure whether to call it disappointing, because I didn’t really have any expectations for the show–in fact, it might even be better than I would’ve initially thought. But I don’t think that the quality comparisons are helped by the fact that commercials are always throwing the TVD/TSC producer connection in our face at every opportunity, and I REALLY don’t think that TSC benefits, comparison wise, from airing on the same night as TVD. I’m sure it benefits ratings-wise, which is obviously important for business, but … I don’t feel like as a viewer, there’s any benefit at all.

I can completely understand this perspective, because TVD has really mastered the art of perpetual motion, where at this point every episode feels like three, given how much HAPPENS in an hour. I think that a big part of this is the fact that TVD has built up a huge cast of characters that can be endlessly explored in different configurations. TSC is still in it’s infancy and whether by design or due to budget constraints, has a more limited pool of people to work with. The show just feels smaller-scale and more insular than TVD, and when the smaller show follows the bigger, more epic show, I’m sure that to some it can feel like a bit of a letdown.

With TSC, we see the same six main characters in the same handful of settings on a weekly basis, which can start to feel a little static, even this early into the run. I think that this is why episodes like ‘Beneath’ led to such a strong (positive) fan reaction; because the show expanded it’s physical setting and it was exciting for the audience to move beyond the abandoned house, the bar and Cassie’s Kitchen of Death. (This episode also worked because it let the kids be teenagers and have some fun, which I’ll get to in more detail later). So overall, I agree that following TVD with TSC is probably not the best idea, because the scale feels much smaller in comparison and therefore possibly a little anti-climactic. I tend to watch TVD on Fridays, so this isn’t really an issue for me, However, most people probably do watch them back to back and I think even just flipping the order would work. Of course, that would deprive TSC of the TVD lead-in, which could be a problem – does it have a strong enough following at this point to compete with everything else on Thursdays at 8? I don’t know.

Well, I doubt that anything on the CW can REALLY compete with everything else on at eight on Thursdays (except, apparently, Community–sad face), but I think they’re okay with that. I feel like CW isn’t really EXPECTED to compete, so they have different standards.

I do want to go back to your point about the scale of the show, though. I just feel like, in a setting like the Pacific Northwest, there should be more variety in settings just by virtue of being in the great outdoors, ESPECIALLY with all the witchy nature connection shit. And they have the restaurant, but they don’t even use that very much. And (AND!) it cannot be that hard to find young, pretty, unknown actors who will work for cheap to get some exposure. I mean, was it really NECESSARY to cast Lux in this part? No. And I hope they didn’t blow their budget on her and Thomas Dekker. (I mean, she’s MUCH better as Cassie than Lux, but I’m obviously still not over it completely.) I don’t know exactly what the problem is with the show, but I will say this–I don’t think it’s a problem with the acting (I especially love the adults, and the kids are fine), and I don’t think it’s a problem with premise or style. I think this is a writing issue, and I have a couple of key points as to WHY I think that. Ready for the bullets? Read the rest of this entry »

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I’m sure ya’ll thought there was going to be a fairytale sized hole in your hearts for the next few weeks but that’s not how I roll. The best way to move past Sheriff Graham’s death *moment of silence* is with new shiny things. Now I can’t give you Prince Charming (and if you think I wouldn’t keep him for myself anyway, you clearly aren’t reading these recaps) but I can give you a few fairytale recaps. Some of you may remember that I did a recap of the original Snow White fairytale a few weeks ago. This week I thought I’d cover the story of Little Red Riding Hood. Ruby’s been a fixture in Storybrooke but hasn’t had her own back story shown in the fairytale realms yet. Seeing as I’m adoring all the subtleties of Meghan Ory’s portrayal of our own Little Red Riding Hood, I thought it was high time she got her own story.

There are quite a few versions of Little Red Riding Hood out there but most go along the standard, girl goes to grandma’s with goodies, wolf eats grandma first, tricks the girl and then eats her too. Some versions that prefer a more cheerful ending allow Red to get away. If you’re familiar with Grimm’s fairy tales, you’ll know that she is known as Little Red Cap. The Brothers Grimm did things a bit differently. In their version, a huntsman hears the wolf snoring (I did not know wolves snored but apparently they are really fucking loud) and decides to enter the house and see what’s up. Because snooping around an elderly woman’s home while she’s asleep is totes normal. Anyway, the huntsman sees the wolf taking a nap after his dose of fairytale tryptophan and is like oh hey, maybe if I cut open the wolf, I can pull grandma out. It would seem that the wolf’s belly is like Mary Poppins’ purse. Scissors seem to be sharp enough to cut through fur, skin and muscle and within a few snips, Red pops out of the wolf and then Grandma does as well. To further emphasize the massiveness of this wolf’s magical belly, neither Red nor Granny saw each other while they were in there. The trio fill the wolf’s belly with stones…not sure why killing him wasn’t an immediate option, and then he dies when trying to run away. And then Red is a good little girl who agrees to never stray from the path again. Because obviously paths are magical and you can’t be killed in the middle of the damn road. Red needs to pick up a TV and watch every supernatural show on the planet and learn the truth about that little lie.

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She whips her hair back and forth.

“The enchantress was so hard-hearted that she banished the poor girl to a wilderness, where she had to live in a miserable, wretched state.”

That’s the quote from “Rapunzel” that they used to open Friday’s episode of Grimm. Not all of the quotes they use are 100% related to the episode. I don’t have a problem with that. In fact, if they tried to follow the stories they quoted too closely, I honestly think the show would become quite stale (it’s what I was afraid of when the show first started, and about what the writers have episode after episode proved me wrong). But something about this quote and the episode that was laid out after it gives me pause. The second part of the sentence absolutely was covered, and in a really awesome, made-me-want-to-own-a-tree-house sort of way. The first part of the sentence is where I take issue.

For starters, the episode felt like it should have been about 2 hours long. Going by the quote, and all the questions I had at the end, I just needed and was expecting more. And I know we can’t always have the answers to “what happens next?” I watch Law & Order (only SVU. Mmm, Stabler). I know that sometimes the episodes end before they even go to trial because the story they were trying to tell had ended. Maybe that was the case here, but I just have so many questions. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Last week I mentioned that I wanted Roddy (the Reinigen) to come back because he seemed, like Eddie, to trust Nick, and in a world where all the creatures seem to recognize Nick for what he is immediately (and I have another point to make about this later), Nick could really use another ally. Maybe Roddy will show up again for some big showdown further down the line, but right now, I’m reasonably sure he’s a one-off. But the creature from Friday’s episode? I want her to be more than that. They have opened her up to be so much more than that. The story holds so much potential for the characters, and my appetite was only whetted. Also, did I mention she’s freaking Rapunzel?! More on this later, but first, the recap: Read the rest of this entry »

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Happy Holidays!

So this has been on my list to watch for almost a year and when Amazon had the whole series on sale the first week of November, I bit the bullet and just bought it. Because I have a giant girl crush on Rachel Bilson.

For those of you who live in a cave or are like, twenty years old, The OC premiered on FOX back in August 2003. I am going to go on the assumption that you’ve seen it before (although I had not seen S4 before this rewatch) or that you don’t give a shit about spoilers.

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