Best and Worst of Last Week’s TV: 9/8/13 – 9/14/13

I give you, a joke five years in the making

This article is a little later than I wanted it to go up, mainly because my PS3 managed to die on me earlier yesterday morning.  This normally would have been a regular sized tragedy as I rather enjoy some games that have been coming out on it over the last year or two, but considering that GTA 5 and Tales of Xillia came out this month I got to spend most of my free time last night figuring out how to transfer files from one system to a bored one.  Don’t worry, I am still watching the same insane amount of TV.  My computer is still, oddly, just fine.

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia

Seems legit

Where: FXX
When: Thursdays at 10:00 PM
If this was any other show I would complain about it attempting to take a hot button issue and make an episode about it, the problem is that because of the filming schedule is so far in advance that most of the stuff happened about a year ago—like how The Simpsons talk about the election that happened so long ago they are talking about people that dropped out during the primary.  Always Sunny finds a way around that by being completely polarized in the most amazing directions one can imagine and then riding that course until they hit something, which is normally Cricket (David Hornsby).  It isn’t even that they attempt to make the topic seem relevant, all they really do is take the worst possible stance on something and go from there—it is like putting magic in a bottle with lightening and waiting for the science to start appearing.

This week it seemed to be left up the gang to solve the hot button issue of gun control whatever means they felt was being most neglected at that particular moment.  I would like to think that the key to the show is that regardless of what side of anything that you fall on you really don’t want any of the characters from the show siding with you, mainly because they seem to have the ability to switch everyone around them, including each other and themselves, to the opposite side of the issue simply by how insane and out of control their theories are—clearly there is no middle ground in Philadelphia, there is only Zuul. Oddly enough the best part of the show was settling the age old argument about what is best in life, guns or swords (the answer is guns).

The League

Sadly I know people like this

Where: FXX
When: Thursdays at 10:30PM
Last week I made a joke about Ruxin (Nick Kroll) screaming “no” and throwing a tantrum like a small child that he claims to be raising.  This week that exact thing happened.  The point of humor is to exaggerate (something I am good at) and make a normal circumstance seem crazy or unlikely.  It takes all the wind out of my sails filled with attempted jokes if they just go ahead and do it, poorly, pretty much as I am saying it.  In my head when I was making that analogy it was entirely funnier and possibly with him wearing some kind of bib or something, when he did it he was all in man clothing and it was just disappoint and kind of upsetting for what I assume was everyone watching.

This show is going the way of Always Sunny really fast, in that it wants to be about the worst people ever and less about the core thing that started the series to begin with.  The problem is that the more that the show becomes about them just being completely terrible to each other the less relatable that every single one start to be and the less enjoyable that all of their “pranks” are.  Pranks are only funny when you are doing them to someone you care about, like when I take a shit in Stark’s milk, because at the end of the day I don’t want him dead or unable to walk. It was one thing two season ago to watch as they filmed a porno in one of their friends apartments because it seemed like they were just doing something that would bother him and weird him out, in this episode they pretty much actively destroyed Andre’s (Paul Scheer) life and stood by laughing as it fell apart.  This wasn’t funny and prankster filled, this was people on a slow decent to murdering each other over a fucking trophy.

Adventure Time

BMO does look really cool

Where: Cartoon Network
When: Monday’s at 7:00 PM
Adventure Time is a show about what the world would be like thousands of years after a nuclear holocaust, but for children.  It slowly constructs an environment where anything is possible and candy is people and people are pretty much extinct due to being amazingly delicious.  Trying to describe it to someone is like listening to a stroke victim tell a chair about the dream they had last night, half of it sounds insane and the rest sounds like something you should probably drop what you are doing and investigate at this very moment.  It is like combining two of the best things in the world, the wonder of youth and doing things for the first time and really dark and messed up things that you kind of shouldn’t think about, and getting something that proves to be even better than you thought it would be—because of the transitive rule of animation.

This episode deals primarily with Jake (John DiMaggio) and cooking, which is a topic that I wish the show would bring up more—which sounds like someone complaining about an episode of good eats now that I am going through and proofing this.  That guy really loves his food, and whenever he is unable to eat something due to a series of events his tragedy is like fuel for my amusement heart.  Jake manages to make possibly the world’s greatest sandwich, one that I hope to eat a replica of at some point in my life, but it is stolen by Magic Man (Tom Kenny).  As a point of order I really want to bring up the fact that Magic Man is possibly one of the greatest villains of all time due to the fact that he deals out completely random and unfounded punishments and demands that people learn stupid and pointless lessons before continuing with their lives.  He is my personal hero.

Paranormal Witness

paranormal witness 9-21-13

Where: SYFY
When: Wednesdays at 10:00 PM
I think the only other show I have managed to bag on more than Paranormal Witness is Dual Survival, and that is only because for most of this shows run I didn’t publish many of the articles that I ended up writing.  One of the main problems of the program is that most of the time it lacks anything that would ever be considered a credible witness.  It is hard to take a ghost siting seriously when the guy telling you about it is also the first guy that you would ask about getting you both illegal fireworks and possibly a gun with no serial number.  The list of things that I would believe from those people is so short it pretty much normally ends at my first question of “what is crystal meth like?” because how can you not want to know.

This week they fixed that silly problem by having the dean of a college appear as the person that was haunted, because people with higher educations are never wrong or mistaken.  There are two things that the show just simply loves to do that I completely hate; use things that can easily explained away as solid evidence (such as the wind blowing or “old house noises) and use stupid special effects in places where the witness was saying nothing because the story would be boring in that moment without them (also known as the “I went back into the house to get my keys…” and the silence is filled with exploding wall ghost semen).  This episode was entirely those two things.  The root of the problem is that the show needs to be half an hour long and SYFY keeps trying to drag it out to an hour; all this is doing is making it boring and unbelievable.  It is the reason that everyone tries to cut as much as they can from a Stephen King novel, because it isn’t creepy when you learn about the guy taking a giant dump and how much he likes to masturbate.

Breaking Bad


Where: AMC
When: Sundays at 9:00 PM
Sometimes the show leaves me wondering if Walt (Bryan Cranston) is really a criminal mastermind or just kind of bumbling super-chemist that thinks way to highly of himself.  Sometimes he pulls of these amazing exploits that simply manage to crush everyone that may one day turn on him, sometimes he just kind of falls into this massive and explosive shoot out over some money that he has buried in the desert because he thinks that Jesse (Aaron Paul) is plotting to get him, and sometimes he just sort of seems like a whinny little girl.  Maybe the lesson that I should take away from all of this is that being large and important as an outlaw is difficult work and always requires Bob Odenkirk in your corner.

It might be easier to hate Walt at this point in the story if the writers weren’t doing such a good job of just making Jesse an entirely irredeemable character.  Granted, I honestly believe that the show has done some of the best work I have ever seen portraying his character actively having a nervous breakdown—at some point you just want to look at that person and pull them out of society and life in general.  The flashes back and forth between damn near being a puddle of self-inflicted urine and trying to violently, and poorly, lash out against his previous life and weird and uncontrolled.  Truth be told I doubt I would ever change a single thing about this show if given the chance, and just long for more people to hold open conversations about it with.

Burn Notice

"Remember when this show was good?" "I remember when I was young..."

Where: USA
When: Thursdays at 9:00 PM
Last article I stated that I thought that episode was the last and was disappointed by that.  Last week the disappointment was because I thought to myself, “this is all going to wrap up” and kept thinking that until the credits hit and it said “next week on Burn Notice!” which is not really what you want to hear when you half expecting the show to either tell you it is a movie or has been some kind of fever dream of a random side character for the last two seasons.  I think that my main issue has been, and continued to be, that this show has basically failed to deliver on the promise that it made to the views a season or two ago—that Michael (Jeffery Donovan) was out of the spy game for good.  Instead it has actively tried to supplant that image with something more exciting and has managed to stop just short of throwing circus clown hacker spies at him.

So, spoilers.  Just stop reading if you care.  I am going to complain a bunch about the ending.

Madeline (Sharon Gless who plays Michael’s Mother) dies in the most meaningless sacrificial death that I think I might have ever seen since the Mayans thought that it would make their drinking water not give them the runs. Her death was more meaningless than most of the stuff that happened during the Twin Peaks movies.  If I had to equate it to a movie I would call it Crispin Glover’s “What is it”, the one with the all mentally handicap cast.  That was the highlight of the episode.  From that moment forward it was a downhill stream of nonsense that was clearly every writer in the building flipping off the rest of cast as they walked out the door.  It managed to be stop be insulting and start being full “Plan 9 From Outer Space” right around the time that you realized that Michael and Fiona (Gabrielle Anwar) weren’t dead but the rest of the world’s best spies would never be able to figure that out.  Screw everyone who was involved with this, aside from Bruce Campbell I hope you all never work again.

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