Southland | You are Getting Less Gritty and More Corny

After Southland was resurrected by TNT, fans of the show were very excited to see the second season of the show air. But here is the problem: what we were promised was a gritty cop show, rough streets and human cops. In fact, if you are so inclined you can watch the special feature on the show’s season one DVD box set where the word gritty is used in practically every cast/crew interview, as though the higher-ups told everyone to use it in their interview. So, season one was good in fact much better than your average cop drama on network TV, but now that it is apart of the TNT lineup it has to contend with the cable cop shows that are so superior to the average CSI type of show, it is hard to even draw a fair comparison between the two. Shows like The Shield or The Wire stand in a class above Network TV, they were actually gritty, intricate and well executed. But as you probably know those shows are long gone, relegated to reruns and DVD. So, does this mean that Southland is the only gritty cop show currently on the air? Does it now hold the title of the gritty cop drama? It’s hard to keep high drama from turning to cornball drama. And that is just what the fifth episode of season two of Southland delivered. In it one of the detectives that the show follows has a mentoring session with a young gang banger that later ends with the shooting of another gang member. An Over The Top type crying hugging moment between the juvenile and the detective right before he cuffs the kid and puts him in the curser. Thank god for corny Sylvester Stallone movies otherwise that scene might have come off as sincere. (If you don’t know what Over The Top is, it’s a Stallone movie about a sappy father and son relationship, driving a big rig and an international arm wrestling competition. HA.) This episode was the worst of the season because it went Over The Top, and hopefully will not again for the rest of the season otherwise another show might prove itself to be TV’s grittiest cop show. The condensers are: Justified, Law & Order: SVU, Law & Order.

Cancel Family Guy

It has become apparent that Family Guy should end its run before it gets any worse, and take the Cleveland Show with it. While Family Guy was resurrected from the ashes and brought back to television, it seems that there wasn’t much life in it after all. Family Guy was originally a darkly funny, clever cartoon which was very funny, but it has moved from darkly funny to just weird, crude, mean, and kind of lowbrow. Maybe this is because Seth McFarlane is stretched too thin with three shows, but the effort isn’t there anymore. Some episodes seem like his mouth piece to say terrible things that he couldn’t get away with otherwise. The other episodes are just dirty, and not funny dirty, awkward dirty. It’s seen its best days and the writers should drop it so they can focus on the much superior American Dad, which has kept up the quality and is actually coherent. American Dad surpassed Family Guy a long time ago, and they should focus their attentions on it before the problems of Family Guy migrate to American Dad.

Is Treme Good Enough To Succeed The Wire?

The very underrated and now finally appreciated show The Wire has been over for a while now, but the creators of this acclaimed series have now brought us Treme, (pronounced Tre-May) the story of the people of New Orleans as they attempt rebuild their live and their town after the hurricane Katrina disaster. Although it’s fantastic news that people behind the wire are back with something new, it’s not clear how it can measure up to its predecessor. The survival of the show is even in question. The people behind these shows have always been unconventional. The Wire was too intricate, too smart, too slow moving for most people, but was a strong commentary and exploration of Baltimore with the disguise of a police drama. And that disguise allowed it to stay grounded, directed, and, well, watchable as a series. But Treme doesn’t have a direction or a purpose. It is only focused on the exploration of the New Orleans culture. It’s like writers said we don’t need any conventional stories.

Treme is a full blown study of New Orleans life that has no focus other than the day to day lives of various characters, and it doesn’t seem to have a purpose other than to show the greatness of this city. I think people are going to be disappointed with Treme as the succeeding show to The Wire. That’s not to say it isn’t good. It’s an interesting show and I reserve judgment until much more of it is seen, but it’s no The Wire. The self-important nature and fixation of the New Orleans people and music is, ironically, it’s down fall even though it’s an interest of the show. The characters, while interesting, are not that interesting. Watching them live cannot hold your interest. You need something in-between, but it isn’t there. The music is too time consuming for the show. You can tell the creators wanted to showcase the music, but it drains time and story from the show. And it’s just too slow. Very little happens in an episode, which would be fine if there was some conceivable payoff in the future like there was with The Wire. Treme does not have that. One of the redeeming qualities of the show is John Goodman, who seems in his element as a loud, fiery mayor passionate about his town. All that can be said about Treme is that New Orleans and its people better get really interesting if they want to continue with this format, or if they want to be even close to as good as its predecessor.

Happy Town – A Show with Promise

Last year there was a well liked show called Harpers Island, which was a horror-drama that played like a slasher movie. It was a very fun show and had a horror concept that is seldom seen or done properly on television. On April 28th 2010, Happy Town premieres on ABC, a new show with a similar premise that looks promising, and anyone who enjoyed Harpers Island should check it out. It centers on a small town named Haplin which has been tormented by a mysterious killer who made one person disappear every year until he stopped for five years but now suddenly kills again with the arrival of a young woman. It is made by same people who made Twin Peaks. It has very well known actors in the cult television world, Amy Acker (who played Doctor Saunders on Dollhouse) and Robert Wisdom (who was in The Wire as the police commander who legalized drugs). The promotion hasn’t been very heavy with this show, so I wouldn’t be surprised if people pass it by. It’s one of the very few horror based shows that isn’t an anthology. Although there is no guarantee that it’s good, it does look promising enough to check out. So here are some pros and cons for the show, from what we’ve seen so far.

Pros:

1. The killer’s name is “The Magic Man”. Best name ever.
2. The horror genre for television has always been less than great until the last few years. Since Harper’s Island and Supernatural they’ve seen some leaps in quality. This has the makings of a good horror series.
3. The Creators of Twin Peaks are behind Happy Town.
4. Cool death scenes: a victim is killed by nailing a railroad spike into his head in the first episode.

Cons:

1. The killer’s name is “The Magic Man”. Gayest name ever.
2. It might be too weird like Twin Peaks.
3. 1 out of 10 is any good. For every great addition to the horror genre, there’s a laundry list terrible additions. There are very few good horror centered TV series in existence, and that’s stretching back over 30 years.

Lost Fans - The Three Types

Most people are or know fans of the TV show Lost. It has been the subject of so much water cooler talk it has taken on some of the substances, characteristics, in that you can enjoy it three different ways (vapor, ice, liquid), freaky right? Well, no. It’s an odd observation, not unlike those made by people who watch lost.

Lost is coming to a close soon and those who watch it need to realize that the whole story is about to be told. All of the theories put to rest once and for all and the conclusion of the series is at hand. But before we find out why the statue foot on the beach only has four toes it is time to take a look at yourself and ask: what type of Lost fan was I? The three different ways you can view yourselves are as a gawker, a theorist or a worshiper. A Lost gawker has watched periodically over the past six years to see what all of the talk is about. Less concerned with what is happening in the show itself the gawker looks for elements to make fun of and then banks them in hopes of pulling them out the next time he/she is faced with a Lost-centric conversation. They are the ones who usually say something smarmy and about dinosaurs or polar bears being on the island or more presently about the confusion over time travel and how the show has spun into a sort of Twilight Zone.

But then there are the theorists who only watch the show in order to create far reaching theories about what is actually happening on the show week to week and season to season. They have the tendency to bring up aspects of the show which most can’t remember in order to further their theories agenda. The underlining reason why these theorists theorize is to illustrate just how clever they are and you are not. The more all encompassing and complex your Lost theory is, the more you sound clever, but in reality the more you try to make it sound like you came up with this masterful reason behind whether the hatch really needed its button pressed every so often only reveals just how long you have been trying to work it out and that you could be Lost crazed. Finally there are the worshipers who believe in the opaque nature of the show is warranted and has no affect on their desire to watch the show. They look at the theorists as potential spoilers of the weekly dose of mystery island and prefer to not think too much on the intricacies of Lost. Never look a worshiper directly in the eyes when speaking about Lost otherwise you will witness the look of utter devotion in their eyes that is usually reserved for cult member and people who believe angels speak to them through house hold appliances. There are different variations of the three types of Lost fans but they all find their roots within these distinct characteristics outlined above.

The Second Season of Breaking Bad: A Refresher

Cable shows have long periods of off air time and it’s difficult to jump back into the story. Enter The Refresher. So here is a run-through of the second season of Breaking Bad to keep you up to date and ready for the third season.

Tuco murders one of his men in front of Walt and Jesse. They fear he might kill them both so there are no witnesses. This looks to be the case when Hank [Hank is Walt’s brother-in-law and a DEA agent] informs Walt that Tuco’s man (the only other witness) is found dead and seemingly murdered by Tuco, who abducts them both soon after. Leaving off from the previous episode, Walt and Jesse are abducted by Tuco and taken to his father’s Theo, but escape death once Jesse shoots Tuco and DEA brother in law Hank shows up to finish him off in a shootout while Jesse and Walt watch unseen and escape. To explain away their absence and connection to Tuco, Walter is found naked in a grocery store pretending to be in a fugue state while Jesse pays a hooker to tell the DEA he was held up in a motel during the “Tuco debacle”.

Walt tries to reconnect with his family but his wife has grown suspicious that he is lying about having a secret second phone. Jesse, now without money, has no home, no friends willing to lend him money or let him crash with them, and no RV now that the impound demands payment. He steals the RV, drives it to Walt’s house to ask for money, they fight, and Walt gives him the money.

Jesse gets himself an apartment managed by a young woman who is into drawing, wearing black and named Jane and gathers his inept friends to form his group of drug dealers to take over for the now very dead Tuco and his place as the city’s main drug dealer. Everything goes well until a meth-head couple steals a stash from one the dealers Jesse has under his employ and Walt tells Jesse to “take care of them”. Meanwhile, Hank deals with his anxiety over the shootout with Tuco while keeping up his facade of awesomeness.

Gretchen meets with Skyler and finds that Walt has been saying that she has been paying for his medical care. Walt yells at her, but she still keeps his secret. Jesse goes to the thieving meth-heads, gun in hand to get his stolen stash back. He ends up taking care of their neglected kid while they try to open a stolen ATM machine. In the end, the girlfriend kills the boyfriend by crushing his head with the ATM machine and Jesse calls the cops and leaves with the kid on the front steps.

Walt and Jesse become the top drug dealers in town when Jesse gains a reputation after being rumoured to have crushed somebody’s head with an ATM machine. Hank doesn’t do well in his new position in El Paso fighting the drug cartel when his team blown up by a turtle/severed-head bomb.

One of Jesse’s underlings, Badger, is arrested for selling drugs, so Walt and Jesse hire a shady lawyer, Saul, to protect Badger, their interests, and ultimately keep Badger from naming them, or from revealing that the drug lord everyone knows as Heisenberg is really Walt.

After seeing an x-ray of his tumour that looks extremely bad, Walt decides he needs to cook enough meth to provide for his family before he dies and takes Jesse out to a desert in the middle of nowhere in their mobile-meth-mystery-machine for a four day meth cooking adventure. They make millions of dollars worth of meth and all goes well until they strand themselves in a dire situation after killing the RV battery and destroying their generator, and since Walt’s cover story was that he was visiting his mother, no one knows where they are. They survive by pulling a MacGyver to charge the battery, but when Walt returns to the doctor, he finds that he is in remission and going to survive.

Walter has a remission party with all his friends and family but is bitter about everything, and then goes crazy over house repair and scares some drug dealers. Jesse furthers his relationship with Jane.

Saul introduces Walt to a new buyer, the owner of a local fried chicken franchise. But he is reluctant to go into business with an addict like Jesse. Once Jesse’s friend is shot down by rival dealers, he copes by using some powerful drugs. Although he doesn’t want recovering addict Jane to join, she still does, but not before telling her all about his business and Walt. But when Walter is offered 1.2 million dollars for his entire drug supply, he has to go to the very sedated Jesse for the drug stash, missing his child’s birth in the process, yet ensuring her wellbeing.

Now that Walt has his money, he cannot spend it without raising suspicion, but Walt Jr. has created a website for donations to help Walt, which offers a perfect manner for him to launder money he has made through it. The problem is Jesse wants his cut but Walt won’t give it to him unless he goes to rehab. Meanwhile, Jane’s father finds out she’s using again. Jesse and Jane blackmail Walt into handing over Jesse’s cut, and even though he knows he’ll kill himself with it, he gives them the money. But he changes his mind and goes to Jesse’s place while he’s passed out from heroin along with Jane, and Walt watches as Jane chokes to death on her own vomit, which he allows to happen to save Jesse.

In the finale, Jesse awakes to find Jane dead, just as her father soon after. Jesse becomes self-destructive and hunkers down in a meth house, Walt finds him and talks him into going to rehab. Walt prepares for his surgery that will hopefully cure his cancer, but under the anaesthetic he reveals to Skyler that he did have a secret phone. Cut to months later, Walt is told that he is completely cured and able to take care of himself, which is good news to Skyler who decides to leave, now that he can take care of himself and knows of his deception. Jane’s father, who has become seriously aggrieved from his daughters passing, turns out to be a flight control operator. Grief stricken, he allows two planes to collide. The season ends with Walt watching as the debris from the planes crash all around him. Making it clear that in Walt’s quest to ensure his family’s financial security he has adversely affected the lives of so many people. Unintentional as it may have been, Walt contributed to the deaths of every person on those planes because of the choice he made not to save Jesse’s girlfriend while she was chocking on her own vomit and thereby distracting her father the flight control operator who guided two planes into one another. Good job Walt.

The First Season of Breaking Bad: A Refresher

The Emmy Award winning AMC drama is back with its third season. Undoubtedly, Breaking Bad is currently one of televisions greatest shows, but with such a short run with a second season only having a thirteen episode run (the first was even shorter), you may need a bit of a refresher before you start on the third. Be warned, this may not contain everything that happened in the first season of Breaking Bad but it does contain enough of the plot to ruin or *Spoil* it for anyone who has not seen it but wants to.


The plot of Breaking Bad surrounds a high school chemistry teacher dying from lung cancer who decides to break from society’s rules and begins make the best of his impending death by cooking crystal Meth with a failed student, Jesse. With a wife getting ready to have their second child and their son disabled with MS, Walt has many responsibilities and has so far in life been able to keep a mediocre level control. Upon learning of his cancer Walt ponders his options, not wanting to be a burden on his family he at first doesn’t tell them about his cancer in hopes that he will be able to take full advantage of the finite amount of time in which he can cook crystal meth and make enough money to take care of his family after he is gone. This twisted version of the American Dream, carving out his own path in the world gaining power and money, and prestige, Walt now in his mid 50’s, is able to do what most people really want… take the things that the law and social ritual deem wrong. What is the point of following the law of the land if you are only going to be living there for short amount of time and will never feel the repercussions of your actions? That’s the taste Breaking Bad leaves in your mouth a kind of misanthropic version of the American Dream, where the means to bring you to your goal are inconsequential since the consequences have no hold over you. Partnering up with Jesse allows Walt to acquire the connection to the subculture of his surrounding city, with his unmatched ability to cook crystal meth Walt’s product is soon sot after by anyone with a pipe and a taste for meth. The strange student teacher relationship that forms between the two is the driving force of the show it has allowed for some of the more exiting dialogue. Walt scolding Jesse for being the crack smoking whore banging screw-up, that he is, is almost always accompanied by a failure on Walt’s part to execute one of his well thought out yet poorly executed plans.

The path to actually making money through cooking Meth turns out to be full of unexpected speed bumps such as the loss of their cookery on wheels, Jesse’s RV. The repercussions of using chemical weapons on murderous drug dealers, its funny how a little bit of mustard gas can save the day but ruin your week. After a drug deal gone wrong Walt is forced to improvise and gases his would be killers with some homemade mustard gas. The only thing is, he didn’t kill all of the drug deals within that one yellowish plum of smoke; which eventually leads to an uncomfortable conversation between Jesse and Walt, where Walt simply tells Jesse to “take care of it.” This is not the best thing to put on an individual such as Jesse, who is unreliable at the best of times. In the end Walt has to man up and chokes the dealer with a bicycle lock. This takes Walter farther down the Rabbit Hole than he ever intended to go, but what’s done is done and if anything the killing of this low level drug dealer only served to solidify Walt’s resolve to finish what he started and what is needed to take care of his family.

After Jesse failed to go through with killing the gassed then captured drug dealer, Walt left him with the disposal of the body. Walt, ever the innovator decides to pull off the “in the movies” special, of dissolving the body in acid. But the instructions prove to be too difficult for the often high Jesse and instead of dissolving the body in a specific type of rubber container, Jesse just puts the body in his house’s tub adds acid then stirs. This proves to be an unfortunate choice for the young burnout, the acid eats away the body but the tub as well… then the floor… and eventually the ceiling beneath that. That is not the end of Jesse’s problems in the first season.

Throughout season one, the duo find themselves out of their league and barely scraping by. During this painful start the two go through the different ways one can make and distribute their product. The idea of smurfs is introduced to Walt as a means of procuring cold medicine the main ingredient when making street quality Meth. Smurfs are low level associates of Meth cookers who go around to different pharmacies and buy the maxim amount of cold medicine allowed per customer, which are usually 2-3 packs. This inefficient means of receiving one of the harder to come by chemicals needed to make Meth leads to Walt and Jesse’s great heist. This is where they break into a facility that stores a large quantity of the industrial grade version of the same chemical. Using some chemistry club knowhow Walt uses a high temperature burning substance to melt through the reinforced door of the facility. But that is where things start to break down, it turns out that, indeed this is a facility where the needed chemical is held, but it only comes in 20 gallon steel barrels. Too heavy to be moved without a dolly, the two decide to carry it out to the amusement of DEA agents who eventually see the surveillance video of the caper, adding “why didn’t they just roll it out, it’s a barrel!”

In order to distribute more Meth Jesse puts out his feelers in hopes of landing a big Meth dealer and winds up with Tuco. Tuco: the head of the Mexican cartel Meth ring for the city they are in; likes to snort Meth off of his novelty sized Bowie Knife and brutally beat up people. While trying to sell Meth to Tuco, Jesse gets beaten so badly that he actually ends up in the hospital. This sends Walt into protective Teacher/Father mode and it couldn’t have come at a better time. Walt had only started to feel the effects of chemotherapy that his family (his wife) insisted he receive after she realized that he had been hiding his illness from her and the rest of Walt’s closest people. With clumps of hair falling from Walt’s head and a looming encounter with Tuco in the near feature, Walt shaves what is left of his hair off and begins to strategize. Walt needs Tuco to distribute his Meth but he also needs him to not beat the crap out of him. So, knowing Tuco’s propensity to test the Meth he is purchasing by crushing it with the butt of his Crocodile Dundee replica knife, Walter whips up a batch of explosives crystals… that look just like Meth. On his own, Walter goes to meet with Tuco. All does not go as planed, but Walter does get to blow some shit up and earns the respect of Tuco in the process. With all of their base chemical ingredients in good standing and a wholesale buyer lined up, namely Tuco, Walt and Jesse begin to cook what eventually becomes known on the street as The Blue Bomb. And that is where season one ends, Walt and Jesse selling a large quantity of Meth to Tuco in a junkyard and watching him suddenly beat to death one of his men.