Lost Girl - Fae Day: Judge, Jury & Succubus

Some day soon, I'm going to have a non Lost Girl post on this site again, but until then, go to Heroes and Heartbreakers for my detailed recap on the latest episode Fae Day. Bean sidhes and goblins and trials - oh, my!

See a sneak peak of the episode below, which thankfully includes some hot wolf this time...not that that's a deal breaker on anything - but it helps!

Linked Up – What’s Alan Watching

Welcome to the Linked Up feature of the week, also know as the I-read-too-many-blogs-let-me-tell-you-about-them segment. (Wow. I'm actually maintaining a segment here two weeks running! Sometimes I amaze even myself.)

Every single weekday, I read What's Alan Watching?, the daily television blog of Alan Sepinwall, television critic for The Star Ledger.

I like to talk about television (you may have noticed) almost as much as I like to talk about movies. Only last night I bent the ear of a coworker at a cocktail party for 20+ minutes going on about LOST, Justified, Keen Eddie, Human Target, and Community. My young, disappointed aspirations for Hollywood dominance have become an inferior Sailieri-like recognition of dramatic/comedic genius (or things appropriating that) and its lack. I like what I like and I like to talk about it and convince other people to like it too.

Alan Sepinwall like a lot of what I like, but he talks about oh so much better than I. I try a lot of programs I might not have thanks to Alan (lately Justified. No, I cannot stop talking about it. Really.) We're of the same age or thereabouts, so we have many of the same childhood reference points and more times than not, I know exactly what he's referring to. I don't like everything he proposes – I will never understand the worship he and other critics have for The Wire and I have no desire to join the Breaking Bad fan wagon – but it's easy to skip those reviews.

More than just a recap of an episode or a thumbs up/thumbs down review, Alan goes into the mythos of a show and discuss the characterizations, implications, themes, and performances of the shows he has in regular rotation. What shows are these? Mad Men, Justified, Burn Notice, White Collar, In Plain Sight, Community, Cougar Town, Modern Family, Chuck, How I Met Your Mother, Parks and Recreation, 30 Rock, Human Target, LOST, and others. Each summer he takes a season of a show on DVD that he likes/love but never reviewed before and gives it the Sepinwall review treatment episode by episode. My favorite of these was the Sports Night summer because from its very beginning, I have had a deep and abiding love for Sports Night.

Having been in the television critic business his entire career, Alan is also tapped into the industry. This means he has more than a bead on what's going on and often gets interviews with major showrunners (like those of LOST and Chuck) as well as up to the minute info of what's happening in the "biz". I like this too because I'm nosy and like to know as much as I can about the things I like. Plus, it gives great background to the shows and makes my appreciation of them even greater. Alan was also a major contributor to saving my beloved Chuck, using his column and blog to give public, detailed support to this fantastic show.

It's fitting I mention his blog now because it has recently changed homes and is now part of the HitFlix.com family. I have a feeling I'm going to have to start looking at HitFlix more regularly as this is the second reviewer I mesh with who's relocated there (the first was Moriarty i.e. Drew McWeeny once of AintitCoolNews.com, now part of HitFlix). As he's in new digs, Alan's introducing himself to new readers, so this is a great time to become one and get the skinny from him at the outset.

I don't always agree with him but I almost always check out what he recommends. For informed, intelligent (imagine that!), and appreciative commentary of the best TV has to offer today (and some of the worst), check out What's Alan Watching.

Disclaimer: I received absolutely no incentive for this review besides the juvenile joy I get laughing over the share enjoyment of a well-delivered line reading. Actually, that happens a lot.

Appointment Television: Justified

Recently, during a stimulated conversation over drinks after work, a co-worker genially called me a television snob. I own up to it without compunction. I prefer television with high concepts, good writing, and stellar performances. I don't like tricks or clichés or very special episodes or pandering. I like something that's going to challenge me, that expects me to get the joke regardless of its reference points, that uses adult words and responses to potentially real situations or at least real to the world the show inhabits.

This doesn't mean that I don't adore "stupid" T.V. I usually get hooked into genre shows that may not appear at first glance to fit my snobbish preferences. And I like silly stuff too – you can never have enough of the silly in your life. But even that which might seem marginalized or ridiculous usually has more at its core than what might be seen in its pitch. Like Buffy or pretty much anything written by Joss Whedon. Or Burn Notice – smart, clever, and fun with things that go boom. Or Chuck – smart, clever, very funny, often silly, occasionally outrageous, and utterly geektastic.

Justified is not silly, or marginalized, or even remotely ridiculous. It is, however, absolutely fantastic.

Justified follows U.S. Deputy Marshal Raylan Givens. Raylan is of the shot to-kill-school of fugitive retention, though he will give fair warning before he does so. In the pilot episode, Raylan has given a known Bad Guy 24 hours to clear out of Miami, where Raylan is stationed, or he, Raylan, will kill him, Bad Guy. Of course said Bad Guy doesn't go anywhere and Raylan confronts him pool-side of a swanky Miami hotel. Faster on the drawn, Raylan kills Bad Guy, a justified shoot as Bad Guy drew first. Still, the Marshals are less than happy with Raylan and transfer him to the Lexington, KY office, essentially, Raylan's hometown.

Played by Timothy Olyphant (late of Deadwood), Raylan is quiet, intense, restrained, accomplished, pretty hot, incredibly angry, and quite simply, not messing around. With Raylan's return to Kentucky, a can of riotous familial worms blows open and each episode unveils another tidbit of his fascinating back story from digging coal in the hills with a white supremacist former friend to his con man ex-con daddy still playing the grift even against Raylan himself.

My critique partner and I have decided that like his Daddy, Raylan runs his own con on the criminals he captures, spinning the long monologues he uses to convince them to give up their guns or get ready to die to con them into doing what he wants, and sometimes that's not to give up their guns so he can shoot them. My brilliant CP is working on an article on that very theme, so I'm not going to belabor the point but will let her do the heavy lifting and link to her article when it's done. I will say this kind of examination of the program happens because it is so smartly written and so complex.

Justified is based on a short story by Elmore Leonard called Fire in the Hole. Dramatizations of Leonard's work seem to be hit and miss (Out of Sight versus Get Shorty). I really enjoyed Out of Sight and was very fond of the short-lived Karen Sisco series that sprang from that movie but could never be tempted by any of the others. I recently read an interview with Leonard where he said how he's never liked the films made from his books. Justified is the rare one to arrive with his blessing (he's also a producer on the show) possibly because there are times when the show clearly lifts and/or mimics his dialogue and style. His characters are quirky and his bad guys get nearly equal screen time even without Raylan's presence. In this way, it's black, villainous humor like a better Pulp Fiction at times, which makes sense since Tarantino cites Leonard as a clear influence for that movie. This correlation came full circle as the mob hit men from one recent episode are discussing Pulp Fiction during a stakeout. My brain actually turned inside out turning that back on itself two or three times (Leonard to Pulp Fiction to Justified to Pulp Fiction to Leonard…stop the madness!!!)

But it's Raylan who's the draw. As the sixth episode airs tonight, Raylan has taken up with a woman who shot her abusive husband in the pilot. Now he's trying to keep the hillbilly, white supremacist, ex-con filled, bat-crazy family of the dead husband from killing them both, has bailed his father out of jail only to learn the old man conned him from the start so now he wants to get daddy dearest back behind bars, and has justifiably gunned down 1, 2, 3, 4 - a whole bunch of bad guys, which the FBI does not like. They're sort of investigating him. Oh, did I mention his ex-wife works in the courthouse? Yep, coming home is working out just fine for Raylan Givens.

The writing is clever (and we know how I like the clever, people), sometimes raw (flexing those loose basic cable language muscles, though not gratuitously), salacious, quick, and very funny. As the episodes proceed and explore ever deeper the mythos of the series and the history and conflicts of the characters, raising the emotional stakes every week, Justified gets sharper, funnier, impactful, and more must see with each passing week.

Justified is on the FX network on Tuesdays at 10 PM EST and is usually rated MA for mature audiences due to language, violence, and sexual content.

Disclaimer (because I don't want Raylan to show up and shoot me): I received no incentive to write this review other than an inability to delete the show permanently from my DVR if only to see Raylan's hospital confrontation with his daddy one more time.

Reality Bravo Style

Last month I made a hard push through a very late night to complete my first contest entry. This involved cutting 5 pages from a chapter and 3 from the (newly written) synopsis to fit everything into the contest's requirements. I'm a night owl so when I say it was a late night, you can believe it was a doozy. I knew I was in trouble when the birds started to wake up and I was still at my laptop working. That weekend, I attended an all-day writing seminar that left me with a fantastic tool for editing and forming structure and a horrible sense that every word I've written so far is total crap. Ever since then, I've been struggling to generate word count on the WIP. It'll happen eventually (probably) mostly because it pokes and prods at me incessantly and I have to let these people out of my head or else surrender to the insanity once and for all, but for right now: blah.

The contest entry experience did help to hammer out broad plot strokes and some smaller character moments and in the ensuing two weeks, other excellent ideas on both have furrowed through my cloudy brain. But even trying to push through to complete the rough draft by opening new Word files for a "fresh" page has left me frustrated and pissy. My roadblocks appear firmly entrenched for the moment.

In the meantime, I've been fixated on the adverts for Miami Social, Bravo's newest exploitation of the rich and shameless. Amidst early morning reruns of my beloved West Wing, I'm inundated with previews for every bleeping Bravo reality show under the sun from NY Prep and The Fashion Show (really? another fashion show? sigh) to the endless incarnations of the Jersey housewives reunion show. And now the social elite of Miami joins the fold.

Talk about market saturation.

I don't do reality shows. I've never seen The Amazing Race, The Apprentice, The Bachelor, or his rejects on The Bachelorette. I watched a Survivor episode once - Come on! It was Australia! - and have seen, I think, an hour of American Idol, one I greatly wish returned. I've got enough reality in my life; I don't need to watch television for some bastardized idea of it.

So a show like Miami Social would usually barely blip on my radar except for one eensy weensy thing: The Voice.

One of the men on this show has this incredible voice, deep and plummy, nearly tactile in its seductive qualities. Sure he seems to always be in a suit, in Miami (poor dear), and while Michael Westen can pull this off in Burn Notice, I have my doubts about anyone else evincing such effortless aplomb. Thus I'm left with a Thurston Howell-on-the-lido-deck vibe that could be eminently snarkable but is completely canceled out by The Voice. Whenever I hear that voice, this frisson of pleasure literally streaks up my spine. I'm watching the commercials on my DVRd shows just to hear it; it's almost enough for me to break my reality-show- boycotting streak. Almost.

The guy's voice is potent is all I'm saying. He could likely wear a bag over his attractive head and still talk me into just about anything as long as he just kept talking. It's akin to my visceral response to Captain Jack Sparrow's wicked reply when accused of threatening Miss Swan:

Only a little.

Oh yes, please.

And if that can't stimulate my muse (the fickle wench), I'm in serious trouble.

Appointment Television - Chuck and Burn Notice

I'm a little behind the ball on the return of Burn Notice to the schedule this January. Really, it's just the remaining episodes from the summer rotation split, a la BSG, into two sections to stretch throughout the calendar year. But I have no complaints when such scheduling shenanigans result in more hot spy stuff.

Burn Notice chronicles the continuing quest for defrocked spy Michael Weston (Jeffrey Donovan) to uncover who "burned" him, i.e. fired with extreme prejudice, effectively re-writing his life in a single instant. Now he's stuck in his hometown of Miami where he performs A-team like rescues for underdogs with no one else to turn to. Fortunately, he does so in a classic Dodge Charger and not a souped up black and red van. And his team has more spunk with ex-girlfriend and former IRA terrorist Fiona (Gabrielle Anwar) and ex-CIA best friend Sam (the delectable Bruce Campbell) lending their expertise while bickering through every job. There's also his mom, Madeline (Sharon Glesss), who smokes incessantly, drags Michael to therapy (a spy in therapy - think of it), calls him from a spy set up to change a light bulb, ropes him into "helping out a friend", and regularly provides a safe house for whomever Michael is protecting at the moment.

In the first season, either Sam or Madeline would bring a potential client to Michael who were either friends or old buddies in need. Michael would reluctantly get involved, mostly because he needed to earn a living while uncovering who was trying to erase/control him. But now in the second season, Michael rarely even quibbles and in fact is ready to help from the start. This evolution of character is part of what makes it such a good show and what makes Jeffrey Donovan so good of an actor that the audience believe both the recalcitrant Michael and the accommodating Michael as the same man without him loosing any points off his suave bad ass edge.

As Michael is weekly swept up into a new A-plot, he explains various spy techniques for rigging home made bombs, or defrauding bad guys, or blowing up his own car to escape an assassin, usually accomplished with whatever materials are around him or that can be found in a local hardware store. (The producers insist that they always keep back a crucial ingredient so that no one could actually make an explosive from what they see on the show. That's what the Internet is for, right?)

It's like Macgyver on speed. With guns. And cool explosions. And fabulous snarky dialogue. And an intriguing mythology.

Did I mention Bruce Campbell?

For a good, fun, exciting, intriguing, entertaining ride, tune into Burn Notice.

In the same spy category but world's away from Michael Weston's smooth successes is Chuck. Another keeper for me, this show is finally finding its solid legs in the middle of its second season. I've been hooked from the start, but can see the show's rhythm finally becoming consistent and reliable as it heads towards the final season two stretch. Cut short by last year's writers strike, the show elected not to come back on the schedule until fall 2008, setting itself up for a reboot.

Here's the gist: Once an up-and-coming computer whiz kid at Stamford, Chuck was set up for cheating by his roommate and was summarily expelled. He now works with his childhood friend Morgan (Joshua Gomez) at the Buy More (a Best Buy-like electronics store) as part of the Nerd Herd (read Geek Squad) and shares an apartment with his sister Ellie (Sarah Lancaster, lately of the beloved Everwood) and her fiancee, the aptly named Captain Awesome (Ryan McPartlin who did such an incredible job as an a-hole on Mad Men that I didn't even realize it was the same guy). Alls boring day in and day out for Chuck until that same former roommate - now a CIA spy - sends a classified database called The Intersect that's full of - well - spy stuff - to Chuck via an e-mail that downloads the information directly into Chuck's brain.

Stay with me.

Now Chuck lives his days at the Buy More amongst his fellow geeks and his nights (and lunch hours) fumbling around the spy world hither and thither with his subconsciously accessed database to quell the Big Bad every week. He has two handlers - Casey, (the fantabulous Adam Baldwin [no relation]) representing the military and CIA spy Sarah (Yvonne Strahovski) - who do most of the heavy spy lifting and are meant to protect Chuck and The Intersect - and rarely in that order. Casey stays close by as a neighbor and co-worker, Sarah poses incongruously as Chuck's girlfriend - a true pairing of Beauty and the Geek. Chuck himself doesn't really belong in either world and when not indulging his inner 007 or running for his life, he's trying to figure out just where he does fit - and with who.

What makes this show great? Oh, how about everything. Let's start with the Short Skirt and Long Jacket theme song by Cake, to which I do the great spy dance every week. Then there's Adam Baldwin's pitch perfect deadpan deliveries, the totally awesome 80s homages that pop up in every episode if you know to look for them, Yvonne Strahovski kicking butt in nearly every episode (she's no Sidney Bristow, but that's not really a mark against her). Or is it the clear Die Hard hero worship that creators/producers/writers Josh Swartz and Chris Fedak float through every episode, the sometimes disgusting but always hysterical antics of the Buy More minions, or the multiple ways Chuck has saved the day either with some last-minute geektastic knowledge or just by finally being himself. Which is really how we like him best.

If you have fond memories of Gotcha then Chuck is the show for you. Go ahead.

Indulge your inner spy.


Burn Notice fires up Thursday nights at 10pm on the USA channel.
Get out of the car with Chuck on NBC (channel 4 ET) Monday nights at 8pm.

Appointment Television - The Return of Lost.

There's plenty of stuff going around that you'd have to be living in cave to miss the fact that the show LOST premieres its fifth season tonight. This is a show that sucks you in and keeps you. Even through the dodgy second season and other mid-season hiccups and unlike the betrayal of pale imitations (I'm talking about you Heroes) that go completely off the rails, LOST so solidly juggles convoluted plots and multiple story lines and characters with compelling writing and chilling performances that it only keeps getting better. Poignant, dramatic, scary, mind-boggling, adventurous, and romantic, in five years I've rarely been disappointed (see mid-season hiccups above). And this penultimate fifth season is set to blow the doors off everything that's come before.

I confess, I am Very. Excited.

The fact that there's an end date to the series has opened up the opportunity for the show's writers and producers to buckle down and answer all their faithful viewers questions and dangling plot points. Also, per Entertainment Weekly, Sawyer will be much more in play this year.

As if I needed even more of a reason to watch.

It begins tonight with what I've heard is two shockingly revealing episodes, the first focusing on the Losties still on the island in 2004 and the second dealing with the Oceanic Six, the only characters to leave the island who are now existing in 2007 - and some of whom are desperate to return to the island. If only they can find it.

Ooooooooo.



I, for one, plan to hustle my mother out of choir rehearsal tonight so that I can plant my fanny in front of the screen for the nearly uninterrupted duration. (Who am I kidding? There will be endless interruptions. Go DVR!)

The fact that Sawyer is shirtless for nearly the entire first hour has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with it.

A-hem.

All will begin to be revealed tonight 9 - 11 pm on ABC (local channel 7).

Oh my giddy freaking aunt.

Appointment Television - FNL and BSG

Tonight marks the premieres of two of the best shows on TV: Friday Night Lights and Battlestar Galactica.

Friday Night Lights IS the best show on television. Yes, its second season fell off the wagon a bit, but that first glorious season is as near to perfect television as it gets. The continuing story of the Texas-based Dillon Panthers high school football team and the lives that revolve around it is so much more than just about football. Anchored by the mesmerizing and as yet cruelly unawarded performances by Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton as Eric and Tammy Taylor (otherwise known as Coach and Mrs. Coach), it is an entrancing, enriching, funny, and at times achingly heartbreaking show about small town life and big time dreams.

FNLs third season debuts tonight at 9 pm on NBC (channel 4) after completing its full and exclusive run this week on DirecTV's channel 101. I wasn't fazed when it was announced that DirecTV would have exclusive fall rights to FNL in return for sharing production costs as I had DirecTV in my Weehawken apartment. I became slightly less sanguine about it when the trees sheltering my new apartment prohibited the installation of DirecTV, but it was this arrangement or no FNL at all, so I sucked it up and waited the delay out.

The news from the DirecTV front is that FNL is fully back in the awesome saddle. Do yourself a favor. Make your peace with the jumpy camera work, dive into the rare and phenomenally executed organic filming process (multiple cameras floating around the scene so the actors have to be fully "on" all the time. Such. Good. Work.), and discover the glory of Friday Night Lights.

Clear Eyes. Full Hearts. Can't Lose.

A world away in content and yet neck in neck for quality is Battlestar Galactica. I adored the original version of this program that ran from 1978-1979 and for awhile (and to my mother's horror) insisted that any girl children my future might hold would be named Cassiopeia Athena. I remember Jane Seymour's short-lived role as Apollo's wife Serina before I ever knew who she was. When she was killed off, my mother commented that it was probably because she cost too much.

That lovingly time-capsuled show is highly outclassed by the reincarnated masterpiece that showrunner Ron Moore has created in today's BSG.

At its core are the career performances of Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnell who are mind-blowingly fantastic as the admiral of the ragtag fleet and the president of the surviving colonists respectively. It's a master class of acting every week surrounded by a show that is never simply science fiction. The Star-Ledger's television critic Alan Sepinwall puts it thus:

"What I've always admired about "Galactica" is the way that it goes back to the roots of science-fiction. We've grown accustomed to the "Star Wars" model of sci-fi, where we want adventure stories with space battles, and robots and aliens, and time travel. "Galactica" has all of that - the outerspace dogfights, when they still do them, are as thrilling as you'll find, especially given the modest basic cable budget - but at its heart, it's using all the familiar sci-fi tropes to tell stories about people, who we are now and how we might react to a fantastic situation.

The series began as an allegory for 9/11, and over the years, it's been able to tell stories about Iraq, and religious fundamentalism, and abuse of power - all dressed up in sci-fi drag, to make the subjects more palatable, and to remove enough present-day context that it might make you question your own beliefs. It's one thing to be horrified by insurgent suicide bombers, but what if you're watching a show where the characters you root for have been placed in a situation (as they were a few seasons ago) where they're the insurgency?

And regardless of politics, what makes "Galactica" so gripping is its emphasis on character over hardware. The explosions and the killer robots are cool, but they don't stack up to seeing fully-drawn people - brought to life by a great writing staff led by producer Ron Moore and an astonishing cast led by Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnell - grapple with these life-or-death, genocide-level decisions." (See Alan's complete review here.)

Sure there have been missteps along the way, episodes not as up to par as others and characters that I happily would have thrown out of the airlock. And while I was horrified when it was announced that the producers had made Starbuck a woman (in the classic version of the series, Dirk Benedict played Starbuck pre-A-team), I wound up really liking what they did with that dynamic even as I increasingly hated the character (Shut UP Starbuck!)

On a whole, this show cannot be beat and has only grown more apropos and eerily allegorical to the world around us with each passing week.

Over this past summer as the first half of season 4 rolled out, my moving madness prohibited me from working my way through the DVRs saved episodes. Plus I was fed up with Starbuck's whining and screaming (i cheered when she blew up in the fighter and then they had to bring her back. Pooh.) I always figured I'd get settled in the new place and have myself a BSG marathon, but that was before the above mentioned DirecTV installation disappointment when my saved episodes went the way of the dodo with an assist from the UPS guy. Thankfully, the SciFi Channel is running a marathon today of all season 4 part 1 episodes and my new DVR is memory cleansed and ready to go (frankly, it's the first time I've seen the DVR memory at under 50% since I moved in.)

Tonight's season 4 part 2 premiere at 10 pm on the SciFi Channel (check local listings) is the final one for this series as the saga winds its way through the final 10 episodes to a conclusion that will no doubt showcase some of the best drama and performances ever.

I Can't Wait.