The A.V. Club - TV Club

TV: Shameless: “Can I Have A Mother”

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 21:00:00 -0600

The word “uneven” gets tossed around a lot in episodic television criticism. I use it quite a bit myself, so I’m partially to blame for overusing it in a way that sort of robs it of its meaning. So apologies in advance for saying, man alive, what an uneven season of Shameless this is shaping up to me. Honestly, what better adjective can describe a season of television that careens so wildly from nearly great to totally inessential? I really dug "Father's Day," and I was hoping for some continued momentum. But "Can I Have A Mother" represents ...

TV: Once Upon A Time: “Skin Deep”

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 21:00:00 -0600

zOnce Upon A Time does “Beauty And The Beast” with “Skin Deep, casting Rumpelstiltskin as the monster that steals Belle’s heart. Lost’s Emilie de Ravin guest stars as Belle, who is no longer the nerdy daughter of an inventor, just a straight-up princess. OUAT’s Belle might wear the same clothes, but without her humble beginnings, she’s a much less interesting character. In order to protect her village during the Ogre Wars, Belle agrees to be the caretaker of Rumpelstiltskin’s estate, taking the opportunity to show bravery after a life of inaction. While trying to open ...

TV: The Walking Dead: “Nebraska”

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 21:00:00 -0600

It’s hard to get thrilling drama out of grief. Sadness saps energy, mutes passion, and forces character dynamics into a noose. Every scene has to acknowledge the emotion in some way, every conversation has to center around the loss, and the ache, and the person who will never come back, and while that’s powerful stuff, and universal, it’s not particularly fun to watch. Death in fiction can serve any number of ends, but mourning only really serves one, as it forces everyone to take a long hard look at their own lives, and remember that some day ...

TV: Luck: “Episode Three”

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 21:00:00 -0600

Three episodes in, I’m most surprised that Luck is as formulaic as it is. Keep in mind that I’m not saying this is a bad thing. One of the pleasures of TV is the way that the medium uses formulas and expectations to create situations where it can surprise the audience or please us with seeing certain things we want to see happen occur. But Luck is doing something very interesting with its ideas of formula: It’s blending what is, essentially, an episode-by-episode formula with the larger HBO ideal of creating a sort of novel for television ...

TV: The Critic: “A Day At The Races And A Night At The Opera”

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 14:00:00 -0600

“A Day At The Races And A Night At The Opera” (season 1, episode 11; originally aired 07/06/1994) It still seems a little surreal that ABC once paired the short-lived but beloved likes of The Critic and The Dana Carvey Showwith the ratings juggernaut that was Home Improvement. The Dana Carvey Show famously alienated much of its potential audience by opening with a Louis C.K-written sketch in which a triumphant Bill Clinton, convinced that nothing, but nothing, could stop his inevitable march to electoral victory in 1996, publicly breast-feeds puppies (and then kittens) from his ...

TV: Saturday Night Live: “Zooey Deschanel/Karmin”

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 12:00:00 -0600

I cannot, in good conscience, give an A grade to a show that allowed those Karmin performances to happen on live national television. But otherwise, that was a relatively strong episode of Saturday Night Live, mostly devoid of the silly material I thought Zooey Deschanel would engender (they pretty much crammed all of that into one sketch). In fact, Zooey was not really a major player and really only made an impression a couple of times, which surprised me, but this episode had a lot of other strengths. The best thing about it was that it moved a little faster ...

TV: Other Shows: Comic Book Men

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 10:00:00 -0600

Comic Book Men debuts tonight on AMC at 10 p.m. Eastern. Comic Book Men is a weird hybrid of a bunch of stuff. It never quite works as its own entity, even though most of the parts making it up are enjoyable in the moment. It exists, by and large, because AMC needs to figure out a way to keep the sizable Walking Dead audience watching AMC, and the network has yet to decide how it wants to follow up the huge success of the zombie show. (To this day, it continues to hedge its bets on which pilots ...

TV: Cowboy Bebop: “Brain Scratch”

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 14:00:00 -0600

In “Brain Scratch,” writer Keiko Nobumoto delivers a thoughtful episode that’s expressly about the mystery of the week’s protagonist. This is refreshing because for once, a disposable character doesn’t just serve as a foil for Spike or one of the other members of the Bebop’s crew. Londes is the leader of Scratch, a cyber-cult that encourages members to leave their bodies behind and find inner peace by becoming pure digital information. Londes is an enigmatic figurehead that indirectly evokes the Aum Shinrikyo cult that came to world prominence in 1995 after the now-infamous Tokyo Sarin Gas ...

TV: The Twilight Zone: “King Nine Will Not Return”/“The Man In The Bottle”

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 12:00:00 -0600

“King Nine Will Not Return” (season 2, episode 1; originally aired 9/30/1960) In which the past can take us to strange places… In 1959, while looking for oil in the Libyan desert, a team of British geologists discovered the wreck of the Lady Be Good, an American bomber that had disappeared in 1943. While the plane had split into two pieces, it was largely intact, except for one glaring absence: there was no crew. The bodies were eventually discovered the following year, but for The Twilight Zone, that didn’t matter. Rod Serling saw the story of the ...

TV: Grimm: “Tarantella”

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 23:55:00 -0600

Well, so much for consistency. I knew Grimm would take a bit of a dive after a series-best episode last week, and I knew better than to expect some forward development on the plot, but shows like this tend to operate on the assumption that after a handful of standalone plots, somewhere in the episode order is a very serialized one that moves the story along. Right now Grimm doesn’t do that, and even a pretty cool case-of-the-week didn’t abate my questions this week. Angel’s Amy Acker gets a guest turn in Portland as a Spinnetod, a ...

TV: Supernatural: "Professor Pennywhistle's Magical Menagerie"

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:45:00 -0600

It is my sad duty to announce to regular visitors to this corner of The A.V. Club that Zack Handlen will no longer be reviewing Supernatural. Zack was expected to be back here this week, but after several reports of strange noises coming from the empty room behind the waste disposal area. he went to investigate and... vanished... mysteriously. (Cut to office janitor, played by Mark Pellegrino, turning to the camera and smiling ominously.) There are some who believe that Zack fed himself into one of the shredders after he saw the title of this week's episode, which ...

TV: Spartacus: “The Greater Good”

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:00:00 -0600

Trying to convince people that Spartacus is more than just sex and violence is like trying to convince people that Cougar Town isn’t a show about Courteney Cox boinking twenty-something himbos. Making the argument that neither is the case is noble, but usually futile. Oh well. Their loss. “The Greater Good” is a great, succinct summation of what makes Spartacus so addictive. There’s a clarity of purpose at work in this episode, one slightly lacking in the first two installments of the season. Those two haven’t been bad episodes by any stretch, but they were essentially laying ...

TV: The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret: “Conclusion”

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:00:00 -0600

In a few months, when this second season of The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret inevitably joins the first on Netflix Watch Instantly, sitting there with many other short-lived series in the expanding digital vault, I can’t imagine a lot of people are going to take notice. David Cross’ standup work isn’t just hilarious, it’s important, and I’d consider his first two albums landmarks (Shut Up, You Fucking Baby! and It’s Not Funny). His role as Tobias Fünke on Arrested Development is similarly iconic for being a bizarre and ridiculous performance, and Mr ...

TV: Portlandia: “Cat Nap”

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 21:30:00 -0600

I'm a little self-conscious reviewing this, my least favorite episode so far of season two, because I feel if I had personal experience with some of the things being spoofed here (read: if I was both cooler and had fewer Y chromosomes than I do) I would have a better impression of "Cat Nap" as a whole. So, if you usually take that letter grade up there with a few pinches of salt, feel free to dump out a whole cellar. Because as good as Miranda July is in the cold open about the shop with nothing to sell ...

TV: Fringe: “Welcome To Westfield”

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 21:00:00 -0600

For the second time in this recent run of episodes, Fringe opens with a dream sequence in which Peter and Olivia are enjoying an easy, sensual romantic connection—only this time it’s Olivia’s dream, not Peter’s. And that’s not the last time in “Welcome To Westfield” that Amberlivia will have the memories and emotions of Ourlivia overcome her. Later, she’ll remember a case that she never actually worked on with Peter, and at the end of the episode Peter will come over to her apartment, where she’ll have ordered from Damiano’s—the usual ...

TV: Late-night round-up: Late Night With Jimmy Fallon - Week of Feb. 6

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 18:00:00 -0600

When Conan O’Brien was preparing his eponymous TBS talk show, he spoke to the press about how excited he was to have the freedom to do whatever he wanted. Coming off his live tour and his unceremonious firing from NBC, this was going to be his chance for a big reinvention. It turned out, though, that all he really wanted to do was exactly what he used to do on Late Night, just a little earlier. Conan was still a talk show—monologue, sketch, interviews, musical guest, stay tuned for Lopez Tonight. The talk-show format claimed another victory in ...

TV: Other Shows: Lilyhammer

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 16:00:00 -0600

The first season of Lilyhammer is now available for streaming on Netflix. Of all the original regular cast members on The Sopranos, nobody's act got thinner, faster, than Steve Van Zandt's. In the show's early days, Van Zandt's bantamweight intensity, antsy mannerisms, and baleful glower made for a strong contrast to James Gandolfini's solid, watchful authority. But by the time The Sopranos pulled into the station for the 86th and final time, I'd begun to shudder a little every time he lurched onscreen, preceded, like a medieval herald, by his lower lip. It didn ...

TV: The Adventures Of Pete And Pete: “Yellow Fever”

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:00:00 -0600

“Yellow Fever” (season 2, episode 12; originally aired 11/27/1994) Fresh off the heartbreak that is “Farewell My Little Viking,” Pete fans have been dealt yet another powerhouse episode, “Yellow Fever.” Starring Big Pete, his friends and classmates, and Damian Young as the always insanely insane Bus Driver Stu, the episode takes place almost entirely inside one giant instrument of doom: a yellow school bus. Pete’s class is taking a trip to the Glurk County Milk Museum located apparently hours away from school. This comes after other successful field trips to the Sioux City Moth Hatchery, the Triple ...

TV: Other Shows: Mudcats

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 03:00:00 -0600

There are few things it’s worth braving the early August mid-afternoon heat for in Mississippi, but in the summer of 2010, I found one: A live tutorial on catfish noodling. A visit to my parents’ home in Jackson happened to coincide with the Mississippi Outdoor Show, where expert handfisher Jason Reynolds demonstrated his craft in front of an audience of bored-looking adults fanning themselves with maps of the fairgrounds and small children eager to see the monster fish dragged out by their jaws. Reynolds explained the difference between a flathead and a blue catfish in terms of the severity ...

TV: Unsupervised: “Fires & Liars”

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 23:45:00 -0600

Well, I can see why we only got the first three episodes to preview. I don’t think I laughed once during “Fires And Liars,” despite several jokes about homeless people getting up to their hilarious homeless antics. We visit two new locations, and both are so uneventful you can see the script padding itself. We meet a handful of new people, all uniformly lifeless. And the narrative is so slack that everyone trips over it on their way to the obvious climax. Better shows than this have had weaker early outings, and this is the first real warning sign ...