Tag: FOX

Save Yourself From The Exorcist

Ok let’s go on The Exorcist. I own the movie and wasn’t that impressed. I’m really down on this thing where FOX is bringing movies into TV shows. But hey it’s online and not locked behind a stupid paywall like CBS. I’m sure CBS has some great shows but if I miss them on their original air date I’m sure as hell not going to pay to watch them.

I’m curious if this will try to be a horror TV show. I think that would be very tough to bring on a weekly basis.

When I watch shows on something other than Amazon, I really miss the Amazon x-ray feature. Especially premieres.

Did they make this guy talking outside the church look like a clown on purpose? I don’t get the whole clowns thing but it’s pretty creepy.

Thinking. I loved Bates Motel, and that was a movie adapted to TV. Too bad A&E canceled Longmire and I pledged never to watch the channel again. Except for The First 48. I’m a hypocrite.

It’s hard to hear this dialogue. The background noises are too loud. It’s also very dark. Hard to see faces.

They’re clearly holding back the first shot of a possessed kid tied to a bed. It better be worth the reveal.

Marcus loves himself some Marcus. He’s quite poetic. It feels like a movie character, actually.

Plenty creepy!

This couple obviously has something we don’t know. What is it? A death? Feels like death of a child? When will they show us?

This is completely failing to keep my interest. But This Is Us and Pitch have shown that we need to stick around to the end of a pilot.

So there is something inside they’re house and that’s supposed to be interesting. “It’s a demon.” Well okay then. It’s trying to take your daughter? Well that sounds awful!

The thing with the crow was stupid as hell. I’m embarrassed that it happened.

I stopped paying attention. This show is crap.

Snap reaction: Sleepy Hollow series premiere

Sleepy Hollow Premiere – Snap Reaction. Typed in real time, unedited.

Teaser:
Yes, the revolutionary soldier with a black mask and an ax.

Car stopped quick.

Hey, the guy from Lost. What was that character’s name? In the Hatch, Desmond killed him. Inman. Kelvin Inman?

Upside down?

Aw why’d you go and ax Inman?

Is this the guy from Flash Forward?

“When I cut off his head.” Not sure I can go for this.

Act One
Can’t help but notice the camera focused on the pyramid on the back of the dollar bill.

Orlando Jones?!?

Crane seems awfully alert and witty for a guy who just woke up after 250 years. Not at all freaked out by a car, for example. “That building used to be a livery stables.” Used to be? He’s adjusted already?

Someone else from the past, a spooky-faced priest, no less, is good.

She tells him a flashlight is like a gun, “Point. Shoot.” so he sticks his finger in front of it and points it at his face.

There is they pyramid eye again, on a gravestone.

Cool. Wizardry!

Terrible camera trick with the priest getting beheaded. What he knows the location of is a new mystery.

At this point I should mention I have no background with the headless horseman story at all. Movie or anything.

Act Two
Another camera angle riding the wheel of a police cruiser. That’s two.

Second time we’ve seen the bird.

Is this on the WB or a major broadcast network with this cop?

Mom is calling. brb

Now liveblogging the phone call.

We’re both watching TV.

Dad is hollering for something. “He must have found some kind of animal.”

“Rabbit sticks? What?”

Been to any ball games? No.

Now they’re mentioning a mouse in The Formerly Yellow Room, which is where I sleep when I’m there. They clam up.

Went to Spencer Fair. They served Minnesota State Fair cups. Say it’s becoming more of a “city people fair.” I take offense.

Making plans for cousin’s wedding.

Job hunt.

Old science teacher won a $50 gift certificate, said I can have it. He doesn’t remember what it is. Restaurant. Said there are three.

Tell them I want The Formerly Yellow Room fumigated. End of call. Back to Sleepy Hollow

Crane is digging into the cop, there’s another storyline.

She’s going to give us a little taste. Probably something about an unsolved crime, like her partner was hinting at earlier in the diner. Four white trees and a voice. Shocking. Drover her sister to “battle demons.” There’s a connection between them now. He can call her Abby.

Oh, the sheriff has some hidden files, eh?

And they’re about witches. And she’s in one with her white tree experience. Local farmer saw the same thing and guess what: Thought it was the four horseman of the apocalypse. Explains his reaction when he saw the headless horseman.

Orlando Jones seems to know more than he’s letting on.

Oh yeah, next shot confirms it. There’s another mystery.

Act Three
Ah, yes. This explanation helps a lot.

That laid out the show in a good, compelling fashion.

I wonder how much people who know and working to silence him will be part of the show. Probably a lot?

I like that “it’s on” now with what the show is about. Being vague would have been annoying. Putting it out this fast indicates to me there’s enough story that they don’t need to drag this stuff out.

Don’t have a good feeling about possibly Flash Forward guy here.

How many times are we going to shoot the man without a head.

What was that about? Did he say that because of the phone conversation he just had or because he knew what the headless horseman wants?

Best act so far.

Act Four
Wow he dug that hole fast.

The horseman is a terrible shot. Probably because he doesn’t have a head.

Whoa cop girl is bad ass!

What’s FF guy up to? Another storyline.

Is FF guy Brooks?

Orlando Jones is cooperative all of a sudden.

Yes, Brooks is.

HOLY HOLY HOLY THE WHAT? I’m not going to sleep tonight.

Great, quote Revelations.

WTF with the Rolling Stones? That totally killed the ending.

Spring 2012 TV review

Using one word to sum up the shows I watched this television season.

Terra Nova: Failed.

Terra Nova could have been outstanding, instead it’s off the air. That is disappointing but not surprising. Even thought it was ridiculously expensive, FOX said it made money off the show internationally and hinted it would try to sell the show to a different network or possibly Netflix. Netflix however announced it would not buy the show. Still, FOX is reportedly keeping everyone under contract in case the show does find a second life. Should that happen, the show needs a ton of work to become anything remotely worth anyone’s time.

Alcatraz: Lame.

Jorge Garcia is, like, adorable on television, dude. But Alcatraz sucked. Bad. The main character, a female cop lured into investigating the sudden reappearance of Alcatraz prisoners, was horribly miscast. Do real cops show that much cleavage or just TV cops? She was not believable for even one second. Sam Neil’s character was kinda interesting, but not nearly interesting enough to keep the show afloat. There was some interesting stuff here, though. Sam Neil’s character being a guard at the prison when whatever happened to it happened served as a nice tie-in to the story’s two time periods. His Richard Alpert-esque kinda-sorta love interest who was brutally shot and laid in a coma also set the groundwork for something that could have been very compelling. But on an episode-by-episode basis the show seemed to forget all of that.

BUT…I like to Google shows while I’m writing about them. In so doing I read about what happened in the season finale and I have to say I’m stunned. Stunned to the point where I might have to go back and pick up where I left off to see how it all turned out.

Revenge: Unexpected.

Just as Revenge was heating up, ABC inexplicably put it on one of its moronic hiatuses, although at only six weeks this one is shorter than the break that did in Flash Forward. The storyline had finally come back to the engagement party it started with in the pilot. I felt it was a little cheap, but still pretty good. It will have to transition from the summer-in-the-Hamptons setting that it used to augment the soap opera feeling, but I’m looking forward to what it has in store for when ABC eventually lets it back on the air.

Once Upon a Time: Disappointing.

The first two episodes of Once Upon a Time were really neat. Then it kinda wandered. The premise of an evil fantasy witch trapping real-life versions of fairytale characters in an idyllic seaside town is creative and fun. But then it seemed the show wasn’t even about that anymore. The first few episodes had clear connections between what happened in fantasy land and what happened in Storybrooke. After that it flattened out. It is so uninteresting now that I wonder why I even continue to watch it. Adam Horowitz and Mankato native Edward Kitsis earned a lot of loyalty from their work on Lost, but even that is slowly running out. This show needs to pick it up, fast, or else it’s off the list.

Awake: Intriguing.

I hadn’t even heard about this NBC show (maybe because it is on NBC) until Damon Lindelof tweeted about how much he liked the pilot. So I checked it out and damn if it ain’t really well done and really intriguing. The premise is this: An LA cop is in a car crash with his wife and teenage son. He wakes up to find his wife survived but his son died. But then he goes to sleep and wakes up in a completely different timeline where his wife died but his son survived. This is intriguing enough, but the way they weave together the cases he works on in both realities adds a second layer of interest that is really cool. On top of that they add two psychiatrists – one in each reality – who each try to convince him that what he experiences is the other reality is not, in fact, reality at all.

Awake has “it.” It is the rare show that takes a good story and makes it even better through perfect storytelling. Which reality is real? Both? Neither? What’s the deal with his wife-reality boss hinting that the accident wasn’t an accident at all? If there’s a mention of that in his son-reality timeline, I missed it. Does that mean it is the fake one? This show is so good and so superbly done that it will be on the air for a long, long time.

American Horror Story: Compelling.

Person of Interest: Exceeding.

The River: Stupid.

Terra Nova

FOX swung for the fences with the pilot episode of its new mega-drama, Terra Nova, reportedly doubling the $10 million ABC poured into Lost’s epic premier.  It’s too soon to tell if the show clears the fence or falls short with warning track power.

Terra Nova is a human colony in dinosaur times, set up after humans in 2149 find a one-way road back in time. The main characters are a family of five sent to the colony because it needed a doctor, which mom just happens to be. It also needed a cop, which makes it doubly fortunate that the husband escaped prison to go back in time with them.

The family dynamic is nothing special, and frankly it’s better left undiscussed.

Thus far, all but the first few segments of the series take place inside the colony’s barriers.  Even now, typing this review, I nearly typed “on the island” because there is a very island feel to Terra Nova’s setting. Recall the beginning of Lost, the island was an expansive unknown. We would later come to learn of Dharma stations, colonies and even a temple, but in the beginning all we knew was the comfortable beach and cave camps. Because of that, the writers were able to set up anything that took place outside those places to be mysterious, possibly dangerous adventures.

The colony is treated the same way. We are comfortable inside its walls with their markets and hospitals and modular homes. But outside there are dinosaurs. And Others, or “Sixers,” Terra Nova speak for the band of outlaws that lives outside the colony.

But are they really outlaws? The pilot dropped enough on us to show that there is more layers to Terra Nova’s onion. The island (honest to God, I did it again) has a commander, and that commander has a son who we learn is, well, we don’t really learn anything about him other than he has some chalk and wrote a lot of stuff on some rocks. Stuff about the real reason Terra Nova was created. Stuff we, as of yet, don’t know.

Again, this is a lot like what Lost gave us. We learned in season one there was something underground and some other people on the island, and probably there was a lot of history to be told. If Terra Nova’s creators have the same sweeping storyline in mind, we could be in for something exceptional.

Or we could be in for a dud. It’s too soon to tell. Some parts of Terra Nova aren’t up to par. The characters at times are too cliched: a teenage son angry at his father for going to prison, a saucy girl his age to tempt him away from the girl he left behind, a commander who is conveniently militaristic. You could have said the same about Lost in its early days. If Terra Nova can bring its characters and its story along well enough, it could last. If not, it will spiral downward and off our screens. Fast.