Community – “Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking”

A-/B+

In a way, “Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking” is a fantastic episode of Community. Its premise allows for the episode to fit in an incredible amount of revelations about who the characters are – Shirley’s constant guilt-tripping, Jeff’s hidden agony over his father, etc. And it’s clever, too.

The strange thing about the episode, though, is that its gimmick (or concept, whatever you’d like to call it) – the use of a mockumentary format – is exactly what restrains it from becoming what a typically great episode of Community is (that is, an episode with a more developed payoff and progression for all the characters involved). The explanatory nature of it all – as Abed says, “It’s easier to tell a complex story when you can just to people explaining things to a camera,” – dilutes the importance of some of the moments in the episode. The writers get as clever as they can with the mockumentary aspect – Shirley explaining, with regret, that she’s learned that she sometimes uses guilt as a weapon, and then using guilt to finish her own talking head, or Britta’s “Britta for the win!” sequence, where they take the opportunity to throw in a good joke. It’s smart, but it doesn’t really take us anywhere new in the storyline.

The best scenes of the episode were the ones that didn’t abuse the format, working like scenes that could plausibly be seen in a regular Community episode – Annie’s explanation of the supposed “message” towards Pierce, for example (which, cleverly enough, is a reflection on Pierce’s own actions in the episode – namely, he hasn’t moved towards much redemption at all). But by the end, we haven’t moved very far – the unique conundrums that Pierce presents all the characters with serve to reveal their personalities, but do little more. And in our central storyline, Pierce has realized the implications of what he’s done, but hasn’t been redeemed. Community does a mockumentary as well as it can, but it’s the concept itself that has limitations.

Community – “Celebrity Pharmacology”

B+

Through its first and second seasons, many of the most lauded episodes of Community (Modern Warfare, Epidemiology, Contemporary American Poultry) have been comedic genre-parodies, with the undercurrent of character development. But among the Community canon, there also exist multiple brilliant episodes that deal solely in character development (the study-room only episode, Cooperative Calligraphy, comes to mind), where the plot is only there to set up those situations. “Celebrity Pharmacology” walked a very un-Community middle ground between these two (something that disappointingly gives Abed the short end of the stick in terms of involvement), following a relatively un-spectacular and tossing in doses of character comedy along the way.

Yet despite the fact that the episode didn’t go anywhere too impressive (the running arcs get dropped to the side, i.e. Shirley and Chang), it still made for a good thirty minutes of television. The jokes seemed to hit harder and were sharp, based off of the vibrant characters that the show deserves a large amount of praise for creating in a season and a half (“Off to the airport Ramada!”). We got to leave Greendale for a little, and learn some more about our characters’ backstories – which may have been a factor in giving the episode such a middle ground feel (if the characters leave the limits of the community college, the show then has to introduce us to these new surroundings, watering down significance – the fact that Annie lives above Dildopolis, known for its signature cinnamon biscotti, is a good example).

I’d like to believe that Community needs a few episodes like these, simply because they allow us to appreciate the highs that the show hits even more (if we had a “Modern Warfare” every week, it’d eventually get boring). Maybe I’m rationalizing, but that doesn’t make “Celebrity Pharmacology” any less entertaining.

Californication – “Exile on Main St. / Suicide Solution”

B

For a show with a premise that can be boiled down to a mixture of David Duchovny, women, and lots and lots of gratuitous nudity, Californication is surprisingly sharp.

It’s wit has carried it all the way to a fourth season, opening up with a couple of episodes that find fresh-out-of-jail Hank Moody hitting rock bottom. Hank’s main emotional plot doesn’t pull any punches in the first couple of episodes. It flows along the way it’s expected to, striking first on Karen’s anger, and eventually moving to a failed reconciliation with Becca (and a Hank Moody attempted-suicide-letter). Nothing particularly shocking happens.

What makes Californication such an enjoyable show to watch, however, is its almost outlandish charm and dialogue. Duchovny and Evan Handler continue to perfect their whole back-and-forth (and Duchovny gets plenty of ridiculous lines to deadpan in various situations). The guest stars seem pretty promising for this season, too – Rob Lowe as an over-the-top actor has potential to be hilarious and Carla Gugino as the straight laced lawyer plays pretty well off of Duchovny and Handler. The show seems to be headed down a path that’s not particularly exciting, but fun nonetheless.

Community – “Mixology Certification”

A-

The way I look at it, there are two types of Community episodes that the show’s been nailing with equal amounts of brilliance this season. There are the bigger genre homage/storytelling episodes, (“Epidemiology”, or last week’s “Conspiracy Theories and Interior Design” come to mind) which center around telling a story for a story’s sake, and there are the smaller-scale ones, designed to tell a story, but one that is much more character-based (and in both, the pure comedy has been great throughout). This week’s episode definitely fell into the latter.

In a distilled sense, “Mixology Certification” deals with the realities of growing up, and it’s fitting that it centers around a birthday – Troy’s 21st – which has all the characters jumping out of the study room and into a bar for most of the episode. What makes Community shine here isn’t just it’s ability to play straight comedy (Pierce’s inability to make it past the door), but the show’s ability to weave the comedy right alongside its most potent, human moments. Drunk Shirley photos are hilarious, but they also add another dimension to the morally upstanding, straight, good-Christian-mother character that she played for most of Season 1 (something which the show’s been doing all this season).

But this is Troy’s episode, and he’s the one that grows the most over the episode’s course, going from unwitting-21-year-old to man (over the course of only 20 minutes, which is a testament to the amazing things this show can do). He’s thrust into a bar with some sort of youthful naiveté and exuberance, and proceeds to be weathered by the experience. He tries to play along with drunk Jeff and Britta, and laughs along when they confront Shirley, but it’s a sobering experience for him (not to mention that he doesn’t drink at all during the episode) to see her ashamed to the point of anger. He’s forced into other roles during the episode too – he plays designated driver for Jeff and Britta, who he learns have been at the same maturity level he has all along. And in a surprisingly sweet moment, he helps Annie grow up herself, showing her that she doesn’t have to define herself only by her lofty, Type-A, life goals. By the end of all the ugliness, he’s matured.

Mad Men – “Tomorrowland”

A-

Who is Don Draper?

Over the past season, Mad Men has struggled to answer that question. We saw Don hit a personal rock-bottom, romancing young socialites, his secretary, and waking up in bed with a woman he doesn’t know. Then we saw him become a better man, keeping a diary, cutting down on the drinking, and with Faye, a woman who seems to perfectly fit the man Don Draper seems to be.

But then, Don got tired. He got tired of being Don Draper, constantly toiling away in introspection, agonizing over trying to make himself a better man.  So tore all the pages out of his diary. And he proposed to his secretary.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing for the Don we used to know. What outwardly appears to be a shotgun-wedding, “fresh” start for Don is more of a reaction that’s been a long time coming. It’s catalyzed by Faye, who tells him that everything might be better for him if he stopped ruminating over the past (ironically, this advices is bad news for her).

Is this change necessarily good for Don? I don’t think anyone – not even the show – knows yet. On one hand, Megan is pretty much perfect for Don’s whole living-in-the-moment fantasy – she’s amazing with children, as evidenced in the diner milkshake-spill scene, and she professes to only care about who he is in the present. And in turn, she represents an ideal for Don, who usually doesn’t function well when dealing with his past.

There’s a sense of something looming over it all, though. Is Megan in love with Don because she aspires to be in advertising one day? Does she have other motives? After the novelty of love, and presumably marriage, goes away, will they actually be able to fit together well? Can Don completely discard his past?

It’s a blatantly ambivalent ending in a finale that albeit fantastic, seemed more transitional than anything else. The music that plays over the end (which is about as carefully curated as everything else on this show – that is, meticulously) is “I Got You Babe”, a Sonny & Cher single. And the opening call-and-response lines are a contradiction – “They say we’re young and we don’t know / We won’t find out until we grow / Well I don’t know if all that’s true / ‘Cause you got me and baby I got you” Is it all true, or is Don living in a fantasy?

Mad Men – “Hands And Knees”

B+/A-

The theme of this week’s Mad Men seemed to be the simple revelation that no matter what actions you take to avoid conflict, it’s inevitable. Yet most of the time, life goes on. Something profound may change within you, but in the real world, nothing is different.

And this theme is a great way to get the plot moving in a season that so far has played around with perceptions of character and identity. The show takes the idea of unavoidable conflict to various different extremes – as soon as Don begins to settle into some sort of stability, the government starts to look into his past, simply because he accidentally signed a sheet of paper that authorized such an investigation (that’s what he does). Everything’s fine at the end of the episode, but that doesn’t mean something inside him hasn’t changed – when he opens up to Faye about his past, he murmurs that he’s tired of running away.

A similar thing happens between Roger and Joan – she’s pregnant with presumably his child, but by no real intentional means. Yet at the end of the episode, it seems as if she’s gotten an abortion, and that everything will be fine (although the show did jump over any sort of scene actually involving Joan and the doctor, so I’m slightly inclined to believe she might be lying). Nothing outwardly changes, but their relationship undoubtedly has.

In hard plot-related news, SCDP gets dropped by Lucky Strike – an event that will definitely have major repercussions for the rest of the season (again, there’s nothing anyone could’ve done to prevent it). Lane takes a leave of absence (again) after being discovered to be sleeping with a Playboy Club dancer.

The closing shot of the episode sees Don staring away at the seemingly carefree Megan, and it’s quite appropriate. He’s ended up where he expected to be (and he’s gotten Beatles tickets, which occupied the backburner of his worries this week), but he’s changed.

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia – “Mac Fights Gay Marriage”

D

For a low-budget cable show like FX’s Sunny, making it to a sixth season is an undeniable accomplishment. However, it seems that the increased popularity of the show could be a blessing and a curse, as the show produced what might be its weakest episode to date; one which was rife with product placement, lackluster plot, and less emphasis on its usual characters and comedic style.

The highly-anticipated season premiere, “Mac Fights Gay Marriage” simply lacked the usual outlandish charm and quotable lines that caused the show to gain such a devoted cult following in its earlier seasons. Instead, this episode seemed at times like a blatant shill for Coors and Subway rather than an episode of an edgy cable sitcom. Product placement has appeared previously on the show, as Coors and Dave and Buster’s have been mentioned. It was probably necessary at the time in the earlier seasons for Sunny to get some extra funding from corporate sponsors, but with the show at its high water mark in terms of ratings, I have less tolerance for the forced comedy that results from what I hope was network-mandated product placement.

The main plot, involving Mac running into his former transvestite love interest, Carmen, and jealously condemning her marriage to the guy from the Miller High Life ads, didn’t hold my attention. Of all the potential former characters to revisit, Carmen isn’t one that jumps to mind.

With so much time devoted to the Mac and Carmen storyline, as well as the hastily done (and apparently continuing) Dennis marriage storyline, little time was left for the show’s two best characters, Frank and Charlie. They were given the only redeeming scenes of the episode, in which Charlie advocated for the two starting a domestic partnership for health insurance benefits.

As a longtime fan of Sunny, I was definitely disappointed with the premiere, but I can’t imagine that the show will completely ignore the style that got it to a sixth season.  Of course, I don’t expect the writers to produce comedy gold like “Dayman”, the “D.E.N.N.I.S.” System, or a love letter to Chase Utley in every episode, but I expect to see the writing return to form this season. The show has just been too funny for too long to suddenly lose track of its strengths.Then again, maybe it has passed its peak, which is a scary thought for such a brilliant show. Sadly, “Mac Fights Gay Marriage” wasn’t a strong effort, and hopefully it isn’t a sign of things to come for the rest of the season and series.

Entourage – “Stunted”

C

Well, Entourage, here you are again. We’re in the seventh season now, and “Stunted” doesn’t help relieve the general feeling (over the past few seasons, at least) that we’ve been dragging on forever.

You know, I used to really like this show. Back in season two or three (it’s been so long, I can barely remember many specifics), when I first began watching, everything was fresh – the writers came up with all kinds of ways to make the show enjoyable, even if, at its core, it was simply four guys running around in Hollywood, with naked women sprinkled in every other episode.

But flash forward to season seven, and all of this same old stuff seems stale. Turtle’s still running into trouble because he sees a hot chick. Drama can’t get a job. Vince struggles with something on a movie set (a less than mediocre theme that still seems to have repeated itself over the last couple of seasons). Ari’s still an asshole. (And E, well he’s getting married, and he wasn’t in this episode much anyway).

Of course, I don’t look at Entourage in the same way I look at Mad Men (for example), but the writers seem to have gotten lazy. When I see Mrs. Ari complain for the millionth time about something school-related (usually involving the fact that Ari is not actually there, and doesn’t care), or when I see Drama get pissed off at an agent (this time, it’s Lloyd), it’s not special or entertaining anymore. Nothing pops like the way it did when the show visited Sundance, or Cannes.

It’s not a promising start to the new season, but I hope this show gets better. As breezy and light as it always is, at it’s best, it’s shown that it can be a pretty enjoyable half-hour of television.

Lost – “The Candidate”

Every time that I seem to write these reviews, I always feel like I inadvertently list all my complaints first – so, I’m going to do just that.

First off – I never thought Lost could slip that badly on dialogue, but I guess I was wrong – yeah, Sun and Jin is Sun and Jin, but maybe my bias against Sun made it so I couldn’t take the dialogue. Sayid showing his true colors by sacrificing himself to save the rest of the ship came off much better, in my opinion.

And that’s really my only qualm this week, so let’s move on to all the rest of the good stuff that happened:

Finally, we get a single clean plot line that, at least in my mind, signals the fact that we’re moving towards the end (maybe the deaths did too, though).

Through the first half of the episode, which seemingly was designed to bring us to the absolutely arresting final twenty minutes on the sub, we saw our band of candidates united under Locke, who clearly now is the main antagonist as we head towards the end (the scene where he mercilessly takes out the two guards at the place really exemplified this). Sure, the characters didn’t get much done story-wise (Sawyer-doesn’t-trust-Locke-so-he-tells-an-unconvincing-lie, etc.), but the sequences did work in terms of allowing the series to align towards its ending.

The flash-sideways worked much better than most this week too, although I would’ve liked to see more action, or at least more of the whole element of uneasiness, something-doesn’t-quite feel right notion that was lacking in earlier episodes fleshed out a little more (the scene with Bernard worked quite well, but we still aren’t getting any real answers). The ever-present undercurrent that ties the sideways plots to the main timeline also seemed to be more fleshed out this week – Jack’s inherent desire to help everyone escape the sub vs. his desire to fix Locke (and I always feel like there’s even deeper stuff that I don’t get at first glance). Yet we still aren’t getting any clear answers (again, I don’t doubt the show to leave us hanging there in the end, so I don’t mind).

But far and away the best scene this week (and I’d argue in this season) was the bomb-on-the-sub sequence (largely reminiscent of the similar Jack and Richard situation we saw earlier this year). Managing to capture literally everything that we’ve worked up to this entire season, getting all the “candidates” together to have them all killed, allowed Lost’s element of tension to be played out beautifully. Starting from Kate getting shot, to Jack’s argument over why the bomb can’t do anything (which makes complete logical sense now, more at the end), to Jin and Sun’s demise (ok, I didn’t really like the dialogue, but everything else worked perfectly), the entire last half had me on the edge of my seat for longer than any other episode of TV this year.

Thoughts:

Jack’s argument on the sub makes perfect sense – that’s what the Man in Black had to get Ben to kill Jacob, and that’s why for some reason he can’t kill any of the candidates (the “rules”, maybe? And if so, are those the same rules that Ben mentioned in his whole confrontation with Widmore?). But that bring up the question – is it possible to outsmart the smoke monster? Because he seems so far ahead of the group every single time (I mean, he engineered the entire plot of this episode to play out the way he wanted to) that they’ve got no chance against him.

I think that the show is going to show us what Widmore and everyone else seems to know but won’t tell us (because if they told us, they’d basically be dropping a huge bomb in the middle of some dialogue, which seems like it would be unwieldy, at least to me) either next week or the week after that. Right now, my theory on the finale is that Desmond, Jack, and whoever else is left are going to have to get rid of Smokey (something that Widmore seems to know how to do, possibly?) – but I’m already anticipating a huge twist on the show’s entire scenario, so it’s probably not close to correct.

Noel Murray from the A.V. Club already mentioned this, but giving grades to the last few episodes of Lost seems pretty pointless – there’s no doubt they’ll be incredible (simply because the are still so many bombshells to be dropped), so I could practically give them all A’s – this isn’t a show that’s going to have a disastrous last three episodes.

Chuck – “Chuck Versus The Honeymooners”

B-

“But off the record, it’s about damn time,” General Beckman astutely states at the end of “Chuck Versus the Honeymooners” (or not so astutely – I’m pretty sure the entire Chuck audience realized this about halfway into the season). Well then, it’s about damn time for Chuck, a show on the verge on cancellation (from the already-disaster that is NBC) to get good. And if this was the episode that was supposed to magically bring the ratings back, the episode that was supposed to serve as a “season opener” to the tail-6 of the third season, then it certain felt like a little bit of a letdown.

See, the thing that made Chuck such a show worth saving, last year, were those little hints in each episode, those few minutes of every other episode or so, where the audience realized how much Sarah cares for Chuck (the Christmas episode from last year comes to mind), how much she did in fact want to be with him, although she felt like she couldn’t.  But this season, the Shaw diversion was a complete misfire, which left us with the why-won’t-they-get-back-together-already feeling that simply dragged on too long.

So, after tying up every single plot string in “Chuck Versus the Other Guy”, Schwartz, Fedak, and Co. seem to have decided to take a victory lap in “Honeymooners”, which was a light (I mean, come on, Vampire Weekend), somewhat refreshing, but otherwise dull episode.

The change of scenery this week put us on a train car is Europe, with Chuck and Sarah deciding to run away from the whole spy life, a notion that we as an audience know is not going to last (although I wish they kept the whole international, spies on the run thing going on for longer, they probably couldn’t – budget cuts). The thing is, as light, cheery, and Texan-accent-y as I like my episodes, Chuck decided to just play off of somewhat stale devices this week. We got the whole Morgan-being-really-incompetent-but-useful-somehow humor (his scenes with Casey, plus his CIA mugshot were pretty funny, but not incredible), the Chuck-can’t-be-there-for-Ellie deal (and she STILL doesn’t know), and it goes.

I’m going to keep this short because I’ve got a ton of work right now (and I’m way late on this review anyway) – but hopefully you get the point – as a fresh kick-off to the next few eps, “Chuck Versus the Honeymooners” was pretty damn mediocre.