it's been swedish...i mean, sweet-ish

As a very meager attempt to atone for how remiss I've been at posting these past few months, I just wanted to post an abbreviated review of this past season of TV shows that I've been watching. I haven't been able to follow all of them as religiously as I usually try to, but it's been an interesting post-strike stretch of episodes, that's for sure.

Gossip Girl (The CW)
Sometime between telling my then-uninitiated roommate that gossip girl "isn't a character, it's an entity," and haranguing Josh Schwartz on the picket lines about Rufus' backstory, Gossip Girl became one of my favorite TV shows of all time. Sadly, The CW stopped making the episodes available online, as it was more popular as digital media than its Nielsen ratings would indicate. So I've missed about three installments of the first season, which I lament more than you can know. However, Serena's juicy backstory reveal (I CALLED IT ALL ALONG!)*, the entanglement between Lily and Rufus, and for the love of god Blair and Chuck, all of these elements have come together in a show that is actually titillating and still makes me laugh. When a friend recently asked a carload of GG-obsessed girls what the big deal was, I think we held court talking about it for about 45 minutes. Choicest dialogue (paraphrasing):
(Serena is embarassed to tell her friends about her secret shame)
Nate: We've all done things we're ashamed of, Serena. I had sex with you!
Blair: (indicating Chuck) I had sex with him in the back of a limo. Twice!
Chuck: (pause) I'm Chuck Bass.

30 Rock (NBC)
This second season of Tina Fey's pet project managed to be even funnier and more ridiculous than the first, and has really become one of the smartest shows on the networks. In one recent episode alone, they managed to reference both the uncanny valley and the Mozart-Salieri conflict. The season finale ended on a couple of cliffhangers, which is a useful tool for a sitcom, as proven by The Office, but one of them was about Liz Lemon planning to have a baby, by hook or by crook. I've put the brakes on my eyes rolling, but just until proven wrong about season three having "buy Baby Mama on DVD Tuesday" tie-ins every five minutes.

The Office (NBC)
Bluntly put: while remaining one of the funniest shows on American television, the fourth season signalled a decline in quality that is troubling for fans. Jim and Pam seem cemented in their relationship, which moves their romance from the A storyline, but I could see the show breaking them up at some point, just to drag things out and elicit groans from everybody. Michael and Jan had reached a peak of awkwardness - so we thought - until the season finale shocker. There have been some unusual changes in Michael's character, whereby he seems to swing from lovable buffoon Michael Scott to harmful idiot David Brent tendencies, and I don't think that makes it easy for the audience to side with him. (Did the show jump the shark when Michael drove his car into a lake?) Ryan as a cokehead with no business ethics is no surprise, but seems like more of a gag than a character arc to tug at our heartstrings. The Dwight-Angela-Andy triangle, then, seems to be the most compelling storyline, but without a little more insight into Angela's state of mind, I don't know where to stand on that. If showrunner Greg Daniels is devoting time to both The Office and its unnamed spinoff next season, then I forsee bad things happening to the show. I stopped watching Alias when J.J. started working on LOST (though, thank god, because LOST is so much better!)**, I stopped watching Grey's Anatomy when Shonda started Private Practice (also when Izzie and George got ridiculous), and I hope I won't have to do the same for The Office.

Other shows, like Grey's Anatomy and America's Next Top Model, I have basically stopped watching. I've checked in on ANTM from time to time, and was very happy to see this season's winner be a plus sized model, but Tyra is so obnoxious that I can barely stand the clips of her they show on E!'s The Soup. I do watch Ugly Betty and LOST, but the latter's season finale hasn't aired yet so I'm reserving a post to discuss it then, and I'm in the midst of catching up with the last few episodes of Betty online before I do the same.

* (SPOILER) Really, anything too dark for her to tell Blair about in the first place had to be murder. But the show would never want our heroine to be so unrelatable, so I knew it would be either someone-was-going-to-be-sexually-assaulted OR Serena-was-a-party-to-an-accidental-drug-overdose. Imagine my surprise when it was both! (END SPOILER)

** To be fair, I started watching LOST on DVD two years ago, and only started watching Alias on DVD two months ago. But when I got to the season 4 Alias DVDs, which is the point in the show which aired concurrently with season 1 of LOST, I stopped caring about Sydney Bristow and stopped watching.

fea es la nueva bella

So, I watched the entire first season of "Ugly Betty" on DVD in the last couple of weeks, and definitely fell in love with it. At first I thought it was campy and sweet, but that there wasn't enough there to keep viewers interested for much longer than the novelty would have lasted. Now, having completely caught up with all of the episodes, I have added it to my list of weekly must-see shows. The show strikes such a great balance between hyperbole and approachability, and I think that is incredibly difficult to do.

My favorite relationships on this show are the ones between Amanda and Marc, Hilda and Justin, and Daniel and Betty, in that order. Of course, as a devoted 'hag, I think that the catty back-and-forth between Amanda and Marc is just the sort of thing that my 'mo and I could aspire to have one day. Even though Justin is a pretty uninteresting caricature most of the time, it is very refreshing to see how his whole family treats him with respect, and Hilda portrays a very sympathetic mother character, which I don't think is really that present on primetime. The relationship between Daniel and Betty is flat at some points, but it seems like it may be one of the strongest ones on the show - despite everything Daniel does, Betty is there for him, and there are moments (like on tonight's episode), when Daniel notices Betty's lucky sweater and is a true friend to her at Mode. (Also in tonight's episode: the recurring appearance of John Cho!)

So, I know that critics have already heaped praise on this show's treatments of homosexuality, transsexual issues, body image / beauty, and race, and I am totally behind all of those accolades. But mostly I admire how the show creates incredible microcosms that fit really well together, and I am always entertained whether the plot has taken us from Mode to Queens to the green screens of New York. Also, the season 1 finale was so perfectly crafted...maybe I'm just a sucker for West Side Story, but the closing set piece was so good, I could only appreciate it with the knowledge that I could immediately go online and see what happened next! So I figured if my latest guilty pleasure Gossip Girl could get its own blog post, then this great show could too. Right now, I'm really looking forward to Marc's character growing up, as he has totally won my heart with all of his fabulous facets.

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On a smaller side-note, I did want to say that I am glad The Office is back to its half-hour length - for the time being. I do think that it has the potential to be able to carry an hourlong time slot, as long as it doesn't sacrifice character continuity for sensational episode ideas. Kudos to last week's writer Paul Lieberstein (the incredible HR guy Toby), whose first time direction was magnificent. As for tonight's episode, it was heartfelt and simple like Office episodes of yore, and I think that had a lot to do with the episode's length. There was just enough material without distracting us. Other than the amazing musical stylings of Darryl (f. Creed, Kevin, Kelly, and Andy), I also want to point out the hot advertising guy with the beard...IMDb isn't giving me any clues as to who he is, and I'm curious!

TV on DVD

Before I get to my assessment of the TV shows that I am trying my very best to keep up with each week, I wanted to give a shout-out to Netflix, and the shows that I have been catching up with lately. Shortly after I first got my Netflix subscription in early summer '06, I started using it to make up for the time I'd lost during the first two years of college when I didn't have a TV anymore. If it weren't for Netflix, I wouldn't be watching some of the shows which I consider to be my current favorites, like LOST, Grey's Anatomy, or The Office.

I am now caught up with the first four seasons of Nip/Tuck, and I have been totally sucked in. Now, I've heard from the show's fans that after the first two seasons it disintegrated into a pointless soap opera with more twists than necessary. For this, I am grateful. Yes, the first two seasons made me care more about the characters than I do currently, but the show wouldn't be as sensational and addictive if it didn't push the boundaries of believability, network standards, and comic hyperbole. For a while during season 4 I was displeased with Sanaa Lathan's character and with the departure of Julia, but the way that the season wrapped up was very satisfactory. I am quite looking forward to the complications that will arise from Sean and Christian's relocation to my sunny neighborhood of Los Angeles. Also, as I mentioned in my last post about Death at a Funeral, I have become very impressed with Peter Dinklage. I was very happy with his character in Nip/Tuck, especially the romance between him and Julia. The flash-forward episode was a little "LOST" though, and I wasn't over the moon about that.

Also, I am two discs away from being finished with season one of Ugly Betty. I had seen a couple of episodes of La Fea Mas Bella when I was younger, and did watch the pilot of Ugly Betty last year, but I guess I had quite underestimated the quality of the show. Once I catch up, I plan to keep the show as part of my general rotation of primetime programming, and I can't wait to see if this show will have legs. My favorite parts (so far) are the snippets of telenovelas that we get to see, and the interactions between Mark and Amanda. Also, I think that America Ferrera is a very good actress, and I like seeing her do something much more comedic than Real Women Have Curves or, my guilty pleasure, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.