Category Archives: TV
In which Liz tells Frank about TV episodes or entire shows he’s missed.
Liz Tells Frank Who Catherine Tate (The New Boss of “The Office”?) Is
Dear Frank,
According to the Hollywood Reporter, British comedian Catherine Tate, who’s one of the half-dozen or so candidates guest-starring in The Office season finale airing tonight, is NBC’s top choice to fill the gap left by Steve Carell’s departure. I LOVE Catherine Tate, so I’m in a happy place right now, but it appears that many people are not familiar with her, which is a shame, so let’s fix this, shall we?
Basic deal, Frank: Catherine Tate’s like a British Tina Fey, except that she not only had a long-running comedy series (and with her name in the title), but has proved her abilities as a dramatic actress in a wide range of roles. I’ll admit that I didn’t really become familiar with Catherine Tate until after her first appearance on Doctor Who (I chalk this up to my general preference for British drama over British comedy) but I’ve since come to respect her as possibly one of the funniest women in the world. Read the rest of this entry
Liz Tells Frank What Happened In the “Game of Thrones” Pilot
Dear Frank,
So because you and I are both literate adults, students and appreciators of fine pop culture, we are both very in tune with HBO’s tradition of quality television. What does a series stamped with the HBO brand promise? Extreme violence, plenty of boobies and power struggles (the power struggles are what make it classy). Does the first episode of Game of Thrones deliver? Hell yes it does.
The Game of Thrones pilot, based on the books by George R.R. Martin, is, like many pilots, a bit of a shakedown cruise — there’s a roughness to the characterization and the performances that will likely no longer be there in a few more episodes (not to mention a crap-ton of exposition), but is worth forgiving in advance because oh man already so many power struggles! There are pretty much three storylines, which I’ll attempt to summarize quickly and succinctly: Read the rest of this entry
Liz Tells Frank What Happened In the “Sliders” Pilot
Dear Frank,
Of all the terrible things about being a teenager, here is one that’s only really terrible in retrospect: There will be books and movies and TV shows you consume in your adolescence that, upon future reflection, might prove to be embarrassing, especially when you realize just how much they reveal about you. There’s an inevitability to this — the most you can hope for is that the media with that kind of power over your psyche won’t include a Vancouver-produced micro-budgeted Fox show about people who hop between alternate universes with the help of an oversized cell phone.
I am, alas, not so lucky.
The pilot episode of Sliders opens with Jerry O’Connell videotaping his experiments with wormhole technology in the basement of his mother’s house; blah blah blah science science science Jerry’s a genius, having successfully opened up a portal of some sort to a… I dunno. It’s a mystery! (The answer is parallel universes.) Read the rest of this entry
“Buffy the Vampire Slayer” Season 1: The Skip It/Watch It Guide
Hey, want to check out on the complete series? A guide to all seven seasons of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” as well as its spinoff “Angel,” can be found in “Liz Tells Frank: The Skip It/Watch It Guides,” now available on Amazon!
A quick bit of back story: Karmically I feel obligated to write this guide, because I never would have watched Buffy without my friend Nicky. Nicky was a good friend from high school who moved to Arizona my senior year; for the next five or so years, I’d visit every once in a while for a few days of sitting on her couch and watching TV. (It was glorious.)
It was on one of those trips — right before the premiere of Buffy season four, if I recall — that Nicky said “Okay, it’s time for you to understand Buffy,” and using her insane archive of videotapes (Nicky taped everything) I proceeded to get a highly compressed version of the first three seasons, which was instrumental in helping me fall in love with the show.
The first season of Buffy is a season spent figuring out tone and plot and character; there are a few great episodes, but nowhere near the number that would follow in subsequent years. So, if you’re new to the show that made Joss Whedon a nerd god and wanna get to the good stuff faster, here you go!
Buffy Season 1: The Skip It/Watch It Guide Read the rest of this entry
“Fringe” Season One: The Skip It/Watch It Guide
Hey, want to check out on the complete series? A guide to all five seasons of “Fringe” can be found in “Liz Tells Frank: The Skip It/Watch It Guides,” now available on Amazon!
A few weeks ago, I spent a whole bunch of words telling Frank how great the show Fringe is. But I included this one caveat: The first season is pretty problematic, as it darts between narrative-heavy developments and stand-alone monster episodes almost at random. That might have worked for The X-Files in its day, but screw The X-Files, it’s the 21st century and Chris Carter floats in exile on a surfboard. We can demand more from our TV, is what I’m saying.
So (because I have had at least four friends request it) here is a guide to watching Fringe that should help you avoid the less consequential episodes and focus on the good stuff that relates to the ongoing narrative. I try to add as much guidance as possible when it comes to the Watch It episodes, so that if you’re on the fence about a particular storyline you can use your own judgement. But otherwise, trust in me to steer you around the dull bits.
Fringe Season One: The Skip It/Watch It Guide Read the rest of this entry
Liz Tells Frank What Happened In “Babylon 5”
Dear Frank,
So I don’t think it’s any secret that I pretty much spent the 1990s watching whatever sci-fi television was readily available to me. But one that I’ve never given much thought to was Babylon 5, J. Michael Straczynski’s five-year tale of a space station caught in the middle of intergalactic war. Maybe a part of it was the fact that my heart at that point belonged to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and there were only so many space station shows to which I could pledge eternal fealty? I dunno, to be honest. I just know that it’s weird, because I have been rewatching Babylon 5 this week, Frank, and Babylon 5? Actually kind of awesome.
The basic deal was this: Babylon 5 was a space station created as a port of call for a Mos Eisley cantina’s worth of alien races as well as a neutral seat of politics for various planetary federations — ostensibly doing what the United Nations did after World War II to prevent another interstellar war.
Instead, though, it ended up becoming an independent political force that led a war against a totally ancient first evil called the Shadows (you know they were evil because their space ships looked like giant spiders, and yes, it’s a first evil with space ships, just go with it), not to mention an Earth gone completely fascist and no shortage of inter-species fighting. It’s an incredibly dense four seasons of narrative, covering the political situations on at least four different planets simultaneously with the on-station intrigue, while also managing to find time for some incredibly endearing characters, romance, time travel, religious symbolism, telepaths and the occasional Looney Tunes clip. Read the rest of this entry
Liz Tells Frank What Happened In... 