Category Archives: TV
In which Liz tells Frank about TV episodes or entire shows he’s missed.
Liz Tells Frank About The Time She Interviewed Bryan Cranston
Dear Frank,
To the delight of cliche-addicted writing professors everywhere, today’s installment is a is more of a “show” than a “tell.”
In 2010, Frank, I was working full-time as an online video journalist, which meant getting to interview a very odd assortment of folks: Celebrities and CEOs and anyone else deigning to explore the possibilities of new media. It was good fun! I still dabble. And one of those random opportunities ended up being one of the great interview experiences of my life — completely by accident. Read the rest of this entry
Aaron Sorkin: The Skip It/Watch It/Stop Watching Guide
Friends and/or faithful readers of this site will know that I have a lot of complicated feelings about Aaron Sorkin, Academy Award-winning screenwriter and bane of my existence. Not because I don’t think he’s talented — I think he’s crazy talented. Not because I don’t love his work — some of the shows he’s created and movies he’s written number among my absolute favorites. But his particular combination of genius, ego and laziness has a way of crawling under my skin, even when I really am trying to give his newest project a chance.
I try to let these feelings go, y’all, but then some lady Sorkin dated writes about how she was used as the basis for the gossip bitch Hope Davis played on The Newsroom and I see something like this:
Liz Tells Frank What Happened In “Defying Gravity”
Dear Frank,
This weekend, I was going through the ol’ LTF archives, and you would not believe what I found: A half-written entry from 2009 about the short-lived series Defying Gravity, better known as the very-diverse-and-weird-Canadian-Grey’s Anatomy-in-space! Here is literally how my post began:
Defying Gravity is a tricky show, because you look at how four entire episodes of this wacky soap opera set in space have already aired, and you’re like, oh, COME ON, no way this show has really lasted that long on a major network (ABC, if you’re curious). But they are sort of cheating, because the first two episodes aired together as an uber-pilot, meaning that it’s survived three whole weeks in the deadest time of year, and looks likely to at least make it to week 5…
It actually made it to Episode 8. Which, Frank, is kind of in-fucking-credible. The more I describe this show, the more you’ll agree. Read the rest of this entry
Liz Tells Frank What Happened In “The Newsroom” Pilot
Dear Frank,
I think I’ve been doing it all wrong. See, I have been having this one-sided fight with Aaron Sorkin for almost — oh, god, it might be ten years at this point — largely through the medium that he, ironically, takes less seriously than any other in the world: internet blogging.
Maybe, instead of writing lengthy posts about how much I loved Sorkin as a yute and then later felt betrayed by his piggish attitudes towards women, I should be writing complex post-modern two-act theater works about how much I loved Sorkin as a yute and then later felt betrayed by his piggish attitudes towards women. Maybe THEN he’d– Okay, I have no idea what he would do. Change? Unlikely. But an internet girl can dream.
Sorkin’s new “I am awesome, hear me roar” series, as has been frequently discussed already, is The Newsroom, which combines Sorkin’s love of writing about live television (Sports Night, Studio 60 on the Sunday Strip) with his love of being really self-important about The Issues That Matter Today (The West Wing) with his love of swears (thanks, HBO!).
And Frank, here is what happens in it! Read the rest of this entry
“Farscape”: The Complete Skip It/Watch It Guide
[I’ve wanted to do a SI/WI for this show for ages, but it’s been a while since I really dug into the Henson Company’s insane combination of puppets, sci-fi and attractive people in leather pants. Fortunately, I happen to know a bonafide “Farscape” expert, and she was willing to step in and perform this valuable public service! Andreanna Ditton, take it away… –Liz]
Farscape is, as one character says, “Disneyland on Acid.” It’s a roller-coaster of sci-fi and bad decisions when the human is always wrong, but that doesn’t stop him from having a plan. Our protagonists are all escaped criminals, from the big blue priest (Zhaan), who orgasms in the light, to the tentacled warrior masquerading as a Klingon rip-off (D’Argo), who turns out to be funny, young, romantic and ragey. There’s a soldier (Aeryn Sun), raised by a fascist military race that look human, who accidentally goes against her training and gets exiled for it. And then there’s the deposed dictator with the worst case of swamp gas in history (Rygel). Couple all that with a living ship (Moya), her snarktastic Pilot (Pilot), and John Crichton, All-American boy wonder who got shot through a wormhole into the ass-end of a universe that considers him expendable, problematic, and eventually marked for death — and you have a television show.
This is science fiction for people who like their comedy in turns black and snot-filled, their love stories fraught and full of sex, their action-sequences big, the consequences bigger, and the actual science…best left unexplored. It’s space opera on an epic scale.
Farscape tackles all the traditional tropes, then turns them on their collective heads. Continuity matters. Story matters. This is the Odyssey — a man lost in the universe, trying to get home. In the meantime, home changes. Decisions don’t get undone in Farscape, for any of the characters — heroes or villains. It helps that the cast is uniformly stellar, that crazy is not pretty but terrifying, that space is vast, and villains cruel but multi-faceted, and that everyone is capable of doing bad all by themselves.
And yes, there are puppets. If those puppets don’t make you cry at some point, you have no heart. Read the rest of this entry
Liz Tells Frank What Happened In... 