beer_good_foamy

Thoughts on some series I've been watching recently.

Agent Carter, season 2
Was it just me, or did it feel like the writers were just as surprised as everyone else that they actually got a season 2? ( Spoilers whole season )

Agents of SHIELD, 3.11
That was... actually pretty good? ( Spoilers )

The 100
I'm done, I'm out, I'm gone. ( Spoilers 3.07 )

It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, season 11
No show should ever run for 11 seasons. That said, the Gang still manage to wring humour from utterly despicable characters for another round. They've got their character dynamics down so well they can plop them into any plot - this season, including an 80s college comedy and a courtroom drama - and just let them wreak havoc on each other. The shtick is old and we know what's coming, but in a world where Full House gets rebooted, I'm glad IASIP exists to remind us that sitcoms were always just 22-minute slices of sociopathy.

Plus, y'know, if you're going to satirize Trump, do it right.

Oh well. Bring on Game of Thrones and Daredevil. (Has anyone written a Weredevil AU? I'd be disappointed with fandom otherwise.)

Isn't there something very familiar about this?

( Spoilers )

Marvel's Agents of SHIELD (which I guess will forevermore make it impossible to talk about The Shield in Whedon fandom without causing confusion): ( Vauge spoilers for the first two eps )

Breaking Bad. Other people have said it better than I could, so I'll just note that damn, that was a brilliant, brilliant series finale.

...OK, I do have a few words.

Now, everyone loves a good anti-hero. Or anti-villain. Let's face it, apart from The Middleman, uncomplicated knights in shining armour are boring (which, again, most action series...) We love those shades of grey, we love to see good people do bad things... and bad people too. A lot of great TV series of the last 10 years have spent season upon season digging deeper into the souls of people doing horrible things for, what they maintain, are good reasons. At the centre is usually a man, who more-or-less genuinely Loves His Family, who has his own Code Of Honour, who does things for what he things are The Greater Good, who is trapped in a Culture Of Violence, etc etc etc. Basically, he is Just Like Us. Except he's also a (check any that may apply) racist, misogynist, sociopathic, mass-murdering, drug-dealing, hit-ordering, raping, self-righteous, hypocritical, wilfully-blind-to-the-effects-of-his-actions villain. Fine; those make for good stories. But sooner or later you get to the point where you need to end this story. And then what? You can't end it with our anti-hero retroactively turned into a knight in shining armour; that would be dishonest. Yet you can't end it with him simply getting his just desserts either.

( Spoilers for Breaking Bad, The Wire, The Sopranos, The Shield (the Shawn Ryan series), Angel, Dexter... )

Did that get long? Sorry. I did it because I liked it.

Speaking of making excuses, though, the current season of The West Wing running on all channels really sucks. I know the Sorkin years were criticized for making caricatures of republicans, but it's nothing compared to this. When your supposedly adult characters start acting like 3-year-olds holding their breath until mom buys them ice cream, you need new writers.

And speaking of endings, How I Met Your Mother is just phoning it in for the last season, isn't it? Don't get me wrong, HIMYM phoning it in is still better than 90% of the sitcoms on TV, but we know this plot and we know these characters and we know how it's going to end and they should just have made a 2-hour movie and been done with it.


But at least I'm still watching it, unlike Under The Dome which never managed to breathe even a spark of life into a pretty good idea and seems content to be a poor man's Lost. Give me an ambitious failure over a competent bore any day.

Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing was pretty neat, though. And on one final musing on endings, The World's End does a neat job with a loosely connected film trilogy - building not on the characters but on the themes, and aging (or refusing to age) along with the actors.