Trying something new here. At its inception, this blog was fundamentally about completing unfinished business. Old games, old books, old DVDs, you name it. And I adopted (and encouraged) an attitude that boiled down to, essentially, "FINISH IT!" Shitty game? Plow through it. Bad book? Turn those pages. Boring show? Eh - just leave it on in the background and ignore it.
Even after I realized and accepted that a shitty video game isn't worth sixty hours of my life just because I once spent $50 on it - and especially if I got it for free or in a compilation or bundle or something - my "completionist" attitude persisted when it came to television shows. There's just really nothing noble or admirable about sticking with a bad TV show, or even a bad TV season, just so that my year-end list can look nice and big or something. And now that I'm all done with grad school, and now that there's more TV than ever (yeah - still living in an age of #PeakTV long after the phrase itself got old), I've freed myself up a bit to say, "no, no more, this show sucks, it is not worth my time." Likewise, shedding the completionist standpoint has allowed me to feel liberated enough to just, hey, why not, check out some random episodes of television with no intention of watching entire seasons or series.
With that in mind, I want to re-purpose my old "TV Dump" format to go from "these are a bunch of seasons of TV that I recently finished watching" to more of a "let's talk about some TV shows I watched that won't be getting full-on independent posts."
Let me define these shows into three categories: bails, fails, and tales. Yeah the last one's a bit forced but stay with me.
A bail happens when I quit on a show I've watched for a while now, mid-season. There's something cathartic (and ordinary for most people) about sitting through an episode of TV so bad or so boring that you finally throw up your hands and say, "I'm done!" I can't promise that every bail is permanent - there's always a chance a show gets better after I stop watching it, and I hear about it from critics or friends or coworkers or whatever, and I come crawling back; there's also a chance I stop devoting weekly DVR time to it, only to rediscover it in the summer on Netflix or elsewhere. A bail doesn't constitute a burnt bridge; it just means I'm not sure I care for where this bridge is heading, and I will safely and easily step off for now.
A fail is sort of like a bail, except that it has to come during a show's first season, particularly after only a few episodes. A bail says, "I used to like this show, and I no longer do, so I am done with it." A fail says "I decided to try out this show, and never liked it at all, so I am done with it." Subtle difference, but you see it, right? The thing is, I'm not going to go around checking out every new show and every pilot available to stream - a fail has to actually start with some semblance of expectations on my end. These aren't shows I knew I'd hate; these are shows I thought had a decent shot at becoming appointment viewing.
Lastly, a tale is something completely different - a stand-alone episode I took in for some reason or another, just jumping right in, with no previous knowledge of the series, or at least the season. For some shows - SNL comes to mind, as do reality shows - this is almost the natural, default way to consume episodes. For others - deeply serialized TV, for instance - it hardly makes any sense at all. This is meant more to cover the latter; I don't need to weigh in on the latest Melissa McCarthy sketch or Trevor Noah segment in order to justify watching it. But maybe there's a veteran sitcom kicking around - why not watch an episode or two? Maybe I'm at my mom's for dinner and she and my sister throw on an episode of The Bachelor - sure, why not? Think of tales as little nuggets of "investigative" TV-watching. At best, a tale might lead to some actual interest in my end, and a series binge. At worst, it's a one-off episode, a waste of an hour or less.
Okay. That all felt largely unnecessary.
BAILS:
The X-Files: Season 4
I was all set to be done with The X-Files after three seasons - it just wasn't grabbing me! Then Trev told me I had to at least check out "Home," a fourth season episode that's widely regarded as one of the best, weirdest, and most controversial X-Files episodes ever made. Luckily, "Home" was the second episode of Season 4 so I really didn't have much farther to go. (Yes, I could have skipped S4 E1, but why skip just one episode? Ugh - this is my issue, dammit.) "Home" delivered - it was weird as hell, creepy, plenty unsettling. I'm glad I saw it. But I'm also glad to make this bail "official." Looking ahead at almost 200 remaining episodes in the series for me is just harrowing. Life is too short, and there's too much better television. Bail, baby, bail!
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 2
Watching the first season of this show a year and a half ago was a fun little exercise in late '90s nostalgia. The first season was also just twelve episodes long - how modern! But all of a sudden I was watching a second season of Buffy and not really loving it, staring down the barrel of twenty-odd hour-long episodes - and six seasons of them - and I realized the only reason I was still watching was out of habit and Netflix being Netflix. This was rapidly turning into The X-Files all over again - acclaimed '90s show I missed out on the first time around that just wasn't holding my interest in 2017. Bye Buffy!
FAILS:
Mariah's World
I have always, always, always had a special place in my heart for Mariah Carey - her music, yeah sure, but even more than that her mythos. There was her MTV Cribs episode, the pinnacle of Bush-era reality television. There was her infamous HSN appearance. There are dozens or maybe even hundreds of interviews and tell-alls through the years that paint her out to be not just a diva, but the living essence of a diva, this incessantly self-obsessed character whose stage persona had overtaken her own private life, who no longer lived in our shared reality but on a higher plain of existence where everything was glitter and butterflies and obnoxious luxury. So when Mariah Carey took the stage at the TCA press tour last summer on some sort of throne couch, dressed in a weird stage-friendly loungewear get-up, surrounded by shirtless men, to promote her new "docu-series," I thought, okay, yes. This is going to be that Cribs episode made into an entire series. This is going to be every decadent luxury trope, played up to eleven. How many hand massages does Mariah get in a given day? How many episodes will it take before we see her getting fanned by gigantic palm fronds while wearing sunglasses? Will she at any point sip wine out of a literal diamond goblet? What I got, instead - and shame on me for not predicting this - was a "behind the scenes" look at Mariah's life as she went on tour in Europe and prepared for her wedding. Just every shitty reality show gimmick here - played up drama between back-up dancers, her manager being "the bad guy," Mariah just "so over" all of it like the only adult in the room. What? Boo. This isn't what I wanted! This is not what I have come to expect from Mariah Carey, proud diva extraordinaire! I bailed after three episodes, just before the real Mariah I knew and loved showed up for that New Years Eve meltdown. Ha! That was as close to I got to getting what I wanted from this show.
The Mick
Kaitlin Olson deserves a mainstream hit, right? This isn't it. She's basically playing a network-friendly version of Dee Reynolds here, surrounded by less talented actors - primarily, kids. I get the idea here, but not the appeal. Aunt Mickey is suddenly put in charge of her rich sister's spoiled kids and huge house and... that's where the pitch team stopped, I guess. No one in the show is endearing enough or funny enough to sustain a sitcom. Oh well! Here's hoping this thing gets canceled after one bad season so that Kaitlin Olson can find something else to do with her time away from Always Sunny.
Emerald City
Kind of figured this would be a mess. Buzz was bad, the source material's been trampled to death at this point, and I've never been able to stick with an NBC hour-long, like, ever, actually, despite so many tries. But let me back up. This is The Wizard of Oz given the dark-n-gritty modern day twist treatment. Yeah, in hindsight, I don't know what I expected. Maybe something campy and twisted and fun? But that flies in the face of the aforementioned dark-n-gritty treatment I guess. My bad! Shouldn't have bothered. For what it's worth, I made it through two episodes here but I definitely checked out midway through the second.
Detroiters
Sam Richardson is very quietly the best part of Veep, so when I saw that he and Tim Robinson had their own show coming out on Comedy Central I got pretty excited for it. That was a mistake! This was dumb as hell right off the bat, just two overgrown dipshits getting into the same shenanigans as the boys on Workaholics and, like, Kenan & Kel. But these men are already in their thirties. There's nothing funny about completely belligerent dumbasses who reached adulthood some fifteen years ago. (Workaholics is terrible now, and has been for years. but at least when it started it was funny - Detroiters has no excuse!) I made it two or three episodes before pulling the plug - honestly can't remember - but knew I would end up doing so around twenty minutes into the dang pilot. Boo.
TALES:
Frontline S35 E2-3: "Divided States of America"
Torn here. On the one hand, I've got this newfound respect for PBS lately. Maybe that's just me getting older? Not only are they showing all kinds of documentaries, but their Frontline series seems to be the last place on television where I can get an unbiased, good story told to me about a current event. This two-parter was a doozy, four hours long in total, and meant to cover just how we collectively reached this point where we're divided as hell on everything and no longer even trusting entire news networks to report on things accurately. And I got a hell of a great documentary, alright - but not one about the growing divide in America as much as one about the eight years of the Obama administration in general. Covering the elections of 2008 and 2012 fairly extensively, along with the Tea Party movement and some of the domestic issues Obama had to respond to (economy, health care, growing emphasis on gun control, etc.), this just didn't fully paint the picture I wanted to see that would lead me to understand the "white plight" of the Midwest. There was hardly any mention here of Hillary, none of Bernie, and very little of the 2016 election cycle in general. The thesis here seemed to be "Obama oversaw a growing divide, which probably wasn't really his fault, but you can make that conclusion on your own." That's fine, and it made for a compelling current events history lesson of sorts, but it was really just an overview of national headlines over the last eight years. Where's the new insight? What caused the divide? Whatever - would watch Frontline again.
Bones S12 E5: "The Tutor in the Tussle"
Time was, House was a smash success for Fox and in its second season they developed a new hour-long medical-crime drama, Bones, to air along with it, starring a 29-year-old Emily Deschanel and a fresh-off-of-Buffy-and-Angel David Boreanaz. I watched an episode or two, back then, in 2005. Or maybe more accurately, my father did, and I was in the room too, and I didn't bother to, like, go up to my room or anything. It was "meh." Felt like a very run-of-the-mill procedural. And suddenly I blinked and twelve years later, there I was, at my dad's place after dinner, and what's on the TV? Bones! In its final season! How? Why? What business did Bones have lasting twelve seasons? I looked this up, and do you know what Fox's second-longest-tenured drama series is? It is Sleepy Hollow, which is eight years younger. But enough gawking at how mediocre Bones has been for a long time. Question is, how was it? How was Season 12 Episode 5? I assure you, it was definitively worse than "meh." This is so clearly a show where people are no longer trying to make a good show. How long it's been like that, I can't say. But at this point the show seems to exist in spite of itself, almost as if to actively make fun of itself. Self parody is one thing, but the puns in this one, the "who gives a shit" attitude from the writers to the actors. My God! I've seen what happens when good shows go bad, but is this what it looks like when bad shows are allowed to just linger around for a decade too long? Truly something to behold. This is Fox somehow stumbling backward into a CBS-style procedural and playing out the stretch. And I know I've asked how this is still on the air, but here's an equally valid question - why is this ending? It's not like either Deschanel or Boreanaz has a burgeoning career to return to - look at their respective IMDb pages over the last ten years for some truly stark and depressing shit. And against all odds this turd is still pulling in three million viewers a week. (For comparison's sake, little sister Zooey's New Girl doesn't even get more than two million anymore.) But hey, this is way more time and digital print than I ever thought I'd give Bones again after 2005. Let's move on...
Alaskan Bush People S4 E3: "Browntown Boom"
Oh hell yeah. Another thing my dad was always good for on the TV front was Discovery Channel shows about crazy people. Remember Deadliest Catch? He was all over that, and Gold Rush, and like three or four other derivatives thereof. This show... from what I could gather, this show is about an adult family living in the absolute middle of nowhere on the Alaskan coast. (Seems redundant.) They're called the Browns and they have what seems like eight children, all adults, all single, all living with them on this family compound of sorts. I give these people all the credit in the world for hammering out a living out in the middle of North Buttfuck - that's a lifestyle that would drive me crazy with panic after all of, like, two days. They're resourceful as hell, re-purposing trash from "nearby" dumps into these Gilligan's Island style doohickey contraptions that run on gasoline at, like, three percent efficiency. Real Sarah Palin salt of the earth, you know? But holy hell - let's just say there's a reason they're TV characters. Give this one a passing glance some time.
Life in Pieces S2 E12: "Best Waxing Grocery Rental"
Third of three shows I caught at my dad's - wild night, I know! This was better than I expected it to be, which I suppose isn't that hard or anything, given that it's a CBS sitcom with characters whose median age is something like 50 - a slightly older man's Modern Family, I guess. This feels like a show where, had I jumped in from the get-go, I'd be watching and enjoying it just fine, but since I didn't, there's no compelling reason to do so. I mean, none of us needs more TV to watch, right? But yeah - not bad. Certainly better than Bones and Alaskan Bush People.
Black-ish S3 E12: "Lemons"
There's always been Internet chatter about Black-ish, but this episode in particular was being billed as a "very special" post-election episode - one in which Anthony Anderson's character and his co-workers can't stop arguing about whose fault it was that Trump got elected. Meh. It hit some good jokes and funny notes, sure, like any successful network comedy ought to, but for my money this was a bit preachy and treacly.
So yeah - those are my fails, bails, and tales. How long will this shtick last? Can't say, but I've got my eye on some more fails and bails already. Gotta keep on keepin' on cuttin' that fat, folks!
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