Television

Why Cancelling Community is a Terrible Idea/Why You Should Watch it

If you know anything about broadcast television networks, it won’t likely have escaped you that NBC is not the most popular one out there. Save for the height of football season, NBC rarely, if ever, beats out its competition at ABC, CBS and Fox, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Sure, NBCUniversal’s profits might not quite be where they’d like them, but acceptance that they’re never really going to win the fight for viewers sometimes means that they give shows a chance that would never have survived anywhere else but cable.

Community is one of those shows. Since its pilot, the show has had a slow, but steady decline in viewers and now in its third season, it sits just shy of four million a week on average. If you don’t know, that is not good. I’m not going to go into impressions and universes and what 1.7/5 in the 18-49 demographic means, but simply put, the show isn’t doing very well. In light of this fact, NBC recently made the decision to pull the show from its mid-season schedule, much to the distain of fans, and being one of them, I’m here to give you some reasons that we’re complaining and that NBC should keep the faith.

How I Met Your Mother – Symphony of Illumination

The soap opera drama we thought we had on our hands drastically shape-shifted before our eyes. But despite the misleading tease of baby-daddy drama, How I Met Your Mother Season 7 is probably all the better for it.

Homeland – Representative Brody

Just in case you’d thought about relaxing during this week’s Homeland –maybe kicking back and enjoying a cold beer, whilst soaking up some more useful exposition like we did last week – it seems that the writers had other plans.

After the reveal in ‘Crossfire’ that Brody has tasked himself with a covert mission in the name of Nazir’s son Isa, we open with a newly re-energized Brody, seemingly now fully on board with the concept of running for Congress and carrying out his mysterious plan (whatever that might be). As Carrie astutely suggested in ‘The Weekend’, it seems that Brody is now committed to playing the long game, carefully maneuvering the people he loves into the positions he needs them, in order to move on to stage 2 of ‘Brody vs. Vice President Walden’.

Dexter – Ricochet Rabbit

Last week’s Dexter wasn’t exactly what you might call groundbreaking stuff. Sure, the idea that two serial killers are actually the same guy was a fresh approach, but so many people saw it coming that the effect was next to nothing when it happened. It is because of that fact that “Ricochet Rabbit” had an awful lot riding on it. It’s not just that the fate of the season depends on how the writers are going to wrap things up, but also that, given the show’s past ability to shock us into loving it, we’re all kind of sitting around waiting for the real penny to drop. Undoubtedly, the writers will have approached this story with the hopes that somehow no one would notice what was coming, but at least some of those that did are likely wanting something more to turn them around.

Based on a slightly less than subtle sub-plot that has come into the show over the last couple of episodes, as well as the promo for next week’s “Talk to the Hand,” it seems we’re going to get our wish (although this isn’t really what I had in mind), but we’ll come to that later. As for “Ricochet Rabbit” itself, the episode wasn’t half bad. Last week I called for a resolution to the question of how Travis doesn’t know that Gellar is dead if he’s the one that killed him and to my surprise, we actually got sort of an answer. Although it’s not that clear, the idea seems to be that Travis is so far gone mentally that even though he has seen Gellar’s dead body and actually remembers the moment that he “killed” him, he believes that because they are God’s two witnesses, God made Gellar impenetrable to biblical swords, so the violent stabbing didn’t actually do any damage.

FX Announces Premiere Date for Justified Season 3

Fans of FX’s Emmy winning Justified can finally start programming their  Tivos this week, as the cable channel officially announced the start  date of January 17th, 2012 for the return of the acclaimed serial,  starring Timothy Olyphant as a tough, southern-bred 19th century-style  officer for the US Marshal Service.

After the spectacular showdown in season 2’s finale between hill clans the  Crowders and the Bennetts, we can expect season 3 to hit the ground  running with Raylan (Olyphant) hell bent on foiling the plans of arch  nemesis – and some-time best friend – Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins) who, after foiling the plans of his only rivals for the role, announced his  intention to crown himself king of Harlan’s underworld. So expect another  stellar turn from Goggins who, along with stars Timothy Olyphant, Margo Martindale and Jeremy Davies, was nominated for an Emmy for his performance in last year’s season.

Supernatural – Death’s Door

This is set to be less a review and more an expression of the fact that my head hurts. First off, let’s make no mistake, “Death’s Door” was about one thing and one thing only: Bobby doing his best to hold off a Reaper in his mind, whilst trying to get a message to Sam and Dean in the extra-cranial world. When you look at it simply as that, the narrative by itself wasn’t what go me turned around. We’ll get to what did in a few words, but for now: the story.

Essentially, what we got with “Death’s Door” could probably best be described as Bobby’s greatest hits. There was an element of confusion initially as we dealt with both the present timeline outside of Bobby’s head as well as some time jumps going on inside, but once things settled down, it played out true to form. Although they’ve only made a few appearances in the show’s run, Sam and Dean have picked up some tricks to deal with Reapers and Bobby is obviously no fool as he figures out that his reality isn’t all that real almost immediately upon entering it. When he comes face-to-face with his Reaper, he refuses to believe that it is his time and spends the rest of the episode battling to bring himself back from the brink.

How Are They Faring After Full-Season Orders?

The
holiday season hiatus is upon us, so virtually all scripted TV shows
are already on a break until January 2012, and those that are not will
unfortunately follow suit rather sooner than later. Because at Player
Affinity TV we are dedicated to making sure you are entertained even
during these insufferable breaks, we thought now would be a good time
to take a look at a particular group of those shows that will be
returning in January. We are going to check how freshman shows
performed after receiving full-season orders, whether they kept up
their creativity (for those that had any), whether they held on to
their audience or whether networks might already be having buyer’s
remorse.