NBC sitcom Community moved one step closer to its much feared cancellation today after it was announced that the show has been pulled from the network’s mid-season line-up, presumably due to its less than stellar numbers.
The critically-acclaimed-but-inexplicably-low-rated sitcom will be replaced by new episodes of 30 Rock starting January 12th. 30 Rock‘s traditional 9:30 PM slot will be filled by Will Arnett/Christina Appelgate/Maya Rudolph vehicle Up All Night.
Even with Ted and Marshall having had too many sandwiches, nothing could shake the fact that this week’s episode of How I Met Your Mother was about as dramatic and soap opera-y as they come — and need I mention downright sad?
Faithful to their habits, the minds behind Fringe
followed a major event — impacting our characters emotionally — with a
seemingly standalone story having subtle parallels with some elements
of the earlier event. Also, by leaving their options regarding the
physics of timelines open, they kept us on our toes in a story that put
Peter at the center and very successfully built on what we know while
developing this beginning of season overarching storyline.
In
“And Those We’ve Left Behind,” the Fringe Division investigates strange
time displacement events, meaning events from the past or future (in
this case only the past) bleeding through the present with potentially
devastating consequences. The team understands the anomalies are caused
by human technology and quickly identifies the source and this is where
it becomes interesting for the parallels. The source is a house owned
by Raymond and Kate who have been married for thirty years. Raymond has
created a machine based or his wife’s works in theoretical physics and
has put their house in a time chamber, meaning a bubble where time
doesn’t flow like on the outside. With the machine, he has been using a
past iteration of Kate to complete the equations so that the time
distortion is “infinite” and keeps them together in the chamber for
more than a few minutes or hours. Love is his motivation as in the
present his wife is very sick.
For the past few weeks now I’ve been backing Supernatural to start to deliver us something in its seventh season, with its strong track record and my personal attachment to the show. It may however sadly be about time for me to stop. “Season 7, Time for a Wedding!” followed suit with several of its predecessors in that it didn’t totally suck if you’re a fan of the show. This time around humor was leant upon perhaps more strongly than in previous installments but once again, nothing happened. The extent to which nothing is happening in these recent episodes really is such that writing these reviews is becoming as difficult as pretending you don’t know what’s going to happen next. The plots to at very least the past three episodes could be well defined in less than a paragraph and I’ve got 800 words to fill here!
What we did get, as anyone with a brain could guess, was a wedding. Having stayed away from any promotional material for the season, I never definitively know what’s going to happen episode-to-episode, so when it was revealed that Sam was the one getting married, I do have to admit I was vaguely surprised. His wife-to-be, veiled (both verb and noun) as she was, wasn’t exactly difficult to guess however, as the previously on…/then and now was so crammed full of Becky Rosen that the attempt to hide her identity actually made me laugh. For those of you new to the Supernatural world, Becky is essentially Eric Kripke’s way of making fun of the people that watch his show. The most meta of all meta story lines brought Becky into existence, but all you really need to know is that whilst she may seem unrealistically and pathetically creepy, she’s just about a spot on, on-screen version of internet fan-girls.
“Nightfall” perfectly illustrates why Terra Nova‘s choice to be all things to everybody — by attempting to deliver a fast-paced action show centered on a family — is slowing down the story and is starting to affect the overall quality of the show. The earlier episode “What Remains” worked because there was one prominent family story that happened to be interesting. Unfortunately for this episode, having multiple such storylines (of equal importance) backfired, as none of them really shined.
“Nightfall” started with one of those details that makes the viewer appreciate the irony of the situation. The sight of the two meteors zipping through the atmosphere had to conjure up thoughts of the Cretaceous extinction that marked the end of the reign of dinosaurs. We know the settlement is in a different timeline, but the odds of a large meteor impact are as significant as in the 2149 timeline around the same geologic period. The introduction of sonic waves and an EMP (however unlikely they may be) was a nifty and spectacular way to get to the different situations developed throughout the episode.
It was back in August when Showtime
picked up Stephen King’s Under the Dome for a series, but it
wasn’t until this week that Brian K. Vaughan was settled on to pen
the adaption. Deadline was first to report the news on Vaughan
undertaking the retelling of the 2009 novel. King, whose Dark
Tower series is also flirting with an adaption at HBO, will serve
as an executive producer on the series.
Not
a stranger amongst sci-fi fans, Vaughan is best known as a comic book
author, most notably for his series; Y:
The Last Man,
Ex Machina,
Runaways,
and Pride of
Baghdad.
He has also lent his talent to television before, serving as a key
writer on Lost
from the third to fifth season.
Oh Slap Bet, how we missed you. The re-emergence of the long-standing How I Met Your Mother bit after a two-year hiatus was a welcome surprise in Episode #7.9, but fans could hardly consider the reignited romance of two of the show’s main characters a slap from out of nowhere.
“Disaster Averted” marks the third use of storytelling flashback this season, the age-old HIMYM tactic that usually works despite being a bit frustrating. Robin’s boyfriend Kevin (Kal Penn) sparks the episode by asking how MacClaren’s came to have a “no boogie-boarding sign” out front. Turns out this is a story not three months old that took place on the eve of Hurricane Irene’s collision into New York City.
