The 25 Best TV Episodes I Saw This Year (#20)

Happy Endings - "Spooky Endings"

“Happy Endings” was not supposed to work. At least, ABC certainly didn’t think so, delaying the show to be a spring replacement. If you don’t think that’s a death sentence, bear in mind that this year that this year’s ABC comedy fill-in is the execrable “Work It”, a show so terrible it led Alan Sepinwall to write "'Work It' could be seen as an insult to the transgender community, sure. But it's also an affront to all women, and men, and thinking adults." 

"Work It" received a mediocre opening number, assumably mostly from people looking in to see whether all the bashing is truly warranted. It'll be dead by the end of the year, just like ABC assumed "Happy Endings" would be. A few weeks of halfhearted promotion led up to its premiere, and the show opened to lukewarm reviews and ratings. By the time it aired, some of the cast had already attached themselves to new pilots, assuming the show was DOA.

But then, as is sometimes the case with comedies, after a few leaden episodes, things started to gel together. The show ditched their focus on the two leads and abandoned the “left at the altar” storyline that supposedly was frame the show as the producers quickly discovered that the loose, “Friends”-style riffing between the actors was what made the show most watchable. From this we learned two things:

1. In an age where every show needs a high-concept idea in order to get onto the air, regardless of whether that idea is even vaguely sustainable (remember “Prison Break?” Those guys could not stop breaking out of prisons), we need to treat new comedies like young point guards – they need to get a feel for the speed of the game before we judge whether or not they’re going to find their legs or not. “Community” spent half a season trying to make Jeff-Britta work before finally abandoning the pilot’s premise entirely.  “Parks and Rec” tried to make Leslie Knope into Michael Scott before they recognized that Amy Poehler’s likability is not a factor worthy of being ignored. And while we’re on the subject, let’s not forget how tepid the pilot for “The Office” was either.
2. If you must stock your show with comedy stereotypes (the gay guy, the slut, the interracial couple from vastly different backgrounds), abandon trying to mine those things for stock comedy stories. “Happy Endings” mercifully starting creating stories based on the relationships between the characters after only a few episodes, a lesson “Glee” has still yet to learn. Of course, it helps if the people playing those characters are people like Eliza Coupe, Adam Pally, and Damon Wayans, Jr. Who knew I could ever like a Wayans this much?

This episode, their first of what I hope will be many Halloween episodes, was the first step the show took this season into reviving the stories of the two former leads (Zachary Knighton and Elisha Cuthbert) as ensemble characters, which turned out to be huge success. Freed from the burden of carrying the show, both are starting to recreate their characters into looser, funnier creations with the odd quirks and jagged edges all the best sitcom characters have (Cuthbert has best line from the episode: "Hey guys. Good news! Whatever I have is not from the bird I kissed.").

I couldn't find anything memorable to embed from the episode, so here's the opening of the show this season.

The 15 Best SNL Sketches of 2011

Yeah, yeah, I know, it's all opinion, except for number 1.

Also, if anyone chooses to use the comment suggestion to talk about "the golden age of Saturday Night Live" or to explain how it's "not funny anymore like it was when ______ was there," I will climb through the computer screen and throttle you. I don't know how many times that particular argument needs to be trampled before it dies, but we're not there yet and I don't know if we ever will be, unless you really do long for the days when Tina Fey was head writer and we had Mango and The Cheerleaders on every week.

First, a sketch that no one besides me seemed to like, but I was in hysterics all during:

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Now, the list:

15. Knights of the Realm

14. Mozart

13. Mr. Wizard

12. Coach Bert

11. Disney Acting School

10. Jason Segel Monologue

9. British Movie

8. Seducing Women Through Chess

7. Arlene

6. All My Children Wrap Party

5. Someone Like You

4. 3-Way (The Golden Rule)

3. Lifetime Game Show

2. Justin Timberlake Monologue

1. Jack Sparrow

 As for the best Update segment, you can have your Flirting Expert and your Drunk Uncle and your Joke-Off... I'm sticking with Stefon.

Valentine's Day

The 32nd Best Movie I Saw This Year: Gnomeo & Juliet

Everyone I saw this with loved it (admittedly, almost all of them were middle schoolers), so I tried to avoid mentioning my disdain. I don’t mean to rain on anyone’s parade. I can imagine the conversations I’d have had. 

“It’s cute,” someone says. It is, I concede.
“I liked the frog,” says another. The frog was funny, I agree.
“It’s for the kids,” someone would surely pipe up. You’re right, I’d say, It’s not aimed at me.
“Don’t you like Elton John?” someone accuses. No, I like him a lot, I’d say. I always have.
Someone who knows me a little better might even hit closer to home. “James MacAvoy, Emily Blunt, Michael Caine, Maggie Smith, Patrick Stewart, Jason Statham, Stephen Merchant,” they’d say. “Even Ozzy Osbourne’s in this movie. A dream cast for you.” Everything I could ask for, I’d agree.
“Then why didn’t you like this movie?” Someone would finally say.

Simple:

This movie is a children’s update of the famous tragedy, with two warring families of decorative garden gnomes living side by side, endlessly sniping at each other across the hydrangeas. Things become heated, plaster wells are spray painted, prize flowers cut, and eventually Tybalt is smashed to pieces against a picket fence (he returns during the closing credits, glued back together, for a dance routine. Because of course he does). The whole thing is awkwardly scored by ill-placed Elton John songs (John's longtime partner is a producer on the project). Things are going according to story, as much as they can, given the circumstances.

Now, if you were to be a movie executive tasked with making a version of Romeo and Juliet for children, what’s the first thing you’d ask? Right, the same thing everyone would ask… “doesn’t everyone die at the end? What are we going to do about that?”

Evidentially the producers had that conversation before making this movie. I’m sure they thought it over for a long time, went back and forth on it, worked at it in every direction, had some real arguments, and finally settled on the solution they end up with: 

Gnomeo is thrown into the street, and everyone believes he’s crushed. But instead, it’s just a blue teapot that fell off a passing truck that’s shattered; Gnomeo is still alive. Not long after, Gnomeo finds his way to a nearby park and ends up at a statue of William Shakespeare. They strike up a conversation (really! This happened! In a children’s movie!).

Shakespeare notes that Gnomeo’s story seems awfully similar to a story he once knew, where everyone dies at the end. Gnomeo poo-poos this ending, he even goes so far as to call it “rubbish.” Shakespeare agrees that perhaps another ending might be in order, because, of course, why wouldn’t he?

Having approved his new ending with Shakespeare, Gnomeo heads back to the house, where he’s finally able to reunite with his love and end the feud between the families. I can’t totally remember the details, except that I know it involved lawnmowers.

So yes, if you’re wondering why I didn’t like Gnomeo & Juliet, it’s because Shakespeare arrives to rewrite the ending to make it a happy one. I’m not a literalist, there’s a fair amount I deal with in Shakespeare adaptations. But that one is simply far beyond the pale for me. And if it’s not for you, well then, we probably won’t be friends.

The 33rd Best Movie I Saw This Year: The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Pt. 1

There’s something I’d like to note before I dig into this movie: 

This review is not about to be a positive one. But I'm not taking shots at a huge movie simply because it's cool to not like it. I have no bone to pick with the Twilight series. It’s a very popular teen girl franchise, and while it certainly doesn’t look like anything that I would particularly care for, that doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily bad. I don’t have any opinion about My Little Pony, or ‘A.N.T. Farm’ – they don’t seem like things I would enjoy. So I skip over them without comment. I’m happy to do so, because it gives me cause to ignore other people’s dislike of things that I enjoy. Don’t “get” ‘Community’? Eh, it’s not for everyone. Don’t like Doug Benson? He’s a different sort of a comedian, sure. Not a Star Wars guy? Not everybody is. This is how the world works. We are given free rein to make our own decisions, and the steady diversification of the entertainment options available means that there’s more books and movies and music and TV shows than ever that fit your specific tastes. It’s a wonderful time to be part of popular culture, and it’s only getting better as it goes.

So if there’s a giant film franchise out there that features mournful vampires and six-packed werewolves and lots of lip-biting, great. People who like that sort of thing are in heaven. And no one’s forcing me to go.

Except this time, someone forced me to go.

I got dragged to the theater on Thanksgiving by a friend, and once there, we saw the movie playing on the nearest showtime (though he did seem to be angling hard towards seeing this film while pretending he wasn't). So we went, three guys in their twenties at a late showing of a Twilight movie.

Now, I have not read these books. Not even skimmed them. Through the osmosis of living in our current society, I have absorbed some of the plot and subtext, but most of it is hazy to me. And that’s why I can tell you that if you're in the same boat I was, this movie is not for you.

It’s for people who’ve read the books, who love the books, who wanted to see the books come to life, just as they read them. It’s just for those people. And that’s fine. Not everything has to be Lord of the Rings  or Harry Potter, where the films stand fully on their own. Some things are just for the fans.

But even with all of that, Breaking Dawn Pt. 1 is still a pretty lousy movie.

The first half of the movie is wedding. And that’s it. The bride puts on a dress, comes down the aisle, they say vows, there’s dancing and cake, and later they drive off in a car. There’s no plot. It’s the world’s most beautiful and least-important wedding video, after Kim Kardashian’s (topical burn!).

In the second half (spoiler alert!) it’s only slightly less boring (end spoilers). The happy couple has a mournful – because everything is mournful – honeymoon. They play some slow, sexy chess, like honeymooners do. They have out of focus PG-13 sex. And then Kristen Stewart ends up with a demon baby inside her, and that’s when things really get slightly less boring.

They come home. Stewart gets paler and angstier and skinnier, except for the lump from the demon baby. They debate the wisdom of a vampire abortion (been there). The werewolves have some angry wolf-meetings where the digital wolves are all barking at each other, and the lines are voiced over the top, and it is hilarious. Then it finishes with the exact same final shot as Avatar, and then the movie’s mercifully over.

I’ve been defensive about Kristen Stewart before, because I think she’s a solid actress with a very limited range, and she needs to be put in the right position to succeed in order to really shine. She’s perfect as the secretly frail cool girl in Adventureland, and interesting as Joan Jett in The Runaways, and utterly lost here. A huge portion of these movies is being able to see what’s going on in her mind through Bella’s facial expressions, and that’s simply not Stewart’s strength.

Of course, she could be much worse. She could be Taylor Lautner.

The 25 Best TV Episodes I Saw This Year (#25-21)

In order to sustain some sort of vague balance to the list, I forced myself to include only one episode per program, to preclude this list becoming just a jumble of episodes from the shows you’ll see included at the top.

It’s nice, because it lets me mention some of my favorite underseen television episodes this year, including:

25. Bob’s Burgers – “Sacred Cow”

Fox has slotted a number of strange and offbeat shows into the Seth MacFarlane-ego trip that is their Sunday night animation block, but 'Bob’s Burgers' is the only one to really work. The season was an odd and spotty one, but with a few highlights, including the Lobsterfest episode, the one where Bob gets trapped in the crawl space and refuses to come out, and, of course, “Weekend At Mort’s”, where the family spends the weekend at a mortuary.

My personal favorite, though, was this bizarre creation, where a documentary filmmaker makes a statement by leaving a cow outside of Bob’s restaurant. Bob howls and complains, but ends up adopting the cow into the family and taking ridiculous steps to ensure the cow’s well-being. As always, the strange and timid Tina (Dan Mintz) and grade-school anarchist Louise (Kristen Schaal) are the MVPs here.

24. Jeopardy – “The IBM Challenge – Day 2”

It was impossible to read any coverage of this episode, featuring Watson, the IBM supercomputer, without someone mentioning the legend of John Henry, the steel-drivin’ man. While the comparison is understandable, it’s still not quite apt – whether Watson won or not, it is unlikely Jeopardy would ever switch to an all-computer-contestant format – but that didn’t stop the episode from being fascinating viewing.

Watching the episode, you found yourself helplessly rooting for Ken Jennings, a bit of a cold fish who suddenly seems like the last hope for mankind when matched against the blank black box of the IBM machine. Of course, he proves to be no match at all, and Watson defeats him handily, steadily grinding down the competition with calculations far too fast for the human mind to follow. It’s all impressive and a technological marvel, but it couldn’t feel less triumphant. When at last the competitors are defeated, and Jennings flashes up a last joke in place of his wager (“I for one welcome our new computer overlords”), it seems sad rather than entertaining. That somehow by creating this grand machine, we’ve lost our humanity.

Then I remind myself how many times I used Google just writing this entry alone, and agree that perhaps things are much better now. Though perhaps I better delete this post, before our new masters decide to teach me a lesson.  

23. Cougar Town – “Something Good Coming”

There was brief talk last summer of “Cougar Town” finally changing their name, but the only name they like (“Sunshine State”), seemed too close to ABC’s other comedy offering that spring, “Mr. Sunshine”, a dull mishmash of comedy stylings that tumbled out of the gate and lasted only a few episodes.

Instead, the show soldiers on, still saddled with the worst title on network television, still emphatically a show in no way related to its supposed central premise. I recall stumbling across the show about this time last year and realizing, “Oh! It’s ‘Scrubs’, but without a hospital.”

The season finished triumphantly with an hourlong trip to Hawaii to rescue a heartbroken Dan Byrd, and the change in location does nothing to stop the breezy, relaxed interplay between the cast. Especially good is the cameo of Sam Lloyd, recreating his ‘Scrubs’ sad-sack lawyer as a sad-sack, guitar strumming beach bum.

22. Suburgatory – “Thanksgiving”

After a surprisingly excellent pilot episode, I was perhaps too eager in my pronouncement that Suburgatory was “the best new show of the season” (there’s very little competition for that spot, it must be said. New Girl? Up All Night? Once Upon A Time? Even now, it’s not totally clear).

The show quickly devolved into a semi-interesting, overly-broad My-So-Called-Life-For-Dummies, and I gave up a few episodes in. However, when I was encouraged by Twitter to check out the Thanksgiving episode, I was not disappointed. Somewhere between Allie Grant’s decision to streak through the neighborhood and Parker Young’s description of "Ace Ventura in that super confusing Spotless Sunshine movie that had the 'Titanic' lady with the mid-sized naturals,” I was reminded of what exactly had turned me on to this show in the first place.

21. It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia – “Chardee MacDennis: The Game of Games”

It’s Always Sunny has been spotty in recent years, and I tend to drop in and out, but this season was strong enough to pull me back in – particularly this episode, where we learn the lore of the gang’s invented board game, combining every element of every board game they enjoyed (plus lots of drinking, natch).

The show’s an acquired taste and always has been, but there’s never been a better introductory episode for the new viewer if you’re curious about checking out the show. More importantly, I have a new game that I absolutely must find a way to play. Who’s in?