Category / TV

by Nerdy Spice

The Good Spinoff: Who CBS Should REALLY Have Paired Off With Christine Baranski

It’s official: The Good Wife’s Diane and Lucca will be appearing in their own spinoff, which will pick up a year after the date of the show’s polarizing finale.

While I couldn’t be happier at the idea of getting an hour-long dose of Christine Baranski’s steely, nuanced acting, I have to wonder: why Lucca? She was a character shoehorned in at the end of the show’s seven-year run to provide Alicia with someone to team up with, to bounce ideas off of. She had no significant arc of her own–when Alicia wanted to rejoin her old firm, Lucca capitulated after about five minutes’ protest, and when Lucca was unhappy at the firm, her unhappiness functioned as the spur for one of Alicia’s plotlines instead of one that truly revolved around Lucca. And most of her conversation, especially in the last few episodes, revolved around her mistaken notion that Alicia and Jason were true loves pining over each other.

While Cush Jumbo did her best to inject some form of personality into Lucca, the truth is, we haven’t even seen a Lucca-centric episode on the original show and yet I’m already desperately bored by the thought of watching her in her own spinoff. Here are some spinoffs CBS should have considered.

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by Nerdy Spice

Feed the Beast a Strong Addition for AMC

The pilot of AMC’s new show Feed The Beast screened today at the Vulture festival, followed by a conversation with David Schwimmer. Despite some potential political issues, it looks like an excellent addition to AMC’s lineup.

Tommy Moran, played by a ferociously (dare I say, determinedly) dark David Schwimmer, is a former sommelier drinking away his sorrows over the hit-and-run that killed his wife Rie and left his son TJ, who witnessed the death, completely silent. Dion is a talented cook whose coke problem has left him in jail for eight months, and he’s being followed around by a wrench-wielding bad guy in a black van named The Tooth Fairy.

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by Janes

The 100 Recap: 3×15 “Perverse Instantiation pt 1”

“Perverse instantiation,” in Nick Bostrom’s A.I. superintelligence theory, is a “malignant failure,” or a failure that involves human extinction. This specific type of malignant failure involves an A.I. interpreting an unfortunately-worded instruction in the most destructive way possible, like a real-life vengeance demon.

The obvious parallel is A.L.I.E.’s decision to make the world a better place by nuking the human population, but it can potentially refer to any and all of A.L.I.E.’s throwing-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater decisions. Bostrom gives the skin-crawling example of an A.I. interpreting the directive to “make everyone smile” as “freeze their facial muscles into permanent smiles like even creepier Jokers.” That’s A.L.I.E. 1.0’s world domination plan, and the theme of the third season of The 100, in a nutshell.

(P.S. I’m sorry I’m so far behind, I will do my best to fill in the gaps. But here’s what you need to know from the last few episodes: Bellamy’s plotline was somewhat redeemed by the show’s meta-commentary that he’s sort of always been an asshole; Monty and Harper are a random, but adorable pairing; Raven is a bad-ass, and Lindsay Morgan is the best actor on this show; Pike got infinitely more likable once he was placed in an underdog position, but I still hate him; and Ontari is pointless and literally the worst, now and always.)

All right, let’s get on with the recap: Continue reading →

by Nerdy Spice

Nashville Recap: 4×19 “After You’ve Gone”

Previously on Nashville: Scarlett and Gunnar gave an awkward interview to Rolling Stone about how they’re exes; Juliette got nominated for an Oscar, but was sad that Avery chose Layla; Maddie got emancipated; and Deacon punched Frankie in his obnoxious face and got himself hit with a restraining order.

Rayna’s on tour in Atlanta, according to the title cards, singing a song about being strong. What do you think that’s about? I hate when they make you work to figure out the song’s relevance!

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by Nerdy Spice

Links We Loved This Week — 5/13/16

Last week we rounded up some of the pre-finale coverage of the end of the The Good Wife, one of the shows we’ve been recapping since we started this blog in September. Here are some of our favorite reactions to the finale:

  • Emily Nussbaum at The New Yorker, like us, thought it was a flawed episode but liked the“rich, dizzy darkness of the last few minutes.”
  • The NYT wrote that Julianna Margulies’ acting saved any flaws in the finale.
  • The Fug Girls hated the ending: “Instead, I wondered, both of this hour and of the last seven years, ‘Is that all there is?’”
  • The Atlantic analyzed all the ways in which the show came full circle at its ending–not just The Slap, but that too.
  • At EW, Melissa Maerz asks, “Does wanting closure from The Good Wife make you dumb?” (I’d say no, maybe not, but I do still disagree with the dismissal of the ending.)

Someone has been telling a surprisingly well-written cosmic horror story (more like SCP than anything else) in comments to mostly-unrelated reddit threads. This is a page that collects and organizes the story so far.

Huffpo summarizes the legacy of Jane Jacobs, who would have turned 100 this week.

The Emily Dickinson Museum is resurrecting the poet’s infamous orchard and gardens, via the NYT.

by Nerdy Spice

Nashville 4×18: “The Trouble with the Truth”

­­­­­­Previously on Nashville: People didn’t want to play Will on the radio because he was gay; Maddie filed for emancipation; Rayna threatened Cash; Scarlett and Gunnar got stuck in an elevator and then made out; Juliette asked for another chance with Avery, but he made out with Layla instead.

Rayna is getting ready for court. It’s an intense process, involving brow pencil and everything. “You are a good mother,” Deacon tells her as he puts on his suit. He says that Cash is pulling the wool over Maddie’s eyes, but that “no judge is going to rule in favor of a sixteen-year-old runaway.” For the sake of sixteen-year-olds who have actual abusive parents, I hope that dismissive statement is not true. Both parents look sad and worried.

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by Nerdy Spice

Why I Loved The Good Wife Finale: Recap & Review

This is it! In its final episode, The Good Wife rose out of the ashes of a mess of a season and grasped at the character-driven brilliance it had in its heyday. Before that, it attempted to make sense of a character whose contradictions, changes, and choices were opaque to her and wonderfully complex on screen.

I’ll recap it, then follow up with final thoughts—a farewell to this flawed masterpiece of a show.

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by Nerdy Spice

Links We Loved This Week — 5/6/16

In the LA Review of Books, GD Dess holds up the failure of Purity as evidence that Jonathan Franzen is part of kitsch culture.

The tale at this juncture finally transmogrifies from a so-called realistic social novel into a novel of what James Wood has called “hysterical realism,” in which the conventions of realism are not abolished but, “on the contrary, exhausted, and overworked.” …Franzen has abdicated his writerly duty, and this dereliction demonstrates a certain authorial contempt for his readers.

Turns out Walt Whitman was really into “manly health” and cutting down on carbs way before it was cool.

Person of Interest executive producer Jonathan Nolan doesn’t just believe that Facebook will destroy the world, he takes it as a given (via AV Club):

A lot of things that Samaritan espouses are believed by the people who work for Samaritan, the same way that I’m sure people who work for Facebook don’t believe that they’re working for the company that will destroy the world. But, you know, they are. And everyone gets through the day rationalizing their own existence.

 

As you may know, The Good Wife will have its final episode this Sunday. Here are some of the best articles and interviews making sense of its incredible first few seasons, and (by almost all accounts) its struggling seventh:

  • Alan Sepinwall at HitFix takes a look at The Good Wife as the last prestige network drama. “no show has dealt with the struggle to defy societal expectations and keep one’s feelings under tight wraps as often, or as well, as The Good Wife,” he writes. (Ignore the part where he says that Parenthood was a rival for this show. I just watched the whole thing. It wasn’t.)
  • Salon jumps on the “there will never be a great broadcast drama after The Good Wife” bandwagon.
  • At the New York Times, Christine Baranski has a very surprising favorite scene from the show; Michael J. Fox and other cast members also weigh in.
  • Also in the NYT, James Poniewozik writes a good-bye-Good-Wife article notable for describing Jason as a “laconic, bearded sex cowboy.”
  • The Kings looked back at the show. Robert King says, “On our show, no one’s really shooting at each other. Their words are the guns.”
by Nerdy Spice

Nashville Recap: 4×17 “Baby Come Home”

 

This was an amazing episode. There were no filler scenes, which is usually a big problem; every scene was meaty and moved the plot line forward; many storylines came to well-deserved climaxes that have been coming for a long time; every major character had sympathetic motivations, even when they were at odds; and it was genuinely heartbreaking in several spots. Solid work, Nashville.

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