- The theme song is slowly growing on me. It's still not the kind of song you can imagine playing in the background as someone makes their way from the audience to the podium at an awards show, but it's got its own sort of swagger.
- Somehow, this episode managed to reference not one, but two different things that have come up in my reading this semester that make my skin crawl: the phrase "feeble-minded" and the contraceptive concept of douching with Lysol. Ew.
Glee
- I don't think I've previously discussed A.V. Club writer Todd VanDerWerff's breakdown of Glee's three showrunner-writers and what each brings to the episodes they write, but it's gotten a strong example this season in the way Will's been written in the episodes by Ryan Murphy. Where he normally seems like an enthusiastic, if occasionally hapless teacher, in Murphy's two episodes so far this season he's come across as a psycho with no boundaries, who then wonders why acting like a psycho with no boundaries isn't immediately winning Emma over to his side. Murphy can usually make his particular brand of heightened reality work within Glee's universe, but when a character's doing something so cringe-inducingly awful that you want to avert your eyes from the television, that's when you should maybe re-evaluate that character's path.
- Over the summer, I had designs on writing a post about what I though Glee could learn from other high-school shows, which obviously never quite materialized. (If this season is structured like the first, with the multi-month winter hiatus, it still might make an appearance.) The repeated mentions of the club going to Nationals brought up one of those points - where the first season's first thirteen episodes were loosely structured around the trip to Sectionals, there's been no real mention of them so far. The show I'd refer to here as an example is Friday Night Lights - each season of FNL, especially the first and third, where the team actually makes it to the State Championship game, utilizes the game-by-game structure of the football season as a narrative frame. Given that they didn't make it past Regionals last year, all this talk about New York is increasingly seeming like a) totally wishful thinking that is b) completely divorced from reality and c) not in a wacky, fun way.
Sons of Anarchy
One of the things I love and hate about cable dramas is that you never quite know where the writers set their boundaries. When you're not beholden to the same kinds of Standards and Practices as the networks, where do you draw the line on what's too much, especially when your show takes place in a relatively insane, violent universe? I'm thinking specifically about Jax's new Belfast flirtation with the girl he doesn't know is his half-sister, which seems to bring up these two voices in my head as I watch. One says, uneasily, "Even on a show as crazy as this one, incest is totally a line that they wouldn't cross," and the other says, "OR WOULD THEY?!?" And then both yell at the TV for persons in the know to intervene.
Private Practice
This television season seems to be featuring a disproportionate number of actors jumping around the dial - Zosia Mamet, Kevin Alejandro, Paula Malcomson, etc. - but none have been quite so disorienting as the Wednesday/Thursday juxtaposition of the Gustafson-heavy Terriers episode and Rockmond Dunbar then appearing on PP as a guy on the downlow. I mean, it partly indicated to me how quickly I've embraced Terriers (so good), but it also made for a weirder-than-it-was-supposed-to-be hour of television on Thursday.
Also Watched: Sherlock, Luther, 90210, Gossip Girl, Raising Hope, Detroit 1-8-7, The Good Wife, Modern Family, Cougar Town, Hellcats, Terriers, Top Chef: Just Desserts, Community, The Office, Grey's Anatomy, Degrassi
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