- In Which the Starks' deeply ingrained sense of honor begins to come back to bite them in the ass - a theme that I'm sure will only get more and more heartbreakingly wearying as the series progresses.
- I'm not sure that I ever had the impression from the books that Tywin Lannister was the sort to literally get his hands dirty, but I can't quibble with such a perfectly badass introduction. I really love Nikolaj Coster-Waldau's performance in the episode's opening scene as well - you get so much of the fraught relationship between the Lannisters just from the way he shows Jaime quietly shrinking in the presence of his father.
- It's interesting that the show is making me notice parallels that I didn't necessarily see in the books , just from the ways the different story threads are arranged - specifically, I never really thought about the relationships in common between Jorah and Dany with the Dothraki and the Old Bear and Maester Aemon at the wall until their scenes were put together in this episode.
- Idle Thought: It occurred to me as I read Alan Sepinwall's piece on the Deadwood pilot that maybe part of the reason why GoT's recurring use of Expositional Monologuing with Prostitutes feels so clunky is because Al Swearengen already proved himself the master of the form.
Friday Night Lights - 5.8, "Fracture"
- Kyle Chandler has had many great moments across this series, but Coach Taylor quietly yet aggressively running Derek off of his property has to rank in the top ten. Julie must've told her illicit T.A. paramour exactly nothing about her parents to make him think that showing up in Dillon was a good idea.
- I missed the opening credits, and thus got to be pleasantly surprised by Matt's appearance (and, sure, let out a bit of a girly shriek). I may have to re-embrace my final-season-of-Lost strategy of deliberately ignoring the credits to keep the guest appearances as fresh as possible.
- It's really too bad this show has already wrapped. The ladies of the Landing Strip deserve to have their own webisodes where they dole out beauty tips and relationship advice.
Other Shows
The summer season of internet TV writers rewatching past shows began this week, and there's a lot of shows I just might rewatch along with them - Six Feet Under, Veronica Mars, Deadwood. Sunday's popularity as the night for cable dramas means that even with So You Think You Can Dance, the summer schedule of new programming has really front-loaded weeks. And rewatching should mean that I can pace myself week-by-week and resist the temptation to marathon.
In particular, I really enjoyed Ryan McGee's piece on the Alias pilot, because it articulated a lot of things I haven't previously put together about the show's significance in my development as a television viewer and fan. I've already written here about how Freaks and Geeks marks a turning point in my TV-watching evolution, but I don't think I've given the same degree of thought to Alias. I was a sophomore in high school when Alias premiered and, like Freaks and Geeks, Alias was one of the first shows that I really loved in a way that I knew was fundamentally different from watching NBC's Thursday night lineup just because it was popular.
It was the first show where I had a concept of the showrunner behind the scenes (J.J. Abrams, in this case) and how he shaped and drove what happened on the show. It was the first show where I really looked at fan sites online. The first two seasons are some of the first, if not the first, TV DVDs I owned. It isn't just a game-changer for network television as a serial, as McGee outlines, but on a personal level it gave me a degree of familiarity with genre television I hadn't had before, which in turn made me more receptive to shows like Battlestar Galactica and Lost (and probably about a dozen others I could name). If Freaks and Geeks helped me to define my concept of myself as an independent television viewer, Alias helped me think about the kinds of genres I wanted to explore and thematic paths I was then interested in traveling down.
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