Category: Episode Reviews
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Season Premiere — White Collar, “On Guard”
In my review of the White Collar season two finale, I wrote the following: But for whatever reason, this series has a problem with its cliffhangers. This might sound weird, but I think the White Collar writers try too hard to make their cliffhangers cliffhanger-y. With any cliffhanger, there’s an obvious intent to shock and surprise the…
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Season Premiere — Covert Affairs, “Begin the Begin”
Although they are known for their lightweight, summery nature, I like basically all of USA’s series. I guess I’d have to like them a lot to write my entire MA thesis about them. But even though I’ll watch almost anything USA Network puts on the air, there is certainly a clear distinction between what I…
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Surveillance Summer Watch: Cheers, “Give Me a Ring Sometime” and “Sam’s Women”
This is the first post in 2011’s Surveillance Summer Watch series featuring Cheers and Hill Street Blues. For the next couple of months, I’ll be writing weekly reviews of episodes from each series’ first seasons, with Cheers on Tuesdays and Hill Street Blues on Thursdays. For more information, see this post. Let me tell you…
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Friday Night Lights, “Fracture”
Again, this is my review of the episode when it aired on DirecTV, reposted here for your convenience and enjoyment. This is obvious and I also tweeted it when I was watching the episode a few days ago, but my goodness Kyle Chandler has been devastatingly great this season. He’s always fantastic and it was nice to see him…
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Season Finale — Cougar Town, “Something Good Coming”
If there was ever a series tailor-made for the Hawaii vacation episode(s), it has to be Cougar Town, right? Taking a band of goofballs who sit around drinking and playing stupid games in Florida and putting them in another beautiful, warm location doesn’t really change much, thankfully. “Something Good Coming” not only keeps the series…
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Season Finale — Glee, “New York”
Earlier this year, The A.V. Club’s Todd Van Der Werff wrote a great piece with an unfortunate, yet completely valid headline. It reads, “Community and Glee are pretty much the same show.” Obviously, the headline alone was enough to send the AVC community into a tizzy, but Todd’s piece is basically completely on-point. The first…
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Season/Series Finale — The Chicago Code, “Mike Royko’s Revenge”
I’ll be perfectly honest with you dear readers: I stopped watching The Chicago Code three or four weeks ago. With the end of the semester and various other things weighing me down, I had to free up some time and ditch Code was one of the things that helped me do that. I let episodes…
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Season Finale — Supernatural, “Let It Bleed” and “The Man Who Knew Too Much”
Sorry for the delay with this review folks. I had a super-busy weekend and just watched these episodes last night. It was difficult to wait, but ultimately, I think I would say it was worth it. From the very first episode, this season of Supernatural has been a disjointed mess. If you go back through some…
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Checking in with Friday Night Lights Season Five
Again, these posts were written during the DirecTV run. They’re being reposted here now. I haven’t written about FNL in a while (I think since episode three) because of odd scheduling and also because I’ve been a little frustrated with things. It’s not that season five has been bad, I just didn’t feel like the…
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Season Finale — The Office, “Search Committee”
Like many of the series I’ve written about this week, I haven’t checked in on The Office for a bit. Thursdays are always busy for me and the series isn’t in a position where it MUST be written about each week. I thought about writing something during Michael Scott’s goodbye, but so many other people…
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Cougar Town, “Free Fallin’”
Cougar Town is most certainly a goofy, sometimes weird comedy. I usually enjoy those zany parts of the series, but I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes Town goes a little too far into the broad humor that reminds me of some of the lesser episodes of Scrubs. I mean those really bad episodes of…
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Season Finale — The Good Wife, “Closing Arguments”
After a season in which The Good Wife expanded its narrative scope dramatically (so much so, it’s been rightfully discussed as the broadcast follow-up to The Wire), sometimes to its own detriment (let’s just pretend that Hugo Chavez episode didn’t happen, shall we?), it was kind of nice that the season finale dials things back and…
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Season Finale — Raising Hope, “Don’t Vote For This Episode”
I haven’t written about Raising Hope in a very long time, but that’s mostly been a byproduct of my Tuesday schedule and other persona matters. In any event, I wanted to get down a few thoughts about the finale. For the most part, the first season of Hope has been pretty damn great. First seasons of…
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Glee, “Funeral”
Note: I’m traveling today, so this will probably be shorter than normal. Glee has a problem with penultimate episodes, apparently. Last season, FOX swapped the intended penultimate episode “Theatricality” with “Funk” because they wanted the former’s Lady Gaga-centric content to line up with the release of the latest soundtrack. This of course brought us the…
CB, PhD 