Category: Featured
-
Review: Glee, “Mash Off”
Glee has never been a consistent series. Even in the now-halcyon days of the first 13 episodes, the series stumbled on a fairly consistent basis, it just happened to get the raw, emotionally wrenching moments right more often. One of the biggest problems with season two was its wild inconsistency, not across episodes, but within…
-
Guided by Moments: On Watching How I Met Your Mother in its Elder Years
How I Met Your Mother is one of those series that I watch every week, but never find time or inspiration to write about here on TV Surveillance. I don’t feel the frustration that some people do and I also don’t feel the overwhelming support and connection to the series. This is probably because I…
-
Community “Benched” — Why NBC isn’t the ultimate bad guy
NBC sucks. This is something that you all pretty much know. The feathers are off the proverbial Peacock. The once-powerful network has been suffering an extended ratings nadir for nearly a decade and if you take a look at this recent New York Times piece, there are few good signs to pick out among the…
-
Test Pilot: Announcing the Test Pilot schedule through May 2012
Tuesday update: I’ve now filled each of these entries with a co-writer. Thanks to everyone who volunteered and shared this. Hiya folks! Just as I did with #TVFail on Friday, I’ve decided to take this short burst of free time I have currently to plan the schedule for the Test Pilot feature. Constructing the schedule…
-
Review: Community, “Studies in Modern Movement”
There are a lot of real awful things in this world – hunger, terrorism, disease – but if we’re talking about somewhat less real awful things, it’s hard to top moving. I lived in the same house my entire life until I went to college and perhaps it’s just because of those 17 years of…
-
TV Surveillance Podcast Episode 14 — Times Were Different Then, Man
In this episode of the TV Surveillance Podcast, host Cory Barker is joined by his good friend Adam Lukach for a discussion about Hell on Wheels, a recent piece Cory wrote on AMC and a short chat about Showtime’s Homeland. Don’t forget, you can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, if you’d like.
-
Test Pilot: File #27, Carnivàle
Test Pilot #27: Carnivàle Debut date: September 7, 2003 Series legacy: A rabidly-beloved series that was deemed too dense and too slow for even the refined pallets of HBO’s audience For nearly a decade-and-a-half, HBO has been the biggest power player in the television industry. More than any other individual network or entity, HBO has…
-
Review: Sons of Anarchy, “Hands”
Sons of Anarchy is having one heck of a season, no? Whether or not Kurt Sutter agrees with most of the criticisms of the mediocre third season, it is apparent that he decided to push the series back towards the things it does best in season four. Now that we’re coming to the final stretch…
-
Quality television-by-the-numbers: On AMC’s continued misguided laziness
This is not a review for the pilot episode of Hell on Wheels. You see because I don’t think I could barely muster up more than 150 words about that initial offering. At the pilot stage, Hell on Wheels is dull, sloppy, clunky and generally trying to do way too many different things without accomplishing…
-
Review: Glee, “Pot O’Gold”
Well, I guess there was no way that could last. It’s been a while, but when the first three episodes of Glee’s third season aired nine months ago, it was somewhat staggering that all of them were pretty solid, with the last aired episode “Asian F” being one of my favorites in a very long…
-
Early-season check-in: 2 Broke Girls
Over the next week or so, I’m hoping to check in with a number of the fall’s new series. Most have aired half-dozen or so episodes by now, so it feels like a fine time to see what they’ve improved on, if anything, since the pilot. These pieces won’t be too long, but they…
-
Review: The Walking Dead, “Save the Last One”
That’s more like it. “Save the Last One” is definitely the best episode of The Walking Dead since the pilot and it might be one that I actually like more than that stirring initial offering. This is the kind of series that I hoped The Walking Dead would be and this is the kind of…
-
Pilot rapid-fire review: Grimm
There are so many new series debuting and unfortunately, there is only so much time in the day for me to write about television while balancing my “real” life. You know, the one I spend on Twitter. ANYWAY, I’m going to try to touch on each new series once it airs a pilot, but these…
-
Season Premiere review — Chuck, “Chuck Versus the Zoom”
Chuck is one of those series that has trouble with season premieres, or at least it has been recently. Because the seasons two and three finales have suggested big changes for characters and for the narrative as a whole, the subsequent S3 and S4 premiere have been forced to deal with those changes. And because…
-
Chuck Versus the List of Greatness: Chuck’s 15 best episodes
Chuck’s somewhat-anticipated final season begins tonight. And although I already wrote a piece to celebrate the series’ return, I thought it would be best to stray away from the negative and focus a little bit more on the good times. In that vein, I figured the best way for me to do that would be…
CB, PhD 