Category: Featured
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Surveillance Summer Watch: Cheers, “The Tortelli Tort,” “Sam at Eleven” and “Coach’s Daughter”
This is the newest 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 and for all the…
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From Route 666 to The Apocalypse: Ranking the episodes of Supernatural, Introductions and Episodes 126-117
With summer upon us, I’ve been working on all sorts of summer-y features. I’m doing the classic series re-watch posts and hashing out various Emmy-related things to go live soon. But the summer wouldn’t be complete without a ranked list of an entire series’ episode catalog. Last summer, I took on both The Office and…
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Surveillance Summer Watch: Hill Street Blues, “Hill Street Station”
This is the next 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. Just a quick house-keeping…
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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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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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2010-2011 season wrap: Ranking the episodes of Glee’s second season
The other day, I mentioned that ranking the episodes of Community‘s second season was one of the most difficult lists I had ever done. Doing a similar list of Glee’s second season was, well, less difficult. I wrote about Glee a lot this season and realized that I would really just be repeating myself if…
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2010-2011 season wrap: The Vampire Diaries
With the 2010-2011 television season officially over, I’ll be taking some time over the next week or so to look back on how some of television’s best and worst fared this season. General thoughts: I burned through the first season of The Vampire Diaries in very quick fashion last August in preparation for the second season.…
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2010-2011 season wrap: Ranking the episodes of Community’s second season
The 2010-2011 television series officially ended last week. Obviously, there will be a lot of great television coming in the summer months ahead and it is sort of silly to stick to the ancient constructs of the broadcast television season (which ran from September 20, 2010 to May 25, 2011 this season), but I’ve never…
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Telling the best original stories?: Discussing AMC’s brand development
I have been thinking a lot about television network/channel branding lately. Call it a dual byproduct of writing a MA thesis on the topic and the upfronts season, which always brings forth questions about whether or not a series is “right” for whatever it is a network or channel is trying to do. My branding-on-the-brain…
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#TVFail Entry 4: The Office, “The Banker”
The accused: The Office, “The Banker” (Season 6, Episode 14) The crime: Clip show. That is all. Television’s failures are supposed to be obvious. From the overhyped non-starters that flop from the very beginning (hello, FlashForward, Lone Star) to the much-discussed clumsy conclusions of series we were convinced had it all planned out (nice to see you…
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2010-2011 season wrap: Smallville
With the 2010-2011 television season officially over, I’ll be taking some time over the next week or so to look back on how some of television’s best and worst fared this season. General thoughts: Endings are, of course, difficult to manage. This has to be especially true for a series that has been on the…
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2010-2011 season wrap: The top 10 series of the season
The 2010-2011 television series officially ended last week. Obviously, there will be a lot of great television coming in the summer months ahead and it is sort of silly to stick to the ancient constructs of the broadcast television season (which ran from September 20, 2010 to May 25, 2011 this season), but I’ve never…
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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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2010-2011 season wrap: The top 10 episodes of the season
The 2010-2011 television series officially ended yesterday. Obviously, there will be a lot of great television coming in the summer months ahead and it is sort of silly to stick to the ancient constructs of the broadcast television season (which ran from September 20, 2010 to May 25, 2011 this season), but I’ve never claimed…
CB, PhD 