Category: Featured
-
Test Pilot: File #13, The White Shadow
Note: Hope you like our cool new Test Pilot “logo!” Test Pilot #13: The White Shadow Debut date: November 27, 1978 Series legacy: One of the most well-respected television drama series with a sports backdrop, but not necessarily thought of as a “great” series. After a short hiatus, Test Pilot is back! Time for more…
-
The TVS List: Three broadcast series that need to be canceled
Note: I’m hopefully going to have more time to write things here over the next few months, so I’ll be trying to bring back the weekly list feature. Trying. Anyway, here’s the beginning of that attempt. It’s spring, which means it is the time of year that everyone takes to the internet to stump for…
-
The Killing, “El Diablo”
The first two episodes of The Killing that aired last week were, let’s say, fairly dark. The case is depressing, the location is depressing and a lot of these people Linden and Holder are coming into contact with seem suspicious and kind of awful. Well, if the events of this week’s episode, “El Diablo,” are…
-
The Vampire Diaries, “Know Thy Enemy”
I’ll be honest: There have been a lot of television series off the air over the past month or so, but there are none I missed more than The Vampire Diaries. It’s certainly not the “best” series I watch, but it’s certainly the most watchable and enjoyable so it is very, very fantastic to have…
-
Justified, “Brother’s Keeper”
There was A LOT of hype for this episode of Justified. People were calling this best episode of the series yet, the best episode of 2011 and so on and so forth. For the most part, that hype is, well, justified. “Brother’s Keeper” is a fantastic episode of television and most certainly one of the…
-
Series Premiere — Breaking In, “Pilot”
Here we are with yet another new comedy, which immediately makes me just want to point to the piece I wrote a handful of weeks ago about watching and writing about new entries in the genre. Much like so many of the new comedies this season, Breaking In has a lot of potential. In fact,…
-
The Good Wife, “Wrongful Termination”
I couldn’t really bring myself to write about last week’s episode of The Good Wife. Since I watched the first 33 or so episodes in a week-long binge, I can’t really be sure, but I’m mostly confident in making a claim for that to be the worst episode of the series. This is such a…
-
Stuck in the middle — The failure of the complex, restrained television series
Let’s play pretend for a moment (since I planned on writing this column had this thing we’re pretending about actually happened), if you don’t mind. Let us assume for the sake of argument that AMC’s fantastic new drama series The Killing didn’t open to nearly 3 million viewers, which is a sizable success for the…
-
Series Premiere — The Killing, “Pilot” and “The Cage”
I’ve slowly recognized that reviewing pilots of big, anticipated series is sort of a frivolous game. By the time something like The Killing hits the airwaves like it did last night, it’s been discussed so much and been reviewed so frequently, it’s moderately difficult to think about the series in ways that the 923 reviews…
-
Justified, “The Spoil”
In my review of last week’s Justified, I talked about how that episode served as a nice pivot point for the rest of the season. While I still stand by that observation, this week’s episode more overtly points out those sorts of things. So many of the characters and smaller problems introduced in the first…
-
Community, “Critical Film Studies”
When I knew that “Critical Film Studies” was reportedly going to include a lot of Pulp Fiction references I was a bit worried that my general ambivalence (and thus lack of real knowledge) towards that film would mean I wouldn’t enjoy this episode as much as I could have. I wasn’t necessarily concerned about not…
-
Justified, “Save My Love”
I haven’t been writing about Justified on a weekly basis because of various scheduling issues but in short, I’ve really enjoyed this season. And I’m still short on time today but I wanted to get a few thoughts down on “Save My Love” because it was just that good. Anyway, the world of Justified is…
-
The show about nothing — The problem with Glee’s second season
A few of the series I regularly cover here at TVS are on hiatus this week. In lieu of writing reviews of new episodes, I thought this would be a good time to take stock of where we’ve been this season and where we’re headed in the final string of episodes. In these posts I’ll…
CB, PhD 