The A.V. Club - TV Club

TV: Batman: The Animated Series: “Sideshow”

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 12:00:00 -0600

“Sideshow” (season 2, episode 1; originally aired 5/3/1994) What better way to kick off the second season of Batman: The Animated Series than with one of only two episodes that is set completely outside of Gotham City? Batman has to navigate the treacherous terrain surrounding Gotham when Killer Croc escapes while being transported to a new prison, and the change in environment fits for one of Batman’s most primal rogues. Killer Croc’s first episode, “Vendetta,” was more of a Harvey Bullock story, but with “Sideshow,” Croc gets his own classic B:TAS episode in the vein ...

TV: American Dad: “Wheels & The Legman And The Case Of Grandpa’s Keys”

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 02:35:00 -0600

There are a few different types of comedy shows, but two are the most popular. One builds a general form of goodwill, a bunch of likable or at least charming characters interacting with each other. It’s warm and inviting. The other tends to aim for laughter, going for surprise, which often works better with less pleasant characters. At the top of the form currently, the former includes Parks & Recreation, the latter, Community, although there’s a lot of overlap. The typical American Dad episode (or Seth MacFarlane show generally) tends to string together a series of set pieces, vaguely ...

TV: Pan Am: “Romance Languages”

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 00:45:00 -0600

Following in the wake of Christina Ricci’s cheery recitation of DVR-assisted ratings and news that Mike Vogel has signed on to headline a Fox pilot from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia’s Rob McElhenney and Rob Rosell, “Romance Languages” arrives as an obvious indicator that the upcoming season finale of Pan Am is really a series finale. At the very least, the episode’s out-of-order airing displays how little thought ABC is currently giving to the series: “Romance Languages” arrives more than three months after the episode it was intended to follow, the Maggie-centric, flashback-heavy “The Genuine Article ...

TV: Other Shows: The 54th Annual Grammy Awards

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 00:30:00 -0600

To the surprise of no one, Adele was the big winner at the 54th annual Grammy Awards, taking home trophies for the top three major awards—Album, Record, and Song Of The Year—and six overall. Also, LL Cool J invited us all to pray, Nicki Minaj was possessed by the devil, and Dave Grohl would not leave the stage already. As usual, it was a weird, weird night. Here are eight things I took away from it. 1. The “authenticity” narrative: When Adele was handed her Record Of The Year trophy for “Rolling In The Deep,” she said something ...

TV: House Of Lies: “Our Descent Into Los Angeles”

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 23:35:00 -0600

The best thing about “Our Descent Into Los Angeles” is that it barely touched Clyde and Doug’s hookup game. This has been the most frustrating part of House Of Lies since it showed up in that second episode, and I was all prepared to make it the focus of this week’s review. That it was gone was refreshing, but it wasn’t also replaced by any kind of non-hideous character development for the two younger men, unless you count Doug trying find someone to go see Wicked with him. It’s not really a good sign when the ...

TV: Family Guy: “Tom Tucker: The Man And His Dream”

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 23:30:00 -0600

At a certain point it’s just not fair to compare Family Guy to The Simpsons. But when Family Guy eases into an A-plot designed around a fringe character like tonight, which features Quahog news anchor extraordinaire Tom Tucker, it’s hard for me not to think of great Simpsons episodes centered around non-Simpson family characters like Barney, Moe, Apu, Mr. Burns, and countless others. My gut reaction is that I don’t care about very many of the fringe characters on Family Guy, or even many of the members of the Griffin family for that matter, so I didn ...

TV: Other Shows: Absolutely Fabulous 20th Anniversary Specials - "Job"

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 23:00:00 -0600

At its best, Absolutely Fabulous is a brilliant piss-take of the glamour industry, a hilarious riff on the conspicuous consumption and celebrity worship that have so defined the last decade or so. But the danger of a show like Absolutely Fabulous, which relies so heavily on referential humor and insidery jokes about fashion designers and B-list British celebs, is inadvertently celebrating the very subject it supposedly ridicules. “Identity,” the first of three half-hour specials marking AbFab’s 20th anniversary, was a sharp, topical spoof of British culture at a time of royal weddings and riots. In contrast, “Job” is ...

TV: The Simpsons: “The Daughter Also Rises”

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 22:50:00 -0600

It is hard to say exactly where this Valentine’s Day-themed episode of The Simpsons goes wrong, but I think it might be the point where they forgot to include jokes. That’s not entirely fair. There are a few small jokes, some even almost worthy of a chuckle. For the most part, though, the episode simply cranks through its A- and B-plots without any real attempt at humor. While this season has occasionally landed a good episode, some, like this one, have been so lackluster as to make the whole business seem exhausted and exhausting. It is still hard ...

TV: Downton Abbey: “Series Two, Episode Six.”

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 22:00:00 -0600

Dear Lord, where to begin? Tonight’s episode of Downton Abbey is like the TV equivalent of a deep-fried, double-stuffed Oreo cookie: so artificial, so ridiculous, but also so delicious. From start to finish, it’s jam-packed with pivotal life moments: there’s a miraculous physical recovery, a marriage, an illicit affair, a thwarted elopement, an engagement, a death, and an arrest. And, oh yeah, Mary and Matthew totally make out. Plot-wise, this is easily the sudsiest episode of Downton Abbey so far this season, but what makes it work is that, after lots of zig-zagging back and forth, all ...

TV: Californication: “Love Song”

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 22:00:00 -0600

The biggest curiosities hovering over Californication have always been, “Is L.A. really like this, and has it really possessed this series’ characters to be so casually permissive of such reckless behavior?” The answer to part one of that two-fer gauntlet remains subjective. In creator Tom Kapinos’ city-view, Los Angeles can be a fantasy, the kind propagated for years as American fairy tale and wishfully imagined in the show’s opening credits, not to mention tonight’s flashbacks. That perspective, along with much of “Love Song,” essentially answers the second question: Yes. We’re at the midway point of season ...

TV: Shameless: “Can I Have A Mother”

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 21:00:00 -0600

The word “uneven” gets tossed around a lot in episodic television criticism. I use it quite a bit myself, so I’m partially to blame for overusing it in a way that sort of robs it of its meaning. So apologies in advance for saying, man alive, what an uneven season of Shameless this is shaping up to me. Honestly, what better adjective can describe a season of television that careens so wildly from nearly great to totally inessential? I really dug "Father's Day," and I was hoping for some continued momentum. But "Can I Have A Mother" represents ...

TV: Once Upon A Time: Skin Deep”

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 21:00:00 -0600

Once Upon A Time does “Beauty And The Beast” with “Skin Deep, casting Rumpelstiltskin as the monster that steals Belle’s heart. Lost’s Emilie de Ravin guest stars as Belle, who is no longer the nerdy daughter of an inventor, just a straight-up princess. OUAT’s Belle might wear the same clothes, but without her humble beginnings, she’s a much less interesting character. In order to protect her village during the Ogre Wars, Belle agrees to be the caretaker of Rumpelstiltskin’s estate, taking the opportunity to show bravery after a life of inaction. While trying to open ...

TV: The Walking Dead: “Nebraska”

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 21:00:00 -0600

It’s hard to get thrilling drama out of grief. Sadness saps energy, mutes passion, and forces character dynamics into a noose. Every scene has to acknowledge the emotion in some way, every conversation has to center around the loss, and the ache, and the person who will never come back, and while that’s powerful stuff, and universal, it’s not particularly fun to watch. Death in fiction can serve any number of ends, but mourning only really serves one, as it forces everyone to take a long hard look at their own lives, and remember that some day ...

TV: Luck: “Episode Three”

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 21:00:00 -0600

Three episodes in, I’m most surprised that Luck is as formulaic as it is. Keep in mind that I’m not saying this is a bad thing. One of the pleasures of TV is the way that the medium uses formulas and expectations to create situations where it can surprise the audience or please us with seeing certain things we want to see happen occur. But Luck is doing something very interesting with its ideas of formula: It’s blending what is, essentially, an episode-by-episode formula with the larger HBO ideal of creating a sort of novel for television ...

TV: Angry Boys: “Episode 11”/“Episode 12”

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 20:00:00 -0600

The final two episodes of Angry Boys moved at a notably more rapidly clip than its predecessors. Perhaps Chris Lilley was running out of time and simply needed to shorten his scenes in order to fit everything in, but I think I would have preferred had he kept most of the series’ scenes as tight as tonight’s. As I said many times before, the best parts of the show were drowned out by generous amounts of time spent on the least-essential characters. Perhaps I wouldn’t have resented S.mouse and Jen Okazaki so much had my time with ...

TV: The Critic: “A Day At The Races And A Night At The Opera”

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 14:00:00 -0600

“A Day At The Races And A Night At The Opera” (season 1, episode 11; originally aired 07/06/1994) It still seems a little surreal that ABC once paired the short-lived but beloved likes of The Critic and The Dana Carvey Showwith the ratings juggernaut that was Home Improvement. The Dana Carvey Show famously alienated much of its potential audience by opening with a Louis C.K-written sketch in which a triumphant Bill Clinton, convinced that nothing, but nothing, could stop his inevitable march to electoral victory in 1996, publicly breast-feeds puppies (and then kittens) from his ...

TV: Saturday Night Live: “Zooey Deschanel/Karmin”

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 12:00:00 -0600

I cannot, in good conscience, give an A grade to a show that allowed those Karmin performances to happen on live national television. But otherwise, that was a relatively strong episode of Saturday Night Live, mostly devoid of the silly material I thought Zooey Deschanel would engender (they pretty much crammed all of that into one sketch). In fact, Zooey was not really a major player and really only made an impression a couple of times, which surprised me, but this episode had a lot of other strengths. The best thing about it was that it moved a little faster ...

TV: Other Shows: Comic Book Men

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 10:00:00 -0600

Comic Book Men debuts tonight on AMC at 10 p.m. Eastern. Comic Book Men is a weird hybrid of a bunch of stuff. It never quite works as its own entity, even though most of the parts making it up are enjoyable in the moment. It exists, by and large, because AMC needs to figure out a way to keep the sizable Walking Dead audience watching AMC, and the network has yet to decide how it wants to follow up the huge success of the zombie show. (To this day, it continues to hedge its bets on which pilots ...

TV: Cowboy Bebop: “Brain Scratch”

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 14:00:00 -0600

In “Brain Scratch,” writer Keiko Nobumoto delivers a thoughtful episode that’s expressly about the mystery of the week’s protagonist. This is refreshing because for once, a disposable character doesn’t just serve as a foil for Spike or one of the other members of the Bebop’s crew. Londes is the leader of Scratch, a cyber-cult that encourages members to leave their bodies behind and find inner peace by becoming pure digital information. Londes is an enigmatic figurehead that indirectly evokes the Aum Shinrikyo cult that came to world prominence in 1995 after the now-infamous Tokyo Sarin Gas ...

TV: The Twilight Zone: “King Nine Will Not Return”/“The Man In The Bottle”

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 12:00:00 -0600

“King Nine Will Not Return” (season 2, episode 1; originally aired 9/30/1960) In which the past can take us to strange places… In 1959, while looking for oil in the Libyan desert, a team of British geologists discovered the wreck of the Lady Be Good, an American bomber that had disappeared in 1943. While the plane had split into two pieces, it was largely intact, except for one glaring absence: there was no crew. The bodies were eventually discovered the following year, but for The Twilight Zone, that didn’t matter. Rod Serling saw the story of the ...