iZombie’s season finale promises an “unbelievable situation,” which, what? And how!?
Here’s what’s up in the world of TV for Tuesday, June 9. All times are Eastern.
Top pick
iZombie (The CW, 9 p.m.): We’ve have had way, way more than our fair share of fun with this show, tweaking it for the inherent ridiculousness of its high-concept premise while paying lip service to the fact that, yeah, by all accounts, this is actually a really good show. We feel okay with this arrangement because—and here it really helps that we’re just raging narcissists—we’re pretty sure iZombie is getting its own back by messing with us in its episode description. (Yes, specifically us, the gestalt entity that writes What’s On Tonight. Again, just raging, raging narcissists.) To wit, the final part of the synopsis for tonight’s first season finale: “Major gets involved in an unbelievable situation.” An. Unbelievable. Situation. On the show with the zombie mortuary assistant who gets visions from the brains of murder victims and uses said visions to solve crimes, and also said zombie mortuary assistant’s actual name is “Liv Moore.” We can’t even begin to guess what would still count as unbelievable relative to that—some kind of super-intelligent unicorn mafia, maybe?—but we’re glad Carrie Raisler will be on the scene to find out.
Also noted
Younger (Nickelodeon/TV Land, 10 p.m.): This show also wraps up its first season, and apparently the whole web of lies is going to collapse in on Sutton Foster’s Liza, in a way that will surely be devastating but hopefully not completely destroy the show heading into a possible season two. Alexa Planje doesn’t ask for much, but at least one charming basic cable Sutton Foster vehicle making it to a second season is on her list.
Finding Carter (MTV, 10 p.m.): At least Finding Carter is hanging around for another week, though this description sounds momentous enough for a finale: “Unveiled secrets threaten the bonds of sisterhood; Crash returns from military training; and Carter makes a decision about her future.” Not to besmirch the value of long-term planning, but Joshua Alston is pretty sure not a single person in television history has made a decision about his or her future without immediately encountering disaster.
Elsewhere in TV Club
1995 Week rolls on with Alan Siegel’s look at the making of the iconic Simpsons two-parter, “Who Shot Mr. Burns?” Here’s a little taste:
The original plan was to make boozehound Barney Gumble the shooter. Oakley and Weinstein thought jokes about the town drunk had grown stale; if Barney did it, he’d go to jail and not reappear for a few years.
“It didn’t appeal to me at all,” says [David] Mirkin, the showrunner for seasons five and six. “I figured that it would be really funny and good and comical and interesting in a Simpsons way if it turned out to be Maggie.” When he proposed that the baby should shoot Mr. Burns, executive producer James L. Brooks cracked up. “It was a big deal to get him to laugh,” Mirkin says. “He was a mentor and god to me, so I always remember that moment. And I knew this was probably a good thing.”