TV Roundup
Mm, mm, good...
As I’ve said ad nauseum now, it’s a golden age of television — the stuff on the small screen is much better than most of what’s on the big ones — and there’s nothing I like more than to sit down with an Obama Brand TV Dinner (see pic above), and watch me some home entertainment. Here’s a quick look at what I’ve been looking at.
Justified. This is currently the best show on TV — the best one I’m watching anyway. For all I know, Mob Wives is Shakespearean. But in the eyes of this old crime writer, Justified is crime writing like it oughta be. The tough guy dialogue is sharp. The hillbilly characters are riveting. The deep Kentucky setting is fascinating. The scenes of violence are exceptionally well done: they’re genuinely tense and frightening. There’s a sort of running gag that the villains of the piece are almost universally stupid and ineffective — but that doesn’t stop them from being scary and threatening. You know they’re never going to make the big score, but that doesn’t mean they won’t kill you in the process of trying.
Great cast. Timothy Olyphant has elevated himself here from second rate movie hero to star. Walton Goggins, who was Shane on The Shield, is, within his range, as good as any actor alive. Nick Searcy should have more scenes; he’s hilarious. And Joelle Carter is expertly taking her character on its arc from beautiful loser to beautiful fearsome gangster, and have I mentioned she’s beautiful?
The seasonal storylines can be a little meandering, but all in all, this show is top-notch and keeps getting better.
Agree with Justified. Having lived near the area where it happens, it is really only an exaggeration of real life. Its a place that if you weren’t born there, you will never be from there, as the state cop told Raylan in one episode.
A close second, that you left off, is The Walking Dead, jmho. Can’t wait until the next season.
Here’s mine: Justified, Blue Bloods, Game of Thrones, and Sons of Anarchy. Not sure where they fit on your scale, but there you go.
Agree about Mad Men. One problem that US TV has, it doesn’t follow the artist’s credo – when your piece is finished, then stop.
Agreed K, Mad Men, the times ive watched has been lets play dress up and manufacture history.
PS The Finder is fun!
Justified is simply fantastic. Mad Men is…wobbly sometimes. I like it, but I’m not sure what the point is.
I tried watching Spartacus, but I couldn’t stop comparing it to Rome–which is probably the best show I’ve ever scene. The gravity of Rome was almost unbearable at times. Spartacus is just porn in comparison.
Scene=seen. I wasn’t trying to be punny.
One of the most fascinating things about Justified is that it’s based on a character from 2 Elmore Leonard novels. After those 2 novels, the author wrote a short story where the main character was returned to his Tennessee roots, and that’s what the show is based upon. The fascinating thing is that while Leonard gets credit as an executive producer, he doesn’t write the episodes–others do. Reputedly they wore t-shirts that read “WWED” as in “What Would Elmore Do?” until series star Timothy Olyphant said “Well he certainly wouldn’t wear a stupid t-shirt!” Anyway, the plotting is recognizably Elmore Leonard. I know this sounds weird, and there are a lot of writers for whom this *isn’t* the case, but with Elmore Leonard, you can actually recognize his plots. I never read the novel “Get Shorty”, but I could have told you that he’d written the book based on watching the movie. A gangster from back East who’s too honest to be a Hollywood producer? Seriously, that’s obvious! There was a sequence in the first season of Justified where a hit man from Detroit or somewhere showed up for an episode, and intimidated two crooks, threatened them, until one of the guys just up and shot him dead. Vintage Leonard…but he didn’t write it.
A couple of years ago I read a book about Winston Churchill during World War II, and how he wrote his history of the war afterwards. Turns out he *didn’t* write the history, not in its entirety anyway; he had research “assistants” who did much of the writing for him. One of them recounts in the book that they got very good at sounding like their boss. The screenwriters at Justified can lay claim to the same thing, though of course Elmore Leonard isn’t exactly Winston Churchill…
Justified is great . He is so ‘Dirty Harry” politically incorrect and Joelle is smoking hot