Category Archives: TV

List ‘O the Week: Top 15 episodes of Community

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Choosing my favourite episodes of Community is both quite simple and quite problematic, because of the way creator Dan Harmon seems to pitch his show. Harmon is someone who tries so hard, some would say too hard, to produce a show that is more than ‘just a sitcom’. As such there are several episodes each season which will emerge from Harmon saying, ‘wouldn’t it be cool if…..?’. These episodes tend to be high-concept parodies of specific films and television shows or a mere riff on the conventions of film genre and form. Such episodes started being produced towards to end of season 1 and really thrived in season 2.

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List O’ The Week: Top 20 episodes of Adventure Time

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Let’s face it, Adventure Time is weird, but weird in the best possible way. It takes the crazed ADD creativity of youth, where absolutely anything can happen, infuses it with a kaleidoscopic colour scheme and a complete disregard for conventions and the norm and throws it up on the screen for 11 minute bursts of crazy. It has an obscure, sometimes absurdist, off-the-wall sense of humour that is breezily casual and flitters between juvenile gags and quite sophisticated character humour.
And even if you don’t have access to mind-altering hallucinogenic drugs, it’s still a pretty fun ride.

Here are some of my faves from the first 4 seasons. Season 5 is still in production, so I’m refraining from talking about it here (also……I haven’t watched it yet).

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Game of Thrones Catch-Up: Season 2 Review

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*Spoilers ahead. Although I’ve seen the first three seasons in their entirety I try to avoid any spoilers from beyond season 2. But if you’re super risk averse, I’d avoid reading this until you’ve completed season 3*

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I ploughed through Game of Thrones‘ second season in roughly 5 days. I’ve realised that this is a good way for me to watch the show. The faster I watch, the less time I have to build things up in my head, the less disappointed I feel when certain plotlines don’t go anywhere or progress fast enough for my liking. For all the moaning that the show is all table setting that I did in my review of season 1, I do very much enjoy GoT. Purely from a production standpoint, the series represents the pinnacle in TV craftsmanship and polish, and the storytelling choices are often quite bold and outside of what is expected in TV, as per its source material. My main issue with season 1 was its lack of pay off.

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List O’ The Week: Top 25 episodes of The Simpsons (Post Season 8)

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As I mentioned in my previous Top Simpsons Episode List (up to season 8), I am a lot kinder to the Mike Scully (9-12) and Al Jean (13+)  seasons of The Simpsons than many others because I grew up with these episodes. Sure they were muddled in with the re-runs of classic era episodes, but at the time I couldn’t see much of a differentiation, funny was funny and The Simpsons continued to make me laugh, with season 9 and onwards providing me many hours of enjoyment. Having said that, it’s easy to now see a differentiation in the quality and tone of the show. The laughs were still there, but they came from a sillier place. The show became broader, cruder and targeted towards a younger audience. The satire was blunted in favour  of Stupid Homer, or worse, Jerkass Homer as he came to be not-so-affectionately titled.

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Game Of Thrones Catch Up: Season 1 Review

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*SPOILERS for the entirety of season 1, but not beyond*

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Ok I’m going to be completely honest: Game of Thrones is a beautifully shot and designed show that is smartly written, with many bold storytelling twists and turns that successfully juggle an improbably large cast of characters all of whom are finely cast and embodied. But ultimately it creates a world that I’m not sure I’m completely invested in. In fact, I watched the season finale a good week or two ago and I’ve felt no great urge to continue (I will of course, it’s just not a top priority)

There are a number of reasons for this lack of devotion and because I’m lazy, I shall list them in point form. {Ok I realised all my below arguments are exactly the same and stem for my impatience and the desire for more resolution. But please continue, because I believe some of my points are almost valid}

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List O’ The Week – Top 25 episodes of The Simpsons

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Full Disclosure: I still have, to this day, 40+ VHS tapes of The Simpsons episodes that I taped off the TV (that’s right, I’m bad) as a young lad. I have all the DVDs up until season 11 where the horrible packaging made it impossible to remove the discs. Most embarrassingly, I have an entire folder full of sheets (almost 100 in total) which perfectly document which episodes are on which tapes (and a brief description), whether or not the episode exists in its entirety or was only half taped, and a grade out of 10 for each. So this list is in honour of that boy who had (and clearly still has) way too much time on his hands.

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Game Of Thrones Catch-Up: Winter Is Coming

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*There is very little in the way of spoilers here and I currently have no knowledge of events beyond Season 1, episode 4.

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First off, can someone please change the show’s title to ‘Games of Thrones’ because that is how I always see it in my head and it ain’t changing anytime soon.

Anywho (greatest segue ever) it is clear that Game of Thrones has become a cultural phenomenon over the last 3 years. On top of being the most illegally downloaded television program in Australia, my Facebook newsfeed becomes a smorgasbord of people moaning about detested or annoying characters or posting horrified memes when a beloved character dies. Sometimes I’m inclined to take the pretentious route and ignore super popular shows just to be different and contrarian (as I’ve done with shows like Suits), but I also have a fear of missing out on significant moments and movements in popular culture and Game of Thrones with its legions of fans, HBO cred and critical acclaim gave me a massive FOMO pop-culture hard on (a phrase I swear I’ll never repeat).

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Mad Men 6×13 – In Care Of

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*SPOILERS*

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Picture courtesy of the fantastic Tumblr Mad Men Screenshots with Things Drawn On Them

My feelings on Mad Men’s season six finale ‘In Care Of’ very neatly summarise my impression of season 6 as a whole. There are moments of brilliance, and the show still manages to be effectively unpredictable, but as a whole there feels as though too much is happening; it all feels a little messy and the episode ends up feeling less significant than the sum of its parts. However the final scene of the season goes a long way to taking a highly turbulent season that takes place at a confused and violent time period of the 60s and effectively centring all that craziness around Don.

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Mad Men 6×12 – The Quality of Mercy

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*SPOILERS TO FOLLOW*

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The imagery of Mad Men often walks a fine line between poetic and on-the-nose. But for an episode that opens and closes with Don in a foetal position, this one manages to stay just on the right side of pretentious. Todd VanDerWerff has a wonderfully in-depth analysis of all the Freudian underpinnings of this episode, so I’m just going to look at the episode on a more superficial level.

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Mad Men 6×11 – Favors

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*SPOILERS* (All my reviews have spoilers but these are more potent)

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I feel like I enjoyed this episode a lot less than most of Mad Men fandom. Some people have compared it (with knowing exaggeration) to the Games of Thrones’s Red Wedding in terms of the shocks it delivers, but for the most part the episode didn’t really hit me on an emotional level. The episode felt disjointed and lacked the seamless integration of plot lines that memorable Mad Men episodes share. The episode had no streamline momentum; each storyline peaked at different points, some ended there, some puttered on and in the meantime Peggy has a dead rat in her apartment.

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