This week Tiny and I welcome our friend Greg Lenz (from We Are Libertarians) to review Steve Jobs, gush over Aaron Sorkin’s work, and draw parallels between this movie and The Social Network! In potpourri, I review Rick and Morty season 1 and indie drama Unexpected; Tiny talks about NBC drama Nashville; and Greg talks about his excitement for The Big Short and the Tarantino police boycott controversy. Continue reading →
For our 50th episode we took a look at religion’s role in cinema. We covered God on Trial, The Passion of the Christ, Rosemary’s Baby, Ben-Hur, The Mist and several more movies. Not to mention, we also discussed recent religious releases Noah, God’s Not Dead and Heaven is For Real.
For this week’s Potpourri section, we debated the merit in watching leaked Godzilla footage, analyzed Aaron Sorkin’s apology for The Newsroom and, finally, we discussed the failures of The Raid 2.
Thank you for downloading our 50th episode! We’ve got some great stuff planned for our next 50. And the 50 after that.
I will be upfront here; I’m a bit out of my element with this post. I watched season 2 of The Newsroom in a vacuum, completely free from all internet chatter be it reviews or tweets. You can read my thoughts on the season itself in this week’s The Week in TV post. In this post, however, I would like to address something that surprised me.Continue reading →
The latest episode of The Obsessive Viewer Podcast is officially posted. It’s a great episode despite yours truly talking through a cold. We talk about cancelled TV shows and spin offs. It was a good conversation.
You’ll notice that we changed around the music a little bit. We’re in the process of getting better intro and outro music. If you’re a musician and you’re interested in throwing something together for us, let us know and we’ll give you the proper credit and everything. You can also share your memorable movie theater experiences with us.
Pilots are interesting beasts in the television world. They’re used to convince a studio to shell out more money for more episodes. In order to do that, a pilot needs to succeed on several more fronts of storytelling than any other single episode. A pilot needs to introduce the major characters of a series in an engaging, often standalone, story that will leave the audience clamoring for more.
Furthermore, a good pilot needs to rely on a strong cast to build a rapport in a short period of time. Writers working on pilots also have to gauge possible long-term onscreen relationships completely blind of actors’ chemistry. Because of these factors, I live by one steadfast television-viewing rule:
Never judge a show by its pilot.
But some series have such strong pilot episodes that you can and should judge them on the pilots. And so, here I have compiled a list of some of my favorite pilot episodes. They aren’t necessarily my favorite shows ever, and they aren’t exactly the best episodes of said shows. These episodes are just the most engaging series-starters that I’ve seen. They also introduce the characters and story arcs in a highly satisfying way.
You can click the episode titles in the list to buy them digitally on Amazon.
