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 →
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 →
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.
Beautiful movie. It took a while for me to really get into it but the complete shift in Cleo's day is really well showcased. The ending worked very well for me.
Part of my low rating may be due to having just finished re-reading the novella before watching this for the first time. King is very hard to adapt and Apt Pupil makes a solid effort. Some things are streamlined, some dropped entirely. The finished product is just okay, though. I very rarely connected with Brad Renfro's performance. It seems like the ma […]
Solid enough. Its based on King's collection of 5 interconnected stories and I think stripping the book of all but 2 of the stories was probably the right thing to do. However, it loses quite a bit of the collection's deeper meaning and themes in the translation. It's still a solid enough coming of age story and Anton Yelchin gave an amazing p […]
