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.
It's the kind of movie that thinks it's being clever despite not trying hard at all to do it. I appreciate the variety, I guess, but the tonal shifts among the different fantasies just made the whole movie feel like it was working through a genre identity crisis. The way the story tries to tie things together was a bit haphazard but better than not […]
Well-meaning and sugary sweet, but doesn't really have much of anything really profound or interesting to say. Allison Janney and the mean troop just go through the motions of being antagonists for the misfit characters. It's also got one of the strangest "group unites in an act of solidarity" scenes I've seen.
Weird Valentine's Day viewing. Sure. But man, talk about a 180. I saw Snowpiercer 5.5 years ago in suboptimal conditions on zero sleep.Revisiting it now, in a better frame of mind and in the as aftermath of Parasite, I can see the things that should have worked for me when I saw it in 2014. The world building and class system social commentary is a work […]
Not as bad as I was expecting. Tons of humor that does not land with just a couple bits that caught me off-guard (Robotnik's response to Tom saying he was breast fed was genuinely hilarious). Jim Carrey is the stand out by far. But it's not enough to leave much of an impression.My full review: https://obsessiveviewer.com/2020/02/14/sonic-the-hedgeh […]
