2013 Fall TV Thread: Previews, Evaluations, Ridicule and Mourning

yeah garner's a good call. she never really became a big movie star (to an extent she kinda stopped trying, seems like when she works now it's clearly something she actually wants to do and not really a career move), but her push into movies got that style of hype and industry support that willis or clooney got. her appearance in catch me if you can was somehow a big deal. bradley cooper made the jump but he was never defined by his tv work, he was a dude that happened to be on alias and then the show he actually starred in was canceled pretty quickly for better or for worse (i liked kitchen confidential). i mean think of how many movies the dudes from friends headlined and the best hollywood can come up w/ for neil patrick harris is the smurfs?

well, post-doogie wasn't his career kinda nowhere before harold and kumar reset his image? which was a while before himym, but i kind of expect him to get… something… going after it ends (as opposed to say hannigan who will maybe find another tv role, having built up a second store of viewer goodwill kind of like david boreanaz did, only he seems to have flourished more).

what about anyone from the desperate housewives / gray's anatomy side of nighttime soapish shows? i never saw any of those so i don't really follow their actors.

o fuck you're right

HEIGL

can't believe i forgot heigl

eva longoria seems to have set her sights on something bigger than movie stardom. the possibility exists that i have had a fantasy wherein i'm rich (from 'something', something 'positive', not like just wall st) and she becomes my bride and we team up and take the white house by TURNING TEXAS BLUE.

Heigl had a good run for like, three years there, huh, and her career promptly fell off a cliff after that

is that the lifespan of Hollywood careers these days

didn't she have 'trouble' with being 'opinionated' or whatever i.e. not taking typical women-in-media bullshit?

melissa mccarthy is a weird case in that you could easily argue that she's actually the biggest sure thing movie star right now (as in if there was a melissa mccarthy vehicle opening in theatres next week it would almost definitely be #1 at the box office) and yet the sitcom she currently stars in is a just a footnote to her career, it's barely a bigger factor in her success than whether she played volleyball in high school or whatever. it has got to drive cbs insane and they can promote that show w/ 'hey we got melissa mccarthy - LOOK WE GOT MELISSA MCCARTHY - SHE HAS A TV SHOW - MELISSA MCCARTHY FROM THE MOVIES HAS A TV SHOW' and most of america is still 'yeah we love melissa mccarthy, but that show looks fucking awful'.

oh yeah that's a good one. when she broke out i was wondering if she had brought any fans to the table from that show, but i figured it was just that she was running shit and the film performances by themselves did it.

heigl burnt some bridges but she also got a bad rep, esp in yr us weeklies etc, which may have hurt her w/ her audience. she also made too many shitty movies but i don't think that alone scuttled her career, it didn't do the same w/ jennifer aniston.

well, she was like one of the handful of top tv comedy actresses of the 90s, and they gave her SO many chances at vehicles. i think heigl may not have been in such a solid position?

Everyone got super sick of Heigl after a long string of increasingly shit films in which she played the same horrible character. (I know this because I watched all of them while playing drinking games with friends at the ol' video store gig.) Honestly I don't think the mini-Knocked Up beef had that much to do with her falling out of favor.

aniston did get a lot of chances - hell, she still gets too many chances, probably - if the brangelina thing hadn't happened i think she would've disappeared a lot quicker

Can I just: Most hideous movie poster featuring Katherine Heigl's dumb ass face

sadly most of the image links no longer work. well, not that sadly

I just noticed that NBC is premiering About a Boy on a Saturday night.

A SATURDAY NIGHT.

The last time Jason Katims decided to do a TV show based on a movie no one expected would spawn a TV show, we got Friday Night Lights, so sure, I'll give About A Boy a shot.

Wait, I forgot Parenthood. Is that show any good? A few people I follow here and there on Twitter watch it but it doesn't seem to have nearly as much of a dedicated following as FNL did.

i saw a commerical for About A Boy and thought for a second that Bent had returned

Parenthood definitely has a following, it's one of those weird you'd-think-it-was-cancelled-years-ago kind of audience, but it has consistent numbers. It's good if you like that kind of soft family drama, i.e. Judging Amy, Men of A Certain Age, etc. I never got into it, but I could see it was good for its genre.

Parenthood is good (at least, the first two seasons were) but it was so placid and kind-hearted that it was hard to remember to watch it.

Yeah I know people who really like Parenthood and also really like other things I like, so even though it looks uninteresting from afar I can appreciate what its appeal might be.

Parenthood is good but it needs to end next season. They are squeezing story lines out that don't feel organic.

About A Boy is the FOURTH show starring David Walton that NBC has put on the air in the last four years. It's like they really want him to happen, but not enough to give him a promising and/or well-promoted project. I like the guy (he was hilarious in Fired Up and the best thing about a couple of those NBC shows) but it's getting sad.

Sleepy Hollow finale was pretty dope

went full on Empire Strikes Back

About A Boy is the FOURTH show starring David Walton that NBC has put on the air in the last four years. It's like they really want him to happen, but not enough to give him a promising and/or well-promoted project. I like the guy (he was hilarious in Fired Up and the best thing about a couple of those NBC shows) but it's getting sad.

all of this is OTM, I commented on the same thing to my wife when the About a Boy promos started airing

I can't fathom why a broadcast network would even bother debuting a show on a Saturday night, though. If you want it killed, don't even bother.

most likely some kind of contractual obligations, i think

i always get the feeling there's a lot of bullshit network politics going on, shows get produced, executives change over, schedules get wrecked
you ever see the movie The TV Set?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfErkHGPJrA#t=265

Broad City and Workaholics aren't all the different, except I find myself hating the dudes on Workaholics and totally loving the ladies on Broad City. Is this sexist? Or am I just not bored with women doing gross/stoner humor yet?

the ladies on broad city are hilarious - much funnier than workaholics guys. also funnier than girls ladies imho.

Except Girls isn't trying to be laugh-out-loud funny whereas Broad City is (what I'm saying is to stop comparing the two shows - I get the impulse, but don't).

Yeah, I know the above assumes that we all laugh to the same kind of humor but y'all get what I'm saying, I hope.

i think it's natural to compare the two - both are ostensibly half hour comedies about young women living in NY. but you're right that only one of them is laugh-out-loud funny.

also broad city is really really jewy

Was not expecting that webisode to be so straightforwardly righteous, based on their Comedy Central show.

broad city spike lee homage fairly spot on

ok i laughed at the end, but... why did they do this

why did they create a well-made, humorous Spike Lee homage as part of their web series? Why not?

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/01/big-in-norway/355748/

hardcore

lol i remember reading a thing in the wsj about that

Kinda vr

I was staying in a hostel in Lillehammer a few years ago, and on the TV in the dining room was this real-time footage of huntsmen steadily creeping their way through a snowy forest, looking for elk or whatever. No music or narration, just hand-held footage of these men with rifles slowly and silently walking through the woods. I watched about ten minutes of it, I think.

Yeah, they copied that concept in Denmark, and filmed every train-route out of the front window. I couldn't sleep one night and channel-surfed, and found out they were showing the route that went past my parents house. So I spent twenty minutes waiting for the train to pass their house, and then I wanted to see the route I'd taken to school for ten years, and then I wanted to see what it looked like into central Copenhagen... I spent forty minutes watching that, and I had stuff to do the next morning.

It's fascinating.

Also: James Benning!

other than true detective, the best show right now is party down south, recognize

True Detective is piling up on my hard drive. Will begin watching asap. Have no idea when I'll get around to S1 of House of Cards, much less S2.

oh no i thought it was "party down: south" like party down but set in the south. it isn't.

ron's franchise at last

the most recent ep of kroll show (mother, daughter, sister, wife) was v funny

Unless it was totally Nick Kroll-free, I have my doubts about the truth of your statement.

zing! but true.