Author Archives: Phoebe

If We Controlled Your Remote… 10/15/17

Posted on October 15, 2017 by and

Have you ever been at a loss as to what to watch? Too many shows to pick from? We’re here to give you our opinions on what we feel is worth watching. Check it out and then let us know in the comments below what you’re choosing for tonight!

Kyle’s Choice

Tonight, Showtime kicks off the new comedy series White Famous, which centers around the exploits of rising black comedian Floyd Mooney (Jay Pharoah, SNL) as he deals with career and relationship issues. Floyd is still in love with ex/baby mama Sadie (Cleopatra Coleman, The Last Man on Earth), and the two still hook up on occasion. Floyd also has a great relationship with son Trevor (Lonnie Chavis) and is an active and present father to him. However, Floyd now lives with best friend Ron Balls (Jacob Ming Trent, Feed the Beast), who often serves as his voice of reason. Meanwhile, Floyd’s ambitious manager Malcolm (Utkarsh Ambudkar, The Mindy Project) is constantly looking for the next big opportunity to help his client to become “white famous” – so famous that he transcends color.

The series has a nice blend of humor and interesting character drama. The pilot does a great job of introducing the characters and relationships and has some really fun moments. Jay Pharoah was always great at doing impressions on SNL, and they’ve found an organic way to work his comedy and impressions into the show. Plus, if the premiere is any indication, this series is going to have a great supporting cast – tonight’s 1-hour premiere features Stephen Tobolowsky and Jamie Foxx. The main criticism I have of the show is its excessive language – there are so many F-bombs dropped in this first hour!

On tonight’s first episode, “Pilot,” a racially-charged encounter with a film producer goes viral, presenting an opportunity to a young comic, if he is willing to bend his principles. Then, in “Heat,” Malcolm pushes Floyd to commit to his next project; Trevor tours an expensive private school; Sadie comes clean about a relationship.

Don’t miss the premiere of the latest TV comedy tonight on Showtime at 10/9c.

I’ll also be watching/recording Ten Days in the Valley, Bob’s Burgers, The Simpsons, Ghosted, Family Guy, The Last Man on Earth, Fear the Walking Dead, Good Behavior, and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
 
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If We Controlled Your Remote… 10/9/17

Posted on October 9, 2017 by and

Have you ever been at a loss as to what to watch? Too many shows to pick from? We’re here to give you our opinions on what we feel is worth watching. Check it out and then let us know in the comments below what you’re choosing for tonight!

Jenny’s Choice

My favorite new show so far this season is NBC’s The Brave. I’m loving Mike Vogel as Dalton, but the dynamic of the whole team together is great. The premise is a lot of fun too. I’ve loved last week’s episode, where a bad-ass female CIA officer walked into the undercover CIA office in the Russian-stronghold portion of Ukraine to find her two coworkers shot to death and bad guys still in the office. She ended up taking them all out herself even after being shot. During the hour, she was kidnapped and stabbed, but she rocked it, able to keep herself pretty damn safe until Dalton and his team arrived. We also learned a surprising fact about Noah, in that he was top of his class at “spy school.” One thing I was disappointed about was that after the major cliffhanger of the premiere, where the bad guy drove the truck bomb onto the beach where the team had been hanging out and playing soccer with the kids, we didn’t jump back into that story line. In fact, we only got one mention of it at all, where we learned that there had been deaths and injuries of some of the civilians. It was kind of a letdown. Other than that, I’m really enjoying the show, as is my family.

On tonight’s episode, “The Greater Good,” after receiving intel that a serious player in dealing international arms, Ranier Boothe (guest star Andrew Howard), will be visiting Caborca, Mexico, Patricia makes a controversial decision that could lead to a big breakthrough. With Dalton’s team on the ground, they must find a weak link in Boothe’s men in order to carry out the mission. Meanwhile, Noah learns about Hannah’s complicated past in the field.

Find out more about Hannah’s past and see if Dalton’s team can take down some arms dealers tonight on NBC at 10:01/9:01c.

I’ll also be watching/DVRing The Big Bang Theory, Dancing with the Stars, 9JKL, The Gifted, Halloween Baking Championship, Halloween Wars, Scorpion, & The Good Doctor.
 
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If We Controlled Your Remote… 10/8/17

Posted on October 8, 2017 by

Have you ever been at a loss as to what to watch? Too many shows to pick from? We’re here to give you our opinions on what we feel is worth watching. Check it out and then let us know in the comments below what you’re choosing for tonight!

Phoebe’s Choice

Tonight on Epix, season one of Get Shorty comes to a close. If you haven’t seen it yet, start the binge now, I say! Diverging greatly from the movie and book, this adaptation has created a funny, moving, visceral world in its own right. Last week left things looking bad for Miles and his attempts to make his movie, but a silver lining of hope was hinted at. We started with a flashback to Miles and Katie discussing the options when Katie first found out she was pregnant with Emma. Should the stripper and bouncer go dutch on an abobo or have the baby?? Fast forward to the 2017, and Miles has to explain to his boss and investor Amara that while the movie is temporarily shut down, everything is fine and he’ll get it right back on track.

Rick, terrified of Amara now that he knows her mafia connections, fled to his father’s cabin in the mountains. Amara was trying to track down both Rick & Miles. She tasked Yago with taking out Miles, while she would personally kill Rick. She conferred with her lawyer, who suggested that there would be no way for her to recoup the four million dollars she tried to launder through the film “The Admiral’s Mistress.” Over at Gravity pictures, Brandon told April she would be headed to Hawaii to work on another film there because “The Admiral’s Mistress” had been fully shut down. April started to suspect that there was something shady behind the circumstances of this shut down.

Rick tried to call the FBI, and they said they’d send someone to him. April told Louis and Miles that Gravity was dropping the film, but she’d help them shop it to other studios. In the meeting with the new studio head, they discovered that if they went with another company that Amara’s money would indeed be lost. April decided to investigate the insurance claim but was shut out of her own film’s paperwork by the people in accounting. Yago finally got a lead on Miles and had his gunmen wait outside the MGM offices to ice him once and for all. He then went to tell Amara about the impending hit, but she just reamed him out for selling cocaine in Mexico without her knowledge. Their higher-up mob bosses in Mexico did not give them permission to sell there. He denied it but was clearly scared.

While leaving the studio, Miles and Louis got ambushed and everyone got shot. Louis got it the worst though, taking one to the chest. Miles rushed to get him to the hospital, and on the way he came up with the new ending their film needed. Miles then went to Katie’s house to treat his own wound. She came to help him, and they agreed that she and Emma needed to skip town till this drama all quieted down. Rick’s dad wound up giving Amara his location. The last scene showed Miles going to April’s house. She informed him that she thinks Gravity Pictures studio head Brandon committed insurance fraud on “The Admiral’s Mistress” to fund another movie. He then fell over on her floor. She noticed he was bleeding.

That’s a bloody good cliffhanger leading us into tonight’s exciting conclusion. Can’t wait for this and for what will unfold next year on Get Shorty!

On tonight’s episode, “Blue Pages,” Miles faces a final reckoning with his family and must face his past, present and future head on as the film and those associated with it begin to unravel.

To see how the season ends, tune in to Epix at 10/9c.

I’ll also be watching Family Guy, Bob’s Burgers, and Ghosted.

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My Thoughts on Rick & Morty Season 3

Posted on October 7, 2017 by

Way back when in 2013, Dan Harmon was still fighting tooth and nail to find the right avenue to finish his #6SeasonsandaMovie baby Community. His name was hot. His show was hilarious and weird, no matter how well the ratings were doing. So Cartoon Networks’ Adult Swim block offered him a Sunday-night comedy cartoon slot. Harmon recruited then relatively unknown cartoonist Justin Roiland and schlippity-schlop, gloobity-glop: Rick & Morty was born in a test tube of Apathetic-to-Mildly-Annoyed Scientist glee! Similar to Abed on Community, Harmon imbued lead character Rick Sanchez with the knowledge he was on a cartoon and the 4th wall jokes fired at us at a rapid pace. By the summer of ’14, all the kids were screaming, “Pluto is a fucking planet!” and looking forward to Rick and Morty forever a hundred times!

Then two years later, we finally got season two. And it was…okay. Episodes that brought us Mr. Poopy Butthole & Tiny Rick were immediate classics. But they were weighed against episodes in which the “Summer stuck in the car” B story was so much funnier than the Colbert guesting main story that I only need a 2-minute YouTube summary for the replay worth of that one. So when season three finally premiered last April Fool’s Day alongside Harmon’s teases of a 14-episode season for a change, I was interested if not confident. If I had the will to sustain interest in a show and its’ characters over 2.5-year-long hiatuses, then I guess I’d still care about The Venture Bros, right?

And if season two’s overall essence could be summarized as mediocre or adequate, then season three in hindsight was “meh” or “blerg,” at best. We suffered through a Gerry/Rick episode, two anthology episodes, a Beth episode that felt like filler, and an overall lower percent of funny this time around. And furthermore, Harmon let that rumor of 14 episodes linger right up until the season finale dropped last week. Amidst his efforts to scrub the show’s fandom of toxic masculinity that has the angry little MRAs doxxing R & M’s newer female writers and the failing quality of the writing, I have to wonder if it’s even coming back for season four.

And so I gotta ask. Why, Rick? Why are we even doing this anymore? You forced the Mr. Poopy Butthole season closer joke… You let Beth start breaking the 4th wall… It’s clear your concept itself is funnier than the writers you put in place to keep the show as weird and shocking as it was once funny. Now just being dark for the sake of it without context is the S3 motif, I guess? Maybe you need to babysit your writing bullpen a bit better, Dan. ’Cause I show up for the Harmon meta humor, not the Roiland ball-lick jokes. A lot of us do.

In summary? Get your shit together, Rick & Morty. Get it all together. And put it in a backpack. All your shit. So it’s together. And if you gotta take it somewhere, take it somewhere. You know, take it to the shit store and sell it or put it in a shit museum. I don’t care what you do; you just gotta get it together.

Get. Your. Shit. Together.

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If We Controlled Your Remote… 10/5/17

Posted on October 5, 2017 by , and

Have you ever been at a loss as to what to watch? Too many shows to pick from? We’re here to give you our opinions on what we feel is worth watching. Check it out and then let us know in the comments below what you’re choosing for tonight!

Kyle’s Choice #1

Tonight, Syfy kicks off a new Thursday night lineup, beginning with the second season premiere of Van Helsing. In the first season, Vanessa Helsing awoke from a long coma to find herself in a world overrun by vampires and learned that her young daughter was missing. She banded with a group of survivors while she looked for her daughter. In the process, she discovered that she had special powers — her blood could turn vampires back into humans. Dmitri, the leader of the vampires, managed to capture Vanessa and brought her to his citadel, where he had his doctor perform experiments on her, trying to learn more about her unique blood. However, the experiments seem to have left Vanessa with super-human strength, and she managed to break free. As Vanessa roamed the building, she found her daughter, but Dylan had been turned into a vampire. Meanwhile, Taka, with the help of vampire Rebecca, led a small Resistance army into the citadel to take down the vampires. While the others spread out, he found Dmitri and was about to kill him, when Dmitri made him an offer.

Tonight’s second season premiere picks up right where the first season left off. How will Vanessa deal with her vampire daughter? Will she try to use her blood to save her, or is it already too late? The same goes for Julius, who was also turned at the end of last season. What did Dmitri offer Taka, and will he betray the Resistance? Will Vanessa rejoin the others? How will she react to reuniting with Mohamad after his betrayal last season? It should be another exciting season!

While she’s not in tonight’s episode, Missy Peregrym (Rookie Blue) will be joining the cast this season as Scarlett Harker. I’m sure that last name is no coincidence, so I’m looking forward to seeing how she fits into the story. I had a chance to talk with some of the cast members and producers about the show at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con. You can find my video interviews at NoReruns.net.

On tonight’s premiere, “Began Again,” Vanessa and Mohamad search for Dylan as Dmitri’s citadel crumbles around them; Flesh acquires an unexpected ally in one of the Resistance Fighters; Taka clashes with the Vampire Elite.

Catch all the action tonight on Syfy at 9/8c.
 
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