Friday, February 10, 2012

Friday Funke - Your Weekly TV Recap

This week had a lot of great shows. Let's take a look at the playback...

Best of the Week
My top 5 shows:
1. Pretty Little Liars - If you are not watching this show, what! what! what are you doing? Is it because it's on ABC Family? Get over it. I know the commercials for Joey & Melissa are painful, but this show, like Spanx, it is worth the discomfort.
Is it because they're teens? What, you'll watch them when they are singing but not when they are keeping life threatening secrets?
I'm just saying if you enjoy bitchy people, suspense, and some good ol' fashioned murder/teen drama get into it.
This week the girls had a slumber party in school, which made me wonder, does that really happen? I can't imagine there are enough chaperones in the world to handle a co-ed high school slumber party, but alas, it happened in the world of PLL. The best part of this week was the unexpected alliance of Mona and everyone's favorite lesbian swim team member, Emily. Their interactions made it seem like Mona was A more than ever, but at this point I could be A. Have you heard people think it might even be Ezra?

2. Top Chef Texas - This season promised it would be bigger and it is delivering. There's been really different competitions, and drama this season with the girls being edited as super catty (Which just begs for a reunion show, please Andy Cohen? Pretty please with Maker's Mark on top?). The best part this season though - Last Chance Kitchen. It was seemingly a throw-away at the end of each episode to drive traffic to bravotv.com. The chef that got kicked off was challenged by another former cheftestant in a short cook-off challenge, judge solely by Colicchio. Every week it was an awesome bonus to each episode. This week they let the winner return to the main competition and it was, of course, the most controversial chef - Beverly. While I wish she wouldn't cry so darn much, I really don't have anything against her. The rest of the chefs seem to have a beef with her - and it is not a delicious one. While I can't remember what they cooked, I do remember that this was the episode that everyone cried - it felt like a Michael Landon convention in the kitchen. I am bummed about who lost but still think the final challenges will be interesting and mouth-watering to watch.

3. Modern Family - Two of my favorite TV critics GMMR & Ducky of the TV TalkPodcast recently brought up a great point about this 3rd season sitcom - it's missing the allure of the first season since we were meeting all these crazy characters and didn't know all of their quirks. This week, in almost a way to combat that they brought together the characters in a new way foiling Cam and Gloria in the kitchen and bringing a new character onto the scene, Betty Luke. Greg Kinner's cameo was good, but it felt a little trite. Taking on mouth-kissers feels as though it's been done to death and while they tried to put a fun spin on it, it definitely wasn't the best part of the episode.

4. New Girl - Speaking of old conventions, New Girl took this week's episode out of the 90s cinema fad of threesomes, and made it hilarious. It resulted in wonderful uncomfortable humor that had me squealing with delight. I feel like it quelled some of the tension between Jess and Nick, which is good because while I wouldn't hate to see them together, I'd be totally cool with them drawing it out Sam and Diane style.

5. Glee - The sass off between Nene Leaks and Sue Silvester was so good I wanna make a ringtone of it. You honestly could just watch that clip, because other than that it wasn't all that thrilling. Ricky Martin was better at acting than I would've thought, in fact he kinda schooled Mr. Shuester in more ways than one. But was the world really missing Ricky Martin? I feel like he can go back to jet skiing with dolphins in Miami, we're good.

Something I Noticed
Wednesday night on ABC is what Thursday night on NBC used to be when it was 'Must See TV'. I have proof!
So, what made 'Must See TV' great was the stellar sitcoms. Just some to grace the mega ratings time slots were: Seinfeld, Mad About You, Friends, Fraiser, News Radio, and Will & Grace. The formula was - 1-2 strong sitcoms, 1-2 not as strong, but still funny sitcoms, and then ER would bring the drama to top off the night.
ABC has this formula playing out perfectly on Wednesdays, and if you're not on board yet set your DVR or put these in your streaming queue:
The Middle
Suburgatory
Modern Family
Happy Endings
and then the drama that tops it off, Revenge.

It's a mirror image to the formula of NBC's Must See Thursday, but now it's ABC Wednesday...and NBC is still trying to get that magic back on Thursday.

Disappointments of the Week
30 Rock - I love this show, I didn't need this week's to be an hour long. It felt stretched. I'm also feeling like Liz Lemon's character is becoming less inspiring. She used to be head of a show, stressing over writing and corralling all her crazy co-workers. I feel like it's now more about her just being an awful woman. Maybe it was just all the period references, but this week bummed me out a bit.

Real Housewives of Orange County - Over it! It just seemed like a build-up for more screaming. Can't you gals be classy like RHOBH and just say bitchy things and then point at each other with stern voices?

Guaranteed LOL Shows
Happy Endings
Modern Family

Shows that Need to Come Back Sooner than Later
Community
Cougar Town

Favorite Trivia of the Week
Madeleine Stowe of the fantabulous evening soap drama Revenge was also in the 1990 shitty movie also titled Revenge. It's not like a Buffy thing though, the TV show and movie do not share plot lines or characters.

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