I must say, it usually takes me a little while to warm to most of the “characters” on Big Brother, the popular CBS reality show that my husband and I are shamelessly addicted to. But this season, it seemed like the drama and the warming up started pretty quickly. One of the quickest “shomances” ever took off between Rachel, the big boobed cocktail waitress from Las Vegas and Brendon, the swim coach chemist that apparently hit on the bisexual Annie first and then went after her “sloppy seconds” Rachel after that.

We didn’t know that until Annie was the first one to get the boot from the Big brother house. And what a bummer since she was the secret “saboteur”. Guess that twist blew up in their face since their only “twist” this season (at least that we know of)  was the saboteur.

But wait, we may have one more twist if one of the things the saboteur said was true. They said that two people in the house already knew eachother going in. I’m sure this has BB fans guessing who it is and if it’s true. If it is true, my bet’s on the adorable but outspoken little Britney and the female cop (older) Kathy being mother and daughter.

It has already been a really interesting season. There is already a major alliance between four of the smarter guys in the game, Matt, who is uber smart but hasn’t told anyone about his real background to protect himself from being a target (that may have already backfired on him though), Enzo, the tough talking Jersey guy who seems to think he’s a part of the mob, Lane, the soft spoken rancher dude who has barely said two words so far, and Hayden, the requisite scruffy haired dude that the chicks probably dig (not me, I’m a bit too old for that ruffled hair look, it’s way too contrived).

And who knew that Kristen and Hayden had a little flirty thing going on til later on- definitely not me!  This season is sure to be a good one as it’s already proven interesting with all the diverse personalities in the house.  We’ll see who wins – I just hope it’s someone that I like. I don’t really dislike anyone yet, but I’m not a fan of Rachel and Brendon running the house, they just seem too arrogant.

I am a huge fan of Stephen King books, so when the Dead Zone series came out a few years ago, I was curious about it, but never got a chance to actually see it until recently since it was added to the instant options at Netflix.

I watched the first and second episode last night, and I must say I’m disappointed with the way the show was executed. I understand that the show is filmed with a low budget, but they still could have hired better supporting actors for Anthony Michael Hall’s decent portrayal of Johnny Smith.  He plays the nice guy come psychic who discovers he has psychic powers after his brain is injured in a bad car accident that leaves him comatose for several years.

He awakens after years in a coma, only to find that the love of his life, Sara, has moved on and married the sheriff of their small Maine town.  His mother has died, and he’s missed out on a lot of the latest news, as his new friend and physical therapist has filled him in on.  Some of the dialogue is actually witty, with his physical therapist telling him that Clinton got busted for getting head in the oval office and that a black man is the greatest golfer in the world, but most of it is just dumbed down and predictable.

It needs to be a lot edgier, and a lot less cheesily filmed. Every time Hall’s character has a flash of something when he touches someone, time slows down and we see everyone frozen in motion ala Matrix style.  This has the effect of alienation for me, since I picture his flashes as a short, inferred glimpse into the future, not one where he can freeze frame the scene and see what’s going on.  The original movie with Christopher Walken did just that, gave you short bursts of scenes that he now had insight to, and that seemed to be a more effective use.

Dead Zone seems like it was filmed by Disney. It’s too safe, and too predictable to be a worthy telling of Stephen King’s edgy, early days writing. Wish I could have given it a better review, believe me, but it’s just not “smart” enough to hold one’s attention raptly as it should.  By the way, I’m reading one of King’s latest novels now, Under the Dome, and I’ll have a review of that soon. It’s a long one, well over 1,000 pages, so it may be a little while!

So, I told you that we had horrible problems here in Northeast Ohio with our cable for the Lost finale.  Well, we weren’t able to watch the Jimmy Kimmel after-show that night either because we were already up so dang late screwing with the TV and trying to get Lost to come in right. So, we finally watched it tonight. We had DVR’d it and it only had a few glitches. It was a total waste of time. Filled with some pretty lame jokes and skits, except for the Bob Newhart alternate ending, which was pretty funny.

Other than that, more than half of the important characters weren’t even on the show, including Evangeline Lilly, a major part of the show, or Josh Holloway, although both appeared in skits.  Terry O’Quinn who plays Locke seemed the most at ease on stage out of the other actors, who seemed nervous and unsure of what to do with themselves. Can’t say I blame them, they’re so used to having scripts when they’re in front of people.

I was disappointed to that the alternate endings were just jokes. I thought when I read that he was showing alternate endings that they were really what the producers considered airing instead of the one they went with. Oh well, joke was on me for that one!

I just watched the Mad Men season 3 finale last night, and all I have to say is wow. The writing just gets better, the acting more compelling and endearing to the characters, and the more emotionally tied you are to the show and it’s different characters.  Even Pete Campbell, the sniveling spoiled brat from earlier in the show, has somehow made his way into our hearts, and his annoying wife isn’t so annoying any more.  The characters are really fleshed out this season, and the ending to season three is quite a surprise in a couple of ways.

We have the dissolution of an already troubled marriage when Betty Draper tells Don she no longer loves him and “felt nothing” when he kissed her. Wow, that really  blew me away. You never thought that this seemingly spineless woman would have the guts to actually do anything about her unhappiness, but she does. You can’t help but wonder if this Henry Francis guy is really going to help though, because she seems to think that a man can create happiness for her, and well, us modern women know that’s not the case, you create your own happiness, which is what I think the moral of this story is.

And yet, you feel for both Betty and Don when they sit Sally and Bobby, down to tell them the news that mommy and daddy will be living apart from now on.  Even though it’s a troubled family unit, you still feel for them when they are essentially changing it all for themselves and the kids. Are we no  longer going to see the aqua marine backed bed at the Drapers when Betty moves in with Henry eventually?  To be continued!

I find myself wondering how next season is going to be. Are we also no longer going to see as much of the Sterling Cooper office?  Don ends up rousing the other partners into buying back Sterling Cooper and including their British counterpart in the deal, as long as he fires them and helps them to be able to split off and form their own agency. Don and Company approaches only a chosen few to follow them to their newly created agency, taking some of Sterling Cooper’s biggest accounts with it in the process.  Is that even legal? Well shoot, maybe it was back then, who knows!

Joan Harris (Holloway) is back in the fold too. I was wondering how they were going to get her back on the show, and I guess this is it!  They call her in desperation because they don’t know how to gather all the necessary information to effectively split off.  I found myself getting giddy when I saw all the  main, influential characters in one room, a small hotel room, planning with uncertainty and fear for their new agency. It was GREAT seeing them starting from scratch, and I must say I felt like an excited fan girl at the prospect of how next season was going to shape up.

Mad Men is going to go for a few more seasons, and I’m going to await the release of season 4 with baited breath, that’s for sure!  You know a show is good when you burn through an entire season on DVD in a week and a half!

The gritty, and perhaps all too realistic (I find this show very good, but also intensely depressing at times) show “Breaking Bad” starring Bryan Cranston, premiered it’s second season a few weeks ago. Our DVR was backed up, so I just recently had the opportunity to watch the first episode.  Breaking Bad is about a mild mannered chemistry teacher, Walter, who finds out he has terminal lung cancer.  He starts to make methamphetamine for sale on the street to help pay his immense medical bills, a story that is all too familiar and ripped from the headlines today, which makes this show all that much more visceral.

Season 1 was mostly dedicated to developing the story about how this mild mannered man becomes essentially a drug dealer (or maker) and becomes invovled with the lowest of low lifes and the most dangerous criminals off the street.  You can probably guess since the show is called “Breaking Bad”, that it’s about him constantly getting worse and worse in his ethical decisions and choices he makes. You always want to yell at the screen that it’s the wrong choice, but you see the glint in his eye that becomes more and more sociopathic unfortunately as the season went on.

The premier has his wife leaving him, having just had their little baby girl. He’s lost his entire lifestyle and family and for once, it seems like Walt is going to start making some of the right decisions.  Well, until he starts making bad ones.  He gets up in front of his high school in an assembly mourning the loss of the people on board the plane crash.

The fatal plane crash that killed all those on board, which was caused by Jesse’s girlfriend (who died by choking on her own vomit, which Walt could have prevented but did not, prompting a whole series of events which he is clearly in denial over him having anything to do with it).

He tells the kids that life just goes on, which of course sounds callous. Walt is seeming more and more callous, and yet our heart goes out to him because he has lost his family and his wife doesn’t even want him to see his own kids.

We’re really not sure how to feel for him though when he goes and does things that either don’t bode well for other people, or that puts him in harm’s way.  We see now that two bad ass Mexican gang members are out to get him for revenge of the murder of Tuko, the gang leader who was basically the former drug lord before Walt’s made up character “Heisenberg”.

Whoo, sounds like a lot when I start typing it out. At any rate, Breaking Bad is a taut, well written show with excellent, top of the line acting. You really identify and like each character they present, even the terminal screw up Jessie Pinkman.  It’s definitely a keeper, and it actually earned top ratings for best new TV show from Entertainment Weekly magazine.

I finally got around to watching a show that I’ve been dying to see since it came out. I’m usually not really in to “legal dramas”, but this one offered a sense of intrigue that others didn’t, with a seemingly sinister twist. Plus, I love Glen Close.  I don’t know, ever since I saw her give it her all in Dangerous Liaisons, there is not one bad performance I can remember seeing this talented woman in.  She was also great in the more recent show “The Shield”.

Damages is a legal drama.  It revolves around a young law school graduate named Ellen Parsons. In the beginning of the first show, the pilot, we see a pretty young brunette girl running out of an apartment building, bloody, bruised and battered looking. She runs through the city streets bewildered, crying and clearly traumatized over something that has happened.  This is a flash forward. Flash back 6 months and we begin to see the story unfold to tell us how this young promising attorney gets embroiled in whatever has her so distraught.

Ellen is sought out by Patty Hewes, a huge litigation attorney who will win at all costs (that’s actually the tag line for the show I believe).  At the outset of the pilot, we think Patty is simply a very ambitious woman who has a generous and heart felt streak, that she really wants to win class action lawsuits for people who have been wronged.

She seeks out Ellen agressively, which sort of tips us off that something is a little amiss (you find out what at the very end of the episode), and fires her right hand man (also seems a little bit staged, I actually figured this part out before they tipped us off).

You’re not quite sure though, who is the bad guy, Ted Danson’s character who plays a billionaire that has been charged in a criminal suit with insider trading, costing his employees millions of dollars after he dumped stock before it tanked.  He was found not guilty in a criminal trial, however, now he has to take his turn with Patty Hewes and her representation of several employees.

Throughout the litigation, we see Ellen’s suspicions start to grow, only to be alayed by Patty’s former right hand man, played by Tate Donovan. Her fear is that Patty hired her and agressively pursued her because she knew she had family ties to a woman who was found to be a potential key witness against Ted Danson’s character.

The intrigue and mystery deepen, and although I got annoyed with how many times and different ways they said “shit” (probably because that’s the only swear word they’re allowed to use liberally on FX), and some of the scenarios could be construed as preposterous, this show had me hooked to see the next one. Only reason I didn’t watch the next one right away was I had to get stuff done!

So, did you ever have a show that you tried out, maybe when you just weren’t in the right frame of mind to enjoy it? Or maybe you unknowingly gave up on the show and turned it off during the pilot, right before it really started to get interesting and flesh the characters out? Well, that’s exactly what I did with the (now) hit show Fringe.  My husband and I tried this show out when it first came on television. We figured it would be our next JJ Abrams fix since Lost was going to be in the last season and would pulled off the air in a year or so.

We also love the sci fi and eerie mysteries genre, since it fits right in with shows like the X Files and another one that is really more straight sci fi, Battlestar Galactica.  I honestly didn’t know how I felt about the lead actress, who I guess has created quite the swirl in the geek world as the newest hot lady, Anna Torv. By the way, Anna Torv is now married to her hunky Thomas Jane lookalike costar Mark Valley.

Well, we decided to give it another try. We had turned it off during the scene where Agent Olivia Dunham is hooked up to Agent John Scott, who was her partner and also happened to be her lover. Well, at the end of the episode, we find out that he apparently has been working for or with the bad guys. Typical strong leading lady gets played by her lover type stuff, but  a good twist nonetheless.

He was involved in an explosion at a storage facility they were checking out. In the explosion, he was exposed to some biohazardous agent which seems to be eating his body up from the inside out. The special effects must have cost a lot, because he really does look like he’s transparent – it really looks kinda gross!

Olivia is determined to find the cure for this, and eventually does, only to be betrayed by her lover. It ends in a car chase where he apparently dies. But not before a mysterious corporation that seems to have a lot of dealings in chemical warfare and strange occurrences with human guinea pigs wisks his dead body off to “be interviewed”.  We can only imagine what that means, but I know the actor will be in several more episodes, so I’m not sure where it will lead.

It’s very interesting, very well acted, and Joshua Jackson is good as the wise ass brilliant rebel, and I thought he’d get on my nerves.  I think this show is going to be pretty good….

Ok, so we watched the second episode of the much awaited spinoff to BSG, or Battle Star Galactica, for those of you unfortunate souls who have not become familiar with this awesome series yet. We actually had it recorded on our DVR for a while, maybe two weeks, and we finally got around to watching it, because the first one, the season premier, was just really boring and anticlimactic. I know that it’s supposed to be a drama more than a sci fi specatacle, but I guess I keep hoping for more of the intriguing characters and masterful acting and story lines of Galactica.

I keep reminding myself that it’s only the second episode, however, I remember when BSG first came on, I was addicted from the first episode, and it just got better and better from there, and that’s what I was hoping for with Caprica. We’ll give it a few more chances. Hopefully I won’t be watching the clock when we see the third episode!

The HBO showing of BBC original “Extras”, another Ricky Gervais original comedy that has he same flavor as his original “The Office” show, was a very smart idea.  Not because it gives us Americans another flavor of the smart, awkward situational, eccentric comedy that Ricky Gervais is known for, but because it also helps to diversify their shows into difference genres.

For those of you who are not familiar with Gervais, he is the British creator of the original hit series “The Office”. Yep, you’ll see his name in the credits for the American version, which I hate to say, is not quite as funny as the British original, but definitely hits some of the right comedic notes with leading man Steve Carell. You just can’t out do Ricky’s perfection as an awkward, yet always wanting to be loved character who tends to always say and do the wrong things.

Ok, so enough about my obvious admiration for Ricky’s comedic genius, let’s talk about the show “Extras” that aired a while ago on HBO.  It’s a show about Ricky, who is a forty something guy that has acting dreams, but can only seem to get the lowly work of being an extra, over and over again. He continuously rubs elbows with the famous, and there are some pretty hilarious cameos by several very big actors and actresses. To name a few, Kate Winslet, David Bowie, Orlando Bloom, Ben Stiller, Ian McKellan, Patrick Stewart, and more.

They are parody themselves, which is hilarious in itself. For instance, Orlando Bloom is obsessed with making Ricky’s bumbling female friend, Maggie, think he’s hot and desirable, because he’s an ego maniac. Patrick Stewart parodies himself as an actor who is obsessed with making awful, pointless films where women’s clothes are being ripped off the whole time.

Just the guest stars are hilarious, and they really show their acting chops by getting into poking fun at themselves a bit, you can just tell that the set must be fun and open, because everyone is at their best acting and showing their comedy chops.

Just as in The Office, Gervais plays a misunderstood, and yet constantly self loathing and self sabotaging awkward guy who can’t seem to get ahead in life or get the acceptance that he so craves. It’s funny, because as with his Office character David Brent, you feel awkward for him when he messes up, but you also feel like you wanna see the guy succeed, and you actually start to care for him.

I highly recommend checking out this witty, heady comedy, it’s a comedy with some intelligence and sarcasm to it, which is exactly my cup of tea.

I was a HUGE fan of the BSG, better known as the Battle Star Galactica, series on the Sy Fy channel. When the series ended, you’d have thought my best friend died. I actually went through a mourning period and didn’t think that any show could ever live up to it.  I was right, nothing has quite lived up to it yet to fill that genre for me, but I was hopeful when first the movie came out “The Plan” which was basically a huge disappointment and waste of time because it was all recapping stuff you already knew, and which was also why, when Caprica was coming on the airwaves, which is a spinoff of the the show, I got more excited than a nerd waiting in line for a Star Trek Convention.

And hey, I’m not knocking conventions, believe me, my hubbie is a huge comic book and sci fi fan, so I naturally have to be a bit nerdy myself.  I liked the idea behind Caprica, and I really liked the original tv movie that served as the pilot for the show also.

I thought the cast consisting of mainly Eric Stolz and Esai Morales, with relative newcomer as the young daughter of Eric Stolz (a scientist who has invented cylon technology) who died in a terrorist attack on a subway, making a positive splash as the outspoken rebel of a daughter whose belief in “one true god” defies the current conventional wisdom of several gods that rule the earth.  All a very interesting concept, no?

And the true, die hard BSG fans who miss the show no doubt will get some much pined for background about what caused and led up to the Cylon war and the ultimate invasion that destroyed all known inhabitable planets for man.

However, there is definitely something lacking in the show that needs to be addressed if they want to lure new viewers in and please the ones they already have, many of whom no doubt were avid fans of Battle Star.  First off, it bored me.  We were actually glad when the first episode was over, it was excruciating slow and boring, and didn’t seem to give us a lot of answers, or even any reason to believe we’d see any action in the next few episodes.

It didn’t leave me feeling like I couldn’t wait to see the next episode, and that is what I felt when I watched the pilot for BSG, so I was hoping they could duplicate that originality and sense of excitement with Caprica. Not yet. We can only hope it gets better, I really need a fix!