Television Tuesday :: one thing (temporarily) ends and another begins.

Aka, the Sunday I wished the Tonys weren’t because I wanted immediate Mad Men season finale and True Blood season premiere and the weekdays I made up for it.

Obviously I’m into a lot of television programs.  But of currently-running programs I think I am the most intensely into three right now: Game of Thrones and Mad Men and True Blood.  (As evidenced by massive collections of posting pertaining to them, often in sequence, and the immense ladyfeels I have about some of their characters.)  So it was sort of neat and tidy that Game of Thrones ended one week and the next week Mad Men wrapped up and True Blood its place. The tried and true HBO Sunday night pattern will not fail me.

So.  SPOILERS I GUESS.   Bullet-pointy as always.

Mad Men:

• After two weeks of everything happening quickly and all at once, the season finale actually felt sort of slow.  Not bad-slow, at least bad in terms of boring; it was just a different pace than the breakneck speed of angst and tragedy we’ve been subjected to recently.  It’s what aftermaths feel like though: the more I think about it, the more I appreciate the fact that this episode was finely scripted fallout and building tension.  Building to what?  Well, I guess in eighteen months or however long they make us wait this time we’ll find out.
• One of my people compared it to the series finale of The Sopranos: it’s fascinating, and lots is happening, but it’s all so relatively small compared to what’s gone down in the past that you just have to feel like it’s just paving the way for something horrendous.  It doesn’t matter that not a lot of horrendous actually goes down.  It’s the art of making you think it could.
• We’ve had a season now of Megan (Jessica Paré) as a main character, and I still can’t decide how I feel about her.  I like that she’s willing to call Don (Jon Hamm) on his bull.  I don’t necessarily like how he sometimes babies her.  I like that she’s ~going after her dreams~ in theory but it also makes me wary for future plot dramatics.  I don’t know if I have any defining feelings about her a a person.
• I still can’t decide how I feel about Don’s getting Megan the commercial.  On one hand, it was the right thing to do (although seriously, that was their Beauty and the Beast setup?  She looked like a German beer festival waitress in that costume) but on the other hand, it makes me very, very wary.  That look on Don’s face at the end, I think I know what that might mean and I don’t like it.  He’s been so good this season.
• I think it’s interesting that every time we’ve seen an adult female’s mother on the show this season, it’s served the function (at least for a little while) of questioning the daughter’s modernity.  Megan’s mother Marie (Julia Ormond) has shown up a couple of times now to be passive-aggressive and to wind up boinking Roger (John Slattery), but this time she also basically told Megan to give it up and let Don have her as a kept wife, essentially as arm candy or a trained housepet that cooks dinner.  Peggy’s mother Katherine (Myra Turley) really only showed up long enough to criticize Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) for deciding to cohabitate with her boyfriend Abe (Charlie Hofheimer) without marrying him.  And Joan’s mother Gail (Christine Estabrook) has been there to support her and to help take care of her child, but she still had plenty of things to say in the first few episodes that made Joan (Christina Hendricks) really cranky.  (“Greg’s not going to allow you to work.”  “Allow me?”)
• Oh and while we’re on the subject of Joan.  Let’s talk about Joan.  My darling should have some proper meta slated for sometime in the nearish future, so I’m not going to spend time going into the subject of what transpired two episodes ago right now.  (Except to say ow, my heart.)  I just want to buy her a drink and give her a hug and tell her it’s okay.  She shouldn’t feel like she’s expected to solve everyone’s problems, and she should know that she certainly shouldn’t feel like her only worth in problem-solving or in anything else is her ability to use womanly wiles.  She can use them like nobody’s business, but this way of thinking is legitimately not her fault.  This way of thinking is the bull that she’s surrounded by on a daily basis; the if only I mentality is understandable, it really is, but baby, it wouldn’t have solved the problem.  I also want to tell her that yes, the guys are basically jerks, and yes, she deserves better coworkers.
• Completely shallowly, though, I will (again) exclaim GLASSES CHAIIIIN. 
• You know who I want to hit the most lately?  Pete (Vincent Kartheiser).  I want to punch the smug little smirk off of his face and shake the weird entitlement/white knight hybrid mentality out of his skull.  He is not a good coworker.  He is not a good husband.  He is not a good self-actualized person.  He should really work on those things.  He owes it to himself as a person and he owes it to Trudy (Alison Brie) who I will irrationally defend forever.  I’m not saying he’s a bad person (though these last episodes haven’t exactly given a lot of evidence that he isn’t), but he needs to figure out his issues.  He needs to sort out why he behaves in such ways as he does and not do it.
• Also, this is the second Mad Men season finale that has had a sequence that made us stare at each other and go “wait, this must be a dream.”  We had that reaction regarding Don’s proposal to Megan, and we had that reaction to Pete’s weird avenging hero-that-fails scene on the train.  I’m still coming to terms with the whole business of Pete and Beth (Alexis Bledel) and her husband Howard (Jeff Clarke).  I still don’t know what to make of it.
• Basically, you know.  Feelings.

True Blood:

• WELL.  Unlike Mad Men, which picks up months and months and months later, True Blood picked up this season literally right after last season ended.  Actually backtracked to a couple of events that transpired in the finale.  Considering the cliff-hangery nature of said events, that made sense, but.
• I have fewer things to say about this, because I love True Blood a lot but it does not get me quite as feelingsy right off the bat; also premieres don’t get me as feelingsy as finales.  Probably because they’re introducing plots and ideas and things, not wrapping them up (for now).  But this is not from a lack of enjoyment.  I did enjoy it quite a lot.
• Pam (Kristin Bauer van Straten) is brilliant and I really really hope that she and Eric (Alexander Skarsgard) have a chance to make up amid all the AVL political messes and surprise-vampire-Tara (Rutina Wesley) (??) and many other things that are going to be going on.  She may be apologizing to Eric, but she is not apologizing for who she is.  She’s still good ol’ caustic Pam.  And I love her for it.
• Jessica (Deborah Ann Woll) is beautiful.  I don’t really care about her hanging around with drunk college kids, though I see the point it served, and when did she put green in her hair, and that was a fancy Rock Band setup.  (Makes sense, it being all in King Bill’s Grand Mansion and all.  Though I can’t imagine Bill ever playing Rock Band.)  Mostly I am just devoting a bullet point to Jess because of when she burst into Jason’s (Ryan Kwanten) and told off Steve Newlin (Michael McMillian) and… whoops.  That sounded a hell of a lot like babygirl verbally declaring her intent all assertively.  (And while wearing a corset, which… yes, was there before, but.  But.)
• Well, I’m worried that Nora (Lucy Griffiths) is eventually doomed.  I don’t know when, it might not be for a while, and I hope this is one of my failure predictions.  I like her.  I am fully aware that this is completely irrational since she hasn’t been there for that long and my best reasons for liking her are that I like vampire family structure stuff, I like ladyvampires who are capable, I like that she was wearing leather wristlength gloves while she and Eric got, y’know, reacquainted and that she kept her bra on even though it’s True Blood where you can show all the boobies you want (and the gloves and the bra coordinated), and I like British people talking.  But.
• The synopsis on our television for the episode contained, after the descriptions of what everyone else was up to, the phrase “Alcide warns Sookie.”  Seriously, other than wolf politics what does Alcide (Joe Mangianello) do but warn Sookie (Anna Paquin)?
• Eric and Bill (Stephen Moyer) are buddies now, okay.  They couldn’t have thought they were getting out of this that easily though.  If it was going to succeed, it wouldn’t have happened until the second-to-last or last episode of the season.
• Also, Lafayette (Nelsan Ellis) is a pro.
• This is officially nothing like the book.  And I do not care at all.

–your fangirl heroine.

Television Tuesday :: 18 months is too long.

I’m speaking, of course, about this Sunday’s premiere of Mad Men‘s fifth season.  As evidenced by both my Sunday giddiness and my frequent mentions of the show’s other seasons on this blog, I’m sure you can all imagine exactly how I was feeling about it.  Namely, every positive emotion.

Mad Men is one of those shows where I actually dislike a lot of the characters sometimes.  But then they do something that makes me like them, and then they do something that makes me dislike them again, and then I like them again, and… you just can’t actually decide for sure.  (Except for sometimes: I like Joan [Christina Hendricks] always, obviously.  I like Peggy [Elisabeth Moss] always.  But.)  I sort of love that, though.  I love that everyone is so complicated that you can’t know how you feel about them, but you can’t help but care about them even still.

This is a bullet-pointed list of thoughts that don’t spoil anything too serious, because I want everyone who would to watch it for themselves.  (Everyone who doesn’t, go ahead and skip this.  As I’m sure you always do when the post does not pertain to your interests.)

• I just finished an epic all-four-seasons rewatch.  I did.  But before this episode, I’d honestly forgotten how hilarious this show can sometimes be.  Or maybe everyone had just turned their sarcasm dial up to eleven now because they all feel like they could get away with it now.  I don’t know.  It was two hours of nonstop sixties snark, and it made me so so happy.  Peggy snarking, Don (Jon Hamm) snarking, Joan snarking, Pete (Vincent Kartheiser) snarking.
• The standoff with Roger (John Slattery) and Pete.  Oh, my gosh.  Spoiler: telling his secretary to pencil in a fake appointment at six in the morning so Roger would show up to it and get his.  Then “some of us are above that kind of trick” and the look.  The smug, knowing look: smug because he got one over on Roger, knowing because Roger sure wasn’t going to tell the others what happened, since it would make him look like a fool.
• This Roger who is sans responsibility is just hanging around the office all day acting like a sarcastic asshole, and that’s simultaneously terrible (for everyone else who has to deal with them) and sort of amusing (for everyone that’s watching).  I don’t really like Roger as a character, I never have, but he’s amusing, so that’s something.
• So I guess Megan (Jessica Paré) and Don did get married.  Since they’re now living in a supercool sixties apartment together and wearing wedding rings.  Given Don’s history of being terrible at relationships (and to a lesser extent the happenings of the episode and how I’m sure that’s reflective of the rest of the time) I don’t entirely know how well it will happen, but Megan seems much more prone to not taking his b.s. and snarking right back at him.
• And… passive-aggressively stripping and cleaning.  Was that a one-time thing or a usual thing with them?  I don’t know.  Hm.
• Megan’s party.  So many thoughts.  Apparently she’s friends with all sorts of 1960s quasihipsters?  And she’s approximately 1/5 of a quasihipster herself, given her mod hair and mod eyeliner and tiny dress and singing like she did.  Apparently the song is now a thing for people to discuss online, so I won’t, much, except for to say I was just trying to translate the lyrics as I heard them and failing miserably because my French is paltry at best.
• But oh mydear sweet lord, Lane (Jared Harris) imitating her dancing for Joan in the office.  Oh my dear sweet lord.  I’m not sure I’ve been so close to literally rotfl-ing in the recent past.  I love when British people dance or are sarcastic or dance in a sarcastic fashion.
• I do not love when British people that are Lane creep on a picture found in a lost wallet.  That was sketchy.  That was a 😦 moment for me, but then the dancing and Lane’s general way with Joanie put me back on the 🙂 side of things, and I had to like him again.
• This is the paragraph devoted to Joan: she wears glasses sometimes and I love when she wears glasses.  (Completely necessary italics.)  She had the baby.  Nobody knows it’s Roger’s, and it’s a boy.  (Kevin…?  I choose to believe that the name was Greg’s idea, and will until told otherwise, because I don’t like that name.  But I want Kevin and Tammy Campbell to be buddies. I want Sally to babysit them.  I want all the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce children to hang out.)  Also, every time anyone flops desperately on a bed, I think of Kiki’s Delivery Service, but I also think of how it is such a perfect representation of a feeling that everyone has.  Also, my Joanie loves her son, but she also loves working.  I feel like Joan’s line to Peggy in season one is a perfect picture of her:
  “Although sometimes when people get what they want, they realize how limited their goals were.”
  I think Joan has realized how limited her goal of marriage+baby was — not in general, and some people are happy with that life, but Joan herself is not.  She enjoys work, and she needs it in her life.  Mommy Joan would be happier being Working Mommy Joan.  And I love this about her.  And I love that Lane acknowledges that she is so very necessary.  And I love when she’s buddies with the others in the office.  And I… love her.  Surprise.
• Also, Christine Estabrook as Joan’s mother.  Not really contradictory to my headcanon, nope, so that’s good.  And Christine Estabrook is a perfect mother-who-needs-to-impart-b.s.-gender-roles-on-her-daughter.
• Also, let’s talk about Peggy.  Peggy is a badass and is perfect.  Peggy is sometimes sarcastic, sometimes businesslike, sometimes self-deprecating, sometimes drunk and chatty and sarcastic again, sometimes friendly, always awesome.
• Megan and Peggy seem to have become friends, ish.  Except for the part where Megan also seems like… a cranky optimist?  She doesn’t like everyone’s negative attitudes, and she doesn’t believe they’re necessary, but she also seems to believe that people don’t generally suck.  …meliorism?  Maybe?
• And also, Don’s comment to the kids about Betty (January Jones) and Henry’s (Christopher Stanley) new house.  “Give my regards to Lurch and Morticia.”  Or something like that.  Brilliant snark, because really, my people were all looking at the house when they pulled up and saying things like “so Betty and Henry moved to a mausoleum?”  In retrospect, I’m also reminded of the Haunted Mansion, but the one at Disney World, not the one at Disneyland.
• Basically, all the feelings.  And also all the excitement about the season.

–your fangirl heroine.

Television Tuesday :: I am a mess of confused feelings.

Namely, about FX’s American Horror Story, produced by the same people behind Glee and also the plastic surgery drama Nip-Tuck, which I have never watched.  I will admit that my initial desire to watch stemmed from a desire to see what Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk could come up with when they weren’t patronizing twelve-year-olds combined with a morbid fondness for, well, horror stories.

I would normally wait until the season is over to go on about it in a nonspecific fashion, but I feel like so much could change that it would be a completely different piece, and I want to get my thoughts out now (before tomorrow’s episode, which makes this post very of its moment, but that’s fine).  So, in the trusty bullet pointed list, here goes (spoilers for the first three episodes do ensue).

• Again, why can married couples on television not be faithful to each other?  Ben (Dylan McDermott) and Vivien (Connie Britton) move all the way across the country in attempts to deal with his infidelity, and then mistress Hayden (Kate Mara, who my father has somewhat ruined for me by proclaiming that she should really just go ahead and play some type of werecat [he said “cat person,” but that’s what he meant] on True Blood or something; I can’t look at her without thinking about whiskers and claws) pops up out of nowhere.
• Only to be popped back down again by crazy Larry (Denis O’Hare, delightfully messed up as per usual).  I can’t say I saw it coming, but I wasn’t exactly surprised, either.
• See, this is the thing about this show so far.  I have no idea what’s going on most of the time, but by that same token nothing is going to shock me.  I’m just assuming that anything is possible.  And yet, even with my not knowing what’s going on, I’m… strangely entranced.
• This could just be because it’s shot pretty.  Or because there’s flashbacks.
• Or because they’re mixing a pretty good soundtrack.  I’m assuming that “Special Death” by my babygirl Mirah (and my favorite song of hers, no less) is daughter Violet’s (Taissa Farmiga) unofficial theme song or something, as they’ve played it no less than three times already, not to mention on some of the ads.  Rock on, that.
• Speaking of Violet, she confuses me too.  On one hand, she’s got a right to be a little angsty, what with her Tokenly Dysfunctional Parents, but on the other hand, what?  I wish I had a better sense of who she is and not just who she’s being to be rebellious.  I appreciate in a way that they’ve chosen to take her down the “wearing messes of clothes that look like they got grabbed at random from an upscale vintage shop’s bargain bin” route and not the “wearing too much black and having piercings” route, though I wish I knew why.
• And I wish I knew why Vivien screwed the guy in the gimp suit (Riley Schimdt).  I understand her thinking that Ben was just playing a joke at first, but, you know.  Once the sex act began, I feel like she’d have noticed that wasn’t her husband.  It’s not like they’ve never had sex or anything.  I even have a hard time buying bed tricks in Shakespeare, for goodness’ sake, but nowadays?  Really?  And is the baby Ben’s or gimp suit’s?  These are things I need to know.
• So… everyone who dies in the house can’t leave it ever?  Or just the people buried in the backyard?  Or what?  And why did Moira’s (Alexandra Breckenridge, who I just looked up and am not sure whether to be impressed by the resume of, or giggle, or both [True Blood and Buffy both, but also She’s the Man] / Frances Conroy) ghost age but only sometimes?  I really need them to get expository regarding their ghost canon more.  I mean, for all I know, freakin’ everyone but the Harmons are ghosts.  Like I said, I wouldn’t be surprised.
• But, actors!  I think True Blood is developing a mini-mafia, and they’re appearing here somewhat, O’Hare and Breckenridge (she played Katerina, the girl whose glasses made me like her until she was actually a spy/f-buddy for Bill) and Adina Porter (Tara’s mom) popping up as one of Dr. Ben’s patients.  Also there’s some minor Whedonverse cred, again Breckenridge (she was in “Lessons” in season seven, playing the girl who adventured in the basement of the school with Dawn) and Azura Skye (who was that girl Cassie who predicted her own death, also season seven) and Bianca Lawson (who was Kendra, and how is she still playing high schoolers?) and Andy Umberger (who was D’Hoffryn on Buffy and the creepy doctor in one of the four episodes of Angel I’ve coherently seen and also an Alliance guy on Firefly) and I’m sure many others to come.  And there’s other people, like Evan Peters who plays Violet’s creepy friend dude, he was in Kick-Ass, and one of Azura Skye’s cult buddies was played by Mageina Tovah who’s the neighbor in Spider-man 2 and 3 and more importantly one of the geeky kids in Bickford Schmeckler’s Cool Ideas, and of course Christine Estabrook who was the original Adult Woman in Spring Awakening (and in some other stuff too).
• Are you sensing my ambivalence yet?  I am ambivalent.  I have no idea what to make of this show yet.  I’m intrigued by it, and the cinematography rocks, and all that, but I have no idea what the point is.  It’s a mystery!  But I like knowing just enough to not be sitting there going “whaaaat.”  But, as I feel compelled to discover the answer do that question, I will continue to watch, of course.

–your fangirl heroine.