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Once upon a time, a musical episode like Once Upon a Time’s’ May 7th episode “The Song in Your Heart” would have been at least a minor “major event.” Here in the 21st Century, though, we’ve already had more TV musicals than in all of the previous history of TV, so this went comparatively unnoticed.
Welp, I saw the first episode of the new series out of Shonda Rhimes’ ever-expanding corner of ABC aka Shondaland the other night. It’s called Still Star-Crossed and is a kind of sequel to a little play called Romeo and Juliet that all of us have pretty much been forced to read at some time or other in our lives.
Short Version of My Reaction:
(This article contains spoilers!)
Season 4 was redemption for House of Cards. But the thing I loved most was the rise in importance of Frank’s wife Claire. Season 4 laid the groundwork for Claire’s rise and season 5 completed it. It just took until the fifth episode for you to firmly realize it.
Once again starting slow, Cards took its sweet ass time getting to the point. Season 4 left off with Frank wanting to declare war on ICO after an affiliated terrorist cut off a US citizen’s head on live TV. He thought this was his ticket to winning reelection over the Republican golden boy Will Conway, played by Joel Kinnaman. It took Frank an eternity to realize the American public didn’t exactly adore him, but they sure loved his wife, which is why he begrudgingly put her on his ticket as VP in an effort to get reelected.
Let’s play Spot the Embarrassment…hint, it’s the source of the pic on the right
May 24, 2017 will go down in history for sure – as a day of genuine showbiz infamy. On that date, ABC released a remake of the 1987 classic film of female coming of age Dirty Dancing, with catastrophic results for all involved.
THE GOOD:
Two episodes in to the Twin Peaks Revival I find myself still giving it a chance. I love David Lynch. I get the metaphysics — we construct an artificial reality over a quantum universe which is the ‘real’ universe(s), but I am increasingly irritated by the seeming conclusions — that we have no real agency or responsibility for our actions in this world, and that agency is but an in-habitation from a mysterious meta-reality.
While that paranoia anchors the foreboding of TP and has been the subject of Lynch’s work since Eraserhead (which is echoed in much of the new TP), it is never anchored in much beyond stream-of-consciousness associations. One is constantly left with the feeling of an auteur professing something profound in the margins but not actually having a core epiphany.
Yes, consciousness is akin to a nested Russian doll, elusive and receding, and yet the leap to a quantum explanation for agency does nothing to resolve the dilemma. It just reassigns it, and while that idea is appealing in a spooky way, it disconnects the problem from behavior, an evolutionary process. Specifically, primates exhibit both violence and altruism as a product of their social evolution. We don’t need a meta-dimensional possession to explain our tendency toward nasty behavior.