September 24, 2013
Post‑Mortem: Emmys Shmemmys — Never Again?
Killough is mortified at how badly he called them....
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August 13, 2013
EMMYS 2013: Through a Crystal Ball Darkly (Part Two)
I had no true concept of the scope of television content until I embarked on this thankless task of predicting this year’s Emmys, and by thankless I mean that about three of our regular readers seem to be interested in this — we’re getting far fewer hits than our Oscar predictions. The categories are so many that I thought I’d have Tuttle weight in to ease the workload by taking a stab at the reality-show noms,
July 22, 2013
EMMYS 2013: Through a Crystal Ball Darkly (Part One)
I’ve never made predictions about the Emmys. I’ve never even watched them. But with the shifting dynamic of dramas away from the big screen to the small — and getting smaller as Netflix storms the gates of entertainment with two superlative web series out of four unleashed so far — I’m now not only paying attention, I’ve seen enough of the nominated shows in many of the categories to make predictions.
Cable hasn’t just come of age. It’s now a big, brawny alpha person with an edgy personality
May 28, 2013
Post Mortem: Is Sundance Channel Ready for Original Programming after ‘Rectify’?
If you want dark, groundbreaking TV drama, then the dark groundbreakers at Gran Via Productions would seem a logical choice: they developed and produced Breaking Bad. But TV is a writer’s world, not a producer’s like feature film, and without Breaking Bad’s creator Vince Gillian you’re not necessarily assured the same level of dark, groundbreaking entertainment.
The last episode of the first season of Gran Via’s Rectify aired last night,
August 20, 2012
‘Veep’: High Heels and Yoghurt with an H
I have to confess I’m having some scary revelations about myself as I ditch movies for the rest of the summer and delve into TV. For instance, I don’t see anything wrong with anti-heroes Walt from Breaking Bad or Dr. House from House M.D., which I have only recently started watching despite the fact it is eight seasons old. I think they’re not only completely relatable, but absolutely right, from their behavior under the circumstances they are put in, to the things they say and the way they say them. But when I read comments on forums, many people consider these guys to be arrogant, egotistical, utterly lacking in humility or sensitivity. I think I even read somewhere that House is supposed to be autistic. To wit, when we were considering Hugh Laurie for a role in something I was working on, a producer said, “You know, he plays that crazy doctor on House.” How puzzling. Worse: how troubling that I don’t see them that way at all.
August 10, 2012
REPOST: ‘Homeland’: The Co‑Best Show on TV?
UPDATE: I wasn’t surprised by last night’s upset at the Emmys. Well, okay, I was—as I mention in the repost of an article below, it’s the first Emmys I’ve ever paid attention to. I was on the money about Claire Danes, but my hesitation about Damian Lewis cost me a firm call in the Best Actor category. Had I done my homework and seen that Bryan Cranston from Breaking Bad had already won three times, I would have definitely called it for Lewis.
In the end, I guess I’ve been told which show to like better. Although, to be honest, this season of Breaking Bad is killing it, more so than ever, but it wasn’t eligible for this round of awards. So, compared to last season, Homeland was the better show. Or was it?
Here’s the original post:
July 27, 2012
Is ‘Breaking Bad’ Bisexual?
The wonderful thing about Reddit, aside from introducing me to the wild ‘n wacky mind of the computer hacker (I mean, programmer), is that the threads often closely follow my own trains of thought, no matter how obscure or obvious. And one of those trains was a post the other day comparing Breaking Bad to The Wire, the police procedural set in Baltimore that ran from 2002 until 2007.
If you haven’t seen it, I would urge you to watch at least one season of The Wire. It is widely considered to be the best TV show ever, but that is assuming your tastes run towards hyper-realistic dramas, not campy fantasies riddled with vampires and the fairies who love them. I see both as the equivalent of the opposite ends of a Kinsey-type scale of TV drama preferences. When I visualize that scale, I see a petulant, girly Filipino twink wearing a Madonna t-shirt grabbing the remote and aiming it at an episode of The Wire, saying, “Enough of this shit. So depressing. I wanna watch True Blood. Alexander Skarsgaard, he’s so hot. SOOKIE!!! I love you!”
September 6, 2011
My Mecca
THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES
by James Killough
As an Eastcoaster, the minute Labor Day ends, you think summer is finished. Your mind prepares for siege mentality against the onslaught of that horrible cold and wet. “Winter is coming,” is the Stark family motto in Game of Thrones. That sense of doom is, of course, ridiculous if you’re living in Southern California. We’ll get a light dip in temperature somewhere at the beginning of December, and it will rain a bit, maybe a total of twenty days between then and the end for February. Winter will never really come.
"I know meth heads," states Jesse Pinkman from "Breaking Bad," played by Aaron Paul.
The LA equivalent of the February Blues, which make the winter-weary on the East Coast and in Europe suicidal with ‘seasonal affective disorder’ (an ailment invented by pharmaceutical companies if there ever was one, just as Valentines Day was conjured by Hallmark), is something called June Gloom, when this city is overcast until it burns off at midday. I heard one buxom bunny say to another while they were heading into pilates class earlier this summer, “I’m just so totally bummed this morning. Must be, like, June Gloom or something.” Then it burns off by, like, 1 p.m., along with your death wish, and there’s just nothing left to be unhappy about. La-la-la.