Grid Effect

Slow day, so in order to avoid anything substantial, here’s some preliminary thoughts on last night’s Rescue Me and a few site notes.

Rescue Me was strong again last night. No Nona, very little Sheila and an understandably angry Tommy. After dozens of years in presumably the same fire house, he now has to kowtow to a probie because the kid can play a little basketball, and everyone in his house cares besides him. It was vexing how they managed using the basketball subplot to symbolize Tommy’s ungraceful entry into his elder years. But ultimately, are they simply stealing themes and technical styles from The Sopranos? The similarities, as stated in last weeks recap, are becoming more and more prevalent, to the point its getting harder to take the show seriously. When I first saw this series I described it as “The Sopranos with firemen”, in the sense that their is a myriad of flawed characters and the people whom the viewer can empathize with are few and far between. It wasn’t meant to be a literal analogy, but its slowly turning into one.

As a scheduling note, it looks like we’re going to begin recapping Mad Men, and it will be done exactly like every other drama: we’ll post the recap the morning of the day the following episode is on. We also might discontinue the scene-by-scene format as well, its too time consuming and outside of The Wire and The Sopranos, no series is detailed enough to warrant such lengthy posts, everything else can be covered in summary.

I meant to watch the replay of Damages last night but fell asleep earlier than I have since I was thirteen or inebriated. Has anyone watched this series and can vouch for it? The previews looked somewhat incredulous and Ted Danson in a dramatic role only accentuates that. But yeah, if it’s supposed to be solid I’ll give it a tumble.

Here’s a quick link about the ineptness of HBO movies and why they are generally so terrible. My guess is the premium network invests all their money in original programming, thus leaving very little to compete with other premium networks that have little to no creative projects.