Television

Everyone on TV has nicer clothes and a bigger house than you do. And I’m not just talking about TV doctors or lawyers. Even small-screen characters with relatively modest incomes manage to live in palatial apartments. (Friends is probably the most famous example.) We complain about how unrealistic it is for a barista and a line cook to be able to afford such a nice place, but part of the appeal of turning on the tube is temporarily turning off our real-world problems.

“Ride into this world all alone. God takes your soul. You're on your own.
The crow flies straight, a perfect line on the devil's back until you die.
Gotta look this life in the eye”.                                        

If you've already read previous reviews, skip ahead to find out what's new this season

“Money, right yeah it matters, but it’s one piece of the puzzle. Let me tell you something. Sometimes who you are doing business with is a lot more important than the business that you are doing.”

When How to Make It in America season two begins, Ben (Bryan Greenberg) and his best friend, Cam (Victor Rasuk) return from their business trip to Japan after spending their new-found cash on a load of “Japanese soft cotton” hoodies they intend to silk screen with their new Crisp fashion label and find a way to mass distribute. Ben’s ex-girlfriend Rachel (Lake Bell), now unemployed, hits the job market and scores a gig with an uptight home improvement magazine.

Remember when I mentioned the difficulty of reviewing a season in the middle of the show’s run? This week, I shall attempt to review two different HBO shows at the end of their respective run. Yes, I will be piecing together a show that is in its last season with very little (or no knowledge) of the seasons before. This should be a fun ride and our first entry is the third season of the HBO Comedy: Bored to Death.

This Naval Criminal Investigation Service lead by Agent Jethro Gibbs (played by Mark Harmon) continue to sift through suspense filled tales of deviance in the military that takes them from all the way from political offices to the streets to battle villains.

I never really meant to have 3D TV in my home theater. But our Sony Blu-ray player was 3D-ready, and the receiver and monitor both needed warranty replacement about the same time. Bingo: All I needed were a couple pairs of glasses ($40 each at Amazon) and some 3D programming. Having seen almost every 3D big-screen release already, I was pretty sure the TV version would be an inferior format. I was wrong. The electronic-shutter glasses beat the heck out of those old red-and-green gimmicky glasses. They work as well as the polarized lenses at the multiplex.

Anyone who has watched enough of the SyFy original movies has a pretty good idea of what they're getting. The network has made a bit of a name for itself with low-budget to no-budget monster movies. Most of the creatures are mutant and large and appear like they escaped from a bad 1950's drive-in theater. The computer generated stuff usually looks like a kid drew it up on their pocket computer, and the cast is going to be made up of unknowns with a few known names to give the whole thing some street cred.

George Romero created the modern zombie movie in 1968 with his low-budget masterpiece The Night Of The Living Dead. While we can debate the direction the genre has gone in the last 40 years, it's hard to argue that Romero defined the rules of the game with that first film and the series that followed. And while zombies have been populating the comic scene since the early days of Creepy and Eerie, it took the likes of Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore to give us a compelling interpretation of the Romero zombie in the form of a comic book series.

The “cast” of Jersey Shore have returned from their adventures in Italy as Season 5 is back to the American location that is the show's namesake. This means a return to their familiar zones for more partying and more...talking about how they partied.

The show differs in several ways from NCIS or JAG. While LA is still a military show, that angle is downplayed here. The atmosphere for the team is more civilian-looking all the way around. There are seldom folks walking around in uniforms. The operations utilize more of the standard surveillance and undercover work. In the back-door pilot, the leader of the group was an agent who had history with Gibbs. Her name was Macy, and she was played by CSI alum Louise Lombard, who was gone when the series premiered in its own right.