Midseason Updates Part 2

Raising Hope: The second season so far has not had the same endearing quality to me that the first season did.  I’m starting to see the more low brow aspects to the humor that I glazed over in the first season because of my love of Martha Plimpton and Garrett Dillahunt.  However, there are still small shining moments of true wit in this show that keep me coming back.  They’ve had some solid guest stars like Patton Oswalt but I just don’t see a promising future on my DVR for this show.

Person of Interest: Despite a strong desire to watch this show, too many built up on the DVR and sacrifices had to be made for the greater good.  If it gets a second season, I’ll definitely consider going back to catch up.

Charlie’s Angels: CANCELLED

Community: This half of the season had more “okay” episodes than I remember season 2 having.  However, when it lands, it freaking lands.  The Chaos Theory episode was one of my favorite half-hours of comedy ever.  The mid-season finale with all of the Glee references made my side hurt from laughter.  The anime foosball sequence was instant classic.  No show in recent history has been nearly as innovative or as successful at its sarcasm as Community.  If NBC doesn’t bring it back after Whitney and Are you the Vodka, It’s Me Chelsea go down in flames on Wednesday night, I’ll be booking a flight to New York to have some words with them…  Insiders on the show feel pretty confident that they will be back.

Parks and Rec: I can believe that about 6 months ago, I wanted nothing to do with this show and now I’m completely caught up and loving every second they throw my way.  While I really enjoyed The Office in earlier seasons, I never connected with some of the characters.  The same cannot be said for Parks and Rec.  I love every single character on that show.  The addition of Ben and Chris was great and I can’t imagine the show without Ben now.  “What happened, they cancel Game of Thrones or something?”

The Office: So I watched the first two episodes of the season, then I was letting them accumulate.  Apparently when I did that, my DVR decided to arbitrarily not record 3 of them so I just cleared the rest off and I’ll catch up on Netflix next summer or something.  Apparently, it’s done a good job of staying afloat without Steve Carrell.

Big Bang Theory: This show has increased a TON since the beginning.  While the nerd references were always fun, there was something missing.  In comes Blossom (yes that Blossom) and Summer from True Blood and the show explodes with greatness.  Giving Penny her own group of girls to interact with was brilliant and on a regular basis, the girls are far funnier than the guys.  This show went from being something I recorded in non-HD and watched when I could to something I watch pretty much right after Community.  Yes it still has its moments when it’s very sitcom-y but the girls have added a lot more depth to the comedy and I’m excited to see if they keep it up.

Fringe: The show took its time introducing to a new environment after the cliffhanger last season.  Just as the show was really kicking into gear, FOX, in its infinite wisdom pulled it until 2012.  Yes, this means we’ll get a practically uninterrupted second half of the season but I think people needed to be left with more.  The show is dangling by a thread and if it gets taken off the air, it will be a grievous loss of Firefly proportions.

Supernatural: We’re in season 7 now and the show still manages to surprise me.  They’ve been systematically attacking the infrastructure of the show.  We haven’t thought about how these guys operate and survive since they first told us in season 1 (scamming credit cards, etc) and now this season, the Big Bad has been taking away those things and causing them to go further off the map.  It’s been an interesting approach and a character death at the end of this half of the season was heart-wrenching.  When a show in its 7^th season can still pull that kind of emotion out of its characters, it’s impressive to me.

Pan Am: The show was interesting but it wasn’t high enough on my priority list to keep from getting piled up on the DVR and eventually swept off when space was needed.  Its ratings situation is precarious at best so I don’t know that it will stay up in the air long enough for a second season renewal…see what I did there, with my airplane pun….I’m awesome.

The Good Wife: I know most of you giggle secretly that I watch a show called The Good Wife but I can tell you that it earns its Emmys every freaking week.  This third season had a very strong shift in the dynamic of the characters and I can’t say it completely worked for me.  However, the acting is continually solid and they’ve shown signs of getting back to what the show face-meltingly awesome in season 2.  If I could only recommend one show to try that you wouldn’t normally watch, it’d be The Good Wife…seriously.

Family Guy: In a pretty decent season so far, they’ve had one of my top 5 favorite episodes, Back to the Pilot (OH, they’re setting up the f*cking cutaways!) and one of my least favorite, the Thanksgiving one that literally went into a 5-7 minute speech about the Armed Forces.  I don’t watch a comedy for your politics Seth MacFarlane.  I watch it because it makes me smile.  Keep doing the second thing, not the first thing.

Chuck: Despite a questionable cliffhanger at the end of last season, Chuck’s managed to make its final strides to the finish line just as entertaining as before.  They show did a segment at the nudist colony this past week and instead of doing snarky camera angles and pieces of fruit, the show just straight up blurred it out like a reality show.  For whatever reason, I thought this was brilliant and made me laugh quite a bit during that whole sequence.  Carrie Ann Moss (yes Trinity is on Chuck now) has been a good addition to the cast.  I thought she was only going to be a one-off guest but she prove a great recurring character that I hope we see again before the series finale.

Now onto the cable shows…

The Walking Dead: This show built up all 7 episodes of this first part of the season on my DVR and then I watched them all in about 3 days.  What a great show.  Some people claimed a part of this season was slow but I didn’t see it at all.  I loved every minute of it.  Daryl is an amazing character for being made for the show and Andrea is apparently lining up with her comic counterpart and I can’t wait to see where she goes.  Shane’s slow descent into madness was fascinating to watch and Rick’s slow march into defeat was painful to see.  I can’t wait for February when the show comes back.  There will be a ton of fallout from the winter finale and I hope it’s amazing.

Burn Notice: This season was…interesting.  The show has gone back and forth for me in quality.  Thankfully, they usually split their plot arcs so if one doesn’t work for you, chances are the second one will be more your style.  Season 4 had a weak middle for me but both the beginning and the end were spectacular.  Last season they added a new regular character and I have to say that I thought the addition of Jesse turned out to be a great move for them.  Watching him find his place with each member of the team was a lot of fun, especially between him and Sam.  However, this season, Jesse apparently has a security firm job but then he can get off whenever he wants to work any job with Michael.  Whereas I felt that Jesse was perfectly integrated into season 4, he’s felt almost tacked on at some points this season.  Anytime Maddie gets involved in the case, I know it will be a good one and this year was no exception.  Thankfully, they haven’t fallen in the trap of including her more because she’s so great.  They space it out and therefore make it special every time.  The finale was definitely a game changing thing and I hope it isn’t resolved too soon next year.  On the flip side, I hope it doesn’t last too long because the character is needed.  There’s a fine line they need to walk at the beginning of next year but Burn Notice has shown it can be trusted to do the right thing.

Psych:  Despite a long wait for the new season, the show hasn’t let me down.  They have thankfully done a good job of putting their will they/won’t they together without harming the dynamic of the show.  The romantic subplot was always just that, a subplot, so it makes it easier to change the dynamic without altering the fundamental thing that makes the show what it is, Shawn and Gus.  Gus has reached new levels of crazy this year and while I would almost be inclined to say it’s slightly out of character in some parts, the comedy that results is really hard to argue with.

I technically still have The Closer and Leverage but I don’t know that many of you care about either so I’m going to wrap it on.  My fingers hurt.