Hell on Wheels - Pilot, S01E01

Hell on Wheels is one hell of a title. Makes me think of motorbikes and street gangs. Which is not at all what this show is about. It's a period piece, taking place in the States after the Civil War, and it focuses on the construction of the rail road. It's gritty and dirty, very curious and interesting, but in the long run not something I want to stick with.

I liked the concept. A man lost his wife during the war because some enemy soldiers did not conduct themselves like gentlemen when they took over the farm, and naturally he plans to seek vengeance on all the bastards who hurt her. By the end of the episode, he discovers that there was another man involved, but he doesn't know his name, so that certainly sets up a path for the show to follow.

Meanwhile, you've got a skeevey politician trying to build the railroad, and you really can't like him, which has apparently become popular these days. Come on! I don't want to watch shows about people I don't like. I want to love the heroes, and love to hate the bad guys, or hate to love them. But feeling mostly indifferent with a dash of distaste is not going to make me watch a program.

Also, there was a charming young woman and her loving husband who were attacked by a group of blood-thirsty red Indians. And I use those words knowing full well what they imply because frankly this group was right out of those monstrous stories told about Native Americans. I'm surprised that no one had a fit about it. I'm not saying that the Native Americans never killed any Europeans anymore than no Europeans ever killed Native Americans, but the scene was far to violent for my tastes. It was brutal and seemed absolutely pointless, and the attackers came across as really really awful.

And that's what it came down to, for me. I love a good period piece, and I appreciate when a show does adhere to the mores of the time period. I don't need things sugar-coated. But I also don't need to watch a blood bath.

Grimm - Pilot, S01E01

An interesting concept - the decendants of the Brothers Grimm are able to see things that the rest of us can't. They recognize the...we'll call them demons for lack of a better word. Turns out the Big Bad Wolf is a species of men with animalistic tendencies and an obsession with red hoodies.

I liked the pilot. It was scary at points. Very scary in fact. A good combination of the scary with the campy. Because Grimm fairy tales coming to life is nothing if not a little campy. I really like the idea of our hero, Nick (David Giuntoli) teaming up with a wolf, Eddie (Silas Weir Mitchell). Sure, these are the monsters which haunt our nightmares, but perhaps they are not so given over to the side of them that gives us the willies.

As to where it is going...well, I've only watched the first two episodes at this point, although 4 have aired, and it did get a full seasons pick up, which is always a good thing...so going somewhere it must be.

First episode, Little Red Riding Hood. Second, Goldilocks and the Three Bears. And there are a lot more Grimm fairy tales to go through, though not all are as famous or well known as these. So the question is whether they will continue to follow a theme of one story per episode, or will a larger plot take over. And will that larger plot have anything to do with the fairy tales as we know them?

Once Upon a Time - Pilot, S01E01

I love fairy tales. Always have, probably always will. And so I am on board to watch this show. Yet I wasn't as thrilled with the pilot as I had hoped. Perhaps we need to wait a few more episodes until we really get into things. Really great stories sometimes need a bit of a runway to bring them up to full speed.

Emma Swan (Jennifer Morrison) I loved. Okay, I wasn't wild about the name, since swan is just a little too Twilight for me, but let's not focus on that. She's a bondswoman, not afraid to use her feminin wiles to achieve her goal, and she's got this incredible gift of always knowing when she's being lied to. But she has major abandonment issues from growing up an orphan, and also has no friends. This is not a boring, one-dimensional hero. Yay!

Then we have her son, Henry (Jared Gilmore), who appears on her front door on her 28th birthday, just as she blows out a birthday candle wishing she did not have to spend the evening alone. I suppose every fairy tale needs a child's faith togive it full power, and he's a pretty good reason for Emma to go to Storybrook, Maine, where her future awaits.

So far so good...except as we are learning about the current state of affairs, we are also finding out how our fairy tale heroes got themselves stuck in our modern world. I can't say how I felt about Snow White (Ginnifer Goodwin) and Prince Charming (Josh Dallas). I loved when Charming got their baby into the wardrobe to save her, fighting off enemy soldiers while wielding a sword in one hand and holding his child in the other. Also, having him get stabbed did really give a sense that the Happily Ever Afters were coming to an end. But I couldn't help but think a lot of it was a little cheesy.

Fairy tales can be cheesy. Enchanted certainly does a wonderful job of showing us the pitfalls of love at first sight, as well as the reasons why poofy dresses just aren't practical. The 10th Kingdom never shied away from story references and commentary. But in Once Upon a Time, they lacked a classy modern gloss across the fairy tale world, and yet never acknowledged the silly romanticism of Snow White's rediculous dresses or The Evil Queen (Lana Parrilla)'s Force-like powers.

The fairy tale world looked like something out of a 50s tv show. Too bad it's not the 50s anymore, and without winking at the audience about the choice, it just seemed as though it had not been carefully thought through.

But, we aren't going to hang around in that cheesy world too much. Instead, Emma's got to help people in the here and now.

So the big question that remains is how is the Evil Queen winning? Sure she's mayor of the town, but she doesn't seem that happy. Does she remember where they all came from, or was she just as much a victim as the others? And why on earth did a woman like that decide adoption was a good idea?

I'll continue to tune in to find out.

Boss - Listen, Pilot, S01E01

Considering that Boss was renewed for a second season before it even premiered, expectations for this pilot were pretty high. And certainly the quality was there. I can't complain about the storytelling, the acting, or the cinematography. I can, however, complain about the show itself.

Why should I watch a show were all the characters are manipulative jerks completley out for their own interests?

Kelsey Grammer's Tom Kane is an ass. He may be dying of some bizarre ailment which is certainly going to be problimatic while he remains Mayor, but I'm not going to like him simply because he's sick. It's his actions in life that matter - his intimidation techniques to accomplish his political goals, his violent tendancies, his astrangement from wife and daughter. This guy has no redeeming qualities, except perhaps that he is quite smart and capable, but as he is using those for all the wrong reasons, I really can't care.

And he is the lead character of the show. The rest of the cast is equally corrupt and irreverant. Just what the daughter is doing as a pastor who buys drugs, I cannot say, and nor, frankly do I care. I care no more about the wife who may be trying to help children get better education but is more concerned about appearances than results. And the one character I did like, the doctor who diagnoses Kane, well, what does she get for her trouble of being a good person and an honest doctor? She gets drugged so that she knows that people can get close to her and her son and hurt them if she screws up. I suppose in a world so full of mean spirited people, it's impossible to believe that she would have stuck to her vows without coersion, but if I were her, I'd be so much more tempted to speak out of interests of self-preservation now that I'd been threatened.

So I spent an hour watching this show, during which I really started to question my resolve to stick to watching entire episodes when I really don't care. Next time, I'm not going to waste my time.

The Walking Dead - What Lies Ahead, S02E01 - Premiere

How I missed my zombie action! A mostly great start to the season, although I would have liked to see somebody fall victim to the horde, but I suppose I will accept the shocking ending of the episode as a decent reminder that the stakes are and remain high. No one is safe.

I really liked where this episode took place - travelling along a highway, somewhere in the country but who can really say where, with all these signs of disaster. Why did all these cars get stuck here? Why are there so many dead bodies in the cars who never arose as zombies? What happened here? And yet none of that matters anymore; it's all about what will happen here, what still can happen here.

Our heroes continue to try to find a balance between humanity and survival. The road is a graveyard, a battleground riddled with corpses. It has been so long since it was normal to remove the boots from a dead body simply because they were too good quality to waste. For centuries, need required us to give little respect to the dead we did not know, but in North America, that need is no longer prevalent. Yet, post-zombie apocalypse, that need has returned. To survive, no qualms can be suffered regarding robbing the dead - after all, the dead have no qualms about eating our flesh.

As I said, I was disappointed that no one died when that massive horde of zombies passed through. Lucky, weren't they, that no zombies noticed Sophia (Madison Lintz) until most had gone. Had the horde come after here, they would know where she is at this moment, and feel far worse about it. T-dog (IronE Singleton) got off easy with that extremely ugly cut he gave himself. It was nasty, and bleeding, and SO gross. Good thing there was so much death around that the zombies could not smell the fresh meat through it. Daryl (Norman Reedus) may be my favourite character. Sure, I love Rick (Andrew Lincoln), and I think he is awesome too, but Daryl is so badass. Stabbing a zombie in the back of the head with a crossbow bolt, then throwing corpses on T-Dog and himself...I loved it.

My favourite scene, of course, was when Rick and Daryl dissected that zombie to be certain it had not eaten Sophia. Disgusting. I was practically gagging, but it was so wonderfully done. Exactly the kind of thing that keeps me watching this show.

After that, the episode did get a little monologue-y. There are other ways to do exposition, guys. But I suppose we needed to get some of that info out there.

So now we wait until next week to see what's going to happen next. Are Shane (Jon Bernthal) and Andrea (Laurie Holden) going to leave the group together? Will they find Sophia? Will Karl (Chandler Riggs) survive being shot? And will zombies eat somebody soon, please?

American Horror Story - Pilot, S01E01

I slept with the light on after watching this pilot.

American Horror Story is creepy. You spend half of it in suspense, and the other half covering your eyes. And all you know is that there is something very very wrong with that house, but who can say what it is. Frankly, I want to know, but I'm not sure I really want to find out.

The show certainly does its job of freaking its viewers out, and the only concern I have for it is how it will maintain that. Do I really want to subject myself to terror every week? Can I stand not knowing what is going on, what might happen next from week to week? Can they keep up the fear I feel, and do I really want them to? These are factors we will have to examine over the next few episodes.

What I do like is how original it feels. Sure, the concept is standard - wounded family moves into new house to start over, but the house is evil and haunted. It's been done many times before.
But it's still different. What is with that maid? The women see her as an old hag, but Ben (Dylan McDermott) sees one hot redhead who is bent on seducing him. And the neighbour, Constance (Jessica Lange), threatened to kill her again? What exactly did that mean?

What part in the horror going on in that house does Constance play? Is she a ghost too, or something worse? And Tate (Evan Peters) is equally baffling. How did he end up as Ben's patient if he's not real? Or is the house just messing with some poor unbalanced kid?

And so we wait and watch and discover new things, all the while leaving our nerves in a raw state of anxiety. But I will go back to the well, as long as the storytelling remains as fantastic. I will stick with it, even though it frightens me.

The Season So Far

It's mid October, and while we are still waiting on the premieres and pilots of a few shows - Walking Dead, Chuck, Grimm, Boss, and Once Upon a Time - most of the new series have been on long enough to form an opinion on whether they are worth it.

As previously mentioned, I liked the Playboy Club, although it was the first casualty of the season, but like many other people, I never got past the pilot.

Other shows that I did not bother watching more than one episode of were Unforgettable, Revenge, Charlie's Angels, Person of Interest, Prime Suspect, A Gifted Man, and Hart of Dixie.

I thought Revenge, Charlie's Angels, A Gifted Man, and Hart of Dixie were absolutely atrocious. I'm rather disappointed with the popularity of Revenge, and while I give CW a lot of credit for ordering full seasons to give viewers a better sense of security, Hart of Dixie did not deserve it.

As for the others, I will give Person of Interest special mention. I did not dismiss watching it after the pilot. Indeed, I have the second episode ready to go whenever I want. But with all the other shows on my roster, plus all the old series like the West Wing to catch up on, it just didn't make the cut.

Shows that did make the cut were Ringer, The Secret Circle, Pan Am, Terra Nova, and American Horror Story.

Ringer and The Secret Circle I watch because, well, I like Sarah Michelle Gellar and I like witches. I really need to catch up on Vampire Diaries. I realize I am in my late 20s now, but I still like the same kinds of shows I did when I was 15...and really, I wouldn't mind being 15 again. In some respects.

Pan Am and Terra Nova, while one is a period piece and the other a futuristic-blast-into-the-past dinosaur show, are both just fun. They make me smile and I have a great time while I am watching them. So worth my time.

American Horror Story, the only one of these shows that I watch with my boyfriend, although he did sit through multiple pilots with me, I watch because it is excellent. It is well written, well acted, and well filmed. It's scary as hell (which means that I actually need my man beside me to protect me while watching it), but it is terrific too.

Now, the "old" favourites that I am sticking with are

Castle - which has delivered entertaining mysteries with just a bit of a darker flavour than pervious seasons, as expected;

Big Bang Theory - which is still exactly what a sitcom is supposed to be;

The Mentalist - where I am hoping that Rigsby (Owain Yeoman) and Grace (Amanda Righetti) will get back together this season;

Boardwalk Empire - which is not living up to the standard it set in season 1, but which i am hoping will improve since it has already been renewed for a third season

Dexter - which only disappointed me once, and season 3 is a while ago now

If I could find the time, I would catch up on Vampire Diaries, Supernatural, Fringe, and The Good Wife, as well.

So that is the current overview of what's worth watching out there. Do you share my opinions? Is there a show you can't believe I watch? A show you can't believe I don't watch? Let me know