TeleChimp | TV Journalism

Scrubs focuses on the unique point of view of its main character and narrator, Dr. John Michael “J.D.” Dorian (Zach Braff). The series follows the lives of the employees at Sacred Heart Hospital:  Dr. Elliot Reid, Dr. Chris Turk, The Janitor, Dr. Bob Kelso, Dr. Perry Cox, Nurse Carla Espinosa and J.D. himself. Season 8 sees the replacement of Dr. Kelso by Dr. Taylor Maddox (Courteney Cox-Arquette).

When Dr. Maddox arrives on the scene, she brings about a lot of changes that will affect the way doctors treat patients. Elliot and J.D. confess their feelings for another and are back together as a couple. They then prepare to leave Sacred Heart, so that J.D. can be closer to his son.

In the meanwhile, Janitor gets married to Lady and Dr. Cox is promoted to chief of medicine and Turk is promoted to chief of surgery.

Popularity: 10% [?]

This show really isn’t afraid of doing what it wants.

Sometimes, shows become complacent and formulaic the point where it becomes a detriment.  And, whether it works or not, you have to give credit to those shows that try and change things up once in a while.

Hart Hanson and the Bones crew definitely shook it up to finish up the shortened third season of Bones.

I must confess I’m a recent convert to Bones.  I’m not usually into the crime scene shows, although I have been caught watching the original Law & Order.

But, with repeats on CBS, I switched over to FOX and caught the second-last episode of Bones (S03E14) and got hooked.

Initially, I was mostly intrigued by the shooting of Booth, one of the main characters.  I actually thought the bastards were going to make me wait until next year to see what had happened.  So I decided to do some catching up.  I obtained the first 2 seasons of Bones and starting watching. I found out that Bones has repeatedly put Brennan and Booth in harm’s way and the pair have always lived to tell the tale.  We’re not talking minor brushes with death, but Jack Bauer type survivals (being buried alive, captured by a serial killer, fighting a pipe-yielding bad guy with no weapon, being blown up, etc).

I’ll forgve them their tendency to almost-kill too frequently on Bones–I would do it too.  That’s because they lead to these tender moments between Brennnan and Booth that make the show great.  Their chemistry is what separates this show from every other crime drama on TV.  I think those 2-3 minutes every few episodes are the reason I haven’t got tired of show.

But those almost-kills create another problem and here comes my biggest gripe with Bones so far…it has no impact on their relationship in the following episodes.  Booth will save Brennan’s life in dramatic fashion one week and the next she’s very removed from him.  It’s like each episode they press a reset button and the characters have to build their relationship back up from scratch.  And they did exactly that this episode.

In the last episode, we were left wondering if  Booth would even survive after heroicly taking a bullet in the chest for Brennan.  Instead of continuing where it left off, we skipped ahead 2 weeks to a supposed funeral for Booth.  This might have worked on other shows that left the possibility of killing their lead characters open, but on Bones it fell flat.  I knew it was fake and it took away any emotion from the that scene.  It’s a minor grip for the show in general, but every time the overlook the emotions of dramatic events, I feel it’s a wasted opportunity.

I know a lot of Bones fans detested this episode.  Some hated this episode enough to write off the show for good.  I think those people are liars.  They’ll be back watching next season.  Another group of fans suggest that with all the inconsistencies in this episode that it will be revealed as a hallucination or dream sequence. I’m not like Hodgins, and so I take what was presented at face value.  Zack’s the apprentice and he won’t be back in the Jeffersonian in the near future.  Not to mention his motor skills will take considerable recovery.

Sure, there were inconsistencies, but I think that was an effort on the part of Hart Hanson et al to try and throw suspicision on as many false suspects as possible in order to keep the suspence going.  Everyone became a suspect in the episode with the frontrunners always a toss-up between Hodgins and Dr Sweets.  The writers certainly played those two characters odd behaviour to another level to paint them as possible suspects, but that’s always a good sign that it’s not true on TV.

I have to admit, I only figured out who it was when Hodgins made his discovery that lead levels concluded the killer lived in his neighbourhood.  It couldn’t be Angela, so it had to be Zack.  It’s unfortunate this decision wasn’t made in time to have Zack actually killing the person he supposedly killed.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Published on May 27, 2010

From today, you can see the pilot of BBC3′s horror/drama Pulse in its full goodness on the Internet. This is quite a bold move for the BBC, which is making a trio of pilots available prior to them being broadcast, and Pulse is the first out of the bag.

Why should you be interested in Pulse? An assortment of reasons. Firstly, it’s from the mighty pen of Mr Paul Cornell, a man whose television work alone has brought us the terrific Doctor Who two-parter Human Nature/The Family Of Blood. He’s the same Paul Cornell who gave the world Bernice Summerfield, and whose name you can find alongside Captain Britain and MI-13. And now, he’s turned his hands to Pulse.

The BBC has also put out a trailer for what’s easily the bloodiest show it’ll put out on any of its channels this year, and having seen this pilot, we can attest to its quality.

Pulse is shown on BBC Three on Thursday June 3rd, and if all goes to a plan, a six-episode season will be commissioned for broadcast in 2011. Please give the show your support: it’s not often we get a horror-themed television show on British television, especially not one as good as this.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Chuck Versus The Living Dead

With this show now the proud owner of a shiny thirteen-episode season four, and an option on a back nine, those working on Chuck must be walking tall.

But that good news does also bring with it the whole question of where the show goes next? I mean, the concept must develop or die, I’d suggest.

If Chuck Versus The Living Dead is anything to go by, there appear to be those in the Chuck writing team who’d like the show to entirely morph into a serious spy drama. Because some bits of this week’s show were so Alias in places I wondered if Sydney Bristow herself would come gliding into view wearing an implausibly tight rubber dress and an outrageously red wig.

What underlined this to me was that the plot of the show is reworking the same idea as the first season of Alias, namely it’s not just being a spy that’s tough, it’s the impact on those around you that’s even harder. If this seems all a bit serious for Chuck, and it is borderline in some places, before it gets too out of hand they have Morgan Grimes and Jeffster on hand to remind us that this show was/is/can be a hilarious comedy.

The headline event this week is the reappearance of Scott Bakula as Mr. Bartowski Senior, lured back by The Ring’s manipulation of Ellie. With her planting bugs and telling lies, that makes Big Mike and Jeffster the only non-spies in the show!

I remember joking in an early review that, by the end of Chuck, everyone would be a spy, and by a quirk of weirdness that seems exactly where we’ve gone.

It’s the BuyMore characters that are the very spine of Chuck, though, and their often manic contributions are the highlight of most episodes. The bits they contributed this week made me genuinely laugh out loud, rather than the mumbled snigger that most allegedly funny TV can draw from me. The whole idea of Jeff and Lester breaking up their act and then Big Mike coming to manage their reunion was a masterstroke. But the scene where Mike explained that he was the missing ‘Rain’ from ‘Earth, Wind and Fire’ had me in hysterics.

They capped that piece beautifully when Mike handed Lester the gold stage costume, because, as he saw it, Lester has the ‘hips of a six-year-old girl’. This was pure Chuck magic, and I’m still chuckling now, hours later.

I suppose the strength of this show is that it can be intense, crazy and thoughtful, all within the space of 90 seconds, which makes it very entertaining. Where they’ll take this eventually, I’m not sure, but I’m glad they invited us along for the ride.

What it also demonstrates is the confidence everyone in front of and behind the cameras has in their product, and that they can still deliver strong entertainment going into a fourth season.

I’ve kept this review spoiler-free in most respects, but I do want to mention the appearance of a previously dead person at the end of the show. It will either be the catalyst for a suitably insane finale, or we’ll all regret that particular actor’s involvement in this show. Time will tell.

With only two episodes left in this season, I anticipate probably more drama than laughs, but the I’m confident we won’t be disappointed on either front.

Popularity: 5% [?]

With a title like Pain, it’s obvious that there’ll be some heavy drama in this episode, which may put some viewers off. Right from the opening scene, in which Lt Scott (Brian Smith) is having sex with Lt James (Julia Benson) emotional tensions are running high. Lt Scott tries to leave and Lt James takes it rather badly and bashes him over the head, leaving him dead on the floor.

In another part of the ship, Dale Volker (Patrick Gilmore) gets trapped in his room when his door doesn’t function, and it’s only when Sgt Riley (Haig Sutherland) opens his door from the outside that he can get out. However, it doesn’t take long for us to realize that these are illusions, as we see Lt Scott alive and well, and being entirely bewildered by his son appearing on board.

When it turns out that an alien tick has bitten into the heads of certain members of the crew, including Lt Scott, Dale Volker, Chloe Armstrong (Elyse Levesque), Dr Rush (Robert Carlyle), Sgt Greer (Jamil Smith) and a few other members of the crew, the hallucinations become more of a problem.

Sgt Greer believes that another mutiny is about to occur, and under what he takes as orders from Col Young (Louis Ferreira), he takes unprovoked action.

All the while, Dr Rush gets increasingly freaked out by the fact that he thinks aliens have taken control over the ship, which has to be at least a little unnerving.

This is one of those classic sci-fi staples that has made appearances in many shows over the years including Buffy, Stargate Atlantis and Star Trek Voyager, and that, if you get right, can be brilliant.

Unfortunately, this episode is a little lacking in ingenuity and thought process.

For instance, the first scene in which Lt Scott gets murdered would be increasingly more effecting on the viewer if we didn’t see him a few scenes later alive and well. Dale Volker’s hallucinations, however, become more and more terrifying as the episode goes on, and it’s only a shame that they work out what’s going on early in the episode.

It’s in situations like this that a ‘red-shirt’ would come in handy. It’s something that Stargate Universe has done once before, in the episode which introduced them to the altogether different kind of alien life form they have come across in this series. The ‘dust devil’ in that episode was responsible for the loss of Cpl Gorman early in the series and made the threat to the crew all that more real.

Now, I know that, with a limited number of expendable background characters like we see on Destiny, you can’t afford to kill off a member of the crew every time there is an unknown threat. However, in situations like this, that very thing can sell the threat of the unknown so much more than it can without it.

Still, given that the ticks don’t take anyone’s life, and, in fact, only cast the illusion of doing so to a very limited number of people, the threat becomes relatively infantile and the impact of the hallucinations falters because of it.

Only in the first scene do we really feel like there is anything to worry about as, with a crew full of smart people and relatively good technology, they’re going to find a way around it within the 40-minute runtime.

However, we already know that the rules of the show can be changed, as in the episode Time, and that people can die from alien threats, as in the episode Water. So, the fact that this feels like a step down is disheartening.

It’s not bad, though. The quality we see here is higher than you can get in a lot of other shows on television right now, which is a testament to just how good this team is at making the show.

Even at their lowest hour, they can still make a good episode, no matter if the quality of the writing dips. It’s by no means a good reason to stop watching. In fact, the episode only goes to prove why it is worthwhile viewing.

By giving us this rather poor episode in comparison to the excellent standard we have become accustomed to, we see how this show could be weekly, and if it were at this standard every week, viewers would re-consider their fan status. As it is, this only goes to strengthen the efforts of Time and Human, which are arguably the show’s finest hours.

Of course, I would have preferred that the episode hadn’t been this weak and that this truly brilliant germ of an idea hadn’t went to waste as it has. However, I do still have faith that the quality will pick up, and that it’s only because this idea came from a wealthy pool of great sci-fi that it feels worse than it actually is.

In conclusion, probably the worst episode of the season to date, but given that it has some good points, it’s still worth a watch.

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