Steven Moffat, Amelia Pond, and the Complexities of Doctor Who

"The Angels Take Manhattan" is the culmination of Moffat's delve into the Doctor's decidedly destructive tendencies.

Caitlin Blackwood as the young Amelia Pond in "Let's Kill Hitler."

There's a definite philosophical dividing line between the Russell T. Davies/Christopher Eccleston/David Tennant era of Doctor Who and the Steven Moffat/Matt Smith seasons. That difference began, sneakily, to manifest itself in the very first Moffat/Smith episode, "The Eleventh Hour," but it didn't really come to the fore until the sixth and (currently airing, pretty fantastic) seventh seasons. This underlying change in philosophies mostly concerns the way the show treats its central character, 1200-year-old time-traveling adventurer The Doctor, and the effect that he has on the people who travel with him, fight with him, and love him.

Davies' Doctor, as embodied by Eccleston and Tennant, is (almost) never anything less than a full-on hero. There are moments when the show acknowledges his destructive impact, sure - Donna has to save the Tenth Doctor from his own rage when he drowns the Racnoss queen, and he power-trips when trying to change a fixed moment in time in "The Waters of Mars" - but, all in all, the Davies-era series shied away from taking a hard look at the tensions between the good intentions of its hero and the broken people left in his wake.

2012 was apparently the year of kick-ass women on TV

Flavorwire just came out with a supercut called "TV's Year of Kick-Ass Women," which celebrates the girls and women who rocked the small screen this year.



While I don't disagree with Flavorwire's Michelle Rafferty when she calls this year's crop of female characters "intelligent, empowered and awesomely flawed," the supercut leaves out a number of TV's best ass-kicking women. It was nice to see 30 Rock's Liz Lemon, Up All Night's Reagan and the women of Community alongside the (more traditionally) badass Nikita and Olivia Dunham, but where were The Vampire Diaries' Caroline and Rebekah? Why not include Archer's Lana Kane next to Selina Meyer of Veep? Why is Lady Sybil the only Crawley who gets a place on the list, rather than Lady Mary or the Dowager Countess? And while I wholeheartedly support the presence of Daenerys Targaryen and Brienne of Tarth, where exactly were Arya Stark and Cersei Lannister?

The CW is the future of television. It's also failing.

Why a network that's doing everything right can't attract viewers.

Clockwise from top left: The Vampire Diaries, Gossip Girl, Supernatural and Nikita.

Todd VanDerWerff of The A.V. Club recently wrote a pretty fascinating think piece (disguised as a news report about the TCA press tour) that detailed the many ways in which The CW has become a ratings pit of which NBC would be ashamed, despite being the single most forward-thinking of the major networks:

If you were going to create a TV network that catered to the modern TV fan, it would be a network that aired lots of heavily serialized shows that were addictive and engrossing once you got into them. It would be a network that cared less about immediate Nielsen ratings and more about DVR plays and (even better) digital streaming. It would be a network that wouldn’t cancel long-running shows out of nowhere and would, instead, announce that a show was ending, but only after a shortened final season designed to wrap up its plotlines. Such a network would also feature a frequent focus on genre fare, because the modern TV fan likes that sort of thing. Maybe it would air longtime Internet favorite Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog in its television debut, coming up on October 9th. 

Here’s the thing: That network exists. It’s called The CW. It does all of the things above, right down to Dr. Horrible (coming on October 9th). And nobody watches it. 

[...] 

If you were to make an argument that the network will almost certainly be the first of the “big five” to die—and sooner, rather than later—no one would argue with you. The CW regularly loses to Univision and several cable channels. It’s not on the same level as the four major networks, and if you’ve ever spent time jeering about how far NBC has fallen, well, most of its shows look like ratings kings compared to even The CW’s hits. Parks & Recreation, for instance, would be the highest-rated show on The CW by a fair margin. The CW is starting from a very weak position, both in terms of ratings and in terms of “buzz,” whatever that means.

The Walking Dead's third-season trailer is action-packed and tense (and probably misleading)

Every time I vow to stop watching The Walking Dead, the show sucks me back in by doing something amazing: the tense confrontation between Rick, Glenn and the two mysterious strangers; terrifying, heart-pounding action set-pieces; and Shane (finally) getting what he deserves. Those moments of brilliance are almost always wasted, lost in the endless conversations about nothing and the inexplicable continued existence of Lori and Andrea, but the promise of more sends this viewer into self-perpetuating spiral of hate-watching.

The Comic-Con trailer for Season 3 is no different; it's beautifully done, propulsive, mournful and action packed, and it teases a season full of constantly shifting allegiances, lots of actual anti-zombie combat (something the show has a tendency to forget about until it suits the purposes of the plot) and, of course, the (spoilers ahead) long-anticipated appearances of Michonne and the Governor and re-appearance of Merle Dixon. What we'll probably end up with, however, are endless debates about post-apocalyptic morality and Carl doing stupid things in order to move the plot along, not to mention a general dearth of zombies getting their heads sliced off by Michonne's katana. Until that inevitable disappointment, I'll just watch this trailer on repeat and pretend that Hershel's farm never happened.

 

THAT Scene: the problem with The Newsroom's use of real news

The News Night team's coverage of the Gabrielle Giffords tragedy doesn't just sap dramatic tension; it exploits real grief in the service of its own message.

Jeff Daniel's Will McAvoy reports on the shooting of Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords on The Newsroom.

THAT Scene is a recurring feature that takes a closer look at a single scene that exemplifies a particular show, theme or moment in time. The scene might be good or bad, but it will always be memorable and worth talking about.

Television Without Pity's recaplet of the (pretty terrible) fourth episode of The Newsroom, "I'll Try To Fix You," hits the nail on the head when it comes to the biggest problem with the series' much-discussed decision to have Will McAvoy and co. cover actual news stories from the recent past: in this case, the shooting of Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. The results were not only uncomfortable to watch, but also undercut any point the sequence was trying to make about how the news should be covered:

When the other outlets start reporting that Giffords is dead but there hasn't been any official confirmation, Will has to decide if he should join them and risk being wrong or hold off and risk being the last news outlet to report Giffords' death. Of course, we all know that she survived, and Will's decision to wait is the right one, even though Reese is screaming at him to join in and pronounce her dead. Reese is the Bad Guy. Charlie, Will, and his staff and even Don are the Good Guys, so they realize that Giffords is a person and shouldn't just be used for news ratings or as part of a race to report the news first. No, although apparently it's totally cool to use her for an HBO show's sleazy and hypocritical attempt to elicit an emotional response from the viewers, titular Coldplay songs and all.

The entire sequence, which begins with Maggie (Alison Pill) sprinting to tell Will and MacKenzie (Emily Mortimer) and ends with Will's refusal to announce Gifford's death vindicated by the news that she isn't actually dead, is a perfect example of the ways in which reporting on real news can be incredibly damaging, both to The Newsroom's dramatic structure and the show's credibility as a moral authority. (And if you think the series isn't aiming for moral authority status, re-watch the episode and count the number of times Will says he's on a "mission to civilize.")

  

If you ever wondered what Better off Ted would look like if penned by Armando Iannucci, wonder no more

Those of you who love Better off Ted as much as I do (and I love it a lot, as evidenced by my summer TV suggestions) will probably enjoy this profanely filthy outtake reel from the show's hilarious second-season outing "The Impertence of Communicationizing." Fair warning: it's extremely NSFW, so unless your workplace has, like Veridian Dynamics, instituted a policy that requires employees to use offensive and insulting language in the workplace, you should probably put your headphones in. (via The A.V. Club):

How To Get Your TV Fix This Summer (Without Watching True Blood

A thoughtfully funny priest, a bumbling spy and a downright Biblical clash of Kings provide a great antidote to vampires and werewolves.

Clockwise from top left: Jay Harrington and Portia de Rossi in Better Off Ted; Chris Egan in Kings; Jude Wright and Darren Boyd in Spy; and Tom Hollander in Rev.

With May sweeps a distant memory and early-summer series like Game of Thrones already finished, summer TV epitomizes Minow's famous "vast wasteland." Although many cable networks are starting to challenge traditional scheduling, the current television landscape consists mostly of reruns, reality series and True Blood. Even Doctor Who, normally a godsend for those of us who prefer quality programming to baking on the beach (not everyone tans, and not all of us enjoy slathering on SPF 1500 and donning a hat just so we can watch other people brown) has taken an extended hiatus, and won't be returning until an unspecified date in the fall.

Luckily, we live in an age of streaming video and HD laptop displays, which means that a world of TV is sitting at our fingertips, waiting for us to dispel the summer doldrums and dive right in. If you find yourself with some extra time between barbecues and beach parties, these five series are well worth your time and energy (and, in some cases, the cost of an Amazon Prime subscription).

Spy

Who should watch: Anyone who misses the covert ops shenanigans of Archer and adores Community's genre parodies.

Available on: Hulu

Hulu has become a great source of less-known British television, and Spy is one of the streaming service's best offerings. The show's protagonist, Tim (Darren Boyd), is a middle-aged loser working in an electronics store and fighting for the love (and custody rights) of his precocious, witheringly critical son Marcus (Jude Wright) when he stumbles into the wrong civil service exam and ends up as an MI6 agent. Spy combines the best elements of several shows - the set-up is pure Chuck, the portrayal of MI6 is right out of the Archer playbook, and later episodes have Marcus starring in parodies of gangster movies and Westerns that could have teleported in from Community - but the show makes them its own. Spy features a great cast of supporting characters (I'm a particular fan of Mathew Baynton's Chris), but the whole enterprise is anchored by the prickly, hilarious, often cruel and occasionally sweet relationship between Tim and Marcus, whose odd couple banter is like nothing else on TV.