Recaps/Reviews

Sunday night’s HBO settle-in brought back two solid season premieres of the best HBO has to offer right now: Game of Thrones and Veep. It also introduced a new series, Silicon Valley, by Mike Judge, which suffered greatly for delivering a singularly male vision of the tech industry. This did two things to sabotage the series from the outset. The first, it is unrealistic in 2014 to shut women out completely out of any story. The second, it just isn’t that funny when the characters on the show don’t point out the obvious: that it’s a sausage fest of nerds.
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“The cosmos is all that is, or ever was or ever will be. Our contemplations of the cosmos stir us. There is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation as if a distant memory of falling from a great height. We know we are approaching the grandest of mysteries.

The size and age of the cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home, the Earth. For the first time we have the power to decide the fate of our planet and ourselves. This is a time of great danger, but our species is young and curious and grave. It shows much promise. In the last few millennia, we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the cosmos and our place within it. I believe our future depends powerfully on how well we understand this cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.”

With those awed, reverent words, Carl Sagan introduced his ground-breaking 1980 science miniseries Cosmos: A Personal Journey to record-setting audiences on PBS. Conceived by Sagan, Ann Druyan, and Steven Soter during the Cold War when the bulk of the scientific energy (not to mention the physical resources) of the two most powerful countries on the planet were being funneled into ways of wiping the other off the map, Cosmos was a rallying cry for the power of knowledge and the importance of the quest for understanding ourselves and our place in the universe.

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There comes a day in every man-dressed-as-a-woman’s life when she’s challenged to channel a ‘90s rapper. And in the “Oh No She Betta Don’t” episode of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” that day was today.

If “The Snatch Game” episode is the Oscars of Drag Race episodes, the “Library is Open” episode is the Golden Globes, a close second in drag theatrics. The best part about the “Reading” episode is that no books are involved. The only thing that gets cracked are jokes at the expense of other drag queens, peppered with dramatic falsetto Ooohs.

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I keep meaning to write about the importance of Cosmos now airing on FOX and on National Geographic, but I haven’t. Nevertheless, you should be watching this show. It’s more important now when more US citizens believe in angels than believe in global warming than it was when Carl Sagan originally created the show in 1980.

Here’s a quote from last night’s episode, the fourth in the series so far. A quick science primer for those of you who napped through physics in high school: a light-year is a measure of distance equal to how far light can travel in one year. If something is 6500 light-years away, that means the light from that object has taken 6500 years to reach our eyes. So…

“The Crab Nebula is about 6500 light years from Earth. According to some beliefs, that’s the age of the whole Universe, but if the Universe were only 6500 years old, how could we see the light of anything more distant than the Crab Nebula? We couldn’t. There wouldn’t have been enough time for the light to get to Earth from anywhere farther away than 6500 light-years in any direction. That’s just enough time for light to travel a tiny portion of our Milky Way Galaxy. To believe in a universe as young as six or seven thousand years old is to extinguish the light from most of the galaxy, not to mention the light from all the hundred billion other galaxies in the observable universe.”

Cosmos: A Space Time Odyssey airs Sunday nights on FOX and reruns later on the National Geographic Channel. To swipe a tagline from once proud NBC, it is Must See TV.

Remember when everyone couldn’t wait for the “eating bugs” episode on early seasons of CBS’ “Survivor”? That is kind of the same thing with the “Snatch Game” episode of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” Only instead of bugs, DR fans get to eat up bad celebrity impersonations and double entendres.

The best part of this annual episode is watching the queens severely screw things up. You’d think after more than five seasons these queens would understand how the show works. Yet, there’s still always a basic bitch who thinks she can come in to “Snatch Game” playing someone unfunny. Just because the celebrity is recognizable or celebrated in the gay community doesn’t mean a queen should attempt to portray her. Season 7 queens, take notice.

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Last night’s episode of Girls seemed to upset the apple cart yet again as Hannah Horvath has the nerve to contemplate leaving her hot boyfriend Adam for Iowa’s writing workshop. Some will complain that the show is too unrealistic. After all, society has long since put “overweight” girls in their place. This is who they’re supposed to be, this is what they’re supposed to want, these are the only options they have. How dare Hannah act like a regular person worthy of love? How dare she show her naked body as though she weren’t ashamed of it? And how dare she dream a little bigger than being the girlfriend of a really hot guy but not much more than that?

I have to admit a little ambivalence at the way their relationship seems to be going. On the one hand, the feminist (yes, not a dirty word) in me wants her to never put her own ambitions behind the man she’s involved with. But the older lady part of me might want to her to remember that rare love is sometimes worth sacrificing for. Really what Hannah was saying to Adam, however, was really just that she wanted to attend grad school while maintaining a long distance relationship. He was saying, in turn, that he didn’t really want that. He likes having her there for him. He needs her. He loves her.

Some reactions to the episode, mostly from women, are starting to wonder whether the show is TOO unrealistic. No way would Hannah land a guy like that. No way would she have the choice of whether to be with him or not. No way would she get accepted to the Iowa writers program.  But the show cleverly asks, why not? Here is a possible alternative to the negative swill women are conditioned to believe from birth.  Lena Dunham says — what if? What if everything you’ve been taught to believe about yourself is WRONG? What if you really aren’t a worthless piece of shit because you don’t fit the mold of what desired, successful women are supposed to be? While she isn’t going to be Leonardo DiCaprio, George Clooney, or Bradley Cooper’s arm candy any time soon, she will hopefully do a lot better than that: attract someone who is just as turned on by what’s inside, and is drawn to the confidence she projects. After all, who wouldn’t be.

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[Guest writer Kevin Klawitter (@KevinKlawitter) weighs in on what is, for my money, the best show currently running on broadcast TV. In a new TV golden age where cable earns all of the glory, NBC proves there may still be some life left in the network dinosaurs.]

When it was first announced that a TV show based on Thomas Harris’s beloved cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter was being made into a crime series on NBC, most people reacted with trepidation, if not outright derision. Who would be so silly as to take on a character made legendary on film by Anthony Hopkins and reduce him to TV scale? And on NBC? The network with the lowest ratings of all, and a reputation for cancelling anything with the slightest hint of promise? What kind of nut thought this up?

Well, that nut was none other than Bryan Fuller, and thanks to him, Hannibal has become not only one of the best shows on network TV, but one of the best shows on TV period, which makes the low ratings all the more frustrating. How can any number of generic CBS or Fox crime shows rake in the viewers, but something as dark, inspired, and beautiful as Hannibal barely scrape by? If more people were to take a chance and watch it, they’d see how brilliant it is: by taking on the conceit of telling the story of the relationship between Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham prior to the events of the first book, Red Dragon, we are given a show unlike any other… a nightmarish look at the nature and impact of evil combined with very engaging crime procedural elements and one of the most fascinating character relationships (I refuse to use the term “bromance”) on TV.

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As if “RuPaul’s Drag Race” couldn’t appeal any further to the homosexual demographic, in this week’s episode the queens were challenged with putting on a musical, “Shade: The Rusical” to be exact. And the episode lived up to its title with more shade thrown around than wigs in the work room.

The mini-challenge was kind of a take on the “Fashion Police” segment where you see close-ups of photos and have to decide whether it’s a hooker or an E! fixture selling her body for a spot on a tabloid. Only with the “Drag Race” version it was, “Female or Shemale,” with photos of everybody from Tan Mom to Michelle Visage (Darienne Lake thought Michelle was a man. . .ouch).

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[Editor’s Note: Please welcome new Awards Daily TV contributors Megan McLachlan (@heydudemeg, Megoblog.com) and Joey Moser (@JoeyMoser83, Movie MoJoe). This week, Megan and Joey dig into the 3rd episode of this season’s “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” the reality competition series that airs Monday nights on Logo.]

The formula to Logo’s “RuPaul’s Drag Race” is as follows. Typically, from the first episode on, a dozen drag queens are thrown together, and compete in a series of competitions until one queen is crowned. But in season 6, Ru threw everyone for a loop when she had two big opening episodes (sexual pun VERY intended), each focusing on 7 queens instead of audiences being overwhelmed with 14 at once. Two queens were eliminated, and in the third episode entitled, “Scream Queens,” the remaining prospective drag superstars finally met, in what could be dubbed as “When Sallys met Sallys.”

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The biggest mystery for me going into the end of True Detective was how it could possibly resolve itself in a way that would satisfy all of the enormous expectations I’d built up for it after watching and rewatching and rewatching the previous 7 episodes. Turns out it was a wonderful end to a terrific and unique program. I haven’t looked around much to see what the wider reaction to it was, but I have a suspicion a lot of people are going to be really pissed off by how much was left unresolved and how ultimately unimportant the show’s central mystery was.  Read on for more, but be forewarned that there are spoilers.

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