So last week’s Sunday night shows were so good we decided that they needed to be recognized, and I had planned to make this a weekly feature. The problem now though, there was a noticeable dip in quality from last week to this week.
What follows were my top 5 TV moments from Sunday night…
There is real plethora of excellent television currently airing on Sunday nights as everyone rushes in to fill the time-slots that last month were held by Game of Thrones and Mad Men. What follows were my top 5 TV moments from Sunday night…
In all my years of watching TV, I haven’t seen the level of outrage proportional to the popularity of a show as I saw with the season 1 finale of The Killing. To say people were livid and finding any and all means to express their rage on the internet is an understatement. Then came along season 2 and the methods of season 1 made more sense. It was obviously different from other crime shows because The Killing focuses on one case for the entire season. There are a lot of viewers who don’t like how seemingly slow the action and storytelling is which would explain why AMC felt the need to cancel the show at the end of season 2. Fast forward nearly six months and surprise! they were just kidding, really they want to make a season 3 and that’s what we are a mere hours away from tonight.
The actors who play the two main characters, Mireille Enos as Sarah Linden and Joel Kinnaman as Stephen Holder, are returning but for the most part, with this new case comes a new cast. The Larsens are gone, Jack Linden is gone, and the most sad of all (for me at least), Billy Campbell and Darren Richmond is gone. This is not necessarily a bad thing though as a group of equally as talented actors have come aboard. Amy Seimetz is currently on HBO’s Family Tree but I’d have to imagine her character on The Killing is going to be quite different from a member of a Christopher Guest comedy. Seimetz is playing the season 3 victim’s mother. In addition, the very talented Peter Sarsgaard plays a main role as well.
Enough of my chattering, let’s get a look at this new season!
If you haven’t seen the first two seasons of The Killing, creator Veena Sud says that you can just jump right into season 3. That is great news for people who might not have noticed the show the first two years but maybe caught wind of it with the canceled/not canceled hubbub. I’d suggest seeking out the first two seasons on Netflix when you get a chance but for now, let’s enjoy season 3!
Gather round it’s time once again to delve into the latest TV news that we deem fit to print!
The man behind the Transformers movies is producing a series for Starz and they’ve gone and released a trailer. If you have a thing for men in dirty, salt water stained clothing half naked and women in period garb, also half naked… then this is the show for you!
Created by Jonathan Steinberg and Robert Levine, who worked together on both Human Target and Jericho, Black Sails tells the story of Captain Flint (Toby Stephens– Prince John in BBC’s Robin Hood) and his crew, including the infamous John Silver (Luke Arnold) twenty years before the time of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.
Given that Spartacus is ending this year, audiences will be looking for another show with sex, action, and accents to fill the void and it looks like Black Sails is more than willing to step in.
I’ll be watching if for no other reasons than I have a love for tall ships and of course that smirk!
Way back in December of 2011, it was announced that Microsoft was seriously looking at branching out into original programming. Now that XBox Live has become a legit media hub (I’m currently watching Netflix’s Hemlock Grove on my XBox), it makes sense that they would want to make a go at their own shows. Given the popularity of XBox and Microsoft’s promising 1st quarter financials, this seems like a good time to make that move.
You know what’s not a good idea? Having that first jump into the “original programming” water being actually the revival of a show that had moments of brilliance but that was quickly and thoroughly drowned out by mediocrity.
That right folks, MSN is rumored to be considering retooling the NBC sci-fi drama, Heroes. They obviously aren’t bringing back the original cast but instead are relaunching it with a brand new cast while the old-schoolers will be making cameo appearances. I think we all know this is going to be so awesome and cool and super duper exciting.
One can only hope that MSN has more ideas up their sleeves and this is just a small part of their plan going forward.
Now this is a show MSN should have jumped on and “brought back”. Too bad for them, FEARnet got it first. Starting in June, FEARnet is set to air all two seasons of the fan favorite. In addition, they will be putting together a half hour reunion special. Deadline has already confirmed that Sam (Bret Harrison), Sock (Tyler Labine), and The Devil (Ray Wise) are set to appear. I’ll admit that I hadn’t heard of FEARnet before this, but they are on a number of cable providers, sorry satellites, no Reaper for you! As for everyone else, enjoy a show that we here at Grizzly Bomb surely believe was Gone Too Soon.
NBC might have passed on the Dwight Schrute centered spin-off of The Office but AMC is looking at the soon ending Breaking Bad and they see potential in a spin-off starring Bob Odenkirk’s loveable lawyer, Saul Goodman. Of course there is potential! While Aaron Paul and Bryan Cranston are obviously the stars as the meth making duo but Goodman is a scene stealer by every definition of the phrase.
Of course how this would work is certainly a good question. Saul is usually a moment of comic relief in tense moments so how would his character carry a show on his own? As this idea is just in its infancy, I’m sure there will be plenty more questions to be asked in the coming months. It’s only a matter of time before people start bringing up Vince Gilligan’s failed X-Files spin-off The Lone Gunmen.
Seriously. If you’ve seen FX at all recently you know what I’m talking about. These four promos that don’t do much to explain what the show is about.
So that’s The Bridge. I’m sure those four bits answered all your questions about the crime drama. Oh you didn’t know it was a crime drama? Well it is. Based on a Scandanavian show, that is also being redone in Europe as The Tunnel and between England and France, The Bridge is about a serial killer who is being hunted down by detectives both in the US and Mexico.
Demián Bichir plays the Mexican detective and Diane Kruger his American counterpart. At first blush, it sounds a bit like The Killing with maybe a bit of Twin Peaks (mainly due to the odd promos) mixed in. That could be completely off base, I’ll just have to wait until July to see if I’m right.
So there you have it, the top news as we see it in TV today! If you think we’ve missed a story, by all means let us know down in the comments or if you’re feeling downright neighborly, it’s perfectly all right to just say hello. Until next time!
AMC acknowledges that times are going to get pretty tough soon. Mad Men is heading into its swan song final season. Breaking Bad is about to end. They botched The Killing which resulted in the show being canceled, and Walking Dead is not on 24/7. So they have decided to go back into the well and tap the executive producer of Walking Dead (and The Terminator and Aliens), Gale Anne Hurd, and commission a new series about cult event: Area 51. Yes, you may get excited.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, AMC has decided to add Aliens to its zombies, ad men, and drug lab population. They got the rights for Annie Jacobsen’s best selling book, Area 51, which was just recently published in May. The book is about the never confirmed military installation in Nevada, and looks into the area and the people around that have their thoughts on what is truly going on. The author interviewed several people that served on the base as well others that have been employed at famous secret facility. Obviously there is a lot of potential considering that this was culled from actual servicemen and people’s reports so it will make for a good conspiracy show that will explore into what is or truly isn’t out there in the desert or the great beyond in the sky. The series will take place in the 1950s-1960s, most likely dealing with the Roswell incident as well as how the base came to be and the lengths to keep it on the down low.
I really dig this because AMC just puts out great stuff (how dare you cancel Rubicon!) and their track record on just going after shows that are not typical of network television, and pushing the envelope makes me excited. If anything, it has the potential to remind of the X-Files and the conspiracy and the mythology of aliens that we lack on television today. Between this and Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman’s new comic adaptation Thief of Thieves, we might have a few viable replacements in the near future.
One of them, however, will NOT be The Killing. AMC has decided to cancel the show due to falling viewership and lack of interest according to EW. This really is not a shocking move considering the gimmick of the show was to find out who killed Rosie Larsen and they could not answer that in the first season, thus pissing off viewers that felt like it was drawn out unnecessarily. They did at least reveal the end of that story by the end of the second season, but it was too late. Ratings went from 2.7 million viewers when the series premiered, to 1.8 million for the second season premiere, and down to 1.4 million for the last season (series) finale. [Ed. Note – For the record, I feel like this is more of an indictment on the audience in the Law & Order/CSI world we live in. This is the same formula used by Twin Peaks 20 years ago and that show is still praised to this day…]
There is still hope however as Fox Television Studios, who makes the show, plans on shopping around to other networks so who knows, maybe we will see the show given new life on FX or TNT. Granted, this would also require someone to actually care, but I never watched the second season so I cannot judge whether it was good or not. [Point.] Thoughts people? Should it be saved or was there reason to abandon the show after they botched their relationship with viewers? Also, for Area 51, is it too much to ask for a shot of Will Smith punching an alien saying, “Welcome to Earf!”? Maybe while performing Summertime? Just saying, you were thinking about it too…
So, after the first season finale most of the good will and momentum built earlier on was lost. People were pissed about the case not being wrapped up yet and wanted to know who the killer was. Just didn’t want to know bad enough to keep watching. When season 2 premiered it did so to much lower numbers than the previous season and it was clear that even the people still watching were less invested. Now I was one of the people who didn’t hate the finale last year, but even I found myself not caring anymore. So when season 2 started popping up on my DVR, it was the show that I had to “get around to watching”. It airs the same night as Mad Men and Game of Thrones, so it’s running uphill already. Season 2 to this point has been all about…well, not much. Mitch ran out and is working through some stuff with a runaway she can pretend is Rosie. And as it turns out Stan isn’t Rosies’ real dad, and Sterling Cooper’s Duck Phillips is Linden’s boss now. Mostly though, its business as usual. Oh, and Richmond is paralyzed. Anyhow, I just watched Sunday’s episode and after 6 weeks of not really caring about the show anymore, something has finally happened…
Linden and Holder were investigating the Casino and the evil Indians told them to leave. They first found Linden in the woods outside and basically told her “We don’t get a buffalo f*** that you’re a cop. If we find you here again we’ll f*** up are dumb white ass.” Well Linden heeds the warning, but being a goddamn space cadet, she fails to let Holder know what’s going on. Despite the fact that he is inside the Casino. Alone. So anyhow Holder is trying to get into this secret “Under construction” floor of the hotel and hires a gigolo to get him in there, but passes on the Man on Man action. He instead unwittingly gets some info from a maid and then the Hotel cops find him.
While this is happening Richmond’s staff tries to convince Stan Larson to speak out on Darren’s behalf, to which he promptly tells them to piss off. Eventually though Darren goes to see Stan himself, and something obviously resonated with Stan because that night he shows up at the Press Conference. Stan agrees to read a per-prepared statement which includes him almost immediately attacking the media for not caring about Rosie and being opportunistic vultures. Then, in a move I could not approve of more, he pulls a total ‘Mel Gibson – Ransom‘ move, and offers up $12,000 for any info on Rosie’s killer. Whom he will then surely then kill. It was pretty solid. Brent Sexton was awesome in that scene, and overall is just a really underrated actor.
So Sarah and Jack are on the run from CPS because, well you know, she is a really good Mom and all. And just when it seems things can’t get much worse for Detective Linden, she gets a phone call from Holder. Or at least from Holder’s phone. It’s a courtesy call from the evil Indians. They want to make sure Linden can hear Holder being beaten down in the woods. It was awesome. Real renegade stuff. The Killing was in some serious need of something like this. I’m actually excited for the next episode now…
Grizzly Bomb 