Category: TV

All about what’s on the boob tube!

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Ashes to Ashes: Season 3, Episode 2

This episode begins with Alex having a dream… in which Gene and the gang recreate Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl” video:

ashes_to_ashes_s3_ep_2_01

Alex wakes up, and static crackles on the TV. A lonely Alex looks at the TV and asks where everyone is.

Back at the station, “Uptown Girl” plays on the radio as workers hammer and saw and make other construction noise. Shaz jumps up and asks who long they’re going to be, as they’re giving her a headache. The workers say that they’re “dragging this place into 1983”. Chris tries to comfort her with some small talk, but a short-fused Shaz tells him to get lost.

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Ashes to Ashes: Season 3, Episode 1

“My name is Alex Drake… and, quite frankly, your guess is as good as mine.”

So begins season 3 of Ashes to Ashes. The credits start the episode, and we’re then sent to 2008 (or is it 2009 yet?), where Alex is talking to a therapist. The two discuss how “real” her visions of the early 80s world were. The doctor then asks if she’s still “hearing voices”. Alex says that she isn’t. She’s asked if she still dreams about Gene Hunt and we then see a montage of Hunt kicking ass to the tune of Wagner’s “Flight of the Valkyries”. Alex ignores the question. Then doctor then asserts that her “dream world” wasn’t real. Alex says that Sam Tyler was in a coma too, and that he went to the same place as Alex, so how could it be possible for the two of them to “imagine” the same thing? The doctor assures her that Sam Tyler is dead and that the world she imagined isn’t real.

We next see Alex at an electronics store looking at DVDs. She “sees” a DVD for a movie called Legal Force, which has Gene, Ray, Chris and Shaz on the cover:

We’re pretty sure she’s imagining it, especially when, a few minutes later, we see Ray suddenly appear on a wall full of TVs. He’s begging her to wake up, as a girl has been kidnapped and, with Hunt on the run from the authorities for shooting Drake, he (Ray) has been put in charge. The screens then burst into static for a second, and then Chris appears, offering Drake a melon (he says he couldn’t find grapes). He too begs her for help with the kidnapping. He then says that Shaz will be coming in soon, and also mentions that he and Shaz have broken up. Another burst of static, and we see Shaz, who offers to clean up the melon on the floor. She then gives an emotional plea to Alex, saying that she made CID better then left her hanging.

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Awwww crap! (Ashes to Ashes)

Just a heads-up:

I was out of town last week when the first episode of season 3 of Ashes to Ashes aired in the UK. I didn’t get to watch the episode until I returned home this past Monday night.

I have company coming in from out of town this weekend, so when I heard the announcer say that Ashes would “return in two weeks”, I was happy. I figured that this would give me lots of time this week to catch up on errands and clean up the house for my guests, so I could start on the recap next Monday… and be fully ready for episode two next week.

Well, come to find out the “back in two weeks” thing only applies to the high-def version of the show. BBC HD is apparently running coverage of The Masters golf tournament this week on their HD channel. So the SD version will air in the UK in just a couple of hours.

So it seems that I’ll be two episodes behind when I start the recaps on Monday. My apologies – life got in the way the past two weeks!

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Badass!

The first trailer for the final series of Ashes to Ashes has been released… and I’m so excited I almost weed on myself!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAPmh1ukMsg&feature=player_embedded

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The Funniest Show You’re Not Watching

With the Olympics bumping NBC’s Chuck, 30 Rock and The Office off the air – and many other networks airing re-runs – it’s kind of slim pickins right now when it comes to TV comedy. But there is one show out there that’s absolutely hilarious, and if you haven’t seen it yet, you need to do so as soon as possible:

ArcherArcher is an animated series on FX. It stars H. Jon Benjamin (Coach McGuirk from Home Movies) as Sterling Archer, an attractive and classy James Bond style secret agent who works for ISIS, a private intelligence agency. However, Sterling is also barely competent at times, has severe “mommy issues”, treats his butler like a dog, drinks at the office more than Don Draper, and thinks nothing of charging thousands of needless dollars on his expense account, especially for prostitutes.

He is also insanely jealous of the developing relationship between ex-girlfriend and fellow secret agent Lana (Aisha Tyler from Talk Soup and Friends) and ISIS comptroller Cyril Figgis (Chris Parnell of SNL and 30 Rock). Jessica Walter (Lucille Bluth from Arrested Development) plays Malory Archer, Sterling’s mother and CEO of ISIS (which explains how Sterling manages to not get fired no matter what happens). Mother Archer has problems of her own, including an obsession with her dog which leads her to get an erotic portrait of her and the dog which mimics the iconic photograph of a nude John Lennon and Yoko Ono in bed. And speaking of issues, Mallory’s secretary Cheryl (Judy Greer from Miss Guided) has her own issues, mostly about wanting to be strangled to death during sex.

It sounds silly, and it is. But the show packs more hilarious one-liners in 20 minutes than other shows could do in an hour. I can’t help but giggle every time I hear these lines:

“Now let’s go bury this dead hooker”

“Seriously, call Kenny Loggins. Cause you’re in the Danger Zone”

“Oh god, with the curry again. This shirt smells likes Indira Gandhi’s thong”,

“God it’s like my brain’s that tree and you’re those little cookie elves!”

Sterling: “You killed a hooker!”
Cyril: “She was a call girl!”
Sterling: “No Cyril, when they’re dead they’re just hookers!”

Seriously, check it out. This show really brings the funny. It comes on FX at 10pm on Thursdays; your cable company might offer episodes on demand as well.

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The TOTALLY Random Stuff post

– A 15-year-old girl from the African nation of Lesotho who did not have a functioning vagina nevertheless became pregnant after having oral sex. Yeah, it’s complicated. Apparently she performed oral sex on someone and was shortly thereafter stabbed in a bar fight. The knife pieced her stomach in two places, and doctors surmise that the sperm spilled into her guts and somehow made its way to her fallopian tubes.

– A 24 year-old British woman was carded when trying to buy a slice of quiche from a Tesco grocery store. The cashier claimed that the “ID check” was triggered by the computerized cash register; the chain claims that the quiche was never on their “restricted items” list.  So – stupid and\or angry cashier, or computer glitch at the home office? You decide.

– Speaking of British stupidity, the Brown government now wants to ban “logos, images and graphics” from cigarette packs, create “Smoke Free Communities” where people would be banned from smoking in their own cars and homes, and have the Thought Police helpful government ministers chat about the “dangers” of secondhand smoke with parents who smoke.

– Is stupidity generic? Australia has not only upheld its ban on cartoon child porn, but the government of South Australia also attempted to ban anonymous political speech on the Internet. A law would have required anyone posting political content during an election season to include their real name and address, or face a fine of up to AUS$1250. Most frightening? The law would only apply to bloggers and commenters, and not to “online journals” (i.e. the websites of “real” magazines and newspapers). When Internet users revolted, the government backed down. The funniest thing about this story? That South Australia’s Attorney General, Michael Atkinson, went on the radio and confidently declared that an Internet poster named “Aaron Fornarino of West Croydon” was a fictitious person made up by an opposition party. A couple of days after Atkinson’s declaration, Aaron Fornarino was found to be a genuine human being… who lives 500 meters (1640 feet) from Atkinson’s office.

– Fans of the canceled show Reaper might want to check out this article, in which the show’s creators talk about how the show would have ended.

– A guy is in the frozen foods aisle of his local grocery store. He spots a Healthy Choice frozen dinner, which has a promotional offer giving 1000 frequent flier miles for every ten Healthy Choice UPC codes collected. The frozen dinner is $2, so the deal isn’t that great… but a few aisles over he spots some Healthy Choice soup for 90¢ a can. He fills his cart with cans of soup. He then visits a discount store looking for more cans of soup. There, he finds Healthy Choice pudding cups for only 25¢ each. The man buys every pudding cup he can find at all ten stores in his area. He even has a store manager order two pallets of pudding for him. Soon, he was 12,150 pudding cups. The man enlists a food bank and the Salvation Army to help him open the pudding cups for their UPC codes. He mails all the UPC codes to Healthy Choice. He soon begins receiving envelope after envelope of frequent filer coupons. The man eventually ends up with 1,253,000 frequent filer miles. The man gets lifetime Gold Status on American Airlines, and gets enough frequent flier miles for “31 round-trip coach tickets to Europe, or 42 tickets to Hawaii, or 21 tickets to Australia, or 50 tickets anywhere in the US”. The man paid $3,150 for the pudding, but got an $815 tax write-off for donating it to the food bank. The bottom line: each ticket to Europe set him back $75. And it’s all true.

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Get well soon, Phil!

Phil Harris, one of my favorite captains on the show Deadliest Catch, has suffered a massive stroke and is now in a coma.

Harris had just brought his ship, the Cornelia Marie, in to port to offload a catch when the stroke occurred. He was flown to a hospital in Anchorage, where doctors worked on him for 12 hours before putting him into a coma in hopes of reducing brain swelling.

You might remember Phil as the captain who had a blood clot in his lung in a previous season of Deadliest Catch. There’s no word at this time as to whether the blood clots and the stroke are directly related.

Here’s hoping you get better soon, Phil!

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Worth Watching: Paradox

If you know me, you know I’m a huge fan of British TV. I’ve recently stumbled across a show I think my readers might enjoy: Paradox

Paradox

The gist of the show is this: a satellite (privately owned by a British defense contractor very closely aligned with the Ministry of Defence) suddenly, out of the blue, begins receiving pictures… from the future. The pictures come in batches of eight or perhaps twelve. They’re usually grainy or out of focus, and are of some minute detail, like the partial serial number of a manhole cover, or a small section of a roadway sign. It’s up to a special group of Manchester cops – led by DI Rebecca Flint (Tamzin Outhwaite, of Hotel Babylon, The Fixer, and “sexy, sexy voice” fame) to figure out the clues and stop a crime – or disaster – from happening.

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