Category Archives: Television

It has been just over a week since the finale of Being Erica. It has taken me this long to calm down enough to be able to compose some “intelligent” thoughts about how I feel about it.

“Feel? Really Lizz? But it is just a TV show!” Sure. But if TV shows had no effect on your emotions then they’re wouldn’t really be doing their jobs. Even reality TV makes you think about something – albeit maybe just how much you don’t want to eat cow brains.

But back to Erica.

It wasn’t just the bad acting, indulgent story lines, or overall bad writing – all of which is true and I will get to – but mostly I was just so completely offended by the plot that it actually drove me to tears of anger. This was the big story, the one we’d all been waiting for: Leo’s death. The preview for this episode had been scrolling on the website for many weeks before, and Dr. Tom told us in the very first episode that Erica couldn’t go back and save Leo. And yet, they went there anyway.

What I was so incredibly offended by is that this episode was written like all the other episodes – as if saving or not saving her brother was the same as telling the truth about her party at Casa Loma or being bold enough to fire a bad writer at work. Leo’s death, which is hyped up as a pivotal moment in Erica’s life – was reduced to a lesson about …. well actually, I’m not sure. Either way, the trauma of sending Erica back to watch her brother die was never given the power it so obviously deserved.

Let’s back-track a bit.

Summary: It is the anniversary of Erica’s brother Leo’s death. We sit through 15 minutes of superfluous indulgence where Erica and Ethan gush about how happy they are, how stressed Erica is about the anniversary, and how her parents react every year. Next, in an odd attempt at curing her family’s collective guilt for Leo’s fiery death, Erica suggests they rebuild the barn he died in. Blah, blah, blah, her mother finds Leo’s cigarette case and falls apart in a tremendous display of bad acting. Enter Dr. Tom.

Ordinarily Dr. Tom is entertaining enough. He spouts out quotations that you know some eager writer has been scouring the Internet for daily, tells Erica what she is doing wrong and what the lesson is she should have learned. In this case, Dr Tom gets hyper and gloomy (if those can really happen at the same time) and tells Erica she can go back to the time of Leo’s death if she PROMISES not to try and save his life. She promises. She just wants to help her family get over it.

So let’s stop right here. If the point of this was that Dr Tom actually knows that she will fuck up and save Leo – as any human on the planet would do if they knew their brother (or anyone I’d hope) was about to die- and the lesson was that her years of guilt were unfounded because shit happens, then great. The trouble is that apparently Dr. Tom was turned into an idiot, sent her back to do something he knew she couldn’t do, then got ANGRY with her for doing that thing she couldn’t have done. Setting aside all the reasons it is inaccurate, and offensive to have her therapist be angry at her for sending her to complete an impossible task, it was all just an awkward set up for a new, higher-up “therapist”. If you write the end of the story before the beginning then there is no natural flow.

Then it turns out that Erica is actually a bad person if Leo doesn’t die when he’s 21 – which I guess means the whole show about fixing her unambitious, aimless life is useless since the whole reason she didn’t “go anywhere” was just because Leo died. The show also falls into the butterfly effect category that it has managed to avoid all season. This show was special because Erica’s time traveling actions were about self-discovery and improvement, rather than being a typical change the past/future show where everything inevitably falls apart because you have messed with the space-time continuum. The beauty of this show was always that it wasn’t about the time traveling itself, it was about the lessons learned in it. Apparently some over-zealous writer forgot that, or maybe didn’t know that to begin with. But this is still not what really bothered me.

Leo dies again in the butterfly effect life. So then Erica must go back to the original time to let him die how he was supposed to (I guess so that she could stop being the bad person she is in the new life). She goes back, encourages Leo to write a letter (which magically solves her family’s guilt problems despite having nothing to do with the fact that they couldn’t get him out of the fire) and then stands in front of the burning barn with a tear running down her face as her brother burns alive.

Is no one else disturbed by this?! She watches her brother burn alive! BURN ALIVE! Then in real time she gets back up on the horse, delivers Leo’s letter, and tells Ethan about how good the weekend is.

There were all sorts of poorly-acted emotions from the entire cast, but none that reflected the trauma of watching your brother die. Not even to mention the trauma that follows when her therapist, with whom she had spent months building up a relationship of trust with, abandons her because she failed. What were they thinking?

Someone over there at CBC better clean up their act and decide what kind of show they are trying to make before they even think about writing a second season. If not, I hope they set Erin Karpluk free to pursue well written shows where her acting ability isn’t the only thing holding it together.

The L Word – everyone’s favourite show of overly-dramatic, over-sexed, crazed lesbians. But I mean those as good things. On Tuesday night (in Canada) the show ended after 6 seasons.

I’ve been a big fan of the L Word – watching quite religiously for the entire series, but at the end of the show on Tuesday night I wasn’t sure how I felt about it ending. I’ve often had mixed reactions when shows I’m into end. Usually it is because they started out fabulously (or my standards were lower) and gradually, or in some cases drastically, went down hill. I quit the OC before the last season because while it was bad to begin with, it lost its fun. I quit Lost last season because I just didn’t have it in me to make it through another extreme season of madness. But when I finished the last season of 6 Feet Under (despite being totally bummed out by the last episode) I felt satisifed. I felt like we had just been on a lovely journey together and now it was our natural time to part. There were no hard feelings, no frustration with fallen storey lines, extreme characters, or shark-jumping. It was just right. So while I do not hold the OC to the same standard (because it wasn’t intended to have standards it was meant to be entertaining), I do hold The L Word to a higher-standard.

Now my reasons for watching the L Word are likely different than some. Unfortunately, being straight, I wasn’t watching it just to be on the afterellen bandwagon. I’m really not bold enough or clever enough for that. I watched it because it was a good show. It was a good show about women, and the good and fucked up things women did.

Over the series it obviously had some ups and downs – Alice went crazy, Max was a weird addition to the club, and Tina went straight I guess just to show that she could. But nothing drove me crazier than the new Jenny.
Jenny started out as a sweet, artistic and likable character and turned into a crackpot narcissist that didn’t even remotely resemble the original character. Why? Why was it necessary? Why do writers think that drama isn’t interesting unless you can make it completely absurd and never ending? As if it wasn’t bad enough that Jenny’s Hollywood persona last season was irritating and silly, this season she just seemed to be schizophrenic. She was mean, and conniving, and bordering on evil. The worst part is is that they appear to have over done her evilness just so they could feign a mystery surrounding her death.

Jenny’s death was revealed in the very first episode. I was happy she was out because her character was so very painful last season. Then I discover that the entire season is going to be the lead-up to her death. The trouble with this is not only that it spoils the surprise at the end, but that the episodes didn’t seem to unfold naturally but instead were forced toward a pre-established goal. What’s more is that the episodes that had goals weren’t very good, and the finale where this was all to come together was rushed and confused.

I didn’t even know I was watching the series finale until I realized everything was being revealed really quickly and they were forcing together happy, emotional goodbyes with a whodunnit murder mystery (the worst of which was the police interrogations that would have been better suited for a sleepover party). Everyone has a clear motive because Jenny was so completely hateable, but at the end they reveal the murderer. Sort of. Well kind of. They lead us to believe that Nikki is the killer because she hid in the bushes and I guess was obsessed with Shane. Considering all the well-crafted motives of everyone else, couldn’t they have given us more than a one-line scapegoat? Better yet, they could have left it as a mystery. I hate cliffhangers, but I could have dealt with that one because it would have been demonstrative of the complexities of all of their relationships..

I got where they were coming from but they failed. And it hurts me. It hurts me deep inside. Because I expected more.