Time spent on the TV blog

40% blogging
10% answering comments
50% removing spam comments

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Nashville- Season 1, Episodes 10-14

You guys, this show is finally getting good and trimming the plots that aren't working. It's moving things along and bringing everything we like about it, There is no more Scarlett/Gunnar/Avery love triangle. Avery is out; Gunnar is in. They didn't even annoy us with Gunnar's brother for long! Jason dies quickly, and thank the Lord for that. We thought Gunnar and Scarlett might get arrested for aiding and abetting. Wouldn't that have been a stupid waste of time?

Pretty Little Liars- Season 3, Episode 21

Out of Sight, Out of Mind- Wow. The moment we all knew was coming happened. We were sad about it, of course, but it's so so so cool of the show to take a main character here. Here meaning Radley. They have actually committed Spencer!

The episode starts with Spencer telling her friends about Toby. Emily does not want to believe it, thinking of Toby as a friend, lover of Spencer, and the person who helped her get up the courage to come out. Spencer has ZERO sympathy.

Aria spends the episode dealing with (?) Ezra building a relationship with Malcolm and Maggie moving to Rosewood. Shockingly, his son in the hospital takes up more of Ezra's attention than his high schooler girlfriend. Emily attempts to locate Toby and finds nothing but a warehouse full of Toby's old co-workers, one of whom is clearly lying about what he knows about Toby.

Hanna finds Wilden's cop car, complete with incriminating videos, in the Marin garage. She enlists Aria and the two push the car into the lake, breaking a jillion laws. Literally a jillion. Spencer ends up in the woods, finding a dead body (well, a body that MONA says is dead, so take that with a grain of salt) that appears to be Toby's. We're not taking any of this to the bank.

Spencer chases after Mona in the woods all night and suffers from exposure/exhaustion/general craziness. By the time local authorities find Spencer, she is reeeeeal cray, and they take her to the loony bin. The other Liars don't know yet. Man, this is getting good. We can't wait for the next one.

Episode grade: A-

Bunheads: Season 1, Episode 15-18

Take the Vicuna (B+), There's Nothing Worse Than a Pantsuit (B-), It's Not a Mint (A-)- We don't care for the Millie building an amphitheater storyline, because there isn't much at stake there. Still, it's nice to have Liza Weil on our TVs again. The show kind of dropped the Michelle's mom plot as soon as it brought it up. Is that going to come back soon? Why bring it up if you're not going to do anything with it? We'll wait for season two on that one.

The Oscars 2013

We don't usually review awards shows, but we thought we'd start. Armed with a pack of Guinness, a pizza, cell phones to text friends, and whoever we could strong arm into watching this with us, we sat down to view the show, determined to make it until midnight. Ern, in particular, is a huge pussy when it comes to staying up past your average grandmother's bedtime.

Zero Hour

We can't even be bothered to write a review for this show. Just...it's bad. It's tragically bad. Just trust us.

Re-watching LOST: season six

The final season. Sob. Lots of people hated this season and plenty were satisfied. We were among the satisfied, and we're not going to say why again. Just read this post. The post you are reading now is to grade each episode and talk about the arc of season six. This show was uneven from the start, but what made it one of our favorite shows ever was that it was always challenging and completely unique. There will never be anything remotely like this show ever again, unless it's a remake.

Fiction we read in February

The Furies of Calderon by Jim Butcher: We love his Dresden Files books (with the exception of the most recent entry...ugh), so we thought we would give his high fantasy a try. It started out rough, and we didn't care. Once we got into it, we appreciated the tight little story and the characters. They were a little black-and-white for us, a little too flat and blatantly "good-vs.-evil," but that's better than having no one to root for, like in the first Game of Thrones book. The writing is easy to understand, and the book was fun. We care enough to read the second one and watch where Butcher takes this, but we don't care enough to read it right away. We will take a little break first. Book grade: B-

The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater: We liked everything about this YA book except for one thing. They way Maggie writes, you can't get sucked into a scene. She has paragraphs of character thoughts after every line in a conversation! She interrupts herself and her scenes so much that it feels choppy. She needs to let things flow. Otherwise, there are good characters, romance that actually works, a good story, and good use of magic. We loved the gang of guys and the main female character. We want to read the next one...we just hope it won't be so hard to read. Book grade: B

Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl: This was like Twilight, only with the genders swapped and the more offensive/abusive elements removed. We liked the small-town, Southern Gothic setting and many of the adult characters. We also loved that the main character and narrator was a guy. He seemed cool. This was easy to read, but it was way too long, keeping this book from being tight and focused. It's not special or original, but it's enjoyable if you like YA paranormal romance, and we do. We weren't nuts about the ending. If we continue this series, we hope the writers take more risks. By playing it safe, the writers didn't write something bad, but they didn't hit any great notes either. Book grade: B

House of Cards season one- Netflix

When we heard that both HBO and AMC bid for this series and lost to Netflix, we had to check it out. This is the show Netflix chose to brand and kick off their original programming. It stars Kevin Spacey, and David Fincher directed the first two episodes and helped in the creation of the show. The entire first season is available, because Netflix knows we like our binges (or at least to watch a show when we want to watch it). So is it as good as it should be?

Movies we've seen in the past couple of months

Lincoln: You've heard all about this. The people who saw it loved it. It's historically accurate, it's not boring once it gets past a few opening scenes, Lincoln is fully humanized with both good and bad traits, Sally Field is great, Daniel Day-Lewis channels Lincoln (no, seriously, we suspect magic), you'll feel things, it looks good, and the script is awesome. What you might not have heard is that Tommy Lee Jones steals the movie, and Lee Pace is still hot as a racist bad guy, which is hard to pull of since racists are the worst. Movie grade: A

Re-watching Gilmore Girls: seasons six and seven

This is the season where the show started to go downhill. It wasn't SPEEDING downhill like in the seventh and final season, but there were some things we didn't like. The main thing? April. Giving Luke an illegitimate love child when we were perfectly content thinking he'd spent most of his life pining for Lorelai or watching Star Trek was sleazy.