Category: TV

TV

GLOW

Who would have ever guessed that a series about the 1980s female TV wrestling program GLOW: Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling would be so good? The second season of the drama GLOW on Netflix debuted Friday and picked up right where the first season left off. If the first season was about the girls of GLOW lead by Alison Brie and Betty Gilpin banding together to make something out of nothing — even if it’s a women’s wrestling program that airs on local TV — then the second is about what happens when these same girls realize that if they’re all not looking out for themselves, no one will.

The story of GLOW is complex. On the one hand it’s about these wild, over-the-top comic book-esque characters doing all these nutty and crazy things in a wrestling ring. They’ve got names like “Zoya the Destroya,” “Liberty Bell” and “The Welfare Queen” with over-the-top personalities to match. On the other hand these characters are played by “real” people like Ruth Wilder (Brie) an actress who hasn’t quite figured out how to make it in Hollywood and accidentally finds herself at a GLOW audition and realizes this might be her only chance at fame, Debbie Eagan (Gilpin) another actress who did make it in Hollywood for a time before having a baby derailed her career and Tammé Dawson (Kia Stevens) who plays the “Welfare Queen” in the ring but in “real life” has a son who’s attending Stanford and is willing to do anything, even play the “Welfare Queen” on TV, to keep him there.

And these are just a few of the deep and interesting characters of GLOW.

I kind’a sort’a wonder if the second season of GLOW will mark the beginning of the end of the fictional show within-the-show of the same name? While the real GLOW: Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling turned out to be very influential, it only ran for four seasons and then only in syndication. I wonder if that’s where the fictional GLOW is headed too? The first episode is kind’a setting things up that way with director Sam Sylvia (Marc Maron) firing one of the girls for insubordination, Eagan renegotiating her contract for more money and a producer credit on the show and Wilder finding out that her spirit of “all for one, one for all” might be wasted on GLOW.

The fictional GLOW looks like a fun place to visit but it’s a facade, the “real life” place the actors of GLOW live in is just as unforgiving as our own.

Westworld

Westerns and sci-fi usually don’t go very well together. Whenever these genera meet it’s usually not very pretty — Cowboys vs Aliens immediately pops to mind. However, the exception to that rule is the marvelous Westworld series on HBO that mixes both genres together into something both new and familiar that wrapped up its second season last week.

In Westworld, it’s the future at the park of the same name guests can come and interact with the robotic “hosts” in a place that looks and feels like the real wild west. But the guests aren’t interested in playing nice with the hosts, many of them are there play out every dark fantasy they’ve ever had in a consequence-free environment during their stay. Much of the first season of Westworld had a distinctly Philip K. Dick vibe going on and dealt with a software glitch that caused many of the hosts to realize the true nature of the reality they’re trapped in and want to rebel.

The focus of the second season of Westworld is on the rebellion and its aftermath, told in two separate timelines. Here, once meek and mild host Dolores (Rachel Evan Wood) now leads a band of robots doing to whatever guests they find along the way that had been done to them over the years. But they’re not just out for blood, they’re also trying to find the fabled “valley beyond” and escape from the park. In a parallel story another group lead by ex-madam Maeve (Thandie Newton) who can control and reprogram other hosts on the fly searches the park for her daughter while guest William (Ed Harris) is trying to find the real meaning of Westworld hidden somewhere inside its borders. And that’s not even mentioning Bernard’s (Jeffrey Wright) story of, shall we say, “self discovery” in the second season of the show too.

If the first season was Philip K. Dick then the second was a bit of that along with Solaris with Terminator thrown in for good measure.

I really enjoyed the second season of Westworld if I was a bit confused at finale episode. There were a few too many twists and turns and “is this taking place in the past or future?” in the finale for me to keep them all straight. There were a lot of stories all going on in the second season, probably too many to be neatly wrapped up in one episode which Is what I felt happened in the last one. In addition to wrapping things up and clipping dangling storylines, there was also a bit of new story, getting things ready for the third season of the show due out sometime next year in the finale.

I think it would have made more sense to rather than try and wrap everything up in the finale, to instead only finish some of the storylines and continue others next season.

The Expanse

There once was a time when The Sci-Fi Channel was the destination for quality science fiction programming. In addition to airing lots of classic sci-fi shows, they also aired series like Farscape, Stargate SG–1 and the Battlestar Galactica reboot in addition to doing things like creating mini-series like Dune. But over the years things changed and as The Sci-Fi Channel chased the bottom line into the ground airing things like professional wrestling and cheap-o movies like the Sharknado series while also changing their name to SYFY, fans of the genera slowly began abandoning the channel for other venues. However, a few years back new management seeing how well sci-fi was doing on other venues decided to once again air more original sci-fi programming on SYFY, one of the first shows of this new slate was The Expanse.

Great from the very beginning, The Expanse is set in the near-future where mankind is living on the Earth, Mars and throughout the solar system and is still struggling with all the things we struggle with today. But when a mysterious alien artifact is discovered that threatens the entire human race, humanity must band together or face extinction. The Expanse was the first show in a long while to return to the genera of “people in big ships zooming around in outer space” and is a show that seemed like it was made for me. Over the three seasons of The Expanse I only loved it more as the story of the series changed and shifted from what started out in the first season to the current third season.

If the first season and second seasons were about the lead-up to war because of this artifact, then the third was about this war breaking out. Which I figured was going to take up the bulk of the third season of the The Expanse. But that’s not what happened. Rather than focus on this war, the creators of The Expanse instead stopped the conflict in its tracks and then jumped ahead many months into the future. Going from conflict to a weird sort of inter-solar system alliance to figure out what happened when the artifact changed into a … something.

And that’s where the second half of the third season of The Expanse spent its time, trying to figure out what this artifact had become while at the same time trying to keep the conflict that had just been capped from boiling back over into war.

Honestly, the third season of The Expanse was the best season of the show so far, and I was dying to see where the series was going to go from here.

Except that even before it ended SYFY announced that they were going to cancel The Expanse after its third season. Their reasoning was the ratings of the show were never what they wanted and that since the series had convoluted streaming deals in place that didn’t benefit SYFY they weren’t going to commission any more seasons of the show.

Which was a major bummer, but luckily the cancellation was short-lived as Amazon quickly stepped up and picked up the show for their Prime service.

Still, it burns me to no end how much SYFY has fallen from once being the home to sci-fi to the thing it is now. When I want to watch sci-fi I almost never turn to SYFY, I turn to places like BBC America that shows things like Star Trek and The X-Files, pay cable like HBO with Westworld and Fahrenheit 451 and online streaming services like Netflix with Stranger Things and Lost in Space. SYFY? I usually avoid it at all costs — even morso now that they dumped The Expanse.

Ironically, the big new “thing” that Syfy has been promoting as of late is them being the new home of the Harry Potter film franchise. The film franchise that at this point is a whopping 17 years old. The film franchise that has been playing on all sorts of other channels for those 17 years already.

The Expanse is new and fresh and I’m extremely excited that I’ll be able to watch new episodes of it on Prime (hopefully) next year. As for Harry Potter on Syfy? Give me a break.

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Comics

Lone Wolf and Cub Gallery Edition

A new edition of the critically acclaimed and highly influential Lone Wolf and Cub manga series is due out this week. This volume costs a whopping $100 but has reproduced the artwork at its original size and in original Japanese.

Kazuo Koikes samurai epic is a tour-de-force of graphic fiction, and the Lone Wolf and Cub Gallery Edition features selections of the late Goseki Kojima’s spectacular illustration reproduced at original size on heavy-stock art paper to preserve the work in detail as it exists today, as close as one can come to owning these rarest of artworks. Including in its entirety the final titanic clash between ogami Itto and Yagyu Retsudo. This deluxe volume is a must-have for collectors and enthusiasts of the finest comic art ever created.

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