Posted Nov 26th 2009 11:02AM by Danny Gallagher
Filed under: Other Comedy Shows, News, Programming, Pickups and Renewals, Reality-Free, Sons of Anarchy
Who doesn't love Thanksgiving? I'll be enjoying mine with all the usual staples: turkey, cranberries, cornbread stuffing, some weird brown thing my father attempted to make and my Mom's mind-numbingly good meliton dressing. I'm literally chomping at the bit to take that first of 227 bites of homemade turkey. I've gone through three remotes in the last hour.
But I have to come up with something to do after all the food has been ravenously devoured by that wolf pack I call my family. And rather than list 100 reasons for regretting life (because 99 of them would be "Why did I eat that?"), here some things I have to be thankful for instead.
Continue reading What Danny is thankful for
Posted Nov 25th 2009 11:16PM by Danny Gallagher
Filed under: Episode Reviews, Reality-Free, Sons of Anarchy
(S02E12) "Either you or me goes home in a bag." - Jax to A.J.
The showdown we've been waiting all season to see finally happened tonight and even though it didn't end the way the antagonists deserved (i.e. heads removed where the shoulder meets the neck, placed on a stick and paraded around town on a substandard Japanese import), it still had my head spinning.
The show opens with SAMCRO preparing for their big, inevitable smackdown with the League by keeping all of their loved ones under lock and key at the clubhouse. But instead of just jumping into the fray head first with baseball bats twisted in barb-wire and all, they do what they should have done from the beginning: they plotted and planned. They turned the tables on the League and by doing so, turned the League on each other.
Continue reading Review: Sons of Anarchy - Culling
Posted Nov 18th 2009 8:13AM by Jonathan Toomey
Filed under: OpEd, Episode Reviews, Reality-Free, Sons of Anarchy
(
S02E11)
"If Gemma had gotten raped on John's watch, he'd have written a whole different book." - Jax
Forgiveness can be a funny thing. Assuming you're on the receiving end of something awful, It's not always easy to determine if you'd even be willing to forgive. That's the beauty of forgiveness though -- the act that led you to it might have been sincere, but that doesn't mean your capacity to forgive has to be. Unlike quietly accepting a situation, forgiving a situation has the power to pacify the parties at fault.
As we learned with Opie last night on
Sons of Anarchy, his capacity to forgive is
huge, but that doesn't mean he ain't lying through his teeth when it comes to his true intentions.
Continue reading Review: Sons of Anarchy - Service
Posted Nov 11th 2009 4:21AM by Jane Boursaw
Filed under: OpEd, Episode Reviews, Reality-Free, Sons of Anarchy
(S02E10) I'm filling in for Danny, who experienced a DVR malfunction, so be gentle with me, as I've been a bit here and there with
Sons of Anarchy this season. Last winter, I raced through season one for
Jane After Dark, and fell in love with the gritty characters and edgy storyline. But to tell you the truth, I had trouble watching it after Gemma's rape this season. It was really disturbing, and I wasn't sure I wanted all of that in my head all the time.
But the fact is that
Sons of Anarchy is a great show and -- like many other FX shows -- unlike most of what you see on TV these days. So I'm happy to have this chance to get caught up a little bit with season two.
Continue reading Review: Sons of Anarchy - Balm
Posted Nov 7th 2009 3:52AM by Danny Gallagher
Filed under: Episode Reviews, Reality-Free, Sons of Anarchy
(S02E09) -
"I know the greater devil when I see it." - Deputy Chief Hale to Clay
The great thing about a show like
Sons of Anarchy is you never exactly know when you're watching its true boiling point. You might think the situation you're watching is the apex of the conflict, particularly the beef between Clay and Jax, but it always finds an interesting and surprising way of making it worse and makes you forget that it still has more episodes to go.
That's the true sign of a good series. It sucks you in and erases any and all concept of time. Unlike other TV shows that you can just have in the background to break the silence of your lonely place,
SOA demands your attention and gets it every time, at least for this season. You can't just leave it on and not not watch it (screw good grammar, if you can think of a better and more entertaining way to say it, be my guest). Anything that can stop and slow time, whether it's a TV show, a flying DeLorean or a hot tub deserves special merit in my book.
Continue reading Review: Sons of Anarchy - Fa Guan
Posted Oct 28th 2009 9:28AM by Danny Gallagher
Filed under: Episode Reviews, Reality-Free, Sons of Anarchy
"Pull the trigger man. That's the only way this leather is coming off my back." - Jax to Alvarez, the head of the Mayans who orders him to give up his club jacket
Jax is supposed to be the hero of this little modern day Shakesperian epic, but he's starting to look more and more like the enemy in each episode.
I don't mean that he'll be the one in the end who has been scheming the whole time behind SAMCRO's back with the white power. This is a well-crafted, slow paced, high caliber drama, not a badly written Schwarzenegger movie with a thrown together twist ending (cough,
Total Recall, cough).
Jax is more of an enemy of himself. He might have good intentions at heart, but his moves are nowhere near his brain. Maybe his loyalty to his family runs deeper than he ever imagined. Logic and family hardly make a decent cocktail. Anyone with a brother-in-law can tell you that.
Continue reading Review: Sons of Anarchy - Potlatch
Posted Oct 21st 2009 1:55AM by Danny Gallagher
Filed under: Episode Reviews, Reality-Free, Sons of Anarchy
(S0207) - "This club needs a healing brother, and you got to be the one to deliver it." - Bobby to Jax
The tension between Jax and Clay has never been thicker. You could make a birthday cake with it ... a big, tasty birthday cake of hate.
Tonight, it finally came to a head, and who knew that Agent Stahl would be the one to cut them down to slices? It looks like she finally got them ... or did she?
Kurt Sutter's episodes are always deeply complex and very clever, and last Tuesday's episode really put Jax and Clay in a corner. He should write every episode, if he were superhuman and incapable of suffering from total exhaustion.
Continue reading Review: Sons of Anarchy - Gilead
Posted Oct 15th 2009 4:18AM by Danny Gallagher
Filed under: Episode Reviews, Reality-Free, Sons of Anarchy
(S02E06) "It's not your time yet, man. This is Clay's club. You either back down or get in line, before somebody gets hurt." - Opie to Jax
It was really hard to find a good quote for this week's episode. I watched the bastard four times before I found the one I did and I'm not entirely thrilled with it.
That's because this week's show was all action and little talk.
The tension between SAMCRO and the Aryans got turned up to 11 when they planted a car bomb in the shop that almost turned Chibs into a fried fish filet that would need a gallon of malt vinegar to be edible. This not only made for a perfect set-up against the club but also within it, driving an even deeper wedge between Clay, Jax and each of their alliances.
Continue reading Sons of Anarchy: Falx Cerebri
Posted Oct 7th 2009 12:52AM by Danny Gallagher
Filed under: Episode Reviews, Reality-Free, Sons of Anarchy
(S0205) - "When relationships become a ledger of profit and loss, you have no friends, no loved ones, just pluses and minuses. You are absolutely alone." - John Teller
It's almost the mid-season for
Sons of Anarchy and that can only mean one thing: someone, nay anyone, can die. It's precisely the reason I asked
Katey Sagal in my last interview if she ever worried about her character being killed off. A show this violent and heavy always carries the air of collateral damage.
And episode five's "Smite" proved it when Chibs, played by Tommy Flanagan, almost got caught dead center of a car bomb planted in the club's garage by the local Aryans and may or may not have croaked in the ensuing explosion.
In the words of Jean Paul Sartre, "It's on, gopher."
Continue reading Sons of Anarchy: Smite
Posted Sep 29th 2009 11:02PM by Danny Gallagher
Filed under: Reality-Free, Sons of Anarchy
(S02E04) - "If you come across something that don't make you miserable, enjoy it." - Chief Unser to Tara
Was I the only human being on the planet who was completely snowed by the BS claim that SAMCRO was headed out of town to do a charity blood drive for Charming? The thought of any shady dealings never crossed my mind for a second. I probably wouldn't even have any doubts if they devised a charity scheme that's more their speed like a "Ride Joust for Diabetes" or a "100-Yard Coke Line Snort for Macular Degeneration."
It's not a sign of my stupidity. Believe me, I've got much more convincing signs of that. For instance, I drive a Pontiac, a brand new Pontiac ... with a 30,000 mile warranty.
It's a sign that the characters are becoming more endearing and real and they play on your emotions more than if they were just flat images on a high definition television screen. They are flesh and blood and bone, and all the little synapses and thoughts that make them human beings are connecting. They have made the audience, or at least the audience that sits in my living room each week, part of their family.
Continue reading Sons of Anarchy: Eureka
Posted Sep 29th 2009 2:35AM by Bob Sassone
Filed under: Episode Reviews, Reality-Free, Sons of Anarchy
(S01E01) The first question I had after watching the new NBC medical drama
Trauma was this: can the show keep this up every week?
You can tell a lot of money was spent on the pilot, because the first 20 minutes is like
Irwin Allen: The Movie. Helicopters crash, cars explode, children are endangered. It's like those big episodes of
ER where something massive happened, only this is going to be a regular thing with this show (if, as I said above, they can spend a lot of money on future episodes).
But what about the rest of the show? It's one thing to have big accidents and pyrotechnics (which are actually very impressive) but what about the cast, the writing, the stories?
Continue reading Trauma: Pilot (series premiere)
Posted Sep 28th 2009 2:01PM by Jane Boursaw
Filed under: OpEd, Reality-Free, Mad Men, True Blood, Sons of Anarchy
Some shows are really creative with their use of music, and one that stands out for me is
Mad Men. In last night's episode (read Bob's review
here), the song that played over the end credits was "Sixteen Tons," and they couldn't have picked a better song. After signing that contract, Don Draper did indeed owe his soul not only "to the company store," but also to Betty and to a life he doesn't seem all that happy about leading.
Another show with great use of music is
Sons of Anarchy. In
his review of "Tears," Danny noted, "Letting Katey Sagal sing a solemn cover of the Rolling Stones' "Ruby Tuesday" was really a great move on whomever made that call." I couldn't agree more. The song just washed all of the sadness and weight of her rape over us in a big way.
Continue reading The Music of Mad Men, True Blood and Sons of Anarchy
Posted Sep 22nd 2009 11:55PM by Danny Gallagher
Filed under: Reality-Free, Sons of Anarchy
(S02E03) - "I'm talking about creating a temporary problem that allows you to flush out the permanent one." - Ethan Zobelle
The thing that surprised me most about this week's episode are the number of times it made me laugh. That's hard to do for a show that cracks more skulls per episode than a plastic surgeon.
It doesn't do so by sacrificing the things that make it great. It's still just as hard-edged, emotional and violent as before. You're just chuckling for all the right reasons, this time.
Continue reading Sons of Anarchy: Fix
Posted Sep 15th 2009 11:15PM by Danny Gallagher
Filed under: Episode Reviews, Reality-Free, Sons of Anarchy
(S02E02) - "Unraveling the matriarch will destabilize them. They're all little boys who need a strong mommy." The thing I'm starting to love about this show is the way it switches gears on just about any incline. They are so swift and sudden that the law should go totally "nanny state" and require me to wear a helmet during each week's episode.
For example: in this week's chapter, we see the aftermath of Gemma's rape and the toll it takes on her as she tries to keep it from the club. Then the very next shot is of Tig, played by Kim Coates and some random fishnet whore slowly waking up with hangovers that could stun an elephant, together in a spent 69.
And I ain't talking about a broken down '69 Chevy.
Continue reading Sons of Anarchy: Small Tears
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