Covert Affairs 5.01 "Shady Lane": Annie Are U O.k.?

Hahah goddamnit now I have that song in my head again.  I got it in my head before with a season 3 Covert Affairs review once, and it just popped back in there due to the nature of the season 5 opener.  The problem is, the version that gets in my head is never the original MJ version, it's always the cheese-tastic Alien Ant Farm version from like 13 or 14 years ago.  Fun fact: They were a local band from Riverside, where I went to college, while I was in college.  Oh shit Wikipedia just informed me it's technically Moreno Valley, a much smaller town right next to Riverside, which I also spent a lot of time in while in college.  Even more obscure.  But point being, their big hit was quite an achievement for the ol' Inland Empire.  A real flash in the pan.  Great job, Riverside (Moreno Valley).

O.k. I can't believe I just embedded that here.  I feel so dirty and embarrassed.  But I'm not taking it out because I can't get it out of my head now.  And the lyrics do really fit this Covert Affairs episode pretty perfectly.

So here we are.  Covert Affairs season 5 premiere, "Shady Lane."  Season 4 of this show had me so incredibly frustrated that I had kind of given up on putting much hope or care into season 5.  But guess what?  They just f*cking sucked me back in.  It's almost like they called me on the phone and asked me exactly the type of stuff I'd want to see in this show and then they did it.  Hold up, I shouldn't go that far, I'll just jinx it and it'll end up giving me just as much TV blueballs as season 4 did.

The Dying-slash-Thriving Art of the TV Title Sequence

It has been a thing as long as I can remember that a TV show will start off in its first couple seasons with a nice long title sequence, and then gradually cut it shorter and lamer and shorter and lamer as the series goes on.  It seems to me that that trend has reached an extreme in modern television, with shows keeping title sequences to the bare minimum to allow themselves more time for storytelling.

Err, but wait ... then why are there so many fantastic title sequences out there right now??  Oh right, it's the difference between shows that have a strict time constraint with ad time + traditional 30-60 minute slot, vs. the shows that ... don't.  Shows on premium channels like HBO and Showtime usually still stick to the traditional 30-60 minute slot, but they have the luxury of zero commercials taking away from their story-telling time.  And then you've got the basic cable networks, which can go either way - a channel like USA sticks to the traditional formula, where as a network like FX lets some of their shows (e.g. Sons of Anarchy and The Americans) take up all the time they damn well please.  Sure they've still gotta deal with commercials, but they also regularly run like 5-15 minutes past the hour mark.  Not all networks give their shows that luxury.  Oh and don't forget about Netflix!!  Talk about being able to do whatever the hell you want - these guys have it better than anyone in that category.  Must be nice.

The Dying Theme Song

On one hand, let's take a show like Castle, which I'm pretty sure never even bothered with a full title sequence in the first place, right?  Wasn't it always just that quickie little ditty with the ... OH wait!!  I just remembered, they used to start every episode off with that little backstory first!  But yeah, they stopped doing that quite a while back.

And then there's Louie, whose theme song was catchy as hell, but they seem to have cut it out entirely for its most recent season.  And New Girl, which started off with a pretty short opening theme, and only shortened it from there (it's gotta be like 10 seconds long at this point right?).  Didn't Breaking Bad go that same route?  Also Covert Affairs, which kept its full sequence for its first three seasons, but then just pulled the cord and cut it out completely in season 4.  Now they just do a fade in and fade out of the title.  In their case I was actually fine with the elimination of it, because I was never a huge fan of the original theme/sequence to begin with.  It was pretty cheesy.

This is Why No One Takes Your TV Show Seriously

I need to just take a minute to bitch and moan a little about a TV pet peeve of mine: When a show, at least in some respects, refuses to step outside its basic formula, like ever.

A perfect example is Castle.  If I had the energy, I'd try to figure out how many times Castle has done an episode without a case of the week which gets solved by the end of the episode (or by the end of the 2-parter).  It's extremely small, right?  Out of six full seasons of the show, at 128 eps total?  But haven't those very few episodes that have stepped at least a little bit outside of the typical formula been some of the best of the entire series?  I'm thinking like, "Knockdown," "Knockout," and "Always," as the examples that come to mind.  I'm sure there are a few others I'm forgetting.

So why the HELL don't they do this more often??  Why do they feel the need to do a new murder case every single episode and to always solve it by the end and to always structure it to follow the same Scooby Doo formula??  I don't understand.  Now, to be fair, Castle is usually cranking out 23 or 24 eps per season, so they do have to put a lot of filler eps in there.  But still, as the series goes on it feels like more and more filler/cookie-cutter formula and less substance eps.

In a sense, it's entirely unfair of me to lump Covert Affairs in with Castle on this topic, because Covert has actually done a FAR better job than most other shows at evolving and constantly striving to improve.  Not only did it step outside its original mission-of-the-week formula starting in season 3, it completely re-invented itself as a serialized and much more serious show.  It continued its evolution on that path in season 4, and while I don't think it has always been successful in its quest to give itself and its characters more depth, I still love the fact that it's at least making an honest effort to do so.  I didn't even bother watching the show until season 3 for this exact reason, and then I finally watched because I had major respect for the writers/producers/etc. for having the balls to kinda turn the show on its head a bit, with good results.

So then, given all this, why the hell are the season posters still so damn lame and generic looking??  Here's the first two seasons, for reference:

I mean, could these things possibly be any more generic??  "Single woman.  Double life."  "Under Cover Girl."  The only way they could be more bland is if they were literally just pictures of saltine crackers or like, Gap ads.  It's no goddamn wonder I refused to watch this show in seasons 1 and 2.  To be fair, the show itself was pretty generic too at this point, so at least the posters fit a theme there.  Still, it did have a bit more substance than you'd think just from looking at these things.

Bill Haverchuck is My Favorite

This is just a quick and rather lazy post to pose the question: Is Bill Haverchuck the best TV character of all time?  Of all TV shows?  I'm sure it's been asked a bazillion other times on the interwebs, to the point where adding here too is probably pointless.  But it's just a question that pops up in my brain pretty often, so I'm typing it here.  Please forgive me.

Nina Sergeevna: Hero or Villain?

Well o.k., the title of this blog post is misleading, because a show like The Americans is designed in a such a way that no one is a clear cut good guy or bad guy.  Everyone is just fighting for their own cause, and no cause is meant to be the "right" one for the audience.  It's like Game of Thrones in that sense.  But still, you gotta want to root for someone right??  Otherwise the show is not interesting.

That was actually a huge issue for me in season 1 of this show ... since Elizabeth and Philip are the two main characters, then presumably, we're supposed to be rooting for them, at least to some extent.  But I found both of these two to be so closed off and cold and spy-like in season 1 that I didn't feel motivated enough to really be on their side.  As a matter of fact, but the time season 1 ended, the only person I really WAS rooting for was Nina Sergeevna.

I certainly wasn't rooting for FBI agent Stan, that's for sure.  Vlad-murdering, extramarital affair-having schmuck Stan.  KGB or not, by the end of season 1, when Nina turned the tables on Stan and started playing him for a change, I was cheering at my TV screen.  Nina was a sympathetic character to me, because she was forced into the situation with Stan and the FBI against her will.  She was put into an impossible position, and she did what she had to do to survive.  And Stan had turned into such a douche by the end of the season that her betraying him was totally justified from my point of view.

Covert Affairs Comic Strip: The Walkerson Breakup

The other day, a friend of mine on Twitter half-jokingly suggested that I should create another Covert Affairs "comic strip" as a follow-up to a very short one I did for a review of episode 4.14 several months ago.  It only took me a short time of considering it before I realized that the Annie/Auggie ("Walkerson") break-up storyline had a TON of material to go on for a re-telling of the saga in comic form.

So here you go.  This is my take on the Walkerson break-up from Covert Affairs season 4.  It's obviously meant to be funny, but I have to admit it's also literally how the storyline played out for me as a viewer.  I'm unclear if this may cause half the fandom and all the Covert writers to hate me, but here goes.  Heh.  Please forgive me for my sins.

About

Is there an "About" section on Blogger?  I can't find it.  I mean yeah there's an "About Me" section at the right, but not an "About This Blog" section that I can find.  So I guess I'll just write it here instead.  I have another blog here that has no theme to it, it's just random posts.  I noticed that a lot of the stuff I post about there happens to be about TV and movies, and other entertainment-related topics.  So I created this blog specifically for that - My fangirling of TV, movies, music, or anything of the sort.

Here's some old fangirl-related posts from my other blog:

The most recent Covert Affairs episode review I did (the others are on there too but I'm not going to link to all of them; they're easy to find on there): http://maryploppins-brainpoops.blogspot.com/2013/11/covert-affairs-416-trompe-le-monde.html

I did a little "Rating the TV Romance" series on:

Castle (Castle & Beckett)
Chuck (Chuck & Sarah)
Alias (Syd & Vaughn)
Gilmore Girls (Luke & Lorelai)
Felicity (Felicity & Ben)

And before that there was a post that sort of kicked off the "Rating the TV Romance" series, which was Confessions of a Former Soapaholic.

Oh I also reviewed the first Hunger Games movie when it came out in 2012, which makes me feel like a total slacker for not having reviewed Catching Fire, which I think was a significantly better movie (and I liked the first one).  So hey, if I end up not writing a separate blog post about Catching Fire, just know that I LOVED the shit out of it and I can't freakin' wait for the BluRay to come out.  Maybe I'll do a review once I get my paws on the BluRay to watch over and over.

Anyway that's mostly it.  I think I had a few earlier posts but I don't think they were anything worth reading.

OH one last thing: My "real" Covert Affairs reviews are actually on GeekFurious.com.  I plan to keep reviewing the show there for season 5.