57 Channels and Only This Is On: 11/18/2018

Supergirl: The season finale promised up Soviet Supergirl but it seems like she has only been on screen for about a minute and a half in the first five episodes this season. Certainly that storyline has to be better than this annoying anti-alien storyline.
Supergirl on iTunes.

Ray Donovan: So just how long does it take to drive from Los Angeles to New York City? I actually used Bing Maps and it actually took less than I expected: forty hours without traffic (though when I searched, Bing estimated nine extra hours with traffic). The trip while avoiding toll roads which I am guessing two fugitives would want to avoid would take at least forty-six hours (plus maybe twelve hours of traffic). Still, that is plenty of time for Daryll to hire some protection. Or does that set not have any protection. Last week Daryll said his dad was going to kill him, maybe get prepaired for that situation.

The Walking Dead: So five(ish) years later they never did finish the bridge (you would think how much Rick wanted it, you would think they would have continued) and Negan is still in prison. Oh, and Carol and Eugene have way more hair. Weird the different communities have lost touch, but of course theey are just starting to get back together. And was the “her” Michone talked about in HillTop Maggie or did she die in the missing years. And when did covering yourself in mud throw your scent off the zombies?
You can download The Walking Dead on iTunes.

The Last Ship: I guess we now know what Saving Private Ryan would look like on a television budget. Though I guess the less personal and firepower can be explained away by the virus. And I joked about Tom Chandler going down with his ship a couple weeks back and it turns out I was right that they actually did sink the ship. Except Tom Chandler didn’t actually go down with it despite an apparent lengthy white light montage. Jokes aside, The Last Ship was a fun summer diversion (even though it crept into the fall in the last couple seasons), like a televised weekly action movie and still managed to go multiple seasons after no longer being the last ship.
You can download The Last Ship on iTunes.

You: Well I have been predicting Joe would kill Beck by the end of the season and it turns out I was right. Which brings up his death doll this season to six I believe. But whatever happened to the DNA the PI mentioned? Is there really no DNA in urine like Joe hoped? Was the PI just bluffing to see how Joe reacted? And though I was right about Beck, I was wrong about Candice being killed by Joe. So where has she been? Was Joe telling the truth that she really changed her name and moved to Italy? I just assumed the teeth were hers. So whose teeth were those?
You can download You on iTunes.

The Challenge: Final Reckoning: Do you believe in highly unlikelies!?! The curse of Bananas screwing over Sarah strikes again. And just in time for TJ to announce that twist of players being able to screw over their partner is back. I ridiculed Bananas for doing that, but for an extra half a million, I think I may just have to take that money. But then I thought about taxes. If you take the million dollars, you will ended up with $512,000.29 while if you split it, then you would receive $283,670.89 which is not as dramatic as getting an extra half a million dollars. But without Bananas and Tony, this may be the weakest finalist field ever. I guess if I had to make a prediction, I would go with Joss and Sylvia.
You can download The Challenge: Final Reckoning on iTunes.

Survivor: David vs. Goliath: The rare we get to see no votes cast Tribal. You have to expect some weird shirt to happen when the editors pull that. But why not just show the obligatory one vote for Christian and one for Angelina? We still would have gotten that shock that, oh, why is John getting votes moment. But yeah, why exactly did John get votes? Was it that Davie did not tell everyone that he had an Idol, but devised a plan to get rid of strong Goliath and not just an easy pickings like Angelina with Christian and Nick? That seems the only plausible answer I can come up with.
You can download Survivor: David vs. Goliath on iTunes.

The Good Place: Isn’t it obvious why Doug Forcett is destined for The Bad Place like Shawn suggest even though Michael was shocked. Tahani’s whole reason for going to The Bad Place is because she did good for the wrong reasons and so it would also mean if the sole reason why you are doing good things is for the moral deserts of not being tortured for all eternity, then not only are you not getting those points, you are actually getting negative points for your efforts to subvert the system. But really disappointed that The Real Eleanor did not play a bigger role in the episode. Why even un-pod her just to be a random henchman in a bar brawl?
The Good Place on iTunes.

Blindspot: A couple weeks ago an episode with a tease of Jane getting caught by Kurt only for her to talk her way out of it pretty easily. I do not think that will happen this time. But if she is going to go rouge, how long until she teams up with Zapada?
You can download Blindspot on iTunes.

Around the Tubes: 11/16/2018

I have gotten a plethora of cool press releases have been flooding my inbox recently that you may find interesting. This post will include blurbs on The Affair, Comcast, Terrorism Close Calls, Game Show Network Daily Draw, Invisible Hands, Ariana Grande, Noël Wells, The Carpenters, and Cassadee Pope.

- Oscar® and Golden Globe® Award winner Anna Paquin (True Blood) has signed on as a series regular for the fifth and final season of the critically acclaimed Showtime drama series, The Affair. Paquin will play a pivotal role as Alison and Cole’s now adult daughter Joanie Lockhart, who returns some years in the future to a climate-change ravaged Montauk to piece together the truth about what happened to her mother, bringing the whole story full circle.

- Comcast Corporation (Nasdaq: CMCSA) today announced it has selected two new African American majority owned independent networks to be broadly distributed on Comcast Cable systems beginning in January 2019. After a thorough evaluation of dozens of proposals, Comcast selected AFRO and CLEO TV, both of which will provide quality entertainment that highlights and features TV and movie content about African American and black communities.

- Looking for your next Netflix binge? Check out Terrorism Close Calls– a ten-part series investigating the world's deadliest terror plots that failed at an intimate event (now streaming on Netflix). The series features exclusive access to the agents involved in disrupting the plots as well as leading national and international authorities on counter-terrorism, intelligence, and law enforcement, including Mark Kelton.

- Game Show Network’s popular daily sweepstakes, Game Show Network Daily Draw, is super-sizing for the holidays by giving away up to $25,000 throughout its “Twelve Draws of Christmas.” On weeknights from Monday, December 10 through Tuesday, December 25 at 7 p.m. ET, host Trish Suhr will announce which twelve lucky viewers will win cash prizes ranging from $750 to $10,000! To play, viewers need to watch Game Show Network for the code word each weeknight from 8 pm – 2 am and then enter the code word online at https://www.gsntv.com/sweepstakes/dailydraw/ or send in a postcard for a chance to win. For more information go to gsntv.com/dailydraw/rules/.

- Invisible Hands exposes child labor and child trafficking within the supply chains of the world’s biggest corporations, which produce some of our most loved items. The film offers a harrowing account of children as young as five years old making the products we buy and consume every day. Chilling undercover footage shows children being sold like animals to the highest bidder and others being abused by this pervasive slave labor. Invisible Hands digs deep into a modern slavery system quietly supported by some of the world’s largest companies, demanding to know why top stakeholders continue to engage in this unlawful practice.

- Multi-platinum, record-breaking superstar Ariana Grande makes more history. Her brand new song, “thank u, next” claims the #1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 with over 55.5 million streams in the U.S. On Apple Music, she broke multiple records. “thank u, next” now holds the global record for “#1 Most-Streamed Pop Song First-Week on Apple Music.” She also reaches rarified air as the “only female artist to chart in the Top 5 songs first-week of release on Apple Music.” It represents a milestone moment for the singer. At Spotify, it captured both “the U.S. and Global One-Day streaming records for a female artist,” generating over 9 million plays worldwide and 4 million in the U.S. on the platform. Not to mention, it soared to #1 on iTunes, Amazon Music, and Tidal. It also debuted at #1 on the Official UK Singles chart, becoming the highest selling #1 debut of the year in the UK.

- Actress, writer, filmmaker and comedian Noël Wells is proud to present the first single taken from her forthcoming debut album titled “Sunrise.” Streaming now, “Sunrise” was the first song written for the upcoming full-length, composed on a guitar Wells picked up in an AirBnB she was staying at in Austin, TX while she was shooting a film.

- The Carpenters are getting the royal treatment. Carpenters With The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra is set for release worldwide December 7 by A&M/UMe. Featuring timeless hits and favorites, the album pairs Carpenters' original vocal and instrumental tracks with new orchestral arrangements from Carpenter, conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (RPO) at Abbey Road Studios. It is available now for preorder in digital, CD and 180-gram 2LP vinyl LP formats. The vinyl set will be released February 8.

- Tune in Friday, November 16 at 9:00 to watch the broadcast premiere of the concert special “Cassadee Pope” on AT&T* AUDIENCE Network via DIRECTV Ch 239. The show will also be available streaming on-demand through DIRECTV NOW and WatchTV.

Previewing Escape at Dannemora

At the dawn of twenty-four cable news station, we got inundated with these bizarre true crime stories about figure skaters who wacked their competition quite literal and women who cut off their husband’s manhood while they slept. A decade late, Nancy Grace rose to fame by spending whole episodes talking about missing hot white chicks. These cable networks would spend so much time on these types of stories it would become unwatchable at time.

But the thing is, I kind of miss those days because now it is ninety percent political news which is just a conservative nut job and a liberal windbag yelling at each other with us rational people in the middle wishing a pox on both their houses (which I think is the point because politicos have realized it is easier to get people not to vote than vote for you). Take the prison break in upstate New York a couple years back, a decade ago new it would have been wall to wall news for months, but in the summer of 2015 as the presidential campaigns were starting up, it barely made a blip and quickly faded from conscious after it was over.

Where the twenty-four news channels spend all their time reported on the latest stupid thing the president say, television and movies have picked up the slack on the retelling of the salacious news stories from OJ to the Menendez Brothers. Now that prison escape story from 2015 is getting its own true crime limited series on Showtime called Escape at Dannemore.

The show stars Benicio del Tora (Excess Baggage) and Paul Dano (Ruby Sparks) as the two prisoners who broke out of prison while Patricia Arquette (Little Nicky) is the prison work supervisor who helped them escape while David Morse (Treme) is another worker at the prison. Bonnie Hunt (Rain Man) also shows up as the Inspector’s General of New York.

I was a bit surprised at the format of the series. I assumed the manhunt would be the heart of the series, but that does not even begin until the final episode while the show starts in the winter of the escape that happened during the summer. Granted that final episode runs an hour and forty minutes (the show was originally announced as an eight episode miniseries so it seems like they just combined what was supposed to be the last two).

So really this comes off more as a six episode mini-series of how they escaped and then crammed the twenty-three day manhunt into a feature length movie. I do wonder if the show would have been better off evening the show between planning and escape because the planning episodes drag at times. And just when you start wondering if they ever revealed what exactly these two prisoners to land themselves in prison, we do get some graphic flashbacks showing us exactly what happened.

It was also a little disappointing that the whole show is not as weird as the trailer would have me believe. Sure Arquette and her on screen husband make interesting choices but must and other things get weird from time to time, but this is mostly a straight movie based on a weird story. Del Toro plays the suave inmate who paints portraits of Hilary Clinton (yeah, that is one of the weird parts) while Dano is the follower in the situation.

The musical choices are also interesting. Sure this is a period show, but that period was only three years ago. Apparently Uptown Funk was so invasive back in 2015 that it even got overplayed in prison. I was also weird to think we actually let Meghan Trainor to be a thing and this happened just a couple years ago.

Though the show takes it’s time in places, it does go to some interesting places. Part of the escape includes crawling through a pipe and you really feel the claustrophobic as one of the prisoner only goes a small distance. And when we get a long tracking shot from the jail cell to outside the prison, it is beautiful.

Escape at Dannemora airs Sundays at 10:00 on Showtime.

57 Channels and Only This Is On: 11/11/2018

Supergirl: Wait, The Real Eleanor did not die in the season premiere? I thought she got stabbed in the back of the head. Oh well, I guess she is dead now since her fiancé just bought a shirtload of guns. And why is Manchester Black, um, actually black now? Isn’t making a football hooligan black kind of racist? At least Russian Supergirl is back. That storyline seems much more interesting than the anti-alien one is. Granted Commie Supergirl will likely do something evil and everyone will think it is American Supergirl which will only enflame the racists old white dudes on the show.
Supergirl on iTunes.

Ray Donovan: Oh Bunchy, you have never been the smartest of the Donovan children (which says a lot) but murdering a prison guard to break out your father who is on death’s doorstep (though being a television show, Micky will undoubtedly make a full recovery) is the dumbest thing you have ever done. It is hard to imagine even Ray can fix that situation for you, but being a television show, he probably will. I guess that will involve a cross country trip to New York.

The Walking Dead: Wow, Rick got out of being gored by a metal rod pretty quickly. I guess the only way they could end an episode that the show heavily promoted as Rick’s last episode would be to not actually kill him off. Instead he was taken by the mysterious helicopter people whom will may never learn about on the show because the flash forward almost ten years. But it seems we may actually learn what was going on there with a big budget Rick movie. So will he die in that because I cannot image Rick would not do everything to get back to his daughter.
You can download The Walking Dead on iTunes.

The Last Ship: I joked last week they were killing off all the minority cast members in the final season, but c’mon, another one gone this week. But the Columbian dude killing all his generals because of Tarot card was wild even if they were planning a coup.
You can download The Last Ship on iTunes.

You: I have spent most of the season thinking the season would end with Joe killing Beck with the outside chance of her joining him and his murdering way. Now that she knows, it kind of has to end that way. Or maybe she gets shipped off to Rome with Candice. Is that really happen to Candice? On the cusp of being signed only to move to Europe and completely cut herself off from everyone, including not learning her brother died? Sounds fishy.
You can download You on iTunes.

Kidding: I knew the show was always dark, but I would not have ever guessed that is was slit Tara Lipinski’s throat dark.

Manifest: The little kid can speak Bulgarian now? I did not think the show could get much dumber. And why him? Is there were like eight people being experimenting on, why did no one else feel it? This show is so stupid.
You can download Manifest on iTunes.

The Challenge: Final Reckoning: Yeah, doing the math before you actually start plugging in the pegs seems pretty obvious. Should have been obvious for the stronger males, but they clearly got outsmarted. Unfortunately the other battle was just pure strength with the two bigger dudes winning in a blowout. But it will be interesting if the other teams can get Bananas out before the final, which looks may start next week.
You can download The Challenge: Final Reckoning on iTunes.

Survivor: David vs. Goliath: Kind of a bad strategy from Elizabeth to wait until Tribal to stir up things. I almost thought it worked though when people started to get up and talk which has not been a good sign in the past. Though now I wonder what there were talking about because no one seemed to change their vote.
You can download Survivor: David vs. Goliath on iTunes.

Superstore: Weird to see Sue Heck play someone who is not Sue Heck. Good thing there is a spin off in the works for her. But since her replacement urinated in the middle of the store, she may be hired back next week.
You can download Superstore on iTunes.

The Good Place: The Real Eleanor is back! I was wondering why she was in a blink and you miss it first flashback and then did not appear in any more (the actree did say she was in the animal fair but she was cut). But then she shocking popped up in the present after the demons figured out how to get to Earth without going through the Judge’s door. This should be interesting. Hopefully she last longer than Trevor.
The Good Place on iTunes.