CliqueClack

How Survivor stumbled into a perfect season… so far

Survivor has been around for a long time — from a television perspective anyway — over ten years and twenty-five seasons. It rose to fame as one of the first “good” reality game shows that many people watched and even won a few awards. There have been good seasons (Samoa), bad seasons (Gabon), and great seasons (Heroes vs Villains). I’ve seen most of them, although I didn’t watch much between seasons three and twelve because season three was so boring. But after thirteen, I haven’t missed an episode. So that makes me a “sort of expert.”

So why has this season been so phenomenal?

Archetypes That Want to Win

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Person of Interest brings Valentine’s Day to Christmas

The Reese and Carter match up is like the crush you have on the high school quarterback. Sure, you’re the tiny girl with a ponytail and too-short bangs. Sure, he’s the 6-foot goliath with the stone-blue eyes and the fox-cold smile, but everytime you’re together he smiles at you and you think it’s going to happen. Then he runs off with his genius best friend or the leggy prom queen and you’re back to square one. This week, Person of Interest didn’t just return to the old Reese and Carter relationship, it made love this week’s theme by relaying Finch’s courtship of his fiancée, introducing new love interests for Fusco and Carter and reconciling a love-ruptured-turned-assassins couple.While this week didn’t incorporate the Machine’s backstory, it still felt full, warm and fun due to the three overlapping couple stories. Although not much happened in the way of overarching story development, this is my favorite episode so far.

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CBS orders Stephen King’s Under the Dome to series

Fans of Stephen King – and Steven Spielberg – have reason to celebrate today, as CBS announced a straight-to-series order of a show based on King’s novel Under the Dome. CBS’s studio will produce in association with Spielberg’s Amblin Television. While the project had been in development at Showtime for some time now, it has shifted over to sister-network CBS and is being prepared for 13 episode run this upcoming summer.

For those of you not familiar with the novel, Under the Dome chronicles the story of a small town in Maine suddenly and mysteriously cut off from the outside world by an invisible yet deadly dome-shaped force field. Fully enclosed and separated from external help and “influence,” the already dicey small town politics take a turn for the worse when the sheriff dies investigating the phenomenon. UtD is an interesting piece of work by King, as it includes an expansive cast – not dissimilar to The Stand – but manages to create a microcosm of what a smaller post-apocalyptic society could look like.

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Love Girl Scout Cookies? Don’t buy them! Bake them!

The closing of Hostess re-awakened my nostalgia for childhood treats. On a whim, I took out Sandra Lee’s Bake Sale Cookbook, expecting to find recipes I could easily recreate. While reading the “Cookies, Cookies” section I encountered three recipes: “Minty Thins,” “Toasted Coconut Gooey Goodies” and “PB and Chocolate Chewies” which reminded me of the “Thin Mints,” “Samoa” and “Tagalong” cookies I sold as a Girl Scout. I gasped. While part of me loved the nostalgic recipes, part of me wondered how Sandra Lee managed to recreate them without a troop of green-garbed elementary school girls parachuting into her backyard to torture her for daring to recreate the cookies that comprised their annual fundraiser. I never knew what happened to the money I raised. All I knew is I needed to sell at least two boxes while my mother guilt-tripped her friends into buying the rest.

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Arrow knocks it out of the park with Huntress

Arrow continues to develop and deliver as a TV show. Each week, the writers introduce flaws in Ollie’s plans and present him with characters that mirror him in a bizarro way. This week, throwing Huntress into the fray continued Ollie’s development. Out of the bat-family, I always liked bathing-suit-cut-out Huntress the least. But, as a character, she contained an irrational rage. However, because Huntress was essentially bat-candy and Katie Cassidy played Laurel as the sassy girl next door, I had pretty low expectations for the character. Luckily, Jessica De Gouw hit it out of the ballpark, without ever playing the character as the sad little pretty girl. De Gouw’s portrayal hit every single angle that ever existed in the character from rage to sadness to an incredible loss without playing to a pre-established template. Seriously, when she cried in the end over her fiancee while whispering no one could know her secret, I saw the true Huntress that lurked in the comics, but most artists buried by focusing more on her body over her character.

All I have to say to the Arrow writers, producers and directors is … damn! You guys are good!

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What happened to Gossip Girl?

Watching Gossip Girl has been a guilty pleasure of mine for some time now. I mean, let’s face it: a thirtysomething single hetrosexual male probably isn’t their demographic. Despite that disconnect, I’ve watched every episode covering the exploits of our (my?) favorite Upper-East-Siders for five solid seasons now. Unfortunately, in the show’s sixth and final season, something has happened, and what we’re seeing on the screen is just plain bad.

I get that there are many that would argue that the show has been “plain bad” for a while now – like since the first episode. The show has been defined by unbelievable plot twists and turns – and not “unbelievable” in a good way – and has seen characters flipping personalities at the drop of a hat. But I’m not a fan because of the show’s well-thought out season long arcs, but because I like the way the dialogue is written. To call it smart and rapid-fire and compare it to Aaron Sorkin or Amy Sherman-Palladino is probably a stretch — and insult an insult to those wordsmiths — but the character’s of Gossip Girl have always had a very unique way of speaking. Plus, the show is as full of pop-culture (and New York City) references as much of what Sorkin and AS-P have written in the past. I appreciate a show that makes you think about what the characters are actually saying.

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Does Patrick Jane’s list point out Red John?

You may recall that I’m a huge supporter of the idea that Patrick Jane himself is Red John. I won’t get into that again here, because it can be a long conversation that sometimes upsets a lot of long-time Mentalist fans. Something else I’d gotten into at one time was my second-favorite theory about Red John: that he is forensics investigator Brett Partridge. Now, as you can see from the above image, it seems Partridge is on Patrick Jane’s radar as a person he’s met in the past (more specifically, someone he apparently shook hands with, as Lorelei Martins seemingly let slip out last week).

So, as I usually do when the thought of Brett Partridge coming back to the show comes up, I contacted actor Jack Plotnick for comment. Here’s how the basic back-and-forth went:

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CBS to reboot Beverly Hills Cop — Is television running out of ideas?

It’s been decades since television was first created which naturally means that there’s been a colorful plethora of TV programs — some inspired and some not so much. Lately I’ve been wondering whether or not screenwriters have been running out of ideas. It looks like reboots and re-workings of old TV shows have been the norm, and while there have been a share of tragic flops — Bionic Woman, Knight Rider, V, Charlie’s Angels – there have also been successes — TNT’s Dallas, and, well, I can’t really think of any others, but that’s beside the point. Now it seems that CBS is set to reboot one of the most successful film franchises of the ’80s — Beverly Hills Cop.

Okay, now I’m pretty sure this news is going to have one of two dissimilar effects. Either people are going to become deeply intrigued by this pristine development … or they may sigh and curse the network executives at CBS for even entertaining the idea. I think I’m in the middle. Beverly Hills Cop is arguably one of the films that helped make Golden Globe winning comedian Eddie Murphy a star. While the first film was actually pretty decent, the sequels left a lot to be desired. Still, it was a profitable franchise, and CBS is hoping that they can turn it into an entertaining series. I’m intrigued.

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Why did I stop eating Twinkies?

Exactly three years ago, I guest-clacked for CliqueClack on how to make fried Twinkies. In August 2009, a friend and I attended a local state fair. We spent the entire day searching for that unique local fair delicacy, the fried Twinkie. Along the way, we encountered fried candy bars and deep fried onions, but we never found that magical unicorn, the deep fried Twinkie. Of course, with Hostess potentially going out of business, the deep fried Twinkie becomes even rarer. What happens to the county fairs that made an entire enterprise based on frying the American icon? More importantly, what will parents put in their kids’ lunchboxes along with a fruit juice box, bologna sandwich and a piece of fruit? Will kids have that grocery store elated feeling of picking out their own weekly dessert along with their weekly lunch meat? The possible disbanding of an American icon reminds me of my own Twinkies tradition, my slow growth away from the treat and the recipes I found to help recreate my beloved snacks.

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M. Night Shyamalan talks about Signs

M. Night Shyamalan is exactly who you’d expect: an incredibly down-to-earth, self-aware director. During his half hour Q & A after the 10th anniversary screening of Signs at the Philly Film Festival, he described his experiences with Mel Gibson, his inability to recgonize an adolescent Abigal Breslin and his love of his craft. Note: Because I can’t keep typing Shyamalan for the next two pages, I’m going to call him what everyone else calls him — Night. Let’s be honest that is such a cool name for a horror/thriller film director/writer.

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