Logging

TV:  Homeland S.2 and The Walking Dead S.3

These shows are absolutely bonkers.  Homeland is a such a curious show.  There are times when it is incredibly good and arguably the best show on TV and two scenes later will be soap opera quality.  Very strange.  I feel like a total idiot watching it at moments and yet, probably look forward more to it to any other show on TV other than Game of Thrones.

The Walking Dead is easily the most holy-fucking-shit of all the holy-fucking-shit TV shows on right now.  In fact, this little era of TV, post-Wire, post-Sopranos, should already be termed "the holy fucking shit era."  We are experiencing the hangover period for a great leap forward in TV-drama quality - the whole Six Feet Under, the Wire, Sopranos era is over - and in the wake of it we have the lesser quality offshoots:  Mad Men, Boardwalk Empire, Treme and then the holy-fucking-shit shows:  Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, True Blood, Walking Dead, Girls, Homeland...I must be missing some others as well.  These shows are nuts.  They are like the insane crazy younger brother of the star athlete in high school who could never imagine measuring up to the older brother, so he doesn't even bother and carves out his own identity by being totally bonkers.  Half of them involve eating people or cannibalism, the "grounded" ones include a girl hooking up during a miscarriage, a terrorist running for vice president, and a high school chem teacher becoming a drug lord and poisoning little kids.

But The Walking Dead is the king of all this madness.  I personally like Game of Thrones the best of these shows, and superficially, it would appear to be the more bonkers show with the gratuitous sex and dragons.  But Walking Dead...I don't even know where to begin (and there will be spoilers in this)...maybe with the amateur c-section being performed while under attack by zombies.  Who thought of this?  How did this get through?  I thought there was Standards and Practices and you know, studio executives who wrestled with what middle america wants to see and were the "suits" making sure the creatives didn't get too offensive.  Half the stuff shown on Walking Dead I cannot believe makes it onto television.  One entire storyline of this last episode was a dude going crazy and bashing zombies heads with an axe and then finding the zombie who ate his wife and killing it and trying to cut it's stomach open.  I am not making this up.

There is an entire side show to The Walking Dead called "The Talking Dead" that is simply devoted to talking about the show.   Because, I forgot to mention, The Walking Dead is like the most popular basic cable show to ever be on TV.  I'm pretty sure it is more popular than anything on NBC.

What the hell is going on?