The Good Wife Drinking Game

The Good Wife is a show about a lot of things, but it is mostly about how much adult life sucks and how much adults need alcohol to deal with adult life. What better way to celebrate this than to drink along with them? You can make like Kalinda and play with milk, but it sort of defeats the purpose and this show is more fun after throwing back a few anyway.

Take a drink...

1) Any time someone drinks. Obviously! 
2) Any time Alicia is a good wife.
3) Any time Alicia is not a good wife.
4) Any time someone begins a conversation with "I want you to work with me."
5) Any time someone ends a conversation with "Think about it." Take two extra drinks if this conversation began with "I want you to work with me."
6) Any time Kalinda says "I'm on it."
7) Any time a character uses the phrase "fishing expedition." Take an extra drink if it's a judge. 
8) Any time a character uses VidTrope or VidLook. This will often be accompanied by an extra drink for rule 27.
9) Any time a character uses FaceBranch or ChumHum.
10) Any time a character buttons his suit jacket as he stands up.
11) Any time an actor who appeared on The Wire shows up.
12) Any time an actor who went on to appear in The Walking Dead shows up.
13) Take four drinks if an actor who appeared on both The Wire AND The Walking Dead shows up, then ponder this show's amazing eye for acting talent.
14) Take three drinks if an episode begins with a decontextualized image, followed by a cut to black, then another image, then black, then the rest of the episode.
15) Any time the dubbing is bad. (In any over-the-shoulder dialogue shot, watch the mouth of the character with their back to the camera. TV production values ahoy!)
16) Any time someone uses the word "cynic" or any derivative thereof.
17) Any time two Lockhart-Gardner lawyers object at the same time. Take an extra drink for each lawyer past the second.
18) Any time the prosecution and defense simultaneously attempt to talk over the other.
19) Any time "in your opinion?"
20) Any time Michael J. Fox launches into his tardive dyskinesia spiel and you start to feel a little weird because you don't know if the show is turning his Parkinson's into a convenient character trait/running joke or if he's totally cool with it???
21) Any time the show takes a passive-aggressive shot at premium cable.
22) Any time Diane says something in a foreign language.
23) Any time the show demonstrates a questionable understanding of digital fiat currencies or the sites used to exchange them (MtGoX, Silkroad).
24) Any time you can tell the writers desperately wanted to use the word "fuck" or any of its derivatives but were unable to.
25) Any time there's a partner's meeting of paramount importance that doesn't actually resolve or accomplish anything.
26) Any time Alicia is made out to be a racist and gets comically flustered over it.
27) Any time Dave Buckley busts out some cheesy-ass original music. Take an extra drink for seminal hip-hop cut Thicky Trick.
28) Any time you hear THIS song:

(Why did the uploader use a picture from a random anime? Who knows, but of course that's the one I'm going to pick.)
29) Any time you feel a burning sense of injustice that House of Cards is one of the most popular programs on the air and The Good Wife is relegated to the CBS senior ghetto.
30) Any time Elsbeth Tascioni waltzes in to wizard a character out of a seemingly insurmountable plot obstacle and then vanishes, presumably for the rest of the season.

Finish your drink...
31) Any time Will and Diane share a tender dance and your heart melts <3

32) Any time the show kills a major character.

33) Any time Cary uses Dana Lodge's relationship with Kalinda as a quasi-lesbian proxy fuck.

34) Any time Kalinda has a meaningful plotline after season 3. 

Top of the Lake: A Devil's Heart

Top of the Lake is a mystery, in case you couldn't tell by that picture of Elisabeth Moss peering at some foul secret or something through the trees. Not that "mystery" tells us much anymore about narrative art, since any plot line by nature must have some mysterious elements in order to keep it compelling, but typically we associate it with a crime, suspects, motives, alibis...the whole collection of modular pieces that suit the needs of its storyteller's message. All of these elements are necessarily in service to unraveling or shading the central mystery, though a skilled craftsman can distract from this mechanical approach. Jane Campion's deft creative hand guarantees that Top of the Lake – equal parts rape-murder riddle, gender polemic, socioeconomic dissection, and character study – wobbles only minimally, despite the wealth of content on hand. A densely plotted six-hour miniseries brings outstanding attention to its swerves in storytelling, especially when they're as portentous as a bottle labeled “ROOFIES” or as inexplicable as a character being pardoned almost immediately for stabbing someone in a bar. Though consistently compelling, Top of the Lake is also noticeably sloppy, which ultimately diminishes the genre framework that Campion chooses to work in.

No Kingdom Lasts Forever: Enlightened

This kingdom. This amazing kingdom we have made. This monstrous kingdom. Its castles are magic. They are beautiful. They are built on dreams and iron and greed. They are inorganic and cannot sustain. No kingdom lasts forever. Even this will end. And life and Earth will reign again.

I try to avoid talking about myself when I write these posts, primarily because I'm here to highlight media that catches my attention, not the toiling of a disenfranchised quarter-lifer. Most of you are probably within a year's distance of completing college, one direction or the other, and you already know what our lives are like.

But Enlightened resonates with me. So much of the show's appeal to me is a byproduct of how frankly it addresses some serious issues with our world, on both interpersonal and international levels. For those unfamiliar with Enlightened, which is likely most of you given the show's criminally low viewership, it tells the story of disgraced corporate drone Amy Jellicoe. After a manic breakdown and a revelatory stint in a new-age rehab center, she attempts to enter the world once again, her rage and confusion layered over with a new insurmountable optimism. Goal Number One: overnight reform of her previous employers, rapacious megacorpoation Abaddon. Abaddon, we come to learn, is Evil Capitalism incarnate, destroying the environment and inciting violent civil unrest and producing toxic products with no concerns but for the bottom line. They take delight in crushing the little guys and buy off politicians. Anyone who isn't Amy can infer the tremendous challenge present in realizing this degree of change.

Maybe give Community a chance to breathe, guys?

Who's missing?

Salvo 1

Salvo 2

Salvo 3

Salvo 4

Look at all of these proclamations of a slow death! Community's season premiere was tonight, and to hear some of the big critical voices tell it, the episode was the first horseman of what would be a disappointingly average season. The once-adoring fanbase, based on 320 AVClub ratings, bid it a similarly dismissive B-. "History 101" was a rough sit sometimes, don't get me wrong, but seeing a sitcom falter to find a new take on necessarily predictable characters is something typical to its fourth season. Parks and Rec did a little; Archer is feeling it right now; 30 Rock sure as hell did, especially in its sixth. Community itself was stretched a bit toward the end of its third season.

Let's not damn the genre, but the medium: nearly every show sustains these hallmarks of decay, especially considering how the very act of running and producing a show is such a volatile task. In a way, avid watchers of the show had primed themselves for a potential disaster right out of the gate. Dan Harmon was gone, Chevy Chase was pissed, and there was little satisfaction when we learned that the premiere would be something as trendy and cheap as a Hunger Games parody episode. When you love something long-running like a television show, you owe it to yourself to be objective about the changes that accumulate around it; losing its distinct auteurial voice and the illusion of interpersonal harmony were two that just didn't register well with most people. Harmon was crucial to the show's vision, and without him the best I was hoping for was a muted (at least relative to Community standards), sweet bowing-out.

This was not muted, nor was it particularly sweet. It was oddly loud and those end-of-the-episode affirmations, powerful if sporadically graceless, fell heavily here. The laughs were there, but minimal. The Hunger Games stuff was dire as expected, and barely had anything to do with The Hunger Games in the first place. The subplots accomplished nothing. Bearing all of this in mind, it's important to remember is that the show's season premieres, as Sepinwall points out in that second article, have never been its strongest episodes. Each season takes such a radically different perceptual tack from the one that precedes it that they need these episodes as a sort of readjustment time. What aired tonight was a public examination of the show's anxieties, an entity fully aware of the impossible space of satisfaction it must fill. Abed's regressions into his own mind, spurred by anxiety or disunity in the real universe, reveal a similarly pitched but entirely artificial multi-camera sitcom. We see the sort of show that Community was always concerned about becoming, a gradual distillation of something much smarter, and its recognition that a sitcom must broaden in order to become more commercially viable should shade the initial flatness as ground to grow upon. There are elements of an arc here, a multileveled examination of the necessity of change - hell, the episode is called History 101, begging for an understanding of the genre's failings - and that's enough for me to not write the season off as some thoughtless back 13 of a dying sitcom.

I understand the desire to take this attitude toward the show; it isn't a particularly flattering one, but it's common to just about everyone. Those who are able to systematically demonstrate why what they once loved isn't good anymore feel they are proving, simultaneously, both their love for the original show and their disdain for the assumed breach of principle that this new and inferior version has brought about. "Kill your idols," in this critical climate, has become a proving ground. Art evolves through criticism, but not through melodramatic proclamations of a show's death upon its first episode of a season.

Harmon is gone but not forgotten. Community still knows this. Let it have its say.

Sneaky July update: Season 4 was essentially a disaster, start to finish. Some cute moments, a few nice ideas, and exactly one big laugh. The rest is poorly-made, exsanguinated comedy flotsam. So you can disregard this entire entreaty, I suppose.

"You Wanna Suck a Brontosaurus Dick?", or How is American Horror Story Good?

There's a huge difference between horror comedy and horror camp. The names alone should leave this division apparent; it's all a matter of intention. As a positive example of the former category, let's look at Drag Me to Hell, by far the genre's most successful entry in the past few years. It's goofy, but it's also sad and sinister, with a really cruel perspective on karma informing the story. The comedy works because it supports the absurdity of the horror. Horror camp, meanwhile, is often produced as a result of singular horror elements that are not executed well enough but are treated as if they are. Susan Sontag's Notes on Camp delineates the relationship between two oppositional creative impulses in a camp work: "the thing as meaning something, anything, and the thing as pure artifice." And as Sontag says, "intending to be campy is [probably] always harmful" - look at the repetitive, tedious deluge of Z-grade failures produced by SyFy, who are content to throw us paint-by-numbers shittiness and have the temerity to pass it off as a good time. Troll 2 is an awesome example of unintentional camp, a prime example of why bad horror movies brought us so joy in the first place and why intentionally bad horror movies are usually just desperate in comparison. It clearly meant something to the people creating it, but their complete lack of talent rendered it "artificial" to anyone watching.

Breaking Bad: Is There a Right or Wrong Way to Watch Something?

Spoilers for the most recent episode.

After one year spent in the universe of Breaking Bad, who thinks that Walter White has become the most awful person on the show?

Vince Gilligan: "As unpleasant as some of these tasks he has taken upon himself have been, there is something else that drives him. And that is this need for power. This need for feeling potent and feeling important in this little world he lives in.  And to that end, he does what he would probably describe as a lot of unpleasant things. He rationalizes his behavior, and says that what he does, he does for his family. But, in fact, he does what he does for self-aggrandizement, to make himself feel important. So as the killings progress, they take more out of Jessie [sic]. They seem to bother Walt less and less."

Bryan Cranston: "Cranston adds that he understands some of the character's impulse, but only to a point. 'It's not so hard for me as a man to get into that survival instinct, or protecting your family,' he says. 'Most men take on that responsibility. But the thing that is difficult for me to accept is his whole ego. His hubris and greed and avaricious nature are foreign to me. I have to allow myself to go there and have him become the peacock that he is.'"

Jonathan Banks: "I don't think he loves Jesse at all. You're talking about Walt? I don't think Walt cares for anybody...A sociopath feels no guilt in their actions and what they do...I think he's been a sociopath since the time in the gym when he justifies the airplane crash - with 'Well, there have been worse crashes. More people have died.' That is the classic sociopath."

Aaron Paul: "I think he's definitely taking us down...and he just knows how to manipulate everybody. He has everybody on his little strings...he just wants to be the king. That's it. It's just a power trip."

The critical pulse: He's a controlling megalomaniac, a monster underneath a regular suburban dad mask, relentlessly badgering and mocking, someone Gilligan is unbelievably committed to [making us] hate, and a mix of arrogance, greed, intellectual vanity, and male insecurity that drove him to kill the old Walt and replace him with Heisenberg.

Who doesn't? I dunno, maybe take a quick trip through Twitter and see who's least popular there? (Or skim this poorly argued Slate article, which totally misreads the last four episodes.)

I'm framing this discussion through Skyler because she acts as a mirror to what Walt's plan was from the very first episode. He started cooking meth as a way to provide for his family after his death; in his eyes, it was a market he could easily assimilate into and slip out of once he'd pulled down enough money to allow them a comfortable post-Walt life. Skyler is the only person in the cast who is able to put this into perspective, since Walt Jr. remains obliviously enthralled by his father and Holly is a dumb baby. She is the only character who takes Breaking Bad back to its first seed, morally questionable action in defense of loved ones, and her presence serves as a painful reminder of how far Walt has strayed from this goal. She has her own goal now, explicitly announced - she's taking morally questionable action in defense of loved ones - and that puts her in direct opposition to Walt. The most recent episode portrays her as her childrens' most staunch defender, which earns her Walt's fury and scorn and promises of greater trouble down the line. How odd.

Whoever names the episode titles for Confessions: Animal Hoarding deserves a medal

I think Chihuahua Hell is probably my favorite, but the finality of She Gets My Goat cannot be ignored.

The Dark Expressions of Breaking Bad

Spoilers for the most recent episode.

I've wanted to write about Breaking Bad for a while now, an urge reinvigorated by its excellent fifth season debut (made even more encouraging by its strongest ratings ever, so Dish Network can suck it). Whenever I rack my brain for something about it to focus on, I always return to the imagery: potent, subtle, dark, occasionally surreal. The visuals of the show exemplify its unique qualities, serving as the grim scaffolding upon which its writing and acting and sound rest. This is a collection of scenes from last night's episode that I think drive home what makes this show so special.

A quiet call-back to happier times. Walt is teetering constantly on the verge of personal apocalypse, so it comes as a surprise that this isn't a secret signal or mushroom cloud but instead a way to remind himself that it's his 52nd birthday. (This comparison could also be read as Walt emancipating himself from Skyler's nasty-ass veggie bacon. Walt Jr. says it smells like Band-Aids, but it looks like dog jerky and that's all I need to know.)

Toasting himself in the mirror with a glass of scotch while watching over his daughter. He's just secured a major victory, but who is there to celebrate with anymore? This is the most paternal, warm thing we see from Walt this episode, a phantom of the loving father he was a year ago - and it's punctuated by his immediate realization that oops, he's still in deep shit. No rest for the wicked.

Hank Schrader is a beast. Ambling through the burned-out meth factory, cane in hand, we know without so much as a word that he's going to figure this out before anyone else does. Much like Walt, he has undergone significant personal change by means of traumatic event after traumatic event. Once an embarrassing caricature of threatened masculinity, he's now an astute DEA superstar. All it took was the constant derision of his colleagues, a look into the brutality of the cartels, repeated gunshot wounds, paralysis, and Marie giving him a handjob in the hospital.

"C'mon, c'mon. Be nice. Let Gwendolyn in there. Gwendolyn don't eat, nobody eats."

Vince Gilligan has this odd way of making New Mexico look like an alien planet. The show and its characters are often locked into interchangeable suburban monotony, but shots like this give character to the stage for all this drama. It isn't Weeds or Law and Order, but something far more harsh, barren.

This is a nauseating follow-up to one of Season Four's most darkly comic images: Ted Beneke sliding headfirst into a counter and, presumably, dying. Except he didn't. Breaking Bad has an unmatched penchant for deriving horror from humor and humor from horror. The first exchange is demonstrated by the reveal of a completely ruined man, stuffed with metal and hooked up to machines...


...and the second exchange, by this sequence. You get about two seconds to laugh at this ridiculous turn of events before you realize how screwed Walt and Jesse actually are. The show derives absurdity from misfortune regularly, to the point where control simply becomes an illusion. The life of each character is ruled by chaos, a reality that none of them can confront. What do you think made Walt laugh so hard at the end of Crawl Space?

The superimposition of dark secrets on happy exteriors. This probably drives the "IS GUS GAY?!" question home a bit too hard, but it serves a more important purpose. Like Walt, Gustavo Fring was a man toying with forces that proved far greater than himself, and they devoured both him and the things that he cared for. It's a microcosmic representation of truths that Walt has spent five seasons learning the hard way.


And this isn't from last episode, but just because I love it, here's the opening to Fly from the fourth season.

NBC's Comedy Dilemma (or the untold dangers of six seasons and a movie)

For most television networks, having a robust slate of high quality comedy programming would be a blessing. Not NBC. No, for them, having The Office and 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation and Community all on at the same time is scary and confusing. "Too much of a good thing" definitely holds true if idiots are running your network and don't understand how promotion, the Internet's effect on television viewership, or the changing ratings landscape function.

I'm not equipped to speak on the two former, more venerable shows. I've seen about six episodes of each, which I generally enjoyed, and looking at their ratings they seem to have been the beneficiaries of good, long (if not dwindling) runs. Parks and Rec and Community, however, have always struggled. Fans love them dearly, but they don't turn the numbers a major network needs, with Community's third season finale pulling a dismal 2.5 million viewers and P&R generally sitting at 3.5 million. Strategies like repeated time-slot shifting and putting both on hiatus didn't work. Faced with these two critically successful but publicly ignored programs, the network made a call that angered many: Parks and Rec got a full fifth season, while Community got a 13-episode order, conceivably its last, and simultaneously lost showrunner Dan Harmon. 

Reduced to sheer programming tactics, the decision makes sense. P&R has been on for a season longer and is still posting stronger numbers, and I can only imagine that Amy Poehler is much easier to work with than the notoriously embattled Harmon. As a huge fan of Community, all this didn't make the news any easier for me, nor would it have for any of the show's other ardent supporters. Having just finished each show's most recent season, however, I find myself aligning unexpectedly with the message this decision sends out. Creatively, it just feels right - well, maybe not NBC's unceremonious ejection of Harmon, but letting the show come to a close after an abbreviated last gasp. As recently as two months ago, I would never have expected to champion P&R as a series with continued momentum while decrying Community as long in the tooth; consider this my critical attempt at coming to grips with some unforeseen changes in my television life. (Possibly one of the most pathetic sentences I've ever typed, for the record.)

The Walking Dead Cast Survival Index

(Spoilers for both seasons.)

Rick
 + Has gotten very good at pointing that revolver in the exact same position every single time
+ Special policeman gun training
+ Some degree of common sense, which is I guess what allowed him to become king of all these yuk-yuks in the first place
+ Will go through hell and back looking for/saving/protecting your lost/dying/beleaguered ass
+ Leadership capabilities. Supposedly
- Leadership capabilities more or less amount to him looking sad or calling in support from a different, more persuasive cast member until he gets his way
- Has to lead this group around
- Is married to Lori
Value: 7. Definitely not who I'd put in charge of a bedraggled handful of humans staring down their own mortality, but it's not like this group has much of a choice.

Futile Attempt at Television Logging

Going Strong

Mad Men (S7, completed): Unfailingly rich in every way: production design, characterization, employment of time as catalyst for dramatic irony. Never puts a foot out of line. Cutting the final stretch into halves feels wrong, though. This season has felt a little bit cartoonish. Touching finale.
The Good Wife (S5, completed): Constant and surprising idiosyncrasy; doesn't shy away from complexity; fun cast, juicy melodrama, organic and intelligently charted growth of legal-political biomes. Breaking away from its case-of-the-week structure has done it a world of good. Unafraid of bold dramatic choices. Kind of weird about its guest characters, though.
Hannibal (S2, completed): Lushly filmed, wonderfully written, and gruesome, its existence on network television seems like an impossibility except that it's still a police procedural. Refreshing attention to character. Curious about Mikkelsen's ability to nail inevitable character shifts. Constant metaphor and subtext gets a bit exhausting. Hoping that it will take a more appealing, less rigid shape as serialization develops, although the season finale does not point to this.
Black Mirror (S2, completed): Charlie Brooker may not be the most subtle dramatist, but what else on television cuts to the diseased heart of social technology with this kind of force? Episodes vary in quality, as is common with compartmentalized British television, but all are at least engaging. 1x2, 1x3, 2x1 standouts for me.

Still Standin' 

Girls (S3, completed): Season 2 was less consistent than 1 but had some remarkable highs. 3 has been better than ever. Unafraid of examining the really dark, awful truths about these people, and then mining that for pathos and humor in equal measure. More thoughtful than most comedic television and yet chronically misunderstood for it. Show's grasp of failure and privilege seems a little shaky.
The Americans (S2, completed): Very uneasy about the show's first-episode use of rape as character backstory (see also: Bates Motel). Dialogue is cheesy more often than not, especially in the first season, but the actors work overtime to sell it. The contrast of espionage politics with sex and fidelity works surprisingly well. Annet Mahendru is a major find.
True Detective (S1, completed): Great performances; Fukunaga bringing his compositional A game. Capable of stunning evocative power. Often showboaty to diminishing returns, stranded in ceaseless monologuing and samey tone. Peaks in the middle, before you realize how reliant the series is on graceless exposition.
Louie (S4): Structural looseness and surrealist flourishes pay off handsomely. Occasionally an episode will fail to land, but these are forgotten easily enough. Has been awfully didactic lately; C.K. is at his dadly best with his daughters, not the audience.
Community (S5, completed): After a season 4 that felt his absence miserably, Harmon is back and on his game. Show feels more lived-in, complex as a result of its troubles. Postmodernism's bag of tricks is definitely wearing thin, though. Difficult to really feel passionate about these days. Bad season finale that tastes of sour grapes, as if begging NBC to cancel it.
Bates Motel (S2, completed): Picks up on all of the subtleties that so enliven Psycho (book and movie) - questions of class, Oedipal neurosis, forbidden knowledge, desperate survival, etc. Shaky S1 finale, disorganized structure, iffy use of sexual violence. Has its own sneaky brand of humor that grows on you by the halfway point, and Vera Farmiga is amazing. Season 2 has really brought it. A curious treat, though not for everyone.
Arrested Development (S4, completed): Given the wide berth of structural freedom that being on Netflix affords him, you'd think that Mitch Hurwitz could have put together something a little less frenetic for his fourth outing. Poorly edited and sort of lopsided in terms of laughs per episode. Still, quite funny, an impressive feat after such a long absence.
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (S9, completed): Remarkable longevity; the show is not and will never again be what it once was, and the truly memorable episodes are probably behind us, but it is at least reliably amusing. I'll be with the gang through the twenty seasons FX surely forces them to make.
Orphan Black (S2, completed): Really silly science fiction pulp, emulating Lost's scattershot style of mystery building. Tatiana Maslany is fantastic. I tend to forget that all of these radically different women are portrayed by the same actress, though I wish they'd do something with her eyebrows. Characters made more compelling through show's ideas about science and the family. Sexy, unpretentious junk food television given value by its lead performance.
Archer (S5, completed): A breath of fresh air in some ways; ISIS hijinks were definitely getting stale by the end of season 4. As in-jokey as ever, even by sitcom standards. Lana's pregnancy/birth gets a resounding "eh" from me.
Parks and Recreation (S6, completed): Occasionally has strong episodes, but is clearly losing steam. Staring the sitcom predictability kiss of death right in the eye. Cast changes may help to shake things up, but lessening a character pool without adequate replacements seems perilous. NBC made a good choice in calling it off after Season 7.
Orange is the New Black (S2, completed): Broad, overly permissive structure (where are the guards? why are the inmates allowed so many potentially lethal tools?) stretches credibility of many of the plotlines. It's a necessary concession for Kohan's narrative, but this smoothness does a disservice to the real-life gravitas of these issues. Visual language often quite obvious. Piper has improved, mostly thanks to Schilling.
The Legend of Korra (S2, completed): Clearly suffering from the growing pains of accommodating two vastly different demographics: out-of-place humor and oversimplified plotting clash with mature themes and interesting sociopolitical ideas. Animation and voice acting are awfully ropey. Giving the main character amnesia halfway through the second season feels like a huge "we fucked up" button press. Squandering its potential.
Helix (S1, completed): Looks great; bursting with atmosphere. So-so acting and science that seems questionable even to a layperson. Camp flourishes are funny, but never really cohere with the main thrust of the season. Questionable ending. Good to see SyFy attempting at least marginal complexity after the Shark Ages, though.
Sherlock (S3, completed): Quite exciting in starts, but stylistically shallow and unrelentingly clever. Not here for Moffatt's queer-baiting. Remains fun, usually, to work through the puzzles, and Mary is a surprisingly full addition to the cast.
Parenthood (S2): Cheesy as hell, mighty formulaic, but easy to like. One episode is a good palate cleanser if you've been watching a bunch of heavy shit. Characters are usually pretty irritating but I guess that's the point.

On the Bubble

American Horror Story: Coven (S3, completed): Hit a slump after the hiatus (and the insultingly bad episode before) that it never really recovered from. Ryan Murphy's trademark sloppiness overwhelms the now-expected visual and narrative insanity. Terrible finale. Fun moments, delicious gallery of actresses, residual style worth tuning in for.
The Walking Dead (S4, completed): Refusal to adhere to its already shaky internal logic in the name of flashy but unoriginal set pieces is really killing it. Characterization is middling as always, but episodic crisis structure sometimes yields fruit. Hard to stay invested when constant death is so integral to the show's calculus. Often dreary when it thinks it's powerful.
House of Cards (S2, completed): Flabby writing, sloppy characterization, and a scenery-chewing, unbelievable performance from Spacey. Constantly moving its huge cast like chess pieces from subplot to subplot, trying desperately to maintain dramatic rhythm. Baroque politics and grim oddity engage fitfully. Heinous product placement an ill omen for this model of content creation/distribution. All the sheen of a prestige drama, little actual insight or originality.

Stalled/Dropped

The Following (S1): Uh, I don't know how far I'll get in this one. It is truly as ugly and mean as the reviews claim, and the thought of sitting through nine more hours of it for light schadenfreude makes my toes curl. At least Kevin Williamson still knows how to cast cute boys.
Game of Thrones (S1, completed): Not to be that guy, but after witnessing just one season's worth of adaptation decay with double the density on the way, I don't think this will live up to any expectations I set for it. Stimulating, lavish production values, but its tendency to wallow in (and embellish on) the garish details is more easily ignored when reading.
Fringe (S2): I am having a hard time getting past the bad dialogue. Peter, in particular, is the worst. Roberto Orci truther paranoia is fun to bask in, though, and if you can get past the sledgehammer exposition written for all the FOX watchers then the stories are pretty fun sci-fi standalones.
The Newsroom (S1, 10/13): Nope.
The Bridge (S1, 5/13): Just your run-of-the-mill dark serialized drama with a hook - Aspergers, as it were, furthering the troubling trend of mental disabilities as superpowers. Nothing to see here. Diane Kruger is a lousy choice for this role; too bad for Demian Bichir, who is great.
Homeland (S3, completed): Not a single character escaped this season unscathed. Whether desperately unlikeable (Carrie, Saul), underwritten (Peter, Brody, Dar Adal), or never good to begin with (Dana, Jessica), each one wore me down enough to give up. Show has always been potboilery, but never so sloppy.
Misfits (S2, completed): Haven't watched an episode of this in four years, but apparently it only gets worse after this point, so why bother now?
True Blood (S3, completed): Way too much going on and yet way too little deviance from its fuck-marry-kill carousel. The first two seasons are definitely worth catching, though.