Don't cut me in front of my kids

I wasn't in too much of a hurry to watch the final three episodes of Treme, because once it was over, it was over forever, and I knew I would miss seeing an attempt to render real Americans on tv rather than just and idealised version of the most well-off representatives of the population as seen in... well, in every damn tv show from America that I watch.
I recall watching the first couple of episodes of the painful Skins adaptation and running into a wall quite early when the show revealed itself as set in Baltimore, and after seeing the Wire I just didn't recognise this place at all and it might as well have been set on the Moon.  This was my main bone of contention with it, though there were other problems it had - particularly that it was a show for cunts - and the same problem followed me to my viewing of Vampire Diaries spin-off The Originals, which was set in a parallel reality version of New Orleans that I didn't recognise from watching Treme for the last few years, not the city itself, the culture on display, the very, very Caucasian-looking cast, and, of course, there was also that it was a show for cunts.

Despite it ruining lesser television for me and making me an even bigger and more obnoxious snob, I will miss Treme.  I like that it was a show unafraid to show a different aspect of American culture than we're used to seeing, as we sure don't need another show about the New York Irish or Italians, valid though their cultural identity is despite many attempts to ridicule the notion of Guidos as all being mafiosas and Irish Americans all "plastic paddies" or whatever - that is their culture and I believe it's real and a big part of their identity and who they are - but enough with whitey on tv, already, he's had a great run and is not exactly under-represented.
I don't know what the next Treme is going to be, but I want it already.

The last time I checked my watch, it still said America

Watching: Charlie's Angels (2011) 1.4. Hey, did you know that Charlie's Angels is great? This is an actual exchange from the last episode I watched that takes place between Bosley (who is a buff playboy super-hacker and globe-trotting womaniser) and Lois Lane from Smallville (who is a dreadful actress):

Lois Lane: The last time I saw you, you were a hacker playboy who spent his days penetrating the firewalls of European banks, and spent his nights doing the same to European women.
Bosley: Until I met you.
Lois Lane: We did have a good time, didn't we?
Bosley: A blast... until I discovered you were CIA.

And then it goes and becomes even more awesome by being a plot about rapes, which I liked because other shows would get sidetracked with being goofy and trying to entertain their audience without being a total downer, but Charlie's Angels brings a bit of heavy realism to the table, and in a show about bikini-clad private detectives that is exactly what has thus far been missing and exactly what I and many others clearly want to see in a programme about multi-ethnic demographic friendly casts who infiltrate fashion shows and sea cruises for plot-related reasons that also require white tank tops to be worn when it's raining.
The plot sees evil, corrupt Cubans - not communists, mark you, but the actual Cuban people as a whole who are to a man portrayed as corrupt, on the take, totally okay with torture and counting the days until Castro dies so the Americans can come and give them money - are framing American tourists for crimes and then locking them up in prison where they're farmed out as prostitutes by an American businessman. Now... a lesser show would probably address why these girls were being framed and sent to prison in stitch-ups since their whereabouts are unknown to their families and the American authorities because, you know, if you can make them disappear, you don't actually have to go to the bother of framing them for anything, and likewise, a lesser show would have someone point out that actual prostitutes would be much cheaper, easier to organise, willing, and unlikely to kung-fu your guards and shoot you to death, and that is why other shows don't last a season - they're so hung up on signposting every bit of illogic and tripping over themselves to write in a rebuttal or an explanation that makes sense that they forget to be Charlie's Angels. Charlie's Angels makes no such mistakes, I assure you! It never loses sight of being Charlie's Angels and it never forgets exactly what it thinks of its audience - that Charlie's Angels' audience want mentally traumatised women - in this instance practically a child - screaming and twitching onscreen as they flinch at the touch of their sneering rapists, but also wearing sexy dresses as this goes on.
When all the women in sexy prostitute costumes were fleeing - one shot during this actually framed by an actress' legs - I remember thinking when they make a game of this, they should absolutely call this level 'The Great Rape Escape', because I was very disappointed that this was not the title of the episode.
And surprised.

I also watched the melodramatic and overblown American Horror Story, which is daftly entertaining in its own way, though it doesn't feature rapes so I'm on the fence about the makers' commitment. A couple undergoing a difficult patch in their marriage blah blah new house, blah, history of violent events, blah, angry teen daughter, blah blah, jump cuts and flashbacks, blah. It is unsubtle like you would not believe, and I think that's a big part of the charm so far (two episodes in), though where once the season-long story arc was once greeted as an innovation in television storytelling, nowadays all I can think of is shite like Terra Nova and how it's a risk investing in a show as a viewer of late because there's no guarantee that you'll ever see a payoff to the threads sewn throughout the early episodes of even really good shows. This is still worth a gander, I'd say, as it entertains without being completely unpleasant, try though it might to be the latter.

Do you think you could ever be a husband to her? I mean, what can you offer her? Companionship? Love? A man’s love?

Watching: Blake's 7 - only thirty years too late and the first thing I ever knew of this series was when a tv show about old sci-fi mentioned it as SPOILER!! "the show where they all got killed in the final episode", but hey - I get there in the end. It's all right, as it happens. Money was clearly spent on some set dressing and location shooting/costumes, yet quite a great deal more money was clearly saved on special effects. There's also a terrible habit of just throwing exposition at the viewer, like characters sitting on a sofa explaining their evil plans for civilization that hinge on censorship, or Blake sitting Avon down to watch a power point presentation of what happened in the previous episode even though Avon was not only present during events but central to them - but all told, it's okay fluff.
Clash of the Titans - this here remake movie is stupid. Really, it's utterly, utterly stupid and composed of nothing but sequences where things jump towards the camera, which as a visual gets old if you aren't watching in a 3D cinema, which I imagine the vast majority of the audience won't be. I can watch any old shit, mind, so this didn't really offend me and I quite enjoyed it, but it's a ham-fisted, sometimes visually incomprehensible beast. Cool Kraken, all the same.
Steel Dawn - a Patrick Swayze favorite round these parts, it's basically a post-apocalyptic kung-fu version of Shane. Dumb, no-budget, and acted by a bunch of trees, but still likably daft and a good reminder of those heady days when 'low-budget' didn't automatically mean A LOAD OF SHITE and film makers got around their shortcomings by being entertaining and knowing a bit about their craft. The first Terminator, for instance, was a low-budget effort (and far better than the soul-less and bloated sequel whose appeal I've never been able to comprehend), as was Monster Squad, Night of the Comet, Ghoulies, American Ninja 2, Phantasm 2, Warlock, Showdown in Little Tokyo - shit, I could go on for ages just listing complete tosh that's inexplicably entertaining despite itself because someone somewhere along the line decided to apply a little TLC to a concept.
Covert Affairs - I have often wondered what would happen if they reversed the Jennifer Garner road to success and instead of starting out in a good tv show about a female spy before graduating to success in terrible films, an actress started out in successful and good films before moving on to shit television shows about a female spy and clearly Piper Perabo and I are on the same wavelength, because after making The Prestige, she's taken a demotion to this 'so awful it's entertaining' tv show that also stars several other tv no-marks I quite like and him off Jake 2.0. It's basically Alias if you tuned into Alias for the first time and Alias was exactly how you expected it to be (especially the pop songs that play during the end and lots of girly doe-eyes made to some point vaguely off-camera because the main female is feeling inadequate in a man's world) rather than a tv show about a woman who hits a wall and decides the best course of action is to not feel bad but to instead solve that problem immediately by using fancy gadgets for a bit and then shooting Arabs before going home and drinking alcohol until the next episode starts.
Rookie Blue - the more I watch the tall brunette in this attempt to do any acting at all, the more I expect the camera to pull back and reveal the whole thing to be a 'show within a show' where everyone is deliberately spouting the most deliberately cliched lines they can in the most unconvincing way possible to convey that they're playing a terrible actor reading from a banal script, and if that actually comes to pass about ten episodes down the line, then this becomes officially the best mindfuck on soap opera viewers ever committed to television - but I'm going to lay money right now that this will not be the case and this really is all there is to it: bad actors, poor drama, and not a speck of playfulness or genre awareness in sight.
But I keep thinking "any minute now, the camera will pull back..." Quite baffling.