Bloglander

Spokane’s own Cami Bradley is performing on America’s Got Talent again tonight. This time, after advancing from the quarterfinals, she’s up against some acrobats, comedians, an opera singer and a rapper. Online voting is open from 7:55 pm to 3 am tonight.

For those of you who know nothing about America’s Got Talent, you could ordinarily earn a “good job” for that. But now it’s time for the basics so you can fully understand what is happening here.

This is the eighth season of the NBC talent show, which follows in the footsteps of performer-competition reality TV pioneers like American Idol. But the competitors feature a whole variety show of talents, from dancers to magicians to huge musical ensembles. Singing is still popular — and successful. Five of the seven previous winners were singers of some type.

Each season begins with a whole bunch of talented hopefuls auditioning in different cities and then performing for the judges in Las Vegas. Those selected in Vegas (and sometimes a few others) go on to the televised live shows, when voting begins.

This season’s live shows started with 60 acts in the quarterfinals. For five weeks, sets of 12 acts competed for the judges’ votes (and public votes, which are used as tie-breakers). Bradley was one of 22 acts to advance to the semifinals, which begin tonight.

The show wraps up in September. The winner ultimately gets $1 million and typically headlines a national tour.

I’ve been regularly watching TV for less than decade.

But in that time, I’ve seen fingers broken, kneecaps shot, a hand shot, an earlobe sliced with a knife, a cheek held against a red-hot oven element, needles driven up finger tips, bamboo driven under fingernails, skin shocked with a lamp cord and covered in corrosive chemicals, veins injected with painful drugs, heads shoved under water and in a barrel of motor oil.

I’ve seen a man tased repeatedly until his heart stops. I’ve seen a woman dunked in a bathtub with electrical equipment. I’ve seen people beaten with fists, whips, chains and a phonebook.

A hardening resin is poured down one man’s throat on one show, while on another the hero takes a wet towel and threatens to shove it down someone’s esophagus to rip out of his stomach lining. I’ve seen a single scene were an unarmed man was beaten, choked, twisted with a plier, slashed with a knife and burned with a blowtorch. (That’s by a “good guy.”) I’ve seen people subjected to belt sanders, defibrillation paddles and sensory deprivation chambers. I’ve seen a whole lot of waterboarding.

I’ve a barrel heated up so the rats inside dig through the chest cavity, I’ve seen a finger being meticulously skinned. In the last week alone, I’ve seen a gleeful woman spattered with blood as she drills into a man's thigh, and – if the scene hadn’t cut away at the last moment (for, you know, decency) would have nearly seen a castration.

That’s just a selection from a few TV shows — Lost, 24, Game of Thrones, Alias, Prison Break, Scandal and the Shield. I’ve never watched The Sopranos or Homeland — both shows which, presumably, feature a quite a bit of torture. (I’m also only four episodes into Downton Abbey, so if the Dowager Countess ends up using sharper implements than her wit to protect the estate, I haven’t yet seen it.)

As the United States debated the ethics and effectiveness of torture (or “enhanced interrogation,” if your kids are around) over the past decade, it’s been a crucial debate. So it’s unsurprising out television shows have chosen to draw from that debate, and it’s unsurprising that activists have condemned (or praised) the cavalier way that TV gets its torture on.

But today, I’m not going to retread the ground of what torture does to our country, or our national security, or our soul.

Today, I’m upset about what it’s done to our television shows.

I can choose not to see Saw or Hostel, but if a torture scene is the part of a larger narrative I’ve invested a 100 hours in, they’re harder to avoid. They can be violent, they’re stomach turning, they’re genuinely gross.

And worse, with very rare exceptions, these moments of torture are the weakest on the show.

I think of graphic violence the same way I think of a dirty joke told in mixed company — the dirtier it is, the funnier it has to be to justify. In the case of stomach-rending (sometimes literally) violence it should be extremely compelling, illuminating, or tense — it should drive the plot forward, or reveal interesting aspects of depths of character.

But torture rarely does. Instead, torture scenes are usually dramatically inert.

Consider how, in a perfectly symbolic way, most of them have the poor tortured soul literally tied to a chair. He’s not going anyway. Often, that’s the purpose the scene serves in the narrative: To stall the story, to kill time.

On 24 — a show often trapped by its real-time format — a torture scene gave a character something to do for an episode, without necessarily bringing Jack Bauer closer to the bomb/virus/weapon/season finale. On Game of Thrones, repeated torture scenes kept Theon employed as a regular cast member until he could appear up in the later seasons based on later books.

Hence the formula: The threatening monologue from the torturer, the reveal of torture implements, pleading or defiance from the victim, a whirring or a blade or a crackle of electricity or a swing of a fist, a bloodcurling scream —cut to commercial.

Occasionally the writers like to show off their sadistic creativity — here’s my awesome idea for inflicting pain upon the human body. But believe me, I’ve walked through a Torture in the Middle Ages exhibit in a museum in Russia — modern TV writers can’t hope to match history. It’s been done.

Sometimes, of course, torture is supposed to act as a critique against it. It’s supposed to show the tough choices of the War on Terror or the War Against The Criminal Element. It’s supposed to show the degradation it inflicts, not just upon the tortured, but the torturer.

But this rarely happens.

Most of the time, torture is practically shrugged off as a bad-boy quirk, like wearing leather jackets or drinking from a flask or using the B-word. “Oh, you!” The show says, “Did you cut off the victim’s toes again, you silly goose!”

On 24, Jack Bauer’s a loose cannon, but dammit Chief, he gets results. On Scandal, Huck has clearly been mentally altered by torturing and being tortured — but his colleagues basically continue to treat him like a big ol’ teddy bear with a lingering waterboarding habit instead of an actual monster. (The Shield was a thankful exception — its greatest feat was showing how truly poisonous Vic Mackey was to everyone around him.)

Other times, torture feels like sadism for sadism's sake, the succession of the weekly “And now, back to your regularly scheduled Theon Greyjoy mutilation session!” torture scenes on Game of Thrones so far only tell us two things: 1) This guy’s pretty evil. 2) Sucks to be Theon.

Game of Thrones already had (at least!) two psychopaths before the latest torturer was introduced. So far, this new guy doesn’t add much.  

But here’s the biggest problem: It’s not hard to make someone feel pain. Anyone who’s ever slammed their fingers in a car door knows that great amounts of agony can be inflicted extremely easily. When the Manly Man just grits away all the pain, it doesn’t seem realistic, and when the torturer gives up a secret location of a bomb, it doesn’t feel earned. (Absurdly, the torture victim rarely ever lies which is my go-to plan if I’m ever tortured.)  

It’s absurd to treat torture like a Vulcan Mind-Meld, something that if you do it just right will automatically get the truth.

Great drama works by playing different powers against each other. Whether we’re talking the kings of Game of Thrones or the hicks of Justified, factions play their hands, and other factions counter. They may rely on wit or alliances or a quick draw or massive armies or jury-rigged weapons or a box full of rattlesnakes — but there’s almost always a way to counter. A brute threatens a dwarf? The dwarf uses his clever words and his family reputation to talk his way out. A rich man threatens to use the law to crush a poor man? The poor man breaks into the rich man’s home and threatens to kills his family.

Dutch talking a confession out of a suspect on The Shield was always so much more interesting than Mackey beating him out of it.

When a man’s tied to a chair being burned or cut or shocked, there’s rarely an interesting interplay — there’s too much power imbalance. Instead, they just scream, and we grimace and yawn.

American television sitcoms, at least the good ones, are great in their dependability. You know what you’ll get. You’ll know why you want it and when you want it. They become like a favorite piece of furniture in our living rooms — the armchair you can curl up in when you know nothing else will feel quite right.

The Office has been my armchair for the last eight years. It’s not always been perfect — in fact it’s been quite imperfect over the last two seasons — but it’s the television show I’ve watched more than anything else. I’ve seen all 200-plus episodes more than once. I’ve had more than one dream that featured a character from The Office. Is this the clinical definition of obsession? Quite possibly.

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But again, this show is somehow comforting to me. It’s a glass of warm milk, if you will. I often write late into the night a lot and when I wrap up, I can never get right to sleep. A couple years ago, I took to watching an episode — usually whatever reruns TBS had placed On Demand — before going to bed. It has become a ritual of sorts. And when the series comes to an end tonight after nine seasons, in the words of Michael Scott, it’s going to “hurt like a motherf*****.”

I watch The Office because it makes the mundane in our lives outrageous, unlike the Everybody Loves Raymond or Two and a Half Mens of the world, which manage to make the outrageous mundane. There is no reason why a show that, at least in its first few seasons, took place almost exclusively within the depressing confines of a fluorescent-lit office, should have survived this long.

In the beginning, The Office was very much realistic. Cubicle warriors working in any field could relate with the banal yet hilarious conflicts and controversies that arose at the Scranton branch of Dunder Mifflin. The characters have, over the years, engaged in bouts of hatred, love, acceptance and apathy — and if you’ve worked in an office you know how this goes. Small things become huge things because the unfortunate reality (a reality you’d rather not acknowledge) is that you spend more time with these coworkers than you do with your spouse or kids.

At Dunder Mifflin we’ve seen Dwight hate Andy and love Angela while adoring Michael and designating Jim as his mortal enemy. Then, over the years, those relationships flip-flopped and rotated, sometimes not with the sort of comedic promise producers would have hoped for, but in a way we could allow ourselves to believe would happen at our own place of employment.

Seinfeld featured a few of the best characters in the history of television, but their egomaniacal hijinks weren’t the sort of scenarios in which you could imagine yourself entangled. Sure, there is likely no boss out there with the sort of need-to-be-loved that Steve Carell laid out in The Office, but if you talk about how your boss is a “little bit of a Michael Scott,” people know what you mean because they’ve had a boss like that at some point. Everything about the work environment on this show was amplified (we’re not going to believe that someone like Kevin Malone could ever survive in a full time job for more than a week), but it never took us too far away from what could possibly happen under the fluorescent lights of our own offices.

We’ve all seen inappropriate email forwards (but probably not of your boss on vacation with his boss), we’ve all known of clandestine romances (but probably not ones that end in dead cats), we’ve all been to a coworker’s home for an awkward social engagement (but probably not one that required the police to intervene) and we’ve all had our eye on a Jim or a Pam at some point (but you probably didn’t marry him or her).

This isn’t a popular opinion, but the American version of The Office executed this relatable-ness more effectively than its British forefather. Ricky Gervais is a god, but his take on the boss was more vaudevillian than what we Americans could relate to. That version was hilarious and legendary in its own right, but it’s the American version that’s going to live on forever.

I’ll keep watching The Office as the years go by. Probably late at night, and probably episodes I’ve seen a dozen times. I’ll watch it because I feel like I’ve been sitting at one of those desks in Scranton all those years.

With the release of the upcoming fourth season of Arrested Development quickly approaching, diehards have found themselves desperately searching for the latest news and developments.

Arrested Development was funny — comedic genius — when it was cancelled seven years ago. Could it possibly come back and match its glory?

After watching the official trailer, it’s safe to say that this isn’t going to disappoint.

Let me expand.

First off, it takes all but 10 seconds for the trailer to feature its first inside joke. Those familiar with the show (and the horrific cornballer) will find humor as Michael burns his hand on a hot door handle.

Second, we have George Michael. That’s all I really need to say. Despite the fame Michael Cera has managed to achieve in his post-AD days, he looks just as… helpless as he did during the show’s original run. He’s rocking a short-sleeve button-up shirt just like the good ol’ days. Ah, the nostalgia.

Thirdly, he appears as though George Michael and Maeby finally have a thing. This is no longer a forbidden love à la Romeo and Juliet or Le Cousins Dangereux. Remember, gang, the series finale unveiled that they are NOT cousins. It’s totally cool for us to root for them now.

Next, we have “Final Countdown” playing in the background during the second half of the video. Not because we are now in the homestretch for the premiere of the season, but as a reference to GOB’s hilarious magic — I mean illusions.

Lastly, the stair car is back. Are they hoping for some people to hop on the Arrested Development bandwagon? How strategic. 

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To really understand Community, don’t turn to its most popular episodes, like paintball action-homage “Modern Warfare” or the diverging-timelines hilarity of “Remedial Chaos Theory.”

Watch “Intermediate Documentary Redux.” In this third-season episode, the Greendale Community College Dean Pelton wants to update a dated TV advertisement for the college. But over the course of weeks, the scope of the commercial grows, the budget spirals out-of-control, and the dean becomes a tyrannical auteur, unhinged from reality, obsessed with a vision that can never truly be realized. Eventually, he drives away everyone who believed in him.

That, of course, is a the story of Community. Read through the AV Club’s second-seasonpost-mortem with Community creator, writer, showrunner and, by many accounts, unhinged tyrant Dan Harmon. See the parallels. See the obsession and the passion that goes into creating what could have been just a half-hour of laffs.  See the seeds of perfectionism leading to self-destruction.

Harmon was fired from his own show last spring. Granted, there are plenty of signs he should have been. The show never excelled in the ratings. The show regularly went over budget. It burned through talented writers. Harmon clashed visibly with the network brass. He managed to somehow be seen as a big of a jerkas Chevy Chase. When he broke up with his girlfriend, he shared his very raw feelings with the entire internet via Tumblr. Tumblr!

In cop-show terms: He was a loose cannon, but dammit, he gotresults.

It’s easy to explain Community’s awesomeness in terms of genre parodies: There was the zombie episode, the video game episode, the space episode, the musical episode, and mafia, Law and Order, and Christmas claymation parodies. “Intermediate Documentary Redux” was, after all a parody of  theHearts of Darkness documentary about the troubled Apocalypse Now production.

But in the best of these, ambition, not parody, is the driving force. If you listen closely, you can hear the sound of a showrunner cracking a whip, calling for yet another rewrite, demanding stronger character beats. My favorite episode focuses on a game of Dungeons and Dragons, something NBC was skeptical about.Yet, it also happens to be one of the most tightly scripted half-hours I’ve ever seen. Every moment counts — drives the plot forward, establishes emotional character beats, establishes stakes, or delivers a set piece. It had clearly gone through countless drafts from multiple writers in that pursuit of perfection.

Harmon isn’t necessarily a comedic genius. But here’s one of life’s little awesome secrets: Even if you’re not the most talented, you can brute-force brilliance through obsession and ambition.

To be clear, he wasn’t responsible for all the best parts ofCommunity. That would be taking too much away from the other writers on staff, and from the producers and network executives that reined in his worst impulses. Harmon wasn’t the only staffer to leave Community after Season Three.But judging from early reviews, there’s a hollowness to tonight’s premiere.Something’s missing.

That could be because the new showrunners are less like Harmon and Dean Pelton, and more like the trustees reviewing Dean Pelton’s salvaged, just serviceable final product at the end of“Intermediate Documentary Redux.”

“It's good,” the trustee says. “You know what, better than good. Good enough.”

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Kevin Spacey’s majority whip Frank Underwood is practically a cartoon. And that’s its second biggest strength.

Spacey plays Underwood as a meld of Mike Huckabee, Bill Clinton and Lucifer, Prince of Darkness. Consider House of Cards a political reboot of the canceled 666 Park Avenue, the devil whispering in ears, signing away souls, pulling strings to command his puppets to his will.

His monologues come out silky and loquacious, wrapped in vivid metaphor and overwritten prose. Take a parody of a slick-talking southern attorney and exaggerate it three times, and you have some sense for Spacey’s performance.

And yet… it’s captivating.

The best part of his portrayal is the cheesiest: Spacey, and Spacey alone, has the power to break the fourth wall, turn to the audience, and tell us all his plan. Sometimes it’s just a wink or a raised eyebrow, other times it’s a full-blown soliloquy about his manipulation. The device, borrowed from theater, is odd enough on television (or whatever Netflix is) to stand out. It’s going for Shakespeare, it’s ends up more Bond villain.

But there’s a place for Bond movies.

You can nitpick House of Cards all you want. No, a leaked draft of an education bill wouldn’t be a gangbuster above-the-fold story on inauguration day. No, journalists don’t walk up to sources and explicitly offer the entire sum of their integrity to politicians they’ve met for the first time. The show is essentially set in a fantasy world, sure as Middle Earth or the forest moon of Endor, where politics, punditry, unions, charities and the human condition have very few similarities to our own.

But realism shouldn’t always be used to define great art. Rather, “great art” shouldn’t always be used to define great art. There’s a place for foie gras and there’s a place for Taco Bell Beef Baja Chalupas. Great fast food can be delicious too.

House of Cards is not Mad Men or the Sopranos, and it shouldn’t be judged by their metric. It’s a closer fit with Prison Break, Con Air, 24, or Revenge. It’s a crackling good yarn — which is a different, but not necessarily lesser, standard for “great art.”

It doesn’t mean that House of Cards is immune to criticism: Most of the surrounding characters are nearly as vibrant as Spacey’s, and some of the other plots drag down the show’s momentum. Underwood is begging to be brought low, for his elaborate plans to backfire, but for at least the first half of the first season of House of Cards, everything just falls into place. Entertaining shows need conflict and suspense, and, as addictive as House of Cards is, there’s not yet enough of either.

But don’t dismiss the show for its silliness. Praise it for precisely that reason.

Once in a rare while I'm invited to be a guest on a podcast based off my sole qualification of watching a considerable amount of television. Last Sunday, I was invited to join TV bloggers Jason Griffin and Melissa Lowery on the TV Times Three podcast to chat about Alphas, The Killing, Drop Dead Diva, Once Upon a Time, Once Upon a Time, Bunheads, Last Resort, 30 Rock,  Parks and Recreation, Scandal, and Downton Abbey.

We try to answer the important questions, questions like:

Why do so many have TV superheroes have such super-lame superpowers?

Are AMC network executives trying to tank their own network, Producer's style?

Wait, there was really a show called Drop Dead Diva?  And people are sad that it's gone?

Will Once Upon A Time turn to increasingly odd fairy-tale characters, like the Keebler elves, the zany gargoyles from Hercules, or Disney princess Zooey Deschanel?

Is Channing Tatum a fine actor?

What's 30 Rock's secret for staying so funny after all those years? Is it some kind of cream?

Is there a dangerous acting-ability gap on Last Resort?

Is cheating on your spouse romantic as long as you're the President of the United States and your wife is sort of frigid?

Check it all out here.

Two caveats: 1) Only one moment per show, to prevent this list from being “Top 10 Moments from Breaking Bad.” And 2) No man, no matter how tepid his social life, can watch all of television, so don’t complain I didn’t include that OMG moment from Gossip Girl.

10. Jim Carrey turns into Leap Day William on 30 Rock

Not satisfied with its normal selection of holiday episodes, 30 Rock invents an entire mythology around Leap Day, with a blue-and-yellow color scheme, carolers, and candy for the kid. There’s even a Santa Clause knockoff, starring Jim Carrey, who turns into the aquatic, mustachioed mascot of the holidays, and learns the true meaning of Leap Day.

9. Chevy Chase becomes a pillow-clad human superweapon on Community

Community could have been satisfied to just do an episode about a high-stakes battle between denizens of a rival pillow fort and blanket fort on a community college campus. But Community ups the brilliant weirdness by telling the whole episode like Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary. And then it goes one step further by turning Chevy Chase’s Pierce Hawthorne into a walking monstrosity of pillows and duct tape that could tip the balance from one side to another.

8. A pawn shop owner plays “Harlan Roulette” on Justified

On Justified, even the throwaway villains-of-the-week get a chance to shine more than the Big Bads of most entire series. A sketchy pawnshop owner gives a failed underling a chance to redeem himself through a game of Russian Roulette. Typical villain behavior. The scene stands out for the series of twists defying the Russian Roulette clichés, puncturing the tension by genuine surprise. But the result is the same as always in Harlan County: a dead junkie.

7. Mr. Bean saves the Olympics opening ceremony

If Olympic opening ceremonies aren’t jingoistic or ponderous, they’re usually disturbingly weird. And that was the mostly the case for Danny Boyle’s often creepy opening ceremony of the London Olympics. Yet, it was saved, in the last moment, by Rowan Atkinson, the rubber-faced oddball behind Mr. Bean, delivering his iconic zany antics while tasked to perform the keyboard part of Vangelis’s Chariots of Fire theme. That, not shepherds or umbrella-toting nannies, is what makes up the British spirit.

6. Megan sings serenades Don with "Zou Bisou Bisou" on Mad Men

In the first Mad Men season, set in 1960, Don Draper was the ideal of cool. But the most recent season opens in 1966, as “cool” starts to become less about maintaining authority, and more about relinquishing it. Megan, Draper’s new wife, unintentionally humiliates him at his birthday party with a sexy, and a little hilarious, rendition of an especially goofy French song. The interplay between them swiftly alludes to a generation gap, a cultural divide, an already troubled marriage, and of Draper’s obsession with appearance and childlike need for control.

5. Tina’s slow-motion car wreck on Bob’s Burgers

In a nearly empty parking lot, Bob lets has 13-year-old daughter, Tina, practice driving. Of course, it’s inevitable that she’d hit the only other car in the sprawling lot. But her long drawn-out two-miles-an-hour scream; the way the car, swerving back and forth, is drawn inexorably to the accident; and Bob’s increasingly panicked reaction shows why Bob’s Burgers, of all things, is fast-becoming comparable to the best seasons of The Simpsons.

4. Captain Marcus Chaplin warns us all on Last Resort

Andre Braugher could give a monologue reading from the phone book, and in the end, you’d be willing to sacrifice your life in service to Aaron A. Aaronson. It’s no wonder, then, that as submarine captain Marcus Chaplin, he’s able to, in defiance of a shady fire order, lead a crew to defy the entire might of the U.S. military. In measured tones, over a video broadcast to the entire United States, he brandishes the submarine's stockpile of nuclear missiles.

“Test us, and we will all burn,” his deep voice threatens. “You have been warned.”

3. Frank gets analyzed on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

It was natural that the Always Sunny ensemble, a choir of insanity harmonizing into chaos, would do an episode around the group finally sitting down for some therapy. Frank (Danny DeVito) stares horrified off into the distance describing to the therapist how he as a child he was shipped off to a school for the mentally disabled (“You ever see a frog kid?!” Frank says, his eyes wide) and received his first kiss, from a girl with no lips who died two weeks later. It’s politically incorrect and a little gross of course, but Frank’s anguish and anger, and the mournful violin singing in the background, gives the moment a just-short-of-genuinely-moving sort of hilarity.

2. The first salvo of the battle of BlackWater on Game of Thrones

Viewers have long rooted for the death of the sniveling, sadistic child-king Joffrey. But when his kingdom is invaded by a fleet of ships, Game of Thrones turns to the impact of the invasion on the women and the innocent children. So we cheer for the brilliant opening maneuver, where a season’s worth of special effect budgeting takes out most of the invading fleet in a glorious green explosion.

1. Skyler goes swimming on Breaking Bad.

Former chemistry teacher Walter White’s descent into evil after his cancer diagnosis would be bad enough if he weren’t a husband and a father of two. But even as he chants the mantra I did it all for my family, it’s clear it’s a lie. His wife Skyler knows it will all end poorly.

At first, his wife stepping, fully clothed, into a swimming pool during Walt's birthday dinner seems like the powerless actions of a battered woman in a Lifetime movie. But it isn’t: It’s a brilliant gambit to win her children a reprieve from the poisonous influence of a self-made monster. It can’t work forever, but it buys her time as she waits. For what? “For the cancer to come back,” she says.

Last night, the fifth season of Sons of Anarchy premiered, making this the perfect time to launch a sporadic feature exploring the best and worst parts of flawed shows. More than almost any other show, this motorcycle drama is packed with both.

STRENGTHS

- Almost all of Season 2. The show went from a campy show with a few moments of brilliance to something great. Very few shows have dealt with the issue of sexual assault, especially as expertly nuanced as Sons of Anarchy has.

- The portrayal of all sorts of pain and guilt, from nearly everybody.

- The tragic arc of compromised former police chief Wayne Unser.

- The moral struggle of Deputy David Hale.

- Katey Sagal (as club matriarch Gemma) and Ron Perlman (as the gravely, bitter former club president) give some of the best acting as two of the best characters on television. They have the weariness of years on the road and pain behind every crease.

- The casting choices of a few of the one-season characters – like Henry Rollins as a white supremacist, or Ray McKinnon as a twitchy Assistant U.S. District Attorney – were superb.

- The showrunner Kurt Sutter completely looks the motorcycle part. This is a guy who truly seems gritty, not just a clean-cut creator slipping on a fake leather jacket.

- By all accounts Sutter has genuinely dug into the culture of Motorcycle Clubs. It’s never sacrifices the pulp for authenticity, but the flavor seems drawn from a real place.

- It continues setting ratings records, for a show much better than The Walking Dead.

WEAKNESSES

- ATF Agent Stahl.

- Wasting Benito Martinez — a far better Hispanic actor than Jimmy Smits — in a boring role.

- Constantly raising sticky moral questions about the race, crime, and club politics, and ducking away from them just as quickly.

- Building up the End of Clay for all of Season 4, and then wussing out at the last moment through a series of meaningless plot contrivances.

- Whatever happened in Ireland in Season 3.

- Agreeing on the end of the season too early, resulting in 10 episodes of wheel spinning.

- The 15 other motorcycle gangs, all of who are interchangeable and undeveloped, identifiable only by skin color.

- The obsession with porn and prostitution as comic relief. Never that funny, never necessary, and never insightful into those actual industries.

- The casting of Damon Pope (Harold Perrineau, from Lost) one of the most unintimidating villian performances I’ve ever seen. You can do two things with your villains: Give them a genuinely scary demeanor (the Prison Break method), or give them a kind or charming demeanor, they undercut with scary actions (the Buffy the Vampire Slayer method).

Pope goes for a scary demeanor, but it just comes up seeming like your six-year-old brother putting on an angry face as he ineffectually punches you.

- Confusing and generally unexciting action scenes.

- Does Sons of Anarchy really need more music montages than Glee? And do those montages have to be used as replacements for important for difficult-to-write scenes? And does the music have to be so terrible? And did they really replace “the word New Orleans” with “Charming Town” in their “House of the Rising Sun” montage?