Another week another episode of The Real World.  This week we finally get to see some of Josh’s music skills and meet Mike’s family.  Also Erika remains whiney.  Let’s get started.

This episode starts with Mike meeting his local Congressman from Colorado, Jared Polis.  It turns out he is the first openly gay elected congressman.  Mike says he never considered politics as a career before but is getting more interested in it.  Mike confesses his mom told him he should hide “parts of himself” while on the show (read: don’t say your gay) to protect his future.  But now he has a role model.  Also he takes a picture of a picture for some reason:

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Alright everyone it’s here.  The Friday Night Lights season 4 finale.  This season certainly started off rough but it had a lot of greatness packed into it and it really went out on a high note.  Between last week’s episode and this episode, it’s just some of the best TV around right now.  I cannot wait for the 5th and final season.  Let’s get started.

This episode starts off at a press conference being held basically to promote unity through the town for the big Panthers and Lions faceoff.  It’s being called “The Big Cat Clash”.

There’s even a trophy.  Anyway the coaches and captains are supposed to act like they get along so they do.  Meanwhile the Riggins brothers are far from being comic relief this week.

They meet with a lawyer who tells them that if they plead guilty he can get other charges like tax evasion dropped and they could wind up with 1-5 years.  This is pretty bad timing since Billy just had a child.

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The Deep End is an ensemble drama on ABC set in the world of a high class LA law firm.  It mostly focuses on a group of first year lawyers newly arrived at the firm and thrown into the deep end.  It has an ensemble cast featuring some great actors you’ve probably seen before like Norbert Leo Butz (best known to me for his part as Roger in the Broadway production of RENT), Tina Majorino (Veronica Mars, Big Love), Billy Zane (Titanic), Leah Pipes (Sorority Row) and a whole bunch more recognizable faces.  It’s sort of ABC’s attempt at a Grey’s Anatomy set in the legal world or a Ally McBeal type show.  You’d think maybe ABC would hold off on a show like this after they had a tremendous legal show, Eli Stone, and cancelled it.

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Alright.  Once again I have to say I’m sorry.  I’m a week late again.  I’ll spare you any excuses and promise to do better.  Let’s just get going.

Last week we were teased with cute, adorable, thinks she can sing Erika saying she wants to go home on the “Next on…”  But when I went to DVR this there was no aftershow so safe assumption is that she didn’t.  However I got my wish for a big Erika episode.  You know how they say be careful what you wish for?  Yeah…

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Well after a week where I dropped the ball and didn’t get it written on time, here’s the recap for Friday Night Lights Season 4’s penultimate episode “Laboring”.

Everyone feels the pain this week.  This is one of those episodes where they take our beloved characters and just wreck their worlds, which make for some of the best FNL episodes.  In particular Kyle Chandler and Michael B. Jordan both put in some of the best performances on television period in this episode.

As always I have to throw out a please support us request.  I personally do not have much money and these recaps take a lot of time.  So take a moment and maybe consider Alright let’s begin.

If you remember last week it was discussed that the Lions and Panthers would be playing against each other.  Nope not in this episode (which btw starts off the day after the last episode left off).  But the Panthers have gotten the league to inspect the Lions’ beat up field trying to get the game moved to their stadium.  The Lions field is in sad shape but they give Coach the week to fix it up.

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Quite obviously you’ve probably read reviews of this show on other sites by now.  It’s aired 4 episodes.  But I held back my review based on my television review standards (read about them here).  I liked the pilot a lot. But I’m skipping ahead of myself.  Let’s start with what it’s about.

Life Unexpected is about an orphan named Lux (Brittany Robertson) who is trying to get emancipated on her 16th birthday because she hates life in foster care.  To be able to do this she needs to get signatures of her birth parents.  So she tracks them down.  The first one she is able to find is her father, Nate Bazile (Kristoffer Polaha), better known as Base, pronounced basil without the il.  He is running a local bar and had no idea he had a kid that was out there.  When Lux asks about her mother she discovers that she is actually a well known local radio host, Cate Cassidy (Shiri Appleby).  Base and Cate have not talked since High School and even then no one knew about the baby or the fact that Cate and Base even had sex.  Apparently Cate had it secretly and gave it up for adoption but Lux had a heart condition and needed a lot of surgeries which is why she was never adopted.  Anyway long story short both Cate and Base wind up with a bit of a connection to their spawn and also are both total opposites.  When the day of Lux’s hearing comes up the judge declares she cannot be emancipated but since she has 2 birth parents who can care for her they will have to take care of her.  So now Cate and her fiancee/co-host and Base must care for teenage Lux who they are just meeting.

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I am so sorry I’m over a week late on this one.  I got very busy.  It’s no excuse though.  Anyway when we left off we were teased that this week would feature Andrew losing his shit in a potentially violent way and I called shenanigans.  I was right.  This whole episode is all about Ashley being annoying.  However it is free of Ty and Emily drama so yay!

The episode starts with Ashley and Andrew chilling in the hot tub and of course Andrew is fooling around.

Ashley says she wants him to open up her because he has with everyone else in the house.  Andrew says he hasn’t opened up to anyone.

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Every night I sit down in front of my TV for the local NBC News (Channel 4 here in NYC) and every single night I get commercial breaks that feature these, some of the most horribly directed, written, and acted advertisements ever produced.  There’s 3 of them total and they air in various combinations, with often repeating the same one more than once during the same commercial break.  They are hilarious the first time you see them, but after that you will want to violently injure every single person involved.  Here they are with some analysis from yours truly.

OK so this is the first.  It doesn’t start off that bad.  The delivery of “I think we’ve been robbed” is a little poor but otherwise not abnormal.  Then we hit the “Rewind” and show the alternate reality in which these people have the Slomins Shield.  Now we discover that the neighbors have been robbed instead.  This is where we start losing any grip on reality.  This woman is so angry that her neighbors did not get the Slomins Shield.  Like really, really, abnormally, not at all proportionally angry.  Also way to overact.  Was no one directing this?  Did no one at any point go “Hey maybe you should tone down that reaction a little/a hell of a lot?”  I have worked on commercials.  I know that there are people from the agency and people from the client both analyzing every single second of everything that’s going on.  How did this make it to the air?

But we’ve only just begun.  Now let’s visit another family.

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This one starts off with the crazy.

You know I’m not comfortable leaving the kids and the babysitter home alone.

Then why the hell did you hire a babysitter?  Isn’t that the entire point?  That the babysitter is going to be left alone with the kids?  And wow this woman is also really angry that this guy did not know better.  At least the second part of this scenario is pretty normal.

Now we get to my personal favorite.

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This entire ad is insane.  First off they didn’t bother with any kind of noise effect that the woman might have heard.  She wakes up from a dead sleep, jumps up within a half second and gets her husband (presumably, boyfriend? one night stand? Some things we will never know.) to investigate.  If she’d maybe have awoken and maybe waited to ensure she heard something this might be more normal.  Also apparently she does this a lot judging by how fast that dude moves and how unconcerned he seems.  But then we “Rewind” and hit the second half.  This time the guy doesn’t get out of bed or even wake up fully because the Slomins Shield is on.  So the woman goes right back to bed without a second thought and a smile on her face.  The issue here is even with your alarm set, if there’s someone in your house alarm companies are notoriously slow to respond and by the time a cop got there you could be dead.  What if it’s a rapist or murderer?  This is very troubling.  If I think someone broke into my house I get the fuck out of there, or at the very least call the cops or investigate (as in the first part of this scenario).  Isn’t there some kind of panic button on the alarm itself?  Anyway the thing I do know is that you do not just go back to sleep unworried because you have an alarm.  Seriously.  The lack of any common sense is both comical and extremely bothersome.

Anyway I thought I’d share these with the world, as they are a constant pain in my ass (to get the effect play each of those over and over and over and you’ll see what I mean).  I hope at least you get some comedy out of them.

Another week another Friday Night Lights.  This week’s episode is called Injury List.  It features a surprise return of Matt Saracen and since the season is almost over all of our storylines are coming to a head.  A lot goes on in this episode.  Also for the first time ever I’m gonna try to bring you some video in this one.

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We’re only 5 episodes into this season, but for some reason it seems so much more than that doesn’t it?  Last week’s “Next on…” seemed to promise an episode focusing a lot on Erika and also some Josh getting into girl trouble.  Last week’s “Next on…” lied.  I am very angry Real World.  I wanted a ton of Erika and you gave me more Emily and Ty crap?  Not even new Emily and Ty stuff but the same stuff that’s been said in every other episode just again?  I hate you Real World.  I hate you so hard.  So yeah there’s a lot of Emily and Ty being Emily and Ty and not adding anything new to that story at all so I’m gonna not recap them in this episode.  I hope no one has a problem with that.  If you do, go read the recaps of the other episodes and you’ll have the same stuff as is here.  Repeated ad nauseum.  Also for the very first time on Media Decay I’m gonna try to bring you some video on this post.  Let me know if it’s working alright for you.

The episode starts with Josh talking to his girlfriend Ashley.  She misses him and is apparently coming to visit soon.  Josh confesses she came along at a time in his life where he was losing everything and just made it better.

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