Television Without Pity

TV Here's something I'd never thought I'd see. Television Without Pity are posting Doctor Who reviews. These are suitably droll and funky with references to US shows, TWP running jokes and wierdness surrounding the insertion of ad breaks.

On Rose: "The music continues to go crazy as Rose runs down the stairs on the outside wall of her block of apartments. Then London is crazy and bustling, and Rose gets off a bus, and we pan past a bunch of mannequins, and Rose works at Henrik's, and finds it boring. Maybe it would be more fun if they just called it "Harrod's," but I think on British TV that would not be allowed. Man, can you imagine if there were no product placement on American TV? Willow would have been doing her shit on like a Smac and everybody would be listening to iGrods. Every time Rose is in there, actually working in the shop, the music goes to a tinny, quiet radio sound, and when she's gone, it comes back real again. Very effective. Davies said, "The most important thing about Rose is that she works in a shop," which I love, because there's a way in which that's true, even though in the whole series she actually works in a shop for about ten seconds total. She meets her boyfriend Mickey for lunch, they laugh and have such fun, they tease each other, they make out, he does a little dance, it's all still quite frenetic and British, they get up to leave, and Rose says again, this time to Mickey: "Goodbye." "

On The End of the World: " "So tell me, Jabe. What's a tree like you doing in a place like this?" Heh. Jabe says that she's there to show respect for the Earth, which is maybe the best character point of all, because of what Rose says later about how there's no one left to give witness to her passing. Jabe's so complex and delightful, being able to manage this as simultaneously an art exhibit, a network opportunity, and a sacred and meaningful farewell to the place we all started. The Doctor asks if she's not really there for the networking, and she admits that there's a certain necessity of having to be seen at the right occasions, "in case [her] share prices drop," as the Doctor says. "I know you lot. You've got massive forests everywhere, roots everywhere, and there's always money in land." Talk about a hate-on for the multinationals. Dude, Doctor. Remember 1990 in America when everybody got so ecologically-minded that the whole country was bored with it by 1992? From my understanding, the whole multinationals argument was the same thing in the UK, around that time. Which is kind of where Russell Davies lives. He's a great storyteller with the timeless themes, and this show makes me cry a lot, but his references and grudges are...similarly timeless. Not that they're not important, it's just weird."

It's actually fun to find a fresh perspective on stories which I know so well. For the uninitiated, TWP post a weekly synopsis/review for a range of US tv shows across the networks, and has been a saviour to me in the past for catching up when I've missed episodes of The West Wing. Updated weekly.