Revised Blogs

Community's letdown of a season finale





I love, love, love Community. The characters are ridiculous, the situations unbelievable, and it’s jam-packed full of witty one-liners and quips. A satirical show, Community makes a mockery of other shows and movies while subtly reinforcing the stereotypes associated with community colleges (they’re “not real schools”, “theyre easier”, “the students are lazy”.) Don’t worry, I can say this having attended community college for a year prior to transferring to CU!
As with previous episodes, the show mimicked that of the traditional, open-ended, unexpected-twist finales that so many other shows rely on. Which makes sense, they want you itching to know what is going to happen next! They’re not going to deliver a clear cut, black and white finale, where’s the fun in that? However, the season finale did leave the viewer with something to be desired, the half-hour I spent watching it! No, but, really, the final episode of Community seemed so random, unexpected and a bit cliched. Instead of making a mockery how contrived other show’s finales can be, they essentially delivered a show just like the ones they make fun of.

Season finales, in general, adhere to the cliffhanger ending to be resolved in the next season or bring open-ended plot lines to a conclusion. Community went the cliffhanger option.

What was with the out-of-the-blue love triangle between Jeff, Britta and Professor.Slater? The sudden emergence of a love triangle leaves Jeff with a tough decision and the viewer completely blind-sided and confused. Of course, Professor.Slater would show up again (after being M.I.A for so many episodes) to give Jeff another chance, who else would be the third party in Jeff’s love triangle? Just as guarded Britta finally lets her guard down, professes her love to Jeff in front of the entire school at the “Tranny Dance”, and he, of course, in his typical nonchalant manner, sidesteps the sticky situation. Instead, Jeff excuses himself from the room, runs into Annie( who decides not to leave Greendale with Vaughn), and unexpectedly, they kiss. Quite an age difference between the naïve, flighty freshman and the pessimistic, smooth-talker! That will never work. All things considered, I expected more from Community, not the usual cliffhanger-ending finale. It seemed as though the writers didn’t have anything original and novel for the finale, as with previous episodes, and merely fell back on the clichéd open-ended ending.





Never trust a pretty girl with an ugly secret”—My favorable take on the new show Pretty Little Liars




ABC Family’s new show Pretty Little Liars premiered last night; actually it aired a surprising three times back-to-back. The new drama features a posse of popular, affluent, pretty high school students dealing with the mysterious disappearance of one of their own. After the unsettling event, the girls grow apart, but reunite after they each start receiving foreboding messages from a mysterious author, “A”, which they believe to be their missing friend Allison. Each eerie text, instant message, note received by the girls contains information that only Allison was privileged to. Each girl receives a message specific to a secret they harbor, threatening revelation of said secret. The episode closes with the funeral of their possibly belated friend. I say ‘possibly belated’ because there is much suspicion that the body in the casket is not Allison’s.…how else would one explain receiving messages from a dead girl?







Each character is a walking cliché.
The typical line-up as seen in the new series:
Spencer is the uptight, studious girl, who inevitably ends up falling for every single one of her older sister’s boyfriends.

Emily is the quintessential jock. She has a secret that hasn’t yet been disclosed. Based on a few alluding statements made by Allie and her sort-of-kiss with the new girl in town, it appears she may currently be struggling with her sexual orientation.

Allison is the missing girl who assumed the role of the bitchy, instigating “queen bee” prior to her disappearance. Think Regina from Mean Girls. It’s strange how Jenna looks like a dark-haired version of Allison. It’s hard to get a good look at Jenna’s face though as she is always wearing enormous sunglasses.

Hanna (former doormat of the estranged group) rises up in the ranks and reintroduces herself as Allison’s replacement as most popular girl in school. Hanna transforms from an awkward pushover into a defiant rebel. She’s resorted to recreational shop-lifting as a way to cope with her family issues.

Aria is the level-headed, observant, skeptical friend of the bunch. She becomes very uneasy about these mystery texts, rounds up her old friends, only to discover that they, too, have been receiving ominous messages from an unknown author. Aria is being pursued by her (recent college grad) English teacher; she is on the fence about the matter. They met under false pretenses, she lead him to believe she was attending college as an english major. Very weird (and illegal) how her teacher pursues her after discovering he’s her student. He must have been so enamored with the two cutesy, witty comments she made about books.

Jenna, what is there to say about Jenna? Well, not much so far, there’s a lot of mystery surrounding this girl. Any mention of this character’s name was in the phrase “the secret about Jenna”. Also, she is blind. Her handicap is made evident when a man escorts her to her seat at the seemingly deceased friend’s funeral.

Despite this predictable set-up, there is something about this show that compels me to keep watching. Pretty Little Liars is entertaining and intriguing, I’m curious to know what will transpire next. What really happened to Allison? What is the “secret about Jenna”? Will a secret relationship between Ari and Ezra (her young teacher) come to fruition? What, if any, repercussions of her shoplifting habit will Hanna incur? So many unanswered questions that need to be addressed.

My take on Pretty Little Liars in a nutshell: dire secrets, complicated characters, forbidden affairs, mysterious murders and “the secret about Jenna”. I’m going to stay tuned and see what other secrets this show has in store!





I DOn't care for Four Weddings
I’m really not one of those girls whose had every detail of her wedding day planned out since she was 5, but I really enjoy watching wedding-related shows, ‘Say Yes to the Dress’, ‘Engaged and Underage’, ‘Battle of the Wedding designers’…However, I do have a few bones to pick with the a more recent show, Four Weddings on TLC (Fridays at 10/9 c).

The jest: Four women strive to impress each other with their weddings in order to win a free, lavish honeymoon. Each episode, four soon-to-be brides have their weddings critiqued, inviting three competitors (other brides) to judge their wedding and allot her a score based on four specific facets of the special day: venue, food, dress and overall presentation.

There appears to be a negative recurring theme in the show. The bride-to-be with the most money invested in her wedding nearly always receives the highest scores from the three other rival brides, and therefore wins the lavish honeymoon. Which poses the question, if this woman (or couple) had such an expensive wedding then can’t they probably afford dishing out for their own fancy honeymoon? I mean, it seems to me that the woman with the quaint, lower-budget wedding is more deserving of a complimentary honeymoon than the woman who spends $50,000+ on hers! Besides, it is these quaint, inexpensive weddings that focus more on the ceremony and nuptials, rather than on impressing their guests with over-the-top decorations and an extensive open bar. Some of the best weddings, in my opinion, were the more intimate, low-key ones.





Also, it’s slightly annoying how some of the rival bride’s took issue with weddings that didn’t incorporate drinking or offer an open bar, and subsequently issued lower scores to those women’s wedding.

Four Weddings, in general, perpetuates out society’s materialistic mindset. Gone are the days of simple wedding in the family’s backyard or in a small church. Now it’s commonplace for couples to invite hundreds of their “closest friends” to a ridiculously expensive venue…








They really will give anyone a reality show these days…TLC’s Mall Cops





So I was flipping through channels one night and stumbled upon Mall Cops, proof that they will literally give anyone a show. Hence, Mall Cops, a tv show highlighting the high jinx and staged incidents that transpire at the Mall of America and how the mall security deals with said incidents. The show makes everything look so intense, with the dramatic music, the use of schematics to pinpoint where a ‘suspect’ is located, and the security room packed with mall cops watching people on their monitors.

I find it pretty hilarious how the security people are given titles like “sergeant”, “lieutenant”, “captain”. Highly doubt they earned their way through military ranks. Some of the uniform shirts seem to have different types of badges that they may have earned…..doing what?!

Mall Cops really aims to make the security guards look like legitimate police officers, but they lack the credentials or the authority. They even do Roll Call, where the security guards are given their tasks and duties for the day, similar to what one would see in a police drama to police tv shows.
A few ridiculous/odd happenings featured on the show:
-A bike mall cop spends two hours looking for a man’s car that was presumed stolen, but actually parked on the opposite side of the mall.

-A man is escorted out of the mall for running to Victoria’s Secret’s makeup counter, quickly applying all the makeup and sprinting out of the store. Apparently, men are prohibited from wearing makeup in Mall of America. Weird, yes. Criminal, probably not?

-A female cop loses a toenail after breaking up a fight in the food court? How she lost a nail through her shoe, I have no idea…



-A young man is scolded by a mall cop for dancing without any music. The dancing fiend gets reprimanded, a second time, for dancing and doing handstands, still without music.

-A young man wearing a dress is kicked out of the mall. The young man insists that his uncle is a cross-dresser and that makes it ok. It’s so obvious that this kid is just being a smartass, wearing a slip dress and Nikes, but the mall cop takes the stunt so seriously.

-Sarah Palin arrives at Mall of America for a book signing, the mall cops find a suitcase (probably planted there for the show) and enlist the help of their bomb sniffing dog to discover if there truly is a threat. There was no threat. But it’s stupid how they didn’t call the police or bomb squad if the possibility of harm existed.








VH1's adds yet another classy reality tv show to the lineup--You're Cut Off





Nine privileged narcissists are knocked down a peg or two after their families enroll them in a reality check bootcamp.


Surprise...You're Cut Off!: "The girls have their first rehabilitation session with professional life coach Laura Baron. They open up about 'why is money is so important to them.' Watch the full season premiere!"


It’s one dilemma for the girls after another:
1. Nine women, under the guise of starring in VH1’s new reality show highlighting their lavish lifestyles, The Good Life, are in for a rude awakening. Each one aghast to find their credit cards declined during their daily shopping spree.

2. The women “coincidentally” meet each other at the customer service kiosk in the mall to complain about their decline credit cards.

3. The host, a lifestyle coach, reveals to the women they have been ambushed. Their families have turned the money hungry mooches over to the professional to set them straight. They have been sentenced to an 8 week lifestyle boot camp, a last effort to check their egocentric ways.

4. The girls cry and whine and swear revenge on their families for cutting them off from their trust funds. The princesses are brought back down to Earth a bit when faced with reality that parents and husbands are no longer willing to fund their shopping addictions or turn the other cheek to their selfish attitudes.

5. The drama begins after the girls find out they are not being escorted to their new home in a limo like other reality shows, but in a mini-van. The horrors! They consider their transportation to be far beneath them and vocalize their extreme dissatisfaction.

6. Transported in the abomination that is a mini-van, they are let down, yet again, when they see the “shack of a house” they’re forced to live in. What most people would consider a normal, middle-class home, these privileged women deem a shack. One woman insists that her house maid would not live in a house so decrepit. (there is a picture of house at the top of the blog, doesn’t really deserve dump status, huh?)

7. And get this! The girls to cook their own food! Most of the women don’t know how to cook or refuse to cook; so they are limited to cigarettes and boxed wine. And just to reiterate how they are going to start living more modestly, they are supplied with a box of wine. After all, it wouldn’t be a trashy reality show without excessive alcohol consumption.

8. Needless bickering and petty arguments soon ensue after “fake girls” and “bitchy girls” are outed. Alliances are drawn, setting the stage for the upcoming drama that will likely transpire throughout the season.

9. As the season progresses, the women are going to be taught a thing or two by taking on demanding jobs. But will they take what they learn to heart, merely go through the motions, or refuse to cooperate?...We shall see.

All in all, You’re Cut Off is another predictable reality featuring spoiled, childish people with no appreciable concept of real life.