Almost about a year ago, I had plans for 2015. I wanted to travel more, get into shape, get an internship and learn about the culture of Japan. I ended up sitting home all day binge-watching entire seasons of shows with Popcorn and Cheetos until I started to feel delirious and my shoulders cramped. I’m trying to make two points here. A. Lots of things happened in the television space. B. Don’t ever make new year resolutions. Here’s my Review of the year in: Television.
1. Television Royalty
How can I have a television review show without including Game of Thrones. Everything was burning, everybody was dying, everybody was flipping. Jon Snow died. Sansa got raped. Ramsay Bolton played with our hearts. All in all, GoT didn’t fail to impress. Not much of a surprise. I’m sorry for the spoilers, but what are you doing in your life if you don’t know these, any way?
2. Debuts
Empire’s pilot was released on January 7th, this year. What started out to be a war between three sons for their father’s multi-millionaire business becomes the ‘Taraji P Henson show’ for her in revile acting chops, conviction and bitchiness. Let’s be honest, we need more female characters like her.
3. Viola Davis
I can’t ignore Viola Davis while talking about strong female characters on American television. Wasn’t it enough for her to make us happy, sad, angry and powerful in ‘How to get away with Murder’ that she decides to floor us with just the most relevant, empowering acceptance speech at the Emmy’s. It’s one of my favourite acceptance speeches of all time, and that’s saying something. She accurately, blatantly pointed out the racism meted out to women of colour by stating ‘You can’t win awards for roles that aren’t written’. Brilliant.
4. Gaga
So I’m a huge pussy pants when it comes to horror movies or television shows. This one time, I was watching ‘The Conjuring’ in the cinema theatre and a particular scene freaked me out so much so that I ended up hurling my popcorn basket onto someone’s head. So it came as a surprise to me, more than to anyone, when I decided to watch ‘American Horror Story Hotel’ which is essentially Season 5 of the AHS series. Fans were unsure of what to expect, considering the absence of Jessica Lange but additions including Lady Gaga and Matt Bomer made it a season to remember. From what I’ve heard, It seemed to reference the first season and while it wasn’t the best out of all the past seasons, I definitely needed a change of pants every episode. (Yes I just made a pee joke, deal with it)
5. Sofia’s Choice (I like you if you get the reference)
There’s always conjecture about who the funniest woman on television is. I made my mind up the first time I saw Modern Family. Sofia Vergara is hands down the most humorous person on Television. She’s silly, honest, raw, uninhibited, beautiful and most importantly so talented. It was only normal for everybody to freak out when she got married to ‘Magic Mike’ heart-throb Joe Manganiello on November 2015. She looks like a million bucks, he looks like a million bucks, their babies will be unattainable. Also, Modern Family’s seventh season finale was aired this May. I can’t even be jealous of her, she deserves it all.
6. Good byes
While a lot of new shows were premiered and lot others were renewed for further seasons, we bid adieu to some. These included legends of the small screen- Jon Hamm’s ‘Mad Men’ and Amy Poehler’s ‘Parks and Recreation’ both of which drew the curtains after 7 seasons each. The former gave us witty, multi-layered characters like ‘Don Draper’, ‘Joan Holloway’ and ‘Betty Draper’, the latter gave us hilarious ones like ‘Leslie Knope’, ‘Ben Wyatt’ and ‘Tom Haverford’, soaring Christina Hendricks, January Jones, Aziz Ansari and Chris Pratt to super stardom. Other shows that left us were ‘The Mentalist’ and ‘Justified’. All I can say is, you’ll always have a piece of our hearts.
So that was that. Comment below if you think I need to start watching a TV show that got you hooked on! We can construct resolutions for 2016. We can plan things for ourselves. But we’re going to end up snuggling within our blanket losing sleep over the next episode of practically everything, distancing ourselves from any shred of reality. And that’s fine. (Keep telling yourself that, it makes it better).
I’ll be back with another review tomorrow, pretending to know everything about everything. You can check my last review on the music industry in 2015 here: https://akashakumar.wordpress.com/2015/12/21/2015-in-music/
Akash Kumar Existence 