Crumbs: Blog » True Blood, Curb Your Enthusiasm (15 August 2011)
Critical reviews of U.S. TV shows
and analysis of what makes them
good, bad, irritating and enlightening.

True Blood, Curb Your Enthusiasm (15 August 2011)

Posted by The TV Critic on 15 August 2011 | 2 Comments

Tags: ,

Curb Your Enthusiasm - 806 - The Hero

Once more this finished on a perfect comic note. The shoe-lace inspired heroism came in the first scene and so to revisit it at the very end was beautifully constructed. The rest of the episode was much more problematic. There was a LOT of Larry arguing with people which often leads to people talking over one another and irritating plots. Several things happened where Larry was suffering from a miscarriage of justice (the waiter giving a bottle of wine to Ricky Gervais without asking which one Larry wanted to give, Gervais offering him a ticket and then making him pay for it). Those moments are irritating because Larry isn't a very sympathetic figure and so when he complains about those incidents in an abrasive way it becomes difficult to care about any of it.

He also dipped into his Seinfeld story-bag a little too much for my taste. You may remember George insisting once that everyone brings wine to a dinner party and he would rather be different ("The Dinner Party" 513). Then it was Elaine who laughed during a concert performance and had to hide her identity from the angry performer ("The Pez Dispenser" 314).

True Blood - 408 - Spellbound

Again I enjoyed this more than I usually do. If you are going to have a big fight scene then the fog which Antonia brought down was an effective way to make the action entertaining. All the inter-personal conflicts were allowed to play out nicely and Eric being captured is as good a cliff hanger as the show is likely to produce. I also like the way that the necromancy\witchcraft\ghosts storyline has been tied together fairly neatly. It's brought the evil baby, the Lafayette and the main Antonia story into basically the same ongoing exploration of the never ending supernatural troubles of Bon Temps.

Elsewhere I was less happy with all the misery-porn. Not only did we get Jessica dreaming of a horrible breakup but then Hoyt treated her like crap when they actually did. Did they have to yell such abuse at one another? He essentially resorted to racism in terms of calling her out on being dead etc. It felt unpleasant and unnecessary for one of the show's nicer characters to say all that. Similarly we have Alcide's pack leader being such a nice cool guy and then turning around and acting like the most clichéd piece of trailer trash when he sees Sam with his woman. That lack of subtlety is plaguing Alcide who promises never to see Sookie again and then races off to her rescue immediately. Presumably now Debbie can go insane with jealousy and start yelling abuse at him. Great.


Post your comment

Comments

  • Curb'd has "stolen" from Seinfeld a few times this season. The talking during the show, Larry being a social assassin (like the time they used Kramer's lack of social tact to tell a woman she had a bad hairdo), and the dinner party stuff.

    I love the show and it's not a big deal, but there have been multiple times this season where I've noticed this.

    Posted by Aaron, 18/08/2011 3:03am (9 months ago)

  • True Blood reviewed itself pretty nicely this week. We saw the audacious dream break-up sequence. Then we saw the actual tame break-up, followed by the comment "This is so fucking lame!"
    I was bored by the grotesque comedy True Blood. They had the chance to kill off a few characters and they chickened out.

    Posted by Michael, 16/08/2011 2:27pm (9 months ago)

RSS feed for comments on this page | RSS feed for all comments