BOOB TUBE: THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE UGLY

We are all going to need to run to Costco to buy tissues in bulk for the Breaking Bad mid-season finale on Sunday.

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly dives right into the good, the bad, and the ugly parts of television each week.  Still unsure what this column is about: The Good will focus on the best thing on TV this week, The Bad will explore the worst thing, and The Ugly will vary from week to week, but it’s usually serving up the hottest of hot messes allowed to hit our TV screens.

The Good.

I’m sorry, but the best thing this week was Breaking Bad again and it will definitely be the best thing on TV next week too, so be prepared for that. The mid-season finale is on Sunday so I need to start mentally preparing myself right now.

I was expecting the entire episode this week to end with Mike’s suicide. That seemed to me what the episode was building up to, but we all know now that’s not what happened.

This piece from Vulture sort of sums up what I was thinking: “The other great scene, Mike’s death, was a stunner, not just for its film-literate beauty — that sunny green final shot of Mike falling over dead by the river channeled Badlands, Sugarland Express, and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid — but because it was a great example of poetic justice, Breaking Bad-style. If Walter disposes of Mike the usual way — by dumping his corpse into a vat of acid — no one will ever know what became of him, and Kaylee will think her grandfather abandoned her. Because we like Mike, with his grumpy one-liners and glacial cool and finely tuned sense of honor, and because Jonathan Banks inhabits him so completely, we root for his escape and mourn his death. But at the risk of ruining a virtual wake for a great TV character, we should remember that Mike, for all his gruff charm, was a vicious hitman and fixer, and that Breaking Bad, for all its violence and treachery, is one of the most deeply moral shows on TV, one in which characters inevitably reap what they sow. And that’s what happened here. Mike killed a lot of people in his life, and this is his punishment: He dies knowing that the only person he loved will go to her grave thinking he left without saying good-bye.” RIP MIKE

The Bad.

I’m not really into writing about politics because most people write it much better than I do, but Clint Eastwood’s chair at the Republican National Convention. This was just weird TV.

The Ugly.

There isn’t a lot on TV right now, because we are about to start the new fall TV season, so I spent some time this week watching some of the new fall pilots available to watch on the internet and on demand.

You can see The Mindy Project (Fox) which I really loved. I mean it wasn’t perfect, but very few pilots are -- I just see so much potential in this show. NBC also released a bunch of their pilots: Go On, starring Matthew Perry, was much better than I was expecting even if it was a little weirder than I was expecting -- I’m still not sure about it though. I liked Animal Kingdom, starring Weed’s Justin Kirk, even though there is a monkey co-star. I’m not really sure what to say about The New Normal -- maybe you need to make up your own mind about that one.

When he’s not discussing what he watched last night on television with his cats, Steven is a freelance writer and blogger from Boston. He writes about television at TV Hangover and blogs about really important stuff like pizza and feelings at his blog. He also tweets from the bathroom while his children are playing video games.