There are scores of TV shows out there, with dozens of new episodes each week, not to mention everything you can find on Hulu Plus, Netflix streaming, and HBO Go. How’s a viewer to keep up? To help you sort through all that television has to offer, Flavorwire is compiling the five best moments on TV each week. This round, Emmy nominations infuriate thousands, while Pretty Little Liars celebrates a milestone.
And the Emmy (Might) Go To…
This year’s Emmy nominations were unveiled yesterday morning via live broadcast on Yahoo. Since the big Y will soon host none other than Community, the time seems ripe to start counting stuff that happens there as “TV.” Anyway, we’re as angry as Tatiana Maslany’s snub as anyone, but Vox has a very helpful guide to just how the Emmy list ends up so arbitrary and/or exasperating from year to year. (One takeaway: Natasha Lyonne chose to contend as a guest star, not a supporting actress. Go figure.)
Halle Berry Initiates Widespread Comparisons to Sigourney Weaver
Pregnant scientist in (or rather, recently returned from) space! Such is the premise of Extant, the heavily promoted CBS drama that rolled out its pilot into the more or less competition-free landscape of mid-July TV. Thanks to Berry and the even more high-wattage name of one Steven Spielberg, there’s a lot of hype attached to the sci-fi/mystery show, and the series premiere does its best to translate that hype into a desire to keep going with its central mystery: what kind of child is Berry’s character carrying, and how will it affect her family life with her second husband and their robot kid? Plenty of angles there, clearly.
Pretty Little Liars Celebrates Its Century-sode
Hard to believe we’ve watched these four appallingly good-looking, suspiciously well-coiffed “high schoolers” get cyberbullied for a hundred hours of television, no? Anyway, we have, and so we get “Miss Me x 100,” a surprisingly novelty-lite 100th episode by the standards of teen soaps. There’s really only one major reveal: A’s back! Which isn’t that surprising, considering that A’s harassment of the Liars is the series’ central premise.
The Bridge Hits Refresh
Critics have been making largely positive noises about the FX border drama’s second season, but for now, all viewers have to go on is Wednesday night’s premiere. The focus of the show has now pivoted away from the serial killer plot inherited from Bron, the Scandinavian series of which it’s a rough adaptation, and towards the messy goings-on at the Texas border between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez. That’s a lot of territory to cover, but “Yankee” offered several possibilities for compelling storylines, including a relapsed alcoholic and a woman’s relationship with her sister’s murderer. It’s enough to keep us on board for the next couple episodes.
Werewolf Down!
In a show that’s really all about exposed abs, Alcide Herveaux’s exposed abs were always the ab-iest. It must have been hard for True Blood‘s showrunners to dispatch Joe Manganiello’s perennially shirtless character so early in the final season, but hey, at least we have seven more episodes of Sookie’s Instagram-filtered flashbacks about their boring relationship to look forward to! But seriously, this character death was handled several orders of magnitude better than Tara’s off-screen zapping in the premiere. Maybe there’s hope for True Blood yet.