{"id":8144,"date":"2012-09-24T19:17:48","date_gmt":"2012-09-24T09:17:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=8144"},"modified":"2012-09-24T19:19:10","modified_gmt":"2012-09-24T09:19:10","slug":"tv-show-round-up-survivor-philippines-the-west-wing-season-two","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=8144","title":{"rendered":"TV Show Round Up: Survivor: Philippines, The West Wing Season Two"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Survivor: Philippines<\/strong><\/h2>\n

My favourite reality tv show of all time Survivor<\/em> is back for its 25th season with Survivor: Philippines.\u00a0 <\/em>The producers had some work to do after their previous season Survivor: One World<\/em> fizzled badly<\/a> with a cast too heavily stacked with pawns, introverts and idiots.\u00a0 The winner, a woman named Kim, comfortably outplayed her opponents and strolled to victory in anticlimatic finish.<\/p>\n

Survivor: Philippines<\/em> started off a lot more positively with a double length pilot episode that showed plenty of promise and colourful characters.\u00a0 This season’s gimmick sees the return of three famous players who had to leave past seasons due to injury.\u00a0 They include one of my favourite players, Jonathan Penner, who was awesome in Survivor: Cook Islands<\/em> and is such a cool dude that he appeared in the tv show Arrested Development<\/em>.\u00a0 The other two include Michael, the guy who fell in the fire in Season Two and ‘Black’ Russell, the dreadlocked fatty who collapsed in the season that ‘Evil’ Russell Hantz first made an appearance in.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Angie<\/p><\/div>\n

The rest of the cast include a reasonable number of strategically minded players (shocking), some super hot chicks, a couple of window lickers, a Major League Baseball star and a washed up child actor who blew all her money and wrote a book advocating child abuse.\u00a0 Surely a recipe for an interesting season ahead?<\/p>\n

The stand out for me in the first episode was RC, an attractive sociopathic Wall Street banker who has already formed an alliance, alienated a tribemate for being old and awkward and seems to be playing the game pretty hard from the outset.\u00a0 I have a hunch she’ll go far and will be a fun villain.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

RC: evil banker, mega rich, pretty hot<\/p><\/div>\n

Let’s hope this season delivers.\u00a0 The three tribe split, diverse casting and healthy balance of aggressive players suggests we’re in for good things.\u00a0 It certainly had one of the funnier opening tribal council dismissals in Survivor<\/em>.\u00a0 After losing their immunity challenge, Zane decided he would come up with a brilliant strategy: publically give up in front of everyone and then hope a blindside magically comes together against another player!\u00a0 Best move in Survivor<\/em> history, baby!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

My Pony For This Season:\u00a0 <\/strong>Jonathan Penner.\u00a0 One of the most likable and entertaining players in Survivor<\/em>.\u00a0 I hope he makes it to the end.<\/p>\n

My Poison For The Season:\u00a0 <\/strong>Russell.\u00a0 Already getting on my nerves.\u00a0 Kind of a douche.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The West Wing Season Two<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Like many tv shows that have the good fortune to get renewed after a promising start, The West Wing<\/em> really hits its stride in the second season.\u00a0 Extraneous characters like Mandy are given the flick.\u00a0 Popular minor characters from the first season like Donna Moss and Charlie Young are given more prominent roles.\u00a0 All the actors have ‘found their voice’ playing their roles and a lot of the fun in Season Two is understanding what makes the characters tick and anticipating how they’ll react to one another in certain situations.<\/p>\n

We pick up where we left off at the end of the first season where a crazed gunman fires on the Bartlet administration as they leave a Q&A session at a college.\u00a0 Although there are no fatalities, there are lingering after-effects that that their toll on the staff as they try and rush back to work.<\/p>\n

Season Two is a real treat with no real dud episodes.\u00a0 The weakest episode for me was Noel<\/em>, an unusual episode heavily focused on Josh Lyman’s visit to a psychiatrist with flashbacks to events in the past week.\u00a0 It’s purposefully done in a style that moves away from the show’s bread and butter ‘walk and talk’ format and I appreciate the effort to mix it up but it didn’t really do it for me.<\/p>\n

One of the most entertaining episodes is Somebody is Going To Emergency, Somebody is Going to Jail<\/em> in which the administration spend the day with fringe groups as part of the Big Block of Cheese Day.\u00a0 This includes a memorable exchange between CJ and the Cartographers For Social Equality (“how can there be equality issues with map making?!”)<\/p>\n

The stand alone episodes in this season are pretty strong.\u00a0 There are informative episodes about duties of presidency (Bartlet’s Third State of the Union<\/em>) and there are also touching political parables, like the elderly man giving the filibuster in The Stackhouse Filibuster<\/em>.\u00a0 There is also the addition of Ainsley Hayes, a Republican lawyer who becomes a regular character.\u00a0 She has a hilarious and unique style of speech and she actually articulates the Republican viewpoint on the show pretty even handedly.<\/p>\n

The biggest improvement in Season Two over the first is the execution of the series-length story arc.\u00a0 In the first season, one of the long running stories is Sam Seaborne’s relationship with a call girl which eventually leaks to the press.\u00a0 After a significant and lengthy build up, the matter is actually resolved very quickly and without much fuss or drama.<\/p>\n

In Season Two, Jeb Bartlet’s failure to disclose his medical condition comes back to bite him big time and there is a mucher greater emphasis on the consequences this has for both his chances at seeking re-election and also his marriage.\u00a0 In fact, the last five episodes of this twenty two episode season are largely dedicated to the eventual public disclosure.\u00a0 Even though we know the series runs for seven seasons, the tension that Bartlet’s condition presents is palpable.\u00a0 And then when it seems like things couldn’t get any worse, Mrs Landingham has to go and get killed in that car accident.\u00a0 It’s a real tear jerker of a moment \ud83d\ude41<\/p>\n

I’m now onto Season Three.\u00a0 The first episode of the season was filmed shortly after the events of 9\/11.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Survivor: Philippines My favourite reality tv show of all time Survivor is back for its 25th season with Survivor: Philippines.\u00a0 The producers had some work to do after their previous season Survivor: One World fizzled badly with a cast too heavily stacked with pawns, introverts and idiots.\u00a0 The winner, a woman named Kim, comfortably outplayed …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,4],"tags":[158,1365,1356],"class_list":["post-8144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-tv","tag-survivor","tag-survivor-philippines","tag-the-west-wing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8144"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8144\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8150,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8144\/revisions\/8150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}