In Which Hugh Grant Would Add A Lot Of Spice To These Proceedings

Friends of Color

by DICK CHENEY

The Walking Dead
creator Frank Darabont

No one on AMC's The Walking Dead has ever heard of explosives. If they had that Muslim kid from Texas, he probably could have whipped something up to destroy the massive zombie collective the cast discovered in last night's season premiere, but they don't. They just have really intimate, but friendship-level relationships between white guys and black guys, with a desiccated old Jewish woman (Tovah Feldshuh) chiming in with her catchphrase, "Rick's right."

Half of last night's premiere of The Walking Dead was in black and white, for two reasons. The first is that they didn't trust their audience to realize which parts of the show were flashbacks. The second was for that art-house feel, which did not come across in any of the actual misogynistic content. There was one scene between two women in the premiere, but it was mostly them talking about other men, in this case the Asian pizza boy Glenn (Steven Yeun).

I could have done another Quantico review, but I'm pretty sure the Indian woman did it.

Deanna's husband was one of the most interesting characters of last season, so of course they killed him off in the finale. Rick (Andrew Lincoln) subsequently shot the man who murdered the town architect. At the same time Rick's bosom buddy Morgan (Lennie James) arrived. James is the best actor on The Walking Dead, although he is mostly given lines like, "I know you, Rick!" and grunts/knowing looks.

Lincoln himself has abandoned the slow-talking PTSD phase of the Rick Grimes character when he was acting like Dan Stevens in The Guest. Did you see The Guest? It was about the guy in Downton Abbey murdering an entire town's worth of people. The sheer amount of narrative dissonance gave me an erection that sustained me and Lynne for months.

Good plan, Ethan, go back to sponging off Tom Hanks for the rest of your career.  No such luck here. Carter (Ethan Embry) emerges as the man constantly questioning Rick's authority. Given that the last man who did that was escorted to a grave somewhat south of the camp, he is probably the bravest individual on the show. Rick and Morgan drive a ways to bury the body of the malcontent, where they find a gigantic crater some enterprising individuals created to house the dead.

He's probably going to shoot you in the head at some point in your fifties, Keira.  I was rewatching Love Actually for the eightieth time last week. They should have put a black censor bar over Keira Knightley's teeth they were so bad. And Hugh Grant fucked his secretary for some reason. Lincoln's character in is love with Knightley, although she is married to his best friend. She sees in the wedding video he made that he does love her. Lincoln does all the same mannerisms — the head shake, the downward look, that he would make famous as Rick Grimes. He's pretty mediocre as a performer, but I have to say he has a flawless American accent.

British performers have abrogated the roles that rightfully belonged to red blooded Americans like Matthew Fox and Sam Waterston. The assimilation is real — now no casting director will want these fellows to do their spicy British accents. Americans are a lot more of afraid of pretending to be British — only Gwyneth Paltrow was fully prepared to risk in it Sliding Doors, and that was an amazing disaster.

Your reluctance to grab your ankles for the man who saved you from your abusive husband strikes me as a massive character flaw, woman.  The Walking Dead requires romance, but there really isn't any this season. Rick's blonde love interest shut him down: she was not entirely sympathetic to him killing her husband. It would be nice if Michonne (Danai Gurira) could find love, possibly with Carl Grimes, who was nowhere to be found now that his Dad's best friend is on the scene.

Do not startle me from behind with your child, Rick. I know you.

At the end of this dull mess of an episode, a massive horn sounded to foil Rick's foolproof plan of leading the walkers...somewhere. I didn't really understand the plan, or any plan that doesn't involve bombing Fallujah. The deus ex hornchina is not much of a cliffhanger, but what the hell. They had to get out of that boring town at some point anywhere, even though my fantasy of being dominated by a sensible Jewish woman in her sixties is now dead.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording.

"Little Sparks (Hushed Mix)" - The Woodlands (mp3)

"Making Love on the Mountain (Sexy Mix)" -  The Woodlands (mp3)

In Which We Have Expanded Our View Of This Crime

In the Academy

by DICK CHENEY

Quantico
creator Joshua Safran

"The majority of threats don't come from nations or extremist groups explains a Viola Davis-lookalike FBI agent (Aunjanue Ellis), "they come from our own backyard." Um, what?

When it begins, Quantico displays the wreckage of what used to be Grand Central Station. Alex Parrish (Miss World winner Priyanka Chopra) is arrested for the crime of bombing the place. Mere months earlier she is backwards in the lap of FBI agent Ryan Booth (Jake McLaughlin), riding his hard penis for all it is worth:

Maybe give us the slightest indication you used protection. Kids love Quantico.

Well, Quantico got me thinking about my idea for a young adult science fiction novel in which all knowledge is transmitted by sex. The better the sex, the better the knowledge. This kind of pressure to make wintercourse the best it can possibly be leads to a lot more banging than you would imagine, but most of it is bad.

Alex shows up at the FBI Academy six months before her arrest. Her instructors are all agents being punished for failures in the field. There is no running or physical training of any kind outside of pushups. No one even breaks a sweat in Quantico: they mostly just sit around the fabulous Virginia campus telling each other not to feel bad about various things.

Is this the Bret Easton Ellis version of the FBI academy?

Liam O'Connor (Josh Hopkins) directs the training of the recruits. He tells them all to select another trainee and find out their "secret." It subsequently emerges that a Mormon recruit had impregnated a 14 year old girl who died during her abortion, and the trainee kills himself before he is exposed. "I have no doubt Eric would have been a great agent," someone comments afterwards, and no one contradicts them.

"But D.C.," you ask, calling me by my initials because we have become rather close to one another during the review of this ABC drama, "I have two questions." I nod to indicate you should continue. "The first is, is Shonda Rimes, or as I call her, Ronda Shimes, involved in this show? The second is, don't you think the premise of this shit is bit ridiculous?"

I don't hate that jacket.

I can answer both your questions in the form of a question. No? And, sure, but no one spent all of their time at a Boston bar either, and yet Cheers became a huge hit?

It emerges in a grainy flashback that the bosomy Alex Parrish shot her FBI agent father after he became a bit angry with her mother and brandished a gun at her. Self-defense would seem be a stretch in this case, especially since her father carried a weapon regularly and the gun was never pointed at her. Did you know that the majority of kids in juvenile detention are now women?

Wondering what the Old South was? I guess white hoods and Jefferson Davis.

Parrish's roommate is a blonde from Texas known for her hunting skills. Also on the hall is a gay Jew, a legacy case, and a pair of Muslim twins pretending to be one person. The FBI recruitment team was beset by a plague of chicken pox this year.

Parrish is quite voluptuous, nearly always on the verge of popping right out of her top. She is always in full makeup, even when she wakes up. Every part of her seems to bounce or twitch on contact. She is the human equivalent of a beanie baby. When she gets arrested after they show her the various detailed plans she has in her apartment for bombing Grand Central Station, she cries like a little girl and screams that she has rights. This is clearly the cool calculus of a trained federal agent.

I feel that this show could have been saved by a S & M arrangement Alex had with her superior.

Quantico's sexism aside, I shouldn't really be upset at the show, since it is basically The Hunger Games with an attractive protagonist. It is no more meant to be taken seriously than Michael Moore or Dr. Ben Carson. But I have sketched out in my dream book a real television series about what it was like to train to fight our nation's terrorists. I just didn't think anyone would believe they were incubated in the FBI.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording.

"Gimme A Little Sign" - Shawn Colvin ft. Marc Cohn (mp3)

In Which We Start A Company With Our Best Girlfriend

Season 3 All Happens On A Boat

by DICK CHENEY

"So how was the season finale of True Detective?" Lynne said, twirling a chicken thigh on her finger like a basketball.

"I don't want to talk about it," I said, covering my face with my hands. Lynne gave up on the show in week four, quietly walking out of the room around the time Vince Vaughn used the word 'kike,' throwing a framed photo of her with Matthew McConaughey on the set of Mud into the trash.

"You watch bad shows so I don't have to," she said.

"Ugh." I was still reeling from the twenty minute recap of NBC's Mr. Robinson I had given her the previous day. Women be shopping, I had begun, you can't stop a woman from shopping.

Now that he has a woman in his life, he leaves the house like this?

"Tell me, or the next time Roger Ailes calls I'll tell him you are here."

"All right!" I screamed in her face. "Vince Vaughn was murdered by Mexicans and he hallucinated black kids bullying him for being who he was! Colin Farrell looked up to God in the heavens and it turned out his wife was making her rape up to get out of the marriage! The mayor killed himself because he was sad! Rachel McAdams dyed her hair the same color that it was! The solution to the murder the season began with had nothing to do with any of the characters on the show! Rachel and Colin fell in love forever based on the mutual sharing of how terrible Nic Pizzolatto has been for their career! Colin Farrell's torso looked decent to good! Is that what you fucking wanted to hear?"

His inspiration was 90s album art and early 60s porn magazines. That explains a lot.

"Wow," Lynne said, "by any chance did Ray Velcoro (Farrell) tell Rachel McAdams 'None of that is your fault' after he had mincing sex that reminded her of the abuse she suffered as a little girl?" Lynne always reads the worst recaps of television shows, the ones that are like, 'Last night's True Detective was a fine example of film noir...' It's like, go fuck yourself. At least include your significant other as a presence in the recap, so you can make it seem like you're not just quietly taking notes on Vince Vaughn's skin by yourself.

"None of it was anyone's fault," I replied. "About 100 people were murdered and there was not one investigation."

A tortured portrait of a man who hates minorities.

After that, Lynne and I had make-up sex on top of our bear rug and ate string cheese like the dogs in Lady and the Tramp. I still couldn't get over how bad the finale was, so to take my mind off it, I explained in choking, interrupted sobs how it wasn't fair that Nic had a job while the guys who make Halt and Catch Fire can't even get a meeting with AMC because no one watches their show.

His hoodie exceeded all my expectations. Watch this show immediately in its entirety please.

It is almost impossible to write about Halt and Catch Fire. The show stars Lee Pace and his huge, massive eyebrows as Joe MacMillan. In the first scene of Halt, Joe is speaking at a university computer class when he discovers Cameron Howe (Mackenzie Davis), a computer prodigy who is basically if Kate Moss absorbed Albert Einstein. This wonderful, multidimensional character proves to Nic Pizzolatto once and for all all that not every woman need either be a whore or a lesbian.

"Vince Vaughn fired his agent, honey. Don't worry."

Complementing these two centerpieces is the starmaking role of Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy) a disgraced engineer working at a small Texas electronics company that Joe flips on its head. McNairy's Clark is married with two young daughters. He and his wife Donna (the gorgeous Kerry Bishé) are recovering from the failed launch of Gordon's computing brainchild, a device called Symphonic. Gordon's relationship with Donna is fractious, disturbed and fragile: it is also completely authentic.

Instead of relying on nudity, profanity or violence to carry any of the action, Halt and Catch Fire consists of intensely charged personal interactions between people meant to be more intelligent than any on television. Instead of making genuises so different from us they are unrecognizable, creators Chris Cantwell and Chris Rogers do a marvelous job of treading the line between moments that are alien to strategies for life that are barely recognizable. Halt feels so much like the world that it must actually be disturbing for some people to watch. This is the only reason that would explain the low ratings.

Talking about boys again.

The second season of Halt and Catch Fire explored Cameron starting her own tech company with Gordon's wife Donna, one that she named Mutiny. She also found manic pixie love with a young programmer named Tom.

Tom is the absolute sweetest and everytime he and Cameron kissed I had butterflies in my colon. Meanwhile, Lee Pace suppressed his past dalliances with men and pursued a relationship with the journalist daughter of a CEO of a multinational corporation, Sara Wheeler (Aleksa Palladino). She wasn't the strongest personality on the show — her clothes always looked like a throw rug — and she ended up "needing her time and space," which we all know what that means.

It's a good thing Colin Farrell fathered like twelve children out of wedlock in the 90s so they had these pics to use.

Having a show about two women running a company was exciting on both a sexual and human resources level. It felt novel, which the first season of True Detective exemplified, especially when Matthew McConaughey said things were shit for like ten straight minutes that one time. When it came to basically all the guys on the show dying and Rachel McAdams living somewhere in Venezuela and still being extremely cranky... the target was in L.A. but the arrow was in New York.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording.

This is the same haircut she had to begin with. She should have gotten one of those Wendy Williams wigs.

"Spirit Moves" - Langhorne Slim (mp3)