Spontaneous is a little bit of everything. It’s horror-lite and philosophy-lite. There’s comedy, sci-fi, coming of age romance, and the mysteries of life and death. It’s streaming on Prime and several other streamers.
Continue Reading: Spontaneous – a big blowupTag: PIper Perabo
Brain Dump: Thursday Nights on ABC
I haven’t done a brain dump in a while. My definition of a brain dump is sharing a few thoughts about several things at once. This time it’s Thursday night on ABC with Grey’s Anatomy, Notorious and How to Get Away with Murder on my mind. Continue Reading: Brain Dump: Thursday Nights on ABC
Watch This: Trailer(s) for Notorious
Piper Perabo is back this fall with a new show on ABC, Notorious. She stars with Daniel Sunjata in this thriller. The story is about “the professional and personal relationship between a charismatic attorney and a powerhouse television producer as they attempt to control the media, the justice system, and ultimately – each other…” Continue Reading: Watch This: Trailer(s) for Notorious
My Favorite Prospects for the New TV Season
I’m watching the news about new TV shows for the upcoming season. A few have caught my eye as hopeful prospects. These series have women in leading roles, or women I like in supporting roles. These are the shows I’ll watch for sure. There may be others that I’ll watch as well, but these are my favorites so far. Continue Reading: My Favorite Prospects for the New TV Season
Brain Dump: Gugu Mbatha-Raw, The Good Wife, Covert Affairs, Person of Interest
A brain dump about this and that. Join in with a comment. We’ll hit on Gugu Mbatha-Raw as a not-so-new comer, the series The Good Wife, Covert Affairs, and Person of Interest.
Continue Reading: Brain Dump: Gugu Mbatha-Raw, The Good Wife, Covert Affairs, Person of InterestBrain Dump: Stalker, Covert Affairs, Bones, Cristela and some Good Books
Time for a brain dump. It’s a little bit of this and a little bit of that.
Stalker
In the “Love is a Battlefield” episode of Stalker, which is the 6th episode of the season, we finally get a female stalker, played with convincing intensity by Jessica Tuck. One of my concerns with this show was that every episode would be about some dude pursuing a helpless female. We had to wait 6 episodes, but we finally did get a different scenario.
Covert Affairs
Annie Walker (Piper Perabo) is back with a new season of Covert Affairs. Annie has a heart condition and the CIA wants to confine her to a desk because of it. She wants to be in the field, but her heart does slow her down in critical moments.
Heart disease and heart attacks are the number 1 killer of women in this country. And the stats are showing that younger and younger women are dying of heart attacks every year. Kudos to Covert Affairs for working this theme into this tale of the best action hero(ine) on TV.
Bones
The Bones episode “The Lost Love in the Foreign Land” (season 10, ep 6) was a moving story about human trafficking. In one scene Booth (David Boreanaz) was surrounded by a whole room full of Chinese women forced into slave labor. It came out that the women were controlled by threats against their families and loved ones back in China. The woman Booth was talking to (Leann Lei) held up a photo of her daughter. Every other woman in the room stepped forward with a photo. It was one of the most powerful images I’ve ever seen in efforts to put a face on human trafficking. Kudos to Bones for such a touching and important episode.
At the end of the episode, there was a brief mention of The Blue Campaign, a State Department effort to end human trafficking. I recommend the book Not For Sale. It will give you a lot more information about the global slave trade, particularly the huge numbers of slaves now forced to work in the US. You might be interested in this info from sharedhope.org showing stats state by state.
Cristela
I’m loving Cristela. Why?
- Cristela’s Latina
- Cristela’s sporting a normal body
- The players deliver their lines in a normal tone of voice and with pauses and beats the way real people talk. It isn’t one of those shouting lines and saying them faster than a speeding bullet sitcoms.
- It’s funny and real.
As long as I’m recommending books in this brain dump, may I mention The Richer Sex? Cristela Alonzo is a a perfect example of a south Texas Mexican-American doing exactly what is described in this book. With many examples from south Texas, the book talks about the trend across the country of women in charge, women making more money than men, and women being better educated than men.
Why Annie Walker is the Best Action Hero(ine) on TV
Piper Perabo plays Annie Walker on USA Networks Covert Affairs, now in it’s 4th season. Annie Walker is a CIA operative who goes all over the world doing dangerous and exciting spy missions.
She goes undercover, she catches bad guys, she carries a gun, she dresses up as nicely as James Bond ever could, she chases people through the streets of strange cities, she drives a fast car better than Mario Andretti, she speaks about 57 languages fluently, and she kicks ass. And she does it all in high heels. If that isn’t an action hero, I don’t know what one is.
Of course, she’s just a girl, so no one has ever given her credit for being the best action hero on TV.
I’m here to correct that error.
Other CIA characters who surround our heroine Annie Walker include her handler, Augie, played by Chris Gorham. Augie is blind, but a genius at finding out anything Annie needs to know to carry out her missions. Once in a while Augie gets out in the field with Annie.
If you only know Chris Gorham as Ugly Betty’s dorky boyfriend – and took note of his amazing abs – you’ll be glad to know his abs are on display from time to time in this show, too. There’s a separate web series devoted to Augie called Sights Unseen. It features Augie’s history and story with the CIA before he went blind.
Some of the higher ups in the CIA who boss Annie around from time to time are Kari Matchett and Peter Gallagher, playing a married couple of CIA lifers. In four seasons, many characters have come and gone. There are family members, lovers, co-workers, spies, and assorted others needed to tell the spy tales in Covert Affairs.
You can catch episodes of Covert Affairs on USA Network. There’s a Facebook page for the show. You’ll find lots of video from the show on the Covert Affairs YouTube channel.
All images ©USA Network