THE 2015 POPFILTER TV CHALLENGE: MARCH MADNESS

Follow the Tournament Here!

Round Two

Weird Loners

vs

Bloodline

Hello all you beautiful Filterinos! In a fight that will go down in history as being almost too close to call, Weird Loners faces off against Netflix’s very own Bloodline. It’s exciting. It’s amazing! It’s tremendous…ly one sided. You see, sometimes you have two weak turds trying to out turd each other for a spot (re: last week’s battle between Weird Loners and Younger). Sometimes you have two painfully heavy hitters that make you vomit blood because one has to lose (re: The Unbreakable Kimmie Schmidt vs. The Last Man on Earth). And then you get a battle like this one. A real David vs. Goliath, but in this one Goliath wins because fuck you, that’s how the world works.

Last week, I spoke of the middling merits of Weird Loners. The show contains a base level of charm that almost makes up for its painfully regurgitated story lines and old school sitcom tropes. In this episode, the vaguely East Indian girl channels the man-child’s dead father and they have a nice day together. Meanwhile, bitter hot girl and shitty douche guy pull a fast one on Nana. And for the second week in a row, David Wain is left holding his comedy dick, wishing that he hadn’t have been seen killing that hooker by a hack-fuck comedy writer. Oh David, you always need to take care of the witnesses.

And then there’s this Netflix show called Bloodline. On the second episode, everything ever happens all the time. But, it’s reined in performances and pitch—perfect direction make it feel like nothing has happened at all. This show is full of intrigue, family drama, dark pasts and will, by the end of its run, equate to a 13-hour episodic film that blows your dick off. Or so I would assume. After two epis, that kind of seems like the direction this show is going.

So the winner is clearly Bloodline. And though it may be trite to say, this battle really came down to one thing: which of these two shows was remarkably better. You can try to tell me that the chemisty is building between the leads on Weird Loners. You can try to tell me that Bloodline might go the way of the True Detective and be so good early that no ending can live up to it. You can try to tell me that Nate Torrence is doing interesting things with the man-child character (even though Will Forte has now destroyed anyone else’s chances of doing anything with that particular trope). In all three instances, however, you would be powerfully wrong. Stop being a dodo bird, you dodo bird. Bloodline takes its rightful place in the final four.

With Love,

Jason R. Noble

NEXT UP…BLOODLINE VS iZOMBIE!

IT’S THE FINAL FOUR, BITCHES!