ROUND 2

SCORPION

VS

GOTHAM

Follow the bracket at http://challonge.com/popfilter

 Sometimes is very difficult to weigh the merit of one show against another. Comparing two shows, what each show did wrong, what each did right and declaring one better than the other can be challenging. Sometimes it’s hard to choose a winner. This, however, is not one of those times.

Gotham is doing something that I haven’t seen before. For lack of a better term, I’ll call it dramatic camp. That means it’s campy on purpose and still takes itself seriously. The camp is applied with a light touch. Comedians are cast in serious roles and play them straight, but with a slight twist. The gunfight looks like a live action Dick Tracy cartoon. The bosses of the crime syndicate are legit bad guys who you’d find in any police drama while the bad guys familiar to those who grew up watching Batman: The Animated Series (The Riddler, Penguin etc) are gobers. No one is winking at the camera and there is no attempt at irony. That’s a bold move for a show that is primarily targeted at the aging, irony-loving hipsters of my generation. Gotham is in touch with its superhero-show heritage at the same time as being a semi-procedural drama about a police force.  It shouldn’t work. Nothing about what I just wrote makes this show seem watchable. But some-crazy-how it comes together in a way that makes sense for the story it’s telling. Gotham has my attention.

I just watched Scorpion’s second episode in a room filled with my dog’s noxious farts. After finishing it, my dog’s farts didn’t smell so bad. That’s how much Scorpion stinks. (Jones is fine, she just got into the garbage and when she eats trash she gets toxic flatulence.) The things that were wrong with the pilot are also wrong with the second episode. All this show does is cheat. It cheats its way through a deliriously incoherent second episode and cheats its viewers out of their precious time. It uses genius in place of making sense. “This sick little girl has a virus bioengineered to be infectious only to her! Yes that’s a thing! I figured it out when I looked at her laptop and saw it had a virus specifically targeted to it. Who cares how I figured it out? Fuck our audience.” That was only paraphrased slightly. I’m just happy to drop kick this show out of the bracket and never have to watch another episode. Don’t watch it. But if you have seen it, and feel like I feel, please write to Nina Tassler, President at CBS Entertainment, 7800 Beverly Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90039-2112 and let her know this crap is unacceptable and insulting to the intelligence of the stupidest people on the planet: people who watch CBS regularly.

-Stephanie Rose

NEXT UP:

TRANSPARENT VS HAPPYLAND