Skin

I think the last full season I watched of this was season 7. I'm glad the show is still running and the CW are still giving Jared and Jensen pay checks though. This show will probably go on for another 2 seasons at least. The CW has nothing else to show at this point, might as well ride this pony into the ground.

Katherine's exit was the most impacting episode of the entire season, Gone Girl is probably the best episode of season 5. Haven't watched the last two episodes of the season, and honestly don't feel compelled to do so. Word is that the series may be wrapping up either this season or next season (depending on if the core three renew their contracts at the end of this season).

Season 4 is the worst season, by far. I would say it gets a bit better towards the end due to Elena's loss of humanity but I would consider season 4 the worst season, easily. Katherine was the only redeemable thing about this season so far. I really feel like the Original's killed the show. From that point onward the mythology has just become that much weaker.

The thing about Brian that is particularly interesting is that his best friends are all in love with him. Lindsey chooses Brian to be the father of her child, they previously dated in college and they would also play fake hetero-sexual partners concerning Gus. Justin was in love with Brian from the moment they had their one night stand and Micheal was forever waiting in the wings for Brian to de-friend zone him. Brian is an interesting character study just because of the way he breaks down his relationships and how he compartmentalizes his love for people. He denies Micheal the sexual gratification he continuously gives Justin, he denies Justin the intimacy that he so desperate needs by giving it to Micheal and he denies both Micheal and Justin the respect and equality he gives to Lindsey on a regular basis. He purposely defeats and sabotages all of his relationships because of a catastrophic up-bringing he witnessed with his mother and father. Brian will never be satisfied, because he never gives himself fully to anyone. He will never have a full relationship because he never gives everything to one person. He is virtually in a polygamous relationship threw out the entire show, and because of it all of his relationships are in lock-step. Ultimately Brian ends up alone at the end of the series because of it. Micheal, Justin and Lindsey all move on and he is still at Babylon. Loved Ben, even threw that steroid mess they put him threw. No wonder Micheal completely forgot about Brian as soon as he showed up. Hated the Hunter storyline, though, every bit of it. I don't think it was that he was bored with his life so much as this was just circular writing. You can tell toward the end of the show (s5 in particular) that they were just recycling storylines. S3 and S4 show Brian maturing into a person who is more or less concerned with his community and accepting responsibility for them and looking out for all of the gay people in Pittsburgh, which was a nice progression from where he was initially in seasons 1 and 2. But in season 5 he is virtually reset. Ultimately I think the shows creators didn't know how to progress the character while still being true to who he was, the endless eternal stud who wanted to screw everything with no attachments. That doesn't mesh well with the hero they were trying to make him into after his fight with cancer and taking down a political opponent who wanted to make gays second class citizens. Not because there can't be both, but after all Brian went threw it seemed shallow that his number one obsession was if he was still hot or not. The Brian and Justin relationship was also an issue, because they had to stunt Justin's growth continuously. There was nothing wrong with his character arc at the end of season 2 and beginning of season 3. It was completely right for Justin to want more out of a relationship than an open one. That's the one thing I liked about the Ethan arc, that Justin finally realized he wanted a monogamous relationship that meant he was with one person. It's clear Justin wanted that intimacy and security, and it was ok for that to not be with Brian. But they changed that, and made him go back to Brian and say "I am the guy he [!@#$%^&*] more than once." Like that was some kind of prize. The STD scare in season 5 only brought the point home further. Justin's character after season 3 virtually went no where. He had no further growth.

This is probably the part most people identify as being "Girls-esque." The day in the life of unlikable and ultimately bitchy characters who have no direction in life. I think that comparison is apt for that particular reason it fits and has the same general tone and ideology of messy people that this sub-generation seems to crave. Entertainment comes from people engaging in unbelievably stupid, infuriating and self-destructive behavior. Which is something I can't really get behind of, but in this post-reality television world I can see the appeal of. In a way I understand the concept that a character doesn't have to be likable (it certainly helps, by the gods yes it does - at least for me), but ultimately if the character pops it's a salvageable situation, hence the success of Girls and to an extent Weeds and Shameless' titular character successes. Nancy, Fiona in addition to Hannah aren't the easiest characters to root for but ultimately they "pop." I think it's a bit odd that viewers are so in to this particular version of leading anti-hero(ine) television these days, but I guess it's the effect cable has as being a radical alternative to the heroes on basic television (i.e. Dexter, Breaking Bad, True Blood, Mad Men, etc.) there seems to be this adverse reaction to perfect leading protagonist achingly trying their hardest to do the right thing. Instead of wanting to struggle with a moral horizon, it seems like there is some kind of underlying schadenfreude that comes from watching these characters perpetually screw everything up.

This isn't worse than Britney and ...Baby One More Time, but it's one of her weakest efforts because it's uneven. Femme Fatale is one of her most dance heavy albums. Pretty much the entire album is dance. It's full of house, dubstep, euro-dance, trance, hi-nrg, and bass drops. Circus, Britney and Oops!... are probably Britney's pure pop albums. But I would say all of her albums post In The Zone heavily incorporate music from the dance genre. Femme Fatale is a better album than Circus is, from the production alone. I would consider Femme Fatale her second best album in terms of production and sound (after Blackout). It's a very cohesive dance record which is a good thing, but I don't understand why people want more of the same thing. If you want to listen to a hardcore dance record she has supplied fans with three of them Blackout, Femme Fatale and In The Zone. I think it's beyond past her time to move on from that and mine new territory, which is what I liked about Britney Jean. I just wish there was an entire album with slower moments like Alien, Chillin With You, Don't Cry and Perfume because that's clearly where Britney's head space is as a 30 year old woman. I like that we get an album where we have moments where she really speaks sincerely about her life. She should move to progressing her sound forward instead of trying to recreate the same dizzying and spacey dance music which doesn't even relate to her right now. I don't want to hear about her partying, boozing and drinking Ke$ha and Rihanna under the table because it's beyond apparent she doesn't even live like that anymore and it's not connecting. This is why I am fine with the personal moments, but don't really care for the uptempos even though they are still enjoyable. The album is a good listen, but the collaborations with Will.i.am, David Guetta and T.I. are gratuitous and are solely recorded for token radio moments and satisfy the fans who loved her previous dance efforts. It's mollifying, but not the purpose of the album (at all).

I enjoyed the album for what it was, but what's surprising is that the uptempos are the major let downs on the album. The album seems uneven mostly because it sounds like they wanted to make a personal effort but then realized half way threw that they needed something to play in the clubs and on the radio. I wish they would have just gone with the initial premise and made the personal album they advertised it as. In terms of quality it reminds me of Britney (her other self-titled album). It hints at personal territory but falls a bit short and regresses towards tried and true methods. Alien, Chillin With You and Perfume are all great though, you can kind of see the world threw her point of view with those songs.

Her music has consistently underwhelmed me since Born This Way and I feel no different with this last outing. Outside of the two officially released singles and some sparse potential in songs like Gypsy and Dope I don't see anything of worth in her album. It's sad because The Fame (Monster) had a chance to grow into something great, but instead she has remained consistently dull in the harsh light of day.

Interesting that you said this considering it's only in hindsight that Madonna's debut album is considered so highly. Originally it was Cyndi Lauper who ended up getting most of the critical and commercial recognition and had the bigger debut and initial impact. LAV was the album that really turned things in her favor and started capitalizing her as a star and cultivating her initial power as a celebrity. I think that album is much bigger and more significant than her debut for that reason alone. I've always found Like A Prayer to be overrated as an album. Ray Of Light as the epiphany album always held more weight with me as a listener. True Blue was also an easier listen and is defined as Madonna's most successful album commercially speaking apart from her first greatest hits record. I didn't think Erotica was considered to be that great an album with fans. Erotica and Bedtime Stories often feel like the forgotten albums in Madonna's catalog, the step children of her music career.

Another song from her album leaked today called Passenger (I won't bother linking it because it will be taken down within hours if not minutes of posting), and it may be one of the best vocal performances she has ever recorded in her 16 year career. I'm incredibly excited for this album, more so than any of her other releases and I have been a fan for about a decade now. I always found her material to be superior to most pop artists, but this time around it feels different. It really feels like she has taken her music to the next level in terms of quality.

Well everyone considers anything with a big beat to be dance music. My point is to say that dance music does have it's differences. Work Bitch is different from a lot of the other dance music that been released as of late. A lot of music that is popular now is just experimentations of house music, which is more mellow and soft sounding which is what artists like Rihanna, Zedd, Avicci, Lady Gaga, and Madonna have experimented with recently. I really don't think you can confuse those songs with this, this sounds much harder and grittier than those pieces and the production on this track takes a lot of notes from rave music, clash and glitch. It's definitely not what BEP and Gaga have been releasing. I would definitely say Britney is popularizing a trend that was underground, which is what she has often done in her previous music. Is she creating this sound? No. But she is definitely a step ahead of the curve and her competition in this regard. She is one of the first to really step out and go this route musically, as no other pop star can really say they've done this style of music before. As to Britney not being new anymore I feel like we keep reiterating the same point over and over, we know Britney isn't the it girl of the moment and she hasn't been in awhile. That happens to all artists who endure. No one stays on top forever. That kind of success is not sustainable.

  I already expressed all the ways this is different (Also will.i.am didn't produce this. Otto Knows did) this doesn't sound like The Black Eyed Pea's music. As I said this utilizes a lot of dance style production called glitch, electronic house music and rave music, which is not something any one else in pop music is doing right now. This is very different for the US and none of the recent pop artists have experimented with this particular dance style. This is more inline with Swedish House Mafia and Girls Aloud's musical outputs then anything on Top 40 now. In that way it is avant garde and atypical of what is popular now. Britney's always done that though, she did the same with dubstep a few years back with Hold It Against Me. No one was utilizing that particular genre in pop music either until she highlighted it in her single. Rihanna's commercial viability has hit a snag and it's been that way since Talk That Talk (2011). Gaga's career has been on borrowed time since 2010. Katy and Miley are really the only current pop stars who are "in season" and that's because they are still relatively new. But again comparing Britney to these stars makes no sense because she is not in their group. These women are not her contemporaries, and she out paces them all in terms of overall impact. Her career pre-dates them by a good decade so the similarities are meaningless. In many ways it's inappropriate to compare them, because it's apples and oranges. The only reason people really compare Britney to the newer pop females is because none of her musical contemporaries are still around or relevant to compare her to, so she gets added in to the newer "it girls."

This hasn't been well received at all commercially, it may grow on people like Scream & Shout did but as of now, it's been one of her poorest starts sales wise since iTunes digital breakthrough in 2005. I like it for the most part, and I think it's fairly inventive. I think Britney is one of the few pop artists who is generally ahead of the trend musically speaking. This single for instance features a lot of electro-house, glitch and rave elements that a lot of pop artists haven't touched yet, even though dance has been building on popular airwaves since 2006. Well Britney isn't really of this time period in general anymore, so of course she is going to stick out compared to women whose careers started in 2007/2008. She's been in the industry for 15 going on 16 years now. She's not in the same place as them. It would be like comparing Janet in 2002 and Madonna in 1999 to Britney, Christina, BSB and Nsync when they first started out. Britney is in a completely different career phase than Rihanna, Katy Perry and Gaga are. For what it's worth Gaga isn't that big of a deal anymore either. Her career has been sliding since 2010. Same with Rihanna since 2011.

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I feel that the cohesiveness of the show stayed until season 4. But during the middle seasons and beyond it dried up and died. After that the show became a character study about Buffy and her friends, which I was fine with as I think Buffy is probably one of the best heroines in television history. I just feel in general Buffy/Angel was much more effective at saying what they wanted to say in terms of theme and also wring more out of one in terms of emotional impact, even if they drifted away from their premises they were still emotionally resonant, while Supernatural just remains an empty husk. Supernatural is about family, love and tragedy and now all there is, is despair. Sam and Dean don't have anything together anymore, which is basically the reason for the show and the entire existence for it. The show isn't about Castiel, Benny or other people. It's about two brothers, hunting things, avenging their fallen family members and trying to heal -- but you don't get that any more, from either brother. I agree on Jimmy Novak, but Castiel is a dead end character and always has been, that was the problem with the angel arc in general. They weren't meant to exist on this show continuously in this way and it undercuts pretty much the genesis of the story that they do. There is no reason for Sam and Dean to hunt if they just have a super powered angel to bail them out every time. What is the purpose of them, then? Castiel always had an expiration date and the show has basically destroyed itself in trying to escape this fact and compensate him because of fan demand. There is a similar problem with Benny too, who is basically just a different version of Lenore a previously liked character from season 2/3. As to Castiel's relationship with Sam and Meg those seem pretty non-existent for the most part aside from a few brief scenes here and there. They never really had any kind of relationship. Castiel used Sam to hurt Dean, because Sam is just Dean's appendage and Castiel's brief scenes with Meg were mostly devolved into jokes and sexual tension that kind of led nowhere. Castiel is centric around Dean and exists solely to be his buddy. He doesn't feel like a real character and he never has. He's not human. He's an angel who isn't supposed to have human feelings or a real human identity. He shouldn't even still be on earth actually. The PTSD is the same story the brothers have had for years now though, it's nothing new. No new material to be found in either case as the show doesn't wish to get too emotional with their leads outside of one off speeches. Dean has had this storyline in particular before. He had PTSD in season four for being in hell for 40 years, Sam had PTSD for being in a cage with Lucifer for 180 years in season 6. It's all recycled ideas. It's the same formula, "something is wrong with Sam, but it all happens off screen", "watch while the good son Dean suffers silently on the inside and cries man tears for the 12,000 time!" As to the show moving away from key characterizations of Dean there are still far too many jokes about Dean objectifying women's bodies, watching animated porn and in general make sexist jokes for there to be real character progression. Ultimately the problem with Dean is that his overall persona is unlikable, even if the actions and choices that he makes are supposed to be seen as both noble and self sacrificing.

I still think he is the same character, so I still think he is the same person he always has been. I remember kind of liking Dean around season 3 because he seemed to be open to seeing more forms of grey and having a more open interpretation to what was "right" and what was "wrong." But they ruined that and basically made him whiter then white and he has been the same way for several seasons. The thing that I don't like about Dean is that he is annoyingly red neck. He is basically a himbo all about drinking beer, banging chicks and just being incredibly stupid. I think the brother dynamic worked very well in the earlier first four seasons but then they broke them apart and they never rectified or made their relationship better. I think the sad thing about Sam is that he really serves no purpose. He basically just exist to be a sidekick to Dean and bring up plot based problems and issues. When he was a character who truly effected things and had a point of view I found him to be incredibly interesting and I think that is what the show is missing, a true balance between two equal characters. I think the problem with Castiel is that he was a temporary character that was stretched out beyond his original use. He was originally only supposed to be on until 4-6 episodes and they kept him on because of fan reaction, with a great detriment to the show I think. The angel stories should have taken at most only 2 seasons in total. I'll disagree here too. I think Buffy and Angel were perfect in their runs for the most part. Even the worse season of those shows seem better to me then the worst seasons of Supernatural. Supernatural to me just seems boring.

The show was far better before they brought Castiel and all the other Angels, actually. Since they brought on the Christianity storylines everything has been all kinds of messed up.

You can thank Justin and Timberlake for that top 5 peak of 4 Minutes. Madonna hasn't had a solo top 5 hit in 12 years, her last solo radio hit was Die Another Day (2002) and since then she has had to rely on collaborations with younger artists to chart into the top 10. In other news Madonna is still a huge album seller, her album sold 740k worldwide this past week, she'll probably sell tons of albums even if she doesn't get any more Hot 100 hits.

I wish pop girls today danced like this. It actually kind of reminds me of the routines some of them used to do when Christina/Britney/Jessica first came out.

I actually liked Chris Stamp. I preferred him as Ryan's father as it did away with all that sillyness about being an evil Lavery monstrosity Megan played with so extensively.

VI is heavy set too though.To be honest I don't think of any of the men listed in the last few posts as being sexy. Susan looks amazing though, she looks like she is in her 40's in that clip.

I'll disagree about this point. I don't think AMC ever lost it's family values in story telling. There was always a sense of familial unity on the show in some form, even in the later years. I will say the one thing that did suffer on AMC was it's overall sense of community/environment and it's friendships. Even with AMC's more campy storylines there was always some heart to them it was very rare to find a character who was truly bad on AMC because there was always some form of redemption given to the characters and that was almost always done on the basis of love and family. What you are talking about to me sounds more like OLTL then AMC. OLTL was always the show that was the colder, grittier, risk taker where evil had a face and had several names and in some cases flourished. That was the show where damaged characters truly thrived. AMC was never played that way to me. AMC was for the most part always bright and happy even at it's darkest it was still significantly brighter then OLTL at it's darkest.

I can't watch Steve Burton anymore. I just automatically close myself off whenever I see him in any capacity. It's sad how much I can't stand the character of Jason Morgan these days. Who are those OLTL characters in the Love in the afternoon Promo? This was one of the storylines that got me hooked into GH actually. The whole Alexis/Sonny/Carly drama is what kept me watching and was one of the first storylines that introduced me to the show. That and Lucky/Liz and Gia/Nikolas.

She also killed Ritchie with a tire-iron. Who knew Annie had it in her?

This is pretty much the way I feel about it. If they are advertised as amazing singers and they lip it's worse to me then if they are advertised as performers/entertainers/dancers and they lip sync. Santana for instance doesn't sing a word in his concerts and just plays the guitar and people come out in droves to see him. Different expectations for different artists/performance styles. They are all valid.