Good TV, Bad TV

Game of Thrones vs The Killing.  Had heaps of fun today reading the reviews of both. In general, folks loved the former and hated the latter.  Sometimes I wonder how much my opinion is shaped by the reviewers.  Did I hate the Killing that much before I read Sepinwall's review and then the various tweets?

Spoiler break



In the very last minutes of the show, the two major plot threads--the murder mystery and the family response--are completely torn apart.  I think the family part was more egregious actually, but that the murder mystery's "resolution" was pretty awful.  And I think I was not polluted by the reviews because I reacted as it was going on. 

For the family stuff, I was like "tell her about the house, tell her about the house" yet the husband did not.  So, where did his money go?  The wife, Mitch, can maintain her belief that he gambled it away.  And so the family thread ends with her gone--while she was distraught the entire time and not a great mother for the two kids left behind, no inkling that she cared so little about the kids that she would leave them and the rest of the family.  Just gone. 

For the murder mystery, everyone has harped on the lack of reality of having the small, female cop meeting a principal suspect (guilty of beating J-Lo in a previous movie and able to manage to defeat an entire Nazi horde in a much older movie) alone not once but twice.  Even so, ok, he looks kind of guilty, so we go with it when the partner gets a picture showing the suspect in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Oh, but it was faked.  Given how quickly this info came out, the conspirators must have been only interested in derailing the suspect's bid for Mayor.  But let's think about this conspiracy for just a second.  First, Holder, the detective who falsified the document, is now hanging out to dry.  Clearly, he presented falsified stuff, so why would he do that, given how easy it was to prove him wrong?  So, his career is over and he could be going to jail.  Second, ok, our suspect does not win the race for Mayor, but if it comes out that he was framed (and that is very likely), the current Mayor then will be suspected in the conspiracy, so he would probably be recalled. 

So, the conspiracy makes no sense.  However, I will not know how this turns out, as I don't need to see more rain fall on a bad set of plots.  I'd rather just re-run an episode of Game of Thrones.