The finale of Sarah Palin’s Alaska aired Sunday night on The Learning Channel.   The series garnered great ratings and stirred up plenty of discussion.  I am willing to bet it surprised a lot of people as well.

When Sarah Palin said she would be doing a reality show, most commenting on it thought it was a horrible idea.  What could she be thinking?  Maybe this meant she didn’t want to run for President, because what could be less presidential than a reality show?  Or maybe it did mean she wanted to run because why else would she want to open her family up to such exposure. 

I won’t speculate too much on the effect of the show on Sarah Palin’s future political pursuits other than to say I think any effect of the show will be positive.  In Sarah Palin’s Alaska, Palin is shown as a tough woman who can hunt for her food, rear five kids, and create new words.  She appears calm, good natured, steady, and solid.  And she shows she has a sense of humor, a great family and an intense love for the beautiful state where she has lived her life.   

Above all, in Sarah Palin’s Alaska we see that Sarah Palin is a real person.  Her kids make fun of her sometimes (“Mom, take your prom hair back home”) and don’t always do exactly as told.  Sarah talks like many of us do saying things like “flippin’” and “freaking out.”  Instead of that decreasing her presidential factor, though, it just makes her more relatable.  We also saw her as a mother, interacting with Trig and her other kids in some incredibly touching scenes.

In addition to seeing what an incredible woman Sarah Palin is, we were introduced to some amazing characters.  Her daughter Piper was a constant companion of Sarah’s in the show.  She is beyond adorable, says all the things a smart-as-a-whip witty little girl would say, and makes lots of funny faces.  We see a lot of her husband Todd who is a hunky, smart companion to Sarah Palin. (more…)

I had high expectations for the series finale of LOST.  That’s because I’m an addict – I’ve seen every episode (yes, including Season 6’s brutal What Kate Did) several times; I’m a subscriber to LOST magazine; I read Doc Jensen at EW and Doc Arzt at DocArzt.com; I had to keep myself from looking at LOST spoilers on a regular basis over at DarkUFO. 

[SPOILERS COMING] 

Immediately after watching the series finale, I came away angry.  I wasn’t angry for all the reasons most people were.  I understood that Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof couldn’t answer all the questions they had posed in the series, and that to do so would actually take away the mystery of the show.  I wasn’t angry because Jack ended up with Kate, though I admit that I would have liked to see Kate plunge from a cliff in a ball of flame a la Denethor from The Return of the King (Good Lord, woman, it took you six years to make up your mind?!).  

I was angry because I felt that the end of the show embodied a rather depressing underlying philosophy.  At the end of the show, we find out that the alternate reality of Season 6 has in large part been a ruse.  It wasn’t a different timeline created by Juliet’s nuke at the end of Season 5; it was a purgatory state created jointly by many of the Oceanic 815 survivors where they could find each other and remember their lives before passing to the next stage, presumably heaven.   (more…)

Warning: Spoiler alert!  

The “Mad Men” finale was a satisfying, although a bit too tidy, end to its 3rd season. When I was 8, my teenage sister introduced me to a card game called “52 Pick-Up.” When I handed her the deck, she tossed cards across the room. As I whined, she said, “What else did you think a card game called ‘52 Pick-Up’ was about?” When writers Weiner and Levy created chaos with all my familiar characters in the opening episode, I should have thought “52 Pick-Up.”

After all, they just had a merger for heaven’s sake. What else to expect? Relationships between and among characters changed as work and economic status changed, and they were reshuffled into new and less pleasing ones. But we became gradually more accustomed to the new “order,” although the dominant “feeling” was a cheerless dreariness. There were some memorable moments. When a drunk Lois amputated the erstwhile new Brit super star Guy MacKendrick’s foot with a John Deere tractor in the office, I laughed out loud for minutes. Taken one show at a time, they were good, but the cumulative gloom and doom became stifling. (more…)