Sunday Night Roundup - April 6, 2014

Since all my favorite shows are on Sunday nights now, in lieu of doing a recap or discussion about each, I’m going to start doing a more general post and take it to the comments.

Last night was the long awaited return of Game of Thrones. Viewers must have been clamoring to see it, because HBO Go crashed. It seems obvious to me that this is probably due to people sharing their HBO Go logins and passwords with their friends. I mean if you had HBO, you’d just watch it live on TV, right? It’s not like there’s commercials or anything, and most people can pause and rewind with their regular cable boxes, right? Or am I overestimating the amount of people that have that service? Anyways, it was a solid episode to kick of the season. Something about it reminded me a little of the first season. Perhaps it was the celebration in the air around King’s Landing, that I can only assume is going to lead to something horribly bloody and/or tragic. I enjoyed the episode as a whole, but the only scenes I felt really excited about were those with the Hound and Arya. That scene in the tavern at the end was totally badass. It was good (if not a little chilling) to see Arya take back Needle and kill a couple of dudes that had it coming. Something about the way she slowly slid her blade in that guy’s neck gave me the heebie jeebies.

I also watched the series premiere of Silicon Valley, a new show from Mike Judge. On the surface I might not have much interest in this series, a comedy about a group of young tech upstarts. But I’ve grown to like Mike Judge over the years, and I’ve been a pretty big fan of some of the talent involved, including stand up comedians (and podcast regulars) TJ Miller and Kumail Nanjiani, as well and Freaks and Geeks alum Martin Starr. So I may have gone in with biased intentions, but I enjoyed a lot and will keep watching. I especially thought the lampooning of super progressive tech companies was funny, with their bike meetings and the “voluntary retreats that are really mandatory.” Thomas Middleditch plays a likeable, sympathetic lead, and TJ Miller is great as the weirdo wannabe guru. I’m just hoping Kumail Nanjiani and Martin Starr, who both played the character they always seem to play (but do it so well!) get more screen time in the upcoming episodes.

I plan on watching Veep this evening, so I’ll update the article or post in the comments if there’s anything to say beyond “it’s still a hilarious show about a bunch of assholes that run the country.”