Following The Following

I started watching The Following for one reason:  Kevin Bacon.  He is one of our best actors and he played Fenwick in Diner, that alone is reason enough to love him. 

The three episodes had me.  It was like a page turner on TV, then.....  
 http://www.tvfanatic.com/2013/04/the-following-season-finale-review-finishing-the-story/
Bacon plays Ryan Hardy and ex-FBI agent who captured a serial killer, Joe Carroll who is now running a cult via his jail cell.  Hardy is called back into action to track down Carroll, despite being fired from the FBI. He's an alcoholic who we don't see drinking after the first few episodes. 

The show really got stupid when Carroll escapes from jail with the help of the warden (the beginning of a tiresome show of law enforcement being totally inept).  He exits into a helicopter and Hardy misses him by seconds. This will be played out in every episode, as well as several dead people (most of them are FBI and lots of stabbing. It became tiresome, but I held out and watched the whole season which concluded last night because Kevin Bacon is a good actor. 

Who on this show gave the ok to light the show the way they do?  Regardless of them being in a dark room, why does it have to be so dark the viewer can't see anything?  There is a big fight scene at the end, but I had no idea what was happening because I couldn't see anything.  This has been going on all season.  

For my amusement, I could not stop reading online reviews of the season finale.  I have been laughing out loud all day.  I have to share some of my favorite lines.  It's clear that I am not the only one to find that that show lost it's way early in it's first season.  It has been renewed by Fox.

• Sweet Claire is dislocated herself, waking in a dark room that shouldn't surprise her because hey, everything in the set design is dark.
• Weston [an FBI agent], convinced they don't have to play by Joe's rules, utters perhaps the finest line of the series thus far: "WE CAN CHANGE THE STORY." (If right after this you screamed at your television "WE CAN CHANGE THE CHANNEL," then tweet me so we can become best friends.)
• Bodies move around in space (I really do apologize but I can't see anything on this show) until somehow, someway, Hardy and Joe's tussle lands them in a boathouse full of gas tanks.
• THERE SHE IS, HARDY, THERE'S YOUR CRAZY EX-GIRLFRIEND STABBING YOU NOT IN THE BACK BUT RIGHT IN THE STOMACH OH HOW DID WE MISS THAT ONE.

hollywood.com Henning Fog

• And there are days when I think the high school girls on Pretty LIttle Liars are a collective Sherlock Holmes compared to the FBI on this show.
• Seriously, no one can die from a gut wound on this show, can they?
• This show really tests my facial recognition.

TV.com Nick Campbell

• Are you surprised that law enforcement didn’t rise en masse and demand that the second season of The Following be killed for portraying all cops as mentally slow and unable to hit a target?
• Ryan goes to the address that Joe described in the book.  There he finds Emma and gets syringed in the neck.  Because he’s an idiot. 

wsj blog Dawn Fallik

Female Mets Fans Are Happier

Yes, the Wall St Journal confirms that female Mets fans are happier than female Yankee fans. The subway series begins today and the WSJ polled 650 sports fans in NY. There seems to be a great divide between younger and older Yankee fans. Older women who follow the Yankees are less likely to be traveling this summer on vacation (26% versus 10%) and are bigger fans of public radio (18% versus 12%) and bowling (7% versus 2%). They're also far more likely than their younger counterparts to be Democrats (75% versus 59%). I think younger Yankee fans also think they are entitled to World Series wins. Let's face it, in their lifetime they have seen many.

Mets fans on the other hand didn't have an age divide. In general, "Ms. Met" falls into the statistical middle in most categories, with the younger and older Yankees fans touching either extreme. She is most likely to make between $50,000 and $150,000 (53% versus 44% of young Yankees fans and 38% of older Yankees fans) and you're more likely to see a tattoo creeping across her shoulder than you would with older Yankees fans (17% versus 6%), but less likely than with younger ones (24%). Could Lisbeth Salander be a Mets fan?

Mets women generally feel more enthusiastic in their daily lives..... Mets women are more likely to abstain from alcohol (25%) than older Yankees fans (18%) and younger Yankees fans (14%).

Since this isn't very scientific, I don't think you could say that female Yankee fans are miserable drunks. Being a female Mets fan, I feel (and this goes for the past few years) that taking each game as it comes is a good prescription for a healthy life. Yankee fans haven't had the kind of angst we live with.