Steven Helmer Publications

My wife and I just finished watching the third season of The Traitors . With just one more to go (at least until there's another one), here are my thoughts: This season had a very bad group of Traitors. I mean, wow, they were partnered for what, a few hours, maybe a day, before they started backstabbing each other. Bob the Drag Queen (Christopher Caldwell) was flat out outed by fellow traitor Boston Rob (Mariano). Carolyn Wiger and Danielle Reyes painted targets on each other's backs while late recruit Britney Haynes all but confessed to being one with her reaction to Danielle being banished. It was like none of them wanted to win. Oh, and could they have been any louder during the coffin episode? Forcing the Traitors to commit one murder (or, in this case, a murder short-list) in plain sight is an intriguing twist to the show but in this case, it really felt as though they all should have been outed. There had to be a more intelligent way to pick three names than all of them d...

As I've said before, I rarely watch a television series until I know it is going to last more than a season. Life it too short to get invested in something that is going to get cancelled. As a result of that, we had not watched The Traitors  until very recently, when we finally got caught up on all the past seasons of Project Runway. I haven't quite finished the first season of the reality series, which features a group of contestants staying in a Scottish manor and competing to earn money while trying to figure out which three are "murdering" a contestant per night. So, please, no spoilers. However, I do have some thoughts to share: The contestants sometimes take this a bit too seriously. I'm not talking about being overly competitive. This is, after all, a game with money at stake. I do think they sometimes forget it is a game though, whether it is guilt over "murdering" a contestant, almost to the point you would think they actually died, or getting o...

Even though I like watching television, I rarely watch a show when it first airs. This is because networks have very short leashes and I have no interest in getting invested in a series only to see a cancellation after only a few episodes. To be fair, there are plenty of series out there that probably shouldn't have even gotten to a first season but there are also just as many that were cancelled out of impatience despite plenty of shows taking more than one season to find their audience ( M*A*S*H comes to mind). Here are four I personally think should have been given more than one season. Forever (2014) I love a good mystery and this Ioan Gruffudd -led series about a doctor who, much like a video game character, respawns whenever he is killed, had plenty of them. Why couldn't he die? How old was he? Why did he always respawn near water? Throw in the fact it was also a crime drama, and you have a series that, if given more time, could have gone down a number of different road...

I gave myself a little bit of time to reflect on it. After all, any finale of a favorite series is going to bring mixed emotions. Now that I've done that, my opinion is still the same, the finale was a big let down. I'm not saying there weren't likable moments. Dean ( Jensen Ackles ) discovering that pie festival, for example, was pretty funny. And, I'm willing to admit, Dean's surprise goodbye did have a bit of an ironic/artistic quality to it. The problem is, I just feel like this episode wasn't needed. Last week's penultimate ended as perfectly as you could end a series, Sam and Dean saved the world and rode off into the sunset in full control of their destiny. Why ruin that by showing us their destiny? I would have much rather have had the series leave that up in the air so we could go on debating what happened to them and maybe, some day, see a made-for-TV reunion movie that answered some of the unanswered questions. My other big issue with this episode...