Primal Screen
Lena Dunham strikes again
Courtesy photo
'Girls'
Published: January 9, 2013
“For two minutes there I felt worth something. Like I was doing something — something real. And I was alive. It felt good to feel alive for once, and not just dead and plastic and numb.”
Enemies of the dead and plastic and numb would be well advised to tune in to Enlightened.
Continuum (7pm Mon, Syfy)
A beautiful cop arrives from the future with a skintight gold jumpsuit and an arsenal of cool hologram weapons. Keira Cameron (Rachel Nichols) is accidentally swept back to 2012 while pursuing terrorists, a few of whom are swept back with her. In this new fantasy series (imported from Canada), Keira must tangle with them while negotiating an unfamiliar world.
The pilot is fascinating in the early scenes set in the future. Unfortunately, it soon turns routine as Keira hooks up with a detective (Victor Webster) and a teenage computer genius (Erik Knudsen) from the present. Cue familiar chase scenes and banter.
To be honest, though, I plan to keep watching. Continuum had me hooked at “a beautiful cop arrives from the future with a skintight gold jumpsuit and an arsenal of cool hologram weapons.”
American Experience (8pm Tue, PBS)
If you missed last week’s premiere episode, you need to start watching The Abolitionists, a three-part documentary on the 19th century heroes who risked all to end slavery. This week, you will recoil from a U.S. government that recommitted itself to slavery with the Compromise of 1850. Then you will thrill to the abolitionists’ refusal to back down in the face of tremendous pressure.
William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Brown play a part in the drama, but the episode revolves around the wondrous Frederick Douglass, the slave turned antislavery crusader. It would be foolish to try to paraphrase this most eloquent of Americans, so let me just quote his pre-Civil War rebuke to fellow reformers who advocated half measures:
“There is not a nation on earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour. It is not light that is needed, but fire. We need the storm, the whirlwind and the earthquake!”
As we all know, that’s exactly what was on the horizon.
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