Bad Bed Weather
My slice of Quezon City was wet with heaven’s tears for the most part of the weekend. The bad bed weather was a good excuse as any to remain in bed the entire Sunday morning. It helped that the entire length of my windows is now covered with not-so-flimsy blue curtains (the old curtain rod covered only 80% of the windows) to create the illusion of being under the sea. While in bed I rolled from point A to B and then back to A, and then I flipped sideways and rolled from point A to C then back to A. At this point, I have covered the entire bed with my laziness, I did not want a spot to tell me I play favorites. After I got tired of rolling like a giant turon, I adjusted my third pillow, Jack-Jack from The Incredibles (yes, I know I am too old to have one. Rolls eyes) to be my desk and turned my laptop on and read my favorite sports blog (not Juan Mata’s blog), two gossip sites and an international cable news channel website, in that order. I know my priorities. 🙂 The bad bed weather also afforded me to watch the premiere episode of Game of Thrones season 2 and the entire season of Benched.
Benches
Speaking of Benched (I just used “Benches” in the title for parallelism), it is a hilarious show, not roll-on-the-floor-laughing hilarious, but it has its moments of brilliance. USA Network’s 22-minute show Benched revolves around the life of Nina Whitley (Eliza Coupe), a corporate lawyer on the cusp of being a partner at a successful firm. On the day of the announcement, her ex-fiancé, lawyer Trent Barber (Carter MacIntyre) tells her some bad news. To make matters worse, she is bypassed for the title by someone with less stellar body of legal work, but with a great body. She has a nervous breakdown and turns her wrath on every breakable object in sight. She ends her (almost) dramatic exit with curses and an offensive finger.
Nina resurfaces as a public defender with fashionable clothes, branded bags and red-soled shoes. To say that she struggles on her first few days will be an understatement. Her new colleagues call her permutations of the word brat and tease her about her courtroom booboos, yet it is apparent that Nina’s learning curve is off the charts. Soon she starts winning cases against Trent. Yes, the same guy who dumped her months ago. Her colleagues start to respect her legal prowess and her never-say-die attitude.
Among her colleagues is Phil Quinlan (Jay Harrington), Trent’s archrival who finds himself on the losing end of every battle, in and out of the courtroom. With Nina’s arrival, Phil feels rejuvenated and finds a level of confidence he thought he never had. Aside from the love triangle of Trent-Nina-Phil, Micah the intern (Jolene Purdy), Carlos the lawyer-wingman-sidekick of Phil (Oscar Nuñez), boring Larry (Peter Spruyt), and Judge Don Nelson (Fred Melamed) provide idiosyncratic characters and good comedic timing to keep the show interesting.
The show does not have great courtroom dramas nor does it have complicated cases. What it has are good one-liners, fast paced exchanges of sarcasms, juvenile games played by men in suits and insane characters in one of the most respected professions. Nina’s privileged background is a great contrast to the situations of the homeless and petty criminals she defends – this is a goldmine for funny situations and awkward realizations.
Just as I was finishing the 12th and final episode of season 1, I found out that Benched was cancelled. I know it is not a great comedy show, but it taught me a couple of new words (jag-bag is one of them) and I hoped for a second that there was more of it. The season (and show) finale ends well, with definite answers to my questions, but the selfish part of me wants more of Nina and her man.
Brujas
The copy of the entire Benched show came from Hope, my generous provider of shows I would not have watched if it was up to me and my gift of laziness. Now I have four USB’s full of American, British and Spanish shows - the perfect companions for bad bed weather. Then, I have another provider and recommender of shows (and literary works) in Che. With her gentle urgings, I watched True Detective, Broad City and Game of Thrones. These are shows of different genres that require multiple levels of attention span, but I throughly enjoyed all of them. Lastly, there is Mai, the queen of Spanish movies and series whose trailblazing path I am trying hard to follow. Hehe. These three ladies and myself make up the brujas. We do not look like witches nor do we stand over a cauldron and recite, “double double, toil and trouble”. We were at one time or another in a group that talked about witches in Spanish class. For our presentation, we wore black clothes and “scared” our former professor with a report on local witchcraft and witches/wizard.
Almost every Saturday, right after our class, we have lunch together to talk about our lessons very briefly, the shows we watched during the week, the inspiring scenes we remember, work, and the men not in our lives. We have lively discussions and ribbings that last for a couple of hours.
To the ladies, thank you so much for the laughter, words of wisdom, food (hehe) and company.