Shows with the same formula every week tend to get boring, yet there are a few that somehow manage to keep the audience interested. An excellent example of this is The X-Files, a show that adapted this predictability of the procedural into stories that maintain mystery. However, I must admit that even I, with my deep love for The X-Files and my usual unending loyalty to shows, lost interest part-way into the seventh season and stopped watching entirely during the eighth. The reason? You can’t have The X-Files without Mulder and Scully.

This is something that all procedurals should take note of: it isn’t the new medical mystery or supernatural event or bizarre murder every week that keeps bringing us back, it’s the characters.

“I am an organic vegan and my carbon footprint is miniscule,” utters Amy Burley, as she embarks on her environmental cause. “Balance”, “Harmony” and “Beauty” are three signature words defining Amy’s cause in the HBO series, True Blood.  Amy, along with other True Blood women, does not represent a new wave of womanhood, but rather women’s participation in contemporary society as activists in their own right.

The character of Amy, played by Lizzy Caplan, is an eco-activist constantly preaching and guiding her partner, Jason Stackhouse, towards an organic lifestyle. She is the future of modern ecological consciousness in the small, dysfunctional town of Louisiana.

Weeds recently wrapped its eight seasons on Showtime. While it certainly hung around longer than most of us may have wished (or were aware of), it actually retained most of its ratings which, for Showtime, broke records at several points during its eight-year run. We can certainly point to it as the series that defined the network and paved the way for Dexter, Homeland, and whatever is coming next down the pipeline.

I’m a bit obsessed with those websites that rate beers and give them grades or whatever, and one of my favorite terms from those sites is “sessionable”. A beer is sessionable if you can drink it over the course of a lengthy drinking “session”, and so more intense beers might be better, but don’t score well in terms of sessionability (which is not a word they use on those sites, hey, it’s funny). The point is that Weeds is a highly sessionable television series. You can watch an entire season in roughly 5-7 hours, depending on the number of episodes in that particular season. And even the later seasons, which are diminished in quality, believability (never the show’s strong suit), and genuine drama, remain entirely watchable and enjoyable enough to keep watching.

Well, I seem to be late to the party in weighing in on Homeland’s most recent jawdroppers, unleashed in the hilariously titled “Broken Hearts” episode. With the week nearly over and episode 2.11 days away from hitting our screens, I am compelled to take a minute and see where we are and how we got here.

The backlash has been fervent this week, responding to the improbable events surrounding (OK, seriously, SPOILERS) the death of the Vice President. Other backlash topics include the frenzied over-emoting of Damian Lewis as Nick Brody, the bad-season-of-24-style-terrorism of Abu Nazir, the sudden and ridiculous surveillance-fails of the government, and the Lifetime-movie behavior of Carrie Matheson. The backlash-to-the-backlash articles have followed suit, reminding readers that this is indeed a television show, one that has always been more interested in maintaining suspense and surprising viewers than in subtlety or in portraying the business of fighting terrorism with any degree of realism.

After the winter finalé of Once Upon a Time, I am left with both hope and skepticism. While this latest episode managed to retain a sense of cohesion and resolved a few of the perplexing concepts of the plot, quite a few issues with this popular series still remain. Despite some mediocre acting, a scattered and sometimes illogical trajectory, an overwhelming abundance of characters and unclear character motivations, Once Upon a Time still keeps me coming back for more. But why? What is it about this world of fairy tale (and Disney, and Arthurian, and Gothic novel) characters that remains so compelling?