TV Geek Out 193: 2011 Golden Globe Nominations

The awards season kicks off in earnest with the Golden Globes telecast this Sunday night. So before you sit down to watch alcohol-fueled acceptance speeches and the stinging barbs of host Ricky Gervais, join Heather, Dana, and Perry as they offer their predictions on who'll be taking home the big awards. Listen in here!

TV Geek Out 192: The Walking Dead, "Vatos" and "Wildfire"

TV Geek Out covers two installments of The Walking Dead with this chat about "Vatos" and "Wildfire," the 4th and 5th episodes of the series. In "Vatos," Rick, Glenn, T-Dog, and Daryl react to the discovery of Merle's severed hand in Atlanta, follow his trail of blood, and attempt to retrieve Rick's big bag of guns. Complications quickly arise when they run into another human in the middle of the operation, who calls out for help from his seemingly hostile gang of survivors. Back at camp, sisters Andrea and Amy go fishing and Jim is obsessed with digging holes, but the big event is the gruesome nighttime zombie attack! during the fish fry that night. "Wildfire," deals with the fallout from that horrific attack, in which, among other victims, Amy was killed and Jim was bitten. Andrea is traumatized and won't leave her sister's corpse... until Amy eventually turns into a zombie and Andrea puts her out of her misery. Meanwhile, the group is split over where to go now that their campsite is no longer safe, and how to handle the Jim situation as he slowly deteriorates. And in the last part of the episode, the show takes a leap into the CDC, where a sole scientist is still toiling away trying to develop a cure for the outbreak. Listen in as TV geeks Heather, Perry, and Dana discuss all this and more here!

TV Geek Out 191: True Blood, "It Hurts Me Too"

TV Geek Out covers "It Hurts Me Too," the third episode of True Blood's third season. Eric takes out a werewolf in Sookie's home, but only after she's heard him think "Jackson," which they soon figure out means the city in Mississippi. She's determined to go there in search of Bill, so Eric sends the (good) werewolf Alcide to watch over her and help her in her mission. Elsewhere, Tara has a steamy one-night stand with a mysterious vampire in a seedy motel. She and Sookie later make up when Sook pays for Eggs' funeral service. Sam returns to Bon Temps, but unfortunately for him, his birth family follows him and starts to cause trouble. Meanwhile, in Jackson, Lorena recovers from her burns, and Bill gives in to the king's wishes in order to protect Sookie. In a dream, he flashes back to the last time he saw his human wife, after he'd become a vampire; the experience was so traumatic for her that he had to glamour her into forgetting it. Bill's so forlorn in the present day that he has extreme hate sex with Lorena, leading to perhaps the show's most disturbing moment ever! In other events, Jason wants to become a police officer, Arlene is indeed pregnant, but with Rene's baby(!), Lafayette's got a new Bentley, Sheriff Bud Dearborn quits, and much more. TV geeks Heather and Dana discuss all the crazy goings-on here!

TV Geek Out 190: Boardwalk Empire, "The Ivory Tower"

TV Geek Out is back to talk more about HBO's latest hit show, the captivating Boardwalk Empire! Though the pilot may have had a few too many narrative bumps for most of the TVGO crew, the second episode, "The Ivory Tower," went a long way toward winning us over. Join TV geeks Dana, Perry, and Heather as they expound on the pleasures of Michael Shannon and Steve Buscemi having their first face-to-face confrontation on the show, marvel at the fact that Dabney Coleman can still play unrepentant racists and assholes decades into his career, and share their confusion about the relationship between Gretchen Mol's and Michael Pitt's characters. Listen in here!

TV Geek Out 189: The Walking Dead, "Tell It to the Frogs"

TV Geek Out covers The Walking Dead's third episode, "Tell It to the Frogs," in which Rick reunites with his family and joins the band of survivors outside Atlanta. Meanwhile, Merle is still baking on the city roof and having a serious a meltdown as hordes of zombies try to force their way through the chained door to devour him. Rick and the others struggle to decide what to tell Merle's brother, Daryl, when he gets back from hunting, and Rick, not surprisingly, insists on the moral route of total honesty. He even decides that he wants to go back for Merle, and spends much of the episode attempting to convince others to join him. They also deal with the disturbing arrival of a zombie near camp before a group of them head back to Atlanta for Merle -- and for Rick's abandoned bag of guns, ammo, and his walkie-talkie (for communicating with Morgan and his son). Also, at the quarry Shane teaches Carl about hunting frogs before getting told off by Lori and later stepping in on a skirmish between the women and wife-beater Ed, in which Shane beats the living daylights out of him. Listen in as TV geeks Dana, Perry, and Heather discuss all this and more here!

TV Geek Out 188: True Blood, "Beautifully Broken"

TV Geek Out covers the second episode of True Blood's third season, "Beautifully Broken." After Bill's bloody battle with the werewolves, he meets the king of Mississippi, Russell Edgington -- the vampire behind his abduction. Russell whisks Bill off on horseback to his mansion, where we meet the king's charming partner, Talbot. The next night, over an extravagant meal, Bill finally finds out what the king wants -- his help in convincing Queen Sophie-Anne to marry him and join their kingdoms into one. When Lorena shows up, an enraged Bill throws an oil lamp at her, setting her afire! Back in Louisiana, Sookie goes to Eric for help regarding the Operation Werewolf symbol, and we get a flashback to Eric and Godric in WWII, dressed as SS officers and hunting down werewolves (yay!). Meanwhile, Lafayette stops Tara from ODing, and takes her to the psychiatric hospital where his mother is a patient, showing Tara that they are the strong ones in their family. He also meets a hot nurse named Jesus. As for Tara, she ends the episode getting picked up by a dangerous English vampire, who encourages (and helps) her to beat the crap out of some racist rednecks outside Merlotte's. Elsewhere, Sam finds out his birth family kinda sucks and Andy and Jason's misadventures lead them to Hotshot, where Jason glimpses a beautiful but mysterious woman and busts a drug dealer. The episode ends with another werewolf/vampire standoff, this time plus Sookie! TV geeks Heather and Dana discuss all this and more here.

TV Geek Out 187: Mad Men, "Tomorrowland"

In this installment, TV Geek Out analyzes Mad Men's season-four finale, "Tomorrowland," in greater detail than our initial-reactions discussion. Listen in to what Heather, Dana, and Perry had to say about the episode after we all had some time to reflect on the major turn of events in Don Draper's life. After a season of hitting what seemed like multiple rock bottoms, Don went on another trip to the West Coast and fell in love... with his secretary. Was becoming a cliché the only path to Don's salvation? The TVGO geeks discuss this and much more -- including Betty's firing of Carla, Peggy's continued savvy at work, the milkshake of destiny, and that unforgettable chat between the two most powerful, and underappreciated, women at SCDP -- here.

TV Geek Out 186: Glee, "Grilled Cheesus," "Duets," and "The Rocky Horror Glee Show"

It's time to take another ride on the Glee roller coaster! Season two has had some thrilling, and not so thrilling, ups and downs since the last time we discussed it. "Grilled Cheesus" fell into some of the traps we at TV Geek Out cannot stand about the show: it took on a heavy subject -- religion -- but did so in a simplistic, patronizing fashion, once again used Kurt and Burt Hummel's fraught but ultimately loving relationship as a vehicle for a Very Special Episode, and reduced the rest of the characters to caricatures (we're looking at you, Finn, you numbskull). "Duets," on the other hand, was a tantalizing reminder of just how great Glee can be. Not only did we get more of new character Sam (the fantastically named Chord Overstreet), the episode actually had the New Directions kids performing believable songs in a believable way for a believable reason -- to win dinner at Breadsticks! Glimpses of Santana and Brittany's relationship and great performances of "River Deep, Mountain High," "Le Jazz Hot" and "Sing!" made it one of the second season's best moments. Finally, "The Rocky Horror Glee Show" got into the Halloween spirit while remaining completely Glee: racy, campy, subversive and heartwarming all at the same time. That the kids didn't get to perform the show for an audience was a bit of a buzzkill (as was Mr. Schue's increasing creepiness), but with Glee being so unpredictable this year, you take your pleasures where you can find them. We discuss all this and more here.

TV Geek Out 185: The Walking Dead, "Days Gone Bye" and "Guts"

TV Geek Out begins our coverage of AMC's smash-hit zombie series, The Walking Dead, with this epic chat about the first 2 episodes! In the premiere, "Days Gone Bye," small-town cop Rick Grimes wakes up from a coma to learn that zombies have overrun society, which mostly now looks like a ghost town scattered with corpses, both dead and undead. We discover this terrifying, sad new world along with Grimes as he heads out in search of his family and meets father-and-son survivors Morgan and Duane, and we're introduced to a camp of other survivors outside of Atlanta and discover along with Grimes that the big city is the very opposite of a safe haven. In "Guts," Grimes meets a group of people who are on a mission to retrieve supplies from Atlanta. He helps them deal with their power-hungry bigot, Merle, as well as the dilemma (partly caused by him) of how to get out of a building surrounded by hordes of famished zombies and escape the city alive. The answer leads to possibly the most disgusting couple of scenes in the history of television -- let's just be glad that TVs don't come equipped with Smell-O-Vision! TV geeks Heather, Dana, and Perry discuss how the slow, contemplative style that the show establishes fits right in with AMC's other series, and analyze how the zombie world here compares to other stand-outs in the genre, as well as the comic it was based on. Listen in to this mega-geek out here.

(Note: The "Guts" discussion begins at about 57:13.)

TV Geek Out 184: Conan -- The First Week

After months of waiting and expectations, Conan O'Brien returned to late-night TV last week with Conan, his simply named show for TBS. While some things were better than O'Brien's brief stint hosting The Tonight Show -- letting sidekick Andy Richter return to his rightful spot next to Coco among them -- Conan got off to a somewhat soft start. The TV Geek Out geeks discuss what went right and what went wrong with O'Brien's first week on the job here.