Sunday! Sunday! Soap day!

Spoilers for "Desperate Housewives" and "Brothers & Sisters" coming up just as soon as I get a neck massage...

So it's been a recurring theme on the blog this week that I'm not in a soap opera mode of late. I watched the season's first two episodes of "Ugly Betty," for instance, liked them, and yet made no effort to set my DVR to record it going forward (even though there's a hole in the lineup now that I've ditched "Survivor: China"). And I'm more interested in seeing episode two of "Bionic Woman" than "Dirty Sexy Money," even though the latter was clearly a much better pilot.

Which brings me to "Desperate Housewives." I was never one of the critics who was over the moon about the first season, nor someone who thought the shark fin had been leaped over in season two. And I remember quite liking the first episode or two of season three that they sent me on DVD -- and yet skipping almost the entirety of that season, save the supermarket hostage show (which I think I also got in advance). So this may be the last thing I blog about the show this year, even though I liked several things that happened in it.

Start with the arrival of Dana Delany, who, as most everybody knows, was the first choice to play Bree but turned it down because she'd just done a comic mystery soap hybrid with "Pasadena." Delany gives good bitch here, in a very different way than Marcia Cross plays Bree. I just hope it doesn't become one of those Al Swearengen vs. Cy Tolliver things where the creator brings in his original choice for the part in an only slightly modified role, then runs out of stuff to give him/her once the initial rush of loyalty fades out. Also, I'd rather see Nathan Fillion in an action role, but the guy can do comedy, and anything that keeps him employed in a relatively high profile is okay by me.

But as far as the returning characters go, I've reached the point where I dislike all the main women, with the exception of Bree (where Cross' comic flair compensates for what's often a very caricatured part). And that, as much as any soap fatigue, means I probably won't be around moving forward.

"Brothers & Sisters" is a more elusive creature to me. I mentioned in a comment to a "Dirty Sexy Money" post last week that, for reasons I still can't quite identify (even though it's one of the things I'm paid to do), Greg Berlanti makes TV shows that I admire, often like a lot -- I never regretted an hour spent watching "Everwood" -- and yet ones that I never feel compelled to see every week.

I had a season pass to "Brothers & Sisters" last year and was really enjoying what it had become under Berlanti's watch -- the road trip episode was a particular highlight -- yet there came a point in the season where the number of episodes that were backlogged on the DVR became so high that I knew I was never going to get around to them all anytime soon, and so I deleted them to make room for a Giants game or something. (Football in high-def roolz.) I dug the premiere episode, particularly Rob Lowe's presence as the one man capable of bringing the Walkers down from their various pity parties (he arrived almost exactly when I tuned out last year, though for no reflection on his work) and intend to be more dilligent about catching the show this year than last, even if it means sometimes watching episodes on ABC's kick-ass streaming site... But I still have this feeling that, within a month or two, I'm going to be cueing up old underdog sports movies on one of the movie channels when I should be watching Rachel Griffiths play drunk.

Somebody want to psychoanlayze me on this? And what did everybody else think?