Mad Men, "Maidenform": Reflections of the love you took from me

Spoilers for "Mad Men" season two, episode six coming up just as soon as I delete "The Man who Shot Liberty Valance" from my Netflix queue (and thank you very much, Pete)...

"Women want to see themselves the way men see them." -Paul Kinsey

Unsurprisingly for an episode that features so many characters looking into mirrors, "Maidenform" is about how people see themselves and then how hurt they are to realize how the rest of the world sees them.

Don is briefly pleased with Sally's worshipful gaze, particularly during the Memorial Day celebration, but after he realizes that Bobbie Barrett sees him as a reflection of herself -- and that, though he refuses to admit it to her, she's seeing him correctly -- he can't bear to have Sally look at him that way anymore.

Peggy struggles with an issue that still plagues women in business today -- how do you get an edge in business when the boys are doing so much business at the bar, or on the golf course, or other He-Man Woman Hater's Club-type venues? -- and needs Joan to tell her to stop looking like a girl when a woman can probably have more luck in this arena. (Modern businesswoman might suggest that Peggy's new approach -- not just dressing sexier, but sitting on the lap of a male client and giggling about it -- won't do her any favors, either, but least the guys seemed happy to have her around, and might think to invite her to future after-hours events.)

Betty is again flattered by the attention of young Arthur (so long as it doesn't go past attention) and is then embarrassed when he sees his reaction to the arrival of her kids. To feel better about herself, she buys a sexy yellow bikini at auction and is completely humiliated when Don -- who watched her, from afar, flirt with Arthur at the country club -- tells her exactly how he thinks she looks.

Duck Phillips, struggling to stay sober in the wake of personal and professional problems (his appearances late last season strongly implied that he was an alcoholic whose drinking nearly destroyed his career in London), finally succumbs to the temptation to drink. But he can't bear to see his beloved dog Chauncey -- a reflection of the life he threw away the last time he drank -- stare at him with those big brown eyes, and so he sends the poor pooch out into the streets of New York so he can destroy himself in solitude. (And if you have any doubt that Duck went back up for that bottle, it should have been erased by the immediate cut from Duck's haunted face to Bobbie Barrett pouring a glass of champagne.)

Pete, who has never had much of a personality to call his own and who therefore mirrors others -- see his desire to buy an "office dog" after seeing Duck with Chauncey -- preys on the insecurities of a model who just got rejected at a Sterling Cooper casting call. Though he's pleased with his predatory reflection in the mirror after returning home, unnoticed, he's furious when he watches Peggy acting flirty and happy at the strip club. (Pete's "I don't like you like this" to a happy Peggy from "The Hobo Code" was his version of Don's "It's desperate" to Betty here.)

Mirrors -- flattering and unflattering, real images and perceived ones -- are everywhere in this episode. Don has created a (successful) campaign for Playtex that holds up a mirror to the product and shows you why it works. The clients want a campaign that mirrors the one used by Maidenform (which is all about fantasy images of oneself), and so Don comes up with a new one that involves one woman playing two versions of herself, as Jackie and Marilyn.

Jackie and her husband have come up an awful lot this season, and they're also held up to the harsh light of the dressing room mirror. Don's public relations buddy at the Memorial Day barbecue talks about how the image of youthful vigor we all had of Kennedy -- which we all now know was a lie, that he was frail and sickly -- vanished as soon as Kennedy got to the White House and was confronted with the reality that he couldn't get anything done. (Case in point: The Bay of Pigs, which Don's pal was involved in.)

"Maidenform" is a less intense episode than last week's "The New Girl," but it features a number of typically beautiful, haunting "Mad Men" moments. Chief among them is Duck abandoning Chauncey so he can get his drink on in peace. Based on Mark Moses' continued listing as a guest star, I fear Duck's not long for Sterling Cooper. It's one thing to indulge the likes of Freddie Rumsen, who has a middle-tier job and at worst falls asleep on the job; it's clear from the rumors we heard about Duck last season and from the comment from his ex-wife about how he used to act in the afternoon that Duck is a much messier drunk, and the sort that Bert Cooper won't be able to tolerate as his head of accounts.

The shame of it is that Duck's fall off the wagon comes in the same episode where he finally makes peace with Don. He doesn't realize it at first (look how defeated he seems after Don leaves their "lunch" meeting) because Don can be such a cold bastard, but when the Playtex campaign plays out exactly as Don predicted it would, Don declines to play the "Toldja so" and genuinely tries to reassure Duck that this wasn't a bad thing. (Unlike the American fiasco, this didn't cost them any money.) There had been a lot of speculation that Matt Weiner brought Duck in to be this season's Richie Aprile, but after weeks of watching them clash and watching Duck try to lure Pete further into the dark side, Weiner instead shows us a very human and vulnerable side of Duck, and then tosses poor Duck off the wagon. Great work by Moses.

Bobbie Barrett, on the other hand, is becoming more problematic the longer she sticks around. I recognize that she's supposed to reflect (oy, there's that word again) an uglier side of Don, that he's drawn to her out of frustration with the state of his marriage and that both of them get off on the fact that neither likes each other very much. But the unpleasantness of their relationship is starting to flow into the actual scenes. The idea that Don's much more of a himbo than we realized, and in fact has a reputation among a certain circle of professional ladies is an interesting one (not that I ever thought Midge was his first mistress), but there comes a point where I'm tired of seeing Don cast this nasty woman out of his life only to go back to her again.

Then again, the Duck storyline doesn't seem to be traveling in the direction I expected. Maybe my perception of the Bobbie story is going to turn out to be as inaccurate as Sally Draper's view of her perfect daddy.

Some other thoughts on "Maidenform":

• Though the story overall is frustrating, I did get a kick out of Don doing the mental math whenever Bobbie revealed the existence and age of yet another kid. Jon Hamm had a priceless "How old is this broad?" look on his face when she mentioned the daughter at Sarah Lawrence, and the whole thing neatly mirrored (please stop me from beating this metaphor into the ground) Arthur's reaction to the physical reminder of Betty's motherhood.

• I really appreciated the nuance of the guys' behavior around Peggy in her storyline, which reflects (God help us all) her unique standing in the office. She's not a secretary, and they don't treat her like one, but she's also not one of them. Freddie's the one who plucked her from the typing pool by praising her way with words to Don, yet he still slaps her on her ass (albeit with a folder) to dismiss her complaints of being left out of the brainstorming session. And you can tell that Ken does sort of like her -- if nothing else, he recognizes that she's good at what she does, and therefore good for his own business -- but he also doesn't grasp what her complaint is about.

• Also, you can tell how badly Peggy could use that makeover, even if sexing herself up may not be the best way to deal with these guys. Don compares her to Irene Dunne, who was 63 in 1962, and hadn't even appeared in a movie in a decade. Dunne was adorable in her heyday, but it'd be sort of like telling a 22-year-old today, in the midst of a discussion of which Jessica is the hottest, that she reminds you of Diane Keaton. (Hat tip to Matt Seitz for suggesting Keaton; I was on the verge of going with the less age-appropriate Meg Ryan.)

• I loved that Betty's friend casually uses a phrase like "the summer they executed the Rosenbergs" while discussing the weather.

• Lost a little in all the hubbub about Playtex is the tension between Peggy and Pete over the Clearasil campaign. Two things that struck me: 1)Unlike Duck's proposed, unfinished suggestion for the Playtext slogan, Pete's "Thanks, Clearasil!" catchphrase doesn't sound bad (I have a nagging suspicion it was a Clearasil slogan at some point), but Peggy won't admit it because it would suggest he had some talent in her area; and 2)Peggy's TV commercial concept sounds fairly novel for the period, and maybe another thing that could help put Sterling Cooper (and Harry's brand new TV division) on the map.

• Another reason I suspect Duck is on his way out: Roger hasn't had much to do professionally this season. That said, the writers always make sure to give John Slattery one hilariously oily bit of business in every episode. In this case, it was his delight in admiring the curvy (albeit lobster-like) form of Jane and mocking Don about what Betty's eventual reaction to her will be. ("Has your wife seen that yet?")

• Any Stephen King fans immediately start thinking about "Gerald's Game" after Don left Bobbie tied to the bed? A robe sash isn't as hard to get out of as handcuffs, and of course someone would be home before long (either a housekeeper or this college-age daughter), but I did wonder how long she wound up stuck like that.

• For the second episode in a row, Freddie embarrasses a co-worker with something that seems inappropriate, but at least here, his request for a box of bras was actually professional, whereas there was no earthly reason (except comic genius) for him to play Mozart on his zipper last week.

• During the non-lunch peace accord meeting, there's a shot from behind of Don leaning on Duck's couch that looks exactly like the image of him from the main titles.

• Creepier part of Pete's seduction of the model: that her mom is in the next room, or that Pete (who recently lost his dad in a plane crash) has sex while the TV shows an aviation documentary where the narrator reads RAF pilot John Gillespie Magee's poem "High Flight", which is often read at the memorials for people who died in plane crashes? (Reagan quoted it while addressing the nation on the night of the Challenger explosion.)

• For the most part, music supervisor Alex Patsavas sticks with period-appropriate songs, but she's not opposed to an anachronistic tune if it fits right, which The Decemberists' "The Infanta" certainly does over the montage of Betty, Joan and Peggy putting on their underwear in front of the (sorry, but this is a literal use) mirror.

What did everybody else (or, at least, everybody else who was watching a Memorial Day-themed episode of a TV show in the middle of Labor Day weekend) think? Click here to read the full post

The Wire, Season 1, Episode 13: "Sentencing" (Veterans edition)

Since we're up to the final episode of "The Wire" season one, you really don't need me to tell you that this is the review where you can talk about anything and everything from all five seasons. If you want to be protected from anything from future seasons, scroll down for the newbie-friendly version.

Spoilers for episode 13, "Sentencing," coming up just as soon as I take this blog federal...

"You grow up in this s--t. My grandfather was Butch Stamford. You know who Butch Stamford was in this town? All my people, man -- my father, my uncles, my cousins -- it's just what we do. You just live with this s--t until you can't breathe no more. I swear to God, I was courtside for eight months, and I was freer in jail than I was at home." -D'Angelo Barksdale

Why do we watch this show? Seriously, why do we subject ourselves to a drama that spends 13-plus hours of television building towards an ending this bleak, that offers such little hope for the future of both its characters and the system we all live in? What masochistic impulse could lead me to obsess so much on this world, to go back and watch Bodie kill Wallace, or Brianna change D'Angelo's mind, or Bubbs fall off the wagon, six years after these things upset me the first time? Forget McNulty's line from season five asking what the (bleep) is wrong with this city. What the (bleep) is wrong with all of us who keep sticking around?

Nothing's wrong with us -- not related to our love of this show, anyway. We watch it because, even though it makes us despair, it's brilliant. We watch it because, even though it's awful to see D'Angelo throw away his future after Brianna packs his bags for a guilt trip, Larry Gilliard Jr. delivers such a scorching performance throughout. We watch it because, even though it's stomach-churning to see Maury Levy on the other end of Ronnie's phone call instead of the public defender, the moment is set up so expertly. We watch it because, even though many characters we like suffer many fates we don't, we realize in the end how much the show has been trying to warn us about this from the jump.

David Simon and Ed Burns have always modeled "The Wire" after Greek tragedy, and the concept of predestination is as strong here as it was in the time of Sophocles. Landmsan warned Jimmy in the very first episode that he'd wind up riding the boat, and Lester warned him again a few episodes later, and where does Jimmy wind up? (And it is, as usual, Jimmy's uncontrollable need to lecture others on their moral inferiority that screws him over; if he walks politely out of the meeting with the U.S. Attorney instead of insulting the guy, Rawls almost certainly never gets a call about it.)

"Sentencing" is packed with callbacks or payoffs to moments from throughout the season. Poot repeats D'Angelo's lesson about the danger of one man selling and then serving the same customer, as he takes D'Angelo's role as leader of the Pit. (Characters filling other characters' shoes will be a popular theme on the full-circle "Wire," particularly as the series moves forward.) When asked whether he talked business with Wee-Bey on the ride to Philly, D tells Bunk and Jimmy that they have a rule against it -- a rule Wee-Bey had to remind him of in the first episode. When the two detectives hear D refer to Diedre Kresson wanting to put the 8-ball on ice, they immediately understand why the refrigerator door was open. (D's recounting of that murder and how Wee-Bey really did it also reconciles D's aversion to violence, particularly against civilians, with him taking credit for the deed. For more on that, look to the bullet points.) Daniels gives Prez his gun back and makes a wry joke about its infamously light trigger pull. Herc tries to pass on the brains-over-muscle lessons of the detail, even though you can tell he doesn't really believe in them. On his way out of court, Stringer throws Jimmy's "Nicely done" line from the premiere right back at him. And after all of that, after the closing montage shows that the partial takedown of the Barksdale crew has in no way slowed the spread of drugs throughout Baltimore, we hear Omar whistle "Farmer in the Dell" one last time and remind us that it's "all in The Game, yo." The players may change, may (like Bodie or Lester) get promoted to bigger roles, but The Game will always be here.

One of the series' key themes is the folly of placing your faith in institutions, because they're designed to protect themselves and not you the individual. D'Angelo placed his faith in both The Game and his family, and they combined to drag him down and send his ass to prison for 20 years. McNulty put his faith in law-enforcement and found out that no one on either the local or federal level really cares about stopping the likes of Avon and Stringer. D goes to prison, Jimmy to the boat, and their institutions grind on with them on the margins.

Bubbs put his faith in Kima and had his thin recovery plan undone not because she was unreliable, but because the system placed her in a situation that made her unable to help him when he absolutely needed her. (Though, again, it was a shaky idea to begin with.) Daniels put his faith into the idea of climbing the ladder and staying tight with Burrell, and in the end gets burned and passed over for promotion because he tried to do his job the right way. Carver instead becomes Burrell's new pet and gets his own promotion, but Daniels' come-to-Jesus lecture makes him start wondering if it was such a good idea.

There are happy endings on the margins, like Lester escaping pawn shop purgatory (and winning the affections of Shardene, to boot), or Prez proving himself to be a useful detective, or even the return of a smiling Omar to the streets of West Baltimore (NOTE: several readers have pointed out evidence within and without the episode that Omar's operating out of the South Bronx at this moment in time), but they're overwhelmed by all the tragedies at the center. Yes, the detail gets Avon locked up on a minor charge, and several of his lieutenants are either dead or locked up for a long time, but at what cost? Wallace is dead. Nakeesha Lyles is dead. Orlando. Kima caught a bullet and is lucky to be stumbling around a hospital corridor on a walker. Jimmy's on the boat, Santangelo back in uniform, Daniels' promotion prospects are iffy at best, Kevin Johnson is half-blind, D'Angelo is taking the fall for his uncle, and Stringer and the organization as a whole don't seem to have missed a beat.

By the end, even Jimmy recognizes how much damage he's caused for so little noticeable gain. His "What the f--k did I do?" catchphrase again is used to connote tragedy, not comedy, as is Bunk repeating his "Happy now, b---h?" put-down from earlier in the season.

The wheel keeps turning, the players keep playing, and as hard as it was to re-experience most of what happened towards the end of this season, there's a part of me that wants to blow off all my professional responsibilities and proceed immediately to watching all the awful events of season two. And I don't believe there's a thing wrong with me to want that.

Some other thoughts on "Sentencing":

• Getting back to the pain of seeing D take the fall for Avon, it's a mark of how well D was written and played that we mourn a 20-year prison sentence for a character whom we first met as he was beating a murder charge through witness tampering.

• In the veteran-friendly review of "Old Cases," I talked at length about how D'Angelo lied to Bodie and the others about killing Diedre Kresson, and how it was virtually the only time in the run of the series that Simon and Burns would deliberately lie to the audience about something that big, for that long. I went on at length about my discomfort with the choice (specificially as it changed my perception about D'Angelo going from then until this episode) and then invited David Simon to offer up his own explanation for the choice. If you've been following the newbie versions of these reviews, I'd advise you to click on the above link to read it; so long as you bail out before the comments start, you won't get spoiled on anything that happens in later seasons.

• I could probably isolate and sing the praises of virtually every scene in this episode if I had the time, but one in particular I want to highlight is Jimmy finally finding the stones to visit Kima in the hospital. Every beat was just right, from Cheryl bolting in disgust as they discussed the case to Jimmy crying over his white guilt to Kima pragmatically stating that her only regret was not using more tape to secure the gun.

• As I said when I first started talking about the show's music rules, the one concrete exception made each season is with the montage at season's end that sums up where the characters, and The Game, are headed. This one's scored to "Step By Step" by Jesse Winchester

• I thought it was a very nice background detail to have D's public defender be so obviously horrified by the crime scene photos of Deirdre, Wallace, and company, and the realization that her new client was involved in some bad, bad stuff down in Baltimore. Like Jimmy and Bunk and D'Angelo, we've been so hardened to all these murders by now (save Wallace, of course) that it was good to have an outside reminder of just how brutal the Barksdale crew is.

• If you've ever seen or heard a David Simon interview or commentary track, you might have recognized his voice as the bailiff announcing the entrance of the judge for the sentencing hearing. It was a last-minute bit of audio looping, and Simon was the only guy in the room who hadn't already contributed a voice elsewhere in the episode.

• Jimmy's comportment in the relationship department has never been what you would call admirable. But Ronnie -- who claimed to be done with his drunken, manipulative ass several episodes back -- jumping his bones in the parking garage after he handed her what looked like a career case was a reminder that it takes two to have an ugly affair sometimes.

• Rawls punishing Jimmy is in some way on Jimmy, who could never leave well enough alone even as he knew his boss was gunning for him, but Rawls absolutely does not play fair with Santangelo. Santy kept up his end of the deal by closing an open case, and Rawls still puts him on a foot post in the Western district.

• Another nice touch involving a throwaway character new to the storyline: Lester's retired buddy at the phone company who invokes the cliche of cops giving speeches about how "all-fired important" their case is, followed by the guy's genuine pleasure at realizing he can help Lester catch a guy who shot a cop.

• Carver's a knucklehead and a rat, and yet there are these moments of incredible clarity like his "Wars end" line from the pilot or, here, him watching Bodie and his crew beat on Onion and observing that this is why the cops can't win: "They f--k up, they get beat. We f--k up, they give us pensions." Somewhere, Det. Mahone (retired) is hoisting a glass in Bodie's honor.

• Blink and you may have missed Toni Lewis, who played Det. Teri Stivers in the last few years of "Homicide," as one of the feds in the second meeting with McNulty, Daniels and Lester. She'll pop up a few more times in season two.

And for the last time, let's talk about how events in this episode pay off down the road:

• Kima refusing to ID Wee-Bey will be reflected in her refusal to go along with Jimmy and Lester's plan to get Marlo. Sometimes, things just gotta play hard, right?

• When "Sentencing" originally aired, I was amazed that someone as bright as McNulty somehow was dumb enough to ignore Lester's warnings about how to answer the "Where don't you want to go?" question. Eventually, I tried to write it off as Jimmy punishing himself for what he did to D'Angelo and everyone else, but in season two we find out that Jimmy did, in fact, keep his mouth shut, and that Landsman ratted him out just so he could win their bet from the first episode.

• Stringer will work out of this funeral home for the rest of his run, though the place looks different in later seasons. Simon couldn't remember whether or not they changed locations between seasons, but we also don't see the inside of the viewing rooms here, which is where most of Stringer's memorable economics lectures will take place. So it could be the same location throughout in real life, and in the show's world it's supposed to be.

• D'Angelo never does get to breathe free, now does he? Sigh... I can take some (very) small solace from watching Jimmy emotionally destroys Brianna for what she does here when she confronts him in season three (skip ahead to about the five minute mark, and then watch how good Dominic West and Michael Hyatt can be).

• In the end, Lester's arrogance will be the undoing of his career the same way it will be for McNulty, but his other happy ending from this season sticks, as Shardene will still be his special lady friend by the time we get to the series finale.

• While Prez proves himself to be a good police over the course of this season, he's right to not really want that gun back, given what happens with the undercover cop at the end of season three. In retrospect, Prez would have been a lot happier if Daniels hadn't saved his job after the Kevin Johnson incident.

• It's been a while since I watched season two. I know Jimmy tries to get back into Ronnie's pants a few times over the next two seasons, but is this the last time it actually happens?

Coming up next: Nothing. Summer's just about over, new TV shows start debuting as of Monday, and I unfortunately won't have time to move on to season two until at least next summer. (And I still have to do those "Sports Night" reviews I've been promising for forever; maybe that'll be a circa-Christmas/Chanukah/New Year's thing, but don't hold me to it.) It's been really gratifying to read comments in both versions of these reviews from people who said they finally started watching the series because of me and quickly raced through the later seasons.

As a reminder, you can find my reviews of season four here, and of season five here. Eventually, I'll get around to chronicling the adventures of Frank Sobotka, Ziggy, Fruit and company.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

The Wire, Season 1, Episode 13, "Sentencing" (Newbies edition)

Since we're up to the final episode of "The Wire" season one, you really don't need me to tell you that this is the version of the review where you don't have to be worried about spoilers from later seasons. Scroll up for the veteran-friendly version.

Spoilers for episode 13, "Sentencing," coming up just as soon as I take this blog federal...

"You grow up in this s--t. My grandfather was Butch Stamford. You know who Butch Stamford was in this town? All my people, man -- my father, my uncles, my cousins -- it's just what we do. You just live with this s--t until you can't breathe no more. I swear to God, I was courtside for eight months, and I was freer in jail than I was at home." -D'Angelo Barksdale

Why do we watch this show? Seriously, why do we subject ourselves to a drama that spends 13-plus hours of television building towards an ending this bleak, that offers such little hope for the future of both its characters and the system we all live in? What masochistic impulse could lead me to obsess so much on this world, to go back and watch Bodie kill Wallace, or Brianna change D'Angelo's mind, or Bubbs fall off the wagon, six years after these things upset me the first time? Forget McNulty's line from season five asking what the (bleep) is wrong with this city. What the (bleep) is wrong with all of us who keep sticking around?

Nothing's wrong with us -- not related to our love of this show, anyway. We watch it because, even though it makes us despair, it's brilliant. We watch it because, even though it's awful to see D'Angelo throw away his future after Brianna packs his bags for a guilt trip, Larry Gilliard Jr. delivers such a scorching performance throughout. We watch it because, even though it's stomach-churning to see Maury Levy on the other end of Ronnie's phone call instead of the public defender, the moment is set up so expertly. We watch it because, even though many characters we like suffer many fates we don't, we realize in the end how much the show has been trying to warn us about this from the jump.

David Simon and Ed Burns have always modeled "The Wire" after Greek tragedy, and the concept of predestination is as strong here as it was in the time of Sophocles. Landmsan warned Jimmy in the very first episode that he'd wind up riding the boat, and Lester warned him again a few episodes later, and where does Jimmy wind up? (And it is, as usual, Jimmy's uncontrollable need to lecture others on their moral inferiority that screws him over; if he walks politely out of the meeting with the U.S. Attorney instead of insulting the guy, Rawls almost certainly never gets a call about it.)

"Sentencing" is packed with callbacks or payoffs to moments from throughout the season. Poot repeats D'Angelo's lesson about the danger of one man selling and then serving the same customer, as he takes D'Angelo's role as leader of the Pit. (Characters filling other characters' shoes will be a popular theme on the full-circle "Wire," particularly as the series moves forward.) When asked whether he talked business with Wee-Bey on the ride to Philly, D tells Bunk and Jimmy that they have a rule against it -- a rule Wee-Bey had to remind him of in the first episode. When the two detectives hear D refer to Diedre Kresson wanting to put the 8-ball on ice, they immediately understand why the refrigerator door was open. (D's recounting of that murder and how Wee-Bey really did it also reconciles D's aversion to violence, particularly against civilians, with him taking credit for the deed. For more on that, look to the bullet points.) Daniels gives Prez his gun back and makes a wry joke about its infamously light trigger pull. Herc tries to pass on the brains-over-muscle lessons of the detail, even though you can tell he doesn't really believe in them. On his way out of court, Stringer throws Jimmy's "Nicely done" line from the premiere right back at him. And after all of that, after the closing montage shows that the partial takedown of the Barksdale crew has in no way slowed the spread of drugs throughout Baltimore, we hear Omar whistle "Farmer in the Dell" one last time and remind us that it's "all in The Game, yo." The players may change, may (like Bodie or Lester) get promoted to bigger roles, but The Game will always be here.

One of the series' key themes is the folly of placing your faith in institutions, because they're designed to protect themselves and not you the individual. D'Angelo placed his faith in both The Game and his family, and they combined to drag him down and send his ass to prison for 20 years. McNulty put his faith in law-enforcement and found out that no one on either the local or federal level really cares about stopping the likes of Avon and Stringer. D goes to prison, Jimmy to the boat, and their institutions grind on with them on the margins.

Bubbs put his faith in Kima and had his thin recovery plan undone not because she was unreliable, but because the system placed her in a situation that made her unable to help him when he absolutely needed her. (Though, again, it was a shaky idea to begin with.) Daniels put his faith into the idea of climbing the ladder and staying tight with Burrell, and in the end gets burned and passed over for promotion because he tried to do his job the right way. Carver instead becomes Burrell's new pet and gets his own promotion, but Daniels' come-to-Jesus lecture makes him start wondering if it was such a good idea.

There are happy endings on the margins, like Lester escaping pawn shop purgatory (and winning the affections of Shardene, to boot), or Prez proving himself to be a useful detective, or even the return of a smiling Omar to the streets of West Baltimore (NOTE: several readers have pointed out evidence within and without the episode that Omar's operating out of the South Bronx at this moment in time), but they're overwhelmed by all the tragedies at the center. Yes, the detail gets Avon locked up on a minor charge, and several of his lieutenants are either dead or locked up for a long time, but at what cost? Wallace is dead. Nakeesha Lyles is dead. Orlando. Kima caught a bullet and is lucky to be stumbling around a hospital corridor on a walker. Jimmy's on the boat, Santangelo back in uniform, Daniels' promotion prospects are iffy at best, Kevin Johnson is half-blind, D'Angelo is taking the fall for his uncle, and Stringer and the organization as a whole don't seem to have missed a beat.

By the end, even Jimmy recognizes how much damage he's caused for so little noticeable gain. His "What the f--k did I do?" catchphrase again is used to connote tragedy, not comedy, as is Bunk repeating his "Happy now, b---h?" put-down from earlier in the season.

The wheel keeps turning, the players keep playing, and as hard as it was to re-experience most of what happened towards the end of this season, there's a part of me that wants to blow off all my professional responsibilities and proceed immediately to watching all the awful events of season two. And I don't believe there's a thing wrong with me to want that.

Some other thoughts on "Sentencing":

• Getting back to the pain of seeing D take the fall for Avon, it's a mark of how well D was written and played that we mourn a 20-year prison sentence for a character whom we first met as he was beating a murder charge through witness tampering.

• In the veteran-friendly review of "Old Cases," I talked at length about how D'Angelo lied to Bodie and the others about killing Diedre Kresson, and how it was virtually the only time in the run of the series that Simon and Burns would deliberately lie to the audience about something that big, for that long. I went on at length about my discomfort with the choice (specificially as it changed my perception about D'Angelo going from then until this episode) and then invited David Simon to offer up his own explanation for the choice. If you've been following the newbie versions of these reviews, I'd advise you to click on the above link to read it; so long as you bail out before the comments start, you won't get spoiled on anything that happens in later seasons.

• I could probably isolate and sing the praises of virtually every scene in this episode if I had the time, but one in particular I want to highlight is Jimmy finally finding the stones to visit Kima in the hospital. Every beat was just right, from Cheryl bolting in disgust as they discussed the case to Jimmy crying over his white guilt to Kima pragmatically stating that her only regret was not using more tape to secure the gun.

• As I said when I first started talking about the show's music rules, the one concrete exception made each season is with the montage at season's end that sums up where the characters, and The Game, are headed. This one's scored to "Step By Step" by Jesse Winchester

• I thought it was a very nice background detail to have D's public defender be so obviously horrified by the crime scene photos of Deirdre, Wallace, and company, and the realization that her new client was involved in some bad, bad stuff down in Baltimore. Like Jimmy and Bunk and D'Angelo, we've been so hardened to all these murders by now (save Wallace, of course) that it was good to have an outside reminder of just how brutal the Barksdale crew is.

• If you've ever seen or heard a David Simon interview or commentary track, you might have recognized his voice as the bailiff announcing the entrance of the judge for the sentencing hearing. It was a last-minute bit of audio looping, and Simon was the only guy in the room who hadn't already contributed a voice elsewhere in the episode.

• Jimmy's comportment in the relationship department has never been what you would call admirable. But Ronnie -- who claimed to be done with his drunken, manipulative ass several episodes back -- jumping his bones in the parking garage after he handed her what looked like a career case was a reminder that it takes two to have an ugly affair sometimes.

• Rawls punishing Jimmy is in some way on Jimmy, who could never leave well enough alone even as he knew his boss was gunning for him, but Rawls absolutely does not play fair with Santangelo. Santy kept up his end of the deal by closing an open case, and Rawls still puts him on a foot post in the Western district.

• Another nice touch involving a throwaway character new to the storyline: Lester's retired buddy at the phone company who invokes the cliche of cops giving speeches about how "all-fired important" their case is, followed by the guy's genuine pleasure at realizing he can help Lester catch a guy who shot a cop.

• Carver's a knucklehead and a rat, and yet there are these moments of incredible clarity like his "Wars end" line from the pilot or, here, him watching Bodie and his crew beat on Onion and observing that this is why the cops can't win: "They f--k up, they get beat. We f--k up, they give us pensions." Somewhere, Det. Mahone (retired) is hoisting a glass in Bodie's honor.

• Blink and you may have missed Toni Lewis, who played Det. Teri Stivers in the last few years of "Homicide," as one of the feds in the second meeting with McNulty, Daniels and Lester. She'll pop up a few more times in season two.

Coming up next: Nothing. Summer's just about over, new TV shows start debuting as of Monday, and I unfortunately won't have time to move on to season two until at least next summer. (And I still have to do those "Sports Night" reviews I've been promising for forever; maybe that'll be a circa-Christmas/Chanukah/New Year's thing, but don't hold me to it.) It's been really gratifying to read comments in both versions of these reviews from people who said they finally started watching the series because of me and quickly raced through the later seasons.

As a reminder, you can find my reviews of season four here, and of season five here. Eventually, I'll get around to chronicling the adventures of Frank Sobotka, Ziggy, Fruit and company.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Chuck: Josh Schwartz interview

In an unexpected but very cool move, NBC has given "Chuck" a full season order for season two based on their opinion of the first six episodes. (Initially, it only got a 13-episode order based on the weird strike-related nature of season one.) So even though the show's been off the air since January (it comes back on Sept. 29), and even though it'll have tougher competition than it did last year (including having to face Josh Schwartz's other show), and even though NBC doesn't own the show, they've just given the show a very public sign of support.

The back nine pickup has inspired me to finally finish transcribing the interview I did with Schwartz back at press tour. After the jump, Schwartz talks about the different media reaction to "Chuck" vs. "Gossip Girl," the lessons he learned from season one, his motivation for all the season two stunt casting (including Nicole Richie showing up as Sarah's high school nemesis), and more. There are some spoilers here, but for the most part, they're minor.

You've got the two shows. One of them, in total audience, is destroying the other one, albeit not head-to-head. Yet all the attention goes to the other one. Why do you think that is?

It's the type of show that it is. A show like "Gossip Girl," if you hit the target, is a show that is designed to hit the zeitgeist in a certain way. It becomes more than a television show. It's a lifestyle, it's fashion, it's New York as a character, it's the cast as tabloid fodder. It's a show that naturally, I've learned, attracts that kind of attention. No matter what, an action/spy/comedy hybrid isn't necessarily designed for the Us Weekly crowd. But I'm going down to Comic-Con this weekend and "Gossip Girl" will be verboten.

So by their nature, I think both shows are going to hit in a different way. That being said, I'm incredibly proud of "Gossip Girl" and the success that it's had and attention it's garnered, and I love the cast and the writers. It's fun. "Chuck" was more outside of the box even when I pitched it. I pitched it and people were like. "Why are you doing a show like this, and can you even do a show like this?" I'm fortunate to work with Chris Fedak on this, but to do more of a straight-ahead comedy -- which is where my instinct wanted to push "The OC" a lot of times, until that instinct and spirit was crushed -- but to do something that had more of the genre elements and had more of a procedural element, all that kind of stuff made it much more of a challenge, and therefore all the more satisfying for me when people seemed to enjoy it. The fact that we're back is very very gratifying.

I'm not going to ask you to pick between your children, but "Gossip Girl" is the CW's standard-bearer. It's holding up the network at this point.

I still think "Farmer Takes a Wife" is going to catch on...

Given that, you probably don't need to worry about "Gossip Girl," but with "Chuck," you're competing with yourself, you're competing with "Terminator," football, CBS comedies, etc. What are your expectations and what are their expectations for what you have to do?

Beat "Heroes." They keep telling me, "You've gotta beat 'Heroes!'" No, I don't think the competition is crazy-different from last year. I suppose "Terminator" versus "Prison Break," "Terminator" is a bigger show I guess. "Gossip Girl" versus the Monday night comedies on the CW is a change, but everything else is basically the same. It's hard. They say, "Your promotion's in Sunday night football," and I go, "Yeah, but we're on against Monday Night Football."

But I believe in the show. I watch these episodes, I go to the set, I go to these panels where Zach (Levi)'s there, and it just feels like a show that works. You know when a show is not working, and it feels like it works. I've gotten used to, now, people wanting to talk about "Gossip Girl," but I've gotten pleasantly surprised by people who go, "I watch every episode of 'Chuck,' I watch it with my daughter." And I go, "Really? Your teenage daughter watches it? Okay." I think there's an audience there for the show, I think the show has its heart in the right place, the characters are likable, and it's fun. We're there to be fun. We're there to entertain you.

You've said that "Chuck" needs more women and "Gossip Girl" needs more men, in terms of viewership. How do you do that, especially given that they're now in the timeslot together?

I do not run a network, so I don't know. If "Chuck" came out and did the same numbers as last year, or in the ballpark -- because everything was down last year and I think you'll see that again, as DVR penetration becomes more obvious -- I think we can run for a while.

During the strike, right after "American Gladiators" debuted, there were these stories published about how reality's success would make it difficult for scripted shows to find a way back on these networks. There was a quote like, "If I'm the producer of 'Chuck' and I'm seeing what 'Gladiators' did in that timeslot, I'd be worried."

Except I am the producer of "Chuck" and I waited to see how "Gladiators" did against repeat competition a month and a half later, and I'm slightly more comfortable. For me.

Going over the first season, what do you feel worked? What did you learn about the show?

I felt like the show found its tone really early, which was good. For me, the episodes where the mission of the week reflected on Chuck in either a very personal way, thematically or in terms of the storyline, we had success, versus episodes where he just had a Mission of the Week that he flashed on. So this year, the mission storylines are much more designed to either be part of this larger story, which definitely incorporates Chuck, and the hunt for the Cipher, which we called, in early drafts of the script, our Flux Capacitor. It's the final piece to complete the Intersect.

Or they're more emotional stories, like Sarah going back to her high school reunion. Or we do our "King of Kong" homage, where there are command codes hidden in the kill screen of Missile Command, so we have to find the one guy who kicked ass at Missile Command 20 years ago, and it turns out that's Jeff from the Buy More. And it becomes about Chuck and Jeff, who are perennial underachievers, and Chuck inspiring Jeff to reach back and be what he was. Hopefully, every episode comes back in that way.

Also the Jill episodes (with Jordana Brewster as Chuck's college girlfriend) are going to be really emotional. The show is really emotional this year. It's really romantic -- which I know is something not all guys want to hear, but I promise that Yvonne (Strahovski) is in enough skimpy attire to balance that out, if you're worried about us getting soft. We come out and own the love story right out of the gate, and there's a scene at the end of the third episode with Zach and Yvonne where I get choked up watching it.

Let's talk about Yvonne's attire. Everybody loved the Wienerlicious uniform.

I agree.

So why get rid of it?

I think you'll be happy. We wanted to change the set-up a little bit, and we started talking about other stores like Pink Berry, and so she wound up at the Orange Orange -- or, as we call it, the Double-O -- and her costume is adorable. You will be fine with it. And the CIA has sort of taken over this particular space.

What does the new setting allow you to do?

It feels more contemporary, it's sleeker, and behind the freezer door, there's another world.

With this show, you've always had to balance comedy and drama and action. Do you feel you have a better handle on it now?

I think you know, if you're doing a spy story now, okay, that's a good story, but what's the "Chuck" version of that story? What's going to separate it from an episode of "MacGyver," or "Miami Vice" or "My Own Worst Enemy"?

It's always a high-wire act, but when you have a guy like Zach at the center of your show, he can do so many things at once. He can be scared and funny in that moment, so you're getting a lot of comedy with the real tension. He solves a lot of tonal issues for us. He just gets the show completely.

The big advantage of a second season is you really understand the rhythms of your cast, and you start writing to their strengths. Lester becomes assistant manager for a few episodes at the start of the season, and the power quickly goes to his head -- he's incredibly abusive. But knowing Vic (Sahay) and knowing his range and what he can do, knowing Ryan McPartlin and the nuances of Captain Awesome -- and at some point this season you will meet the Awesomes -- being able to deepen those characters, I do think we have a better handle on what the show is.

We know when we're watching an episode now when it feels like we've veered off and we're just another show. the one thing above all that we're striving for with "Chuck" is that it doesn't feel like another show.

Are you satisfied with the quality of the fight scenes?

At times. Hey, we got nominated for an Emmy. Some were great, some were like we're making a show for TV and we have 8 days to make an episode. But we've upped the ante this year, there's some great action and stunts, our stunt coordinator is fantastic, and that's something we wanted to spend some time on, make the fights fancier and the explosions more fiery. Yvonne's got a kick-ass martial arts showdown with Michael Clarke Duncan.

I was talking to Yvonne at the (NBC press tour) party last night, and Michael Clarke Duncan is to her as she is to Nicole Richie.

But Nicole Richie has weapons in her favor. She literally has the plumbing from the shower. It's cool. She looks good. I think it's going to surprise people. She was better than I thought she would be. It started as a shameless ratings ploy and evolved into something that was legitimately good.

You've obviously had the experience with Paris (Hilton, who guest-starred on "The O.C.").

I did. That was less successful. I would put my money on Nicole.

Do you think people still care about Nicole?

I do. I think people actually really like her now, because I think they see, and it was a side we saw, someone who's really responsible, a grown-up now, and has come out the other side of that. I hear a lot from people like, 'I really like her now.' People feel like she's the one who really made it through and is grounded. She brought her baby to the set, she showed up every day, she knew her stuff, she was prepared. It was a very satisfying run.

Who does John Larroquette play?

Larroquette is Roan Montgomery, former spy and seducer of women, who is now a complete drunk living in Palm Springs. They need him to teach Chuck how to seduce Sasha Banacek, the black widow, played by Melinda Clarke. Roan is the last man who is known to have seduced Sasha. He's really funny. It's like our "My Favorite Year" episode. He and Zach are great together.

What kind of stuff do you have planned for Casey?

We have a really good run for Casey. (Adam) Baldwin is just awesome. He's just great. He shows up and does more with a grunt than most people do with a monologue. I think this storyline of "You must kill Chuck," you get to see a slightly more human side. And he gets really into selling. He becomes determined to be a great salesman at the Buy More. He really wants to move some Beast Masters.

You have a built-in expository excuse for the missions that Chuck is out on service calls all the time, but how do you justify Casey and Sarah constantly bolting away from these cover jobs?

Well, Sarah we can justify (now) because it's a front. And her (old) manager was never going to step to her. Casey, just nobody questions. I think there's a sense of relief when he's not on the floor. He brings intensity.

The reaction to Morgan waxed and waned a lot in season one.

I think this year, we've dialed him in just right. You'll get the right percentage of Morgan. First of all, he's got a new haircut. You can see his face, he's very expressive, very likable in that cut. Part of the reason Morgan bumped for people was he was always getting in Chuck's way, he was the thing always jeopardizing Chuck and it became, "Why is Chuck friends with him?" And now he's definitely much more Chuck's, you know, buddy. I think his relationship with Anna has really grounded him.

Do you plan to deal with the reality of Casey having to maintain this tedious cover identity for months or years on end?

I think it's on his face every time you see him. All of that really comes into focus in the first episode, it's all about the Intersect being near completion, it's time to get the Intersect out of Chuck's head and him back to his normal life. What it means for Sarah is she doesn't have to protect him. For Casey, it means he can go back to flying F-14s in Afghanistan and all the other things he really enjoys doing. All of that is in the forefront.

What did you learn about Yvonne in season one?

Yvonne can kind of do anything. First of all, she's a very physical actress. She's got a dance sequence with Bryce Larkin in the third episode that's mind-boggling. She's incredibly physical, but she's so sweet and so good with the emotional stuff, she has this scene at the end of the third episode that's just heart-breaking, so she can shift between bad-ass Sydney Bristow spy and this sweet girl who pines for a real life. So we'll write more to that.

Can she be funny? Does she even need to be, given all the other people on the show?

She is funny. It's not necessarily what's asked of her character, but she has some moments where there's this real sense of fun about her.

So obviously Bryce is coming back, even though the way you wrote him out suggested he would never come back.

Yeah, but they always need him, especially since s--t's getting real. He comes in the third episode, and (Matthew) Bomer's just great. He brings this movie star charisma to the role that constantly pisses Chuck off. He's back. We're putting it all out there early.

Will he be in the Jordana Brewster episodes?

No.

Stunt casting has killed many a show but it can also be a boon. What's your approach to it, why are you doing it, how do you feel it's going to work here?

Where it set off for me was we had an episode last year where Kevin Weisman from "Alias" was a villain, as the evil poisoner. And people really responded to that villain and him being in the show. We don't get a lot of time with the villains, and it gave people a real pop, even if he wasn't necessarily the most nuanced bad guy we ever had on the show. So, for me, it was like, if we can get someone who's great and fun and right for the role and pops in that part, why not? I don't think we're abusing it, or doing it just to do it. But if you're going to have a bad guy hanging Chuck out of a building, why not have it be Michael Clarke Duncan, and the visual that provides and the screen presence he brings? The part of Roan Montgomery was written as a big guest star part. I think it's in ways that are organic to the way the show is constructed, with the Villains of the Week. I will still shamelessly write a part for (Steven) Seagal, even if it has nothing to do with the show. Even Michael Strahan's cameo, it's like a real part. I don't think you'll ever see someone on the show just to be on the show. Click here to read the full post

Aaron Sorkin presents... Facebook: The Motion Picture?

Okay, this is either unspeakably weird or unspeakably awesome, or maybe both: Aaron Sorkin is writing a movie based on the guys who founded Facebook, and he's started his own Facebook group so he can get a better understanding of how Facebook works.

You can't be Sorkin's friend, but you can write on his wall and -- at least for now, when he's in that heady "Ohmigod Ohmigod Ohmigod Facebook Is The Awesomest Thing Ever And I Can't Believe My Eighth Grade Girlfriend Is On Here" phase where his personal and professional lives get consumed with the site for about eight days -- he'll probably write back to you.

I didn't want to write about this until it was clear one way or the other whether this was Sorkin or one of the many Sorkin impostors out there. (Sorkin impersonation being second only to porn-downloading among popular Internet-based activities.) The writing style of his wall posts sounded like Sorkin, as did the post-script to his introduction to the group: "I feel about this introduction the way I felt about Sophie's Choice--It could have been funnier." But thankfully, we have real confirmation, as the movie's producer, Scott Rudin, confirmed it for Vulture.

Now, Sorkin has his very infamous history with the internets and the concept of an interactive audience, and I have my own complicated history with the guy. But the last time I saw him, when he showed up randomly at ABC's press tour party last month, he seemed in much brighter spirits than I'd seen him in in a very long time (we even achieved a peace accord over our "Studio 60" run-in, and I'm listening to Don Henley's "New York Minute" as I write this, in tribute to Sam Seaborn), and it's heartening to think that he can learn a few new tricks. As a shoulda-been poet laureate might have said, if I can change, and Aaron Sorkin can change, everybody can change. Right? Click here to read the full post

Short, spoiler-free 'Shield' season 7 preview

"Jesus, Vic, everything we do to get out of this $*&% just drags us down deeper."

This quote is uttered early in the seventh and final season of "The Shield," of which eight episodes were sent out to critics last week and which I finally got done watching today in a marathon burst. And because the eighth episode ends up with several characters in unthinkable places, and because it's unclear whether FX will send out the remaining episodes, and because if they don't I'll have to wait more than two months to find out what happens next, I'm starting to regret my haste.

All I will say about them is that, as Shawn Ryan has promised, they are very much in keeping with the tone and spirit of "The Shield," and they feature the return of a number of figures from seasons past, from those I remembered well (Tavon!) to those I can't believe I almost forgot (Bottom Bitch!).

The one key difference is that, because we're close to the end, the plotting and quicksand nature of Vic's life -- as described in the above quote -- get even more intense as it goes along. This thing's gonna end in a trainwreck, and it's going to be amazing to watch, I think.

Look for a more fleshed-out review in next Tuesday's paper, and blog reviews of each episode from now to the end. Click here to read the full post

Middleman, "The Clotharian Contamination Protocol": Welcome to the party, pal!

Spoilers for the season's penultimate episode of "The Middleman" coming up just as soon as I confess that I did, once upon a time, own "The Return of Bruno" on cassette...

When a show has as many unstable elements as "Middleman," you have to get the mixture just right. Add too much of any one ingredient, and you won't get the tricky reaction you were hoping for, as happened with last week's puppet episode. (Then again, I seem to have been one of the few dissenters on that one, so what the hell do I know?)

It's hard for me to quantify exactly why "The Clotharian Contamination Protocol" worked when last week's didn't (yeah, I know, I only get paid to explain things like that), but it simply did. The pop culture references (starting with a subtle "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" riff that then morphed into a far more overt "Die Hard" homage, with a splash of "Charlie's Angels" with the design of Ida's brain) all flowed well, the emotional moments like Wendy's good-bye to Middleman were lovely, and the callbacks to previous episodes (their knowledge that Ida can die and be resurrected easily, Tyler's job interview shot in the same style as Wendy's Middleman audition) gave it all some added resonance. This one, I liked a lot, and it makes me even sadder that next week will most likely be the last "Middleman" ever.

Some other random thoughts:

• Middleman dressing down the NASA employees and Wendy's admiration of same was great, but what made the scene really funny was Middleman's response to Wendy's suggestion that they always pose as NASA guys: "It's thinking like that that led to drug-resistant malaria."

• Given how closely Tyler's audition mirrored Wendy's, and that Tyler almost wound up becoming the new Middleman-in-training (which I guess makes him the Guy Gardner of Middle-world), should we assume that Manservant Neville (played by the always hammy/creepy Mark Sheppard) is running some kind of evil version of O2STK? And that they'll figure heavily into next week's evil parallel universe storyline?

• "It's coming in hotter than the Devil's wedding tackle!" may be one of my favorite lines in the run of the show.

• Why is Lacey wanted in three states?

• Am I the only one who wanted to sick the Interidroid on whichever ABC Family exec thought it would be a brilliant idea to have a "Samurai Girl" banner ad cover up one-third of the screen at the exact moment the show was doing one of its more elaborate chyron gags? Urge to kill... rising...

• Also, was I the only one who, when Dubby suggested the building was designed by TV writers, immediately thought of Sigourney Weaver screaming "This episode was badly-written! Whoever wrote this episode should die!" while running through the "Galaxy Quest" chompers?

• Speaking of "Die Hard," let me remind you that anytime is the right time to enjoy another listen to Guyz Nite's ode to the hijinx at Nakatomi Plaza.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Two: One to hold the giraffe, the other to fill the bathtub with brightly-colored bicycles.

Following on the wildly-successful knock-knock joke post of a few weeks ago, it's time for you to share your favorite lightbulb jokes. Unlike last time, you don't need to restrict yourself to stuff that's appropriate for my daughter, since the vast majority of the lightbulb genre isn't suitable for a kindergartener, but let's try to keep this vaguely within the boundaries of good taste, if such a thing is possible. Click here to read the full post

Judging the new 'Idol' judge, 'Gavin & Stacey' review

Today's column has a recap of the snooze-inducing conference call with new "American Idol" judge Kara DioGuardi, plus a brief review of the BBC America comedy "Gavin & Stacey" (pictured above), which I've had to try very hard to not refer to as "Ned & Stacey." Click here to read the full post

New 'Cupid' is a go

A source close to the production on the "Cupid" remake confirmed what Nikki Finke and Kristin have reported: ABC just picked it up to series. (They're also reporting several other pick ups, which I don't know about.)

I've been excited for this ever since it was first announced, and especially once Bobby Cannavale was cast in the Jeremy Piven role. Now it feels like all that time I spent watching the original "Cupid" during the strike will come in handy when it comes time to look at the new series. I still don't know if it will work, but as I've said over and over since the new version was announced, the ABC of 2008 (or, in this case, 2009) is far better equipped to launch a show like this than the ABC of 1998 was. Click here to read the full post

All singing, all dancing, all judging

Couple of announcements this morning related to the top two reality competition shows on TV:

• Fox is adding a fourth judge to "American Idol": songwriter Kara DioGuardi (pictured above). They tried to add a fourth judge for season two with DJ Angie Martinez, but she quit during auditions because she didn't like having to criticize the singers; we'll see if DioGuardi has gone into the gig with a better understanding of what she'll have to do. (Fox is doing a conference call with her this afternoon.) This still doesn't address the Randy Jackson problem, as we'll still have to suffer through his useless comments, but maybe DioGuardi will manage to be more coherent and precise in her criticism and praise.

• New "Dancing with the Stars" cast officially announced: Lance Bass (former boy-bander), Toni Braxton (R&B star), Brooke Burke (model/reality show hostess), Rocco DiSpirito (celebrity chef), Maurice Greene (Olympic sprinter), Kim Kardashian (Paris Hilton wannabe), Cloris Leachman (classic sitcom actress), Cody Linley ("Hannah Montana" co-star), Susan Lucci (classic soap actress), Misty May-Treanor (Olympic beach volleyballer), Ted McGinley (showkiller), Jeffrey Ross (comedian) and Warren Sapp (future NFL Hall of Famer). I'm particularly struck by the intestinal fortitude it took to cast McGinley; is this the beginning of the end for the show? Click here to read the full post

Mad Men, "The New Girl": Freddie the zipper

Spoilers for "Mad Men" season two, episode five, "The New Girl," coming up just as soon as I plan a route to the airport...

"Peggy, listen to me. Get out of here and move forward. This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened." -Don Draper

Who exactly is The New Girl? Is it Jane Siegel, Don's comely new secretary? Is it Bobbie Barrett, whom Rachel Menken clearly views as Don's new girl? Or is it Peggy? And, if so, does the title of this episode -- easily the best hour of season two, and already one of my favorite "Mad Men"s to date -- refer to the way Peggy is reinventing herself under the tutelage of both Don and now Bobbie, or does it suggest that Peggy might one day succeed Midge, Rachel and Bobbie as Don's new girl?

On many other shows, I would rail against the idea of romantically pairing off the male and female lead if they had a pre-existing, interesting platonic (or professional) relationship, as it's a writer's crutch. But the more I watch "Mad Men" season two, the more I think the idea of Peggy becoming the kind of woman Don might want to sleep with is a really interesting one -- even if they never actually get together.

Peggy was already Don's protege before she gave birth, but when he confronts her in the hospital, he teaches her the fundamental lessons of his life, the ones he learned from the hobo: No problem is so bad that it can't be denied, ignored or plain run away from. You do not have to be bound by the identity society has created for you. You are the shaper of your own future, even if that future is built on a foundation of lies.

With that conversation (as good a moment as Jon Hamm has had on this show, and he's had a lot of them), Don sets Peggy on a path towards becoming more like him, but as we've seen in his past relationships, and as we see here in his conversations with Bobbie Barrett, Don is drawn to women who in some way knew the hobo's lesson without having to be told it. Midge and Rachel defy what's expected of them by their families and/or society, though neither is as ruthless about it as Don. And here, Don's opinion of Bobbie -- whom he found attractive and yet loathsome -- changes significantly when she delivers the "This is America: Pick a job and become the person that does it" line. (She offers similar advice to Peggy -- "You have to start living the life of the person you want to be" -- who both appreciates it and better understands what her boss sees in this obnoxious woman.) So even though Peggy now insists that she's not Bobbie's competition -- and means it -- and even though Don clearly doesn't look at her that way now, I wonder what's going to happen as she continues to evolve in front of his eyes.

The flashbacks to Peggy's time in the hospital changes how I've viewed a number of things, both this season and in this episode. For one thing, it would seem that Anita isn't raising Peggy's baby, as she was very pregnant at the time Peggy gave birth, and as there's only one baby in the household. It's possible, I suppose, that Anita's baby died or was stillborn, but that would make her less resentful of Peggy, not more, and if we assume that Pete Jr. was given up for adoption, then Anita's feelings towards Peggy are much more out of jealousy than they are justified griping over having to raise her irresponsible kid sister's offspring.

For another, it changes the Don/Peggy dynamic, whether or not all of this leads to romance. Don takes a huge risk in showing Peggy his true face for a moment. Pete and Bert Cooper may know more details, but the only people in Don's adult life who understand who he truly is -- not his real name, but his real personality -- are Rachel and Peggy. Getting a good look at Dick Whitman scared Rachel off, and it seems to have changed Peggy's opinion of her boss. She still respects him, and is protective of him, but you can see that she's aware of his limitations as a human being. Her line in the car where she promises to forget the car crash in exchange for him not blaming her for knowing about it makes much more sense in context of the final flashback, as does her line to Bobbie: "I never expect him to be anything other than what he is."

And an episode like "The New Girl" illustrates the limitations of the hobo's philosophy. Don has escaped his past, escaped his old persona, established an idealized life for himself, but he's so busy forgetting things and moving on that he sometimes forgets about things he doesn't want to. As he tells Peggy when apologizing about the non-repayment of the bail money, "I guess when you try to forget something, you have to forget everything." You can see in that final scene at the dinner table that Don keeps forgetting how much he genuinely cares for Betty and the kids, which in turn leads him to embarrassing places like the sergeant's desk at a Long Island police station.

Because of the car crash and its long aftermath, I'm tempted to draw a comparison to "Sopranos" episodes like "Kennedy and Heidi" (adios, Christopher) or "Irregular Around the Margins" (Tony and Adriana almost hook up) but the one it really reminded me of was season four's "Whoever Did This," where Tony kills Ralphie and he and Christopher spend the rest of the episode (literally) cleaning up the mess. "The New Girl" wasn't quite as focused -- we kept cutting back to the subplots with Pete and Joan -- but the amount of time the episode spent on the crash's immediate aftermath and the way it used an unexpected, violent incident to expose the main character for who he really is (and the lengths his protege will go to for him) really evoked Ralphie losing his head. That's one of those "Sopranos" episodes that immediately comes to mind when I think of that show, and no matter how long "Mad Men" winds up running, I imagine "The New Girl" will hold similar status in my memories.

Some other thoughts on "The New Girl":

• Well, now we know why Maggie Siff (at a press conference for her new FX show, "Sons of Anarchy") was being so evasive about whether she would return to "Mad Men" this season. So, do you think Rachel's re-appearance was a one-time thing to fit the themes of the episode, or will she be back for more? Was she the recipient of Don's hand-me-down poetry book from the season premiere? Running into Don and his new mistress while out on a date with her new husband (and good on her for at least finding a guy who, based on our limited intro, seems to like her and doesn't seem like a golddigger) doesn't seem the ideal time for her to say, "Hey, thanks for the Frank O'Hara, man," but she did seem shocked to be running into him again.

• Because most of these characters are so repressed, opportunities for them to bare their souls come at unexpected moments, with unexpected people. Last week, it was Don telling Bobby and then Betty a little bit about his father. This time, it's Pete using the fertility doctor as an impromptu therapist, opening up about his anxieties in a way he never would to an actual shrink. (Not that he'd ever actually go see one, but if forced to, he would be determined to make himself appear as confident and well-adjusted as possible.)

• Just as the episode sort of answers a mystery about Peggy's baby (or, rather, tells us that what we thought was the answer wasn't), Pete finds out what we've known all along: he's not the infertile one. Pete being Pete, he has to respond to the news in the rudest, most narcisisstic manner possible. And please don't think less of me for this confession: I had never felt the tug of the show's nostalgia-by-proxy while watching the way the men get away with behaving towards the women -- until I watched Pete, in mid-fight, order his wife return to the table and apologize for getting mad when he was the one being an ass.

• Joan getting engaged was overshadowed by other developments within the episode, but is Roger right to question the wisdom of her marrying her doctor friend? Obviously, he's jealous, but looking at it objectively, how happy is Joan going to be when she actually has the husband, and the house in the country, and all the other things she tells the secretaries they can attain one day? Her interaction with Sally Draper last week suggested a woman without much of a maternal side, and I can see her getting bored if she were to leave her job as Sterling Cooper's queen bee. As Paul reminded everyone a few episodes back, Joan's over 30, which makes her an old maid in 1962 years. If she really wanted to get married, wouldn't she have done it long before now? And if Roger is right that she'll hate marriage as much as he does, will we see Joan going to Peggy for advice on how to reinvent herself? (Okay, probably not.)

• I also liked that, even while distracted by showing off her gaudy ring ("You'd like to think it doesn't matter"), Joan is still good at her job. She knows to shut the door when Don takes a call from Bobbie, and she doesn't tolerate young Jane's attempts to hoochify the office. Joan's outfits, while skintight, rarely show much skin; she knows the difference between putting your goods on display and simply giving them away.

• There was some question a couple of weeks back over what foreign film Don was seeing when Jimmy was insulting Mr. & Mrs. Utz. Here, Don mentions loving "La Notte." I'm not much of a foreign film guy; can any film buffs tell me whether that could have been the movie Don was watching? Also, when told of Don's fondness for "La Notte," Dan Fienberg rolled his metaphorical eyes at the notion that Don would enjoy the work of a director (Antonioni) whom he (Dan, not Don) feels is drowning in pretentiousness. Agree? Disagree? Ready for a knife fight?

• The funniest moment of Joel Murray's career by a long stretch (and I say this as somewhat of a fan of Murray the younger): Freddie Rumsen emerging from his office to play "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" with the zipper on his pants, driving the final nail in the coffin for Ken's fumbling attempt to impress Jane. (His desperate "I'm Ken!" sounded eerily like the "I'm Taye Diggs!" incident from press tour.) How long do you think Freddy spent in his office working on that routine before he decided the world was ready for it?

• And yet I'm still not sure the zipper gag was the funniest juvenile joke of the episode, considering it also featured the brilliant transition from Pete about to give a sperm sample to Roger furiously whacking his paddle ball. Apparently, writer Robin Veith has an inner 12-year-old boy she hasn't told anyone about, and he is awesome.

• Bobbie tells Jimmy that she checked into a fat farm, which was one of the many theories around the Sterling Cooper offices about why Fat Peggy disappeared for three months and returned as Slim Peggy. (Pete from the season premiere: "I thought we had verification!")

• The music over the closing credits sounded very much like something you might have heard in a movie from the period, but it was actually an original piece, called "We Love You, Daddy," written by "Mad Men" composer David Carbonara.

• God, I love the compositions the production team comes up with on a regular basis. In this case, it's director Jennifer Getzinger and director of photography Chris Manley on the scene in the Draper bedroom after Don comes home from the crash. Don spends the bulk of the scene with his back to his wife. Don (returning from the scene of several crimes, including one against his wife) is concealed in shadow; Betty (for once totally innocent) is bathed in light. He looks very grown-up; she (scrubbed of makeup and hair products, and wearing a baby doll nightie) almost looks like a little girl, and the way Don tries to reassure her when she talks about her father's high blood pressure is very paternal. Just a beautifully shot (and played) scene.

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Skins, "Jal": In the woodwinds

Spoilers for "Skins" episode three coming up just as soon as I get my sound system fixed...

Another strong episode, and one that again confirms that, despite the show's title and hype, it has far more on its mind than sex. Yes, Jal is uncomfortable with being a virgin and feels inferior to Michelle (even though, in the grand scheme of things, she has far more going for her than Michelle does), but she's far more preoccupied with kicking butt at the music competition, and with getting the respect and affection of her father. I'm in a hurry -- and I'm still not clear how many of you are watching for the first time versus revisiting the show to see how BBC America cut it -- so let's do this bullet point-style:

• "Jal" also continues the trend of making Sid the secondary character (I wonder how Sid's own episode will be structured), then has Jal's father apparently take care of his Mad Twatter problem once and for all. (It's at this point I want to remind you again to respect the American air order, and not discuss -- or even hint at -- plot developments from episodes that haven't aired here yet.)

• I love the moment in the hospital when Jal's brothers (and Don) are begging for Michelle to kiss them, because it suggests that for all their rapping bravado, they're just as inexperienced as Jal.

• Can someone who understands the British school system explain exactly what kind of "college" these kids are going to? Somebody tried to tell me a week or two ago that they're at the equivalent of a vocational school, but that doesn't seem to fit with either them taking psych classes or with the presence of Jal, who comes from far more money than somebody like Sid or Tony.

• Also, what's the deal with the principal talking about Jal's "handicap"? Is this supposed to suggest the woman's so clueless she doesn't even realize what student she's talking to, or am I missing something?

• I got a huge kick out of Claire the profane music teacher, though of course she'd be much funnier in the original, non-bleeped British version.

• Sid's theory of how he might actually have sex with Michelle (largely involving booze and mistaken identity) was profoundly sad and profoundly funny.

• Two of the three episodes so far end right before the central character is about to perform the action the entire hour has been building towards (Cassie eating something, Jal playing her clarinet), and even "Tony" ends with Sid acknowledging that he's still a virgin, even though the majority of the episode was devoted to Tony trying to change that. Interesting that a show so allegedly obsessed with sex keeps designing its episodes to eliminate gratification.

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Generation Kill, "Bomb in the Garden": Iceman vs. Captain America

Spoilers for the "Generation Kill" finale coming up just as soon as I score some valium...

When I interviewed the "Generation Kill" producers shortly before it premiered, David Simon said something interesting that didn't make it into the final story. While talking about the thematic similarities between "Generation Kill" and "The Wire" -- specifically, how both shows give their loyalties to the footsoldiers on the ground, and eye their bosses with extreme suspicion -- he said, "To be fair, it would have been a different book if (Wright) had hung with Ferrando."

"Bomb in the Garden" provides some hints of what that book might have been like. We get the throwaway moment between Sgt. Major Sixta and Gunny Wynn when Sixta offers to bring up the grooming standard as a way to combat drooping morale. (The men, of course, hated Sixta for ragging on them about their moo-stashes, but it was usually in that Charlie Finley Oakland A's way, where their mutual hatred of an authority figure brought them all together.) More importantly, we get the reporter (who is never, as far as I can tell, referred to by name at any point in the miniseries) doing his exit interview with Godfather. Ferrando suspects that Captain America is probably unfit for combat, but he has the same perspective on Cap's actions that he does on Lt. Fick's -- which is to say that he has to rely on the reports of men below him, and sometimes below those officers -- and if he deals harshly with one, isn't he obligated to deal harshly with the other? Yes, we know Fick is a great leader and Cap is a nutcase, but we're seeing them from a different point of view, and one that's then filtered through Evan Wright and again through Simon, Ed Burns and company.

By the same token, the wanderings of First Recon during their days in Baghdad seem aimless and counter-productive to Fick and Colbert, but there could have been very rational motives behind each of them from the way command saw things. The explanation behind the lack of night patrols wasn't a terrible one; in that environment, who's to say the presence of the U.S. forces at night might not have made things worse, along with getting our guys killed?

But allowing for the possibility of an alternate perspective only goes so far. There's no way to justify punishing Kocher and Redman for the bayonet incident and promptly reinstate the actual bayonet-wielder, Captain America, for instance. And we are, after all, five years removed from the events depicted here, and our military is still over there trying to clean up the mess we made by breaking the country without having a sound plan to immediately begin fixing it.

In that way, "Bomb in the Garden" is more important than all six previous "Generation Kill" chapters put together. The miniseries has been enormously entertaining (even if, as I've said, the "Groundhog Day" nature of the Marines' lives made it tough to blog at times), but in deconstructing how Operation: Iraqi Freedom went wrong, they were all just a lead up to the events depicted here. As an invasion, this was an enormous success; we took down an entire country in three weeks time. As an attempt to promote democracy and discourage terrorism, it's been a dismal failure, for reasons illustrated by First Recons various misadventures in this hour. You can't just leave the unexploded bomb in the garden, because sooner or later somebody's going to blow the thing up, right?

Some specific moments I liked in the finale:

• The Marines' arrival in the cigarette factory, with the silver paper raining down on them like a ticker-tape parade, was a perfect homage to/parody of President Bush's "Mission Accomplished." The war is allegedly over, but the battles are going to keep going for years and years.

• Much as I love the Rick Rubin-produced Johnny Cash "America" albums, they're dangerously close to becoming a cliche for TV show montages. "Sarah Connor Chronicles," of all shows, already used "The Man Comes Around" at the end of its last season, but I'll give "Generation Kill" a pass because the song is such a perfect fit, between the mix of jaunty tune and somber lyrics (a nice match for the show's black comedy and how the Marines often found their greatest joy when matters were at their worst) and the radio squelch at the beginning and end, which matched the miniseres' opening credits and constant stream of radio chatter.

• The home movie, by the way, was a mixture of footage shot by the production and stuff shot by the actual First Recon Marines during the invasion, much of it scrounged up by the real Eric Kocher.

• Kocher, Wright and others have talked about how quiet Ray Person is in the real world when he's had a lot of sleep and isn't guzzling Ripped Fuel. I liked the acknowledgement of that in the moment where Colbert complains that he isn't talking any more.

• Though the themes are very different, the structure of this episode reminded me in many ways of the finale to HBO's other great war miniseries, "Band of Brothers," which also featured odd vignettes about what the company did after the end of the war but before they got sent home. Both episodes even climax with a sporting event, albeit with divergent tones. In "Band," it's a baseball game that provides the Easy Company soldiers an opportunity to exhale and enjoy the beautiful countryside; here, it's a football game that gives the men (particularly Person and Capt. Patterson) an excuse to physically but unofficially vent their frustration with the likes of Encino Man and Fruity Rudy. (Rudy actually hadn't done much in the past to earn Ray's ire, but Ray's rant about high school jocks suggested his explosion had little to do with Rudy himself.)

• Getting back to the nature of perspective, the new edition of Wright's book (the one with the miniseries' cast on the cover) has an afterword filling in what happened to many of these Marines after the invasion. Of particular interest is the revelation that Casey Kasem turned out to be a hero during combat in a later deployment.

• The original Alan Arkin/Peter Falk version of "The In-Laws" was one of my family's favorite movies when I was growing up, and so when the reporter started zig-zagging while running away from the sniper, I immediately started shouting, "Serpentine, Shel! Serpentine!" But for the reporter to then actually quote the scene? Pure pop culture Nirvana. (I had forgotten that bit from the book, thankfully.) Can someone get that clip up on YouTube already? (The only scene I can find is this one.) I'm not sure how funny it is if you haven't watched Falk torment Arkin for the previous hour, but in context it is one of the most hilarious things ever committed to celluloid.

• Throughout, the singalongs have been a real pleasure, but I especially loved Colbert finally relaxing the ban on country music while Ray was asleep -- and that Ray was just awake enough to realize this.

• Another running gag paid off well: Trombley's "You see, Sergeant? We do shoot dogs in Iraq," followed by him defiantly eating some Charms.

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