The Shield, "Game Face": The river in Egypt

Spoilers for "The Shield" coming up just as soon as I pat my head and rub my tummy at the same time...

"I'm in this so deep, and I don't know how to get myself out." -Olivia
"You're talking to the right guy." -Vic

There's an awful lot of self-deception going on in "Game Face." Vic has always been a master at lying to himself, but his blinders are particularly strong tonight. He claims that nailing Pezuela "is a down-payment on me being able to live with myself," when even Shane (Shane!) can see that it won't change much of anything, and certainly won't bring Terry Crowley back to life. He refuses to even consider the possibility that Cassidy (who's been in trouble all season) might have played an active role in scoring the drugs for the party until he has the truth shoved in his face. And when Olivia confesses her own predicament, he suggests he's the best man to save her, when in fact he should know by now -- as Ronnie tried to explain to him a few episodes back -- that all he ever accomplishes is falling deeper into the quicksand.

Even the other characters are starting to be plagued with Vic's affliction. Danny actually lets herself believe that Vic might sign himself out of their son's life, Claudette refuses to see how her lupus might be an ongoing liability, and Dutch convinces himself he can outsmart Lloyd, when the closest he tends to come to matching wits with a serial killer is when he picks up a stray cat. (Claudette was the one who got Kleavon to confess, after all.)

But getting back to Vic's own little circle of self-deception, what's really stuck out to me in these last two episodes is how effective Julien has been. While the rest of the Strike Team is running around trying to put out Armenian and Mexican-related brushfires, Julien is doing the actual job, and doing it well. (So well, in fact, that in the previous episode the others had to work around his effectiveness to solve one of their extra-curricular problems.) For all that Vic likes to talk and talk about how all the crimes he commits are in some way in service to the people of Farmington, maybe he should take a step back and pay attention to what a cop can get done when he's not constantly trying to escape the latest hangman's noose.

In some ways, Claudette (and, to a lesser extent, Dutch) served that purpose in earlier seasons. Their cases weren't exactly the same type -- where Julien's doing gang intervention with the rest of the Strike Team, Dutch and Claudette had to contend with rapists and serial killers and the like -- but we still got to contrast Claudette's dogged, by-the-books approach with Vic's reckless, extra-legal tactics. Neither approach has really put a dent into Farmington quality of life, but at least Claudette hasn't left so many other problems in her wake.

I had nearly forgotten about Kleavon. Though his story was featured so heavily in season five, it was overshadowed (as most "Shield" b-stories are) by Vic's stuff (in that year, Vic being hounded by Kavanaugh), and then it didn't come up at all during season six. This was a nice reminder of just what an evil creep he was, as well as bringing home how Claudette's pride may be getting in her way here. Yes, we know that in an ideal world she should still be able to do her job without having her faculties questioned, but "The Shield" takes place in a particularly non-ideal corner of an already flawed world, and this could keep coming up. At least she had the presence of mind to accept Dutch's suggestion from last week to make Danny her administrative aide and emotional backstop.

Kleavon's presence, along with the return of Dutch's profiler friend, also helped kick the Lloyd storyline up a notch. While there's still a part of me that wishes Dutch would be going into fresher territory, the subplot felt much stronger this week than it did last time, in part because of the various expert opinions Dutch was getting, in part because Lloyd was allowed to be more overtly monstrous, and Kyle Gallner (as any "Veronica Mars" fans knows) plays that particular color very well.

Some other thoughts on "Game Face":

• Though the show has been on the air for seven seasons, the events of each season tend to run so closely together that, for the characters, only two or three years are supposed to have passed. Ordinarily, that's fine, but there are occasional bumps like Aceveda's political career. From brand-new police captain to city councilman to mayoral candidate in 2.5 years seems a bit much.

• Speaking of weird timelines, Vic must have a really good body shop, given how quickly he got the Charger back after crashing it into the Army Surplus store in the season premiere.

• This is, I think, the fourth episode Michael Chiklis has directed, and it's a mark of how strong the house style Clark Johnson and Scott Brazil established is that you can never tell when an unusual person is behind the camera. (See also the David Mamet and Frank Darabont episodes, which were terrific but still felt wholly "Shield"-like.) Chiklis (and the rest of the production team) did an especially good job on one of the series' rare car chases. I'm generally not a fan of TV show car chases, as there usually isn't the time or money to do anything interesting with one of the most overused cliches in all of filmed entertainment. But this was very effectively-done, with all the POV shots and use of the revving engines on the soundtrack.

• One particularly clumsy bit: Danny expositing to Vic (and us) about the quit claim paperwork. We would have been better off having it explained in the previouslies so we could get right to the meat of that scene.

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

Terminator, "Allison from Palmdale": Who am I?

Quick spoilers for last night's "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" coming up just as soon as I stare at a balloon...

Given what an odd character Cameron is (and what a wonderfully odd performance Summer Glau gives as her), it makes some sense that the first real Cameron spotlight episode would be such a strange, off-format hour. No Derek, no real action, even in the flashbacks(*), just Cameron disappearing inside her own head, until we discovered those weren't her memories at all, but those of the titular Allison from Palmdale(**).

(*) Is it a flashback if it takes place in the chronological future, even though, thanks to time-travel, it takes place in a specific character's past?

(**) Have they previously established that SkyNet has the ability to download human memories into Terminator brains? And do you think the episode was in some way a cheat because the flashback POV really wasn't Cameron's?

I want to get back to the issue of the show's timeline that we've been talking about the last few weeks. It's been established at various points in the franchise that when Future John sends Kyle Reese back in time, he knows that he's sending Kyle to father him and then die, and that Future John was so interested in befriending Kyle in the first place because he knew he was his father. But with all the time travel of the later films and now this show, exactly what does Future John know? Does he have memories of what's happening here in 2008 (which would suggest SkyNet is still inevitable) and, if so, did he specifically recruit Allison to join his inner circle because he knew SkyNet would replace her with Cameron, whom he would then reprogram and send back to protect himself as a teenager?

Excuse me while I go take some Advil.

I have to think that either Cameron no longer has the Kill John Connor directive, or that if she's secretly evil, there's some other directive that's even more important, because she's had plenty of opportunities to kill him. On the other hands, the TV version of Terminators seem a lot cagier and more interested in long-term planning, as evidenced by whatever Shirley Manson's doing. (And is the little girl supposed to be the daughter of the real Weaver, whom Manson replaced, or is she a Terminator, too?) So I don't know.

Sorry if my thoughts on this one feel as unfocused as Cameron was throughout it. I promise I don't want to put anybody's head on a pike.

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

Sepinwall on TV: 'Friday Night Lights' season three preview

In today's column, I talk about the new season of "Friday Night Lights," primarily repeating material from my post last week explaining why I decided to review the season now rather than waiting for the NBC run. I also talk a bit about some of the storylines in the first episode -- all of which Jason Katims covered at press tour, but which you might want to avoid if you're completely spoiler-phobic. Click here to read the full post

Heroes, "One of Us, One of Them": Shoot the hostage

I was going to write another long rant about how "Heroes" has become incredibly dumb even by its own dopey standards -- especially involving any decision anyone makes about Sylar -- but then I decided I didn't have the energy, or the interest, to say it all again. I'm going to bed. Feel free to complain without me, and maybe I'll jump in on the comments tomorrow. Click here to read the full post

HIMYM, "The Best Burger in New York": Heads, tails or pickles

I probably won't get to "Heroes" until sometime midway through tomorrow at the earliest. (Please hold all comments, even vague ones, until then.) In the meantime, spoilers for a burger-iffic episode of "How I Met Your Mother" coming up just as soon as I put on some Terence Trent D'Arby...

My dad was a scientist. He worked on the team that developed Valium, and was a leader on the team that developed Versed. He had an inquisitive mind, one that I inherited (though I apply it to a completely different -- and far more frivolous -- field), and he believed in being thorough about data, not just with his work, but with life.

One day when I was 11 or 12, I had a doctor's visit somewhere in lower Manhattan. It was a school/work day, and so Dad took the day off to take me. When we were done, we decided to stay in the city to get something to eat. Dad asked me what I was in the mood for; I said pizza. Now, if you've ever been to Manhattan (or watched Seinfeld, or seen "Homer Simpson vs. The City of New York"), you've probably noticed that half the pizzerias are named Ray's, or Famous Ray's, or Famous Original Ray's, or some combination thereof. The way Dad would explain it to me, there really was an original (lowercase), famous (ditto) Ray's Pizza that was so beloved, and yet so untrademark-able that every other place in town adopted some combination of the name in the hopes of fooling people into going there.

"Why don't we," he suggested with a grin, "see if we can find that actual first Ray's?"

I wasn't Robin levels of hungry yet, so I agreed, and we began our search the old-fashioned way: we started driving around in circles, and at every red light, my dad or I would lean out the window and ask pedestrians if they had any idea where the real, famous, original, classic, vintage Ray's was. Even though it was the '80s (the angry, pre-Giuliani New York), and even though we were clearly a pair of suburban dorks in an Oldsmobile station wagon, the natives were surprisingly friendly and helpful -- no doubt because they all wanted to prove that they were smarter and more New York-y than the rest, and did, in fact, know the location of the sacred, holy first Ray's.

The problem, of course, was that they kept giving us different locations; I think we went a half hour at one point without getting the same suggestion twice. But Dad made me dutifully log each one, and even though the locals couldn't agree on the exact spot, a specific neighborhood kept coming up, so we headed there and kept asking. Even there, we didn't get universal agreement, but after we got up to maybe 7 or 8 people mentioning the same place, we decided we were hungry enough to skip past some of the traditional experimental protocols and just eat at that place, dammit.

It was, without a doubt, the best slice of pizza I have ever eaten. After a couple of bites, we looked at each other and Dad said, "I don't know if this is the place all the other ones are named after, but it should be." We wrote down the location on a piece of paper, promised we would come back whenever we were in this part of the city again... and then I lost it. I want to say the place was on 13th and 8th, but I couldn't remember for sure, and the opportunity never presented itself for us to look again.

I tell you that story not because it's so unique, but because it isn't. Everyone I know around here has a story like it -- if not about pizza, then about a sandwich, or homemade ice cream, or french fries, or what have you. Maybe you went to the place once a long time ago, maybe you only hear about it, but you look -- you always look -- and sometimes, if you're lucky, you find it again.

And because of that, "The Best Burger in New York" really resonated with me. It wasn't the funniest "HIMYM" ever -- probably wasn't even as funny as the Barney half of the season premiere -- but there are times when the show really clicks because it feels like it's telling a story out of my life, even though it's the kind of story many people (including, presumably, Bays and Thomas) have lived through on their own.

And there were, in fact, a bunch of funny bits: Robin's ever-increasing despair over not getting to eat ("I will eat your hand!"), the discussion of the Underpants Radius, Neil Patrick Harris getting to ever-so-briefly bust out his Regis impression in front of the real Regis ("I don't know where it is, Regis! I swear!"), the notion that America is obsessed with a game show about coin-flipping (it's no dumber than "Deal or No Deal," which is essentially "guess how many fingers I have behind my back"), and Lily being offended that Marshall could offer such an eloquent defense of the hamburger yet needed to download his wedding vows off the internet.

One minor complaint: all the talk about how gloriously dirty and full of character New York was when Ted and Marshall first moved there is punctured by the fact that New York had already gotten the full Giuliani/Disney/corporate makeover by 2000.

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

Life, "Find Your Happy Place": Boxing day

Spoilers for the "Life" season two premiere coming up just as soon as I ship a kumquat...

"Life" is one of those shows that took a while to grow on me last season. I liked Damian Lewis from the beginning, but it felt like creator Rand Ravich was trying too hard to show how Charlie Crews was different from your average cop show hero -- He loves fruit! Modern technology baffles him! He quotes Zen koans! -- to the point where Crews seemed less a character than a collection of tics. But a few weeks in, Ravich started taking a more Zen approach to showcasing Crews' quirks, allowing them to simply be as opposed to being in our face all the time. And once they relaxed on the fruit and the cell phone jokes and Reese rolling her eyes every time Crews opened his mouth, the show was markedly improved. I don't watch a lot of crime procedurals anymore, but "Life" quickly established itself as something I didn't want to miss. The final pre-strike episode, with Crews going rogue to find the man who committed the murders Charlie went to prison for, was one of the best hours of TV I watched last year.

So I was disappointed to see the show take a step backwards with tonight's premiere. Fruit references up the wazoo (oranges, kumquats, and even a request for mango ice cream), Crews (who's now been out of prison for months, if not a year) is still confused by something as prevalent as a motion sensor faucet, and while Reese is now on the same wavelength with her partner, Donal Logue has been brought in as the new boss(*) so the show can still have someone who acts confused by Charlie's MO every week.

(*) I like Logue a lot, by the way -- "Tao of Steve" is one of the most-rewatched DVDs in the Sepinwall household, and Jimmy the cabdriver's discourses on both the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage" and Alanis' "Ironic" are brilliant -- and don't think Robin Weigert (who'll be around on occasion as a detective) was particularly well-used last year as the boss. So I'm not unhappy to see him here; I just want him to have more to do than asking what the hell Crews is talking about.

Now, I'm sure part of this is the whole re-freshman phenomenon -- "Life" has been off the air for so long, and was so low-rated to begin with, that this is essentially like a second pilot episode. Airing after "Heroes" will likely give it its biggest audience ever, and I can understand the desire to do a "Life 101" kind of episode for the newbies. But earlier this evening, "Chuck" was able to pull off something similar in a way that improved upon what had been happening last season, as opposed to seeming like backsliding.

I've also seen next Monday's episode, which isn't quite as dumbed-down, so I'm not too worried. And there were still some fine moments here, from the usual beautiful/bizarre crime scene tableaus (I especially liked the steamer trunk on the airport runway) to Crews rescuing Rachel by using Kyle Hollis' crazy "ring of fire" talk.

So no panic; just minor disappointment. I'm skeptical of the show's survival chances once it's only on Friday nights, but I'm glad for any extra hours I get to spend watching Lewis do his thing.

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

Chuck, "Chuck vs. the First Date": I used to be a renegade, I used to fool around

Spoilers for the "Chuck" season two premiere coming up just as soon as I go on a hunger strike to prepare myself for a trip to Five Guys, then learn a language only cool people know...

I sang the general praises of all things "Chuck" in this morning's column, and I don't need to repeat those points -- that the different parts of Chuck's world are better integrated with each other, that the spy stuff is loads better thanks in part to the guest stars -- at length here. Instead, I want to go into some specifics on "Chuck vs. the First Date," which worked splendidly both as a reintroduction to the show for newbies (or people who forgot what happened almost a year ago) and as a kick-ass episode.

And maybe we should start with the ass-kicking. I complained from time to time about the fight choreography last season. The Emmys disagreed with me, as the show got its sole Emmy for stunt work, but I thought the various action scenes here were significantly improved, particularly the climax with Sarah flying through the air to kick Mr. Colt and Casey once again catching Chuck as he fell. (Which sounds horribly cheesey as I write it.) Someone built like Yvonne Strahovski should have no business staying in a fight with someone built like Michael Clarke Duncan if they both know what they're doing, and in the end Colt did have his way with her (both on the roof and at the dumpling restaurant), but the wire-work made the brief period where Sarah was hanging in look a lot more impressive than almost any of last year's fights.

Beyond that, though, the climax worked because it was one of the few times since the pilot (when the computer porn virus shut down the bomb) where Chuck's geek knowledge wound up saving the day, this time with the payoff of the seemingly random earlier scenes where Morgan discussed his new "Call of Duty" specs. Too often last year, the spy stories fizzled out at the very end, which would make the entire plot feel unsatisfying even if there was good material earlier in the episode. This climax felt well-planned, and it worked.

Beyond that, "Chuck vs. the First Date" was the funniest episode I think the show's ever done. I could do an entire post just listing all the things that made me laugh so long and so loud that I had to rewind the DVD so I could find out what I missed. What the hell, I'm going to list them anyway:

• The brilliant parallel use of Huey Lewis songs to show Chuck at his most ecstatic and then his most depressed.

• The even more brilliant use of Flight of the Conchords' "Foux Du Fafa" for our first glimpse of Sarah at her new place of employment. (More on that at the end of the post.)

• Chuck's horror at seeing what God gave Captain Awesome down there -- and, even worse, seeing his sister nekkid.

• The getting-dressed montage, which was a call back to the pilot but had some added value, including shirtless Chuck for the ladies, plus the comic brilliance of Casey winking at the Ronald Reagan target. (Also, putting Casey in the montage made clear that Casey is just as important to the show as the other two, when he was more of a third wheel in the early going until Adam Baldwin's angry genius asserted itself.)

• Captain Awesome responding to Ellie's request for more romance with "Tank's empty, babe."

• Chuck finally calling out Casey on the awful action movie kiss-off lines. ("Hey, maybe I'll say this after I crash through the window!")

• The entire job interview montage, from Anna and Jeff both putting their feet in Chuck's pantleg to Lester handing out a copy of his own WikiPedia page to Morgan handling Jeff's disgusting resume with tongs.

• Morgan turning the supply cage into Thunderdome, particularly the candid "One of them will be the assistant manager, and one of them will be Jeff!" introduction.

• The "Cool Hand Luke" homage at the end with Morgan lifting Chuck's spirits with the promise of Jeff eating 90 Twinkies. (Not as funny, but still a wicked pop culture homage: a poisoned Casey crawling through his apartment like Sean Connery after he gets shot in "Untouchables.")

So, so, so much comedy goodness, as well as some decent pathos with Chuck's chance at a normal life (or what he thinks is his chance) slipping through his fingers, and a reasonable explanation for why Chuck is still the Intersect after all this time. And, as I said in the column, I'm glad to see Chuck being less of a spaz both in his relationship with Sarah and in the spy work. Yes, he still gets held out of a window and trips over his own feet, but he figures out a way to save the day and also is reasonably charming before Colt's people interrupt the dumpling date. Chuck needs to grow, even if in small increments, for the show to keep from getting stale, and they've accomplished that.

All in all, a great first effort, and I'm just as pleased with the next two.

A few other random thoughts:

• Schwartz and Fedak originally wanted Chuck Norris to play a big bad guy this year -- in an episode that would, of course, be called "Chuck vs. Chuck" -- but they couldn't land their white whale. Still, when Colt started limbering up to kill Chuck, I couldn't help but think of the best scene of Norris' career, when he and Bruce Lee do some similar stretching before preparing to kill each other in "Return of the Dragon." (If you have the time, I highly endorse following the YouTube link. It is disgusting, it is fascinating, it is, to quote Devin, awesome.)

• The entire supporting cast -- including Big Mike, Captain Awesome, and the rest of the Nerd Herd -- makes their way into a slightly longer version of the still sweet main title sequence.

• Big Mike either found a way to fix his old, duct-taped marlin, or he ordered a new one from eBay.

• I have only one real complaint: like Chuck, I miss the Wienerlicious. Yvonne certainly looks great in the Orange Orange (or, as they call it behind the scenes, the Double-O) uniform, but the brilliance of the Wienerlicious outfit was that it was both hot and ridiculous at the same time. The Double-O uniform is just hot, and while I'd ordinarily never complain about hotness, the added ridiculousness was what made the old costume so memorable.

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

Skins, "Effy": Love thy sister

Spoilers for the penultimate episode of "Skins" season one coming up just as soon as I sculpt my food...

One of the things that's really drawn me to "Skins" is its ability to create a mood through its visual style. Not a lot of TV producers have the time (or directorial talent) to do that properly, so they put most of the burden on the dialogue. But "Skins" always has one or two sequences per episode that are striking both for their beauty and for the way they put you completely in a character's head.

Here, it was the two party scenes, first at the warehouse, then at the sports clubs. The warehouse party is like magic -- kids with this huge space all to themselves, zipping around (or, in the case of Effy and her boyfriend, flying around) -- while the sports club rave appears to Tony to be a descent into Hell itself. Really effectively done on both points.

I'm not sure I feel, though, about Josh's revenge and Sid's reconciliation with Tony. Getting back to the question of how enamored the "Skins" writers are with Tony, we have an entire episode where he deservedly suffers for all the crap he's pulled on the people around him, but then Josh takes things so far (hurting Effy in the process) that Tony begins to look sympathetic again. You know, "Sure, Tony's a rascal, but he'd never stoop that low, right?" Sid being nice to Tony at a moment of family crisis speaks well of Sid, but the last 10 minutes or so of the episode felt like the show trying to take Tony off the hook for everything.

And that makes me uncomfortable, no matter how visually impressive the hour was or how good Nicholas Hoult is as Tony.

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

Sepinwall on TV: 'Chuck' season two review

In today's column, I am very happy to see new and improved episodes of "Chuck":

What’s the opposite of the sophomore slump? The sophmore surge? Sophomore surprise? Whatever you want to call it, "Chuck" is experiencing it — big-time. An amusing enough diversion during a brief pre-strike run last fall, it’s found a higher gear at the start of season two. All the entertaining pieces that didn’t quite click with one another are now working in harmony, and there may not be a show on television that makes me happier right now.

To read the full thing, click here.

I know that the season premiere has been available for a week on Hulu, but I'm going to ask those of you who have already watched it to refrain from any kind of spoilers in the comments to this post. I'll have a separate episode review set to go at 9 o'clock, and we can talk specifics there. Click here to read the full post

DVR alert: 'Life' comes back tonight

Just a reminder, as I wasn't able to do a separate column on it for today's paper: "Life" begins its second season tonight at 10. For the next two weeks of the season, NBC's going to air two different episodes a week, one after "Heroes," one in the regular Friday at 10 timeslot. After that, "My Own Worst Enemy" gets the post-"Heroes" slot, and "Life" hopefully settles down for a long and fruit-ful (get it? see what I did there? because of the fruit? oh, never mind...) run in the old "Homicide" Friday slot.

As with "Chuck," I know that the premiere has been up on Hulu for a week, but we're going to avoid spoilers until tonight at 11, when I'll have a separate post ready to go. This post is here because I wanted to prevent a lot of frustrated "Oh, man, I forgot it was on tonight!" comments. Click here to read the full post

Mad Men, "Six Month Leave": Be careful what you wish for

Spoilers for "Mad Men" season two, episode nine, coming up just as soon as I give blood...

"She was a movie star who had everything, and everybody, and she threw it away. But, hey, if you want to be sad..." -Roger Sterling

All throughout "Six Month Leave," characters wonder how Marilyn Monroe, the most famous, beautiful, successful, lusted-after woman in America, could have come to such a terrible, early end. As Roger says, she had everything and it still couldn't make her happy. If Marilyn couldn't be happy with everything, what chance do the rest of us poor slobs have?

Of course, with the benefit of history, we know that Marilyn only seemed to have everything, that she was treated badly by men throughout her life, that she was a very damaged creature who was almost certainly going to have a bad end. She got everything she ever wanted, then found out it wasn't nearly as wonderful as she had hoped -- just as so many of the "Mad Men" characters find out here.

Don and Betty have already realized that the marriage they both thought was going to be so perfect has been anything but. Roger, who has been complaining about his marriage forever, finally works up the nerve to leave Mona for the much younger and (to his eye) more interesting Jane, and realizes after the ugly scene in front of Don's office that this won't be the perfect escape he expected. Similarly, Jane gets rich and powerful Roger to leave his wife, then has to be confronted by the reality of that. Peggy gets another promotion, but in a terrible way where she'll never be able to feel entirely good about it.

And, in the episode's biggest tragedy, Freddie Rumsen realizes that Sterling Cooper isn't the alcoholic haven he thought it was, and is cast out into the world without a safety net.

There are a lot of parallels between Freddie's situation and Don and Betty's marriage, and not just because Freddie and Betty both wind up passed out drunk on a couch at roughly the same point in the episode. Everybody at Sterling Cooper knew exactly who and what Freddie was, but they didn't care so long as he could function just enough to do the job. And even when he was on the verge of wetting his pants, soaked in sweat and barely able to stand, you saw that he was still able to deliver the Samsonite pitch perfectly from memory. This is who Freddie is; no one had illusions about it. When Roger calls the pants-wetting incident "conduct unbefitting," Don, in disbelief, asks, "Of Freddie Rumsen?" But that urine-soaked pair of pants was a visual reminder of what everyone at Sterling Cooper tried so hard to ignore, something so obvious that Roger finally felt compelled to act.

In a similar way, Betty has always known, deep down, that Don wasn't faithful to her, but until Jimmy Barrett grabbed her by the arm and forced her to take a long hard look at her husband and his wife next to each other, she could pretend everything was okay. Once she saw Don and Bobbie's connection -- as clear to her as Freddie's pants were to the secretarial pool -- she had to act.

Freddie's firing led to one of my favorite "Mad Men" scenes of all time, as Don and Roger try to break the news to Freddie as gently -- and drunkenly -- as possible, and Roger offers a counter to every one of Freddie's attempts to save himself. Everyone starts off telling the common, silently acknowledged lie that this will, in fact, be the six month leave of the title, that Freddie will be paid in full for his time away and be given the chance to come back. Freddie, appearing to take this all remarkably well (though we'll find out later how well he isn't taking it), good-naturedly insists he can do better; Roger shuts it down with his brilliant, "There's a line, Freddie -- and you wet it" joke. Freddie tries to change the subject to Roger's father (who founded the firm with Bert Cooper), hoping to play on nostalgia and Roger's awareness of his own father's excessive drinking to keep his job, but Roger just uses that as an excuse to distract Freddie with compliments about his war heroics. And then, when Freddie starts to make peace with the situation, tries to sound optimistic about life on the road by tying it into his childhood as the son of a traveling salesman who moved the family from city to city, Roger doesn't even let him enjoy the moment with his curt, "Meanwhile, here we are: New York." It's just a masterfully-written scene by Matthew Weiner and Andre and Maria Jacquemetton.

And after an interlude at an illegal underground casino where Don gets to take a swing at Jimmy (more on that in a bit), Freddie has to face up to the reality that this is likely the start of a long downward slide for him. He can't stop drinking, doesn't want to stop drinking, and lucked into working for years at a place that enabled him, provided him a safety net and didn't seem to care that he was three sheets to the wind half the time. Freddie's question about who he is if he doesn't go into that office every day could be uttered by anyone who just got fired, but to someone who suspects he's about to be unemployable, it's a much scarier notion. His insistence on telling Don "good-bye" rather than "good night," and the look on his face as he said it, makes it clear just what Freddie thinks of his future.

Don can be a bastard in many ways, but he has this uncanny knack to feel empathy for other people's pain so long as he didn't cause it. He doesn't feel bad for what he's done to Betty, but he does feel for Freddie. He tries to save Freddie's job, and when that fails, he at least chews out the chipmunks for their (accurate) Freddie Rumsen impressions. Again, Don has a loyal streak (see his attempt to save the Mohawk account), but he also despises gossip -- particularly since he knows there are so many things that people could say about him behind his back, if they only knew. Note that the breaking point between him and Bobbie was when she let him know that she and other women swap stories about his cocksmanship; he doesn't want to be talked about, and therefore gets upset when he discovers a man somewhat like him getting the same treatment.

Don also feels, oddly, for Mona -- or, at least, he's too surprised by her appearance, and her accusation that he told Roger to leave her, to go into denial mode the way he always does with Betty. Roger used him, both in getting with Don's secretary and in making Don the excuse for walking out on Mona, and so I imagine Don will continue to be inclined to feel bad for Mona while also feeling furious with Roger. You don't cross Don Draper and come out unscathed. Last time, Don was content just to make Roger puke; what'll he do this time?

There were several sly references in the episode to Rachel Menken -- Jane buys Don the shirts from Menken's, and Don takes the name of Rachel's husband as his pseudonym at the casino -- to remind us how much she's still on Don's mind. In many ways, Rachel (the woman Don truly wants) is to Bobbie (the pale imitation Don settled for) as Joan is to Jane. And I wonder if, for Jane, Don is the one she really wanted. It's clear that she's buying him the shirts as something more than a secretary, and yet the episode's climax also makes it clear that she's been sleeping with Roger for a while (probably going back to when he saved her job). So is she just hedging her bets by cozying up to the married guy who's already separated from his wife, or would she rather have the younger, more virile Don to the guy with two heart attacks on his rap sheet?

While all this drama is going on at Sterling Cooper, Betty's wandering around Casa Draper wearing one of Livia Soprano's old housecoats while she self-medicates with wine. She looks at the kids like they're not even hers, obsesses on the one locked drawer in Don's desk (knowing Don, the only thing in there is money, but nothing to incriminate him in adultery), and is so eager to be rid of riding pal Sarah Beth and her talk of marriage that she maneuvers her into a lunch date with young Arthur Case. As far as Betty's concerned, a Sarah Beth/Arthur affair would be a big win for her: it keeps Sarah Beth from bothering her and it allows Betty (who has contemplated affairs but never goes through with it) to feel moral superiority over both Sarah Beth and Arthur.

Like Don, I'm wondering how long this is going to go on. Not to bring everything back to "The Sopranos," but when Carmela threw Tony out of the house, they stayed split up for about a season before Carmela realized she had no other option but to take the cheating SOB back. But from a storytelling perspective, at least Carmela was firmly integrated into Tony's world in such a way that they could tell stories about her even when she wasn't interacting with Tony himself. Betty is so far off to the side on "Mad Men" (January Jones jokes that she only ever sees the other actors at awards shows and press conferences) that it's hard to see her remaining a vital part of the series if she and Don stay broken up. And yet watching that scene in the foyer, when Betty finally recognizes how easily and how well Don lies -- "Jesus, did you just think that up?" -- makes it hard to imagine her taking him back anytime soon.

Finally on our list of people finding out success isn't all it's cracked up to be, we have Peggy, who has now leapfrogged all the other junior copywriters (it's clear from that final scene with Duck that she now outranks Paul), but in a lousy way. Freddie, as she reminds Pete, is the man who plucked her from secretarial pool obscurity, and now she gets to continue her climb up the ladder at Freddie's expense. Peggy has obviously been paying attention to her lessons from Don -- when Freddie tries to apologize for the pants-wetting incident, she tells him, "It's over. There's no reason to talk about it." -- but she still retains enough humanity to feel guilty about this.

(Not feeling any humanity at all? Pete, who continues to be less a person than an incredible simulation of one. Note that, in the dress rehearsal for the Samsonite meeting, Salvatore asks "Boy or girl?" as a genuine question, but Pete's response -- "That's good!" -- shows that he just views it as a strategically useful bit of small talk. And what is small talk, after all, if not imitation human behavior?)

And now that Peggy has continued her rapid ascent, from Don's secretary to the number two spot in Creative in less than two years, how happy will she be? She had just started to achieve some equilibrium with the boys in recent episodes; are they going to wind up resenting her just as much as the secretaries do?

Some other thoughts on "Six Month Leave":

• You know I've been complaining about the lack of Roger all season, but we got him back in a huge way here, with more Slattery goodness and one-liners -- "Many's the time I dreamed of finding you like this" -- than the rest of the season combined, it seemed.

• I had been assuming for a while now that people around the office, or at least Don, knew that Duck was a recovering alcoholic, based on both his refusal to drink and all the rumors about his career meltdown in London. But, no: they think he's a teetotaler. Interesting, and of course that means Don didn't really appreciate Duck's comment about how covering for Freddie isn't helping Freddie.

• Do you think Weiner had Peggy replacing Freddie planned all along when he introduced Freddie last year and made him the one to recognize Peggy's talent? Seems too perfect to be an accident.

• Could anyone make out the title of the book Betty was reading before she passed out?

• Patrick Fischler hasn't been given a lot of actually funny things to say whenever Jimmy is supposed to be "on," but I did like his attempt to recover his dignity after Don's punch by asking Floyd Patterson how well he took it. (For what it's worth, by the way, Roger was right and Freddie was wrong about Patterson's boxing career; in less than two months after this episode takes place, Sonny Liston would knock Patterson out in the first round to become the new heavyweight champ, before eventually losing the belt himself to some guy by the name of Clay.)

• Marilyn Monroe died on August 5, 1962. The movie version of "Gypsy" didn't come out until November of that year, so presumably Sarah Beth's aversion to white gloves comes from having seen the Broadway version, which debuted in 1959.

• A nice touch in an episode with so many Marilyn Monroe references: when Don and Roger are drinking at the bar after their casino escapade -- right before Don, drunk, lets down his guard enough to mention his father's name and to reveal his "move forward" life philosophy to Roger -- the camera lingers for a moment on the JFK bust at the end of the bar.

• Poor Sally and Bobby. Poor, poor Sally and Bobby. That is all I have to say about that.

One potential scheduling note before I turn it over to you smart people: I may be taking a few days off early this coming week, which may in turn throw the rest of my schedule off enough to prevent me from getting next week's review done in as timely a fashion as usual. At worst, hopefully, I'll have it done by sometime on Monday.

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

Dexter, "Our Father": Killer cravings

Spoilers for the "Dexter" season three premiere coming up just as soon as I go to the dentist...

This is going to be a weird review, and possible a weird season of reviews for me with this show. Like I said in my column on Friday, and as I hope I made clear all through season two, this is a show I have loved and passionately championed for two years, and even though there's not one thing I can put my finger on that's wrong with the new season, what I've seen so far has frustrated me. In fact, there were moments in various episodes -- good moments, with Michael C. Hall saying and doing interesting, Dexter-like things -- where I really had to fight the urge to put something else on instead.

Maybe this ennui goes away the deeper into the season I get, maybe not. I wrote a few times last year that "Dexter" feels like a show that should have a very limited shelf life, that the concept and character aren't built to run for season after season. And though there's no shark-jumping or fridge-nuking or Landry-killering to be found in "Our Father" or any of the next few episodes, I can't help thinking that I've seen as much of Dexter Morgan's world as I need to.

If that feeling solidifies as I see more episodes, I may just taper off on these reviews, or simply shift to open thread posts at a certain point in the season. After all, the episodic discussion last year was pretty good with or without me involved, and until or unless I can articulate my unease better, it may be pointless to keep weighing in on every episode. I don't want to be a weekly killjoy if I can't find anything to complain about other than the show's continued existence, you know?

Now, for some specific thoughts on the themes of "Our Father" as opposed to my malaise:

Can Dexter change?

That's the question he asks himself at the end of the episode, and the question Harry asked himself years ago. Harry decided the answer was no, which has led to the Dexter we see before us today. But Harry's long gone, and we've seen that Dexter is capable of doing and being more than either he or Harry ever imagined. His relationship with Rita, started as a cover identity to support his true passion, has become real. He cares for her, cares for her kids, even if he insists to himself (and to us, his unseen confessors) that he's incapable of feeling anything but a need to kill. But so long as things stayed status quo, Dexter was never going to have to challenge Harry's (lack of) belief in him, and his own self-doubt. But with Rita apparently pregnant with Dexter's child, things are going to change, and Dexter's going to have no choice but to change with them. And once he realizes that he can change, what then? What does he become at that point? More normal, or less?

The end of last season had Dexter promising to explore new rituals, new ways of killing, but as we return to his life, he seems to be going about things the same way as always until he accidentally kills Oscar Prado, youngest brother of powerful Miami DA Miguel Prado, played by the mustachioed Jimmy Smits. As Dexter says, he's never killed anyone before that he didn't "vet" according to the Code of Harry. For most of his life, the Code has successfully channeled his psychosis into the most socially constructive path possible, short of incarceration or death. Dexter has convinced himself that he has to kill according to the Code; what happens if he discovers that he's not very troubled by going off-mission? He doesn't join Deb at the bar to toast Harry because he wants to let go of the old man; does that mean letting go of the Code, too? And how many bodies get dropped if that happens?

(I should say, by the way, that I'm not fake-speculating based on what I know is coming in the next few episodes; these are the thoughts I had when I watched "Our Father.")

Again, these are promising directions, and even if I wasn't in the tank for Smits based on "NYPD Blue," I would find him a very good choice to play off of Michael C. Hall this season. But for whatever reason, I'm having a hard time stirring up any emotions about it all -- which feels oddly, disturbingly Dexter-like.

A few other random thoughts:

• With Doakes' unfortunate passing, it makes sense that Angel would wind up as the new sergeant, though all of LaGuerta's talk about the responsibilities of that rank never seemed to apply to how Doakes carried himself. Taking Doakes' place as a body in the squad, meanwhile, is Desmond Harrington as Quinn, the object of Internal Affairs' interest. As always with "Dexter," all the office politics are only necessary in that they prevent the producers from overworking Michael C. Hall, but they always pale in comparison to the main storylines. That said, I did like David Zayas and Jennifer Carpenter's drunken bonding at the bar.

• Not a fan of Deb's much-discussed new haircut. Anyone else?

• I laughed at Masuka asking Dexter, of all people, to proofread his article on the Bay Harbor Butcher. He has no idea how perfect that choice is.

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

Almost forgot: My Name Is Earl

In doing yesterday's grab-bag post, I forgot that I had seen both of this season's new episodes of "My Name Is Earl." I forgot in part because I watched them both about a week ago on a review screener, but also because neither was strong enough to stand out in my memory after a day or two. Still, some brief thoughts coming up just as soon as I shove a squid in someone's face...

Greg Garcia has talked about how he wanted to bring the show back to its roots after last year's Prison Earl and Coma Earl experiments. The thing is, while the coma episodes were awful, the earlier prison arc featured some of the sharper outings the show had done in a while. It was a nice combination of the predictable List elements and some format-breaking surprises.

The two episodes opening this season were very much in the vein of the early days of "Earl," but I don't know that this is something to aspire to. Basic stories of "Earl" crossing items off his list have never done a lot for me, in part because they squander Jason Lee's talents by asking him to do nothing but act genial and confused. There are going to be funny moments here and there (in this case, I laughed at Randy's reaction to the prop squid, and at Earl and his dad getting beat up by David Paymer's wife in the stretch pants), but not enough to make it a must-watch, especially now that there isn't a show I care about airing immediately after it. (I haven't watched "Kath & Kim" yet, and could wind up liking it, but the clips and what I've heard from other critics isn't filling me with confidence.)

What did everybody else think? You glad for the back-to-basics approach, or are you as fatigued with "Earl" as I am? Click here to read the full post

Patches, billboards and memorials

Time for the first grab-bag post of the season. Quick-hit spoilers for, in order, "ER," "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" and "Sons of Anarchy" coming up just as soon as I patch over a rival fantasy football team so I can bolster my running back corps...

Giving up on "ER" as anything but casual viewing has made me far more forgiving of things that would have driven me nuts about it when I actually cared. So they killed off Pratt, and it should be ridiculous and over-the-top given the number of ER personnel they've bumped off in extreme ways (Lucy gets stabbed, Mark Greene takes forever to die of cancer, Rocket Romano somehow angers the helicopter gods twice), but instead of rolling my eyes, I was actually a little moved by it. It helped that they distanced his death from the explosion, that there was a period where he seemed fine and was even giving orders about how he should be treated; it made his death feel less part of a lame, sensationalistic cliffhanger and more of a character piece. Like Lucy mouthing her own diagnosis right before she crashed, Pratt's awareness of just how bad this was made it hit a lot harder than it otherwise might have. And, of course, it helps that Mekhi Phifer is such an expressive actor.

Given that they devoted an entire act of the episode to memorializing him (a treatment not all the dearly departed -- like Rocket -- received), it would have been nice for Abby or one of the old-school nurses to remark on what a massive tool Pratt was when he first arrived at County. Most of the other characters in the run of the show have either started off fully-formed or got written out before they had a chance to evolve; other than Carter, Pratt arguably grew the most of anyone in the entire run of the series, and there's something to be said for that, even at this extremely late date. He annoyed the hell out of me when he was introduced -- as I'm sure he was supposed to -- and now I'm going to miss him for the limited time the show has left.

Not a good double-header for "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" this week, I thought. The two season-opening episodes, while typically uneven, at least had some very funny individual moments -- Dee and Charlie trying to reconcile cannibalism with racism, the three guys all trying to seduce the loan officer, any scene featuring the cry of "Wild card!" -- where these two were fairly flat throughout. Other than the return of Green Man, and maybe the scene where Charlie and Dennis thought they were listening to Mac tell The Waitress about some cross-dressing sex fantasy, I doubt I'll even remember what happened a day or two from now.

Finally, "Sons of Anarchy" goes for more of an action episode, with a couple of bike-on-bike chases and the shootout at the Nevada biker bar. I'm slowly warming to the ancillary characters -- Tig's refusal to bond with Juice was a highlight -- but still not feeling Jax, unfortunately.

Also, I'm a little shocked by how different Jay Karnes looks and acts here than he does as Dutch on "The Shield." I know he's an actor, and that some of it's simply the haircut (and letting the gray show through, which is actually an improvement), but I'm so used to him as the dweeby serial killer-phile that it's strange to see him as this more confident ATF guy.

What did everybody else think? Anybody still watching "Sons of Anarchy" at this point? Or "ER," for that matter? Click here to read the full post

Paul Newman, 1925-2008

Paul Newman, one of the last of the old-school movie stars, has died of cancer.

The thing that always interested me about Newman was how he essentially had two careers: everything before "Slap Shot," and everything after. The pre-"Slap Shot" Newman was, for the most part, stoic, cool and (as even Newman would later admit) content to get by on his chiseled features and those legendary baby blues. But by the time he starred in "Slap Shot," a shockingly profane, hilarious comedy about a minor league hockey team that succeeds through goonery, he was already into his 50s. And though he always looked good enough to play 10-15 years younger, he didn't want to coast on his looks anymore. If anything, his career of the last 30 years was built on anti-vanity, allowing Newman to look as bad and crass and un-star-like as possible. This was a much more relaxed Newman, and a much more compelling one.

"Slap Shot" is an all-timer, and "The Color of Money" got him an overdue Oscar, but for me the peak of this later period was 1994's "Nobody's Fool," with Newman as an aging construction worker named Sully who had spent his entire life running from responsibility, but being too lazy to run very far. It's a small movie (very little happens in it), but a very funny and, at times, moving one. And by then, Newman's talent and charisma were so powerful that he was able to elevate the work of everyone around him. Bruce Willis (who took an uncredited supporting role just to work with the old man) has rarely been better; Melanie Griffith has certainly never been better. (It's a movie that makes you think she could act.)

So whether you grew up with Newman movies or simply know him as the guy with the popcorn and salad dressing business, you will get an awful lot of entertainment out of seeing either of those films -- or "The Verdict," or "Cool Hand Luke," or "The Hustler," or "Twilight," or "Blaze," or... Click here to read the full post

Sepinwall on TV: Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!

With so many shows debuting on Sunday -- including the entire Sunday lineups of ABC, CBS, Fox and Showtime, plus a couple of new HBO comedies -- I took the grab-bag approach to today's column, with quick-hit reviews of "Dexter," "The Simpsons," "Little Britain," "The Life and Times of Tim," "Californication," "The Unit" and "The Amazing Race."

As this is an absurdly busy time for me, the only one of those I'm going to do a separate post on for Sunday night is "Dexter." Feel free to use this post to comment on any or all of the other Sunday product (plus other shows I didn't write up, if you want). Click here to read the full post

Grey's Anatomy, "Dream a Little Dream of Me": Pain don't hurt

Spoilers for the "Grey's Anatomy" season five premiere coming up just as soon as I grab a stapler and a pen...

Shonda Rhimes is a genius. An aggravating genius, but a genius nonetheless. (And, really, what genius comes without some aggravation?)

Shonda's brilliance -- her ability to tell a very familiar story in a slightly new and extremely affecting way -- has kept me watching "Grey's Anatomy" for a very long time, through a lot of episodes and story arcs I absolutely despised. Where I've stuck with other shows in the past that I didn't like simply because the ways in which they were bad fascinated me (say, "Studio 60"), with "Grey's" it was my knowledge that, even though I would have to suffer through a lot of annoying shenanigans to get there, Shonda would occasionally provide a moment so elegant and surprising and moving that I would regret not seeing it.

So, yes, I wanted to throw a brick at the TV when we got the dream sequence fake-out about McDreamy being in a car crash, and again with Rose's pregnancy joke (which led to an ABC promo that Shonda had to publicly disavow). And, yes, Lexie suddenly having an unrequited crush on George in the same way he did on Meredith way back when is a little too cute and self-conscious a role reversal. And, yes, I still think Callie and Dr. Hahn are gay for each other (but not, in an unexpected twist for Hahn, for anyone else, past or present) only because the writers needed to give these two characters something to do.

But every minute of it was worth it for the moment when Izzie (and you know how much I hate Izzie) started counting to 30 after Mariette Hartley woke up from surgery, then realized that this woman would spend the rest of her life having to be told, over and over and over, that her husband was dead. As I said in my column this morning, that's the sort of fate even a fairy tale witch wouldn't be cruel enough to concoct. That Izzie found a way, in the end, to turn Mariette's curse -- a condition that makes Leonard from "Memento" seem like a lucky bastard in comparison -- into a blessing (Mariette will instead be perpetually told that her husband is just around the corner) didn't diminish the awesome horror of that earlier moment. If anything, it elevated all the fairy tale talk, because it showed how every fairy tale is a horror story, and vice versa, depending on the perspective you take on it.

Really, aside from the missteps I mentioned above, I quite liked "Dream a Little Dream." I've made peace with the aspects of the series I know are fundamental to its DNA --- the narration, Meredith's need to obsess about her relationships every minute of every day -- and the running meta-commentary about the drop in the hospital rankings(*) suggests Shonda and company are aware of how they slipped in recent years and are going to make a good-faith effort to get back to doing what they do best.

(*) Or was it a meta-commentary? An ABC publicist says she talked to Shonda and was told it wasn't meant as such, but it's impossible to look at it as anything but, especially since "Grey's" last year went from #2 to #11 by most Nielsen measures. Whatever the authorial intent, I'm choosing to regard it as such until proven otherwise.

Meanwhile, I really liked the addition of Kevin McKidd. Yeah, they laid on the "He's a combat field surgeon who doesn't play by the rules!" thing a little thick -- and, as noted in the column, the surgical staple gag was straight outta "Roadhouse" -- but McKidd brings a distinctly masculine energy that the show has needed for a while. I think the producers hoped that McSteamy would provide that kind of counterpoint to McDreamy and George, but he's instead wound up as comic relief.

I'm not clear on how long McKidd is committed to being here, but I hope it's a while because, much to my pleasant surprise, I suspect I'm going to be here for a while as well.

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

The Office, "Weight Loss": Close shaves

Spoilers for "The Office" season five premiere coming up just as soon as I really process 9/11...

Holly beat-boxed! She beat-boxed, people! I don't care if there was nothing else remotely funny about this episode, because I'm a little in love with both "The Office" and Amy Ryan right about now.

Fortunately, there were a lot of funny things going on in "Weight Loss" -- as well as a moment to make every PB&J fan's heart soar -- as "The Office" returned in superb form.

I can't say enough about how perfect an addition Amy Ryan has been as Holly, even if you take out the beatboxing. Michael's attraction to Holly, and Jim's attempt to help Michael actually forge a relationship with her, has forced Michael to curb some of his more extreme behavior. Michael has always worked best when the writers push him back from the cartoon ledge a bit and force him to seem human, if completely inept. So here he was a fool, but a recognizable fool -- growing that heinous goatee, tossing Jim a condom to prevent an unplanned pregnancy, failing to come up with any kind of explanation for his audible groan upon hearing Holly's date went well -- in a way that was still extremely funny. Even the Michael Klump fat suit bit wasn't so outrageous as to make you wonder why no one shut it down, and in the end he actually did some good for Kelly with it.

And then, just as we were all convinced all of Michael's good behavior might lead to him attending the Counting Crows concert with Holly, he had to go and make what he thought was a grand gesture but was in fact a completely self-destructive one by ripping up the tickets! I wanted to smack myself in the head a few times, not because I thought it was a bad moment, but because I feel so much for Michael when the writers rein in his behavior just enough like this. They actually have me rooting for this relationship just as much as people cheered for Jim and Pam to hook up back in the day.

Of course, those two young lovebirds got their moment of pure bliss, which no doubt prevented Michael and Holly from getting theirs. (This is "The Office"; only a few characters are allowed to be non-miserable at a time.) I'll admit it: they had me fooled. I thought for sure that we were heading towards some stupid storyline where Pam "outgrows" Jim while attending the design school (possibly hooking up with the classmate played by Rich Sommer, aka Harry from "Mad Men"), and I was preparing a big screed about how the writers were afraid to have them stay together, even though they proved last year that resolved sexual tension can still be funny. But no -- it was all a set-up for Jim's impromptu proposal in the rain, at a highway service area, a setting that was at once the least romantic and most romantic place he could do it. (That he chose to do it then -- that he needed to do it then -- made it clear to Pam how badly he wants to marry her.) Perfectly written by Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky, played by Jenna Fischer and John Krasinski, and beautifully-shot (from the other side of the highway) by Paul Feig.

I spent a lot of time early last season complaining about the pacing of the hour-long episodes. "Weight Loss" didn't really have any slow spots, because there were stories or running gags for virtually every character (except, as usual, Meredith). Stanley is determined to lose weight on his own to get back to his Black Panther fighting trim, Andy falls in and out of Angela's good graces depending on how much he's willing to bend to her whims, Phyllis blackmails her way into the Party Planning Committee leadership, etc., etc., etc. The writers continued the marvelous joke of Holly believing Kevin to be mentally disabled, but not for so long that we'd get tired of it. (And it's a credit to Amy Ryan that she played Holly's anger at hearing Angela call Kevin stupid so passionately; that only made her mortification at learning the truth even funnier.)

Welcome back, "The Office." You have been badly, badly missed.

Some other thoughts on "Weight Loss":

• Another reason to love Holly; she's read "Lonesome Dove" (one of my five favorite books ever) three times.

• Holly's not the only extremely white Dunder Mifflin female to be trying on a hip-hop persona; check out Pam's amusingly dorky gang signal salute to the 2-1-2.

• Pam gets an iChat talking head! Brilliant!

• We finally have the much-discussed question of Michael Scott's virginity solved once and for all. And now I kinda wish I hadn't discussed it so much.

• Lots of great Dwight/Jim throwaway bits, but my favorite was Jim trying to explain to Dwight that people don't die in shotgun weddings.

• Was there a continuity error with Michael being clean-shaven in the lunch room scene with Holly and Jim, or were we supposed to assume that he shaved the goatee and then re-grew it?

• I loved the stupid nicknames for all the members of Andy's old band (Broccoli Rob!), and that one of his father's old Cornell classmates is now a groundskeeper at The Breakers. Between that guy and Andy, a Cornell degree may not be all it's cracked up to be, no?

• Poor, poor, poor, pathetic Toby. The perfect darkly hilarious kicker to the episode.

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

'Do Not Disturb' -- ever again?

Due to time and space issues, this has been the first TV season where I haven't reviewed every new show as it's debuted. I didn't write about CBS' "Gary Unmarried" the other night, and I didn't write about Fox's "Do Not Disturb" when it debuted a couple of weeks ago. In one case, it looks like I may not get a chance : Michael Ausiello is reporting that Fox has canceled "Do Not Disturb," effective immediately.

A Fox spokesman insisted that the show had not been canceled, and all that's been decided so far is that it's not on the schedule next week, so you may not be able to collect if you had the Jerry O'Connell sitcom in your TV season dead pool. But generally, getting yanked this early means you're done. Click here to read the full post

"Somebody's putting something in his Metamucil": Dave vs. McCain, the transcript

Since some people can't access the YouTube clip at work, I got, courtesy of CBS, a partial transcript of last night's "Late Show with David Letterman" -- including the monologue, his comments after sitting down at the desk, the Top 10 list, and Dave's interview with fill-in guest Keith Olbermann -- coming up after the jump.

OPENING MONOLOGUE

Maybe you’ve heard the big news. John McCain, Senator John McCain, Republican candidate for President, was supposed to be on the program tonight. Were you aware of that? But he had to cancel the show because he’s suspending his campaign because the economy is exploding. You know who John McCain is... he’s the running mate of Sarah Palin.

So John McCain calls up and says I’m not going to be there kids, because everything is going to hell. But the funny thing is that no one told his vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, and honest to God, right now she’s still circling the theater in a white minivan. She’s gonna pick him up later...

And then after McCain canceled being on the show, he rushed right back to Washington to deal with the economic crisis and I thought, well, he sure nipped that in the bud, didn’t he? And I was thinking about this, well maybe if he hadn’t taken two years off to run for President, he wouldn’t have to rush back to Washington now to deal with the crisis.

A lot of you folks are saying that the big tragedy is that he won’t be here tonight. But he’s also canceling the debate on Friday. He will not be participating. So that means Barack Obama will have to debate Regis. What are you going to do?

John McCain said to me the economy is about to crater. To crater. You folks worried about the economy? Not me. I’ve got all my money in second-hand FEMA trailers. I’m not worried about the economy, I’ve got all my money in an alpaca ranch. I’ve got all my money in Rosie O’Donnell aftershave.

But Sarah Palin was at the U.N. yesterday. A big hit. She’s over there meeting all the world leaders. And she’s still learning who all the world leaders are. She thinks that Warren Buffet is the head of Margaritaville. And why wouldn’t he be? She was at the General Assembly and someone said to her, “Oh, look over there. That’s the President of Georgia.” And she said, “Wow, Jimmy Carter.” And then she said, “Boy, I hope I get to meet Queen Latifah.”

ADDITIONAL COMMENTARIES

We’re all running around here a little ragged at the last minute because Republican presidential campaign nominee John McCain was going to be our guest. We always like having the Senator on the program. Here’s a guy, by the way – I have nothing but the highest regard for this man. He’s a true American hero, and as Bill Clinton said the other night, gave everything but his life for America during the Vietnam War. And we’re in sorry need and short supply of actual heroes like John McCain.

I love and respect and admire the man for that. Who among us doesn’t wish he had that kind of steel, that kind of commitment. In a North Vietnamese prison camp for four years, and the North Vietnamese come to him and say, “Guess what? Your time’s up.” And he said, “Well, does everyone get to go home? And they, “No.” And he said, “Well, I’m not going home until everyone gets to go home.” Who can do that? This is why we love that man.

But when you call up, and you call up at the last minute and you cancel the show, Ladies and Gentlemen, that’s starting to smell. This is not the John McCain I know, by God. It makes me believe that something is going haywire with the campaign. I don’t know. Somebody’s gotten to him and somebody said, “You know what, blow Letterman off. He’s a lightweight.”

But here’s what you do. Sure there’s an economic crisis, and here’s what you do if you’re running for campaign in the middle of an economic crisis and it’s about to crater. That’s a quote from him. I love that expression. The economy is about to crater. Well, I’d like to see that! Here’s what happens, the economy is about to crater. You’re a senator. You’re a fourth-term senator from Arizona. You go back to Washington. You handle what you need to handle. Don’t suspend your campaign. You let your campaign go on, shouldered by your vice presidential nominee, that’s what you do. You don’t quit...or is that really a good thing to do?

This guy doesn’t have an ounce of quit in him. So all of a sudden, we’re suspending the campaign? Look, if I drop dead right now, my hand to God, Paul’s taking over the show. You say, “I’ve got to get back to Washington to save this country.” Good for you. “And while I’m gone, campaigning in my stead will be my great running mate from the state of Alaska, Sarah Palin.” And she comes out and campaigns. What happened there? What’s the problem? Where is she? Why isn’t she doing that?

So I don’t know. But you heard it here first. This doesn’t smell right. This just doesn’t smell right. This is not the way a tested hero behaves. Somebody’s putting something in his Metamucil.

And let’s say there’s a time of crisis... and the poor guy, because he’s a little older – he’s about my age and Sarah Palin takes over as president... She ought to be ready because she’s handled crises like these in the past. Oh, wait a minute, she really hasn’t handled a crisis like this in the past.

Let me just go through this one more time to make my point absolutely clear: He can’t run the campaign because the economy is about to crater. Fine. You put in your second string quarterback. Well, where is his second string quarterback?

The republican presidential campaign candidate is suspending his campaign. Suspending his campaign! You don’t suspend your campaign. Do you suspend your campaign? Because that makes me think that well, you know, maybe there’ll be other things down the road if he’s in the White House, he might just suspend being President. I mean, we got a guy like that now!

You don’t suspend your campaign. If you believe in your vice presidential candidate, you say, “Sarah, I have to go back to Washington to save the economy. You take over.” And she says, “Gotcha!”

So now I wonder if he’ll ever come back. Do you think he’ll come back? A hero. An honest-to-God hero. An American hero. Maybe the only actual hero I know. I’ve met the man. I know the guy. So I’m more than a little disappointed by this behavior. “We’re suspending the campaign.” Are we suspending it because there’s an economic crisis or because the poll numbers are sliding?

I mean there’s really no need to suspend anything. You could say, come and do the show and go to the debates and then spend more time at your desk in the Senate. And then let your vice presidential candidate carry on the campaign. Carry on the campaign! She could be on this show talking about how you field clean a moose. Talking about how you smoke enough salmon for the winter...

The Top Ten Questions People are Asking The John McCain Campaign

#10 “I just contributed to your campaign – how do I get a refund?

#9 “It’s Sarah Palin – does this mean I’m pars’dent?”

#8 “Can’t you solve this by selling some of your houses?”

#7 “This is Clay Aiken. Is McCain single?”

#6 “Do you still think the fundamentals of our economy are strong, Genius?”

#5 “Are you doing all of this just to get out of going on Letterman?”

#4 “What would Matlock do?”

#3 “Hillary here – my schedule is free Friday night.”

It’ll be interesting here to see if Barack Obama feels the need to suspend his campaign to go down there and work on the economy. He’s also a senator. And his running mate, Joe Biden, he’s also a senator. So there, those two guys have to get back to work. So of course, they’ll suspend their campaign. Don’t you think?

The Democrats are now at a real disadvantage because Barack Obama has got to race back and fix the economy. So does Joe Biden. He has to race back and fix the economy. But the republicans have Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska. The Alaska economy is fine. It don’t need fixing. It’s fine. So she’ll continue the campaign. So the democrats are really in a hole now.

#2 “Is this just an excuse to catch up on napping?”

#1 “This is President Bush – what’s all this trouble with the economy?”

INTERVIEW WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

DAVID LETTERMAN: Well, first of all...

KEITH OLBERMANN: I can’t stay, I’m sorry... (laughter) Are you saying I wasn’t originally scheduled to be here?

DL: No. This man, on many occasions, has done us the favor of coming in when we’ve had trouble. And no greater and more short-notice trouble than tonight. So once again, thanks again for running in here. I certainly appreciate that.

KO: I was... the right place, right time thing applies. I was around the corner.

DL: Thank you. And what do you think of all this – the racing back, suspending the campaign...

KO: I think you hit the nail on the head there. I think he’s afraid to stand up to you. He can’t take you on.

DL: He wouldn’t be the first man.

KO: No. I thought twice about coming over here. And having seen so much of the show so far...I’m thinking Dave’s on fire tonight...

DL: But what does it mean? We know what it means now but what does it do to the campaign generally?

KO: It does throw it into a bit of havoc – particularly with the debates. Because you’ve got all four debates – the three presidentials and the vice presidential debate – were supposed in the span of 19 days. So that’s only 15 days that don’t have a debate in there. And you’ve got to reschedule a lot of things and of course you have religious holidays, football games, everything else. We may see one of the debates canceled, not postponed. Now if there were to be a debate canceled, what do you think would be to the McCain campaign’s advantage?

DL: Probably canceling the vice presidential debate.

KO: See? This is what I was thinking.

DL: But they’re talking about canceling Friday night presidential debate.

KO: Well, yeah, but then you’re saying there will only be two presidential debates. How can we do that? It could be a tie. Someone has to win two out of three...and then they advance to play the Montreal Canadiennes in the semi-finals...

DL: The Canadiennes are involved? Boy, I just don’t know anything about the Constitution.

KO: Or Senator Clinton, as you pointed out. It might be that. I’m not...it does throw it into a bit of havoc. That’s the idea.

DL: I just have to say this...and it’s hard to say because you have to regard him more highly anybody you know. But this just stinks. I mean, I’m not wrong about that, am I?

KO: No. I was sitting in the back listening to the whole show so far and going, “I don’t think that I should tell Dave this other part that he doesn’t know about.”

DL: Tell me. Tell me.

KO: (to Paul Schaeffer) You’re prepared to take over when he runs off screaming about this? (to Dave) Apparently this morning, the Obama campaign called the McCain campaign and said, Look, with this bill not passed, this bailout – an interesting term by the way considering his not being here and the debate – with this bailout not having passed, we’ve gotta ...let’s make some show of solidarity. Let’s make some sort of joint statement on behalf of both the campaigns. The next thing you know, the statement comes out of the McCain campaign saying: We’re shutting down and we don’t want to be at the debate Friday night...It sounds like an episode of the West Wing. It’s an Obama idea that the McCains then ran against Obama to some degree.

DL: I just wonder because the idea of a bipartisan agreement here, a show of support, that’s all they’re ever talking about to get things through Congress. So to be part of that now seems like it would have been a pretty good idea. That’s a win-win for everyone.

KO: Also, the other part of this that is a little strange is that Senator McCain was claiming, I think it was two days ago, that all the economic problems were Senator Obama’s fault – which just seems a little strange to say that now is a time for non-partisanship – now that I got my shot in.

DL: They also said about a week ago that the fundamentals of the economy were in place and sound, essentially.

KO: Well they were, a week ago. Time moves, as you know.

DL: Giving Senator McCain the benefit of the doubt, maybe – and certainly, I’d be the last to know – maybe we’re in greater trouble than we thought we were earlier this morning.

KO: How long do you think he was going to be in the building here today...seven hours or something?

DL: I don’t know.

KO: A briefing and then a sit-down with you and then a lunch and then a nap and then the show? Look, if the economy could not wait – if the vote of this could not wait the length of the appearance here on the program...eat your money right now. What’s the point? We’re that far gone? And the debate...Now watch, someone’s going to eat their money...

DL: I would hate to be the reason there were breadlines in this country.

KO: A great point about the debate Friday and canceling it – what they should have said was – alright it was supposed to be about international politics and international affairs. Make the debate Friday about the economy. Let’s hear what your two plans are. Suddenly everybody turns into an economic policy wonk...

DL: You’re absolutely right about that.

(Commercial break)

DL: I don’t mean to cut into your time during your generous visit, but when John McCain – and he was nice enough to call me on the phone and said that he was racing back to Washington – our people here were told, so serious, he’s getting on a plane immediately and racing back to Washington. And now we’ve just been told...here, take a look -- do we have it on the thing? This is going live...there he is right there. (monitor shows live feed of McCain having makeup touches for a CBS News interview with Katie Couric) Doesn’t seem to be racing to the airport, does he? This just gets uglier and uglier. I’m feeling bad for the man to have participated in this...First of all, the road to the White House runs right through me. Well, let’s just punch up Katie Couric’s interview and Keith, you can go back to wherever you came from...Let’s just see what he has to say here. This will be interesting....let’s see if he’ll mention me. Hey, John, I got a question – do you need a ride to the airport? Now, this stinks. You tell me. You know how things work. Is it his fault? Or is it something that CBS News got a hold of him and said, “You gotta come in here and do that.”

KO: Oh boy, how much trouble can I get into and how fast? I would be speculating. There’s very little done in that campaign without his knowledge. I think he dissed you.

DL: Yeah, absolutely.

KO: Unless, her first question is, “Now, Senator, why did you cancel on Dave?” Or the other possibility is that she has all the money that’s required to fix the economy.

DL: She’s bailing him out.

KO: If that’s it, I’m voting for her. So there you go.

DL: I don’t want to keep beating this thing but it really is starting to smell now because he says to me on the phone...I took a phone call from him – a lot of senators don’t call me. And so I felt like, Ok, as part of the national good, I understand and I said good luck. Thank you for being attentive to the cause...and he said maybe next time I’ll come in, I’ll bring Sarah Palin. I said, fine, whatever you need to do that’s just fine. And he said yeah, we’re going to go save the country. And then it’s like we caught him getting a manicure or something.

Now listen, I read a thing in the paper where after some election coverage – oh, convention coverage – they said that you and your buddy Chris Matthews over there at MSNBC were being yanked off the debate coverage. Did that happen?

KO: Well, we got a call from John McCain that he wouldn’t show up if we were going to be there. No, I’m kidding. We’re not the anchors anymore. We’re just going to be commentators.

DL: Are you alright with that?

KO: I’m actually going to be on more than I was previously and can actually say what I think rather than going, “Now here’s more from such and such over there... You?” You know that stuff. So I don’t have to do... basically, I can just sit there and eat -- between appearances – eat ice cream for 20 minutes at a time and then come back and go “That’s the crappiest answer I’ve ever heard in a debate.” It makes no difference.

DL: So things are better this way.

KO: Yeah. They actually are. They’re certainly easier. And I can enjoy election night.

DL: OK. I’m going to ask you this one more time. What will this do to the Republican campaign. Honestly? If I were a huge Republican campaign donor, I’d say, “What do you mean you’re suspending the campaign?”

KO: It’ll quiet it down for a little while. There won’t be that much coverage of it – which is a probably a good thing, given the coverage there’s been recently. And I think the poll numbers...you know, if your campaign puts your candidate out there...if John McCain goes on Meet the Press, Face the Nation or whatever, for 45 minutes and says nothing but the host just throws eggs at him for 45 minutes...that’s worth half to one electoral college vote. Just the exposure. Just your puss on TV for 45 minutes. So if you just disappear for a couple of days so that it seems like you look presidential....first off, if the other guy has to too, it doesn’t matter. It’s your fault because you went out with it first without negotiating. I don’t think it really works out too well. Plus, as I think you pointed out once or twice – where is the vice presidential candidate in this? She couldn’t come out here and do the interview with you?

DL: But if I were Barack Obama and Joe Biden...remember when you were a kid, and you found out there was so much snow you weren’t going to school? That’s how I’d be feeling now. “Hey, did you hear the good news? They’ve suspended their campaign!”

KO: Friday night’s debate...the debate Friday night could be Obama vs. Biden. Look... “Senator, what do you think?” “I think Senator Obama is 100% correct.” “Senator Obama?” “I like Senator Biden’s answer on this.” Hour and a half for free on television...

DL: Thank you for dropping in again. Always a pleasure. You’re a true gentleman and we appreciate your attention.

###


Prior to announcing the next guest, actress Chandra Wilson:

DL: We’re told now that the Senator has concluded his interview with Katie Couric and he’s now on the Rachael Ray Show making veal piccata.

Click here to read the full post

Don't make Dave angry. You won't like him when he's angry.

John McCain canceled on David Letterman last night, and Dave made his displeasure felt. Click here to read the full post

Sepinwall on TV: 'Grey's Anatomy' & 'Desperate Housewives' season five reviews

In today's column, I look at how "Grey's Anatomy" and "Desperate Housewives" are trying to reinvent themselves at the start of their fifth seasons: "Grey's" with a two-hour premiere that doubles as a mea culpa for some recent events, "Housewives" with the five-year time jump they showed at the end of last season.

I'm still not enough of a "Housewives" fan to watch or write about it regularly, but this does seem like a good move. As for "Grey's," I'm still here, and there was enough of the Good Shonda that it's going to stay in the rotation. I'll have a separate post up tonight at 11 to go into some specifics about the episode. Click here to read the full post

The plan for 'Friday Night Lights'

Okay, after a lot of thought, and reading the comments here, and talking to other critics, I've decided that the only proper way to deal with the "Friday Night Lights" dilemma is to review the episodes as they air on DirecTV, rather than waiting to comment when the NBC run begins in February (or later; you never know with a Ben Silverman-run network, do you?).

After the jump, I'll explain why I decided to go this way, how this will work, and offer up a brief, 100% spoiler-free review of the third season premiere.

Like I said, I gave this a lot of thought, and talked to a lot of people, and what it came down to was this: these episodes will be airing, legally, in the United States. They'll be out there. This is not a situation like when a "Doctor Who" season would air in England months before it showed up on Sci Fi; this is here. I have some readers who have DirecTV, and many who don't, but to not write about a show I've cared so much about, and written so much about in the past, until it's available to 100 percent of the audience, doesn't feel right. It's like when even mainstream movies used to begin life in limited release before gradually rolling out to every part of the country; newspapers and magazines didn't wait until they were playing in Peoria to write about them, but often did it as soon as they premiered in New York and LA.

And even more importantly, it's not like my reviewing them now will in any way prevent non-DirecTV people from reading these posts once the episodes have aired on NBC, whenever that is. You'll still be getting my thoughts about the episodes as they aired originally, and considering the complaints I sometimes get where I watch a whole season of a show in advance before writing about it (say, "The Wire" season four), you'll probably be happier with the way these are written.

Now, I've seen the season premiere in advance, and I'm hoping to get as many other episodes as I can from DirecTV, but I may not get them all from them, or in advance, and I may have to call on some of my friends and neighbors with satellite dishes to help me out in weeks when I don't have a screener. The episodes are going to debut every Wednesday night at 9 Eastern; in an ideal world, I'd have a review ready to go by Wednesday night at 10, but I suspect the schedule is going to be a lot more unpredictable than that. As with so many other shows in my week, I'll post about each episode when I post about it.

As always, the posts will be spoiler-protected. Nobody looking at the main page is going to see anything that gives away anything. At the moment, I don't even have any season three photos, and the DVDs are watermarked in such a way that make doing screencaps pointless, so I may run them without art altogether. Because this version of the blog publishes each post in its entirety on its RSS feed, I'm actually going to make the bulk of my review into the first comment of the post; that way, if you're skimming the blog on Google Reader or whatever, you won't accidentally find out that Landry has killed again. (Whoops... I mean...) As the NJ.com version of the blog only publishes the first, pre-spoiler lines, the reviews will be right there in the body of each post; if you prefer the way that looks, you can always go read them over there and then comment at either location.

Whenever the episodes actually wind up airing on NBC, I will repost each review as the episodes air. I'm open to suggestions from the non-DirecTV viewers about whether you would rather I just bump up the old posts, complete with all the comments, or whether you'd rather I go with duplicate posts, the way I did when AMC re-aired "Mad Men" earlier this year, so you can start fresh. I suppose it may depend on whether people go back to comment on earlier episodes based on what they know from later ones; if there's a lot of that, I'll have to either delete those comments or start from scratch.

Now, as for my opinion of the season premiere itself, I liked it. A lot. There weren't any mythical, spine-chilling moments like you would get from time to time during season one, but other than that, it felt very much like a return to those good old days. Characters acted like themselves, interacted with each other rather than being lost in their own subplots, and the football team was front and center, as it should be.

I'm looking forward to watching, and writing about, the season, and I hope you enjoy what I have to say, whenever it is you're able to read it. Sound good? Click here to read the full post

Fringe, "The Ghost Network": My thoughts to your thoughts

Quick spoilers for last night's "Fringe" coming up just as soon as I smile...

Not improving yet. If anything, I'm less interested the further in we go. If it wasn't for the John Noble character, I don't know that I'd still be watching at all. Even there, the "crazy old man on drugs" jokes are starting to wear thin, and it's only episode three. This is a much duller show than anything with J.J. Abrams' name attached to it should be. Hell, "Six Degrees" was more engaging than this.

Among my problems:

• This is two out of three cases where the impetus for Olivia being involved hasn't been fringe-y enough. Yes, the trapped-in-amber bus thing was sci-fi-ish, but with both this case and the transparent skin incident from the pilot, the really out-there science came into play with the case's solution. If not for the poor bastard with the incidental ESP, which nobody in the FBI knew about when the case started, this could practically be an episode of "NCIS." (And I like "NCIS," but for the characters rather than the storytelling; and few of the "Fringe" characters are engaging in any way.)

• The big shocking moments really aren't. We need a moratorium on people stepping in front of buses, intentionally or not, on all primetime shows, but especially on JJ Abrams shows. That's at least three, counting the kid on "Felicity," Juliette's ex-husband on "Lost," and now the bad guy here, and it's just funny now. Meanwhile, was I supposed to be surprised by the reveal that Broyles gave the chip to Blair Brown? The Most Expository Scene In The History of Explaining Things from last week's episode already established that the two of them are working together without Olivia's knowledge. And, for that matter, the pilot already established that Massive Dynamics had John Scott's body and was doing stuff to do it, so the dun-dun-DUN! moment at the episode's end fell completely flat.

• The action is lame. "Alias," "Lost" and "24" have all shown that it's possible to do interesting, exciting action sequences on a weekly TV schedule and budget. Whenever "Fringe" goes into action mode, though, it's the same generic stuff we've seen on TV for decades. I could have seen that chase and shootout sequence at the end on dozens of other shows, and often done better.

• Anna Torv can smile, still can't be interesting.

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

Sepinwall on TV: 'Knight Rider' review

Most new TV shows, I will give one or two weeks past the pilot to change my initial opinion. Not so with the subject of today's column, "Knight Rider," which is just as awful as you would expect it to be, whether or not you watched the TV-movie back in February. My hope is that other than this column (where I'm meaner than I usually allow myself to be with this stuff), the only other words I write about this show will involve a sentence that includes the phrase "has been canceled." Click here to read the full post

90210, "Wide Awake and Dreaming": A star is born

Quick spoilers for tonight's "90210" coming up just as soon as I do a survey on the effectiveness of four-year-old condoms...

If we're not at "That's it for me!" territory with this show, we're close. Whatever slightly admirable qualities I found in the pilot are gone by now, or maybe it's just the novelty of a new/old version of the show that's gone.

Sachs and Judah are caught in this weird hybrid mode where they're trying to seem modern while at the same time staying true to Aaron Spelling and Darren Star's creative vision for the original. If Hiro Nakamura were still willing to travel back in time, he could have taken the script for this episode back to 1992, put it on Star's desk, and other than changing the names, Star could've run it as is. And while that amuses me on some level, that's not enough to keep me watching, not when the people I'm interested in either don't have much to do (Tabitha) or have embarrassing things to do. (I'm not saying Tristan Wilds' work here is tainting "The Wire" for me, but I desperately, desperately wish he would bring a shotgun to West Beverly already and jack up some of these rich boys, just to make things more entertaining.)

I was under the mistaken impression that this would be Shannen Doherty's last episode, but I see she's still on next week. Not that I was ever much of a Doherty/Brenda fan, but maybe I'll stick around for the rest of her stint, and use her exit as an excuse to cut the cord.

What did everybody else think? And how grateful were you to hear another "Spring Awakening" song, even if it was for only 30 seconds, instead of that "mama who bore me" one they've been singing repeatedly for weeks? Click here to read the full post

The Shield, "Genocide": Answer me my wishes three

Spoilers for "The Shield" season seven, episode four, coming up just as soon as I draw a few self-portraits...

"How is that our problem?" -Shane

Michael Chiklis has been given lots of wonderful, profoundly crude dialogue throughout his run on "The Shield." And yet most of the scenes I'm going to remember involve Vic reacting silently to what's going on around him -- those brief, deliberately rare moments when Vic is forced to drop his own self-delusions and recognize the monster that he is, and the even worse monster he created in Shane. The look on Chiklis' face after Shane said he didn't care about Pezuela buying up all of Farmington for the Byz Lats was a beauty. Almost as good was his response to Cassidy's accusations about all the crimes we know he's committed. The closer we get to the finish line, the harder it's become for Vic to keep living this lie that he's just made a few bad choices for the greater good, and Chiklis is doing some brilliant freaking work showing the crumbling of the good cop mask.

With "Genocide," we're still knee-deep in Vic and Shane's attempt to puppeteer the Armenians and Mexicans into killing each other off, but this was one of the stronger episodes of the storyline for a few reasons. First, Rezian and Cruz finally got in a room together (Correction: A reader who actually watched the episode tonight, as opposed to a few weeks ago for me, reminded me that Pezuela was not, in fact, in the room, but sent Rios as his surrogate. We regret the error, but the rest of the point of this paragraph stands.), and while I'm still not fond of either actor, the parley scene meant less exposition and more action. In a similar vein, the assassination of controller Martin and the revelation that Olivia from ICE is in the blackmail box made the box seem less an abstract plot device and more of a tangible problem for Vic and Aceveda and the people around them. "The Shield" runs into trouble when the characters are spending almost as much time talking about the plot as they are experiencing it, and "Genocide" featured a much better ratio.

On the down side, when I was towards the end of watching this episode for the first time, I jotted down a note about how I'm getting tired of Dutch seeing serial killers everywhere he turns. It's in some ways as fundamental a part of the character as Claudette's pragmatism or Shane's short-sightedness, but there's a part of me that had hoped he had outgrown this particular fetish by now. Once it became clear that The Stray Cat Incident was a one-time thing and not the beginning of Dutch's own criminal career, I wanted to see the Dutch-man go in a new direction. They've done quite a bit of that lately, with his partnership with Billings and, recently, his attempt to look after both Claudette and Danny, and having him chase after one more budding serial feels less a bit of full-circle storytelling than taking a step back.

I don't want to say too much else about "Genocide," because we're getting deep into the period where my knowledge of what's coming up could too easily color anything else I write. But good stuff is coming -- or bad stuff, depending on your loyalties to various characters.

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

House, "Not Cancer": A low-down dirty shamus

Spoilers for tonight's "House" coming up just as soon as I buy some argyle socks...

I talked a lot in last week's column about the "House" tradition of bringing in a very special guest star to shake up House's life for part of each season, and while some people liked, say, Sela Ward better than others, I can't imagine that any of the previous instigators combined were as polarizing as Michael Weston's going to be as quirky private eye Lucas. My guess is either you loved him or can't wait until he's off the show, whether to the hoped-for spin-off or just to oblivion.

To my surprise, I find myself in the "loved" group. Usually, I can't stand characters who are a collection of colorful tics -- see virtually every David E. Kelley show going back at least to "Ally McBeal" -- and I also have bad memories of Weston from his brief "Six Feet Under" stint, yet his underplaying of the quirk really endeared Lucas to me. I'm kind of flummoxed by this, and would not be surprised at all if I want to throw a shoe at the TV by his next appearance, but I liked him here. The biggest problem I've had by far with the previous Special Guests is that they weren't funny (the cop in particular), which made any interaction with House a lopsided fight. Lucas and House aren't antagonists, but he's still not a regular presence in House's life, and the fact that Weston has various amusing things to do makes him click with Hugh Laurie far better than the previous visitors.

(The real shame of it is the Chi McBride character. As anyone who watches "Pushing Daisies" knows, McBride can be insanely funny if allowed to. But he had to clench for his entire stint as the rich guy who wanted House to cure cancer, or else.)

"Not Cancer" was notable not only for having House actually hire a professional (at great expense to someone, if not himself) to do the break-ins for once, but also for having such a complicated case -- or, at least, such an overpopulated one. Sure, Felicia Day(*) was the only surviving patient by the time we were halfway through the episode, but there were still so many moving parts, and so many facts to be considered about the various dead patients, that it started to feel as tough to follow as certain "Shield" plots.

(*) Will anyone who watched "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog" be able to look at Day and not think of Penny? Also, please be careful with the "Dr. Horrible" spoilers in the comments, for the benefit of anyone who might be waiting for the DVD.

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

Skins, "Michelle": Leave it to beaver

Quick spoilers for the latest episode of "Skins" coming up just as soon as I go watch a field hockey game...

"Michelle" was much more in the style of the series than the Russian field trip episode, though the events of that trip (Tony and Maxxie's failed hook up, Chris finally getting with Angie) reverbated here.

We're now deep enough into the series that it's getting harder and harder for anything to be as surprising as the first few character spotlights, but that's okay. I don't think I know anything more about Michelle than I did before, but it was still gratifying to see her stand up for herself, even in the face of Tony's latest manipulations.

And speaking of which, I'm gratified to see the producers allow Tony to be this much of a bastard. Frequently cheating on Michelle is one thing, but the cameraphone stunt was some twisted, unexpected stuff. Someone mentioned in the comments last week that the producers are a little overly enamored of Tony, but if that was the case, I can't imagine they'd allow him to look this bad.

Meanwhile, poor Sid. He finally realizes he likes Cass at the exact moment when Michelle throws herself at him, and of course Cass is both "dating" someone else and no longer giving her goodies away.

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

Terminator, "The Mousetrap": Smarter than the average robot

Quick spoilers for last night's episode of "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" coming up just as soon as I peruse the celebrity tabs...

That's three episodes in a row of "not bad." I don't know that the show has a higher gear than these B-movie self-contained thriller stories, and I'm not sure I'd want to see that higher gear. (What is the original "Terminator," after all, but one of the best B-movies of all time?) I'm much more engaged when the danger is clear and present than when the show deals with larger, more complicated story arcs like whatever Shirley Manson's doing. On the other hand, if I don't care about the arcs, I'm not sure the episodic stories are good enough to keep me watching once the timeslot crunch gets worse. (Again, I have a three-week head start on "Chuck," which helps.)

A few random thoughts:

• I hope the "Lost" producers have big plans for Penny in the final two seasons, because with Michelle's death here and HBO's decision not to go forward with "Tell Me You Love Me" season two, Sonya Walger's running out of semi-regular gigs.

• You would never have thought it from watching "Deadwood" that Garret Dillahunt is such a gym rat. Guy looked pumped in those swords-and-sandals clips.

• There are certain actors who should never, ever, be asked to run on film, because their running style immediately undercuts any attempt to make them seem like a bad-ass. David Caruso immediately comes to mind (there's about a five-minute sequence in "Elmore Leonard's Gold Coast" that's nothing but Caruso running, and it is among the unintentionally funniest things I've ever seen), and to that list I think we can add Thomas Dekker, who looked beyond goofy sprinting around the Santa Monica Pier. As the "Terminator" franchise is one big chase story, this could be an ongoing problem. Maybe lots of car chases?

• I liked the solution to the chase, by the way: while Terminators look like us, they weigh a whole lot more, and likely wouldn't be able to avoid sinking in water. On the other hand, how does Cameron avoid constantly breaking every chair she sits in?

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

Heroes, "The Second Coming"/"The Butterfly Effect": The greatest American popsicle?

Spoilers for the "Heroes" season three premiere coming up just as soon as I quote Dan Fogelberg...

I made my feelings on "The Second Coming" half of this episode pretty clear in yesterday's column, and nothing in "The Butterfly Effect" changed that opinion. For every cool moment like Daphne's frozen speed lines or Mohinder casually doing a Spider-Man impression (two of the better FX sequences the show has ever done), there were a half-dozen moments that had me questioning the intelligence of the characters, the script, or both.

Since some people already started talking about the episodes in the original review post, I'm just going to make some random observations:

• Just when I thought Mohinder and Peter were so far ahead of the pack in the "Heroes" Stupid-Off that no other character could catch up, Hiro has to go and open the safe, when the only thing his dad asked him to do was to not open the thing. He doesn't want to be a sentinel? Fine: use your powers to bury the safe in an underground bunker no one else can access, then go on with your adventuring life. For someone who's read as many superhero comics as Hiro has (and I did enjoy the Batman/Catwoman/Robin banter with Ando), he seems to not grasp how this stuff works.

• Which isn't to say that Mohinder isn't still an idiot (albeit one in a comic book mad scientist vein, ala Curt Connors), or that Peter, past or present, isn't. I did love Ma Petrelli calling out Future Peter for never being as smart as he thought he was, vis a vis the butterfly effect. But at the same time, I don't see how this time travel escapade led to Claire being assaulted and Sylar stealing (or, rather, duplicating) her powers. Yes, Future Peter told her not to come to Odessa, but if he hadn't traveled back in time and shot Nathan in the first place, she would have had no reason to go there, blah blah blah.

• I had forgotten how stilted Zachary Quinto's attempt to be creepy could be sometimes. We reached the point of diminishing returns with Sylar a while back, and though giving him Claire's powers finally takes away the "Why doesn't someone just kill him?" problem that ran through parts of the first two seasons, it also means we're going to be stuck with him for the run of the show.

• Fair is fair: I'm at least vaguely intrigued by the Niki/Tracy thing, and about whether Linderman is a ghost, an angel or just a figment of Nathan's imagination. Vaguely.

• Really? They hired William Katt (aka The Greatest American Hero, aka the man with the greatest theme song of all time, aka the man whose theme song led to the greatest outgoing answering machine message of all time) so he could pop up twice in a parking garage and get frozen to death?

• Is it me, or did Future Claire's line about always loving Future Peter sound like it was in a non-uncle way?

• Where's my Bubbles at? Jamie Hector (aka Marlo from the greatest drama ever) popped up briefly as one of the escaped supervillains, but after I saw fellow "Wire" alum Andre Royo's name in the guest credits for the second hour, I kept on waiting and waiting and waiting, and... nothing.

• Daphne's apartment lived up to Roger Ebert's rule that every fictional building in Paris must have a view of the Eiffel Tower.

• I'm glad Adrian Pasdar, one of the few genuinely strong actors in the cast, is getting a lot to do this year after being sidelined last year, but there didn't seem to be an emotional throughline between Holy Nathan of the first hour and the much more normal Nathan (who could crack a joke about knowing Niki/Tracy "Biblically") in the second.

• Fair is fair, part two: Elle tossing HRG a gun to go after Sylar was also a nice moment. But how are people getting back and forth to Claire's house in California from either New York (Sylar) or Texas (HRG) so quickly? Are we supposed to assume the scenes aren't all taking place in chronological order (especially when you factor in things like Mohinder randomly putting Molly on a plane to some new life outside the country), or just that the writers are lazy?

• Ando with powers? Boo! Ando's whole role is to be the normal guy, the one who brings real world logic to superhero problems -- or, on occasion, vice versa, like his suggestion that Future Ando was a robot or shapeshifter. I only hope that's true.

• Is this them writing out Elle, or will she now get a storyline about the struggles of being a super trying to live in the real world? They rarely used Kristen Bell well last season, but she's still one of that handful of good actors on the show, and I'd hate to see that number diminish.

• Speaking of "Veronica Mars" alums, is Francis Capra now going to be reduced to a "Quantum Leap" reflection for the rest of this storyline?

• Unlike Papa Nakamura, they bothered to finally reveal Ma Petrelli's power while she's still alive. But I don't like the "Sylar, I am your mother" twist at all.

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

Sepinwall on TV: 'The Mentalist' review

In today's column, I review "The Mentalist," whose pilot is unchanged since I wrote about it back in June. Short version: it's "Psych" minus the humor, but plus Simon Baker, and you can figure out whether that adds up to something you want to watch. I like Baker well enough, but I doubt I'll watch more than one or two additional episodes (if that) before giving up. Click here to read the full post

HIMYM, "Do I Know You?": Barney's bimbo bonanza

Spoilers for the "How I Met Your Mother" season four premiere coming up just as soon as I force my wife to watch "Hoosiers" again...

Ah, my beloved "HIMYM" is back, and even a B+ episode like "Do I Know You?" was simply de... wait for it... lightful!

The Ted and Stella story had its moments, particularly anything involving Marshall being creepy (hiding behind the couch was a good gag) or Ted's various interactions with 15-Year-Old Ted (high-fiving himself, imagining the high school quarterback ganking his proposal with a "What's up, turd?"), which continued the series' motif of "Ted Mosby is unstuck in time." And I can certainly relate to the existential dilemma of wanting the woman I love to love the same stuff I love (see above "Hoosiers" reference, or my semi-successful attempt to get her to read "Astro City").

Overall, though, it ran into a couple of problems. First, Josh Radnor is always in danger of pushing Ted's neediness into unpleasant territory, and he came right up to the line several times here. Second, there's that matter of whether or not Stella is The Mother. I like Sarah Chalke a lot, and think she and Radnor work well together, but the way the show is structured makes it harder and harder to play the Is She Or Isn't She? game with Ted's girlfriends, particularly one where he's in this deep. I spend too much time trying to parse Future Ted's narration and not enough on just engaging with the story.

But any episode with Barney swooning over a woman while still retaining his essential Barney-ness is a keeper, regardless of the A-story. Every time I feared that they were making him soft, another hot babe would wander through his apartment while he was whining about feelings to Lily, culminiating in the brilliant, rom-com-spoofing "Bimbos make me want to be a better man" monologue. Neil Patrick Harris had a lot of great moments throughout, whether it was him swaying his legs around the kitchen like a lovestruck 12-year-old girl or his high-pitched, indecipherable voicemail message to Robin. ("You left a voice, but it wasn't male.")

So here's the question: where do you want this story to go? NPH and Cobie Smulders have great chemistry, and I think the writers have shown here that they can stay true to Barney while placing him in a more sincere storyline, but how does this all work from Robin's end? How does Robin get with Barney without hating herself or looking like a fool?

Some other thoughts on "Do I Know You?":

• Outside of the running gags about Canada and her love of guns, the writers don't always know what to do to make Robin funny, but her increasing dismay at those awful news teases ("Stay tuned for the full... scoop... Really?!?") was hilarious.

• Craig Thomas lied to me. No full frontal nudity for Jason Segel, and no crotch-grabbing for Alyson Hannigan. Sigh...

• They may have been neither nude nor gender-bending, but Segel and Hannigan did some good work in support of the others, before getting the final punchline of the episode, with Lily swapping out "rhinoceros" for "chimichanga" for her "We must have sex right now" code word. And speaking of which, Barney's explanation of the time-to-word ratio necessary to place booty call was the most quintessentially "HIMYM" moment of the whole episode.

• Is the Carter the Great poster in Barney's apartment new? I know we haven't been there very often, but I don't remember seeing it before. I'd like to think that Barney was a fan of Glen David Gold's wonderful novel "Carter Beats the Devil," but my guess is it's just a production design hat tip to Carter Bays.

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

Busy season question: What to do with 'Friday Night Lights'?

One topic that didn't occur to me until I opened my mail today and found a copy of the "Friday Night Lights" season 3 premiere (which debuts a week from Wednesday on DirecTV): how do people want me to cover this season? Try to write about each episode not long after it airs on DirecTV, or wait until it's available to the world on NBC starting in February?

I can't promise that I'd even have time to do the show justice during the DirecTV run (not that post-February would necessarily be any slower), and I'm not sure how comfortable I am doing regular, spoiler-laden write-ups for a show that's only available (legally, anyway) to a very small percentage of my readership, but I figured I'd open the floor for debate. Thoughts? Click here to read the full post

The busy season begins

Lost in my Emmy coverage and my other two columns today was the obvious mention that the 2008-9 TV season officially begins tonight. Obviously, with a bunch of Fox and CW already having debuted, the official start date -- which is reflected by Nielsen and the broadcast networks -- seems more arbitrary than ever, but that's the way the Big 3 still roll, and so get ready for a lot more original TV starting tonight.

Some ramblings about exactly how I intend to cover all of this on the blog coming up just as soon as I find out if I have a long-lost identical twin out there...

If you're relatively new to the blog, some things to keep in mind about the season:

• I watch an awful lot of TV, and do my best to write about everything I watch, but there are only so many hours in my day. This means I may not get to certain shows until several days after they air, or that I simply may skip over some shows on some weeks, either because I have nothing to say or because it took me so long to get around to watching them that it now seems pointless. Dropping into a "House" review post to complain, "Where's the Sarah Connor post?" isn't helpful; either it'll go up at some point or it won't.

• Along similar time-management lines, prepare yourself for a mixture of individual show reviews and multi-show grab-bags. I know the latter aren't as popular, but they're the only way I can realistically cover as many shows as I do, particularly the ones I don't feel as strongly about but can compose two or three sentences on.

• Both of those points being made, there are certain shows I will not miss an episode on, and that I will always review separately from other shows. "Mad Men" is my biggest time-suck of the moment, but I'm going to endeavor to do individual posts for most of my favorites -- "How I Met Your Mother," "The Shield," "Dexter," "The Office," "30 Rock," "Chuck" -- and whenever I get episodes in advance (as I do regularly for "Shield" and "Mad Men"), I'll do my best to have a review ready to go as soon as the episode finishes airing. I can't always be that fast -- and I fear the "Mad Men" reviews in particular may get slowed down for these last few season 2 episodes, now that I have so many other things to write about, in the blog and for The Star-Ledger -- but I'll do what I can.

• I'm going to be covering a much larger number of shows over the next few weeks than I will by late October or November. For the most part, life's too short to waste it on shows I don't like -- though I'll make exceptions for shows where the nature of the badness fascinates me, like "Studio 60" or middle-period "Grey's Anatomy" -- and I'll also eventually be ditching certain shows if the timeslot competition is too rough. (I suspect "Sarah Connor" is in trouble around here once I run out of "Chuck"s I've seen in advance, in fact.)

• So, just as an example, I'll have a "HIMYM" post up tonight at 9 because I've already seen the premiere, I'll hopefully have a "Heroes" premiere review done sometime tomorrow morning, and I'll also have a link tomorrow to my review of "The Mentalist," which you can then use to comment on the pilot after it airs tomorrow night. "House" and "The shield" I've already seen and will hopefully get done for end-of-show time, while I'll hit "Sarah Connor Chronicles" and "Fringe" whenever the time/feeling strikes me. And I realize I still haven't even watched last night's "Skins." Sigh...

(I wanted to put a photo from the actual "What's Alan Watching?" pilot at the top of this post, but I couldn't find one, so I went with Corin Nemec's second-greatest role.) Click here to read the full post

Sepinwall on TV: 'Heroes' season 3 review

In today's final column, I review the first half of the two-hour "Heroes" season three premiere:

The first hour of "Heroes" season three is more exciting than most of the 11 hours of "Heroes" season two combined. Considering that "Heroes" had one of the worst sophmore slumps of all time, though, that's not a high compliment. "Heroes" may be better this year than it was last year, but it's still a very dumb show that just wants you to think it's smart.

Perhaps the second hour (which NBC said they didn't send out for review because Kring wanted to keep it "sacred" for the fans) will be better, but so long as Mohinder and Maya and a number of other people and things are around, I doubt it. "Heroes" is what it is -- just interesting enough to make me watch so I can complain about it, I guess.

(Speaking of which, since I still need to watch that second hour, please wait until after I've done a spoiler post -- likely sometime tomorrow -- before commenting specifically on the episode. And that includes anyone who happened to be there for the Comic-Con screening.) Click here to read the full post

Sepinwall on TV: 'Worst Week' review

In the second of today's three columns (counting the Emmy recap), I review CBS' "Worst Week," which I found mostly amusing in the pilot, but which I wonder about the longevity of. Mostly, the column's an excuse for me to muse on the foreign adaptations trend that's so big this season.

As with the pilots for most new shows, I'm not going to do a separate post for after the episode airs, so feel free to discuss it here tonight. Click here to read the full post

Sepinwall on TV: Recapping the Emmys

My Emmy column is already up at NJ.com. By and large, I was pleased with the results, particularly in the final hour, and extremely displeased with the hosts. Click here to read the full post

Entourage, "The All Out Fall Out": Happy Slapsgiving, Ari

Quick spoilers for tonight's "Entourage" coming up just as soon as I start saving for my daughter's own Sweet 16...

Much more than the previous two episodes, this one gave me some faint hope that "Entourage" might be at least decent again. Several things I liked, some big, some little:

• Vince has to literally sing for his supper (and his rent, etc.) with the humiliating Sweet 16 gig that almost turns out okay until Drama pukes on the cake. If they're going to treat Vince's career struggles as something he can't easily charm his way out of, then they need to up the mortification beyond the notion (from last week) that some hot famous girl would try to pawn him off on her slightly less hot and un-famous friend. Nice use of Kevin Pollak and Fran Drescher as the oblivious parents who are spoiling their daughter rotten.

• Ari's prank war with Adam Davies was actually funny, particularly once Ari went nuclear and slapped Davies in front of his entire agency. Mrs. Ari is a good character, but last season the writers tried too hard to get her involved, which took Ari away from the world where he works best. The prank was was crass and juvenile, but it was very Ari.

• Also funny? TI wanting to star in "Black Sabbath" -- about a black man who has an affair with an older Jewish woman -- with Meryl Streep.

• On a less important note, I liked that there were paparazzi following the guys as they were on their way to a meeting with Vince's business manager. The paps would be an everyday fact of life for a guy like Vince, and yet this show that prides itself on verisimilitude above all else has almost never acknowledged this annoying side of being a celebrity. They didn't need to do a paparazzi-fueled story (and they didn't), but simply showing them in action was a welcome touch.

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

Sepinwall on TV: Handicapping the Emmys

In today's column, I make my usual misguided attempt to predict who will win the Emmys, along with saying who I want to see win.

Feel free to use this post to discuss the show and the awards as they go along. I'll drop in to kibbitz when I have time during the telecast, but my primary focus is to get two different columns (one for the early edition, one for all the others) done for tomorrow's paper. I should have the final version posted by around 11:30 tonight. Click here to read the full post

That old ballpark of mine

Warning: This post will be completely, 100% not about television and completely, 100% about baseball -- specifically, a certain love-em-or-hate-em team that wears pinstriped uniforms and plays in the Bronx. If that subject -- and a length that even I admit is self-indulgent given the subject matter -- doesn't interest you, please don't click through to read the full post. That is all.

You might have missed it -- I'm not sure how, exactly -- but Yankee Stadium is closing. Barring a total miracle in which this year's underachieving squad makes the playoffs, tomorrow night's game will be the last ever in The House That Ruth Built, which will make way next season for a bigger, fancier, vastly more expensive joint across the street.

I recognize that the post-renovation Stadium (the only one I've ever known) bears only a geographic resemblance to the one where Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio and Mantle played, and even then not entirely. (As Tom Verducci points out in his brilliant first-person account of the life of the Stadium, they moved home plate forward 10-20 feet in the renovation, so Reggie and Bernie batted in a different spot than the Babe and the Mick.) I recognize that it's an ugly concrete bowl, that it's cramped and crumbling and for the most part lacking character beyond the history itself. (Also, it had great views even from the cheap seats, something that you can't necessarily say about the new colossus.)

But, again, it's the only version of the Stadium I've ever known, as I was born a few weeks after the team played their last game in the original version. Even if you want to discount all the amazing sports history that went on their pre-renovation (and pre-me), it's an awe-inspiring place. I was lucky enough to go there a lot as a kid, as my dad's company had box seats that he had access to a few times each season, and there are few sights that still fill me with as pure a joy as what I feel when I step out of the ugly gray concourse and get a look at that field.

All the pundits have been sharing their own Stadium memories (the great Bronx Banter has a bunch from fans and pros alike; scroll down the side rail for the "Lasting Yankee Stadium Memories" list o' links), and I'm going to briefly (your definition of "briefly" may vary) share three, in chronological order:

August 24, 1992: I was a few weeks away from leaving for college, and me and my best friend Mike (with whom I had shared plenty of other Stadium memories I won't bore you with here) decided we had to take in one last game together before I was gone. This was the tail end of the bad years, those godawful seasons when Mel Hall and Danny Tartabull were what passed for our power hitters, when Andy Stankiewicz was a legitimate candidate to be our token All-Star, when Gene Michael was still rebuilding the farm system on the sly while Boss George served out one of his "lifetime" suspensions from the game. One of the few alleged rays of light were a pair of pitching prospects named Sam Militello and Bob Wickman who were going to liberate us from the days of staff "aces" like Andy Hawkins and Dave LaPoint.

Militello had already pitched in three games, and Wickman's debut was that night, so Mike and I drove to the Bronx hoping to get a ticket. Again, these were the bad ol' days, when no one but the die-hards actually wanted to pay to see the team, and so when we strolled up a few minutes before game time, a very desperate scalper offered us a pair of field box seats for 20 bucks apiece. We gladly paid, went inside, and discovered they were directly behind home plate, five rows back. Best seats I ever had for a sporting event, and though Wickman wasn't a factor in the end (Yanks won a 9-8 slugfest with a 4-run 8th inning), Mike and I spent the entire time marveling at how easily we could make out the ball coming out of the pitchers' hands, how loud the crack of the bat was, and how close we were to the spot where Lou Gehrig gave the "luckiest man on the face of the Earth" speech. Great night, even though Militello blew his arm out the next season and Wickman became a journeyman reliever, mostly for other teams.

October 26, 1996: Because of when I was born, I barely even remember the Reggie Jackson-led mini-dynasty of the late '70s. My mom was a huge fan, as was one of my sisters -- who got a guest editorial published in the Sunday New York Times sports section during that period, no doubt inspiring me to want to one-up her in the newspaper department -- and they passed that love down to me. But, again, most of my childhood was spent watching mediocre to outright bad Yankee teams that were micro-managed by the Boss.

Now, I recognize that a gap of 18 years between championships must seem like nothing to a fan of the Pirates or the Royals or the Cubs, but the bulk of the Steinbrenner era was so depressing that I was starting to convince myself I would never see a Yankee championship team (that I would remember) in my lifetime. Then came the start of the Joe Torre years, and specifically then came Game 6 of the '96 World Series.

I went with my dad, my mom (who had a knack for befriending people in the ticket office), and one of the nuns at the Catholic women's college where my mom teaches. The nun was from an order that doesn't require an obvious uniform, and so we spent the first few innings listening to four guys behind us cursing a blue streak about how impossible it was going to be for the Yankees to get a hit off of Greg Maddux. Finally, my dad stood up and very politely told the one behind him that they were cursing near a Sister, and they clammed right up.

Maddux was tough that night, but he wasn't unhittable, and when Joe freakin' Girardi hit a triple in the bottom of the third to knock in Paul O'Neill, the Stadium shook. I have never in all my life -- not at the end of this game, when the Yankees had won the title and Wade Boggs was circling the field on horseback, not at the end of the third and final game I'm going to discuss here, not ever -- felt anything like the vibrations in my chest that I felt as the place rocked from all the cheers. It was like 18 years of tension, multiplied by those first two games of the Series when it looked like the Yanks had no business playing with the Braves, were being released all at once. The rest of the game wasn't a formality, but when Joltin' Joe Girardi-O hit that triple, we all knew the drought was over. Everyone was hugging everyone else, and the guys in the row behind us were especially eager to hug the Sister.

That was also the last ballgame I ever saw with my dad.

October 31/November 1, 2001: This one you don't really need me to describe. It was a few weeks after 9/11, the Mr. November game, part of what would have been the most magical Yankee post-season run of all time if Mariano hadn't thrown the ball into the outfield in Game 7. So I'll just tell you a little story from my perspective.

I was there with my mom (resourceful as always with the ticket office) and some of her friends, seated in the Loge section, and after the Diamondbacks scored two runs in the top of the 8th and the Yanks couldn't do anything in the bottom half of the inning against poor, doomed Byung-Hyun Kim, my mom and her friends left so they could watch the last inning in seats much closer to the exit nearest the parking lot. I was taking the train, so I stayed where I was, but when Jeter grounded out trying to bunt his way on to make the first out, I got up and started moving towards the back of my section so I could make a quick getaway when they inevitably lost. I was walking backwards, two rows from the back of the section, when O'Neill got on with a single to left, and I froze, superstitious as hell and not wanting to jinx what seemed like a good spot. Bernie struck out, but I stayed where I was, and then Tino Martinez rewarded my faith by depositing a home run in the right field seats. I swear to you I did not move an inch during the break between innings, during Mariano's scoreless top of the 10th, during Brosius and Soriano's flyouts, or until the ball left Jeter's bat and the place went berserk.

I don't really remember moving my position, or leaving the Stadium at all, but the next thing I knew, I was on a packed D train car heading back into Manhattan. We were all staring at each other, total strangers, not sure what to say or how to react to having been present for one of those nights when the ghosts came out and Curt Schilling's favorite strippers, Mystique and Aura, made their presence felt. Finally, one guy broke the silence and put things about Jeter's accomplishment into perspective:

"It's not fair," he said. "Like that guy doesn't already get laid enough." Click here to read the full post

"Double meat, sir, does not give you license to go on auto-pilot and text your friends about Hoobastank!"

Been otherwise occupied today with Emmy preview stuff (story to run Sunday morning) and the first wave of reviews for next week, but my friend Phil sent me a link to this very amusing YouTube clip: Keith Olbermann (or an incredible facsimile) goes to Subway. Click here to read the full post

Burn Notice, "Good Soldier": Ring of Jesus fire

Spoilers for the "Burn Notice" "summer finale" -- or mid-season finale, or whatever you want to call the show's last episode of 2008 -- coming up just as soon as I go for a swim...

Basic cable scheduling frustrates me sometimes. I get that, for the most part, there are only going to be 13 episodes of a show per year, and that cable channels want to spread out their best assets over as long a time-frame as possible. And I get that "Burn Notice" might start to seem less essential in a week or two, once the broadcast season has kicked into gear and there are more substantive scripted dramas back on the air. (Though, to be frank, I'd easily take this show over any of the Thursday at 10 competition on the networks, barring a miraculous new pilot for "Life on Mars.") But dammit, the show had picked up such great momentum over these past 9 episodes -- and especially over the last handful -- that I don't want to wait until January or later for the next four.

I could also do without the Michael-in-jeopardy cliffhanger. We all know he's going to survive, and we even basically know how (he jumped before the bomb went off), so it likely won't even be an imaginative resolution. It's just false danger to make us more eager for the next episode, when the show has been so strong of late that the only thing I need to feel eager for the next episode is my awareness that it exists.

That said, "Good Soldier" was another terrific episode right until the producers had to play along with USA's scheduling shenanigans.

My brain tends to turn off during the more expository passages explaining Michael's case of the week, so I didn't follow all the details involving the kidnapping ring, but Jeffrey Donovan did his usual superlative job getting into one of Michael's cover identities, both as the drunk barely hanging on and then as the sober, born-again bad-ass who can quote scripture even as he's taking a shotgun to your car. You could see Fi falling in love with him all over again as he delivered that monologue to the bad guy, and you could see why. The man (either Donovan or Michael) is very good at what he does.

Minor nitpicking: more than most weeks, this episode had me wondering how Michael stays off the radar of local law enforcement. Not only does he slowly shoot up a car in broad daylight at a busy location, but he also leaves a whole lot of fingerprints in a place he knows is being set up as a sniper's nest.

Or is that latter bit part of Carla's plan? Has she been setting up Michael all along to be the patsy for whatever assassination she's planning? We've been assuming that Carla has underestimated Michael, let her guard down enough to let him and Sam and Fi gather all this intel on her operation. But what if she and what appears to be a very large and powerful organization have been tracking Team Westen's every move and tailoring their own scheme accordingly?

Tricia Helfer hasn't appeared much so far this season -- two full episodes, plus brief cameos (voice or otherwise) in a couple of others -- but I love watching her and Donovan bounce off each other, each one absolutely convinced they're playing the other. Much of the appeal of "Burn Notice" is in the way that Michael always has an answer for every situation, but it's also interesting to occasionally come upon a scenario where he doesn't have all the angles covered.

Like I said last week, "Burn Notice" has gone from amusing diversion to a show that has a serious shot at making my Top 10 list this year. Hurry back, you crazy spy show.

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

It's always wrong at 'It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia'

"It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia," a show I wax and wane on, is back tonight on FX with a pair of episodes from 10 to 11.

I've seen both episodes, and the first one (hunting other humans, cannibalism) is better than the second (the gas crisis, water-boarding), in that usually uneven (and always offensive) "Always Sunny" way. I'm not sure how often, if at all, I'll write about the show during the season, but I know it has fans around these parts, so over at NJ.com I've embedded my two favorite moments in the show's history: Charlie's original compositions of "Night Man" and "Day Man."

Feel free to talk about the episodes here after they air. Click here to read the full post

Sons of Anarchy, "Fun Town": The Dutch-man cometh

Spoilers for episode three of "Sons of Anarchy" coming up just as soon as I put on an industrial-strength cup...

"Fun Town" shows that Kurt Sutter not only borrowed the frenetic plotting of "The Shield," but that show's tendency for "it's so wrong" wince-inducing scenes and stories. I had to look away for a good portion of the scene with the captured rapist, because even though I felt confident the dad wouldn't go through with it, I also felt reasonably confident that Clay would.

Still more "Shield" parallels: like Vic Mackey, Clay justifies his crimes as being in service to the greater good. He sees the gun-running as financing the Sam Cro lifestyle, which in turn protects the quaint lifestyle of Charming. In reality, both men are largely hypocrites out for personal gain and the inflation of their own egos -- each is convinced their town can't survive without them -- but it makes for a pretty bit of self-rationalization.

And, of course, we get the first appearance by Jay "Dutch" Karnes as Tara's stalker ex-boyfriend, who conveniently happens to be an agent for the one branch of the government that Sam Cro fears most of all: the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. How much hell do you think he's going to unleash on Jax as part of his crazy attempt to win Tara back? And how badly do you think Jax is going to get hurt when Clay realizes this is all because of the young prince's ex-girlfriend?

I still, unfortunately, don't find Jax to be that compelling a central character, but there are enough interesting things going on that I'm going to stick for a while.

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

Meditations on an emergency

While I try to distract myself from the growing possibility that my newspaper might cease to exist by January, let's take a look at some notable recent developments in that magical place we call TV land...

• TNT has renewed both "Raising the Bar" and "Saving Grace." While the press release about the renewals noted that "Raising" is averaging 5.5 million viewers per episode three weeks into the series, that's factoring in the basic cable record debut audience of 7.7 million viewers. The most recent episode averaged about 4.2 million.

• In other quick renewal news, HBO has ordered another season of "True Blood" after only two episodes have aired. The second episode drew about 1.8 million viewers, which was up considerably from the premiere (second item), but is still way down from the glory years HBO shows. (Insert obligatory disclaimer about how "Sopranos" and "Sex and the City" began in a universe without multiplexed HBO channels, On Demand, DVRs, etc., where virtually everyone watched each episode when it first aired.)

• Not surprisingly, ratings for "Fringe" were way up with "House" as a lead-in: from 9 million viewers last week to more than 13 million last night, retaining 92 percent of the "House" audience.Some of that retention is fake -- as people complained about, "House" ran a couple of minutes past 9, which artificially inflates the average of that first half-hour, but retention from 9 to 9:30 was still at about 90 percent. Even if you assume that all of the 9-9:30 number is a result of "House" running long, and that the 9:30-10 number is the true audience, "Fringe" still retained 83 percent of the people who were watching "House." You have to essentially consider this the real series premiere, based on the additional sampling, so we won't know for another week or two how many people intend to stick around for a while.

• Entertainment Weekly says that the CW has approached the reps for three of the "90210" actresses -- Shenae Grimes, Jessica Stroup and AnnaLynne McCord -- about packing a few pounds onto their skeletal frames. I've been reluctant to say much about this in my reviews of the new show, but nearly everyone who comments on the show, either here or elsewhere, can't help but bring it up. As with Calista and Lara Flynn Boyle at the height of the David E. Kelley era of dominance in the late '90s, it's impossible to not notice it, unfortunately.

• Speaking of "90210," week three ratings were down to 3.3 million viewers, which is decent by the CW's low standards, but below Monday night's best-ever "Gossip Girl" numbers of 3.7 million. The goal for the CW this year was to translate the "Gossip Girl" buzz into actual viewership, and to then build on that show's audience with "90210," which on paper would combine teen viewers and nostalgic 20 and 30somethings. Phase one looks like a success; phase two, we'll see.

(Many links courtesy of the invaluable TV Tattle.)

And now back to watching revised pilots and season premieres (and trying not to pay attention to the Recent Unpleasantness here). Click here to read the full post

90210, "The Bubble": The dad that dare not speak its name

Spoilers for last night's "90210" coming up just as soon as I apologize with cookies...

Not sure how much longer the nostalgia's going to carry me with this one. (Though if they promise to use a New Pornographers song on the soundtrack every week, I could be persuaded to stick around a while. I'm a sucker for those wacky Canadian supergroupers.) There are interesting or amusing moments, like Ethan having an autistic older brother or Tabitha belting out that "Spring Awakening" song, but overall the level of dramatic tension is too low. Dixon's money problems sort themselves out easily, Annie wins back whatsisface with some snicker doodles, and even the much-promo'ed Kelly/Brenda argument turns out to be much ado about nothing, since Brenda did nothing wrong. The only ongoing bad situation is with Naomi's cheating dad, but AnnaLynne McCord is so obviously the weakest link in the cast that I don't care.

As for the (apparent) revelation that Dylan is Kelly's baby daddy... eh. It's really the only one that makes sense, but Luke Perry's made it pretty clear he has no interest in revisiting the role. And after all the awkward pronoun-gaming in this episode and previous ones, the actual reveal felt perfunctory.

What did everybody else think? And am I the only one who thinks Joe E. Tata seems really bored with what little they're giving him to do? Click here to read the full post

The Shield, "Money Shot": It's my life in a box!

Spoilers for "The Shield" season seven, episode three, coming up just as soon as I take a midterm...

"We all had choices once, and we made them, and now we have to live with them." -Ronnie

Though Vic and Shane are still in the middle of the Armenian mess, "Money Shot" was significantly stronger than the previous two episodes because it focused much more on the characters and how this ever-spiraling fiasco is destroying their relationships with one another.

Vic and Shane were already estranged, and it's a sign of Shane's fear and delusions that he actually thinks he can win back Vic's trust. But their mission to hijack the confiscated guns gave Vic a front row seat to watch the monster he created. Vic is an awful man in so many ways, but there are some lines he simply won't cross -- lines that Shane barely even notices before he leaps to the other side. Vic might kill a cop who's trying to investigate him, but he wouldn't murder a friend who could potentially turn rat to save himself. Vic might help gangbangers get business done, or get over on rival gangs, but he won't put a massive arsenal in the hands of the Armenians without having the first idea what they'd do with them. Shane doesn't see those distinctions, which makes him less of a hypocrite than Vic, but also a much scarier human being.

But it's Ronnie who really drives home how bad things have gotten. While Vic and Shane are busy trying to save their own skins and find a way to appease the Armenians, Ronnie has to do actual police work short-handed, and he literally gets bitten for it. Ronnie's the Strike Team's thinker, and he's not as tied into this weird father-son dynamic between Vic and Shane, and so he can step back and see that there is no way this ends well. As he puts it to Vic at episode's end (in a line I've already quoted in a few other pieces on this season), "Jesus, Vic, everything we do to get out of this s--t just drags us down deeper."

It's always been this way; Vic just doesn't want to see it, because it gets in the way of his own personal narrative as the good cop who's had to make a few bad choices for the greater good. But if he can't step back and see the situation with Ronnie's clear eyes, his pride's going to destroy all of them.

Some other thoughts on "Money Shot":

• After the experience with the money train cash and other shenanigans with the "retirement fund," how could Vic have not anticipated Aceveda snatching up the blackmail box at the first opportunity?

• Speaking of blinding oneself to the truth, how many times does Corrine need to witness Vic with the kids -- in this case, getting way too rough and loud with Cassidy (though Cassidy deserved some kind of chewing-out) -- before she realizes he shouldn't be in their lives any more? I know she tried running away once and failed, and that Vic is a hard man to keep away, and that Corrine is overwhelmed and not doing such a hot job of parenting herself, but so many of their problems -- including Cassidy's recent behavior -- are caused by Vic.

• Dutch gets yet another case with an unexpected sexual twist, but what was most interesting here was seeing Billings go from apathetic to dedicated once the particulars started to come out. He may be lazy 90 percent of the time, but he's not stupid and he has his hot-buttons, and when one of those gets pushed, he can be a useful cop.

• I also loved watching Dutch successfully play Dani and Claudette -- two women who have both made him look very foolish at various points in the series -- into helping each other with their respective weaknesses. A nice growth moment for the Dutch-man.

• Another curtain call of sorts, as Axl the granny porn magnate from last season's premiere returns and once again gets entangled with Julien, Tina and Claudette. His previous appearance is one of many "Shield" stories I'm going to wish I could scrub from my brain.

• Another returning character: Burnout, whose car Vic borrowed for the gun scam, and whom I don't remember from season five's "Man Inside."

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

Fringe, "The Same Old Story": Lather, rinse, repeat

Spoilers for episode two of "Fringe" coming up just as soon as I get some cocaine...

Pardon me while I pull on my water wings to avoid drowning in the sea of exposition -- much of it designed for the benefit of people who missed the pilot -- that was the first 10 or so minutes of "The Same Old Story."

There's a school of thought in the TV business that says you more or less repeat your pilot with the next five or six episodes. That way, if someone puts on a new show for the first time a month into the season, they won't be lost and get to see the things that in theory made the pilot so strong. But "The Same Old Story" took that concept to the extreme. Between the mediocre Comic-Con reception and critical buzz, plus Fox's curious decision to premiere the show without an established lead-in, someone at the network obviously realized that this episode (airing after "House") would have a much bigger audience than the pilot, and that they had better be ready to hold the new audience's hands for a while.

But good lord was all the re-exposition clunky. First we got the scene with Broyles recapping the events of the pilot for the benefit of Blair Brown and company, which was so awkward that it couldn't even be saved by the revelation that Olivia's team isn't the first one that's tried to investigate The Pattern. Then came Walter reminding us all that he spent 17 years in a mental hospital -- and the writers using Walter's faulty memory to explain again about the Harvard basement lab -- and finally the low point, when Peter offered to go to the crime scene because, "My limited stint at MIT did teach me something."

Yikes!

Once we got past the Television Without Pity portion of the hour, the episode was... well, roughly on par in quality with the pilot. Which is to say, it was occasionally creepy, but not creepy enough, and featured some amusing banter and non-sequiturs between Walter and Peter ("Do you have any cocaine?") that won't be enough by itself to keep me around longer. JJ Abrams has said that the way he wants to distinguish "Fringe" from "Alias" is by giving the audience a complete experience with each episode, such that if you don't watch every week or don't care about The Pattern, you're still getting an entertaining stand-alone story. And so far, the stand-alones haven't been that entertaining.

Maybe the secret of Peter's medical history (is he a clone?) or Broyles' reason for sending Olivia to the storage facility or Blair Brown's true motives will be interesting down the road, but if the weekly procedural stories don't get better in a hurry, I won't be watching long enough to find out.

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

Terminator, "Automatic for the People": Kim Kelly is my landlady

Quick spoilers for last night's "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" coming up just as soon as I talk my wife into getting us a racecar bed...

Not bad. Nothing remotely as exciting as Cameron temporarily turning evil to chase after John and Sarah, but also nothing as goofy as Shirley Manson turning into a urinal (or vice versa). This show's going to come in a distant third to "Chuck" and "HIMYM" for me in the timeslot, but that's what multiple DVRs or Hulu are for.

Couple of random thoughts:

• Hi, I'm a sci-fi nerd, and therefore care about the rules for a show that so liberally uses time travel. John and Sarah have already changed the timeline many times, and now Shirley Manson's doing the same, and yet Future John is still able to send people and intel back to help his mom and his former self. I'm not crying foul over anything they've done yet, but at some point I want Cameron or Shirley or even Derek to explain how this all works.

• Exactly how long did it take the Zack Ward character to write that much in his own blood, and wouldn't it have been smarter for him to just walk into Sarah's new house and ask, "Hey, can I borrow a pen and paper -- and maybe some first aid?"

• Also, re: Zack Ward, when you see him do you think of him as Titus' dopey kid brother, or as yellow-eyed Scut Farkus?

• Good on the producers for giving Busy Philipps something to distract her during the late stages of her pregnancy.

• Is there any way John's new girlfriend (whom I believe is a cast regular) is as normal and non-SkyNet-y as John takes her for?

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

Sepinwall on TV: 'House' season five review

In today's column, I review the first two episodes of "House" season five. Some entertaining stuff, but they still have a major overcrowding problem, one that's not helped by the arrival of the potential spin-off character (Michael Weston, pictured above with Mr. Laurie) in episode two.

I don't think I'm going to have a chance to do a separate episode review for the premiere, so feel free to comment on it here. Click here to read the full post

Mad Men: The waiting is the hardest part

Not sure what the preview for the next episode of "Mad Men" said last night, but AMC sent out a press release today saying that they're going to air a rerun this coming Sunday so fans won't have to choose between watching an original "Mad Men" and potentially watching Jon Hamm and company walk away with a hoped-for Emmy haul. Episode nine of season two will now air Sept. 28. All the remaining episodes have been pushed back a week along with that, with the finale now scheduled for Oct. 26 Click here to read the full post

Sepinwall on TV: Diane Ruggiero quits 'The Ex-List'

So remember how "The Ex-List" producer Diane Ruggiero came into her press tour session and won over the room to the point where even the guys who didn't like the show decided to give it another chance because of her? Never mind. Diane quit "The Ex-List" on Friday over creative differences, and in today's column, she goes into those differences at length. Click here to read the full post

Mad Men, "A Night to Remember": Make room for Danny

Spoilers for "Mad Men" season two, episode eight coming up just as soon as I take care of an agitator...

"There is no sin too great to bring to God. You can reconcile yourself with him and have a whole new start." -Father Gill

Confession is reportedly good for the soul, and it would be very good for several characters in "A Night to Remember" if they could bring themselves to do it. Father Gill wants Peggy to confess her sin of adultery (and whatever else happened with Pete Jr.) so she can get on with her life. Betty wants Don to fess up to the affair with Bobbie Barrett so they can have a chance of saving their marrage. Nobody wants Joan to confess anything, but she might have done herself a lot of good if she could have admitted, both to herself and to others, how much she had grown to love her fill-in job with the television department.

But all three refuse to fess up, and so Peggy's left alone and lost in the tub, Joan is sent back to her less exciting life playing lifeguard in the secretarial pool, and Don has to sleep at the office after Betty tells him not to come home.

Betty's explosion at Don has been a long time coming, at least as far back as her finding out about Don and her shrink. And the tension builds and builds through the early parts of the episode, as Betty runs herself and her horse ragged to vent some of her fury, then pathetically (and verrry slowwwwly) demolishes a rickety dining room chair (that was no doubt on the to-do list she gave to Don). But maybe the most brilliant part of Robin Veith and Mattthew Weiner's script is the misdirection they use at the dinner party. We've been waiting all episode for Betty to confront Don, and then all of a sudden Duck shows up unexpectedly at the party, surrounded by both drinks and drinkers, and so instead we hold our breath waiting for Duck to give in to peer pressure and swig a bottle of Heineken, and we temporarily forget the Betty/Don issue. Then Duck drops the proverbial straw onto the proverbial camel by chuckling over the inside joke with Don about Heineken and Betty finally has her excuse to unload on her cheating husband. (As often happens in marriage, fights about big things are usually started as fights about little things.)

If Betty's looking for honesty and contrition, she's married to the wrong man. (Well, she's married to the wrong man for all sorts of reasons, but we haven't got all week to list them.) Don will never confess his sins to Betty because he can't confess. It's not a choice; it's a pathology. He has sold himself so thoroughly on the lies he tells others that he believes them himself, which is why he always looks so thunderstruck when someone (his brother, Bert Cooper, Jimmy) reminds him of the truth. Don honestly thinks that he looks Betty in the eyes and says he loves her all the time. That's why he's so hurt and confused (and so brilliantly played, as always, by Jon Hamm) in that scene on the couch; Don really does love Betty (or has convinced himself he does), and he can't understand why she doesn't see that, even as he continually and casually does things to hurt her.

It's funny: Don hated his father so much that he patterned his life after the hobo, but he's just as deserving as the old man (if not moreso) of having the liar's mark placed on his fencepost.

Peggy, meanwhile, has started to fashion her life after Don's, and it's unclear how much of his pathology she shares. What exactly does she remember about Pete Jr.? Is she unwilling to confess to Father Gill, or is she unable? Is there a chance (as one commenter suggested a few weeks back) that Anita wasn't pregnant at the time of the hospital flashback, that this was Peggy's mind's way of explaining the existence of a baby she refused to believe she had? I don't know how much I buy into the theory, but you could tell that she wanted to tell Father Gill something before the copy machine turned off and the spell of its hum was broken.

(Question for the Catholics in the audience: is Father Gill violating the seal of confession for pushing Peggy to admit to something that Anita told him under the seal? Or is it appropriate for a priest to confront a parishoner who won't take communion? I know there was some rancor after "Three Sundays" over whether Gill had violated the seal when he gave Peggy the Easter egg "for the little one." Some people insisted he had, while others argued that we only felt that way because we knew what Anita told him, where to Peggy it could have easily seemed like he was giving her an egg for her nephew, who happened to be toddling around in front of them.)

Joan has steadfastly refused to follow Peggy's path into the "men's game" -- has repeatedly mocked Peggy about it, in fact -- but when placed in a position to temporarily step out of her traditional role, she discovers that she loves it. Yet she can't admit that to anyone, not even her doctor fiance, who seems like a nice enough guy but will make her absolutely miserable if this wedding actually happens. (She wants a life of adventure and excitement; he wants her watching TV, eating chocolate and combing the Long Island real estate section.) The success of the revamped television "department" is almost entirely Joan's doing, yet either Harry's too foolish to see that or simply can't imagine a scenario where Joan would want to take the permanent position, so he's more than happy to take Roger up on his offer to hire an outside man to do it. (Do you think Roger had any idea that Joan might like it and was doing this to stick it to her again, or could he also not imagine her wanting to continue?)

Christina Hendricks was so perfect in that moment where Harry unwittingly delivered the bad news, particularly when he asked Joan if she had the time right then to fill Danny in on the job. As Joan admits that, no, she's not busy right now, you can see her flashing back to her fiance's joke about how all she does all day is walk around and get stared at and wondering, "Is that really what I'm going to do with the rest of my life?" But Joan has been trained for far too long to play her role to the hilt, and that means swallowing her ambition and her tongue; unlike the similarly well-trained Betty, she hasn't reached her boiling point yet. She's strapped into her role a little too tightly, just like the bra-strap that left such a deep imprint on her shoulder.

Every episode of "Mad Men" is in some way a visual feast, with the fetishistic devotion to the costumes and hair and sets, but what made "A Night to Remember" so striking were the moments when the characters were out of their familiar costumes. Betty spends half the episode wearing the same increasingly wrinkled dress and ruffled hair, and when she confronts Don in the middle of the night, she's wearing a plain white robe, her face scrubbed of makeup. We see Joan dressed casually for the first time ever, in slacks and with bare feet, and the episode's closing montage features Joan and other characters stripping out of the armor that makes up their identity: Joan out of her dress, Peggy naked in the tub, and Father Gill removing his priestly vestments so he can play the guitar not as a priest, but as the man he reminded Peggy he was (and still is).

I'm still not sure how much of the character of Betty is being created by January Jones and how much by the hair, makeup and wardrobe people, but in this case, it didn't matter. Seeing Betty go from Grace Kelly to that drunken, disheveled mess told us all we needed to know about how badly Don has damaged her. By episode's end, she was looking put together again, but who knows when or if she or her marriage will be close to healed?

Some other thoughts on "A Night to Remember":

• Betty confronting Don about his adultery, and Don's reaction to that, makes it very clear that Betty did not do something similar during the 15-month gap. Nor did Betty's shrink dutifully report her suspicions to Don. There was still some kind of negotiation, based on Don's reluctance to step out early in the season and on Betty's comment in "The New Girl" about how Don promised to stop "disappearing" all the time.

• I got a kick out of how the interaction between Peggy (creative), Father Gill (accounts) and the CYO committee (the client) paralleled all the recent arguments between Don and Duck over how Duck was too willing to sell the clients' ideas to Don rather than vice versa.

• The song Father Gill is playing, by the way, is "Early in the Morning," off of folk supergroup Peter, Paul and Mary's self-titled debut album. Given the lyrics and Gill being established as a hipper-than-average priest, it seemed an appropriate choice.

• Even if you excuse Harry for missing Joan's value to the television operation, he does not come off well at all in this episode, displaying little foresight, understanding or even ambition about his new position. He wants the prestige and the higher salary, but he doesn't want to put in the work to really achieve that -- note that his big directive to Joan was his desire to leave the office by 5 every day -- and the most he takes out of Duck's lecture about the agitator/Agitator fiasco was that the Maytag people are "very sensitive to communism." Harry has in general been presented as more likable than Pete or Ken or Paul, but they all seem to be much better at their jobs.

• They're still underusing John Slattery, but his token priceless moment for the week was the amused look on his face as he introduced Crab to Duck and vice versa.

• Admit it: you all would love to watch a "Peggy Olson: Undercover Nun" spin-off.

• I don't exactly move in the same kind of 21st century social circles that the Drapers did in the early '60s, so I have never been to a dinner party remotely as formal as the one Betty throws, complete with mandatory performance by little Sally and Betty making the guests stand around the table while she goes into a detailed run-down of the themed menu. (Maybe she's been watching a lot of "Top Chef"?)

• I like that several of the cocktail napkins and other scribbled notes Betty found in Don's desk were recognizable as slogans Don cooked up earlier in the series, notably the Right Guard campaign he argued with Paul about way back in the series' second episode.

• For those wondering about the subject line, "Make Room for Daddy" was the sitcom that Bobby and Sally were watching when Jimmy's Utz ad came on the screen at the exact wrong moment for Betty. The sitcom was better (or at least longer) known as "The Danny Thomas Show," but "Make Room for Daddy" was its original title, and the one used when NBC was airing reruns from earlier seasons (which this almost certainly was, based on the age of Danny's son Rusty) in daily syndication from 1960-65.

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

Entourage & True Blood open thread, week two

As I've seen tonight's episodes of "Entourage" and "True Blood" but don't really care enough to say anything about them ("Entourage" didn't really start pleasing me until episode three), time for another post where you can just fire away with your own thoughts. Click here to read the full post

Skins, "Maxxie & Anwar": From Russia with love

Spoilers for the latest episode of "Skins" coming up just as soon as I get some firewood...

What a bizarre episode. Sort of a college spring break movie on borscht: cold and bleak and silly and strange. Every episode of "Skins" is in some way showing the kids' skewed viewpoint of events, but this one -- which featured Chris finally seducing Angie, Anwar losing his virginity (three times or more!) to the wood-choppin' Russian babe, Maxxie pulling a shotgun on the abusive husband, Tony throwing himself unsuccessfully at Maxxie, etc. -- felt almost like it was every character's (save Sid's) fantasy of what this trip to post-Soviet industrialist Russia would be like.

The Anwar/Maxxie schism anchored the fantasy stuff to a point, and I appreciated Maxxie calling Anwar on his hypocrisy. (He's against homosexuality because his religion says so, but he's not against drinking or drug use or premarital sex, all of which the Koran is also not in favor of.) It did seem odd, though, that they had been close friends for so long without it ever coming up before. Maybe they never shared a room together in the past, but Anwar's had no problem going along to the Big Gay Night Out, or in any other way being best mates with Maxxie, and only now does he voice an objection? Seemed less a result of the living quarters than of this being the first episode of the series to focus on these two.

Still, I had fun even as my eyebrows kept raising. What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

SNL: Girls who wear Tina Fey glasses

So, as expected/hoped-for, Lorne Michaels was able to talk Tina Fey into popping into the "Saturday Night Live" season premiere for the part she was born to play: Sarah Palin. If you missed the sketch last night, you can see it on Hulu and at NBC.com.

We all knew that Fey and Palin were dead ringers physically, but she also nailed Palin's Marge Gunderson accent, then left it to Amy Poehler's Hillary Clinton to rip into the notion that her supporters should now vote for McCain because he put a woman on the ticket. ("Please, ask this one about dinosaurs!") It was one of the better recent "SNL" political sketches.

I haven't watched the rest of the episode yet and may not get a chance for a while, but I imagine that the opening sketch is the one thing people will want to talk about. So, what did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

From the archives: The Sitcom Room

Ken Levine, an Emmy-winning comedy writer ("M*A*S*H," "Cheers," "The Simpsons") and friend of this blog, is hosting another installment of his weekend writing seminar, The Sitcom Room, on Nov. 15-16 in LA. (For more specifics or to register, click on the previous link.) I was lucky enough to be in LA for the inaugural Sitcom Room last summer, and wrote a column about it, which I just re-posted at NJ.com. Click here to read the full post

Burn Notice, "Double Booked": Eric Stratton, rush chairman, damn glad to meet you

After taking some time off for tennis, "Burn Notice" is back for two more weeks until going on siesta until early '09. Spoilers for tonight's episode coming up just as soon as I offer a man named Ted Nugent a thousand dollars to listen to my proposal...

Well, if they're going away for a while, at least they're going away with two really strong episodes. (USA sent out a screener of both, but I'll obviously refrain from saying anything more about next week's show.)

Let's start off with Tim Matheson, who both directed the episode and guest-starred as Michael's not-so-dead old buddy. When the hell did Matheson go and turn 60? (IMDb says nearly a year ago, actually.) He may not be as young and spritely as he was in "Animal House" (or even "Fletch"), but he can still carry himself like a man you don't want to mess with, and he was appropriately menacing and darkly funny here. The bit where he casually twirled the screwdriver in his hands was nice, but what really sold the danger was the fact that Michael -- who has an answer for any situation -- seemed scared of the guy.

Michael of course had less reason to be afraid around the hitman-hiring stepson (the latest in a long string of post-"Home Improvement" young punk roles played by Zachary Bryan), and slipped convincingly into character as a knife-wielding psycho. In some ways, "Burn Notice" is beginning to resemble the better parts of "Alias" -- not the confusing Rambaldi mythology or constant reboots, but the way it gives the leading man an opportunity to slip into another character each week before he gets to convincingly kick ass by the end.

(The shows also have strained parent-child relations in common, and this season's rehabilitation of Madline continues with the therapy session where Michael finds out his mom, not his dad, signed him into the military.)

I admire the way the "Burn Notice" team has been able to stretch their basic cable dollar, not only snagging three recognizable guest stars (including Amy Pietz as the target) when usually they have to get by with one at best, but also doing a good old-fashioned stunt with Michael jacking the garbage truck onto the back of his stolen pick-up. Not to sound like a grumpy old man who loves to talk about how everything was better in the good old days, but watching a gag like that reminds me that practical effects are often much more impressive and convincing than the CGI that's become so abundant because it's (relatively) cheap and easy to use.

Though Fiona's paramedic boyfriend turns out not to be Victor, as some people had guessed, the Carla arc progresses, and we finally get back to the key card she had him steal in her last appearance.

Good stuff. This season, "Burn Notice" has gone from amiable background noise to can't-miss viewing for me.

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

Bones, "The Man in the Outhouse": Two guys, a girl and a Thai place

Quick spoilers for last night's "Bones" coming up just as soon as I get my dive certification...

Even by the usual "Bones" mystery standards, last night's case was particularly weak, the sort of generic and dull riff on reality TV that probably every other crime procedural of the last five years has done at one point or another. And while I'll always be in the bag for Carla Gallo thanks to "Undeclared," I thought her role as the second in the revolving-door series of replacement Zachs was too broadly and repetitively written. I get that each of these people will (other than Clark) only be around for an episode and there's only so much time to devote to the role after the writers have dealt with the mystery, the Booth/Brennan interaction, etc., but I hope the future guests are more interesting.

So, since the episode was pretty much a dud outside the usual goodness involving our two leads and Dr. Sweets, here's a question for the fans: at what point, if ever, do you want to see Booth and Brennan actually get together? I'm of the belief that Unresolved Sexual Tension can, in fact, be resolved without ruining the show (see PB&J on "The Office," or the various periods when Sam and Diane were together on "Cheers"), and that certain shows in fact get irreparably harmed by trying to postpone the coupling too long ("Ed"), but I haven't been watching "Bones" long or carefully enough to have a strong opinion on this one.

What do you think? Click here to read the full post

Sons of Anarchy, "Seeds": Son of a biker man

Brief spoilers for episode two of "Sons of Anarchy" coming up just as soon as I run down to the convenience store for an axe...

This is the second and last episode I got to see in advance, and as I said in last week's review, I'm not sold yet.

In the middle of a long interview with Mo Ryan, Shawn Ryan says that Kurt Sutter (once a "Shield" writer, now this show's creator) "was always into the big, complicated, mythology stuff," and you can definitely see a lot of Vic and Shane's more convoluted antics in Jax's attempt to get the corpses removed from the explosion site without any additional bloodshed. But as I've been saying about "The Shield" the last few weeks, the big and complicated stuff works best when it's anchored to a character we really care about, and I'm not there with anyone on this show yet. There are some interesting characters, and Katey Sagal has really stood out as the villainous Gemma ("You wanna touch me, sweetheart? That make you happy?"), but Charlie Hunnam hasn't popped the way Michael Chiklis did in the first few "Shield"s, and that puts a damper on this kind of storytelling.

But there aren't any other Wednesday at 10 shows I'm addicted to (though I'll sample "Dirty Sexy Money" again when it comes back), and there are enough intriguing pieces here that I'm going to ride this out for a while longer.

In the meantime, a few random notes:

• All those references to "Sam Crow" were confusing me until I started thumbing through the typically elaborate FX press kit. It's actually SAMCRO, for "Sons of Anarchy Motorcycle Club - Redwood Original." Now if someone could just clarify the "Redwood Original" part, I'm all good to go.

• In a former life, Katey Sagal was a professional singer, and so when that cover of "Son of a Preacher Man" started, I began wondering if it was her doing the vocal. Sure enough, it's her, a recording done specifically for the episode.

• Dayton Callie! "Deadwood" may be gone (and "John from Cincinnati," too, which temporarily employed much of the "Deadwood" cast), but before this TV season's over, virtually every castmember will have a regular or recurring gig on some other show. It ain't much, but it was amusing to imagine Sheriff Unser as a distant ancestor of Charlie Utter.

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

From the archives: It's all in the title ... sequence, that is.

Somewhere through the huge list of comments for the discussion of the best TV pilots ever, someone asked if I wanted to talk about the best opening title sequences of all time. Conveniently, Matt Seitz and I teamed up(*) on just such a story five years ago, and I just posted it to NJ.com. Read and discuss. Lots of great sequences in the last few years that would no doubt be on the list (say what you want about "John From Cincinnati," but its title sequence was awesome).

(*) Though we wrote it together, and most of the better rhetorical flourishes no doubt came from Matt, I was the one who had to sit on the phone for a half-hour with the unhappy "Petticoat Junction" and "Beverly Hillbillies" fan who neither appreciated nor understood our dissing of his favorite shows. It was actually one of the more polite calls of this nature I've ever had -- no raised voices, no profanity, no invoking of deities -- and yet it went on for-fracking-ever, because the guy seemed determined not to hang up until he had convinced me of the justness of his cause. At one point -- after a crowd of copy editors had gathered around my desk, all of them wondering how long I could stay on the phone explaining over and over why I didn't think Jethro and Elly May were funny -- the guy said, mystified, "I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do here. I keep giving you all these reasons why those shows were great, and you keep saying you didn't like them." I tried to gently explain the concept of agreeing to disagree, but we were on the phone for at least another 10 minutes after that. And that is why I love my job. Click here to read the full post

The Shield, "Snitch": Number five with a bullet

Spoilers for "The Shield" season seven, episode two, coming up just as soon as I dance in my slippers...

So here's my fundamental question with this one, tied in part to my recent comments about "The Shield" at its most convoluted: Do you honestly believe, under these circumstances, that Vic would let Aramboles live?

Now, the key to Vic is that, no matter what kind of bad thing he does, he justifies it in his mind and convinces himself he's still a good cop. His body count over the life of the series is relatively low -- Terry, Guardo, Margos Dezerian, plus a few others (like Kern) by inaction -- because it would be much harder for Vic to rationalize his actions if he was killing people right and left. All three men he murdered posed threats to Vic's life and/or livelihood (Terry less so than the others, which is why I've always had a problem reconciling that murder with the way Vic has been written over the life of the series), and while Aramboles can't physically harm Vic or his family, he can sure as hell put him in the crosshairs of either Pezuela or Rezian if the truth starts to come out on how Vic and Shane are playing puppet-master in this manufactured gang war. At this stage of the game, with so much at stake and so many bad guys in a position to kill him if they get even a sliver of information, do you really think Vic would just send Aramboles south of the border and chance word getting out? Yes, Aramboles is scared now, but anything can happen in Mexico, where we've learned in the past Vic has no real reach or power.

Vic's moral compass has a tendency to point in unexpected directions at times, so I'm not going to flat-out declare his decision here to be out of character. But it was distracting enough -- especially since the far less conscience-driven Shane never suggests the more permanent solution -- that I had a hard time keeping track of the latest twists in the Armenian-Mexican "war" at the same time. I was able to follow the plot well enough in the end, but of the eight episodes I've seen of this season, "Snitch" was probably my least favorite.

Most of my issues, though, were with the arc stuff. This was a rare "Shield" hour where the episodic storylines -- Vic trying to clean up the mess made by the Top 10 list, Dutch and Billings getting on each other's nerves enough that it inspired them to close the cinderblock case -- were more entertaining than watching Vic and the strike team find a way out of the latest corner they'd painted themselves into.

In particular, I loved seeing Claudette tear into one of the junior Spook Streeters over his embrace of the worst aspects of the stereotypical gang culture. It didn't make a dent at all -- and wound up giving Claudette, who already isn't feeling well, another headache to deal with -- but stories like these are a reminder of the larger point of "The Shield." Yes, it's perversely entertaining to see Vic escape the latest trap, but the question at the heart of the series isn't "Will Vic get away with it in the end?" It's "How much power should we entrust to a man like Vic to maintain order in such a perverse and violent world?"

As Phillips puts it to Claudette, "I'm under no illusions, but a day like this one? I can live with him."

Some other thoughts on "Snitch":

• I'm glad that Michael Chiklis loves his daughter enough to want her to be on his TV show, and when Autumn first got cast as Cassidy six years ago, the part was small enough that it wasn't a big deal. But as Cass has grown in prominence -- and especially now that she's being forced to confront the truth about her old man -- I really wish there were a stronger actress playing her. Cassidy going to Billings and demanding that her father be charged with a crime is a moment that should have had a lot more bite than it did.

• "On a clear night, you can see Guardo's house from here." Ha! Even funnier if you know the blasphemous joke about Jesus on the cross. And speaking of which, I loved the old lady witness with the two sons in jail, the lesbian daughter who wouldn't give her grandchildren, and an urgent desire to see Jesus as soon as possible. One of the better throwaway expository characters I can remember the show using.

• The Al Qaeda thing eventually turned out to be an excuse for Vic to sic Olivia and her buddies at ICE on Aramboles' weapons stash. But it also reminded me of all those times on "The Wire" where the cops would go to the FBI for help with various homicidal drug lords, only to be told the feds weren't interested unless terrorism or corruption were involved. As McNulty said there and Vic more or less says here, in what way is what's being done to the civilians in these neighborhoods not terrorism?

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

Fringe, "Pilot": Hazmat suit up!

Now, I've already written about the "Fringe" pilot on two separate occasions, and so at this point all I have left is to repeat my basic points -- good but not great, Jackson and Noble's interplay is the selling point, Anna Torv is iffy, would have liked the first case to deal with fringier science -- and then open the floor up to you. As I like to say, what did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

90210, "Lucky Strike": This is not 'Nam. This is bowling. There are rules here.

Spoilers for episode three (or two, if you prefer) of "90210" coming right up. Also, feel free to comment on the "Privileged" pilot here, as I'm not going to do a separate post.

I'm glad I've been reading Rich Heldenfels' flashback reviews to the original "Beverly Hills 90210," because they reminds me just how closely the new "90210" is hewing to the original not only in terms of tone, but in its actual plots. "Lucky Strike" was a riff on the original's "Perfect Mom," where Brenda was embarrassed to have such square parents until an encounter with Kelly's coke-snorting mom Jackie convinced her to be grateful for being part of such a functional family. Not only did we get that story again, but they even brought Ann Gillespie out of semi-retirement so Jackie could serve as the cautionary tale for a new generation. Fan service, baby!

Overall, my opinion on the new show hasn't changed much. It's slightly smarter and quite a bit better-acted than the original, but otherwise it's been almost shockingly faithful to the spirit of its predecessor. And that's only going to be interesting for another week or two.

Hearing Tristan Wilds -- who, on "The Wire," played the son of a dope fiend -- give a monologue about growing up in homes where his parents and/or foster parents drank and used was an odd nod to his previous gig. On the one hand, it reminded me how great he was on "The Wire." On the other, it reminded me of what a step down in weight class this show is. (Though, to be fair, former "Wire" fans are even less the CW's target audience than hardcore "90210" 1.0 fans.)

What did everybody else think? How much longer are you going to stick with it? Click here to read the full post

Sepinwall on TV: 'Fringe' review

In today's column, I review the finished version of the "Fringe" pilot, which I was lukewarm on, though I really like John Noble and Joshua Jackson. Because an earlier version of the pilot leaked wide and far across the tubes, I'm going to ask you to keep any comments in this post as vague as possible. Anything that seems too spoiler-y to me will be deleted, regardless of the other content of the comment. I'll do a separate post to run after the pilot airs tonight, though it may wind up being an open thread. Click here to read the full post

Terminator, "Samson and Delilah": Girls in the men's room

Quick spoilers for the "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" season two premiere coming up just as soon as I find out what happened to the urinal cake...

I already said a lot about the premiere in today's column, so I'm going to do some quick bullet points on the good, the bad and the silly:

GOOD

• It is just a pleasure to watch Summer Glau and figure out what weird thing she's going to do next. On a purely physical level, there are few performances I'm enjoying more on TV these days, and seeing Cameron both physically and mentally damaged for an hour gave her a chance to do more interesting things. (And it allowed the producers to do their own small-scale version of the original "Terminator" film.)

• They gave Thomas Dekker a haircut. I don't necessarily buy him as a stronger John just yet, but at least he looks less wimpy.

• I'm not exactly sure what they're doing with Cromartie trying to subvert Agent Ellison, but I liked Ellison's reaction to Cromartie framing the actor (just shut it down to avoid more bloodshed), and anything that gives Garret Dillahunt more to do is okay in my book.

• I'm glad they let John be tough enough to let Cameron be turned off even when she was doing the fake "I love you!" bit. Step in the right direction, at least.

BAD

• I'm not sure how John refusing in the end to burn Cameron's body ties into the new hardcore version of the character. I suppose it shows he has faith where his mother doesn't, and that's what's going to make him qualified to lead humanity against the machines in what seems like a hopeless battle, but if Glau wasn't so essential to the show being good, John should've let her stay dead.

• Still not totally on board with Lena Headey, I'm sorry to say. But since they gave the parts of movie-Sarah that I found interesting to Derek, and since The Notorious BAG is still around, I guess I can live with it.

SILLY

• Shirley Manson turned into a urinal! Or, if you prefer, a urinal turned into Shirley Manson! Either way, goofy beyond belief for a show that's ordinarily as somber as it gets. Beyond that, I don't like introducing the Robert Patrick-issue T-1000's to this show's universe, or to the idea that the Terminators are themselves trying to ensure the creation of SkyNet and have control (even if it's through a doppleganger) of a massive technology company. I suppose having the machines trying a plan other than "Kill John Connor! Kill John Connor!" would make sense after John and Sarah had eluded their grasp and messed up their creation so many times in the past, but I still don't like it. The more Terminators and other time travelers you have wandering around present-day LA, the more it dilutes the concept. I know the producers have to take a long view and find a way to turn what's essentially a simple chase movie into a long-running series, but I wish this wasn't the route they chose -- especially since Manson is beyond stiff, particularly for someone playing a metal morpher.

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

Skins, "Sid": Dancing cheek to cheek

Quick spoilers for the latest episode of "Skins" coming up just as soon as I find a clean t-shirt...

Given that Sid has been one of my favorite characters to date -- and by far the character with the most combined screen time to date -- his spotlight episode was a disappointment. Or maybe it's because he had been featured so much that it was a disappointment. The Cass, Jal and Chris episodes were good because they were good, but also because they told us so much we didn't know or realize about each character. We've gotten so much Sid in the previous four episodes that I don't feel like I know him any better after last night than I did before.

I feel like I know Tony better, though, as he's gone from obnoxious user to complete bastard. And I feel like I know Michelle better, because if her self-esteem is so low that she'd take Tony back even after his latest stunt, there's no saving her anytime soon. (And Sid's a fool -- albeit a very typical teenage fool -- in thinking he would ever, ever have a shot with her.)

Not much else to say. Continued good performances from all the kids, particularly Hannah Murray as Cass, but this was the first episode of the show that felt predictable.

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

I'm not an actor, I'm a movie star!

I watched the first three episodes of the new season of "Chuck" over the weekend, and they lived up to everything Josh Schwartz promised in our interview. Very funny, much better integration of Chuck's real life and spy life, better action beats, etc.

I'll offer no spoilers, but I'll say that I really dug the second episode, "Chuck vs. the Seduction." As Schwartz said, it's their homage to "My Favorite Year," which is one of my favorite movies. And whether you're a "Chuck" fan, a comedy fan, a fan of great acting or simply a movie fan, I advise you to get yourself to your nearest DVD purveyor (brick-and-mortar or virtual) to get a copy of that film. After the jump, I'll go into a little more detail about why...

"My Favorite Year" was one of several fictionalized versions of the legendary writers' room on Sid Caesar's "Your Show of Shows," this one inspired by the experiences of Mel Brooks. (See also Carl Reiner's "The Dick Van Dyke Show" and Neil Simon's "Laughter on the 23rd Floor.") The favorite year in question is 1954. Mark-Linn Baker (whose work here inspired me to watch "Perfect Strangers" far longer than was necessary) plays Brooks stand-in Benjy Stone, the junior writer on a hit TV sketch comedy series hosted by beefy Stan "King" Kaiser (Joseph Bologna, hilariously uncouth without ever being vulgar). The special celebrity guest this week is Alan Swann, a legendary swashbuckling movie star, now a bankrupt alcoholic, who's a mix of Errol Flynn and Peter O'Toole -- and is conveniently played by O'Toole himself.

Without O'Toole, "My Favorite Year" would still be a very funny movie about the golden age of live TV comedy. Bologna is, like I said, priceless as King Kaiser, who has a generous streak tempered by the weird gifts he chooses to give. ("Tires are nice. Get him some tires. Whitewalls.") Linn-Baker has great interplay with Bill Macy (this guy, not this guy) as the show's pessimistic head writer, as well as a marvelous dinner-and-a-movie date scene with the WASP-y object of his affection. And the set piece at the apartment of Benjy's mother (Lanie Kazan), filled with a variety of Jewish caricatures that are both over-the-top and right on the mark, still makes me laugh after the 100th time I've seen it.

But with O'Toole, "My Favorite Year" becomes something special. It's still funny as hell -- no actor may have ever played drunk as hilariously as O'Toole does here, and he could have given Lucille Ball lessons in slapstick -- but it's also this wonderful meditation on the nature of heroism, real and imagined, and the magic of the movies. Again, I don't want to spoil anything -- though if you haven't seen it yet, I'd be careful about reading the comments, as anyone who has can feel free to talk about the film -- but there's a scene towards the end where Benjy demands that Swann try to live up to all those heroes he played on screen, and it's a perfect encapsulation of why entertainment matters.

Hell of a movie. Up there with "Midnight Run" among my all-time favorites for pure entertainment value every single time I watch it. And it was cool to see "Chuck" pay a little tribute to it. But we can talk more about that when the episode airs in about a month. Click here to read the full post

Sepinwall on TV: 'Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles' season two review

In the second of today's two columns, I review the second season premiere for "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles." Short version: It's better than it was last year -- or, rather, better than it was at the start of last season, and for the most part continuing with the better stuff they were doing after Brian Austin Green showed up. Not sure yet if I'll be back with a separate spoiler post for the episode, but if not, I'll bump this up around 9 p.m. and we can talk about it here. Click here to read the full post

Sepinwall on TV: 'Privileged' review

First (and shorter) of today's two columns: I review the CW's "Privileged," which was pretty decent but is also not the kind of show I'd likely watch again except during a slow viewing period, which this is about to cease being. Click here to read the full post

Mad Men, "The Gold Violin": For the man who has everything

Spoilers for "Mad Men" season two, episode seven coming up just as soon as I track down the original version of the Port Huron Statement, not the compromised second draft...

"I don't think it's supposed to be explained." -Ken Cosgrove
"I'm an artist, okay? It must mean something." -Salvatore Romano
"Maybe it doesn't. Maybe you're just supposed to experience it. Because when you look at it, you're to feel something, right. It's like looking into something very deep. You could fall in."-Ken Cosgrove

A part of me is inclined to take that exchange in Mr. Cooper's office as a meta commentary from Matt Weiner and company about how we should really view "Mad Men": not as a mystery to be dissected, one 2,000 word blog entry at a time, but as a deep emotional experience where we're supposed to simply fall in and experience it -- to paraphrase the words of the shorter Mr. Smith, to just be with it.

But if that's the case, I might as well run a photo collage every week, and where's the fun in that? So attempt to explain the unexplainable I shall continue to do.

There are three key images in "The Gold Violin," one described and two seen. The first is the violin that gives both the episode and Ken's latest short story their titles, and which Ken describes -- without irony -- as "perfect in every way -- except it couldn't make music." The second is Bert Cooper's painting, which everyone on the staff assumes says something about the old man's tastes, but is really about his bank account. The third is that long, lingering shot of the Drapers leaving their idyllic picnic getaway and casually leaving all their litter behind, in a tableau that would make Iron Eyes Cody weep if he ever found his way to Ossining.

The gold violin is aesthetically beautiful but doesn't serve the function for which it was designed. The hypnotic painting is just a means for Cooper to make some extra cash. The picnic seems so marvelous, but there's a literal trail of garbage underneath it. All throughout this episode, we see men who appear to have everything, but what they really have is either not as useful as it looks, or else there's a lot of trash lurking directly underneath.

Don's life appears to be in ascension, as he has the money to buy a top of the line Cadillac and the social clout to be placed on the board of what might be a prestigious museum. But the museum invite comes from a job where Duck Phillips did all the heavy lifting while Don fought him every step of the way, and as he shops for the car, he flashes back to his earliest days as Don Draper and we're reminded once again that his entire life is a lie.

Ken envies (at least a little) Salvatore's married life, but we all know it's a sham -- and in our first prolonged exposure to Sal's wife Kitty, we see that she at least suspects this.

Jimmy Barrett tells Don "Thanks to you, I got everything I wanted," but both men realize that he got it -- the TV show, a strengthened relationship with his sponsors at Utz, more money -- because Don is sleeping with Jimmy's wife.

"People buy things to realize their aspirations. It's the foundation of our business." -Bert Cooper

Of all the characters on "Mad Men," Don has come the closest to realizing his aspirations, and yet he hasn't realized them at all. He seems to have everything -- gorgeous wife, prestigious job, cute kids, new Coupe de Ville, etc. -- but he only occasionally enjoys any of them, in part because he knows it's as much of a lie as his name. The flashback was an opportunity for Jon Hamm to again show us how easily he can flip the switch between Don Draper and Dick Whitman (in 1952, he still hadn't perfected his new role yet), but also a reminder of his terrible secret. (As was Cooper's "Would you agree that I know a little about you?")

And it also acknowledged that there had to be more to the identity theft when we saw in season one. The real Don Draper was a successful, educated man, and an officer in the military -- there had to be someone in the world who knew and cared about the guy whose life our Don is now living. Don's life has been spinning out of control all season; is it just ennui over the life he has but doesn't really want, or is it guilt over some other dark secret in his past we're about to learn about? What exactly did he have to do to shake this woman loose without having to give up his new identity?

(And is there a chance that the 1952 blonde was the recipient of the poetry book? I was starting to worry that we wouldn't get any follow-up on that, but when this episode brought back Mr. & Mr. Smith after they were absent for five episodes, I felt reassured that the events of the season premiere actually happened.)

Whatever the reason for Don's downward spiral, it's going to get worse before it gets better now that Jimmy has confronted both Don and Betty about the affair. Along with the fate of Pete Jr., the question of what happened between the Drapers after she came back from her Thanksgiving trip in 1960 is the big mystery remaining from the 15-month gap. There have been hints here and there, like Betty saying Don promised he wouldn't "disappear" any more, but nothing beyond that. But as much as Betty hates to confront truths about her life, she can't hide from this one -- her vomiting on her blue gown was yet another of this episode's ugly blemishes on a postcard picture life. If we thought she was emasculating Don at the start of the season, what'll that relationship be like now?

Salvatore's spotlight in "The Hobo Code" was one of my favorite stories from season one, and after keeping the married Salvatore in the background (and the closet) for much of this season, his second spotlight was almost as wonderful as the first.

Sal's encounter with the gay cosmetics executive forced him to confront his sexuality, and it scared him -- a good Catholic boy who still lived with his mother -- into diving headfirst into a hetero lifestyle. But being gay is part of who Salvatore is, not something he can switch on and off through sheer willpower. And as he gets some insight into Ken Cosgrove -- part-time author and far more complex than he seems when he's (literally) pimping for clients or sexually harassing secretaries -- he can't help but feel attracted to him. He likes Kitty and feels guilty when he realizes how much he's hurting her, but I can guarantee you that he has never looked at her with the kind of ravenous expressions that he gave Ken throughout this episode. More great work from Bryan Batt, who, when given the opportunity, continues to do wonders with this character we all wanted to dismiss as a two-dimensional stereotype early in the series.

Some other thoughts on "The Gold Violin":

• What a magnificent bastard is Roger Sterling. The pretty new secretary comes crying to him about getting fired by his ex-mistress, and though he promises to take care of it, he doesn't bother to talk to Joan at all, because in any scenario, he wins. Either Joan realizes what's what and lets Jane keep her job (and therefore increases the odds of Jane having sex with him), or Joan boots her out a second time and then comes screaming to Roger, who clearly enjoys it when she's mad at him. One question: while Joan was 100 percent justified in firing Jane for that kind of insubordination, do you think she resents Jane because she didn't play the game that way when she was coming up in the steno pool, or because she played it exactly that way? My money's on the latter.

• Duck is absolutely drinking, maybe not all the time, and maybe not even in the scenes where we see him. But he's carrying himself completely differently -- far more outgoing and uninhibited than his previous appearance -- and we see him stare somewhat longingly at the wet bar after Don leaves his office. If I'm right that he's on his way out, it'll be not a minute too soon in terms of giving Roger something to do at work. Judging by how he had those sections of the newspaper spread out on his couch, he'd spent most of his day doing nothing but reading them.

• Don's the main character and therefore dominates every episode, but all the other characters fade in and out as needed. Pete's again absent (for what I assume are budgetary reasons), and Peggy's presence is minimal. But at least we see that Peggy is sticking with Joan's advice to stop dressing like a little girl. The checkerboard dress was far more stylish than anything we've ever seen her wear in the office before, while still making her look professional.

• Students for a Democratic Society, the group the Smiths' friend in Michigan belongs to, were arguably the most important organization in the New Left political movement that would gain greater prominence as the decade went along. Among the group's more famous members: Tom Hayden and Jeffrey Lebowski.

• At first, I was bothered by the fact that we haven't seen Smith & Smith since they were presumably hired after the season premiere, but then I realized that they're likely only working on this account for now, and that they would have no interest in socializing with the rest of the younger Sterling Cooper types (and vice versa). I do like how American Smith seemed unfazed by Don pointing out the hypocrisy of their working for an ad agency, and I'm damned if I can get their French New Wave-style Martinson's jingle out of my head.

• The series hasn't featured much casual anti-Semitism from the characters since the first few episodes with Rachel Menken, but Betty's "You people" comment to Jimmy -- whose real surname, Bobbie told us a few weeks back, is Bernstein -- was clearly her attempt to get out of an ugly situation with an ugly but veiled slur.

• I loved how the shot of the closing elevator doors transitioned into a shot of the Sterling Cooper building's exterior, which now resembled both the elevator and Mr. Cooper's painting. And speaking of the painting, from what little I've been able to gather about Mark Rothko in my internet travels, Cooper's belief that the painting will double in value is another sign of Sterling Cooper being behind the times, as by 1962 the art world was already moving away from Rothko and towards the pop artists.

• Another sign of the difficulty of embracing new ideas: Salvatore thinks these new disposable Pampers (which actually launched in 1961) are so expensive (at 10 cents, which would be about 68 cents in 2007 dollars) that you should be able to use them more than once, when in fact what you're paying for is the ability to not have to use them (or, more importantly, clean them) ever again.

• Interesting that Don now seems willing to offer up stories of life on the farm without prompting, at least to his family. Maybe the "We have to get you a new daddy" bonding moment he had with Bobby allowed him to let go of some small amount of paranoia about discussing that time in his life. And speaking of Bobby, my wife immediately went to the sad clown face when Bobby proudly announced that he had peed behind the tree and no one in his family even paid attention to him.

• The ABC exec's lack of interest in Bobbie's product placement concepts for "Grin and Bear It" stood in stark contrast to guys today like Ben Silverman whose primary agenda seems to be product integration, but was it accurate? There's the myth that network executives in the days before corporate synergy really only cared about programming and beating the competition, but product integration was just as important a part of television in those early days of TV as it is now, if not moreso.

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

Entourage & True Blood open thread

I don't have much to say about the first episodes of "True Blood" and "Entourage" that I didn't say in either column, but if you want to discuss either or both, fire away here. Click here to read the full post

Sepinwall on TV: 'Entourage' season five review

In today's column, I review the new season of "Entourage" -- and, surprise, surprise, I didn't hate it. It really takes until the third episode to get going comedically, and I still don't know if it's actually, you know, good (not that it ever was, really), but it's a vast improvement on season four.

As with "True Blood," I don't have much more to say about the premiere for a separate blog post, so I'll probably put up some kind of open thread on Sunday night for people to comment on both the HBO shows. Click here to read the full post

Take me to the pilots

First, apologies to Fienberg for stealing his subject line. Second, like James Poniewozik, I'm looking for an excuse to procrastinate on actual work (in this case, a "Sarah Connor Chronicles" season two review), and so I'm going to take TV Guide's bait and complain about their list of the 10 best TV show pilots ever. After the jump, I'll have the basic list (follow the link to Poniewozik's site to read author Damian Holbrook's justification for each item) followed by a lot of carping.

So, the list:

• "Lost" (ABC)
• "24" (Fox)
• "The Shield" (FX)
• "The Sopranos" (HBO)
• "30 Rock" (NBC)
• "Football Wives" (ABC, never aired)
• "Desperate Housewives" (ABC)
• "Saturday Night Live" (NBC)
• "ER" (NBC)
• "Alias" (ABC)

Okay, I should acknowledge some things up front. First, all lists like these are designed to provoke people like me to complain about them, which in turn will inspire more people to shell out for a copy of the new issue. Second, all lists like these are biased towards more recent product, partly by dint of the author's age but mostly so younger readers (or readers without long memories) won't feel left out of the discussion. And, third, this isn't technically a list of the 10 best pilots ever, as "SNL" never had a pilot by the strictest definition, and the "Desperate Housewives" and "30 Rock" premieres changed significantly between the actual pilot and what aired as the series premiere. (And in the story, Holbrook makes it clear he's referring to the aired versions.)

All that aside, several of these shows have no business being on this list, a few others are debatable at best, and there are some glaring omissions.

The "SNL" premiere/pilot/whatever bears virtually no resemblance to the series as it is today, or even to what it was by midway through that first season. "I would like to feed your fingertips to the wolverines" is funny, and Andy Kaufman's "Mighty Mouse" bit was revolutionary for the time, but most of the rest is either George Carlin monologues or musical performances.

I haven't seen the "Football Wives" pilot (with Lucy Lawless and Gabrielle Union in a remake of the UK's "Footballers Wives"), so I can't speak to its quality, but based on the title of this blog, I can think of at least one unsold (but not unaired) pilot I'd rank higher.

The "30 Rock" premiere, either with Rachel Dratch or Jane Krakowski, is funny in spots, but wildly uneven, and the show took about a half-season to come together. I would also argue that "The Sopranos" didn't become "The Sopranos" until "College," and while the "Lost" pilot is impressive, it wasn't until "Walkabout" that (for me, at least) it became an obsession.

I'd put the "ER" pilot at or near the top of the list. That thing was just as much of an astonishing technical achievement and primetime game-changer for its day as the "Lost" pilot was a decade later, and the characters (Benton and Ross in particular) were more fully-formed from the jump. Placement for "The Shield" is just about right: it's one of the classic cases of a pilot changing everything you think about an actor, a genre, a network, etc., and forcing you to watch it every week.

I've always been lukewarm on "Desperate Housewives," and I thought Jennifer Garner needed a while to grow into her role on "Alias," so that'd be out, too.

Obvious omissions: Like Poniewozik, I'd put "Freaks and Geeks" on there in a second. (When I wrote about it last summer, I said it was one of the best pilots I'd ever seen in terms of establishing the characters, the world and the tone it would use for the rest of its run.) "Arrested Development," too, especially since it's rare for a great comedy to have a great first episode. (See "Seinfeld," American "The Office," early "Simpsons," etc.) I want to say the "Cheers" pilot was great, though I may just be thinking of the opening scene where Sam cards the teenager. ("What was (Vietnam) like?" "Gross.")

The two-hour "EZ Streets" premiere was the first pilot I watched as a professional critic, and may still be the best. "Homicide" got off to a brilliant start, and Martin Sheen's entrance alone should have the "West Wing" pilot in the discussion. At least one of the two Bochco/Milch cop pilots ("Hill Street Blues" or "NYPD Blue") should be on there, both for their entertainment value and for what they meant to television in general, and if there's room for another Milch pilot, I loved the "Deadwood" opener, with Bullock hanging his prisoner under color of law and our first encounter with Al Swearengen and Wild Bill.

I was able to pry Rich Heldenfels away from his latest "Beverly Hills 90210" classic recap long enough to pick his brain, and he pointed to the first episodes of both "Mission: Impossible" and "Dragnet," both of them with elements that "24" would borrow liberally a few decades later. He also wanted me to mention "Jake's Journey" (written by and starring Graham Chapman from Monty Python) in the great unsold pilots category.

Okay, so what else am I leaving out? Or what do you think I'm throwing out that I shouldn't? Click here to read the full post

Sepinwall on TV: 'True Blood' review

In today's column, I review HBO's new Alan Ball vampire drama, "True Blood." As you'll see from following the link, I wasn't that fond of it, and doubt I'll be blogging regularly on it. (Though I may put up some kind of open thread for it and "Entourage" -- which is somewhat improved, and which I'll be reviewing for Friday -- on Sunday night.) Click here to read the full post

Get them to sign on the line that is dotted!

Absolutely tremendous profile of Alec Baldwin in The New Yorker, and I say that not just because it includes a line like "He was lean and intense, and had chest hair in which one could lose a telephone." (See above photo.)

Basically, it's 8,000+ words of Baldwin beating himself up over every decision he's made in his life, be it professional (his post-"Hunt for Red October" movie career) or personal (the "I'm gonna straighten you out!" voicemail message). More interestingly, it's also close friends and family -- including Lorne Michaels and Billy Baldwin -- being remarkably candid about how Alec needs to stop being such a miserable SOB and enjoy his life a little. It's half profile, half intervention. Click here to read the full post

Sepinwall on TV: 'Sons of Anarchy' review

Second (and considerably longer) of today's two columns: I review FX's new biker drama "Sons of Anarchy," which has some interesting ideas but hasn't quite come together in the two episodes I've seen. As with "Bones," feel free to use this post to comment on the premiere tonight. I'll likely work it into the regular blogging rotation (for at least a little while, depending on whether it grows on me), but I won't have a chance to do a separate episode entry tonight. Click here to read the full post

Sepinwall on TV: 'Bones' goes for the funnybone

I hadn't originally planned to write a column on the "Bones" season premiere, but then my actual column for the day wound up running shorter than planned, and my editor asked me for a few hundred words on another topic. Hence, a "Bones" review-let. Not much to read, but we can use this post as a place to talk about tonight's two-hour season premiere, which is a little heavy on the Clark Griswold humor at times but comes together by the end. Click here to read the full post

The Shield, "Co-Efficient of Drag": Project greenlight

Spoilers for "The Shield" final season premiere coming up just as soon as I inform my employers that, from now on, I will be giving them "The Sepinwall"...

Vic Mackey is a straight-line thinker forced to live a very crooked life. He always prefers the simplest, most straight-ahead solution to any problem -- like crashing through a fence in that famous season one foot chase, or here driving his car into the Army surplus store to save Ronnie and company -- yet the rules he breaks and the people he's crossed have led him into one convoluted lie after another, to the point where I have no idea how he keeps it all straight.

I know I'm having trouble sometimes, especially lately. As I said in my column today, the plotting on "The Shield" has always been secondary to the character material, to the point where I zone out sometimes when Vic starts briefing Claudette or the strike team on the latest problem. When the acting is great on both sides (Vic vs. Antwon, Vic vs. Kavanaugh), it's less important, but I'm not crazy about either the guy playing Rezian or the one playing Cruz Pezuela. They tend to shrink when they're on-screen with Michael Chiklis or Walton Goggins, and seem irrelevant when they're off-screen, despite the huge threat they pose. And so I start to get lost in the web of lies that Vic and Shane keep spinning. Shane's lying to Vic, Vic's lying to Shane, Vic's lying to Corrine, Shane's lying to Rezian, Vic to Pezuela, Vic and Shane to Claudette, etc., etc., and there are parts of "Co-Efficient of Drag" where my head began to hurt.

(It doesn't help, of course, that, thanks to the strike, it's been 15 months since the last episode aired. But that's why "The Shield" proudly has the longest "Previously, on..." sequences in the business.)

That disclaimer out of the way, it was still a very welcome and typically stomach-churning return to Vic Mackey's world. The external conflicts provided by the Armenians and the cartel guys aren't that enthralling, but the internal war between Vic and Shane -- and the way it's drawing in Ronnie and Corrine and others as collateral damage -- is as riveting as ever. When you open with Vic and Ronnie binding and gagging Mara and threatening to kill Shane -- all with their baby in the other room! -- you know "The Shield" ain't playing anymore. (Not that it ever did, but that opening scene kicked the whole "It's so wrong" motto to a new level.)

So now all three surviving strike teamers have committed cold-blooded murder (Vic twice), with Ronnie putting a bullet into Zadofian to cover for Vic. Admittedly, the circumstances are different here than they were with Terry or Lem or even Guardo, since Zadofian represented an ongoing physical threat to the lives of Vic and his family, but there are no innocents left in that clubhouse. Ronnie went through a door that closed and locked behind him, and unlike Vic, he can't immediately shut down the guilt.

(Around the time the show killed off Lem, some readers asked whether David Rees Snell would be up to the increased screen time, since for most of the first five seasons, Ronnie was just an extra body for the strike team. His great work in this episode -- and the episodes to come -- should answer that question once and for all.)

What gives Shawn Ryan and his team (in this case, writer Kurt Sutter and director Guy Ferland) the ability to go to such dark and sick places -- Shane chopping off Zadofian's feet, Claudette and the strike team walking along that long, long, long blood smear left by the drag murders -- is that they'll occasionally relent on the darkness with some humor and/or humanity from the likes of Dutch, Claudette and Billings. It's not that the Dutch stories are any less sick than the stuff Vic is involved in (see Dutch as cat-strangler, or Granny-porn), but they're usually less intense, and that gives me a moment to breathe and brace myself for the next Vic/Shane explosion.

I can't say enough about what an invaluable addition David Marciano has been to the show as Billings in these later seasons. Not only is he funny as hell, but partnering up Billings and Dutch automatically makes Dutch seem like less of a clown than he's sometimes in danger of becoming. When Dutch has to carry Billings, it automatically gives him more credibility. Plus, Jay Karnes is funnier when he's rolling his eyes at Billings' laziness -- "Let's just call it 'The Billings'" -- than when other people are rolling their eyes at him.

So glad to have "The Shield" back, and the season only gets better and more intense as it goes along.

Some other thoughts on "Co-Efficient of Drag":

• That's at least two years in a row that the season has opened with a perfect song choice (been a while since I saw the previous season openers): last year, we got the strike team mourning Lem cut to Johnny Cash's "I Hung My Head," and tonight we get Vic and Ronnie sending Shane a message cut to Social Distortion's thrashing "Reach for the Sky."

• I have no idea if it's an actual bit of LAPD slang or not, but I continue to be delighted by the use of "greenlit" (showbiz lingo for a studio putting a movie into production) to refer to gangs putting out hits on people. Sounds clever and disgusting at the same time, like most of the show's humor. (See also Tina's "Dutch, can you fill my box?")

• While this season looks to be carrying through a lot of plot developments from last season, Dutch and Danny's hook-up gets dispensed with very briefly (and hilariously) when Danny interrupts Dutch's attempt to talk about it by telling him about the wife-killer.

• Last season was so focused on the aftermath of Lem's murder that certain storylines got pushed to the side, like the matter of Claudette's health. Dutch asking her how she's doing and Claudette complaining about her new medication was a nice reminder that one of our main characters is struggling with lupus. (If only she had gone to see Dr. House...)

• Before the writing on this season began, Shawn Ryan went back and rewatched every episode to date so he could cherrypick certain stories and characters he wanted to revisit before the end. Some of those are going to be very obvious, while others will be more obscure. Case in point: Beth Encardi, the DA in the Dutch/Billings case, appeared a handful of times early in season four, then disappeared until tonight. Ryan apparently liked her enough -- or wanted a prosecutor character around -- that actress Anna Maria Horsford appears in a bunch of episodes this season.

• Another reminder of seasons past: When Vic tells Aramboles he could do a lot worse to him in that room, it's because that's the place where he killed Guardo.

• Olivia Murray, the blonde fed (played by Laurie Holden), comes from ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), the same agency that gave us Kevin Hiatt last season.

• Unlike Ryan, I didn't go back and revisit the whole series, so there are going to be gaps in my knowledge. Case in point: When Olivia asked Vic whether anyone had ever taken a tumble over the Barn upstairs railing, I immediately started racking my brain and couldn't come up with an answer. Has anyone ever fallen over? Vic's answer suggested that someone had; if so, I'm sure it was startling then but I'm blanking now. Been a long run.

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

90210, "We're Not in Kansas Anymore": That sounds like a pig fainting!

Spoilers for the Most. Awaited. Event. Of. The. Year. -- aka the "90210" premiere -- coming up just as soon as I remind you that a blog's true purpose is to cause problems...

Huh. Neither trainwreck nor masterpiece, the new "90210" was exactly what nobody expected it would be: remarkably faithful in tone and spirit to the original adventures of Brandon, Brenda, Scott Scanlon and company.

Outside of the oral sex gag in Ethan's SUV, it was remarkably chaste. The one kid who seems to be using drugs is heading for a Very Important Lesson. Annie (the new, slightly more self-aware Brenda) goes on the requisite date with an older guy that creates trust issues with her mom, and Theater Boy doesn't so much as make a joke about the Mile High Club. Dixon (the new, definitely less self-righteous Brandon) gets involved with a prank war storyline that not only would have been at home on the original "90210," but on any teenage show going back to the freakin' "Brady Bunch." Morals are handed down, lessons are learned, and kids get to frolic in the Pacific. And when lacrosse star Ethan dumped mean girl Naomi by declaring "I'm breaking up with us," he may as well have been quoting Kelly Taylor's infamous "I choose me!" from "90210" Coke Classic.

Producers Gabe Sachs and Jeff Judah having come out of the Judd Apatow school, this "90210" wasn't as corny as the Darren Star version. The dialogue was at times intentionally funny (Lori Laughlin's exchange with Rob Estes' ex-girlfriend, Grandma telling a story that should settle the "Quien es mas macho?: Fernando Lamas o Ricardo Montalban?" question once and for all, and the various lines about Navid's pig-owning porn magnate dad. If most of the actors, like their 1989 predecessors, looked too old for high school, they also seemed a lot more natural -- frankly, the stiffest performer in the entire two hours was Shannen Doherty. (But then, she's never been an especially relaxed actor; I practically have to fast-forward through any scene she's in in "Mallrats," even if that means missing some good Brodie Bruce moments.)

Throw in a few cameos by Nat, the occasional strains of the original "90210" score whenever Kelly was having a moment with someone, the Hannah Zuckerman Vasquez cameo and the revelation that "Silver" is, as some assumed, David and Kelly's half-sister by way of Mel and Jackie's short-lived marriage(*), and I felt surprisingly nostalgic throughout a lot of this. I don't know that I would call it good, but I could see myself tuning in again in the same way that I'll sometimes stop to watch "A-Team" reruns of "Just One of the Guys" if I stumble across them while channel surfing.

(*) Speaking of which, does anybody actually remember where the show left off with David's dad and Kelly's mom? I know they got back together at some point, but then vaguely recall them splitting again, yet Silver's story suggested they were together when she was in the eighth grade and getting a tramp stamp.

But what do you think the CW's actual intended audience made of it, if they watched at all? While the music and styles were up to date, this felt almost quaint compared to "Gossip Girl," and I'm not sure anyone who didn't grow up with the original would care at all about Hannah, or Erin, or the fact that Brenda helped Kelly with a potential boyfriend instead of trying to steal him.

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

Middleman, "The Palindrome Reversal Palindrome": I maim nine more hero-men in Miami

Spoilers for the season (and hopefully not series) finale of "The Middleman" coming up just as soon as I see how this beard of bees looks in the mirror...

Well, if you're going to go out, might as well do it all guns a'blazing. "The Palindrome Reversal Palindrome" didn't provide much in the way of closure (not that this is necessarily a show that needs closure), but it did give us "The Middleman" on something other than a shoe-string budget, and in a way that didn't sacrifice the series' homespun charms.

Mirror-Middle-verse looked relatively big and scary, but this was still an episode of "The Middleman," which meant mirror universe signifiers like Noser's lyric-quoting suddenly having life-or-death consequences, or a sexy, bikini-clad version of Ida who still talked (and sounded) like the one we knew. And it meant that, even in this dark and twisted place, the series' fundamental belief in the goodness of humanity applied, as Dubby was able to inspire the Snake Plissken-esque Mirror-Middleman to lose the beard and get back to helping people. (His reformation only goes so far, of course; he shaves and turns Ida back to normal, but he sure doesn't have a problem with Mirror-Lacey's hot pants version of the Middle-uniform. And why should he?)

(In case you're scratching your head at who Snake Plissken is, get thee to The Middleblog for the usual rundown of pop culture references, plus a tribute to Neil Levin, in whose memory the episode was dedicated. Plus, it's where I got the picture of Mirror-Middleman.)

Original recipe Middleman continues to be one of the most quotable TV characters I've ever encountered. Among my favorites this time: "My Little Pony!," "This is a sack full of eels and coat hangers," "Dang skippy" and the line about "Come puppet blood monkey fudge or terra cotta." But really, the entire Middle-verse (both versions of it) is awash with wonderful sillyness, from Ivan N. Avi getting his psychic powers after a freak accident at his bar mitzvah to the chyrons referring to the Mirror-apartment as "an evil loft in a parallel universe."

My only complaint is a minor one: they didn't do enough to change the look for Mirror-Dubby. Of course, had they changed her too much, it would have made it harder for our Dub-Dub to try and impersonate her, plus it might have distracted from what turned out to be a strong personal storyline for Wendy. After all, it's only after she's confronted with a version of herself who became so twisted by her father's disappearance that Wendy finally lets go of most of that angst and sounds truly happy when talking to her mom.

If this is it, I will purely miss this show. Such an unexpected surprise, and such a burst of concentrated joy for the entire summer of '08.

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

Sepinwall on TV: 'The Shield' final season review

Today's column goes on at greater length (while still avoiding anything really spoiler-y) the final season of "The Shield." Short version: it's really good, you guys. (Also, as FX often does, it's going to run long. My DVR has the episode in a 68-minute timeslot, so plan accordingly.) Click here to read the full post

DVR alert: America's Game (Wednesday at 9)

Just a reminder: the "America's Game" episode on the Giants-Pats Super Bowl, which I raved about last month, is going to air Wednesday night at 9 on NFL Network. Click here to read the full post

Skins, "Chris": The naked gun

Spoilers for episode four of "Skins" coming up just as soon as I find a better place to store my Pop Tarts...

"Chris" was the first episode I watched live on BBC America instead of on a screener, and it was amusing for two reasons: 1)The title card explaining exactly why they're subtitling some of the dialogue, and 2)The previews for next week's episode, which continue to push the show as some kind of giddy sex romp, when it so clearly isn't.

Yes, Chris spends large chunks of this episode either naked or tumescent, and there's a wild party sequence, but it's a terribly sad episode. From the minute Chris wakes up to find the cash envelope from his mom, it's clear something isn't right, and as the party goes on, even Chris' friends can tell he's out of control. And the nudity, though played for laughs at first, turns into an easy symbol of how much Chris has lost. Older brother, dead. Dad, wants nothing to do with him. Mom, nuts and on walkabout. House, wrecked and taken over by a hippie squatter. Clothes, no doubt being worn by the hippie. And when he starts popping the Viagra again at the end, it's no longer a joke, but a sign that, even after all this loss, after his friends and Angie warning him that he has to change, he still can't resist popping those pills, even with no girl around to use them on.

(By the way, exactly how cheap and available is Viagra in the UK? Chris is popping them like candy, and the teacher who previously occupied that dorm room doesn't even think to take his supply with him, where I'd think any American guy who needed the stuff wouldn't dream of leaving them behind.)

We've been talking about how each episode is told (mostly; see the ongoing Tony/Michelle/Sid/Cassie comedy) from the main character's point of view, and that's why the adults are so often two-dimensional (or, in the case of Chris' biological parents, not seen at all), and I thought the sequence with Chris' stepmom really brought that home. Yes, she's British and therefore genetically required to be polite at all costs (or so pop culture has taught me), but when somebody drops your baby, I would think the maternal genetic programming would override the British stuff.

And that scene led to the episode's highlight: Chris at his brother's grave (which I didn't realize was Peter's, even as I figured Peter was dead) telling Jal about the best day of his life, which would qualify as most people's worst. But Chris so clearly loved his brother -- who, from what we can see here, was the only member of the family to give a toss about him -- that Peter's moment of kindness mattered far more to Chris than his public humiliation. Chris' life is still one of constant humiliation (and still often penis-related), and now he doesn't have his brother to bail him out. Really well-played by Joe Dempsie.

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

Sepinwall on TV: 'Gossip Girl,' the CW and critical thinking

Second of today's two columns, in which I riff on the CW's innovative new approach to network/TV critic relations, vis a vis their "Gossip Girl" summer ad campaign, and the lack of screeners for their big new show, whatever it's called. Somewhere in there, I kinda sorta review "Gossip Girl" season two, but only briefly, (and in which I primarily repeat my complaint from the last time I blogged about season one). Click here to read the full post

Sepinwall on TV: 'Raising the Bar' review

First of two columns today: I review TNT's "Raising the Bar," in which Mark-Paul Gosselaar has to sport an unfortunate hairstyle while Steven Bochco repeats every move you've ever seen him make before. Click here to read the full post