Pushing Daisies, "Robbing Hood": Open thread

Made the mistake of trying to watch this week's "Pushing Daisies" last night, after a long drive home from seeing the in-laws, just as the tryptophan was starting to kick in. In my semi-conscious state, I was aware that the episode was on, but only just. Still, I did technically watch it, and wanted to give those of you who did an opportunity to talk about it. What did you think? Click here to read the full post

Sons of Anarchy: Kurt Sutter Q&A

After the jump, "Sons of Anarchy" creator Kurt Sutter talks about his original plan for Opie, explains the real reason for hiring Kim Coates to play Tig, explains how his wife/leading lady Katey Sagal inspired the direction of the show, suggests where the Dutch cat-strangling story on "The Shield" might have gone if he had been in charge, and a whole lot more (click here for my review of the season finale)...

Every new show has a learning curve in its first season. What were the things you learned making this show?

I've been abreast of your original review of the show and how some of that has changed as you've been blogging. I've learned a lot from the blogosphere on this show. It's allowed me to take a step back on the process, and I've had these conversations with John Landgraf. I think what happened initially on the show -- and I will defend the pilot, I think it's a solid pilot -- but part of the deal with the curve in terms of people coming on board the show is that it was a really different world, and it was a lot of information, and I think it took people a couple of episodes to understand that and plug into it.

We did a version of this pilot originally with Scott Glen that did not work. When we reconfigured the character of Clay and what that needed to be, the network and studio dumped another 2 million into the show, and you have this time to go, 'What else can we fix?' It was the first time for me creating the show, and I was as guilty as everyone, and you begin to overanalyze, and overnote and overwrite. If the pilot is uneven in areas, it's because, quite frankly, we probably spent a little too much time trying to fix it.

And not to lay blame -- because I love working with Landgraf and FX, they're very smart people and compared to a network show, they're a dream -- but we were on such an accelerated schedule for this show when they decided they were going to premiere it with "The Shield" instead of after it. By the second episode, there wasn't time to overanalyze, I just had to trust my storytelling instincts, and there wasn't time for me or anyone else to overanalyze it. That's really when the show hit a groove. Like anything else, there's always bumps out of the gate, even if it's in terms of talent trying to wrap their brain around a character.

We had all those glitches in those first two or three episodes. We had a director come in for episode three, Paris Barclay, and I think he was the first guy who, we had figured out how to do it by then, and Paris is such a great storyteller, and it was from that episode on that we really fell into a groove. And we all just started trusting what we were doing here, and let the stories take the show to where it was going to make it or not make it, but at least it was my vision, and I was sort of putting it out there. I've been very happy with the progression of it.

Well, were there certain things that you realized were working and things that weren't working as well as you had hoped?

It wasn't so much what was working and what wasn't working. It was some of my frustration sometimes when we were getting a lot of comparisons to "The Sopranos" out of the gate, due to the outlaw nature of the show. You know as well as I do that comparing an ad-driven show to pay TV is apples and oranges. I have to answer to a studio and a network, I have to answer to advertisers. There's a lot of restrictions about what I can and can't do. I only have 41 minutes to tell these stories, 3 minutes less than we had on "The Shield." As the shows got more expensive, we needed to sell more airtime.

What we realized is that, initially, some of the episodes were probably too ambitious in terms of how much story we were trying to tell. We just got really simple. My scripts now, Jesus, they're like 38 pages long, 39 pages long. These are really tight scripts. We'll have a really big A-story, and we may not even have a B-story, may just have a series of small beats about the supporting characters. Where on "The Shield," you could tell a big Dutch/Claudette story with a big Vic and the strike team story. We tried to do that initially (here) and realized we couldn't service it with the screen time we had. It's not that it got dumbed down, but it got simpler in terms of how we told the story. We tried not to get too ambitious.

The first episode that I think really hooked me was the one with Brian Van Holt as the guy who got kicked out of SAMCRO, and we find out just how important that tattoo is and get a sense of how their world really works.

That's a lesson I really learned on "The Shield." The first season or two of the show, it's not like we spelled everything out in terms of the areas we were going to explore, "This is how the strike team works." You try to do it organically and have it happen through stories, so you're never handing out exposition. It takes a few episodes, or sometimes a whole season, for people to really have all the pieces fall into place, and they can start to connect the dots a little bit. I think that was one of those episodes where you went, "Oh, that's how this world works."

How much of the season was plotted out from the start, and how much of it came together as you were going along?

I had a pretty good idea of what this season was going to be, only because I had so much time to think during the writers strike. I knew what I was going to do with the whole Kohn arc and Jax's deeper involvement into the club. My original plan was to kill Opie. I had a one-year deal with Ryan Hurst, we were leading down that path. The network was very squeamish about that, and rightfully so. Once Lem was killed on "The Shield," it became a different show. Not better or worse, but different. And Ryan has that great vulnerability, and he was becoming a very sympathetic character that people were plugging into. The fear was if we offed that guy from the jump, it would be hard to recover from. Plus, I love the actor. There's a lot more I can do with that character from here on.

The plan was never to kill Donna, but I knew I wanted to end this season on an exclamation point and not a question mark. We land with Jax having a definite point of view about what he feels he needs to do. To have that happen, you need to have that tragedy, which initially was going to be Opie, but we served that purpose, maybe in a more dynamic and visceral way, by killing such an innocent character.

So I take it then that Ryan Hurst is going to be around for a while?

We just signed a series regular deal with Ryan.

Were there any other characters or stories that changed significantly from your original plans?

We had reconfigured a character in the original pilot, Emilio Rivera, who plays Alvarez, the leader of the Mayans, was a character who was a club member. We reconfigured that character because we felt it was a little too confusing to have a cholo member in the club. So we reconfigured that character into Tig, and we were going out to actors, and we were starting to film the new pilot and had not cast that actor yet.

Kim Coates had come in and read, probably for two other characters on the show, we loved the actor but it never worked with any of the other characters. I met with Kim, and he wasn't initially my first choice in terms of who Tig was, but he's such a great actor, and quite frankly, he could ride a Harley. That was half the reason he got the gig. We were filming the next day! Kim was such a great actor, and I had a couple of those things early on that I had envisioned for that character that he just brought to another place. Everytime that guy comes on screen, he's just money. I used him in 12 of the 13 episodes, and he was only hired for 4.

Speaking of being able to ride a Harley, has Ron Perlman got any more comfortable with it?

God bless Ron. He was so gung ho, he took all these lessons and came in, then had a couple of near death experiences and got a little spooked. He's off doing some knights of the round table movie now, but has assured me that he's going to come back Harley-bound for season two. Once that happens, it's really hard to recover from that. We didn't push him on that.

Can you talk a little about the dichotomy in Jax as the guy who'd like to take the club in a more peaceful direction but also this guy capable of incredible violence?

One of the things I had to convince the network on was they'd never had a leading man this young. Most of their leading men are in their 40s, and the characters are very well-established in their worlds. For me, Jax had to be a man but hasn't decided what kind of man he is. He's more a Christopher or Shane than he is a Tony or a Vic. It's all about "What kind of man am I going to become?" That's an interesting struggle. So you have a guy who is conflicted by his own genetics. I think he's a guy who has been raised in this environment and is comfortable and understands the need for that violence and has a quick temper, and yet is probably like his dad -- as Gemma says in the finale, he thinks too deeply. He needs to know the reasons why. To me, that's the guy who hears a lot of noise in his head.

How I wanted to land at the end of the season, it's not about him ever thinking, "I'm going to get out of the club," because that's all he knows. It's "I do stay, and the only way I am going to stay and the only way I can change things is from the inside out." Next season will really be about him, it's not like there'll be a big coup afoot. It's a somewhat democratic society, and (we'll see) what happens when you have people breaking off into alliances -- what happens to that structure and that lifestyle when you have a two-party system.

Given how entrenched Clay and Tig are, it seems like the only way Jax can create a more peaceful club is through violence.

It's the age-old archetype of you have to become the devil to destroy the devil. It's not about him suddenly -- they won't be selling cupcakes and going on love rides. But I do think he feels like there are some things he can change. There are no new ideas in this show, let's get real, but it's Pacino in "Godfather III" -- "Everytime I think I'm out, they pull me back in!" You know, it's, "We're going to be outlaws, but what's a smarter, less violent, potentially less dangerous way to still have this brotherhood, and what we have here, without necessarily destroying ourselves? Clearly, if we stay on Clay's path, we are going to be in trouble."

What are the challenges of writing for a main character who isn't fully-formed like a Vic Mackey?

It requires a lot more thought on my part. I have to be careful that there's consistency in that fluctuation, and it's coming from an organic place. Me personally, I'm a guy who it took a long time to figure out what I'm supposed to be doing. I relate to a lot of that finding oneself a little later in the game, or being thrown a curve later in the game. I think throwing in a lot of complications in terms of love interests, the deep bond Jax has with his mom, I like that all that stuff still influences his decisions. S--t like that never influenced what Vic was doing. No matter how tormented Corrine was or how much she was being hurt, Vic still did what he did. Jax is still impacted by the people in his life.

I think, if we're blessed enough to have a long run, my hope is by the end of that run, Jax will become who he is supposed to become.

To me, it's more fertile ground, it's more interesting. People had initially a hard time wrapping their brain around Jax because he wasn't black and white. But I think ultimately, that struggle is who he is. And I think people, as the episodes have revealed themselves, and definitely after the death of Kohn, people realized, "That's what's going on this guy's head."

Yes, I definitely was informed by the Hamlet archetype in this show, but the trap in Hamlet is he's the most passive of Shakespeare's characters. He's not a Richard III, not out there taking a lot of action. It's a lot of asides and soliloquies where he's wrapped in angst, and that's not a very interesting character. The trick is keeping Jax a really proactive character in the midst of him making that decision. Week after week, I throw him into circumstances where he's forced to make a decision. Sometimes, it's just the day-to-day of the club and it doesn't necessarily inform the mythology, but the trick is always making sure that he's put into active circumstance.

Your mention of Jax shooting Kohn made me think about Jax and Tara having sex a few feet away from the corpse. When I was talking with Shawn Ryan about some of the more messed-up things on "The Shield," he said, "I could blame Kurt Sutter for that stuff."

I will defend every one my twisted, f---ed-up pitches. I will prove to you why they work psychologically and organically, from David (Aceveda) having to blow a guy to Jax and Tara having sex. That was one of those things, I saw that scene when I was writing the pilot, and I knew the first time they were going to have sex was four feet from a dead body. And, yes, one of the things I lead my writers with is, "What's the obvious and linear narrative choice in any circumstance?" And then, "Let's never do that."

It doesn't mean, "Let's do something absurd that has no roots in the nature of the show," but to me, that (traditional) storytelling, people can go someplace else to watch. As a storyteller, I love to use my imagination, and that's what I hire writers to do. All that stuff is, from the burning off of the tattoo -- I'm not going to say that somebody told me one of those stories, but I can tell you it's a very real thing. For me, the psychological and emotional catharsis that happened when Kohn was killed, maybe it went too far, but to me, I bet you I can get you at least one or two psychologists that can back it up.

Well, on "The Shield," Shawn always got the final say about what stayed in the scripts and what was too extreme. What's it like to be the guy who now gets to make that choice?

I have writers and I trust a lot of my writers, and the network is very conscious of that, and they will always question what's too much and what's too violent, and I hear that. I do feel like, and I don't know that I would call it a signature of the show, but it's the kind of storytelling I love. I love doing stuff that's real but unexpected. Because of the nature of this world, a lot of times that does mean violence. If I was doing a hospital show, it probably would be something completely different. It's a storytelling device that I like and, what I do, I do well.

But trust me, there were other things that didn't make it into episodes, because I trusted somebody telling me , "That didn't work," or "That's too much," or "That's gratuitous.'"

One thing that got vetoed, the character I play of Big Otto had a f---ed-up eye, there was a scene where Stahl offered to give him plastic surgery, and the scene where Otto smashes her face into the table was originally me grabbing a pen and stabbing her in the eye. To me, that felt organic, and the network felt it was one step too far. But I listen to them. It became about the story point, which was him sending a message to the MC that he was not ratting.

Until Kohn got killed, it was really interesting to see Jay Karnes on back-to-back nights every week playing these two completely different characters.

Jay's great. I had him in mind for that role. My pitch for Dutch, and in fact we did something in a gag reel at some point, my pitch for him in season three was that we find out he's a serial killer and has a basement full of bodies.

I know Jay has that level of intensity, and I've had him in mind for that obsessive yet likable -- the trick to Kohn was, on the outside, he's a nice guy, he's at the family picnic, he's ingratiating himself into the town, and yet underneath is the obsessive, dangerous.

Any plans to bring in anyone else from "The Shield"?

I love all those guys. Kenny Johnson constantly sends me e-mails, "Hey, uh, I'm not back on my show until the end of April..." And if there's a role that makes sense, I would love to bring in those guys. But right now, a lot of them are working and I don't have anything specific in mind.

You wouldn't expect a show set in such a macho world to have so many strong female characters. How did that come about?

I went into this project knowing that I wanted to do something with Katey and knowing it was a great world for her. I wrote that character for her, but she helped inspire that idea that took me to the Hamlet archetype. Having a really strong maternal figure in this world, not unlike the Livia Soprano character, who's sort of in the background, maybe not pulling the strings, but at least psychologically responsible for the strings being pulled. Initially, the character of Gemma was much more in the background, and it was the network reading a draft who wanted her pulled out front more. It's probably one of my favorite characters to write, and as a result of that, because of her relationships, it really helped pull Tara's character into an interesting direction, and the Wendy character. You have this great maternal powerhouse who then becomes the light to the moths that surround it.

It wasn't my plan from the jump to write a testosterone-driven show that had a lot of strong female voices, but it was much to do with what a great job Katey was doing. Someone mentioned it to me at one of the panels, and I realized, "I guess that's true." That's great. Some of it speaks to the world, as was discussed somewhat in the exposition in the episode "Better Half" -- unlike the mob, these women become tools for a lot of these guys. One of the guys that I know up in Oakland has felony gun charges and his girlfriend carries his piece. They're more plugged into the lifestyle, and they are aware of pretty much everything that goes on.

I've gotten some reader feedback from people who claim to be in motorcycle clubs, and the one complaint they keep bringing up is about Jax wearing sneakers when he rides instead of boots.

The new subculture, Charlie (Hunnam) and I both did a lot of research hanging out with these guys in Oakland, there's a new wave of bikers, the prospects are influenced by the hip-hop culture. Guys that really want to be bikers are the guys that feel like they need to wear the uniform. Most of the guys I know, 40-odd-year full-patch members, these guys are on motorcycles all the time, they ride for comfort, that's why their bikes aren't all tricked out, they wear sneakers because they're comfortable, they don't have anything to prove. Especially if you have a death's head on your back, nobody's going to say "Why are you wearing sneakers?" But it's definitely influenced by these kids who are influenced by the hip hop culture, and one of the guys Charlie modeled his character after, who has since been gunned down and killed, was a guy who wore these clean white sneakers.

It's like "The Shield." Up until the last episode, from the first episode people write in, 'Why are their badges on the wrong side?" But I love that you're getting complaints about things like the sneakers.

What kind of feedback are you getting from real club members?

I've gotten my share of death threats. Some people are not happy, but I'm actually surprised at all the really good feedback. The outlaw culture by nature is about not being put into a box. The fact that we're making a little TV show about that world flies in the face of that. I wasn't expecting to be embraced, but for the most part, people get it, that it's a TV show, that we're at least trying to make it as organic and real as we possibly can, within the framework of having a compelling narrative week after week. They appreciate the fact that somebody is attempting to tell dynamic stories, and attempting to at least show it as it really is. I would say that the majority of the feedback has been positive.

But you don't usually expect death threats as a showrunner, do you?

Death threats, not as good. For the most part, it's people upset that we're doing it at all, we're having Hollywood actors, and none of these things would happen, and you'd never have a character like Gemma. People don't understand that we're creating entertainment as well, the ones who think we're making a documentary.

I've really enjoyed those modern covers you've done of all those '60s folk and rock songs. Where did the idea for those come from?

When we were doing the origins of all of this and coming up with the tone of the show, I just knew culturally, that music was going to be really important, that northern California sound. I knew I didn't want to just do traditional needle drops like we did on "The Shield." I hired a guy named Bob Field Jr., who's our music supervisor, and Bob is a great musician. He produced a couple of Katie's albums and a lot of local bands, and I knew he'd be able to do some scoring for us. I know how expensive it is to get masters, so I knew he'd be able to do some covers for us, and he just ran with it. I'd be able to say to Bob, "Hey, what about an acoustic version of 'Fortunate Son?'" and then four days later, I'd get an MP3 of a couple of people doing it. He's very plugged into the independent music circuit here, and found people like Audra Mae who did the Dylan cover in episode 12. For me, it's become thematically important to the show.

How did Katey wind up doing that "Son of a Preacher Man" cover? And do you have to fight the temptation to ask her to record half of these?

Obviously, I'm a big fan of my wife. I love some of the stuff that she does, it's pretty soulful. I was thinking originally of using the Aretha Franklin cover of that song and couldn't afford the master. It was 60 thousand dollars, something like that. And I had the idea, I knew Katey had a couple of these blues singers who sang on her album, and I knew I could get her cheap. And then she just knocked it out of the park. She loved the song.

You're going to be called the heir to "The Shield" now.

I think it's a different kind of show. There were two set of shoes laid before my feet. One was, obviously, "The Sopranos" because of the world. And the other was "The Shield." They're two fairly big sets of shoes. But I'm proud of the show and of this first season. And hopefully we continue.

Alan Sepinwall can be reached at asepinwall@starledger.com. Click here to read the full post

Sons of Anarchy, "The Revelator": To destiny run, or not to destiny run?

Spoilers for the "Sons of Anarchy" season one finale coming up just as soon as I visit an out-of-town bar...

"Time for a change." -Piney
"Yeah." -Jax

Kurt Sutter (who not only wrote the finale but made his directorial debut on it) said in our interview that he wanted "to end this season on an exclamation point and not a question mark," and he clearly accomplished that. Jax, with the realization that Clay and Tig were responsible for Donna's murder, and with the prodding of both Hale and Piney (who, remember, co-founded the club with Jax's dad), has stopped asking "to be or not to be?" He's ready to take action, and based on how he handled the two crises of the finale -- Piney mouthing off at the Niner bar, Tig about to shoot the teenage witness -- he (and Charlie Hunnam, who got a lot more interesting once Jax became less passive) should be ready for it.

Like a lot of epic cable dramas (though not, oddly, "The Shield"), this season played out with the major earth-shattering event in the penultimate episode, while the finale was primarily a time for reflection and setting up the events of next season. And I think it worked really well on that level. Jax took his opportunities to step up (including a cemetery-inappropriate, but otherwise necessary, PDA with Tara), we got further clues that Jax's dad didn't die such an accidental death, and the supporting cast -- particularly Katey Sagal, Ron Pearlman, Kim Coates and newly-promoted regular Ryan Hurst -- got to do some fine work showing their grief and confusion over Donna's death.

The 90-minute length didn't seem to add much in the way of plot, but it did allow for more moments of quiet, powerful reflection, whether it was Clay and Tig at the horse farm, or Gemma helping the arthritic Clay button up his shirt for the funeral, or Opie sadly taking off his son's tie (men in this world don't wear ties), plus the beautiful final sequence of Jax walking around the cemetary, and ultimately stopping by the graves of his brother and father.

As I said in yesterday's column (which included excerpts of the longer Sutter interview that should be right above this post), I've been really impressed by this show's improvement curve over the season. It's not in the class of "The Shield" yet (after that series finale, it's hard to think of many shows that are), but it does feel like a worthy heir.

Some other thoughts on "The Revelator":

• One thing I neglected to ask Kurt about: the homeless girl has now had two prominent but seemingly random scenes the last two weeks, this time swapping her blanket for Jax's hoodie so he could catch some cemetery shut-eye. Given all the show's explicit "Hamlet" love, is she supposed to be the gravedigger? Yorick?

• Line of the night, by Wendy and about Gemma: "You're like Dr. Jekyll and Donna Reed."

• What on earth happened to Tom Everett Scott's career? It's certainly not a bad thing to be appearing on a show of this quality, but he's headlined a bunch of shows, and now he's doing a small role as SAMCRO's attorney? Was "That Thing You Do" really that long ago? (Wow; it was 12 years ago.)

• Stahl's scene in prison with Bobby Elvis was very nicely-played by Ally Walker and Mark Boone Jr., and I thought it was a nice touch that Bobby's hair was gray because he didn't have access to his usual grooming products. ("Say Anything" did a similar beat with John Mahoney's hair when Lloyd visited him in jail.)

• Again, Donna's funeral is probably not the ideal time and place for Jax to be declaring his romantic intentions, but dammit if Hunnam's little nod and smile after the kiss wasn't cool.

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

Today I am thankful for... the new 'Cupid' trailer

I was originally going to save this post for tomorrow, figuring that it would give me at least one new thing up on the blog for Thanksgiving, but then I realized that most of us will be too busy being with family, or watching the Detroit Lions stink, or carving new notches into their belts to hang around a TV blog, so I'm jumping a gun, just in time for all of you to instead be busy driving or flying to your Turkey Day destination. (Timely, that's me!)

Anyway, a bunch of people have been e-mailing me over the last week to point out that a new trailer for ABC's upcoming "Cupid" remake (now an official Thomas/Ruggiero joint, as opposed to Rob Thomas solo) is up on YouTube for your viewing pleasure.

It's obviously hard to judge much from just the brief snippets -- particularly whether the two leads have chemistry -- but I liked what little I saw of Bobby Cannavale in the old Jeremy Piven role and am looking forward to seeing a full version, whenever ABC gets around to giving the show a timeslot. (It's one of several midseason ABC shows that has yet to be scheduled; I'm still hopeful it winds up after "Grey's" or "Desperate Housewives," even for a few weeks.)

So watch, and feel free to use this post to speculate on the remake, or talk about your favorite Thanksgiving-related TV moments of all time (Hulu now has the entire legendary "WKRP in Cincinnati" turkey episode up), or just what you're thankful for, TV-wise.

Enjoy the holiday. Other than some "Sons of Anarchy" stuff tonight at 11:30, don't expect much out of me before Monday at the earliest -- if for no other reason than that there's nothing much on before then. Click here to read the full post

The Shield, "Family Meeting": Goodbye, Vic Mackey

A review of the series finale of "The Shield" coming up just as soon as I take a closer look at my snake habitat...

"All those busts. All those confessions you got in this room, illegal or otherwise. All the drugs you got off the street tonight for ICE. You must be very proud of yourself. This is what the hero left on his way out the door." -Claudette Wyms

And, at the end of the amazing series finale of "The Shield," this is what Vic Mackey has left on his way out the door: one cop murdered by his own hands; another cop murdered by his protege; the protege having killed himself, his two-year-old son and pregnant wife; his last surviving partner doomed to life in prison because of his association with Vic; and a wife so disgusted by and terrified of him that she went running into witness protection to keep him from ever seeing their kids again.

As with "The Sopranos," the show we so often compared "The Shield" to, we didn't get either of the predicted endings, as Vic didn't die or go to prison. But the diabolical fate that "Shield" creator Shawn Ryan constructed for his anti-hero had elements of both. Vic may not be dead, but he's lost everything and everyone that ever mattered to him: his friends, his family, his reputation. And he may not technically be in jail, but his vengeful new federal boss has constructed his new job like a three-year prison stretch, with an ill-fitting suit as his uniform and a barren cubicle as his cell.

Now, I loved the "Sopranos" finale, but it was an abstract kind of love, because that show deliberately disengaged from its audience at the end, gave us a climax we're still puzzling over. "The Shield" has never been about abstractions. While it had thoughtful things to say about law-enforcement and urban life (and continued to do so through the finale), its pleasures were largely visceral. And you can't get more visceral than several sequences in the finale, which was the most satisfying end to a great drama series that I've ever seen.

Start with Vic and estranged, fugitive sidekick Shane's final showdown. Though it was on the phone, an in-person encounter couldn't have cut any deeper than the things each man said to each other: that Vic had negotiated a deal that would prevent Shane from saving his wife from prison, and that Shane knew Vic's own wife had turned against him to co-operate with police. And it was that call -- and Vic's taunts about going to visit Shane's kids while Shane rotted in prison -- that led to Shane's horrifying decision to kill not only himself, but his wife and young son, to ensure they remained "innocent."

(I take copious notes whenever I watch a show like this, part transcription of what's happening on screen, part capsule of my feelings as I'm watching, and when Shane's house was notably silent after he blew his brains out, I started typing "OH NO OH NO OH NO OH NO OH NO" over and over, realizing what Claudette was going to find when she went into the other room. Just a massive gut punch. It still upsets me thinking about it a month after first watching the episode.)

And Shane's murder-suicide led to the first of two astonishing, entirely silent scenes by Michael Chiklis. Vic's ex-boss Claudette, unable to prosecute Vic for a single one of his crimes due to the blanket immunity deal he scammed, hurt him the only way she could: by confronting him with the truth of all he had done. Ordering Vic into The Barn's interrogation room -- and insisting he sit on the side of the table ordinarily reserved for the perps -- she read to him from Shane's suicide note, then laid out the crime scene photos of Shane, Mara and little Jackson.

Chiklis has never been better than he was in that scene, attempting to shut down all his emotions, not show Claudette how much this affected him. Every mannerism -- the glazed look in his eyes, the slight facial twitches -- was perfect, especially the way that, after Claudette left the room, Vic had to roll his head down to look at the photos, as if it was just an accident that he was doing so, because if he actively chose to look at the pictures, then they're real, and they're his fault.

In that scene, and in the mesmerizing final sequence -- four silent minutes of Vic adorning his cubicle with photos of his lost loved ones, impotently watching police cars go by on the street below, and reflecting on all his sins -- Chiklis showed Mackey's tough guy façade crack ever so slightly. But in both cases, outside forces -- first Vic remembering the camera in the interrogation room, then the office lights automatically turning off at 6 -- snapped him back to attention and raised his emotional shields.

(Ryan told me that it was a coincidence that both "The Shield" and "The Sopranos" had final scenes punctuated by the lights going out, but the difference between the two shows did get summed up nicely by the way that "The Shield" continued to move forward afterwards, where "The Sopranos" just stopped.)

The finale was dominated by the death of Shane and the destruction of Vic's life -- which included another final humiliation by Claudette, as she made him watch the arrest of longtime sidekick Ronnie -- but Ryan was able to provide satisfying grace notes for most of the major characters.

Dutch, once the butt of Vic's barbs and practical jokes, now stood as the respected cop who got to slap the cuffs on Ronnie while the rest of The Barn watched approvingly. (In possibly the series' funniest line, when Ronnie asked what he was being arrested for, Dutch said, "The last three years.") He also met an interesting romantic prospect (Billings' lawyer, played by Jay Karnes' real-life wife, Julia Campbell), and he and Claudette also got to put one final serial killer into the interrogation room. Though Lloyd hadn't given it up by the end of the episode -- even after we got to hear one final entry from Dutch's Amazing Serial Killer Fact File, about how the streets of LA are literally paved with dead bodies -- it was clear his confession was just a matter of time.

Also, sadly, a matter of time: Claudette's impending death from lupus. In a moment as dignified as it was heartbreaking (CCH Pounder, like Chiklis and Walton Goggins, deserves serious Emmy consideration), Claudette told Dutch that her medication had stopped working, that, "All I have to do is deal with this pain every day, and every day that I can, I will show up. Until the day that I don't." She'll probably outlast Lloyd, and she was able to get some small measure of justice (karmic, if not actual) on Vic, but her clock is running down, fast.

Vic's old rival, cop-turned-politican David Aceveda, seems a lock to win the mayoral election after being tangentially involved in Vic's final, biggest drug bust, and it's clear he'll be just as effective at cleaning up City Hall as he was in corralling Vic -- that is, not at all.

Ryan didn't like to make the series' themes too overt, but in the finale he brought back Andre Benjamin from OutKast as neighborhood activist Robert Huggins (he first appeared in a season three episode as the owner of a comic book shop), this time waging his own fringe party run for mayor, talking about "a new paradigm" for law-enforcement and a change to the "prison-industrial complex." In the end, while Aceveda was busy doing TV interviews taking credit for Mackey's work, Huggins was shot and killed while picketing a crackhouse -- trying to effect change instead of just talking.

For a series that was as fast and loud as any in TV history, after this finale what "The Shield" may be remembered for are the slow, silent moments: Claudette and Dutch looking at the tableau of Shane's murdered family, Claudette watching Vic try not to look at the crime scene photos, or Vic stoically decorating his cubicle.

Our final image of Vic Mackey isn't of him on the verge of tears (that came earlier), but of him tucking his off-duty gun in his waistband and walking out into the night, a brutal expression on his face that said he was looking for someone to hurt. I wouldn't want to be that someone.

Some other thoughts on "Family Meeting":

• Next to the tableau of Mara and Jax lying so peacefully on the bed, the bouquet in her hands, the toy truck in his, the most disturbing part of that storyline was the small scene of Shane helping Mara go to the bathroom because she was in too much pain to even wipe herself. That's a classic example of what David Milch used to talk about with "NYPD Blue": people noticed the nudity and language, but the relaxed content standards also gave him a much greater freedom to show small, painfully honest moments in the lives of his characters. I suppose a network show could have given a version of that bathroom scene, but it wouldn't have been as explicit and humiliating, and in turn wouldn't have made it as clear just how horrible things had gotten for those two.

• For that matter, Shane and Mara's discussion about what to name their unborn baby daughter is devastating (especially on second view). Shane and Mara brought all of this doom down upon themselves, but in that moment, Walton Goggins and Michelle Hicks made you forget about the murders and just think about Shane and Mara as parents who might never get to hold their kids again.

• Clark Johnson returns, not only as director (forming a neat loop with the series pilot in the same way he did with "The Wire"), but in a brief cameo as the U.S. Marshal introducing Corrine and the kids to their new home in Rockford, Ill. (Shawn Ryan's hometown, not coincidentally.) In the closing credits, Johnson's character is identified as "Handsome Marshal."

• Some people wondered last week how Vic could have such amazing recall of every crime he needed to confess to ICE to make sure it was included in the immunity agreement. This week provided a good explanation: Vic had studied up on Shane's blackmail file (and that, in turn, inspired him to remember the things Shane forget to write down).

• I loved how much smaller Vic seemed in that suit (I suspect the wardrobe department deliberately picked out one that was a size or two too big), and how pained he looked throughout the HR reps' tour of his new hell. Note that for help, he now has to dial 912 instead of 911.

• As Shawn discusses in the post-finale Q&A, the songs bookending the episode are "Los Angeles" by X, and "Long Time Ago" by Concrete Blonde. He initially wanted the latter song to start during the final scene but was convinced (by Landgraf, I think) to let Vic's exit to play out in silence. As it is, the song and the montage of classic "Shield" moments (I had forgotten all about Shane with the earbuds) was a reminder of just how far all these characters had come (and, in many cases, fallen) since a long time ago. Plus, it forced FX to run the final credits at their full size, instead of squishing the names of all the crew people in their victory lap.

• You could argue that the three uniformed cops -- Danny in particular -- got short shrift in the finale, but Julien and Tina were involved in the very engaging, mission statement-y Andre 3000 story, so I'm okay with that. You can't fit everything in, even at 90 minutes. Shawn does talk at length in our interview about why he never revisited the matter of Julien's sexuality, and you may have noticed the moment, as he and Tina are driving to break up Huggins' stump speech, that his attention is briefly captured by the sight of a very happy and playful gay couple holding hands on the sidewalk.

• Nobody has a kind word or thought for Aceveda in this episode, do they? Huggins dubs him "Mr. Asses-veda," and Claudette wouldn't even dream of telling this clown about her illness in the way she opens herself up to Dutch. Dial back seven years (three years in show time), and I think she would have much more readily told David about the lupus than Dutch-boy.

• All the major personal stuff obscured the Beltran takedown, but it did give Vic an opportunity for one last bit of creative problem-solving -- sticking Santi's head into the poisonous snake's habitat to make him talk -- and there were some other nice action/character beats throughout, particularly Ronnie's desire to finish what they started, and Ronnie possibly saving Vic's life by warning him about the gunman in the warehouse. (Look how happy Ronnie seems when he starts talking about cowboys, and how heartbroken Vic looks when Ronnie's back is turned. Vic is a bastard for selling out his friend, but at least he has enough self-awareness to recognize what he did.) Hell of a moment from David Rees Snell as Ronnie's being dragged away by the uniforms and the entire precinct is glaring at Vic with disdain. (Also, loved his disbelief as he asked Vic, "You told them... all of it?")

• Before we screened this episode a few weeks back, everyone -- the critics, the FX publicist, everybody but Shawn Ryan -- kept getting the title confused and calling it "Family Matters." Finally, Ryan cracked, "Just call it 'Urkel.'"

• Hands up, everybody who took one look at Olivia back in the season premiere and assumed, based on the show's past history, that Vic would wind up sleeping with her. Ryan said he knew that would be the expectation, which is one of the reasons he went with an attractive blonde for Vic's ICE contact. One of the things that jumped out at me when giving the episode a second view is how often Olivia reminds Vic to report to her office at 9 a.m. sharp tomorrow, making it clear how much she's looking forward to giving him some slight comeuppance for what he did to her.

• Have I mentioned yet how much I loved this episode?

If you have the time (say, if you have a long Thanksgiving flight ahead of you) and aren't ready to let the show go just yet, don't forget to take a look at the Shawn Ryan Q&A, which addresses, among other points, his thoughts on doing some kind of "Shield" movie down the road.

What did everybody else think?

Alan Sepinwall may be reached at asepinwall@starledger.com Click here to read the full post

The Shield: Shawn Ryan post-finale Q&A

The following transcript comes from two different conversations with "The Shield" creator Shawn Ryan: a two-hour-plus chat he had with FX president John Landgraf and a half-dozen TV critics immediately after we watched the series finale (click here for the finale review), and then a solo phone interview last week that ran about an hour. Because Shawn talked for so long, and because both conversations bounced around frequently, I'm combining the two and rearranging the Q&A by topic rather than by chronology. All questions from the group chat are paraphrased and appear in italics; questions from the phone interview will be italicized and bolded.

THE ENDING

When did you come up with the endings for Vic and Shane?

We spent a lot of time figuring out, and I would say, right around the third or fourth episode of this season, how we wanted to end it. I've actually had in my head for a couple of years, the idea of Vic in a suit, in an office somewhere, consigned to Hell. I knew that, but I had no idea how to get there. But we figured out the Shane stuff, and the family stuff, and we had to figure out how to get there.

The thing I kept talking to the writers about, once Shane and Mara went on the run, was for Shane and Mara to become closer. In a strange way, it becomes a romantic tale between them, while Vic and Corrine get torn apart. They meet different fates.

That's a really uncompromising choice on Shane and his family.

You don't do something like that idly. I have two kids. But there are people who do that, and they think they do it for the right reasons. We were writing that in the summer and fall of last year, and there was that wrestler last year, sort of steroided out. It's such a f---ed-up mindset that exists in some people, that we're better off together than torn apart in this world. In a way, I'm sort of glad we were on strike (when the finale was shot), because I would have had to go watch that scene. It was tough. Walton was so seminal to the show.

There was a lot of discussion about Shane and how his fate would end. We figured out around episode 3 or 4 what we wanted to do, and we got on a call with John (Landgraf) and the people with Fox TV, our studio.

I do remember that, that's the first moment I thought, "Well, this could work." Because in the bubble of the writers room, you usually have a pretty good idea whether something works or not, but the ones that are really out there, until you expose them to some people you're not sure. And this was a pretty heavy thing: "We want Shane and Mara to go on the run, and ultimately he takes his own life and he takes their lives in an effort to keep them from being captured and to keep them tog as a family."

What was it like to watch those episodes again with us?

It's obviously been a special show for me, but it's nervousness, even knowing what's coming, and I'm really impressed with the actors in this, like that scene with Claudette and Vic at the end, where she lays the photos out, I still get goosebumps watching that. Michael barely says a word in that scene. In fact, I'm not sure he says a single word, but just watching his face and reaction to all that (was incredible).

I've always been incredibly lucky, I take great pride in the scripts, and the writers and I work very hard on the scripts, but these episodes turn out better than the scripts because you can't just write, "Vic gives a mesmerizing look for 30 seconds." You have to trust your actor to do that, and we're just so lucky to have all them and to see them play, and then to have someone like Andre Benjamin come for this episode and play that stuff, that was great.

Is all of Andre's talk about "a new paradigm" supposed to be a mission statement for the series?

We've never tried to comment too much but you give yourself maybe a little license in the finale to say something through a character. A lot of that story was inspired and helped by Chick Eglee, who is the old pro on our staff who really came up with a lot of that stuff. We all know there's something wrong with how the system works and different people have different ideas what to do about it, but his was an interesting, occasionally rational voice.

Why doesn't Dutch get a win?

Don't you think Dutch is going to win with that kid at the end, do we have to see it?

We cast his wife in real life, Julia Campbell (as Billings' lawyer). That was my little hint that that should work out well for Dutch.

What were the songs used at the beginning and end of the finale?

Those were two LA bands: X's "Los Angeles" at the beginning, and then Concrete Blonde at the end, that song is called "Long Time Ago." I'd always envisioned that Concrete Blonde song ending the show, and the first cut I sent John, the first cut I did that I sent him, I started that Concrete Blonde song over like the last 5 seconds that you saw Vic putting on his jacket and leaving, and I did it because over last 3 years I thought I want to end the show on that song, that song has always spoken to me in terms of this show.

It's really shocking to see those moments of intense silence, like Vic sitting at the interrogation room table before he confesses.

We have done it before. The thing I always say is that if you have a real breakneck pace show, which we tend to have, that those moments when you decide to slow down and just live with someone, they stand out more. My guess is they're probably not as long as you think, but because show usually goes rip-roaring along, when we do slow down for something like that, that they stand out.

Do you view what happens to Vic as a fate worse than death?

As a shark and a survivor, no, I think as long as a shark's alive it can find some place to swim to, I think this is a bad situation for him, and I don't think he's gonna enjoy those three years. The tank's very tiny at the moment.

The other thing, and I've always had this in mind for a number of years because, some people would write, whether it was fans or some critics, about "How many bad things can these cops do and not get caught?" I realize, you do research, there was a group of Chicago cops, one tried to put a hit out on another cop because he was afraid that the guy might turn, and I read about a guy who was doing this kind of stuff for like 11 years. And there was always one common ending to those stories that I found, and that was one of the cops eventually turned on the other cops, to lessen their own load. And so I always had in my mind that as much as a team guy that Vic would be -- and he would not do this until it was his last resort, but he would do it -- is that he would sacrifice somebody like Ronnie for his own freedom and safety. And of all the police corruption scandals I investigated, they all end with one of the cops eventually turning on another.

And he winds up betraying Ronnie.

He's the classic scorpion on the frog, Vic. I think that they can work this way, they can talk any frog into the trip across the river, but then he stings and in some cases he does that in an episode and in other cases it takes 7 seasons to do it.

I don't think he relished doing it, I think he felt bad about doing it, but ultimately there is a real kind of selfishness that exists there.

Vic had the opportunity early in that second to last episode to screw him, and didn't. It was only when he had to make a choice with the mother of his child, that's when he screwed him. I don't think Vic would do it out of simple self-preservation; he would have run. But he knows his autistic kids can't run, his family can't run.

And he gets away with everything.

That's why I like that ending, is he kinda does and he kinda doesn't.

But everybody knows what he's done.

Yes, and his self-image is important to him, but he's not in a cell next to Antwon Mitchell, like Ronnie is. He's not dead by his own hand, the way that Shane is. He's not dead by the hand of another team member, the way that Lem is.

I never had any doubt if there was one person to skate on the whole thing, that it would be Vic, that Vic was just that step ahead of everyone else.

Had you envisioned any other endings earlier? Did you ever consider Vic dead or Vic in jail or even Vic, somehow, someway, keeping his badge and triumphing completely?

We talked about a lot of things, because you want to explore all possibilities. Even though I had that thought of Vic caged in some office, I wasn't sure if there would be a good way to get there. While it was a place I could see as a signpost ahead. The way the story broke for us, it seemed the right way to go.

But would you have been okay with a version where Vic died, or where he got away with it?

That's a tough one. I'm just trying to go through my mind, the various blind alleys we went down. I really kind of felt like we let the story discover itself. We didn't try too hard to pigeonhole an ending and work towards that. If we found something that worked for us -- I investigated briefly the idea does Vic die but appears to die heroically, and the image the city is left with from a PR standpoint is sort of "Hero cop gives life for toddler in burning house," or whatever the equivalent would be. I thought there was an interesting possibility there, that the way we're remembered isn't the way that we were. But that didn't feel as good. But if the right story came where Vic got away with it, or went to jail, or died in the line of fire, I wouldn't have been afraid to do that.

So it's fair to say that you weren't trying to make a thematic point, but just let the story and the characters dictate where things should go?

That's a good way of putting it, yes.

Vic's confession just goes on forever, doesn't it?

In the first draft there were more, and then we cut them back, seriously it went on longer. But it was just from a plot point of view: we needed to clear him, so he had to say them all. I mean, the audience has seen everything he's done, they know that there's a litany.

I remember when I first saw the cut, like this is something an actor does that you just don't script, but when we came back from commercial break and Vic's remembering, and he has that little laugh, the way that you would remember how your kid threw up on an amusement park ride, "Oh, yeah," but he's talking about some awful things. It's such a great moment for Michael.

THE SHIELD: THE MOVIE?

The series ends with Vic alive and relatively free, and while you strongly hint at what's to come for Claudette and Dutch and some of the others, could you ever see yourself revisiting this world in some form a few years down the road?

Possibly. I might be interested in where Vic Mackey is when that three years with ICE is up. I don't think it would be as a TV series. I don't know if anyone would want to make a movie of it. Again, we're not a "Sopranos," "Sex and the City"-esque hit, but we've also made our shows cheap and dirty and it's done well overseas, so that's something I could investigate.

But if anything came out of it, it would only be after giving FX the ending the series deserved. We did not leave anything out in order to preserve the opportunity to do something like that.

So do you ever think about what the characters are up to after the events of the finale?

I do. I envision Ronnie with a shaved head, probably having to sidle up to some of the white supremacist crowd to stay alive, so that might be interesting to see.

GOOD GUYS AND BAD GUYS

We talked a lot over the years about how some fans refused to judge Vic and Shane no matter what they did. And it felt like this season, there was a concerted effort on your part to make their actions so extreme that there would be no doubt left as to exactly who and what they were. Was that your intention?

I'm not sure I agree with you. I'm sure there will be plenty of fans who will work hard to find ambiguity. I don't want to dictate how people think about Vic Mackey. I had my ideas, and those ideas worked their way into the writing, but there's ways for people to watch and argue and have different opinions, but it just felt like the story demanded more desperate measures on both their parts. Obviously, those guys are capable of it, and this season they were placed in a position where they had to do that.

I think the reaction was specifically strong after we got to the episode where we found out that Vic was ready to kill not only Shane, but Mara and the unborn baby.

Would he have? He had the shot, but you could see that he was hesitating. it was a tough one. I talked with Michael a lot about that moment, and how it should play. "Is he certain, is there some element of doubt?" What was fun was putting Vic and Shane in a position of, "It's you or me." There really wasn't a way for both of them to get out of this.

If Vic doesn't taunt Shane about going to visit Jackson while Shane is in prison, does Shane do what he does to his family?

Possibly not. And that was intentional, and I think that's part of what goes through Vic's head as he's going through those (crime scene) photos later in the episode. I think one of the things that people always liked about Vic was that he had a code and that he was true to that code, and that the code allowed for a lot of creative rules and breaking of laws, but oftentimes there was a greater good there. I think Vic -- you're getting me to talk about this more than I would like to -- Vic has a harder time at that table justifying his code when he looks at those photos and thinks about that phone call. But he lives with it for a minute and then he turns it off. And then he looks at the camera and realizes he probably let someone see something he didn't want to be seen, and he compartmentalizes again and turns it off.

I know you don't like to talk about what it all means, but one of things that struck me in watching this season, there were a lot of moments where Vic and Ronnie and Shane are busy cleaning up one mess after another with the Armenians and the Mexicans, and there's Julien in the background getting actual work done, to the point where it becomes a problem for them with their extra-curricular activities. Were you trying to make some kind of point about what the strike team could have been if they hadn't been caught up in all this other stuff?

I think that was a byproduct. I don't think I'd call that an intention. It seemed like that's the cop Julien would be. I think it was episode six where the attempted hit on Shane and the Armenians went down, they were counting on being with Julien and not getting much done, and Julien kept coming up with clues. What was always fun about "The Shield" was you could tell those stories, and you don't see those stories on "Law & Order" and "Without a Trace." Those are the best stories to tell: Julien's just getting a little too much done. That's a conflict you don't see on other shows. We were always trying to look for those things: what were those stories you can see on "The Shield" and don't see on any other show? When you take those dynamics, the rogue band of cops, you look for those stories that those characters open up that you won't see anywhere else.

MISSED OPPORTUNITIES

You've said often that you wrote the pilot without ever
expecting it would be made, and that you made it without ever expecting it would go to series, let alone a series that would run this long. With 20/20 hindsight, if you had known what the show would become, is there anything you would have done differently with that pilot?

Boy, I don't know. I know you and I have had conversations about, "Is the Vic Mackey who shot Terry Crowley in the pilot the same Vic Mackey who exists in the series afterwards?" Different people have different opinions about that. I think it worked. Maybe I would have held it back in episode two if I knew we would be on, but when we made that pilot, you have no such assurances. You have to establish who your character is and what the dilemma is. If we had some assurance, it would have been cool to have Reed Diamond on the show for four or five episodes and see Vic and Shane wrestle with what to do. Certainly, there could have been a very good story to tell about that -- maybe they try to set Terry up so he loses his job before he can rat on them. But that's just me thinking right now about it.

Since this is the final time we're going to discuss this, was there any point in the run of the series where you said to yourself, "Man, I wish I hadn't made Vic kill a cop way back when, because it kind of gets in the way of the point I want to make here?"

No.

Any stories or other decisions you wish you had a mulligan on? Stories you wish you'd spent more time on?

I know (John) Landgraf disagrees with this, but I still don't know that we gave a total 10 to the Glenn Close character and situation. She was so good that I figured a lot of people rolled with it and there were some good episodes in that season. But when I look at what a clear take we had on season five with Forest's character, or the clear take we had in this final season, or season one, or the money train storyline, I don't think we ever had as full a grasp of exactly what we wanted to do with Glenn. It was a great character, I think, we got off to a good start. We weren't trying to make her a mortal enemy of Vic, the way we did with Forest Whitaker, the way we were able to do in the final season with Shane, and it made the storytelling tougher. I'm honest enough with myself to know that we didn't have as complete a clear take as we did in other seasons. I don't know that audience members would agree with that, but that's my take, if I'm being brutally honest with myself.

Were there any people you wanted to bring back for this final season but couldn't?

The one person that I wanted to use in this season that I couldn't was Franka Potente. We had a little mini story arc that was going to deal with her character, but she was stuck in the jungles of Bolivia or something filming "Che" for Steven Soderbergh, in like this never ending film session, she really wanted to come back, we had like a 2-3 episode thing that was gonna incorporate her, it would have complicated the Armenian-Mexican thing, it would've made you so happy, Alan.

We were always looking for excuses to bring Anthony Anderson back but there was just no right story this year. We've been talking about bringing Army back, Michael Pena, and he had wanted to do it for awhile but people keep hiring him to do movies so we haven't been able to get him.

People still ask about Julien's struggle with his sexuality and Dutch strangling the cat. Why did you decide to move away from both of those stories?

Julien, we covered that a lot in the first two seasons. And I felt like at that point, we'd investigated every alley we could with that. The place we got with Julien -- married, being a stepfather to this kid, really clinging to his religious convictions -- it seemed to me like this was a guy who would live that life for 8-10 years before it all came crashing down. In the storytime we were telling everything else, it didn't seem real that he would backslide so quickly. I'd done a lot of research on these people who come out of the closet after 20 years of marriage. That seemed to be the real thing. I really took very seriously Julien's issues of faith, and it felt to me in some ways he was a very strong guy, in some ways, he was weak, but one way he seemed strong was I thought he would resist this for a while. I do read the forums, and I know people ask what's going on, and I did want to throw that little ode, in the finale, you see him watching those two gay men holding hands and walking to that thing, that was my acknowledgment that that struggle and that chapter isn't closed just because the show's ending. It's a small grace note that casual fans may miss, but the hardcore fans might not ignore it.

As for Dutch and the cat, I always viewed that as a one-episode story. I was sort of surprised when people watched it, and most people really loved it. Dutch strangling the cat and Aceveda getting sexually assaulted are the two things people always bring up to me on the show, or Lem's death. I think it was so impactful for a lot of people, and they're so used to impactful things on "The Shield" carrying over, that I realized after the fact that people were expecting that, and by then, we'd moved on. I just saw it as Dutch stuck in an interrogation room with Clark Gregg, thinking he's manipulating this guy, but Clark Gregg's manipulating him and using Dutch's insatiable desire to understand these people. I thought it was clear the way Jay played it that he felt used at the end. I never felt like it was played as, "Oh, I'm really getting juice out of this." People have compared Dutch to Bayliss (from "Homicide"), and they did a storyline on "Homicide" near the end where he got really fascinated with that stuff and killed someone, and I didn't want to cover any territory that Tom Fontana and those people did so well.

THE BARN TIMELINE

What kind of timespan did all these events take place over?

What we started figuring out was that a typical "Shield" season would take place in about 3-4 weeks time. We did our best to try to make sure that everything was accurate, time-wise.

Were Vic's kids played by the same actors all the way through?

Believe it or not the only contract dispute that I was unable to successfully resolve in my history with "The Shield" was for the kid playing his son Matthew, and we recast that. I think it was season 3, sort of like "The Partridge Family" swapping out drummers. Obviously the kids have grown, that's an area where you could probably catch us if you went back.

But we did figure out, we referenced it at the end, it was about 2 1/2-3 year period, the total scope of the show.

Then Aceveda had a really meteoric rise in that time, from new precinct captain to mayoral frontrunner.

Or Barack Obama in that time.

WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN, AND HOW DO WE GET THERE?

(Landgraf gives a long monologue comparing The Shield with Shakespeare.)

I think John gives me a little too much credit, I mean the reason why I think John and I have a good relationship is, you see how smart John is right there.

I tend to be much more of am instinctual writer, and I think where the partnership was really good for us is that he really thought in these terms, and he really pushed me to see the series as a five-act Shakespearean kind of drama and where would that go. I don't think I would've thought of that in my own terms.

I always just would sit in the writers room and think, "What's cool?" And I don't mean what's cool like what's trendy, what's "Gossip Girl"-y. I mean "what's cool" is what gives me a little jolt in my heart watching something on TV, what feels right, what feels authentic, what feels surprising, and to sort of take that instinct, which I think myself and the writers were good at getting, and filtering it through a plan that John suggested to us, of thinking of it as five-act tragedy, is what led me there.

I will take credit for one decision I made early on that I think benefited the show tremendously, and that was after that first season where we got a lot of praise, we won some awards, my first instinct at beginning of the second season was I said, "I think the success of the show will come from going smaller rather than trying to go bigger."

Meaning, that, there was a lot of ass-kicking and out there sort of stuff. And it's not that the show didn't do that again, but the show to me became more and more and more personal to the characters over the years, and that's why I think we were able to keep it going. And it got to that point of being so personal that literally in these final two episodes you have whole segments which is just the camera on an unspeaking character and yet you've lived with them and gone through the journey with them for so many seasons that you understand what they're thinking, even if you don't necessarily empathize with them.

And I think that was a key to the longevity of the show, was not trying to say, "Boy, you know, we did all this outrageous stuff, what can we do that's more outrageous?" I think the show became less outrageous over the years, and I think if we had gone the other direction I think we would have flamed out quicker.

Vic sometimes seems like a superman, doesn't he?

There is definitely a heightened aspect to it, and this is the difference I think between "The Wire" and "The Shield," "The Wire" strives to be utterly sort of journalistic. I've always come from a place as a fan of TV from looking for that I like to say cool, sort of entertaining thing. And so I fully acknowledge there are aspects of Vic that we always tried to keep in the believable, but were in the high portion of the believable and of what was cool. But Chiklis will tell you, once every couple of months somebody would come up to him and say, "I'm a police officer and I know a guy like that!"

But he needs no sleep, has instant recall of everything, and has a Huggy Bear on every corner to provide him with tips.

But the Huggy Bears on the corner allowed us to tell the story the way that I wanted to tell it. There's very little exposition on the show a lot of times. And you get to a place where you just assume, Vic knows someone, I don't need to know the three steps. There were a couple scenes that got cut from finale, and I don't think you missed them, because you're used to going along with Vic for a ride, and you assume that when Vic walks into a bar and there's the bad guy that he wants to talk to, you don't wonder, "Well how does he find him?" You figure, "Well, he took two or three steps, I just didn't see it," and we trust that he's that guy.

But it's also a shortcut storytelling wise, it's how we were able to show so much plot, that you don't need to see every single step, I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but on "CSI" or "Law & Order," they take you A-B-C-D-E, you know, all the way down, but to me their episodes end on F or G. Our episode goes from A to Z, but we're skipping letters of the alphabet, which I really think is cool

We showed Vic doing the laundry once and I didn't get a lot of fan mail, so never again.

This is a difference I think between this show and "The Sopranos," and if there's one reason I avoided those kind of stories, it's because I didn't think I could tell those kinds of stories as well as David Chase and company did. I can't tell -- it's not I can't, maybe I could, but it's not my strong suit -- the "let's talk over making a sandwich and in three minutes we're going to have subtle inferences that lead to minor discoveries of each other."

Late in the run, Vic tells Beltran a story about his grandparents, and before he gives his confession, we hear his full name for the first time ever. We really knew very little about these characters' lives before the series began. Why was that?

David Mamet always talks about backstory being bulls--t in his mind, but I definitely had adopted that attitude before I heard it out of David's mouth. As a storyteller I think I'm a little bit like a shark -- I'm about going forward. And there are certain ways that I ran the show, I would like to think a lot more benevolently than how Vic operated in that world, but the way I ran the show was very similar to the way Vic approached things, and that's where a lot of those stories came from. You know a lot of our episodes, the stories were broken at 11 o'clock at night with deadlines, that "We gotta do this, failure is not an option, what we have is only mediocre right now, you turn it on and you get it done." And those scenes of reflection, you always talk about Vic not liking to be self-reflective, I guess I didn't as a storyteller like to look back too much to the past.

Was it difficult to write the last episode?

This last episode was by far the easiest thing to write on "The Shield," ever, and I don't mean that in some sort of glib way. It's the building up and setting up to get there. I wrote the entire Shane and Mara story in about 2 hours, at my house. The way we always ran "The Shield" is we would tackle the stories, we'd never try to write in order. So I wrote the entire Shane and Mara saga as one document, the entire Vic-Beltran drug takedown as another. Some of my writers contributed scenes in some of those because we were heading towards a deadline, and the one thing I tend to be very good at is figuring out how to integrate them together, how to put them together, within an episode. So once all those dominoes were put in place, that last one went very quick. It just felt like I just had to push the first one and it all fell.

It's those middle episodes where you're trying to conclude the Armenian-Mexican business and you're launching Shane and Vic, and what are we doing with them in The Barn, how are we getting there, those are hard. But once we knew where we were going, we had everything set up, now you've just got to write, you can have fun with it, and write this long scene where he has to wipe her off after going to the bathroom.

I didn't mean to be glib, it's always hard to write things, but that one was easier than most, I think

IN THE BEGINNING

Other than him being physically different from the "Harrison Ford type" image you had in your head, how did the casting of Michael change your original conception of Mackey?

More charismatic. Obviously, you're looking for a charismatic star to play a role. But he made Vic more likable than I thought of him. I thought of him as more of a hard-edged guy, not the guy who would smirk and crack a joke. That inspired me to write Vic that way going forward. He could be hard as nails, but when he wanted to charm you, he could charm you. It's what made people root for him even when they shouldn't.

Charles Wyms became Claudette Wyms when you cast CCH Pounder. Were any other characters changed significantly, either through casting or just over time?

A lot of the times, the casting informed me of who they were. Shane did not have much to do in the pilot, and I give credit to Kevin Reilly at FX. I had initially put forward a different actor for Shane to be approved. He was more a straight ahead looking guy, since I thought Vic would be the Harrison Ford kinda guy, maybe we need that kind of guy but younger as Shane. But Kevin rightly said, "The character doesn't have a lot to do in the pilot, we want someone who'll be an instant character," and we said, "We had this guy who was really good, but there was something a little off about him." That was Walton.

I had no idea how good Walton was when we cast him. Then I saw "The Accountant," the short film he made with his friends that would go on to win an Oscar. I realized this guy is really good, and we wrote him a real big thing in the second episode where Aceveda's interrogating him about Terry's death, and it's that sort of kismet that has really helped the show.

What was the purpose of the B and C stories and Dutch and Claudette, and Danny and Julien? Was it just to lighten the load on Chiklis by making it more of an ensemble show, or was there a thematic point you were trying to make by switching from Vic's latest shenanigans to the work of cops who, for the most part, played by the rules?

It was partly that. It's funny, you probably don't pick up on this, but the show is pretty similar structure-wise to "Nash Bridges," which is where I got my start. The execution may be different, but on "Nash," I got very good at was breaking stories, and sort of balancing, "Nash is over here in the A story, Joe is in the B, and this is how they intersect." I always loved that way of storytelling. I felt like the strike team stories had the impact they had because they weren't taking up an hour of story with them. I see a lot of procedural stories on TV where they have the one case they're trying to solve for the hour, and there are always scenes that drag, that you need to fill out an hour of television but aren't interesting. We always looked at it as, what's the fewest number of beats we need to tell the story?

Also, I wanted to have some balance to these police officers, for every Vic and Shane, there's a Dutch and Julien and Claudette. I was interested in telling those stories as well, how good well-meaning cops can get the job done or not get the job done.

One of my readers suggested there are basically two distinct arcs to the series: everything before Vic robs from the money train, and everything after. That before the theft, Vic is ascendant, can do anything he wants, is largely breaking the law to make money to provide for his family, and after the theft, he's just caught in this downward spiral of trying to cover for the last bad thing he or Shane did. Would you say that's accurate?

I should have had that guy on staff, probably. It's an astute observation, and not one I was aware of at the time. Them looking at the money on the table, and the look of concern coming over their faces of what it all means was a huge turning point. But they still could have gotten away with it, so maybe you extend it to Lem burning the money, where that's the team coming apart, it's all sort of out there and up for grabs, and by season four, Shane's off working on his own and gets tied in with Antwon Mitchell.

I did think that there was an expiration date that we had to be careful of with the Strike Team just blithely going around kicking ass. If you look at real-life incidents like the Rampart scandal, one in Chicago, these guys did pull it off for a number of years. I read about the Chicago cop who was on this 12 year run of taking bullwhips to suspects. I never got the bullwhip into the show.

In real life, there's enough people wiping things under the carpet and enough getting done or however. But I did feel that at a certain point, Vic had to go a little from being a hunter to being the hunted.

THE GREAT ESCAPES

Which came first: the jeopardy, or the escape from it? When you would write Vic into these various messes, particularly the season-long ones, did you always know going in how he would get out of it, or was part of the fun to figure it out at the same pace as Vic?

We figured out the problem first, and then we'd spend three days trying to figure out how to get out of it. What's the tightest box you can get into, what's the biggest moral dilemma you can put your character into? David Mamet keeps talking about -- and I realize I'm quoting Mamet a lot lately -- how good drama and conflict isn't choosing between right and wrong, it's choosing between two wrongs. We did a lot of that on "The Shield." I think a lot of times, choosing between right and wrong, Vic would choose the right. But he wasn't afraid of choosing between two wrongs.

I don't know that we're quite as bad as what I hear about "24," they really write themselves into a situation and then have to figure out how to get out of it at the last possible minute. We were a little bit of that: What's the situation we want to put Vic into, how do we get him out of it, how does it fit into the larger arc of the season? That's why Vic's a compelling character: it takes a group of writers three days to figure out how to get out of a situation, and it takes him ten minutes of screen time to do it.

THE SHIELD: IT'S SO WRONG

When you said you wanted to offer people something they couldn't see anywhere else -- is that what led to some of the more graphic imagery and storylines?

I could blame Kurt Sutter for that stuff. Believe me, there's a lot more pitched, more explicit that we talked about in the room than we put on screen. But it really came from a place of me encouraging the writers, "Don't censor yourself. I'll be here to censor you if you go too far. Just try to come up with the best story, and if it requires us to do something that feels a little shocking, and we can justify and earn it, then we can do it." The writers probably relished it, and would push a little too far in early drafts, and I thought I had a pretty good head for pulling it back. Or we had a really cool idea and thought we had to build up to it and earn it. Vic burning Armadillo's face against a stove in season two, we really built up Armadillo as a really vicious villain where we got to this place of Vic doing it. I would not have done that story of Vic burning a guy's face on a grill if it was just some guy.

When did Chiklis coin the whole "The Shield: It's so wrong" catchphrase?

That was mainly an actor thing, not a writer thing. When Clark (Johnson) directed a batch of two episodes that aired as numbers 3 and 4, while Clark was back filming again, they came up with that. That was a phrase I would hear bandied about on set a lot more than in the writers room. I never wanted to take the attitude that we were trying to be wrong for the sake of being wrong. It amused me that Michael and the actors used that phrase, it was their way of embracing whatever the script sent them.

Were there ever moments, either from the actors on set or from Cathy at home, where people would seem taken aback by the nature of the material?

Only in the first season, before anyone saw any episodes. I remember Catherine Dent almost got physically ill over the "Cherrypoppers" episode, about underage prostitution. No one had seen anything, and she was, like, "You can't do this on TV." I just tried to calm her down and said, "Listen, your job is to act, my job is to write, and you have to trust me." And she came back to me a couple of months later, once everyone was seeing the episodes, and said, "Oh, I get it now."

WHO KNEW WHAT AND WHEN?

How far in advance did the actors know about what was going to happen to their characters?

Usually when they got the scripts for the episodes where those things happened. I would get accused of being overly secretive. But there were two reasons for doing that. One was, I'd often change my mind about where a story would go. I didn't want to promise an actor, "Oh, this moment's going to happen," and it didn't. And also, it's difficult sometimes for actors in an ongoing serialized kind of show. There are certain things where I felt it was important to say, "We're building towards this in a few episodes," but I didn't let Walton know his character was going to do what he was going to do. He read it in a script -- that was a little different because he was in Italy filming the Spike Lee movie - and I think, as great an actor as Walton is, it would have been more difficult to play those scenes squatting in the house, playing the piano and barbecuing burgers, if he knew he was going to kill his family and himself. Michael, in the final episode, has the scene where he stops by the house and says goodbye to the kids, he doesn't know that's the last time he'd see them. But Michael had read the script, and there was a couple of takes where he played it a little bigger, even though Vic is supposed to have no idea that this was a goodbye.

What was Walton's reaction when he got the finale script?

Very moved, and thought it was completely appropriate.

These actors want to play great stuff. They want to play Macbeth, they want to play Hamlet. They don't worry that Hamlet dies in the end. It was tougher for Kenny (Johnson) knowing that the show was going to go on without him.

THE SHIELD VS. THE SOPRANOS

You don't end this show with people eating onion rings and listening to Journey.

It's important, anytime, if anyone writes a big thing about "The Shield," I don't think you can write it without referencing "The Sopranos." This show would not be on TV if not for "The Sopranos," and if not for the success it had creatively and economically, it's the show that I believe gave the courage to FX to try this show. And so I always will have a great debt to that show.

That show was a huge moldbreaker, and opened the way for us, and then I think we opened the way for "Battlestar Galactica," and "the Closer" and "Damages" and "Nip/Tuck." And now a show like "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia," which I adore, is going to open up comedy things for people I think, because it's telling comedic stories in different ways.

I always just had a little jealous love-hate relationship with "Sopranos," in all honesty. It's hard not to. We felt like we made a great show, we felt like our show was comparable to them, and we got about a fifth of the attention and about a 20th of the awards, and you get a little jealous.

I've been able to sort of put that away over the years, and realize that I'm grateful for what I have. But maybe I watched the show with a little harder eye in the later season because I had some jealousy.

But if not for them we wouldn't be on the air, we never would've been on the air. But I don't think that anyone was putting David Chase's feet to the fire in the way that John (Landgraf) would with me if something wasn't coming (out right). And I think we benefited by that.

When they did something well, I think they did it better than anyone, including us, a lot of times, but it wasn't as high a batting average as I would've liked to have seen from them.

THE SHIELD: A GREAT PLACE TO WORK

(Landgraf observes that, for a show with such dysfunctional character relationships, everyone on "The Shield" cast and crew got along remarkably well.)

I always used to joke about "The Shield" vs. "Grey's Anatomy," because we were on same lot. Our drama would be on screen, and theirs would be off screen.

They took over our sets. They ripped down The Barn now, and that's McDreamy's house.

We had to film things so quickly that it just didn't leave a lot of time for actors to sulk in trailers and things like that. Most episodes were filmed in 7 days, we had a little extra time on the finale. We could give ourselves a couple 8-day episodes each year, but for the most part, you'd just do it quick.

And in a strange way, when award attention dropped off after the first couple years, it kind of freed us not to worry about, "What's Michael's Emmy episode going to be?" We never had to worry about that sort of stuff, just focus on, "We'll be the show that's listed in the 'who got robbed this year,' and that's okay." We just knew that's who we were.

Why did the Emmys largely ignore you after Chiklis' one and only win?

I don't necessarily think there was any evil intention behind it. Fewer people watch "The Shield" than watch "Grey's Anatomy" and "House" and "24," and so when you have more people watching those shows, you're going to have more people voting for those shows.

Is it true that you picketed your wife's final scene on the show?

She was upset that I wasn't going to be there, so I said "Well, I guess I could be there if I picketed." So I set up a one-person picket at that point, the scene in the house where Vic's checking in on her and the kids and doesn't realize that will be the last time that he sees them.

(At the end of a long discussion of how Ryan's two best friends are Jay Karnes and David Rees Snell, and how Snell appeared in the pilot as a favor to Ryan because they needed someone to fill a non-speaking role as the fourth strike team member:)

I love what he does in the finale when he finds out Vic has betrayed him. To see your friend go from background extra in the pilot to this big scene in the finale, this great arc over 6, 7 years, was great.

You've said that one day you want to show "The Shield" to your kids so they can understand what Mommy and Daddy were up to when they were growing up. How old do you think they'll have to be before you can have that screening?

It might vary depending on the kid. My guess is junior or senior in high school, freshman in college, but it's as much about emotional maturity as age.

What will be interesting is how the show holds up later. I'm hoping that it holds up well. We made an effort not to put too many pop culture references into the show. I don't think there's a ton of stuff that will date it. There was a Britney Spears reference in the pilot, but we tried not to do too much of that. I'm hoping the story will end intact.

Alan Sepinwall can be reached at asepinwall@starledger.com Click here to read the full post

House, "Last Resort": Puppy day afternoon

Spoilers for tonight's "House" coming right up...

Gonna be brief tonight, both because I'd rather focus on getting all my "Shield" stuff perfect, and because "Last Resort" struck me as far sillier and more inconsequential than I think was intended.

First, we have the writers' continued fascination with Thirteen, and my continued lack of same. I may not have been crazy about the original three fellows, but I never felt like they were being shoved in my face the way that Thirteen has been this season. Yes, she's pretty. Yes, she's dying. Do. Not. Care. Can we please give Kutner something to do? Wilson? Chase, for that matter? (Though Chase walking out of the differential diagnosis was my favorite part of the episode, it also meant he was gone for the rest of it.)

Second, "Dog Day Afternoon" pastiches may be second only to "Twelve Angry Men" pastiches on series television, but they have to be done really smart to work. This one just triggered my eye-rolling reflex, and kept triggering it, over and over. I'm sorry: I don't care how stubborn House is, how myopic he gets about finding the answer to a mystery, even Gregory House does not give a hostage-taker his gun back. No. I will not follow the show or the character down that particular rabbit hole, and I have to basically pretend that it didn't happen or else lose all respect for all involved.

And they didn't even give Wood Harris (aka Avon Barksdale from "The Wire") anything interesting to do. Stringer Bell would have at least tried to introduce House and Zeljko Ivanek to the concept of Robert's Rules of Order, you know?

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

NBC announces January schedule: Friday Night Lights is back on Fridays; Chuck, Life and Heroes take siestas

Who knew when the day began that I'd have an opportunity to do two different posts with "Friday Night Lights" pictures? In this case, the reason is to say that NBC announced its January schedule -- which is different from its mid-season schedule, which I'll explain after the jump -- and "FNL" has a new/old timeslot. I'm not going to run through the entire schedule, so go look at the official press release if you like and I'll hit you with the relevant bullet points just as soon as I marvel at Ben Silverman's continued career arc...

So, here's what you need to know:

• "Friday Night Lights" will be airing Fridays at 9, starting on January 16. Makes sense. NBC seems convinced the show belongs on Fridays because of the title, ratings will almost certainly be depressed because of the DirecTV experiment, and it's a timeslot with low expectations.

• As NBC announced back at its "in-front" schedule thing last April, "Chuck" and "Heroes" will both be sitting out January because they don't repeat well. But instead of being replaced by "American Gladiators" and "Deal or No Deal" as originally planned, the fill-in programming will be a one-month dance competition show called "Superstars of Dance." At 10 in January will be "Momma's Boys," another reality show (produced by Ryan Seacrest). And while the press release makes it clear that "Heroes" and "Chuck" will be back in February, "My Own Worst Enemy" is unsurprisingly left off the list, what with NBC refusing to give it a back nine order and all.

• "Life" also gets the no-repeats plan, as it will be replaced in January by reruns of "Law & Order: SVU." (The "L&O"s don't rerun as well as they used to, but they still perform better than "Life" would do in repeats -- or, for that matter, better than it's been doing in first-run.)

• The Thursday schedule remains unchanged, thanks to Silverman's love of "Kath & Kim" -- which, in a total coincidence, comes from Silverman's production company.

• Like "My Own Worst Enemy," "Lipstick Jungle" isn't mentioned anywhere, suggesting that after all the back-and-forth over whether to cancel it, NBC may have finally given up the ghost.

Again, this is just for January. The resting shows will be coming back in February, plus NBC has the Super Bowl this year to use as a launching pad to promote still more shows (though I wouldn't expect to see the Amy Poehler sitcom from "The Office" producers until late March at the earliest).

But since I'll have already seen all the "FNL" eps already (season three wraps on DirecTV two nights before it debuts on NBC), for at least those four weeks I'll only be watching one night of NBC programming for the first time I can remember. Wow. Even the low points of the Littlefield/Sassa/Ancier/Zucker transitions had stuff of interest sprinkled throughout the week. Click here to read the full post

Getting caught up: Fringe and Pushing Daisies

With a new episode of "Fringe" on tonight -- and don't forget, "House" is scheduled to run about 8 minutes long tonight (which means pad your recording for at least 15 minutes) -- it occurred to me that I never got around to writing about last week's episode, or about last week's "Pushing Daisies." (I was too busy talking about the latter's apparent cancellation instead.) After the jump, very brief thoughts on both, and then you have a chance to express whatever thoughts you've been holding in (or expressing in other forums), if you still remember at this point...

I wish I could have gotten to "Fringe" sooner, because that was the strongest episode they've done since the introduction of The Observer (or The Watcher, or whatever bald guy's code name is). Not coincidentally, it was an episode that was heavy on Walter -- not just for wacky non-sequiturs and mispronunciations, but one that took his mental illness seriously and gave Walter a window on how he must appear to the rest of the world. (The scene where he asked Peter if that's what it's like to have a conversation with him was perfect.) And because there was so much Walter, there was very little Olivia, to the point where I briefly forgot she was even on the show. At this point, other than J.J. Abrams' love of the (allegedly) strong heroine archetype, is there any reason to keep her around? Would the show suffer in any way if it was just about Walter and Peter, with Asteroid around to help requisition supplies and occasionally draw her weapon?

I really liked last week's "Pushing Daisies," too, and not just because it gave Kerri Kenney-Silver her first opportunity in what seems like forever to look like a woman. The magic setting fit in perfectly with this show, and seeing Ned finally throw off the shackles of his anxieties and try to be active for the sake of his half-brothers was a moment long in coming. (Of course, he's had that type of epiphany in previous episodes, only to revert to being a passive dweeb at the start of the next, so maybe this one won't take, either. But it felt like a more dramatic change.) And Emerson's line ("Where did I put that rat's ass I could give?") was one of his best barbs to date. Oh, sarcastic paisley man, I'll miss you most of all.

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

Terminator, "Strange Things Happen at the One Two Point": Dot dot dot

Spoilers for last night's "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" coming up just as soon as I make a Duran Duran/Styx/Pink Floyd playlist...

I think I may need to write a macro for these reviews, because of late my thoughts are the same week after week: I don't really understand half the plot, am not sure how comfortable I am with the sheer number of time-travelers showing up in present-day LA, but the emotional side of the impending apocalypse is being handled so well that I've stopped worrying about plot logic. (Compare this, for the umpteenth time, to "Heroes," which makes even less sense and also has paper-thin characters I don't give a toss about.)

So while I'm somewhat puzzled about the revelation that Riley is a time traveler working with Jesse for some shady purpose, I thought the scene of Riley having to cope with the down-to-earth problems (or lack thereof) of her foster family was very nicely-done. If I understand the timeline correctly, she's too young to even remember the world before the machines rose, and I can imagine how much it would wear on her to be around relatively normal people. A lot of this stuff really reminds me of "12 Monkeys" and all the talk in that movie about how time travel does tremendous harm to your psyche, because people aren't meant to live in more than one era.

Similarly, I'm not sure what Shirley Manson's endgame is -- her desire to teach "John Henry" the computer about morality suggests that she might not be the bad guy here -- but scenes like Ellison interrogating the computer or Ellison discovering that Shirley has turned Cromartie's corpse into John Henry's voice were as creepy as intended. (And way to go on the Garret Dillahunt fakeout, people; I somehow remained unspoiled that he was still on the show.)

But really, the heart of "Strange Things Happen at the One Two Point" was in Sarah slowly cracking up over her obsession with the three dots -- and in how well Lena Headey played this side of the character, so memorable from the second movie and so noticeably absent on the show. So it's not that Headey can't play a crazy Sarah, but that the writers for whatever reason (my money remains on a network note asking that Sarah be more "relateable") haven't given her the opportunity to play it. Good as The Notorious BAG has been at playing Derek's nuttier side, I think I'd like to have a stretch here where Sarah's the crazy one and Derek has to rein her in, instead of vice versa.

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

Heroes, "The Eclipse, Pt. 1": Power blackout

Spoilers for last night's "Heroes" coming up just as soon as I rent a convertible...

I wish I could come up with something more articulate than "meh" (now dictionary-approved!), but this allegedly game-changing episode didn't inspire much from me besides apathy.

If there was ever a point where we watched "Heroes" for the characterizations, I think that time is long passed. We watch... well, primarily we watch out of masochism, or out of a stubborn belief in the potential of "Heroes" rather than the actuality of "Heroes," but we also watch for plot twists and the occasional cool use of powers. So an entire episode in which the characters lose their powers and stand around to talk about their feelings and motivations wasn't the wisest choice. It'd be like a Phillies game where Ryan Howard only got to play defense, or an "American Idol" episode where Randy's the only judge who gets to talk.

Parkman's out-of-the-blue love for Daphne still makes no sense, no matter how many times he refers to spirit walks, but at least she was allowed to call him out on that now. I've completely lost track of whether Elle wants Sylar to be very good or very bad. (If the role were played by a less interesting actress -- say, a certain other diminutive blonde already familiar to the "Heroes" audience -- I'd just fast-forward through those scenes by now.) Peter and Nathan's whinefest about who the bigger sap is might have been interesting if these characters ever had meaningful conversations with each other instead of the usual cryptic dialogue and yelling. And Mohinder is no more interesting with a clear complexion than he was when he was turning into Jeff Goldblum.

Still, at least this one moved, even after everybody lost their powers. The stuff with Baron Samedi (double geek points for naming him after both a James Bond villain and a Brother Voodoo villain) has potential for interesting action -- especially since they spent so much time on Peter talking up his invulnerability that his powers have to turn back on next week, and Seth Green and Breckin Meyer as Kansas comic shop employees has the potential for the entire show to turn into an episode of "Robot Chicken."

But, again, I'm just being a sucker if I'm watching this show based on potential. Or what was that word Tim Kring used last week before he wrote his letter of apology?

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

HIMYM, "The Naked Man": Look! Down on the couch!

Spoilers for last night's "How I Met Your Mother" coming up just as soon as I floss...

There's a running theme of "HIMYM vs. Sitcom" in these reviews, which occasionally prompts people to ask, "But isn't HIMYM a sitcom? How can calling a plot sitcom-y be an insult?" Two answers to that. First, when I say "sitcom-y," I'm referring to bad, hackneyed sitcoms ("According to Jim" instead of "Cheers"). Second, though "HIMYM" has the form and style of a traditional sitcom, it's always at its best when it's telling stories in its own unique way, whether that's playing with the narrative structure (interlocking flashbacks, skewed perception) or just the kinds of topics that the characters get into.

"The Naked Man" was funny, but it was also very "HIMYM." A commenter on another post called it the show's best episode since "Slap Bet," and while I wouldn't go nearly that far, it still felt like the purest concentrated dose of "HIMYM" that we've gotten in quite some time.

The very concept of The Naked Man -- that simply stripping down in the middle of a date leads to sex two out of three times -- was wonderful, as was the gang's fascination with it. As we've established in the past, Barney's often more interested in proving or disproving new social theories than he is in being successful (see also his joy at getting dumped according to the Lemon Law), so his obsession with getting Ted to try out The Naked Man with him rang very true, and very funny. I also got a kick out of Barney and Ted getting caught up in finding the perfect pose with which to introduce The Naked Man to their dates. (Barney should've stuck with the Burt Reynolds -- link probably NSFW.)

While Marshall "calling slut" on Robin seemed a little harsh for such a sexually active (albeit monogamous and schmoopy) character, it did lead to the introduction of dozens of great new excuses -- Paratrooping (or, as Robin called it, Banging For Roof), Condom's About To Expire, Wingman Diving On The Friend Grenade and, of course, Nothing Good On Television -- plus Barney's long and passionate monologue about the 7' woman in the denim skirt.

Mitch's own level of self-awareness was a nice touch. I don't think the joke would have worked nearly as well if he didn't realize what a big loser he is. (Five fantasy football teams? Wow. I only have two and even that's at least one too many.) And Barney and Ted's awe of the guy led to one of my favorite Ted moments of all-time: his superhero-style narration as The Naked Man walked out into a dark and scary night.

Good stuff all around.

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

Clear eyes, full hearts, holiday break for 'Friday Night Lights'

For those of you following the new season of "Friday Night Lights" on DirecTV (or via other means that I don't want to know about), the show is taking this week off, no doubt not wanting to burn one of 13 precious episodes on the night before Thanksgiving. As The Sporting News' First Cuts blog notes, the show's also taking off Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve.

Just a warning in case anyone was thinking about altering holiday travel plans so they could watch Coach and Mrs. Coach (or Landry and Matt). Click here to read the full post

Sepinwall on TV: Talking with 'Sons of Anarchy' creator Kurt Sutter

In today's column, I interview "Sons of Anarchy" creator Kurt Sutter about the arc of the season. I'll post a more detailed transcript tomorrow night after the finale airs (along with, of course, a finale review). Click here to read the full post

Chuck, "Chuck vs. the Gravitron": All your base are belong to Chuck

Spoilers for tonight's "Chuck" coming up just as soon as I find the instruction manual for my house...

"You're under arrest, Jill -- and I'm breaking up with you." -Chuck

As we come to the end of the three-episode Jill arc, it becomes clear that the entire thing was the greatest revenge fantasy ever over the ex who dumped you and broke your heart. Okay, maybe "ever" is hyperbole, but you have to admit that over the course of these three hours, and particularly throughout the second half of "Chuck vs. the Gravitron," Chuck showed Jill that she made a very, very poor choice in breaking up with such an obvious badass.

And the beauty of the episode (written by "Chuck" co-creator Chris Fedak) was that Chuck got to be a badass in a very Chuck way. He can't fight, he's a horrible liar and still prone to panic attacks, but damn if the boy can't read and comprehend an instruction manual like nobody's business. In his mastery of both The Castle and the Nerd Herder, Chuck showed he's not a man you mess with if there are electronics with remote controls within reach.

(In fact, Chuck's domination of Jill and "Leader" in The Castle was so wonderful that I must once again choose to ignore one of the usual "Chuck" plotholes: who designs a super-secret government installation that can be entirely controlled from inside one of the detention cells? Did Michael Scofield draw up the plans?)

In addition to Chuck owning everyone in the closing minutes, this episode also gave us maybe my favorite "Chuck" action sequence to date: Leader chasing Chuck through the titular Gravitron. That is the kind of thing that Fedak, Schwartz and company should be doing as often as they can: action that's likely not that expensive or complicated to produce, but that feels both unique and appropriate to this world. (And is also really funny.) Leave the neck-breaking to Jack Bauer and Sayid Jarrah; Chuck'll do just fine trying to get away from the bad guy while both of them are resisting the powers of centrifugal force.

After doing my best a few weeks ago to explain the nuances of who can know about the various levels of Chuck's secret identity, I have to admit I'm at a loss with all the Fulcrum stuff. I get that Jill wasn't a CIA agent recruited to join Fulcrum, or else General Beckman and the others would have known about her from the start, so that means Fulcrume is more than just an in-house splinter group. And I get that Jill only lied about sleeping with Bryce on orders of her Fulcrum handler (though shouldn't this have come up in one of the season one Bryce episodes?). But how, after all these intersections between Fulcrum, Bryce, Jill and Chuck has it not occurred to anyone yet in Fulcrum that maybe it's not Bryce who has the Intersect, but his nerdy buddy who keeps winding up in CIA/NSA cases? I'm assuming there's a master plan at work here, and given how well everything else on the show is going, I'm putting my trust in the creative team that the Fulcrum story will eventually make sense and be cool, but parts of the last two episodes made my brain hurt.

Some other thoughts on "Chuck vs. the Gravitron":

• The Nerd Herd b-story provided not only an opportunity for '80s pop culture references galore -- Morgan and company doing the slo-mo, side-by-side strut ala "The Right Stuff," Morgan and Lester touching hands through the glass like Kirk and Spcok at the end of "Wrath of Khan" -- but it gave us one of the better "Seinfeld"-ian mergers of A-story and B-story when Big Mike returned from his aborted fishing trip in time to forearm tackle Leader. (As I nerd-quoted when he vaulted the counter last season, how can anything that big move that fast?)

• The powers of product integration: now I want to buy a Nerd Herder. Did you hear? It has iPod capability!

• Captain Awesome's parents don't show up until next week, but their potential arrival did provide Ellie with the line of the episode: "The Very Awesomes are coming here, who make their son look mildly impressive."

• I also liked the pause Lester gave before saying the word "turkey," as if the whole concept was alien to him.

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

Best drama endings ever?

So, in writing my review of "The Shield" finale, I'm going out on a limb and declaring it my favorite drama series finale ever. This prompted a question from my editor about what other finales I would put in my top 5. "The Wire" is definitely on there (though, as with all things "The Wire," it was more of a cumulative achievement than anything in one particular episode). I'm also fond of the polarizing finales for both "The Sopranos" and "St. Elsewhere," and am considering "Six Feet Under" just for the final montage.

The problem with doing this kind of list is that most great series -- drama or comedy -- don't have great finales, because they tend to be on for so long that they lose all creative momentum, or because they try something big in the finale that doesn't work. (For the comedy equivalent of this, see the "Seinfeld" finale.)

While I wrestle with my list (and my review), I'm curious for some of your picks. They must be series finales, so suggestions like "The 'Friday Night Lights' season one finale, and pretend the rest of the series didn't exist" (that one courtesy of Fienberg) don't help. Click here to read the full post

Dexter, "About Last Night": I feel so... used

Spoilers for last night's "Dexter" coming up just as soon as I quiz a vice cop...

Now where is this all going?

We're only nine episodes into the season, and yet "About Last Night" had the definite feeling of penultimateness. The Skinner was identified, and though he slipped away from Deb and Quinn, Anton was saved. Dexter realized that Miguel Prado was far more dangerous than he had realized -- and then, on top of that, realized that perhaps Miguel was more dangerous all along, and had simply been manipulating him into giving serial killer lessons. These two developments in the season-long story arcs would ordinarily come right before the finale, but we've got three episodes left to go, and that suggests a bunch of additional twists in the Dexter/Prado story, if not also in the Skinner subplot. I still think the season has to end with Miguel Saran-wrapped to a table, but getting him there may not be as easy (or predictable) as I had first assumed.

And the idea that Miguel was a monster all along -- if not a killer -- solves a lot of my problems with the recent progression of that story. If, as I had speculated before, Miguel had been using his brother Oscar as an avenging angel, and that he turned to Dexter as both a replacement and an attempt to get hands-on training in the art of homicidal vigilantism, then his lack of curiosity about Dexter past, and about the high probability that he's the Bay Harbor Butcher, makes much more sense.

Very, very interesting, and Michael C. Hall and Jimmy Smits continue to rock it.

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

Sepinwall on TV: '24: Redemption' review

In today's column, I review the return of Jack Bauer in "24: Redemption," which I found pretty wanting -- so much so that I don't think I'm going to do a separate post on Sunday night, so feel free to comment on it here.

Bumping this up so people remember it's here for discussion. Click here to read the full post

Entourage, "Return to Queens Boulevard": Every little thing's gonna be alright

Spoilers for the "Entourage" season five finale coming up just as soon as I buy a bar...

Dammit. Why did "Entourage" have to add Gary Cole to the cast? If it wasn't for him, it would be so easy to pull a "That's it for me!" after that finale, which was a concentrated burst of everything I dislike about the show. But I like Cole enough that I think I'm going to be suckered into watching at least part of next season.

It isn't just that everything always works out for Vince, in this case with a Deus Ex Marty Scorsese. (And was Scorsese watching a completely different set of "Smokejumpers" dailies than we saw? Because the footage they showed in the previous two episodes were a reminder that Vince isn't much of an actor.) I understand that the show is meant to be a fantasy camp. It's that everything always works out in the least interesting, least entertaining way possible. Vince and E have a big blow-up, E decides to explore a life without his meal ticket, and five minutes later, everything's just peachy. It's not dramatically interesting, it's not funny, it's not engaging. It's just... there.

Meanwhile, who wants to join me in filing a class action lawsuit for emotional trauma after witnessing the Turtle/Meadow Soprano phone sex scene? Maybe we could piggyback it onto some kind of suit against Michael Phelps' sponsors; dolphin boy will rue the day he agreed to have the briefest, most pointless cameo in the show's history.

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

Sepinwall on TV: 'The Shield' creator Shawn Ryan looks back

In today's column, Shawn Ryan looks back on the run of "The Shield" and the creative philosophy of the writers room. No spoilers for the finale (though we open with a discussion of the end of last week's episode); all that stuff will be posted on Tuesday night. Click here to read the full post

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, "The Nightman Cometh": The play's the thing

Anyone have any thoughts on the homoerotic musical "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" season finale?

I still prefer the original episode with "Night Man" and "Day Man," but any trip inside Charlie's creative and disturbing brain is welcome. Click here to read the full post

ER & Grey's Anatomy: It's a teaching hospital, stupid

Spoilers for last night's "Grey's Anatomy" and "ER" coming up just as soon as I work up a sweat...

Interesting that both shows did stories about the surgical residents not being interested in teaching their interns, only to have the stories resolve in divergent ways. On "ER," Neela gets chewed out -- and rightfully so -- for not wanting to work with young Andrew anymore. On "Grey's," the secret cutting society is treated as entirely the fault of the interns, even though it started up because Yang, Karev and the rest couldn't be bothered passing on any lessons to the young pups. If we hadn't watched several seasons of the show with the main characters as interns, and saw how much Bailey let them do and how much they learned, I might just accept that this is an intern's lot in life. But it's not, at least not in the universe the show created in previous years, and to not have the Chief lay at least some of the blame for this on Meredith and Cristina for treating the interns like indentured scut servants and little more was galling...

...albeit not as galling as a character (in this case, Alex) once again being forced to justify Izzie's continued employment in the wake of the Denny/LVAD fiasco. How many times do I need to say this: if Shonda and the other writers would stop trying to defend the Denny thing and just ignore its existence, we might be able to let it go. But in having yet another character claim it was kinda sorta okay, and in bringing Denny back from the dead somehow to rock Izzie's world, it makes it really hard to ignore the single worst storyline in the show's history.

And speaking of this supernatural sex marathon, Shonda shot down the most obvious speculation by telling Ausiello that, as Ahnuld once said, it's not a tumor. A tumor would have been a soap-y explanation, but at least it would have worked within the framework of this show. Actual sex with a solidified ghost? Blurg.

If you can somehow ignore all the Izzie/Denny stuff -- I know, it's hard, but at least most of it didn't involve the other characters and was therefore fast-forwardable -- and accept the disposition of the appendectomy disaster, then there were some good things here, like Sloan's heart growing three sizes as he helped the sleepwalker's daughter, or Bailey and Callie talking about their lousy years and their love of surgery, or Joshua Malina making a non-Sorkin appearance to give his wife some, uh, poo. And even the appy subplot worked up until the writers and the Chief let the residents off the hook for it, as it was as creepy and scary as intended. But where the early episodes of this season featured really strong material marred by the occasional bit of silliness, the stupid parts are starting to overwhelm the rest.

Getting back to "ER," I was surprised by how well Brenner's confession of abuse worked. They'd been telegraphing all episode that he had been molested as a kid, and Brenner in general is a character I have little use for, but David Lyons put his all into what could have been standard sweeps/awards show bait, and intercutting it with seeing the music teacher show his true colors had the desired effect. Plus, it helped that Brenner was confessing to Archie, as Scott Grimes tends to make every scene he's in better lately. (The best thing in last week's episode was Archie's stunned reaction to learning that Banfield had chosen to work in the same ER where her son died.)

Also, I have a phobia about stuff touching my eyes (it's the reason I never got contacts), and so watching Andrew and the others work on the guy's eye was one of the more squirm-inducing "ER" traumas I can remember.

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

The Office, "Frame Toby": Caprese for everyone!

As with tonight's "30 Rock," I was so underwhelmed with the latest episode of "The Office" -- other than Michael's initial reaction to Toby's return and the revelation that Dwight is a fan of "The Shield" -- that I don't have the energy or enthusiasm to write anything more than the generic invitation for you all to comment.

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

30 Rock, "Gavin Volure": He hates those sex dolls! Stay away from the sex dolls!

Is it just my cold infecting my funny bone, or was that one of the weakest "30 Rock" episodes ever? I'm flummoxed that an episode featuring Tina Fey, Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin together only made me laugh once, and not at any of them. (It was at Pete's per diem gambit with Jack.) Do I need some higher-dose NyQuil, or was something way off with this one? Click here to read the full post

You get a cancellation! And you get a cancellation! And you get a cancellation! Everybody gets a cancellation!!!

Big day for falling axes in the TV biz. The CW officially pulled the plug on its disastrous outsourced Sunday lineup, replacing "Valentine, Inc." and "Easy Money" with syndicated movies and, in a salute to peanut-lovers everywhere, "Jericho" reruns. (Now, if only they could add "Moonlight" to the mix...) ABC declined to give back nine orders to "Pushing Daisies," "Dirty Sexy Money" and "Eli Stone," effectively canceling all three once their initial run of 13 episodes is up. (Bryan Fuller is still talking about wrapping up all the "Pushing Daisies" stories in comic book form.)

On the good news side, ABC finally announced a premiere date and timeslot for "Scrubs," which will air Tuesdays at 9:30 (and will double up at 9 its first two weeks), along with other midseason changes that will have "Private Practice" moving to the post-"Grey's Anatomy" timeslot and "Life on Mars" (which got a pick-up for four more episodes) airing after "Lost" on Wednesdays at 10.

Still need to get to this week's "Pushing Daisies." Ah, well. I figured it'd be canceled three episodes in. Instead, it was a surprise success at first before the ratings started to drop and then the strike effectively killed it. It's kind of a miracle we got 22 episodes of such a weird show on a major broadcast network. Click here to read the full post

Life, "Badge Bunnies": Young officers in love

Spoilers for last night's "Life" coming up just as soon as I swap guns with a friend...

Much better. Much, much better. This is the first one since the Stanford Prison Experiment episode to live up to how brilliant the show was towards the end of last season.

The focus on police culture -- and the badge bunny subculture -- was interesting, particularly as Crews and Reese are both outcasts within the department, and Victoria Pratt did some particularly nice work as the bunny-turned-wife-turned-fellow-outcast.

The shooting range scene was the first time I actually enjoyed the Reese/Tidwell thing, and not just because it then led to the hilariously awkward scene where the two of them arrived at the drug dealer's house at the same time as Stark and a glitter-faced Crews and none of them wanted to talk about what they had just been doing.

It was a really funny episode, in general, with the return of Reese's "Did you just say (sexist jargon)?" running gag, and the introduction of a new one about Reese's "superpower" for identifying fellow addicts.

My only real complaint comes from the Ted subplot. By most objective standards, I should always be happy with a story that puts Christina Hendricks on my TV set, but it's clear the writers have no idea what to do with Ted and keep trotting out these various subplots (Ted's a teacher, Ted's in love with Crews' future stepmom) just because they have Adam Arkin under contract. If they're going to keep bringing Olivia back, I'd like to see her have some more interaction with Crews, if for no other reason than that it's rare to see multiple, unrelated redheads in a single scene on television. (I'm all about hair color diversity.)

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

Sons of Anarchy, "The Sleep of Babies": Missing the target

Spoilers for tonight's "Sons of Anarchy" coming up just as soon as I get Jesus to mow my lawn...

When you watch TV for a living, there are ways that it can ruin the actual experience of watching TV. Because I see so much, and because I'm always trying to watch with a critical eye, I often find myself in a position where I'm trying to out-think the show I'm watching. All though "The Sleep of Babies," I kept asking myself whether Kurt Sutter would brave -- or maybe foolish -- enough to kill off Opie, and I kept wondering exactly how circumstances would conspire to save him at the last possible second.

But in this case, I didn't so much out-think the show as overthink it. I was so fixated on Opie -- on seeing Opie and Donna look so happy together finally, on watching Ryan Hurst look like the baddest man on the planet during the shootout in the doll warehouse and wondering how on Earth the show could go on without him -- that I never for a second anticipated that tragedy would befall the other half of that couple. So when Opie and Donna swapped cars leaving the party, mere seconds after Tig had pulled away to prepare for the hit, I was thunderstruck, and spent the final minutes of the episode with a knot in my stomach only slightly smaller than the one generated by some of the early scenes in last night's penultimate episode of "The Shield." Great misdirection, and a creative decision that I hope will have repercussions just as deep as when Shane borrowed a grenade on "The Shield."

I'd like to say more about yet another episode that was better than the one before it, but my head is exploding with a cold that doesn't want to leave our house. So I'm going to cut this review shorter than I'd like and leave it to you fine people.

Meanwhile, I'm going to talk to Kurt Sutter on Friday (after taking a look at the season finale, which I haven't had a chance to watch yet) for a season one post-mortem. I'm open to suggestions, if there are particular things you want answers about.

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

House, "Emancipation": Double your parallels, halve your fun

No time to write about last night's "House," except to say that the only thing more annoying than this season's insistence on having the patient of the week's life serve as a parallel to one of the doctors is episodes like this one that turn the patient into a metaphor for multiple docs (in this case, Kutner and Foreman).

Fire away in the comments. Click here to read the full post

The Shield, "Possible Kill Screen": The eyes of Victor Samuel Mackey

Spoilers for the penultimate episode (ever!) of "The Shield" coming up just as soon as I even myself out...

"Do you have any idea what you've done to me?" -Olivia
"I've done worse." -Vic

Oh. My. God.

I'm sorry. I know I'm supposed to be the articulate critic with the deep deep thoughts who can break things down on a thematic level, but I'm not sure there's any way to respond to the series-shattering events of "Possible Kill Screen" without first staring slack-jawed at the screen and going all OMG.

If you thought that the series had gone as extreme as it could with Vic and Shane each attempting botched hits on the other, and Vic turning in his badge to hunt Shane's family full-time, well, you underestimated just how ruthless Shawn Ryan and company (here led by writers Adam E. Fierro & Evan Bleiweiss and first-time director Billy Gierhart) could be.

Even within the confines of this single, unforgettable hour, I was continually blown away by how high the stakes were being raised, and how far the creative team was willing to go with these characters. As I watched this episode in a Fox screening room a few weeks ago, I had a terrible knot in the pit of my stomach as Shane was forced to snort cocaine and it became clear that his latest scam was going to end badly. And that knot only grew tighter as Mara shot and killed that random girl in the house during her clumsy rescue attempt, and even tighter as she moaned in pain and guilt at their safe house while little Jackson looked on. By the time Vic sat in that ICE interrogation room, preparing to confess to everything in order to save Corrine from what he doesn't realize is a non-existent charge -- saving himself and screwing Ronnie over in the process -- I was so tense and uncomfortable that I might have done damage to that screening room armrest if I wasn't so busy typing out every thing I saw and felt.

Even now, just thinking about that long, long, long silence before Vic opened his mouth and began his confession makes me catch my breath, and I imagine it will no matter how many times I end up watching this episode. (My guess: a lot of times.)

Much of that power comes from the seven year journey we've been on with these characters, always wondering how Vic is going to get out of his latest jam, how he's going to end up, what Shane's going to do, etc. To see Shane spiral further and further into impending doom -- now having inadvertently made his pregnant wife into a killer -- was devastating, even though he's a short-sighted, hot-headed, bigoted clown who has brought all of this misery on himself (and, unfortunately, on his family) because good guy or bad, you form attachments to people you've been watching this long.

And after waiting and wondering for years who was going to take Vic down and how, to see him apparently pull off the greatest Houdini act of his career -- to find a way to legally insulate himself from every murder, robbery and other crime he committed over a long and dirty career -- was stunning, especially since we know that he had to sell out Ronnie to do it.

But much of that power also comes from the actors. What praise is left to write about Mr. Michael Chiklis? Every time I think he's wowed me as much as he ever can, he gives a performance like the one in this episode. With Chiklis, your eyes are always drawn to that bald dome, to the muscles, the swagger and maybe the sneer, but all I can think about in this episode are his eyes. There are several distinct moments in the hour where Chiklis gives us a window into Vic's soul, and it's a terrifying glimpse each time. The first is right after he gets the news that Chaffee ok'ed the immunity deal (but before he finds out that it's only for him, not Ronnie) and you see all the relief at seeing what he thinks is the light at the end of a very dark tunnel. The second is right after he sees the cops' (fake) arrest of Corrine, which he knows he caused with all his shenanigans. It's one of the few times in the run of the series where Vic seems to acknowledge, even for a moment, that his actions might have wronged other people, and it stands in stark contrast to the compartmentalized, guiltless look on his face at the end of the episode, after he's screwed over Olivia and Ronnie and gotten himself the greatest Get Out of Jail Free card of all time.

But the thing that has haunted my dreams, that left me shaken in that screening room and the rest of the day, was that long silence before the confession. Again, some of the power of that is cumulative. To paraphrase Shawn Ryan, "The Shield" usually moves at such a helter-skelter pace that when it actually slows down to "Mad Men" speed, those moments hit much harder than they would on a more conventionally-paced series. But dammit, look at Chiklis eyes, the set of his jaw, the utterly engimatic look on his face as Mackey debates whether he can really bring himself to do this: to finally own up to every last one of his sins to someone outside the strike team, and to destroy the life of the last strike teamer standing. Just a masterclass in acting, and one of the most striking moments I've ever witnessed in any TV drama.

Almost as wonderful is the moment when we return from the commercial break (and I thank my local deity that I didn't have to sit through that the way you folks probably did) and Vic is just going on and on and on about the Armenians and everything else, and he just laughs at the memory of setting up O'Brian. These are terrible things he's confessing to, but at the same time, they're a testament to his ingenuity and sheer toughness -- Vic Mackey's Greatest Hits -- and he (and the show) can't help but revel in that confession as it keeps going and going.

And yet, just as Vic's starting to sort of enjoy this trip down memory lane, we get Claudette's arrival and her utter horror at realizing that ICE had granted full immunity to her white whale. It's one of the bigger logic leaps in "Shield" history that Chaffee or Olivia wouldn't have called Claudette to get some hint of what their new hero might be confessing to, but as we see the pain and disbelief on CCH Pounder's face -- to come so damn close to getting Vic, only to witness this? -- all question of plot logic flew out of my head. And under any other circumstances, I might have laughed off Claudette firing Dutch for his involvement in Billings' nonsense, but with only one episode to go and with Claudette at Defcon 1 like this, it sure seems like this could be permanent, doesn't it? If the Emmy voters somehow remember that this show exists when it's time for next year's nominations, Pounder needs to be near the front of the line...

...right along with Walton Goggins, because good lord does he deserve an Emmy to go on the mantle next to his Oscar. Again, Shane has done and said so many awful things, and yet I can't help but feel for him as he watches his wife moan, or as he turns down Tina's offer to come in because he fears he's taken his family past the point of no return. He's been tearing it up all season, but like Chiklis and Pounder, he took it to another level here.

And, for that matter, how about Michelle Hicks? She -- or, at least, Mara -- has been openly despised by most of the fans since she first showed up in season three, but she was superb at showing the devastation and emptiness on Mara's face as she realizes what she's done. The romantic part of their fugitive vacation is a distant memory, and now all Mara can fell is physical and emotional pain, and it's awful.

Some other thoughts on "Possible Kill Screen":

• Because the Vic/Shane stuff is so epic, the return of Lloyd and his mom almost got lost in the shuffle, but it's great to see Frances Fisher again.

• The episode's title comes from the great documentary "The King of Kong," making it the second awesome show on television in recent weeks to pay homage to that movie.

• Again, as mentioned at the top, this was Billy Gierhart's first time directing an episode of "The Shield" -- or directing anything, other than maybe a student film or three. Gierhart was the show's longtime camera operator and had been asking forever to take the reins for an episode. Shawn Ryan says he wanted to do it, then started to balk when he realized it would be such an important episode, but finally decided to let Gierhart do it. And it's fair to say he more than justified Ryan's trust. (Since then, he directed the "Hell Followed" episode of "Sons of Anarchy.")

• Last week, the show acknowledged that the other cops knew Danny was on leave while waiting for Vic to cool down, and this week, she returns to The Barn. It's not clear exactly how she decided now was the right time to return (other than maybe running out of money and/or paid vacation days), but her timing proves fortuitous, as she's able to play babysitter to Corrine's kids (and her son's half-siblings) while Corrine is locked up on the bogus drug charge.

• Even in the midst of the worst period of his life, Shane still has a knack for the one-liner, this time, right after robbing the drug dealer, noting, "People are right: Walmart does have the best prices in town."

• I love that every shady plan in the greater Los Angeles area somehow depends on the arrival of a presidential motorcade to provide cover. Frankly, I'm surprised Billings' lawsuit didn't in some way involve the motorcade.

• Note how the confession scene goes out of its way to skip over Olivia's reference to the date. The way the show's timeline works, only about two and a half years have passed since Vic killed Terry, and so the writing always has to be careful when it comes to identifying specific dates.

Finally, for the last time in "Shield" history, let me remind you: Do not talk about the previews. Do not talk about anything you've read or heard about the finale that would give things away to your fellow posters. Got it?

I'll have a finale preview of some kind (possibly including non-spoiler-y quotes from Shawn Ryan) running Sunday, and I'll have the finale review ready to post as soon as the episode ends, along with transcripts of a couple of different interviews I did with Shawn Ryan: both the group chat a bunch of us critics had with him right after we watched the finale, and a solo interview I did last week. All told, it should only take you three or four times the length of the actual finale (which runs close to 90 minutes with commercials) to read it all.

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

What are your favorite memories of 'The Shield'?

Don't worry: I'll have a separate review post up tonight around 11 for the penultimate episode of "The Shield," but as I work overtime on various stories related to the end of the series, I wanted to poll you guys about your favorite scenes, storylines, or even small moments from the run of the series. Does any one image immediately jump out at you when you think of the show? Click here to read the full post

Terminator, "Complications": Twice the Toby

Once again, busy day/week, but I was able to watch "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" while getting some other work done. No time for a full-blown post, but three observations after the jump:

1)As with "Heroes," I've given up on trying to follow the big story arcs (or, at times, even the episodic plots). But unlike "Heroes," the sense of mood that the producers and actors create is so strong that I don't even care if it makes sense.

2)Who ever thought we would live to see a day where David Silver could beat the snot out of Toby Ziegler? And that the two would be equally badass?

3)I'm surprised to realize that Ellison's probably dumber than I thought, and that the show's concept of time travel is starting to trend back towards the "Terminator 3" model that I thought the producers really hated.

Fire away. Click here to read the full post

Big Bang Theory, "The Lizard-Spock Expansion": Is there life on Mars?

I haven't really written about "Big Bang Theory" since the middle of last season, and while I still have some issues with the ratio of laughing with the characters versus laughing at them, I have to admit that the show makes me laugh a decent amount of the time when I watch it while waiting for "HIMYM" to start. The bit last night with Sheldon attempting to convincingly lie about Leonard working "at the office" was priceless.

Again, I don't have much free blogging time over the next few days, so go read Mo Ryan expressing opinions that are remarkably similar to my own on this subject. Click here to read the full post

Sepinwall on TV: 'The IFC Media Project' review

In today's column, I review "The IFC Media Project," a six-part series hosted by Gideon Yago that promises to deliver "a user's guide to how the news gets made." Cool idea in theory, very iffy in execution, unfortunately.

Also, as mentioned last night in the "Heroes" review, my week just got a little wacky, and I'm being forced to prioritize the stuff I really want/need to write about (various columns and blog entries related to "The Shield," a review of tomorrow night's "Friday Night Lights") from other stuff I would do in a normal week (reviews of "House" and "Fringe" tonight, for instance). Don't be surprised to get a lot of open threads like that "Heroes" post over the next few days. Click here to read the full post

HIMYM, "Woooo!": The tears of a slutty clown

Spoilers for last night's "How I Met Your Mother" coming up just as soon as I get on this conference call...

For a show that started out exploring the advantages and disadvantages of couplehood (as represented by Lily and Marshall) vs. singlehood (as represented by Barney and Robin) through the eyes of a guy who wanted to leave the latter group to join the former, "HIMYM" has taken a decided pro-couplehood turn the last few episodes. Last week, we saw hardcore anti-childists Robin and Barney both overwhelmed by the power of "Sock!" and last night we had Robin explaining to Lily that the Woo Girls only Woo'ed to conceal their profound loneliness and envy of people like Lily.

Now, I'm firmly entrenched in the world of marriage, kids, suburbia, etc., and yet I miss the way the show tended to show both sides of the equation, like in that first season episode where Marshall really wanted to dance at the club instead of hang around with other couples on Game Night. It's one thing to suggest that some of the Woo Girls would rather be home for Game Night, but don't some people just like to party?

I also thought the Woo joke -- and the Dr. Seuss-style dialogue between Robin and Lily that accompanied it -- got repetitive after a little while before being re-energized at the very end by the Woo subtitles (particularly when Ted joined in on the action). Usually, "HIMYM" gives at least three spins on a joke, and here we only got two, with the second coming very late in the episode.

But the stuff with Barney and Sven: The Swedish Architecture Collective? Legen... well, you know the rest.

I know Barney wants to be Ted's best friend and all, but who wouldn't be lured in by the prospect of working inside the brain of a fire-breathing T-Rex, particularly one with a strip club in the N on top? Europeans and their weird affectations have been an easy punchline in America for years (see also Dieter on "SNL," or the nihilists from "The Big Lebowski"), but they're also a good punchline, and seeing Barney briefly think he'd found his kindred Swedish spirits was almost as terrific as the unexpected "Mad Men" shout-out during one of Barney and Marshall's rooftop "conference calls."

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

Heroes, "It's Coming": Love shock, baby, love shock

It's been one of those weeks, and Monday's not even over yet, you know what I mean? So while I had the time to actually watch "Heroes" tonight, I'm not going to have the time or mental energy to really write about "Heroes," beyond three things I'll say about tonight: 1)Kristen Bell is a really good actress, and it's nice to watch her work even in something this dumb; 2)As amusing as the Hiro storyline is, it's the show's umpteenth different attempt to take the guy who controls time and space off the board so he can't just blink and fix everything; and 3)So, ya think an eclipse is coming?

Fire away with your thoughts, good, bad or indifferent. Click here to read the full post

Chuck, "Chuck vs. the Fat Lady": What's opera, doc?

Spoilers for tonight's "Chuck" coming up just as soon as I comb my beard for secrets...

I knew it! As soon as they announced that they'd be doing a big story arc about Chuck's ex-girlfriend Jill, I thought that she'd wind up being a spy. After all, what are the odds, in this show's universe and logic, that only two-thirds of that Stanford love triangle would wind up in the espionage game?

But then the production team and Zachary Levi did such a good job of selling Jill as Chuck's best hope for something resembling a normal life that I got sucker-punched by the revelation that she's a Fulcrum agent. (Technically, I got sucker-punched when the computer started spitting out pictures of other Fulcrum agents, when it became clear that Jill's would be the final picture in the bunch.)

"Chuck vs. the Fat Lady" was probably my least favorite of the three Jill episodes, but at this point in "Chuck" season two, that's a little like saying it was the least chewy of the three Nestle Tollhouse cookies my wife just took out of the oven, you know? It was still damned tasty.

Until we got the last-second reveal, the episode was primarily about the Clark/Lois/Lana-style triangle between Chuck, Sarah and Jill. Chuck's fake girlfriend caused some problems with his potential real one during the Rachel Bilson two-parter last season, but this played out differently for a couple of reasons. One, Jill knows about Chuck's secret identity (albeit not the Intersect part) and knows, intellectually, that Sarah and Chuck have never really dated, even though it's hard to look at Sarah and not feel threatened. And, two, Sarah is much more attached to Chuck than she was last year, and also knows that Jill matters a lot more to Chuck than sandwich girl ever did. Her jealousy over Chuck finding, as Casey so eloquently put it, "a new piece of asset," was much greater this time. So the stakes felt higher, and the jokes -- whether it was Sarah showing up in her best hooker-wear, Chuck and Sarah having a very dirty-sounding conversation in the ventilation ducts after Chuck pocket-dialed Jill, or circumstances conspiring to make Chuck and Sarah shower together -- felt even sharper as a result. In particular, it's an impressive trick to do a scene where Zachary Levi and Yvonne Strahovski are soaping each other up in nothing but their underwear and not have it be the least bit sexy, but they pulled it off, to fine comic effect.

As with any "Chuck" episode, there were the usual plot holes you just have to grin at and ignore, like Casey turning his back on Chuck when the thumb drive was readily accessible, or the Fulcrum agent not bothering to make sure he had destroyed the right thumb drive. And, as with pretty much every "Chuck" episode this season, the jokes are so good that they do a nice job of paving over the plot holes -- in this case, Chuck making unexpected use of Morgan's illicit Canadian video game copier to decrypt and duplicate the Fulcrum list on the drive over to the opera house.

The writers are starting to figure out how to write for Tony Hale, meanwhile. Millbarge's attempt to gain Morgan's loyalty with the concept of "Buy More-ia" was amusing (particularly in that Morgan had himself thought of the concept and name years earlier), and Millbarge's oblivious tool-ishness was better done here, notably with his wine cooler bender.

(Other than that brief period in the late '80s when Bruce Willis thought he was a singer, have wine coolers basically always been funny? Come to think of it, they were pretty funny even during Willis' "My my my my!" phase.)

Millbarge's witchhunt, in addition to acknowledging that the whole "onsite install" alibi for Chuck's missions would get noticed sooner or later, also provided the usual set up for funny moments from the other citizens of Buy More-ia. In particular, I loved the dual interrogation of Lester and Jeff, with Jeff again going into prison mode and Lester sounding genuinely terrified while talking about the secrets in Morgan's beard.

And the rehabilitation of Morgan continues. The Millbarge stuff was largely separate from Chuck's story this week (though a thematic parallel, as usual), but Morgan's uhappiness at learning that Chuck was with Jill again -- and that Chuck hadn't told him -- was well-played by Josh Gomez. It makes sense that Morgan would have the same reaction as Ellie. And Morgan also got to achieve victory over Millbarge, while simultaneously invoking the name of the one, the only, Harry Tang. Nice.

Some other thoughts on "Chuck vs. the Fat Lady":

• Need a ruling: has there ever been a funnier John Casey moment than him unexpected hitting High C, then abashedly explaining that he was once a choir boy?

• A nice joke, and the sort the show rarely had time for last year, when the scenes tended to work on one level at a time: while Sarah and Casey are arguing over what to do about the level of surveillance on Chuck, you see Chuck whining and whining on the monitors in the background.

• Now, when Millbarge says, "I have heard the loading dock is like a Five For Fighting concert," I'm supposed to take it that Five For Fighting is lame, right? But... the song about Superman's existential angst speaks to me as a comic book nerd! And my daughter loves the song about penguins that John Ondrasik did for "Dog Train"!

• Speaking of being a comic book nerd, I can't have been the only geek in the audience whose eyebrows raised when Chuck mentions the Culper Ring, the Revolutionary War-era spy organization that's such a key part of Brian K. Vaughan's sci-fi epic "Y: The Last Man," can I?

• Still more geekdom (if I can't nerd out while discussing this show, when can I?): Jill says that one of the late Guy LaFleur's passwords involved Vogon poetry, which is, of course, the third worst poetry in the universe.

• And yet another kind of nerdhood: the puzzle-bomb stops with the read-out at 007, just like in "Goldfinger."

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

Dexter, "The Damage a Man Can Do": Life almost (but thankfully doesn't) imitate art

Spoilers for last night's "Dexter" coming up just as soon as I get some, uh, treats out of my cereal box...

First thing's first: rarely have I been as horrified by an act of fictional violence as I was by watching Miguel Prado plunge a knife into Billy Fleeter, because I knew it almost wound up not being fictional. When the scene was filmed, Jimmy Smits accidentally grabbed a real knife instead of a prop one and stabbed stuntman/actor Jeff Chase with it, and was lucky that he hit the small plastic plate covering Chase's heart. Even knowing that Chase survived relatively unscathed wasn't enough to prevent some massive cringing as I watched it.

(Also, because this story came out very early in the season, it completely spoiled the fact that Prado would wind up joining Dexter in the plastic-wrapped killing ritual. C'est la vie.)

There are still some major foundational problems here -- the Bay Harbor Butcher issue still hovers over every one of Miguel and Dexter's interactions, Deb is turning into one of those gullible "Heroes" characters who believes whatever story she's been most recently told -- but Michael C. Hall and Smits continue to do wonderful work. Dexter's excitement at finding what he thinks is a true kindred spirit (as opposed to Lila, who was just nuts) and Miguel's excitement at getting to dispense some first-hand justice were so well-played that I almost was able to ignore the fact that Miguel should be smart enough to connect the dots and realize he's dealing with a much scarier individual than even he thinks.

Also, the final scene with Ellen Wolf suggested that there's more to her history with Prado than either has admitted so far. The look on her face didn't say, "God, what is this hypocritical sonuvabitch doing at my front door?" It said, "Is this another booty call?"

And in terms of guesses for our serial killer, I'm assuming it's the head tree-trimmer -- not only because his underling was so terrified of him, but because, unless my eye is way off, he's being played by Jesse Borrego, who isn't quite a Hey, It's That Guy!, but still falls under the Most Recognizable Guest Star theory.

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

Entourage, "Play'n with Fire": Meadow lands Turtle

Brief spoilers for tonight's "Entourage" coming up just as soon as I start my own limo business...

When I initially watched this episode on a review screener, I was under the mistaken assumption that it was the season finale, when in fact we have one episode to go. And I think I liked it more as a finale than I do as a penultimate episode, since I suspect all will somehow be made well by the end of next week's show. (Once again, let me remind you of the spoiler rule: no talk about previews, things you've read, heard, etc., that would give away anything about the next episode.)

Still, the Vince/Verner blow-up played out entertainingly, and if the show manages to pull Vince out of his latest mess, at least it gave us a couple of interesting episodes before it did so.

Turtle and Meadow Soprano? Eh. The sad thing is that Drama has become such a broad, annoying character that I actually prefer a Turtle relationship plot to whatever they would have cooked up for Johnny. "Entourage": exceeding low standards everywhere!

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

SNL: Live from New York, it's Justin Timberlake!

Thoughts on last night's "Saturday Night Live" coming up just as soon as I ask my doctor about my tolerance for cartoonish sound effects...

I know everyone's going to want to talk about Justin Timberlake's surprise appearance on Weekend Update and then his work in the sketch depicted above(*), but I want to start off by singing the praises of this week's Digital Short. Perhaps to an even more extreme degree than "SNL" itself, the Shorts can be very hit-or-miss, and "Everyone's a Critic" started off seeming like it would be one of the misses, relying on a pixellated male nudity gag that wasn't enough to justify the length. But then they unveiled the painting at the art auction, and... well, like Adam at Throwing Things, I can't remember the last time I laughed so uncontrollably at something(**). Just the perfect amount of over-the-top (if such a thing is possible), and the random "Raiders of the Lost Ark" homage in the middle gave the entire thing a great Zucker Brothers (circa "Airplane!") feel.

(*)I'm still trying to figure out NBC's strategy for which sketches to post online. You would think the Beyonce/Timberlake sketch would be a natural to go viral, but it's not up there, while lamer sketches like the kissing family are. Is it a music rights clearance issue? Or will it just randomly turn up online days and days later, like Giraffes! and Night School Musical from the Ben Affleck show?

(**) Actually, that's not true. I'd put the second half of "Everyone's a Critic" slightly behind the safe-sex riff from last night's Ricky Gervais HBO concert special, but in fairness, I first heard that one way back in July.

But, anyway, JT. I think we've already established that Timberlake's in the elite hosting pantheon with Steve Martin, Alec Baldwin, Christopher Walken and, if they ever do it again, Tom Hanks and John Goodman. So while it's a disappointment that he won't be pulling double duty for the Thanksgiving show, the idea of having him condense his entire appearance into a stream-of-consciousness monologue -- which sounded almost exactly like how you would expect the hypothetical episode to go, and allowed Timberlake to introduce a Michael McDonald impression -- was hilarious, and one of several extremely meta moments of the episode.

We also got Paul Rudd(***) doing a monologue about how disappointing it is to be hosting the show after the election, and even the cold opening with Joe Biden promising that he can be as gaffe-prone as Sarah Palin felt like the show's way of promising that they could be funny even without Tina Fey's Palin impression(****).

(***) Rudd was a disappointment as host, I thought, considering how funny and versatile he is in his movies. They primarily used him as the straight man in other people's sketches (like the scared straight bit with Kenan), and didn't even let him be one of the dancers in the Beyonce sketch, even though he showed in the otherwise forgettable (and straight-to-video) "I Could Never Be Your Woman" that he's a wonderful funny dancer.

(****) It also felt like an excuse to once again duck the show's problem with making Obama funny. How long can they hold off on bringing Fred Armisen out as Obama again?

I'm sure everyone who works on the show is bracing him or herself for the inevitable post-election round of "Saturday Night Dead" stories. Devoting so much airtime to various sketches commenting about the predictable nature of the show could have been their attempt to pre-empt those criticisms -- or, at least, to soften the blow by joking about it in advance. But a better -- albeit harder -- approach would have been to come back with a kick-butt episode that made it clear it wasn't just Fey carrying the show this season. Instead, we got a few highlights and a lot of dead air. Even the franchise's best seasons offer up episodes like that now and again; this one was just very poorly-timed.

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

30 Rock, "The One With the Cast of 'Night Court'": With Friends like this...

Spoilers for last night's "30 Rock" coming up just as soon as I do "mannequin comes to life"...

When all the big-name guest stars for this season of "30 Rock" were announced, there was a lot of concern that Oprah, Steve Martin and company would start to dominate the show in the same way that all those latter-era guest stars did for "Will & Grace." Having seen how gracefully Tina Fey and company incorporated guest stars in seasons past -- including another former "Friends" star -- I wasn't too worried, and certainly Megan Mullally and Oprah didn't take over the show the past two weeks.

Jennifer Aniston, on the other hand, almost did. I thought she was very funny and un-Rachel-like, but it felt her presence turned Liz Lemon into a bystander in her own show, in the same way that Tracy Jordan's arrival turned "The Girlie Show" into "TGS with Tracy Jordan." (Would this be "3R with Jennifer Aniston"?)

Again, I thought Aniston gave a good comic performance. So I can't decide whether it's a screentime issue (she was in this one a lot more than Oprah was in last week's episode), or simply a matter of her personal life and the tabs creating this impenetrable halo of celebrity around her to the point where it's impossible to watch her in anything -- particularly something this relatively small-scale -- without seeing imaginary flashing neon letters spelling out "JENNIFER ANISTON! OMFG!" in every scene. That's not her fault, nor is it her ex-husband's new wife's, or Bennifer 1.0, or any of the other celebs who get consumed by the tabloids like that, but there can unfortunately be something as becoming too famous.

That said, the Claire story did provide writer Jack Burditt the opportunity to dip into one of the show's deepest comedy wells: Jack Donaghy talking about sex. Alec Baldwin get this wonderfully juvenile gleam in his eye whenever Jack's getting lucky or using phrases like "emotionally unstable women are fantastic in the sack," and it's always delightful.

(Liz uncomfortably pretending to talk about sex is also funny: see her story about the guy from Chili's who "gave me the business.")

But is it wrong that I got a much bigger kick out of the episode's other Ghosts of NBC Thursdays Past? If John Larroquette wasn't going to do it, they got the right collection of "Night Court" alums (I always thought Charles Robinson should have had a better career after that show ended), and it was fun to watch Kenneth be horrified to discover that even his past idols could bicker the way Jenna and Tracy always do. (Maybe the funniest thing in the entire episode: the ashamed look on Kenneth's face when he admits to Jenna that he did know she played the were-lawyer for three episodes in the final season of "Night Court.")

The storyline also gave plenty of opportunity for patented Tracy lines like, "Court? At night? I'm laughing already!" and, in response to Liz's complaints about copyright infringement and broken union rules, "I want a different answer!," plus the weird meta moment when Tracy notes that if this were an actual episode of "Night Court," we'd get a joke right now, followed by a long pause. And the subplot also gave the Claire story a good conclusion by having Jack complain about how the real night court compares to the show, followed by a snippet of the "Night Court" theme music as Jack and Liz walked out of the courthouse.

Some other thoughts:

• Is this the first episode to feature Pete's new bit in the opening credits? I watched the first two episodes on screeners, which often don't bother to update the main title sequence.

• "TGS" itself has basically become an afterthought, but I like that we're continually told it's not supposed to be very good. Here, Liz is giddy when Variety gives them a "shout out" by calling it "a comedy show."

• One of my favorite small moments of the episode: Liz, Jenna and Claire start jumping up and down giddily at their reunion, and Kenneth joins in for a moment, only to start sobbing over the hated new page uniform.

• I know Fey has made it clear that Liz and Jack will never hook up -- and agree 100% with that decision -- but does someone want to analyze the looks on their faces as they're deciding what to say in response to Claire's threesome suggestion?

• Funnier name: Mi Yao, or Esmerelda Fitzmonster?

• Can any hardcore "Night Court" fanboys or girls (if such a thing exists) remember if the series did, in fact, end with Harry and Christine on the verge of marriage? I lost track of how many times those two hooked up and then broke up. And if Tracy's playing Mac in a "Night Court" movie, who should play the other parts?

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

Grey's Anatomy, "These Ties That Bind": Of course, I'm an excellent surgeon. Yeah.

Spoilers for last night's "Grey's Anatomy" coming up just as soon as I take out my own appendix...

Sigh... they were doing so well this season, and then they had to go and give us an episode that was like a concentrated 44-minute burst of everything I hate about "Grey's Anatomy."

Where to begin? Maybe we start with the usually sublime Mary McDonnell doing her best Rain Man impression as the heart surgeon with Asperger's. I'll admit to some personal sensitivity on this issue as I have a lot of personal experience with people in my life who are on one point or another of the autistic spectrum, but all of McDonnell's scenes were played so broadly (and with the hateful cutesie-pooh, "You're supposed to laugh now!" music underscoring them) that my eyes rolled so far into the back of my head that I can't actually see the computer monitor right now. (Thank goodness for that touch-typing class I took in 10th grade.) It was like watching an episode of "Boston Legal," where even the characters who don't have Asperger's act like they do to suit David E. Kelley's bizarre comic sensibilities. And for her diagnosis to come as a complete surprise to Bailey? Really? I want to hold out some hope for the later episodes of this arc, but this was an awful start.

Or maybe I should start with the introduction of Melissa George as Meredith's old friend Sadie. Ooooh, she's damaged! And sexy! She takes off her top and then eagerly cuts herself for the other interns! That's hot! George tends to inspire a lot of hatred, stemming largely from her time on "Alias" (one of the worst-conceived characters in the history of anything), and while she was one of the weaker links on "In Treatment" (where she was also playing a surgical intern), the format of that show allowed the writers and George to go in-depth about her character's demons in a way that "Grey's" just can't. Eye-roll number two, and that's not even counting the whole secret cutting society the interns have created, which really makes all our resident characters (and the Chief, and everyone else in authority) look bad for not even trying to teach these poor boobs.

Or I could have led with Callie's breakdown in the OR, which was meant as a big emotional moment in showing her dealing with the abrupt departure of Hahn (apparently imposed on the show by outside forces), but just seemed silly. There's a line between letting characters work out their personal problems in the course of their work and just turning the medical stuff into an opportunity for the characters to cry in unusual situations, and this was the latter. Eye roll number three.

But, really, where else could one begin in complaining about this episode then the moment where Izzie reaches out to touch Denny's ghost and he's real? No matter where this story is going (and no discussing rumors you've heard or read about it, because they're out there, and we don't do spoilers here), it's stupid. It's beyond stupid. I'm not even sure I have eyeballs anymore after seeing that stuff.

This was the kind of episode that makes me reluctant to buy into any future episodes that I like, because I'm always going to fear that one like this will turn up soon after to sucker punch me. Blech.

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

The Office, "Business Trip": Take off, to the Great White North

Spoilers for last night's "The Office" coming up just as soon as I drunk dial...

"Business Trip" was a very melancholy episode, the sort the show does a few times a season, as we saw Michael, Andy, Jim and Pam and even Ryan struggle to come to terms with a lousy personal development: Michael grieving for the end of his relationship with Holly, Andy briefly (and drunkenly) realizing how bad he has it with Angela, Jim and Pam starting to lose patience and faith with their long forced absence, and Ryan realizing what a horrible mistake he made by getting back into a relationship with Kelly.

Now, the genius of "The Office" is that it can find laughs even in very depressing situations. "Business Trip" wasn't as gut-busting hilarious as some other episodes this season, but I was impressed by how often I was laughing during an episode that was so much about the characters' pain.

Before Michael had to take his pathetic walk of shame or got to unload on David Wallace for transferring Holly to Nashua, we got to see him get whacked in the knee by the business class drink cart (a problem I've often had, blindfold or no) and rave about how the hotel concierge (played by Wendy McLendon-Covey from "Reno 911," doing a delightful faux-Manitoba accent) was like the Winnipeg equivalent of a geisha. (I especially loved seeing how turned on he got at realizing she knew where to get dry cleaning done on New Year's Eve.)

And even though there was a very sad truth at the heart of Andy's story -- he's being cuckolded by an awful woman who will have sex with Dwight but not him -- it gave us the spectacle of Andy and Oscar doing some drunk out-of-office bonding. I'm not sure there's ever been a wronger sentence uttered in that Winnipeg bar than "Beer me dos Long Island iced teas," but it was very Andy, and the whole thing was a nice acknowledgment of the way that co-workers can sometimes discover they like each other a lot more when they're not working at adjacent desks.

Ryan and Kelly's story was the most blatantly comic from start to finish, with the funniest part being Daryl's silent jaunty walk to his truck, which said all we needed to know about how happy he was in that relationship. Almost as good was the dazed look on Ryan's face in the final talking head as he acknowledged, "I realized that, for whatever reason, I just couldn't do better than Kelly."

The one story I had a problem with was Pam's abrupt return to Scranton. I'm glad to have her back in the middle of the action again, and that the writers are apparently done trying to create false tension in the PB&J relationship. But it seems like a cheat to me to have Pam suddenly claim that she hated graphic design, especially when it was clear in earlier in episodes that she was having a great time on her New York adventure (other than the forced separation). If Pam is just back at the reception desk in the next episode and no longer pursuing her artistic dreams, I'm going to be really annoyed, because it'll be a violation of character in the service of maintaining the series' status quo.

And yet Jenna Fischer and Krasinski did a good job playing their long-distance misery and then their joy at seeing each other again in the parking lot. I really do like having those two together; I just wish the writers had just let Pam finish the class and then decide to come back to Scranton, going back to receptionist while exploring other options in the area.

Some other thoughts on "Business Trip":

• In the course of a brief web search, I have been unable to find a direct flight from Scranton to Winnipeg, let alone one that runs less than two hours. Michael got robbed of a meal, I say.

• Andy's personal DVD collection includes "Harry and the Hendersons"?

• Did Oscar and his "roommate" break up? Or was he just indulging Andy's wingman fantasies because he was bored on the trip? (And because he assumed Andy would fail miserably, which he did.)

• My favorite of Michael's cultural lessons from the opening sequence: in Italy, you have to wash your hands after going to the bathroom. My gosh, what a bizarre country that must be.

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

ER, "Heal Thyself": Greene day

I basically said all I had to say about tonight's "ER" in yesterday's column. Feel free to weigh in on the return of Mark Greene -- and of some other familiar faces -- in the comments. Click here to read the full post

Sons of Anarchy, "Capybara": Stand by your Opie

Spoilers for last night's "Sons of Anarchy" coming right up...

That's two estrogen-heavy episodes in a row, with much of the plot being driven by the manipulations of Agent Stahl (a lady who doth protest too much about this case now being personal) and Gemma (who appears to have decided that she'll have an easier time controlling Wendy than she will Tara). Ally Walker and Katey Sagal continue to tear it up, so I'm not complaining, but it's interesting to see how a show in such a testosterone-laden milieu is being dominated at the moment by two middle-aged women.

And on the male side of the ledger, Ryan Hurst continues to demand promotion to regular status next year. It's amazing how much more vulnerable he looks just by taking off his usual headgear, and I'm really, really hoping that Deputy Chief Hale finds a way to tip SAMCRO off about Opie not being the rat (without also letting them kill the actual civilian witness).

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: after a bumpy beginning, "Sons of Anarchy" is really clicking right now.

Finally, for those of you who weren't happy that last week's review initially featured a photo of Stahl with her face bloodied from Otto's attack, let me again apologize. In general, I'm very vigilant about not putting any kind of spoiler material on the main blog page to protect people who time shift, but I was so hypnotized by the image of Ally Walker looking so dazed, confused and furious that I couldn't resist making a screencap of it. Won't happen again.

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

Life, "Black Friday": Let's go to the mall (today)

Spoilers for last night's "Life" coming up just as soon as I note that the two other shows to have shared a timeslot with the show this year -- "My Own Worst Enemy" and "Lipstick Jungle" -- have apparently been canceled, while Charlie Crews and company are sitting relatively pretty with a full-season order...

"Black Friday" was a definite improvement over the last few episodes. The humor was really strong -- as with "House," the leading man's comedy chops become a useful crutch when other things aren't working -- and I especially enjoyed Charlie going all Crocodile Dundee(*) with the fruitcake.

(*) Hi, I'm old. Is there a more contemporary reference for a hero taking out a fleeing bad guy by throwing produce at him than a 22-year-old movie starring a walking tourism ad?

I also thought the world of the mall and the terrifying culture of Black Friday created fit the off-kilter sensibilities of "Life" very well, but as with the Stanford Prison Experiment episode, I feel like the episode dropped its main hook after about 10 or 15 minutes. Once we cut from Crews and Reese frantically searching for the body to Crews looking into another Wall of Blame candidate (played by legendary '80s movie sleazeball William Atherton!), all the tension of having to work a case on a day like this fell out. By the time we got back to the mall, the pace was far too leisurely.

Also, I could really do without either Crews romancing his ex or, as I've said, Reese contemplating a Tidwell hook-up. I suppose I should be grateful that the creative team has been wise enough to never so much as hint at a Crews/Reese romance, and so these storylines serve a purpose in making sure we understand the show isn't going to Go There, but they do little for me beyond that.

Still, it was an overall strong episode, and yet another entry in guest star Kyle Gallner's clip reel to make sure he monopolizes every homicidal teenager role on television.

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

Sepinwall on TV: Ricky Gervais special makes light of heavy topics

In today's column, I talk with Ricky Gervais about his hilarious new HBO stand-up special (the AIDS riff left me gasping for air both times I saw it), awards how hosting, his next project with Stephen Merchant, and more. Click here to read the full post

House, "The Itch": Two steps forward, one step back

Brief spoilers for last night's "House" coming up just as soon as I clear out a drawer for my special lady friend...

I'm guessing the Cameron/Chase 'shippers will be happy with "The Itch," and the House/Cuddy 'shippers only slightly less. The patient of the week(*) took a decided backseat to romantic angst for various characters, as Chase tried to explain to Cameron that their relationship isn't as perfect as she thinks, and as Wilson tried to hurl House and Cuddy at each other by any means necessary.

(*) Said patient was played by Todd Louiso, whose appearance always makes me think of him dropping an air-conditioner on Tim Robbins' head in "High Fidelity" -- or else of him lecturing Jerry Maguire about jazz. Always nice to see him working.

But as someone who doesn't really miss Chase and Cameron now that they've been reduced to background noise, and who can go either way on a Cuddy/House romance, "The Itch" didn't do a lot for me. The various reactions to House's "I hit that" joke were funny, and this is the kind of storyline that really plays to Robert Sean Leonard's comic strengths, but I watched it a week ago on a review screener and can already remember very little about it, save that it left me feeling unsatisfied.

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

Fringe, "In Which We Meet Mr. Jones": The Godfather vs. The Parasite

Spoilers for last night's "Fringe" coming up just as soon as I find my Polaroid...

Unlike Agent Dunham -- who was on the receiving end of one of the most meta monologues I've ever heard, in which Broyles lectures her (and us) about calming down and not demanding big answers at the end of every episode -- I'm becoming easy to satisfy when it comes to "Fringe," because my hopes for it are now pretty low. I don't much care about if/when we're going to find out something important about The Pattern; all I ask for is that the show be appropriately creepy and tense and, at times, funny each week, and "In Which We Meet Mr. Jones" gave me enough solid episodic stuff that I was satisfied.

The heart-encircling parasite gave me nightmares (whereas it gave James Poniewozik a craving for seafood), and if Walter's method of extracting information from the dead man's brain felt like a retread of past experiments, at least the pacing of it created the necessary amount of tension, with some black humor along the way.

On the downside, I have no interest in Olivia's personal life -- or, really, in Olivia, and would be more than happy if she were to get eaten by a much larger parasite and the investigator role was turned over to Broyles or Charlie or a new character. And the twist ending about Loeb (played by Chance Kelly, aka Godfather from "Generation Kill") was revealed to have masterminded the whole thing so he and his wife could find "The Gentleman," would have worked much better if the previous scene between Broyles and Loeb hadn't so blatantly telegraphed it.

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

Sepinwall on TV: Edwards returns to 'ER,' 'Top Chef' moves to NY

In today's column, I talk about tomorrow night's Mark Greene resurrection on "ER" and how it does no favors for Angela Bassett, and briefly preview the season premiere of "Top Chef." Click here to read the full post

The Shield, "Petty Cash": It's hard out here for a Vic

Spoilers for "The Shield," season seven, episode 11, coming up just as soon as I start going through gas station men's room trash cans...

"The edge is where we live, all of us, all the time. People try to convince themselves otherwise is just an exercise in self-deception." -Vic
"Philosopher?" -Beltran
"Former cop. Same deal, less horses--t." -Vic

Oh, it's getting bad around Farmington. As Ronnie -- still so clear-headed most of the time it's amazing he ever let himself fall under Vic's sway -- puts it, "The wheels are coming off the whole damn thing."

Shane and Mara are still on the run, and they've gone from having 100 grand to start their pie-in-the-sky new life south of the border to being lucky to get $2500 after taking Jackson along to rob Mara's former employer. (In one of the saddest and yet funniest moments in the history of the show, one of the cleaning ladies being held at gunpoint offers to hold the little boy while Mara focuses on opening the safe.) Ronnie himself is apparently doomed when he has to step in for Vic and get the hundred grand to Corrine under the watchful eye of Claudette's surveillance team. And Vic's playing a very dangerous game by stealing from the local drug kingpins whom he's trying to bring into Beltran's organization.

I feel like I need to ask this question every week: how did it come to this? I suppose if I was a philosopher or a former cop, I might suggest that Vic was so concerned with maintaining his edge that he wound up slitting his own throat.

What's been amazing about this downfall of the strike team arc is how little it's been driven by external forces. Yes, Kavanaugh and the Armenians put pressure on the guys that led to certain bad decisions, but they were only in a position to do so because of actions that Vic and the boys committed of their own volition. They chose to get into bed with drug dealers, to treat Farmington as their personal ATM, to bend and even break the law whenever it suited their purposes. As James Poniewozik argued a few weeks back, "If it hadn't been Terry, it would have been something else."

This is on them, every bad thing that's happening now, and it's a testament to the acting and writing that I find myself feeling bad for them as often as I do as they suffer their deserved comeuppance. Shane's despicable and Mara's not a whole lot better, but when he puts his head into Mara's arms and notes that neither of them has another friend in the world anymore, I briefly forget about Lem and the grenade, just as I forget about the bullet between Terry's eyes when I watch Vic share a nice moment with Cassidy, not realizing that Corrine is taking steps to keep father out of daughter's life forever.

"Petty Cash" is another break-neck episode, as Vic and Ronnie race to make the the Beltran/ICE case work at the same time they're trying to deal with Shane's various demands, while Shane himself is too busy trying to scrape together even a small amount of cash to enjoy how much he's making his old partners suffer. And yet in the middle of all the usual maneuvering and double-crossing -- including Aceveda trying to call a truce with Vic in their war for ICE supremacy -- there's still time for a completely self-contained, satisfying Julien storyline involving the murdered basketball prospect.

I've commented on this before, but it bears repeating: Julien's tenure with the strike team, in which he became a better cop without losing his soul, proves that it's possible to move in Vic's orbit without getting crushed. Admittedly, the others deliberately froze Julien out of the illicit stuff, in the same way they did with Tavon and Terry and Kevin Hiatt, so it's not like they ever placed him in situations where had to choose between loyalty and the law. But when Claudette presents him with that exact choice, Julien doesn't even hesitate. He's a good cop who only has to worry about his own conscience, while Vic, Shane and Ronnie are all busy circling the drain.

Some other thoughts on "Petty Cash":

• We get our first reference to Danny since we saw her packing boxes a few weeks ago. And Dutch's comment suggests not only that everyone knows that Danny left and why, but that she's expected back down the road, once things with Vic hopefully calm down.

• Billings' man-crush on Ronnie continues to be amusing, here with him helping Ronnie look out for Shane's envelope because he has Ronnie's back "in a world of crazy coozes."

• This episode was co-written by Shawn Ryan's longtime deputy Charles H. "Chick" Eglee and Jameal Turner, and directed by Craig Brewer, whom you might know from "Hustle and Flow" and "Black Snake Moan." He joins an impressive roster of Very Special Guest Directors for the series that also includes Frank Darabont, John Badham and David Mamet, in addition to more usual (but still talented) suspects like Clark Johnson, DJ Caruso, Paris Barclay, Peter Horton and the late Scott Brazil. (And Michael Chiklis himself has directed several episodes, including this season's "Game Face.")

• Yet another minor character brought out of mothballs for the final stretch: Van Bro, the scooter-bound, eyepatch-wearing street artist, who appeared a handful of times early in the series, including the second episode ever.

• As with Shane's piano lesson story last week, Vic telling Beltran about his grandparents struck me as unusual because we know so little about these characters' lives before the series began. I have better notes now about the chat a bunch of us critics had with Shawn Ryan right after we watched the series finale, and so I wanted to expand on the Mamet-by-way-of-Ryan quote I used in last week's review:

"David Mamet always talks about backstory being bulls--t in his mind. But I definitely adopted that attitude before I heard it out of David's mouth. As a storyteller, I think I'm a little bit like a shark: I'm about going forward. There are certain ways that I ran the show -- I would like to think a lot more benevolently than how Vic operated in that world -- but the way I ran the show was very similar to the way Vic approached things, and that's where a lot of those stories came from... Those sort of scenes of reflection, you always talk about Vic not liking to be self-reflective, and I guess I didn't, as a storyteller, like to look back too much to the past."

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

Heroes, "Villains": Back to before the beginning

Spoilers for last night's "Heroes" coming up just as soon as I figure out how much the American pie-makers lobby has paid to have its product integrated into so many shows in the last few weeks...

I have to applaud Arthur Petrelli for decapitating our African spirit guide/plot device, because hopefully it means we'll be spared any more episodes in which one character eats the special paste and then spends the rest of the hour watching flashbacks or flashforwards of nebulous plot or entertainment value.

Both "Villains" and "I Am Become Death" felt like clumsy attempts to recapture the magic of first season episodes like "Five Years Later" and, to a lesser extent, "Six Months Ago." It's like Tim Kring, Jeph Loeb and Jesse Alexander(*) got together and said, "Well, everybody's mad at us. How can we give the people what they want?" "Well, they liked some of those time-bending episodes we did back in season one. Why don't we do more of that?" "Brilliant!"

(*) The various stories about the axing of Loeb and Alexander aren't exactly filling me with confidence that this will somehow be a cure-all for the series. Not only will their absence not be felt until very late in this season, but it sounds like they're being scapegoated. In the New York Times story on all the changes, Edward Wyatt compares the axing of Loeb and Alexander to George Steinbrenner firing the Yankees' pitching coach in the '80s because the team was slumping.

I don't feel like we learned enough -- or enough of interest -- about our various villains to justify the time spent watching Hiro watch their stories, and other than a reminder that HRG used to be a very, very bad man, none of the stories were particularly entertaining. If anything, they served as a reminder that The Company, whether it's supposed to be good or evil, is among the dumbest ultra-secret organizations in the history of filmed entertainment, even though it employs some of the show's allegedly brainier characters like Angela Petrelli and HRG. Encouraging Sylar to become a power-stealing serial killer? Again, brilliant!

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

Terminator, "Mr. Ferguson Is Ill Today": Pause, rewind, push play

Spoilers for last night's "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" coming up just as soon as I build a safe...

I enjoyed large swaths of "Mr. Ferguson Is Ill Today." The increasing despair of John, Sarah and Ellison were all very well-played -- with John in particular, the writers and Thomas Dekker have done a great course correction this year by showing how heavily his future crown weighs on him -- and I really dug the Spaghetti Western vibe of the final showdown with Cromarite (most notable in Cromartie's choice of shirt and Cameron's choice of boots, but also in the atmosphere and the photography and music choices). And watching Cameron strip off her jacket because she knows how John responds to her faux-body was the creepiest thing the show's done since Shirley Manson made Weaver's daughter wet herself.

But here's the thing: if you're going to employ a storytelling gimmick that calls as much attention to itself as this episode's fragmented, POV-driven chronology, you need to actually get something interesting out of it. And other than the surprise of Ellison opening the car trunk to offer Sarah his hand (and his own version of "Come with me if you want to live"), there wasn't a single thing in this episode that couldn't have been accomplished if they had told the story traditionally.

"Boomtown" made this gimmick into its regular narrative style (at least in the first season, before NBC ordered Graham Yost to stop), and it always drove me nuts how little it added to the proceedings. Only on occasion would the out-of-sequence plotting change how we perceived events earlier in the hour, and there was nothing along those lines here. I kept expecting to see something in "Cameron's Story" that altered my view of events that had just been shown in "Sarah's Story," or "John's Story," but all the episode did was tell the story out of order because somebody thought it would be cooler to do it that way.

Also, I'm going to miss Garret Dillahunt as Cromartie, if we assume he's really dead for sure. And the manner of his dispatching was a disappointment. So all of a sudden a shotgun exists that can damage the metal that makes up a T-888's skull? One of the points the "Terminator" movies and the show until now have tried to stress is that a Terminator, of any model, is really hard to kill. If you can take down the non-morphing models just by shooting at them a lot, it really damages their mystique.

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

HIMYM, "Not a Father's Day": Socks to be him

Spoilers for tonight's "How I Met Your Mother" coming up just as soon as I shoot some cans on the roof...

It's weird: we complain all the time about how we'd like to see more of Marshall and Lily (especially as compared to Ted), and yet the episodes that focus on one or both of them are rarely the most memorable. "Not a Father's Day" was a solid episode with some good laughs, but not much more than that. Even though it was stronger from start to finish than last week's "Happily Ever After," the five minutes or so of "Happily Ever After" that worked (Robin's flashback through the pumped-up cab ride) were significantly better than anything here. In fact, most of my favorite Marshall moments tend to be in other people's episodes, rather than his own.

Drunk Lily as baby substitute was a cute idea, and well-played by Alyson Hannigan, and the dueling flashbacks with Lily and Marshall's new neighbor -- Marshall sees only the cute stuff, Lily sees only the sleep-deprived horror show -- was one of the show's better uses of perspective in a while. And the hypnotic sway of the little sock was a good running joke.

And for the "HIMYM" continuity nerds among us (you know who you are), this episode firmly placed Lily and Marshall into the Dowisetrepla apartment, and explained how Robin wound up moving in with Ted (as we were told about in last season's "The Goat"). So it had that going for it.

But for some reason, the only part that I imagine is going to stay with me is Barney's cheerleader/sorority girl/Spice Girl theorem about how women look hotter in packs. Of course, just as clamoring for more Lily and Marshall doesn't always work out as well as we would hope, we probably shouldn't push for more Barney than we already get. NPH is superb, but that way lies Fonzification, or its sad latter-day equivalent, Urkelization.

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

Chuck, "Chuck vs. the Ex": Kiss me, kill me

Spoilers for tonight's "Chuck" coming up just as soon as I eat a pen cap...

"She kissed me. No spy stuff, no lies. Just me." -Chuck

"Chuck" is a very funny show. It has attractive people wearing ridiculous outfits getting involved in cool fights. It has plot holes you could drive a Hummer through (if you could afford the gas), but is so clever otherwise that nobody pays them much attention.

But if Chuck himself weren't so likable, and so recognizably human, none of the other stuff would work nearly as well as it does. "Chuck" without Zachary Levi providing the pathos would be fun, but it would be a disposable kind of fun. Episodes like "Chuck vs. the Ex," kicking off a big three-part sweeps arc featuring the return of Chuck's heart-breaker college girlfriend Jill, is a reminder of just how important Levi's non-comic skills are to the show.

Yes, there are a lot of great gags, highlighted by Chuck somehow getting it in his head that the only way to save Casey's life is to plant a big wet kiss on him -- followed by Jill immediately declaring it the stupidest thing she's ever heard -- but what holds the episode together, what makes the big moment at the end where Chuck saves the day, kisses the girl and gets applauded by surrounding law-enforcement work, is the vulnerability that Levi projects throughout.

This girl hurt Chuck, and Levi shows us that. This double life Chuck leads is awfully lonely, and Levi shows us that, too. He wants a normal life, and Jill's return -- even though she winds up entangled in another spy mission -- suggests he can occasionally have something like that. And you realize that as much as Sarah makes his heart skip a beat, Chuck wasn't totally lying in "Chuck vs. the Break-Up" when he told her he'd be better off with a "real," down-to-earth girlfriend. And Levi shows us all of that with a very expressive performance that in turn elevates the sillier stuff. Chuck planting one on Casey would be funny regardless, but because we believe in Chuck and therefore believe in this life-or-death situation, it's actually funnier to see him talk himself into this ridiculous path. And when Chuck gets his second standing ovation in as many episodes (he's on a good streak right now in spy world, isn't he?), his moment of triumph is all the sweeter.

Jordana Brewster did a solid job playing the girl of Chuck's dreams. Almost any actress would have a problem living up to the Jill described in previous episodes, but she was a good combination of smart (though the glasses did a lot of the heavy lifting there) and sexy (complete with a slo-mo entrance previously reserved for Sarah), and her reaction to Chuck's unraveling web of lies was convincing.

Just as good was Yvonne Strahovski. We know by now that the sensitive stuff is one of her specialties, so it's not a surprise that she would be strong in an episode where Sarah has to shut down any jealous feelings out of professional necessity (and out of her desire to let Chuck move on from his crush on her), but it still deserves mention.

I was a little concerned that a lot of people -- albeit mostly anonymous government agent types -- this season have gotten a look at Chuck in action as a spy, which seems to defeat the purpose of hiding him in his lousy job at the Buy More. Fedak and Schwartz's argument is that Chuck being the Intersect is the big secret, and that it's okay for cops and feds to get a look at "Charles Carmichael" in action as a spy type, or even for someone like Jill to know his real name and side gig, just so long as no one finds out about the computer in Chuck's brain. I still think that that gets in the way of the show's basic premise (if people can know that a guy who looks like Chuck is a spy, why does he need to be stuck at the Nerd Herd?), but, again, the parts of the show that are good are so good that I can't complain about this stuff for more than a micro-second.


Some other thoughts on "Chuck vs. the Ex":

• Casey's disguises don't usually amount to much more than slipping on a bartender's vest and bowtie or a limo driver suit, so it was nice -- and funny -- to see him get the goofy-looking wig and soul patch to go along with Sarah's Louise Brooks bob for Chuck's big date.

• Speaking of the big date, their entrance into the restaurant was clearly meant to be an homage to the legendary tracking shot from "Goodfellas," when Henry Hill takes Karen into the back of the restaurant and everyone knows who he is. I'd complain loudly about "Chuck" not attempting to do it in a single take ala Scorsese (or the "Swingers" homage to "Goodfellas"), but I also know how much preparation those kinds of shots take, and how difficult that would be to do on an episodic TV show schedule.

• The song playing throughout this episode, starting with the Stanford flashback, was Iggy Pop's "Pumpin' For Jill."

• Two weeks (and one episode) after Jeff's biggest showcase to date, our resident Missile Command master got one hilarious piece of business after another: asking for a donut after watching Big Mike almost choke on one, Jeff raising his hand in response to Captain Awesome's "Who's ready to pound some plastic?" (and Lester pushing Jeff's hand back down), Jeff and Lester flirting with their CPR dummies, Jeff following up Lester's "I was born ready" with "I was born premature," and, of course, Jeff reluctantly eating the pen cap so that Lester and Morgan could cheat off of Awesome saving Jeff's life. (So, does this mean that Jeff now has to take the much longer CPR course?)

• I have to say that, while a lot of funny stuff is going on in the Millbarge storyline, very little of it is coming from Millbarge himself. I had higher hopes for Tony Hale's guest stint than to see him turn out to be the straight man killjoy who inspires the others to do funny things.

• Okay, that's now two guest stars this season conspicuously named after sports figures, this time with Guy LaFleur. Can anyone come up with a thematic link between LaFleur and Von Hayes? And, if so, can you then extrapolate which athlete's name will be borrowed next?

• Unlike a certain bionic woman from a previous season on NBC, Yvonne Strahovski doesn't suddenly turn boring whenever she has to use her non-regional American diction, but it was still nice to hear her actual accent for a few moments when she was posing as an Aussie scientist.

• Funnier caller ID photo on Chuck's iPhone: Captain Awesome kissing his biceps, or Casey scowling? Somehow, it seems perfect that this is how each guy responded to Chuck asking to take their picture for the phone. I look forward to this gag continuing to run with wacky pictures for other characters.

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

Dexter, "Easy as Pie": The key lime code

Spoilers for last night's "Dexter" coming up just as soon as I find my plus one...

In case you hadn't noticed it by now, that Michael C. Hall is kind of a good actor, isn't he? Even though the outcome of the Dexter/Camilla story never really seemed in doubt, Hall and Margo Martindale played the hell out of it, as Camilla pleaded for a painless death and Dexter wrestled with whether The Code of Harry was elastic enough to give it to her. Very touching work by both, and I loved that Dexter confessed to Brian's murder because he couldn't let Camilla's final thoughts of him to be completely pure. (That, or he really wanted to unburden himself about Brian's death, and chose the one person who would both understand and be unable to tell anyone else about it.)

All that said, I wish Dexter had either decided against euthanizing Camilla because it clearly didn't fit the Code, or else that the writers had followed up on suggestions from the season two finale and the season three premiere that Dexter was preparing to move himself beyond the Code altogether. Dexter's world seemed shaken when he accidentally killed Oscar Prado, but rather than use that development to examine a Dexter operating without a rudder, it's mainly been an excuse to put him into the orbit of Miguel. That story arc has had its moments, and I like watching Jimmy Smits play such an unhinged character after a couple of decades of playing super-cool hero types, but watching this episode reminded me of the greater dramatic opportunity that was there for the taking at the start of this season.

And the Prado storyline did give Dexter yet another chance to examine the Code (even though he's still clearly trying to operate within its limits) as he pondered indulging Miguel's request to take out Ellen Wolf. Midway through the season, Miguel's already going off the rails, and I look forward to watching Smits play that.

As for the rest of "Easy as Pie"? Eh. Masuka's outrage over *%&$ing Albert Chung was very funny even before we got the punchline about their obvious resemblance, and Deb and Angel's stories are interesting, I suppose, if you care much about either character independently of their relationship with Dexter. I just don't. And I'm glad that the slicer doesn't seem to be Quinn -- multiple serial killers operating under the same precinct roof would stretch credulity even on this show.

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

Entourage, "Seth Green Day": Short people got good reason to fight

Brief spoilers for last night's "Entourage" coming up just as soon as I tilt my head...

Well, what do you know? That was almost an entire episode of "Entourage" that I found entertaining.

(The one exception: the Ari subplot, which started off promisingly with Ari struggling to follow his daughter's advice to be nice to Beverly D'Angelo, only to have him go back to spewing venom and bile as soon as things went wrong. There are times when I find Ari's hateful rants funny, but this one seemed too easy, and the sort of thing that should have backfired on him.)

But I found the Vince storyline entertaining for the first time in a long time. We've seen very little of Vince at work over the years, and usually it's involved the cartoonish and played-out Billy Walsh. Stellan Skarsgard's Werner seems like a much more plausible kind of dictator, and I liked seeing him completely (and, I think, intentionally) mess with Vince's head about his performance. Five seasons in, I find this stuff a lot more interesting than the deal-making or which hot girl Vince is going to sleep with next. I actually laughed at Vince walking around the cabin with the can on his head, and I can't remember ever finding him intentionally funny in the past.

And Seth Green's hatred of Eric, which E had to indulge this time because another client was involved, remains one of the show's better running gags. I like the idea of Green as an evil version of both E and Vince, and he's of course funnier than both Adrian Grenier and Kevin Connolly combined.

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

Sepinwall on TV: Dipping into the mailbag

In today's column, I answer a few reader letters, including one about whether "The Shield" can get back into awards contention for its final season, and one about the division of labor between the print column and the blog. Click here to read the full post

NBC gives 'Life' the back nine

NBC has ordered a full season of "Life," even though the first Wednesday episode, as expected, got clobbered by "Criminal Minds" (and everything else in the timeslot, for that matter.) Let's hope Rand Ravich and company can relax with the added security and get the show back to the quality of late season one. Click here to read the full post

Friday catch-up: Life on Mars, ER, Private Practice and Terminator

It's Friday, which means it's time for another ever-popular grab-bag post, with spoilers on, in order, "Life on Mars," "ER," "Private Practice" and "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles," all coming right up...

Hell of a night for homages to "The Wire." First, Dwight on "The Office" talks about juking the stats, and then "Life on Mars" features three different "Wire" alums -- Chad Coleman (Cutty), Chris Bauer (Frank Sobotka) and Clarke Peters (Cool Lester Smooth) -- in guest roles. Now, Peters was already in the show's premiere episode, and you see a lot of "Wire" actors turn up on shows shot in New York because they're East Coast-based, but I'm thinking the producers are fans to put three in one episode.

Unfortunately, the guest cast (which also featured Edi Gathegi, aka Big Love from "House," as a younger version of Peters' character, plus Whoopi Goldberg) was more interesting than the episode itself. My interest in the remake is fading even more rapidly than my interest in the original. They've already softened Gene Hunt far too much (and, yes, I say that about an episode where he was prepared to execute a murder suspect without trial or any real evidence), the cases don't interest me, and I don't think I'm going to really care about the clues about where/when Sam really is until we get to an actual finale. (Based on the ratings, that should be sometime this season.) The "Ice Ice Baby" gag was amusing in the same way that sort of joke usually works in any time travel story (see also Marty McFly inventing both the skateboard and rock music), but overall, the show's pretty flat.

(Also, I was waiting for the inevitable moment where Gathegi's character raised an eyebrow at Sam telling a story about a black NYPD detective he met when he was 17 years old, which would have been the 1950s. Was the NYPD progressive enough to have black detectives back then?)

I actually watched a screener of next week's "ER" with the resurrection of Mark Greene earlier yesterday, so it felt a little like watching "Memento" to then see this episode, which sets up stuff the characters will be talking about next week, like Gates and Sam moving in together, or Gates' homeless veteran patient.

Even had I watched them in the proper order, I suspect I would have found this one to be a pretty blah episode, even by later-period standards. I'm not sure exactly what they're doing with the new interns; isn't Shiri Appleby dating (or maybe even married to) the young surgeon, and, if so, why is she drooling all over Gates? (I mean, Stamos is handsome, but he's also got 15 years on her.) Also, casting Carl Weather as the father of a boxer is one of those ideas that probably sounded great on paper but inadvertently turned that entire story into a big meta joke. (The only way it would have been weirder was if they had mixed in some "Arrested Development" cheapskate jokes about Weathers.)

Matt at Throwing Things recently argued that "Private Practice" has been this year's most improved show so far. I can see that, in that it's gone from teeth-grindingly awful to mediocrity, which is probably a bigger leap than the good-to-wonderful one "Chuck" has taken, but the show is still, at best, something I have on while doing three other things. Glad as I am to see Addison behaving like Addison again, and to see more of a focus on the cases and the ethical problems contained therein, I still don't feel attached to any of the other characters. And even when a case involves life or death, as it did this week with the terminally ill teen who desperately wanted a baby, the setting somehow makes the stakes feel much lower. I can't explain exactly why, but put that exact same storyline into a hospital show and it would have felt a lot more powerful, I think.

Finally, it's a shame nobody's watching "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" -- and that even fewer will be watching once the show moves to Fridays -- because they're really on a roll of late. Other than the subplot with Derek and his time-traveling girlfriend, where I constantly feel like they're leaving all the exposition on the cutting room floor (how does she know Derek's fence, for instance?), every storyline was clicking this week. Stupid as it is for John to not tell his mom about Cromartie visiting the house, or about Cameron going walkabout a few episodes back, his desire to have something resembling a normal life -- with a normal girlfriend who did a much better job dealing with Cromartie than any other person to date -- is understandable and a good idea for the show to explore. (When John was whining to Sarah about her not protecting him from killing Sarkisian, she really should have told him that he needs to get ready to kill a whole lot of people and things.) And Ellison's ongoing crisis of faith in the wake of learning that SkyNet is real has been very well-done. I'm still not sure exactly how much, if anything, he suspects about Shirley Manson, and I'm taking a wait-and-see approach on this apparent SkyNet civil war plotline they've been setting up, but this season has been really engaging so far.

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

Grey's Anatomy, "Rise Up": Hahn solo

Spoilers for last night's "Grey's Anatomy" coming up just as soon as I get some cadavers...

I don't think I ever need to see Jeffrey Dean Morgan's face or hear the words "Denny Duquette" ever again. I appreciated that Erica Hahn said virtually everything about Izzie's continued employment that a lot of us were howling about back during the original storyline, but since Izzie's obviously not going anywhere, why keep picking at this particular scab?

Unfortunately, Dr. Hahn is going somewhere, and will not be seen on the show again. Given that this was the last episode Brooke Smith before was abruptly fired, I suppose we're supposed to assume that Erica will resign in disgust, off-camera, but not report the hospital to UNOS. What a lame exit. Unless Smith herself was causing problems, ala Isaiah Washington -- and that's not at all what I'm hearing -- then it's self-defeating to dump her without giving her a proper on-screen departure. Even if the ABC executives were all grossed out by two girls kissing or whatever (because, you know, who wants to see that?), this episode provided the perfect opportunity to get rid of the character without actually having to bring up her sexuality again. Even if you ignore the apparent close-mindedness of the move, it was just a stupid business and creative decision.

Beyond those two irritations, there was actually a lot to like about "Rise Up." Start with Bailey and McDreamy's case, which was the season's latest great showcase for familiar TV faces of a certain age -- in this case, Bonnie Bartlett and George Coe. In a weird way, "Grey's Anatomy" is starting to turn into a latter-day "Love Boat," in that "The Love Boat" used to feature three stories an episode breaking down along demographic lines (one young couple, one middle-aged couple, one older couple), which not only provided something for everyone in the audience, but also provided occasional employment for aging actors who were no longer in demand for steady work. Based on how the Emmy guest actor nominations are dominated by familiar faces who have a lot of friends in the Academy, I wouldn't be surprised to see next year's categories dominated by "Grey's" guests like Coe, Bartlett, Bernadette Peters and Daniel J. Travanti. Coe's despair at his wife's impending death -- and Bailey's own refusal to let go -- was one of the season's most touching moments, and one of the rare times when the obvious parallel between the patient's problem and the doctor's didn't bug me.

Meanwhile, Kevin McKidd got to tear into Cristina and Karev for treating surgery like a competitive sport when it should really about lifesaving. These sorts of lectures, which the show does once or twice a season, are always walking a fine line -- yes, it's appalling on an objective level how the docs behave sometimes, but the competition is also one of the show's most distinct and entertaining aspects -- but this was a good one, and made better by Cristina standing up to Hunt and telling him he might not want to be so quick to judge.

So, a mixed bag, with real-world idiocy and the resurrection of a storyline I despised marring what was otherwise another solid episode for this "Grey's" comeback season.

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

The Office, "Customer Survey": Say hello to my little phone

Spoilers for last night's "The Office" coming up just as soon as I mix up several gallons of guacamole...

"That's what she said! That's what she said! That's what she said!" -Pam

If I was worried about how the show would be in the immediate aftermath of Holly's departure, I'm not so much anymore. Though there were a few flat spots, there were also so many different funny and clever things going on that I feel confident it wasn't just Amy Ryan carrying the show these last six episodes.

The central gimmick of "Customer Survey," with Jim and Pam secretly communicating with each other via the world's smallest Bluetooths (Blueteeth?) not only allowed for the kind of PB&J interaction that's been in short supply this season, but it allowed for some hilarious running commentary from Pam during scenes she would have no business being in even were she still working at the receptionist's desk. Her exuberant triple-"That's what she said!" was the obvious highlight, but we also got her noting that "Right Dwight is loud," or demanding to know the exact hue of Dwight's shirt, or Pam reflexively humming "Centerfold" after Jim turned off Dwight's car stereo.

The Blueteeth gag also gave us lots of PB&J sweetness, and was another reminder that putting them together in no way damaged the show -- which is why my only concern about the episode was the final scene, with Harry Crane from "Mad Men" trying to talk Pam into staying in New York to pursue her artistic dreams. (And good on the writers for making the guy do it as a concerned friend and not as a wannabe boyfriend, which I think we all assumed/feared would happen at some point.) It was a good speech, but it seems to be setting up some kind of artificial crisis for the relationship. Jim and Pam both reacted as if Jim either wouldn't want to or couldn't move to New York to be with her. David Wallace loves him and could certainly find him a job at corporate, and it's not like Jim wants or needs to stay in Scranton for the rest of his life. The bit about him trying to buy his parent's house could suggest a financial/logistical challenge to him moving right away, but we're reaching the point where one or both of our romantic heroes are going to have to behave massively out of character, either in service of a break-up storyline or to get them both back in the Scranton branch.

But we'll worry about that down the road. Getting back to the content of "Customer Survey" itself, I loved watching how the bad customer surveys forced Jim and Dwight to team up. We've seen in the past (notably "Traveling Salesmen") that they actually work brilliantly together on those rare occasions where they have to set aside their disdain for each other, and the moment where Jim realized Dwight was correct about the sabotage -- and Dwight realizing that Jim was acknowledging his genius -- was wonderful.

And before that happened, we got the role play exercise, where Jim hilariously exploited Michael and Dwight's insistence on taking these sorts of things so seriously. No other people would sit there and indulge "Bill Buttlicker" while he pretended to be taking another call in which he mocked Dwight, nor would any other person seriously contemplate pretend-firing Dwight to get Buttlicker's pretend-commission, but Michael and Dwight are not like other people.

I should also say that, while the teaser briefly made me fear that Holly's absence would return Michael to the over-the-top caricature he's sometimes in danger of becoming, this episode had him dialed in just right. No, he's not on his best behavior anymore, but he was still recognizably human, particularly in his empathetic response to Kelly trying to sandbag Jim and Dwight for not going to her party.

Good stuff all around, and I haven't even mentioned poor Andy now being tricked into paying for his own cuckolding by holding the wedding at Schrute Farms. The writers have accomplished the impossible: they actually have me feeling sorry for Andy.

Some other thoughts:

• "Customer Survey" was directed by Brit "Office" co-creator Stephen Merchant, and like most of the show's Very Special Guest Directors (Joss Whedon, J.J. Abrams), he fit right in. Yet there were certain exchanges -- like Michael talking about Jim's "smudgeness" -- that wouldn't have been out of place on, say, "Extras."

• Is Dwight, like Michael, watching "The Wire," or is it just that the show's writers can't stop dropping references like "juked the stats"?

• Perhaps the most disturbing and yet character-appropriate line in the history of the series: Michael telling Kelly, "You can't say 'I was raped' and expect all your problems to go away. Not again. You can't keep doing that."

• Why can't Angela's Nana Mimi stay in canvas for very long? And how old would the east coast's best tentist be if he was involved with Rudy Giuliani's first wedding, back in 1968?

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

Sepinwall on TV: 'Summer Heights High' review

In today's column I review "Summer Heights High," an Australian import comedy that HBO's going to be airing beginning this Sunday (after "Entourage"). It's very reminiscent of (though not as funny as) both "The Office" and the Christopher Guest movies, with creator/star Chris Lilley playing all three major roles. Click here to read the full post

30 Rock, "Believe in the Stars": Help me, Oprah Winfrey, you're my only hope

Spoilers for tonight's "30 Rock" coming up just as soon as I commit some sleep crime...

My sides, they ache. I first saw "Believe in the Stars" nearly a month ago, and yet I'm still laughing at things like Tracy's monster claw, or Liz's voice during the Princess Leia/jury gag ("I really don't think it's fair that I'm on a jury because I can read thoughts!"), or women's soccer being lumped in with beer pong and jazzercise as fake Olympic sports. So, so, so much to love in this one, even beyond Tina Fey's usual Oprah fixation.

(Between the Grant Park rally and now this episode, Oprah's been quite the primetime fixture this week, hasn't she?)

Where I felt like the season premiere labored at times to get Jack back into his office, "Believe in the Stars" had no outside plot agenda, and could therefore just focus on the elaborate, strange, hilarious farce this show does so well. Even stories that would be awful on a traditional sitcom, like Tracy and Jenna in trans-racial drag(*), work because the (slightly) sane characters like Jack and Liz are there to comment on how stupid it is. (And Jack killed with the callback to the earlier joke about Liz once wearing her shorts to the office.)

(*) God help me, I'm reasonably confident this was a subplot on an episode of "The Single Guy," possibly minus the racial angle. All I know is that my dreams are occasionally haunted by a memory of Dan Cortese in a dress -- and that, boys and girls, is why being paid to watch TV ain't always what it's cracked up to be.

I think the Jack/Kenneth plot tailed off after a while, but even it offered highlights late into the episode, like Kenneth slipping out of his page's jacket and into a sweater like the latter-day Mr. Rogers he so obviously is.

But this episode definitely belonged to Fey, who has grown by leaps and bounds as an actress over the past few years. The Princess Leia voice, her drunken panic on the plane at "snitting next to Borpoh" and the religious fervor at the knowledge that Oprah would be coming to the studio were all hilarious, and played with the sort of confidence I don't know that she would have had at the start of the series.

Some other thoughts:

• Having spent an inordinate amount of time at area Chuck E. Cheese's lately doing the five-year-old birthday party circuit, I can say with confidence that the franchise no longer features ball pits. They did when I was a kid (I think), but not now.

• Another brilliant thing about the Princess Leia gag: the immediate cut to Liz relaxing in her first class seat on the plane. Perfect editing.

• Frank was attracted to white female (and monster-clawed) Tracy? Gross.

• Loved Kenneth instructing the guy in the elevator about strangling him ("I will fight back").

• Question from the fashion ignorant: is there actually such a thing as a sweater-cape? Or, like "Sleep crime," is it just a funny-sounding phrase?

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

Welcome to the Friday graveyard, Dollhouse

So, Fox, in its quest to give me yet another migraine -- and/or to laugh so I don't cry -- just announced its mid-season schedule, which -- in typical Fox fashion -- has only a passing resemblance to the one they announced back in May. By far the biggest change -- or, at least, the one that's going to get the Internets all ablaze -- is that Joss Whedon's "Dollhouse," once set to air on Mondays as a companion to "24," has now been banished to Fridays at 9, as part of some 10-years-out-of-date all sci-fi bloc with the similarly-doomed "Terinator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles." (Speaking of which, I'll get to this week's episode eventually. Promise.)

After the jump, some more thoughts on the new schedule (and how much it deviates from the one they announced), the future of "Dollhouse," etc., etc., etc...

First, here's the lineup, night-by-night, both in terms of what they announced way back when and what the now claim it will be:

SUNDAY: Originally, it was going to be comedy repeats leading into some combination of "The Simpsons," "King of the Hill," "Family Guy," "American Dad" and "The Cleveland Show." The regularly-scheduled reruns are out, as "Hole in the Wall" (aka Human Tetris) will air at 7 & 7:30. Also, the release makes no mention of "The Cleveland Show," though I imagine it'll turn up sooner or later.

MONDAY: Was going to be "Dollhouse" at 8 and "24" at 9. Instead, it'll be "House" at 8 and "24" at 9, which defeats the whole idea of using one of Fox's established drama hits to help launch new shows. (To be fair, they did use "House" to launch one this fall, which leads us to...)

TUESDAY: "American Idol" leading into "Fringe," as planned all along.

WEDNESDAY: "House" was going to lead into a half-hour version of the "Idol" results show, followed by "TBA comedy." Instead, we'll get a one-hour "Idol" at 8, followed by "Lie to Me," a crime procedural with Tim Roth as a kind of human lie detector. Yay!

THURSDAY: "Hell's Kitchen" was going to lead into "Secret Millionaire," but instead Fox is using "Millionaire" as a twice-weekly December stunt. Instead, we'll get a rotation of "Hell's Kitchen" and "Kitchen Nightmares" at 9, and "Bones" allegedly moving to Thursdays at 8. (As with so many previous proposed "Bones" timeslots, I'll believe it when I see it airing there.)

FRIDAY: Was going to be "Bones" (see?) into "'Til Death" and "Do Not Disturb," but "Do Not Disturb" was canceled a long time ago and "'Til Death" (along with "Prison Break") will "return to the schedule at a later date." Instead, we get "Terminator" at 8 and "Dollhouse" at 9, even though the last sci-fi show to work here for Fox -- really, the last show of any kind to work here for Fox -- was "The X-Files," a decade ago.

SATURDAY: "Cops" and "America's Most Wanted," like always.

So, what do we make of all this? A few theories:

1)Fox is happy with how well "Fringe" has been doing and doesn't want to push its luck with a second sci-fi show in a plum timeslot adjacent to a hit like "24" or "Idol," particularly when the show has a concept that's much less straightforward than the one on "Fringe."

2)Fox and Joss have been having a lot of creative disagreements about the show (which Joss discussed here and here, and also here with me), and even though the show's new trailer looks all bright and shiny, they don't believe in the concept enough to place it in a piece of valuable real estate. So they're burying it along with "Sarah Connor," which has languished in fourth place in its Monday timeslot pretty much all season.

3)They do believe in the show, but also think it needs a more hard-core sci-fi show like "Sarah Connor" as a lead-in. And they also recognize that both shows are going to have niche audiences at best and are therefore placing them on a night where the bar for success is much lower.

Under any previous Fox administration, I wouldn't even consider Option 3, but Kevin Reilly is both a good guy and a champion of unusual material, so it's at least a possibility. The other two scenarios are much more likely, and either way, I'm not very optimistic for the future of either "Dollhouse" or "Sarah Connor." Click here to read the full post

Sons of Anarchy, "Better Half": My old ladies

Spoilers for last night's "Sons of Anarchy" coming up just as soon as I get some rosary beads...

As the title suggests, "Better Half" was all about the women of SAMCRO, and the different ways they responded when the club is under siege by law enforcement (and, appropriately enough, by a female ATF agent). While a lot of dramas that take place in a criminal milieu treat the female characters as afterthoughts, "Sons of Anarchy" has made a concerted effort to depict the role of the women in this world, to the point where Gemma was the first character to stand out in the show's shakier early episodes. All the women -- from Gemma to Tara to Opie's wife to "Cecil B. DeMILF" to Agent Stahl -- got great material to play this week, and the intensity didn't seem any slacker for having Clay and Jax and the guys somewhat in the background.

Much as I'd love to have Ally Walker be a continuing presence on this show, I do wonder how Kurt Sutter and company are going to deal with the ATF's continued pursuit of SAMCRO. "The Sopranos" could keep Tony out of jail for years because it portrayed the FBI as a bunch of bumblers. "The Shield" has maintained Vic Mackey's freedom because he's a cop who has the ability to undermine his own investigators, and because the LAPD brass at times decided he was too valuable to get rid of. Though the Sons have a handful of law-enforcement contacts, they're not as influential as Mackey, and this show's version of the ATF is a lot tougher than the "Sopranos" feds were.

We have four episodes left this season. Even if Clay somehow manages to get the club out from under Agent Stahl's current investigation, how will they stay off the ATF's radar forever? Not a complaint; I'm genuinely curious to see how they attempt to pull this off.

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

South Park, "About Last Night": Obama's eleven

Brief spoilers for last night's "South Park" post-election extravaganza coming up just as soon as I steal some TV's...

"Trapper Keeper," the episode Trey Parker and Matt Stone did in the immediate, uncertain aftermath of the Bush/Gore election, remains one of my favorite "South Park" episodes ever. I must have watched it at least a couple of dozen times within the first year it aired (it was my "Turk dances" before Turk danced, the perfect picker-upper after a lousy day) and likely would have watched it even more if I had kept my old ReplayTV unit that had it stored on the hard drive.

So even though I don't watch "South Park" as often as I used to, I always make a point to check out their election shows, even though they've now led to diminished returns each time since. It's basically the same joke every time: there's really no difference between the two candidates, and everyone getting worked up about their guy versus the other guy is an idiot. There was a hint of that in "Trapper Keeper," and the theme became more overt in the 2004 edition, and was officially driven into the ground with this extended "Ocean's Eleven" parody where McCain and Obama were revealed as master jewel thieves who used the campaign to create a nationwide distraction on election night.

Really this is the theme of the vast majority of "South Park" episodes: people who care too much need to get over themselves. But the execution of that theme varies from week to week, election to election, and the jokes in "About Last Night" were played out within the first five minutes. Seeing Randy Marsh go overboard in his Obama worship, and McCain supporters like Butters' parents prepare for the end of the world was briefly amusing, but then there wasn't a second joke on top of that. Even the payoff about Ike faking the suicide attempt to help the thieves pull off the Hope Diamond heist just made me shrug. The whole thing was like a half-hour "SNL" sketch.

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

Life, "Jackpot": Sucker Ponch

Spoilers for the return of "Life" to Wednesday nights coming up just as soon as I buy a kitchen table...

"Dale was right. It does help with the solving of crimes." -Crews

I wasn't in love with a lot of "Jackpot" -- like too much of "Life" season two, the case felt like something we could have seen on almost any other crime procedural -- but it definitely brought the funny, whether it was the meta joke about the fruit, or the self-satisfied look on Crews' face when he realized he could stay at the lotto support group or when Erik Estrada claimed to be a fan, or the silent exchange between Reese and Crews about the heavyset con woman being a phone sex worker.

But, again, the mystery felt lacking (the bodyguard screamed "BAD GUY!" from his first appearance), and I'd like the bonding between Crews and Rachel Seybolt more if I had a better grasp of the conspiracy story and the chronology. (For instance, how could Rachel remember the murder well enough and yet not realize she was being raised by her parents' killer?) And every time Tidwell and Reese have a conversation, I cringe.

Still, Damian Lewis is wonderful, particularly in those moments where Crews has to speak the absolute truth to a stranger -- for instance, repeating to gun nut Tom that if the door closes, somebody dies -- that I'm still watching, waiting for the rest of the show to catch up to him the way it did late last year.

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

Looking ahead to 2009: Scrubs is back

So, in between watching election coverage over the last couple of days, I slipped in DVDs of the first two episodes of the new ABC incarnation of "Scrubs," which will debut at some point in early 2009.

And they're terrific.

In particular, the second one -- a spiritual sequel to season one's "My Old Lady," guest-starring Glynn Turman (Mayor Royce from "The Wire," and/or Blair Underwood's dad on "In Treatment") as a terminally-ill patient -- is already one of my five favorite "Scrubs" episodes ever, just the right mix of pathos and weird comedy.

Bill Lawrence promised that he was going to dial back on the wackiness, and he has. JD is still weird, but he's also recognizably human again. And the new intern characters -- notably Aziz Ansari from "Human Giant" and Eliza Coupe -- fit in very well. I think I'd rather see the show go out on a high note, ala "Frasier" or "Cheers" (both of which rebounded in their last years after some weak later seasons), than to attempt to continue a year from now as "Scrubs: The Next Generation," but if the ratings are decent enough to allow that, at least it looks like the creative team has rediscovered what made the show great in the first place.

Not trying to be a tease; just trying to remind everybody that "Scrubs" is still here, and that the new stuff is going to be worth waiting for.

And, because I can never link to it enough, here's Turk dancing. Or, if you prefer your "Scrubs" darker, JD, Dr. Cox and The Fray. Click here to read the full post

Help me, Wolf Blitzer. You're my only hope.

Keeping to my promise to keep the blog non-political, the only thing I want to touch on about last night's election coverage is this: for reasons passing understanding, CNN decided that election night was the perfect time to unveil a flashy but otherwise completely pointless new gimmick where correspondent Jessica Yellin appeared in the studio as a hologram, Princess Leia-style. And, of course, in typical obnoxious TV news fashion, they had to spend forever and a day explaining how awesome it was. I know there's a lot of time to fill in between when certain races can be safely called, but wow.

I look forward to Jon Stewart going to town on this. Click here to read the full post

The Shield, "Party Line": Getaway day

Spoilers for "The Shield" season seven, episode 10 coming up just as soon as I ask Walton Goggins for his workout regimen...

"There was a minute today, when you were playing the piano and Jackson was dancing, I actually forgot about everything that was going on. And I was just -- I was just happy." -Mara

I talked briefly in last week's review about the sharp contrast between the Vendrell marriage and Vic and Corrine's relationship. I want to expand on that here, because "Party Line," above all else, is about what starkly different relationships Shane and Vic have with the women they chose to marry.

Though Shane has turned his wife and child into fugitives, has slept with hookers and been beaten up by pimps, has murdered and stole and broken the majority of the 10 Commandments, Mara stands by her man, because he has never lied to her about who he truly is. Even though her freedom and physical safety are at stake, she won't even consider Shane's request for her to turn herself in. She's standing by her man, staying in this family, and oddly seems more in love with Shane than ever during this ordeal. As we see them making out in the pool, or Shane noodling on the piano while Mara and Jackson dance, it's almost like watching them on some wonderful romantic getaway -- until, like Mara, we remember just what dire straits they're really in. Walton Goggins has really thrown himself into Shane's mania; it's hard to look at his smile in several scenes and not be disarmed by this homicidal, racist, fugitive idiot.

Meanwhile, Vic has lied to Corrine through every step of their relationship (both pre- and post-divorce). So all these revelations about what Vic's been up to all these years falls on Corrine like a ton of bricks, and she finally, finally, finally realizes the only hope for her family's safety and prosperity is to get this man out of their lives by any means necessary. Mara won't turn herself in to the cops; Corrine is now cooperating with the cops.

All these changes in allegiance led to one of the tensest scenes of the entire series, as Dutch orders a panicked Corrine to leave the phone line open so he can record her conversation with Vic, even as Corrine, Dutch and we in the audience are painfully aware that they're tying up the line for Mara's call. Superb work from Cathy Cahlin Ryan in that scene, working off of Angela Russo and John Hlavin's script and directed by Gwyneth Horder-Payton.

While Vic has no idea yet that his ex-wife has turned against him in a way it won't be easy to fix, he can see how badly things are falling apart. Olivia and ICE are still shining him on, he and Aceveda keep trying to elbow each other out of the way of the cartel case, and the attempt to put a bounty on Shane backfires horribly when Shane gets jacked for the 100 grand and demands that Vic repay it, tomorrow. Yet his ego (or just his stubbornness) remains so great that when Ronnie quite sensibly suggests it's time to pull a Gilroy and head south of the border, Mexico way, Vic talks him out of it, somehow still confident that they can find a way out of this quagmire.

And, in a way, I can't blame him. Though I've complained in the past about how many Houdini acts Vic has pulled over the years, the cumulative effect of them is that they've given Vic a justifiable sense of invulnerability. We may be able to see just how much worse this situation is than Antwon, or the Armenians, or Kavanaugh, but to Vic, one death trap's the same as any other, right?

One of my favorite moments of the episode is the way that one of Vic and Aceveda's arguments takes place outside of David's campaign headquarters as a neighbor hoses garbage off the sidewalk. Is the garbage Vic's problems, soon to be washed away by his latest scheme, or is it Vic himself?

Some other thoughts on "Party Line":

• On the one hand, it does seem like Beltran the cartel enforcer is just as gullible as the Armenians in his willingness to trust whatever Vic says. On the other, he is operating in a foreign city (and country), trying to clean up an operation that Pezuela was obviously bungling, and I can understand his willingness to listen to this ex-cop who seems so obviously plugged in.

• Is this episode the first time since season two's "Co-Pilot" (the flashback to the early days of The Barn and the strike team) that we've seen a member of the strike team in a suit? It's just bizarre to see Ronnie dressed like any other detective, and amusing to watch Billings try to curry favor with him.

• DeLane Matthews, who appeared in a couple of season three episodes as Mara's crazy mom (maybe the only character hated by the fanbase even more than Mara herself?), becomes the latest old face to make a curtain call in this final season. This one makes a fair amount of plot logic: wouldn't Mara's family be one of the places where Vic and Ronnie looked for her?

• Each episode seems like a chance for Michael Chiklis and CCH Pounder to see who can look more fatigued than the other. Two great Claudette-is-so-damn-tired moments here: when deputy chief Phillips admits that he overlooked a lot of Vic's nonsense in the past "for the greater good," and especially after she gets off the phone with Mara.

• Shane telling Mara the story about how he learned to play the piano reminded me of how little we know about these characters' lives from before the series began. It's like Vic and the strike team sprang into existence only moments before Vic put a bullet in Terry Crowley's brain. When I mentioned this to Shawn Ryan a few weeks ago, he quoted a bit of advice he got from David Mamet: "Backstory is bulls--t."

Once again, let me remind you that from here until the end of the series (three episodes to go), no talking about anything you see in the previews, or anything you read in interviews, or on spoiler sites, or whatever.

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

Time to exercise your franchise

Okay, in an attempt to keep this blog a politics-free zone while still acknowledging the huge elephant (and donkey) in the room today, we're going to have our own simplistic presidential election, between four recent TV commanders in chief. After the jump, a breakdown of the candidates, and then feel free to both vote and explain your vote in the comments.

Josiah Bartlet ("The West Wing")
Party: Democrat
Pet causes: Campaign finance reform, defense, literacy
Pros: A learned, decent man who commands the respect of everyone around him
Cons: Smoker, secret MS sufferer, prone to losing his cool in a crisis, Dukakis-sized

Laura Roslin ("Battlestar Galactica")
Party: Um, Caprican?
Pet causes: Education, religious fundamentalism, the survival of the human race
Pros: Has kept the remains of humanity alive for several years now, was right about not settling on New Caprica
Cons: Secret cancer sufferer, prone to religious visions, rational but uncontrollable hatred of Gaius Baltar

David Palmer ("24")
Party: Democrat?
Pet causes: Sniffing out the latest rat in his administration
Pros: Charismatic, decent, could easily beat up the other three candidates with his bare hands
Cons: Horrible, horrible judge of character when it comes to picking aides, cabinet members, a wife, etc.

Mackenzie Allen ("Commander in Chief")
Party: Independent
Pet causes: Homeland security, getting re-elected
Pros: Presidential height, ability to get things done without any real political allies in either party
Cons: Constant shifts of direction in administration (and on show), whiny First Gentleman Click here to read the full post

Grey's Anatomy: It's, like, how much less gay could it be? And the answer is... none. None less gay.

Okay, this is massively uncool if true: Ausiello and Kristin are both reporting that the "Grey's Anatomy" producers were ordered to dump both the Callie/Erica lesbian storyline and actress Brooke Smith, who plays Erica Hahn, immediately -- as in, Smith's last episode is this Thursday's, and she doesn't even get a proper goodbye of any kind. Ausiello has Smith's take on getting fired over gay panic, while Kristin reports that Melissa George's character, who will show up in a few weeks, was originally written as bisexual but that the "Grey's" writers were ordered to eliminate that aspect of her character as much as possible.

Now, here's some genuine, non-Alanis irony: Shonda Rhimes and company cook up this storyline because they needed to give Smith and Sara Ramirez something to do, and if these reports are true, then it led to Smith losing her job altogether. Sigh... Click here to read the full post

Sepinwall on TV: 'Life' review

In today's column, I talk about the move of "Life" to Wednesdays at 9 and about some of my frustrations with this season. Click here to read the full post

HIMYM, "Happily Ever After": Ted has fear! A thousand times no!

Spoilers for tonight's "How I Met Your Mother" coming up just as soon as I translate my life into hockey terminology...

Huh. "Happily Ever After" started off as a flat episode (the gang being annoyed at Ted's non-reaction to being dumped by Stella), then took a turn so stupid and bad sitcommy (hiding under a table?!?!?) that even all the dialogue about how stupid it was couldn't save it -- and then the flashbacks started and it took a marked turn for the better.

Lily and Barney's flashbacks were one-joke, but each joke was a good one, and the scenes ended before they got old. (Also, Alyson Hannigan still looks convincing as a ninth grader.) And Robin's flashback to her gender-bending Canadian upbringing was both funny and sad. (Though the soap opera music joke -- Robin's dad was played by daytime drama vet Eric Braeden -- fell a little flat.)

But where "Happily Ever After" really started to click was in the cab ride. Marshall's burning need to see Ted lose his temper finally let Jason Segel unleash his inner whackjob in a way that the show almost never does, even in episodes where Marshall is supposed to be wigging out, and I can't remember the last time I liked Josh Radnor as much as I did as Ted exploded about Stella moving to New York for Tony. (See? It wasn't necessarily Ted's stupid anti-Jersey bigotry I objected to; it's that they didn't do anything funny with it last time.)

This cleans the slate on Stella once and for all, and I'm hopeful the show moves away from Relationship Ted for a while.

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

TV news round-up: Ben Silverman hates us, but America still loves "Treehouse of Horror"

Random thoughts on a few recent developments in the land we know as television coming up after the jump...

• The latest "Treehouse of Horror" installment of "The Simpsons" got the show its best 18-49 ratings in five years, and averaged nearly 12.5 million viewers overall, outperforming its season-to-date average by more than 50%. I had planned to do a more full blog post on the episode, which I watched a couple of weeks ago, but realized that, outside of some jokes in the "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" parody, the only part I even remembered was the recreation of the "Mad Men" credits with Homer as Don Draper. I don't want to say the concept is played out (any more than "The Simpsons" itself is), but they've had better years with it.

• NBC has given a full-season order to "Kath & Kim," a show I hated so much that it actually led me to stop watching "My Name Is Earl." (The disposable nature of "Earl" had something to do with that as well, but when there's a show I like at 8:30, I usually sit through "Earl.")

• You'll also note in the tail end of the "Kath & Kim" story that production has shut down on both "Valentine, Inc." and "Easy Money," two of the CW's outsourced Sunday night MRC shows. Both aired last night; I'm still waiting to hear from the MRC publicists about how much longer they'll be on the schedule.

• Also getting a full-season order: "Samantha Who?," which I liked in small bits last season but not enough to check out this year. For those who stuck with it, how has it been this year? Click here to read the full post

Entourage, "Pie": Somebody stole my line!

Brief spoilers for last night's "Entourage" coming up just as soon as I have a seat at the bar...

I suppose "Pie" was a slight improvement over recent episodes, in that showing Vince at work, in a circumstance where he's no longer top dog -- and where the director doesn't seem to have much use for the former Number One Star in the World -- has potential to be interesting, and in that they're introducing the wonderful Gary Cole to the cast. (He'll be a regular next season, which may be the only reason I'd look forward to next season.)

But the Cole story didn't amount to much more than set-up for stuff down the road, and Vince is such a flat and passive character that it's hard to get any comedy out of him, even in situations (like wimping out in Jason Patric's trailer) that might have been funny with a different character (or on a different show).

I continue to be unable to kick the habit -- I guess I need a handful of shows to complain about every year, and "Entourage" provides plenty of fodder for that -- but I'm not enjoying it.

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

Dexter, "Si Se Puede": Partners in crime

Spoilers for last night's "Dexter" coming up just as soon as I find the perfect Key lime pie...

Bay Harbor Butcher.

These are three words that needed to be uttered in this episode, possibly more than once. How can Prado be smart enough to figure out that Dexter is capable of being a vigilante killer and yet not connect the dots to the vigilante killer operating out of Dexter's office a few months ago? How can Angel and Deb talk about the possibility of Ramon Prado being a serial killer without once invoking the name of Sgt. Doakes?

I can give the writers a pass (for now) on the Prado front, depending on what exactly this guy's motivations really are. If, as I've guessed in the past, Prado was using his brother Oscar for similar purposes, then maybe he knows exactly what Dexter really is, and has all along, and is somehow confident he can avoid suffering the same fate as Doakes. But if that turns out not to be the case, then Prado's an idiot, and he deserves the Saran Wrapped fate I think we all assume is coming to him by the end of this season.

The Ramon subplot's a little trickier. I can understand Angel being paranoid about going after a fellow cop (and the brother of an influential DA), but for him to be in disbelief about Deb's theory, so soon after they were told one of their own was a prolific serial killer? At the very least, they should have had Quinn, as the newbie, bring Doakes' name up to suggest that maybe our veterans have a blind spot about this kind of thing.

Whatever the reason, it was distracting, and in the middle of one of the season's more uneven episodes.

On the plus side, Michael C. Hall and Margo Martindale were perfect in their scenes together at the hospital. Dexter's relationship with Camilla, which we've seen going all the way back to the pilot, is yet another sign that our protagonist isn't the emotionless robot he so often claims to be. I'm curious to see if Dexter ponders putting Camilla out of her misery, or if his own experience with the nurse who tried to euthanize Harry would keep him from going there.

On the minus side, all the ancillary stories -- Laguerta with the defense lawyer, Deb with the terrible actress from IAD, Angel trying to date the vice cop -- felt as uninteresting as usual, even when the plots in some way (like Laguerta's) tie in with the main Dexter story.

And I feel like I missed a couple of steps in the Dexter/Prado relationship. Dexter went from freaked out to, if not comfortable with, then at least resigned to the knowledge that Prado knows his secret. And the scene where Prado was alone with the Aryan was confusing. Had this guy been threatening Prado's family for a while? (In which case, that's one hell of a coincidence that Dexter would select this guy as an example for Miguel.) Or had the threats only begun once Miguel started working on this plot to have the killer transferred to the courthouse?

Kind of a muddled episode that typified what's been to me, unfortunately, a muddled season.

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

SNL: No one dies harder than John McCain...

Quick thoughts on last night's "Saturday Night Live" coming up just as soon as I enjoy some fine gold...

Ben Affleck and John McCain are two longtime friends of the show, in large part because they're game to do just about anything asked of them. Affleck in particular is so much more likable on "SNL" than he is in most of his movies that his acting career might have gone differently if he had taken a year or two off from films to join the cast.

But last night's Affleck/McCain team-up didn't quite live up to expectations. The opening sketch, with a cash-strapped McCain on QVC, trying to counter Barack Obama's network infomercial while selling campaign-themed tchotchkes, was hilarious -- particularly when Tina Fey, in her final appearance as Sarah Palin, went rogue -- but McCain on Weekend Update fell flat.

As for Affleck, after getting what seemed to be the shortest monologue in "SNL" history (can anyone think of a shorter one?), he got to further the Alec Baldwin parallels by actually playing Baldwin as a guest on "The View" in a sketch I didn't find very funny, but that my wife (who watches "The View") laughed a lot at. Affleck's Baldwin was pretty good, as was Casey Wilson's Jennifer Aniston and Kenan's Whoopi; they just didn't get much to do. And I think I would have enjoyed Affleck skewering Keith Olbermann a lot more if I hadn't recently seen and loved the very similar "Double meat, sir!"

In Roger Ebert full-disclosure style, I should say that I decided to go to sleep about a minute into the latest Target Lady sketch, and then watched whatever else was available on NBC.com this morning (including the German coat store ad and Kenan as an old man giving love advice). Did I miss anything good? How was David Cook?

And, with the election only a few days away, let me remind you all one last time: This is not a political blog. Talk about McCain only in the context of the show (i.e., whether you found it funny or not). Do not talk about policy, do not attack either candidate or each other, or I start deleting comments. Got it? Click here to read the full post