Rescue Me, "Torch": A burning in his loins

Spoilers for tonight's outstanding episode of "Rescue Me" coming up just as soon as I polish my coin collection...

"The only thing he can feel is heat. Only thing that gets through that thick Irish skin of his is fire. And even goddamned flames ain't gonna make him cry." -Tommy's dad

Damn, that was good, wasn't it?

It's easy to dwell on the negative with "Rescue Me," but episodes like "Torch" are a reminder of how brilliant the show can be, and why it's worth suffering through the sloppy, self-aggrandizing moments.

Where even the better episodes of the series often appear to be a randomly-assembled series of vignettes, some stronger than others, nearly all of "Torch" (with the exception of the Garrity stuff, which was isolated comic relief, but fairly well-executed comic relief, so no biggie) felt very much of a piece, all of it tied to that amazing shot(*) of Tommy wrapping the little kid's corpse in a blanket. Every scene afterwards -- from Franco at the gym to Lou with Candy to Tommy burning himself after another round with the ghosts -- keyed off of the crew's response to seeing the burned child, and to Tommy's guilt over Connor.

(*) Major kudos to director John Fortenberry and anyone else in the crew involved with the decision to frame that as a static shot, with Denis Leary popping in and out of frame as he worked, occasionally looking directly at us in a way that didn't break the fourth wall, and the other firefighters looking on sheepishly, just out of focus. It lent an immediacy to what Tommy was doing at the same time it deliberately kept our eyes off the horror in the same way that Tommy was trying to hide it from the media and cameraphone gawkers.

"Rescue Me" is often guilty of deifying Tommy past all reason or dramatic interest, not just in the way that every attractive woman in the five boroughs throws herself at the guy, but in the way that he always seems to have the moral high ground on any subject that doesn't involve his personal life. With Leary a producer who has a hand in every script, it's easy to view the series as some kind of massive ego trip. And maybe some weeks it is. But here, Leary and Peter Tolan's script turned Tommy's super-competence and unassailable machismo on their heads.

Yes, he's the only guy from the truck who can bring himself to deal with the little corpse, and the one who can bring himself to enter the pediatric cancer ward and put on a happy face for the kids. But we see through the episode -- particularly when the ghosts come out again (in maybe the series' best use of that device since very early on, if not ever) -- that Tommy's armor comes with a cost, and in many ways is as un-admirable as his drinking, his inept parenting, his clumsy relationships and the rest of it.

Tommy may be as tough as his old man suggests, but so much of his pain in this episode comes from his realization that he's thought so little of Connor in the years since he died. Some of this seems self-corrective on Leary and Tolan's part -- the show killed off Connor at the end of season two, then ignored him as soon as it was convenient to do so -- but the end result of watching Tommy listen to his father, brother and best friend taunt him for being tougher than they are is still devastating, and wonderfully played by Leary.

Even the Sheila sex scene, ordinarily a cue to lunge for the remote or flee to the kitchen for a snack, fit. Though Sheila's concern about the burn being gross was superficial, overall Callie Thorne got to play her as an adult again, which she hasn't done since the 9/11 monologue near the start of the season. And the sex between the two of them was as raw and ugly as the wound on Tommy's leg.

Hell, the dead kid storyline even kept me from rolling my eyes at Lou and Candy for once, even though I suspect I'll be back to that pretty soon.

Strong, strong episode. Best of the season by a long stretch, I think, and that includes the more 9/11-intensive stuff.

A few other thoughts:

• Anyone with experience in makeup and/or special effects want to wager a guess on how they pulled off the thigh-burning effect? There's obviously a cut from a full-body shot of Tommy to a close-up of the thigh, but that still looks like someone's real leg.

• I don't begrudge Leary and Tolan wanting to showcase Steven Pasquale's song-and-dance skills, but these fantasy numbers are starting to feel a bit less special each time they do them. But at least this one ended with a funny payoff to the otherwise pointless storyline of Teddy playing Dr. Kevorkian at the VA hospital.

• That "New York, New York" cover at the end was by Cat Power.

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

Reader mail: TV shows not on DVD & reality show teases

Another reader mailbag column today, with questions about why "Ed" and "LA Law" aren't out on DVD yet, and why reality shows seem to recycle the same clips over and over in an episode. Click here to read the full post

Nurse Jackie, "School Nurse": Black and white problem

Spoilers for the fourth episode of "Nurse Jackie" coming up just as soon as I color-correct a drawing...

"School Nurse," the first of back-to-back episodes directed by Edie Falco's old "Sopranos" co-star Steve Buscemi, has children on its mind. Jackie gets into it with the teachers at her daughter's school when they suggest Grace is suffering from an anxiety disorder. Dr. O'Hara reveals, not surprisingly, a complete lack of any maternal side, while Mo Mo shows his first real signs of depth when he bonds with a little kid who reminds him of the twin brother he lost at age 1. And even Zoey, who's a grown woman, spends a large chunk of the episode acting like a kid and pouting over missing all the interesting cases, only to get some perspective after experiencing her first patient death.

I liked the parallel at the end of the episode of Zoey and Jackie both trying to improve a picture by coloring it in. But where Zoey understands that she's lost this patient, even as she performs the kind post-mortem gesture of giving her back her eyebrows, Jackie's insistence on adding color to Grace's gray drawing(*) shows that she's in denial about the problem.

(*) True story: Day after my wife and I watch this episode, I come home from work and my wife excitedly shows me a landscape drawing that our daughter did in kindergarten that day. "Look at all the colors!" my wife told me, beaming. Cable drama: always an easy way to remind yourself of all the ways your life is better than theirs.

But then, Jackie's in denial about a lot of things, from the Vicodin use to the balancing act she has going with Eddie and her husband, at one point simultaneously fielding calls from both men and telling them, "Can't talk! Love ya!" It's treated as a joke here, but Jackie's willingness to use the word "love" in connection to Eddie brings us back to last week's discussion about how much of that relationship is about the pills and how much is about genuine feelings she has for the guy. Maybe it's just because Falco and Paul Schulze have such obvious chemistry together (as you'd hope they would after knowing each other since college), but I find it hard to watch their scenes together and believe that it's just about the pills. Maybe it's somewhat, perhaps even mostly, about the pills, but Jackie does have affection, if not love, for her drug connect.

Keeping in mind once again that we're sticking with the air schedule, and therefore not going to talk about the content of the fifth episode, which went up On Demand today, what did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Band of Brothers rewind, episode 9: "Why We Fight"

We're in our final week of looking back on "Band of Brothers," with spoilers for the penultimate episode, "Why We Fight," coming up just as soon as I borrow your lighter...

There are essentially two halves to "Why We Fight" -- one of the finest episodes of this damn fine miniseries -- that seem unrelated at first by anything but chronology, but which turn out to be inextricably linked in the final moments.

The first half focuses on Captain Nixon quest for Vat 69. To this point in the series, Nixon's role has been primarily to offer exposition (as a battalion strategist, he knows more about the big picture than Dick Winters does), and to function as a kind of Greek chorus (suggesting that Sobel is a better training officer than the men want to admit, reminding Winters of how much good he did at Brecourt Manor). We've learned that he's a drunk, but also that he's brave (he declines the 30-day pass home in "The Breaking Point") and that Winters obviously thinks the world of him, but because he hasn't been a member of Easy Company since before they left America, this is his first real spotlight.

And the Nixon of "Why We Fight" is burnt out. Like all the men, he's been at war too long, has started to forget why it is this all started, and with the lack of action post-Hagenau, he has a lot of time to do nothing but think, and stew, and drink. And because he's not just an alcoholic, but a discriminating alcoholic, he's running out of the one thing he's willing to drink. And when he's one of the few survivors of the doomed jump, he gets to stew some more about what all those boys in the plane died over.

There's this amazing weariness to Ron Livingston's performance. Like Scott Grimes in "The Last Patrol," he's so much older and frailer than he was at the start of the series (when I praised Livingston for this at an awards event, he gave all the credit to the makeup department for making him look so jaundiced). And while he's always going to look and sound like Peter from "Office Space," he has a gravity and haunted quality here that works perfectly in a scene like the one where Nixon gets the Dear Lewis letter from his wife. And that, in turn, leads into the marvelous scene where the entire convoy sings "Blood on the Risers," the unofficial paratrooper anthem, and Nixon reluctantly joins in, then starts singing louder than everyone else because he's so sick of it all.

The episode's first half also offers vignettes of other characters suffering a similar level of bitterness towards their time in the Army. Perconte rants to replacement O'Keefe about how long it's been since he saw America. Webster flips out at a passing convoy of surrendered Germans: "You have horses! What were you thinking?" Replacement Janovec tells Luz that he's reading an article about how "the Germans are bad," and Luz reacts like this is the most hilarious thing he's ever heard. With few exceptions -- like Captain Speirs, who seems delighted to be able to loot everything in sight now that they're in Germany -- the Toccoa veterans are all desperate to get home, and wondering why they wound up here in the first place.

Then we come to the second half, in which the episode's title goes from being ironic to explanatory. Whether the men of Easy Company knew it or not, stopping the kind of people responsible for the concentration camp they find outside of Landsberg is exactly why they fight -- why they've given up years of their lives and risked those lives repeatedly. As the real Dick Winters (who had fewer problems with his resolve to begin with) said to himself after getting a look at that nightmarish place, "Now I know why I am here!"

As good a job as the makeup department did on Livingston, their masterpiece is their work on the camp survivors. (Amazingly, they lost the Emmy to the TNT fantasy miniseries "The Mists of Avalon.") I don't know exactly how they made some of those extras look the way they did, but the sight of them never fails to hit me in the gut, to fill me with horror and despair that this kind of thing can happen -- and I say this as the son of a teacher who specializes in Holocaust education and who frequently brought her work home with her(*).

(*) And who has asked me to put in a plug for her college's Holocaust education center.

The visceral impact of the camp sequence is just amazing. All the little beats are devastating, from the man carrying his emaciated, possibly dead friend to the prisoner who starts showering his terrified rescuer with desperate kisses.

But the most brutal part of all involves Liebgott. The earlier scene with Webster in the truck is there primarily to remind us that Liebgott is the lone Jew in Easy Company. Because he's also the German translator, he winds up in the position to be the first to discover what this camp really is, and that smacks him -- and us -- extra hard. And then an even tougher blow comes when he's asked to order the prisoners back into the camp even temporarily, for their own good. Ross McCall isn't mentioned often among the best performances of this series, but he owns those two moments.

So here's what I'm most curious about, in terms of your reaction: how do you read the faces of the German townspeople in the sequence where they're being forced to dispose of the bodies? Specifically, how do you read the German officer's widow whom Nixon had met earlier when he broke into her house looking for booze? She's furious and disgusted and mortified, but is it at the Americans for forcing her to perform this horrific task, or at her own country's leadership for creating this place (and making her husband die for this)? Or is it a bit of both?

Some other thoughts:

• I'm again going to break the who lives/who dies rule here, as we're so close to the end that it's more or less pointless, but skip ahead to the next bullet if need be. The level of Speirs' looting -- and the other soldiers' awareness of it -- becomes one of the better running gags of these final two episodes, but the miniseries doesn't have room for the big real-life punchline: Speirs was sending all the looted merchandise not back to America, but to a "war widow" he had married during his time in England, and with whom he fathered a son. One problem: the woman's first husband turned out not to be dead, but a POW, and she chose him over Speirs -- and kept every bit of loot Speirs had sent her.

• Webster's command of German in the scene with the baker seems far shakier than it was in "The Last Patrol," and his bloodlust in that scene is in marked contrast to how he'll behave in a similar moment in the series finale. (Let's save discussion on that till we get to "Points," but I wanted to bring it up now so we have it in mind in a few day's time.)

• Don't Luz and Perconte in the opening scenes feel like they could be either supporting characters in a '40s war comedy, or maybe the leads on a '50s or early '60s Army sitcom?

• In case you haven't seen it by now, HBO has released a trailer for "The Pacific," the long-awaited follow-up to "Band of Brothers" that focuses on the Pacific theater of WWII in the same way "BoB" focused on the European theater. A couple of readers expressed concern that the trailer makes it look like "The Pacific" is going to be filled with the kind of war movie cliches that "BoB" avoided, but to that I would point out that some of the promos for "BoB" featured the scene from this episode where Winters tells Nixon what to write to the families of the boys who died on the jump. In context, "You tell them they died as heroes" is about the messiness of war and the necessity of telling noble lies about it. Out of context, in a trailer, it just sounds corny, even with Damian Lewis saying it.

Coming up on Thursday: We come to the end of the line with "Points," in which the war in Europe comes to an end, and yet the men of Easy Company can't get home.

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

Hung, "Pilot": Tool, shed

Spoilers for the premiere episode of "Hung" coming up just as soon as I refine my search engine terms...

"Here's an idea: you want to be a millionaire, why don't you go market your d--k?" -Tanya
"She definitely meant it as an insult, but somehow, I couldn't get the idea out of my head." -Ray, narrating

I talked a lot about the reasons why I like this show in my review on Thursday, so I just want to hit a few points here and see what you all thought of it.

The first is the charming, utterly self-deprecating performance by Thomas Jane as Ray. Not many actors could make a guy this pathetic -- even someone who recognizes and even embraces his own pathetic nature -- as likable as he does, nor could many make him seem as human even as he's being such an imbecile in so many ways. He and Jane Adams (and the double-Jane thing is going to get confusing in future blog entries, I fear) work very well together, and I loved his reaction to her excessive climaxing, and then having to listen to her post-coital poetry.

The second is that patience is going to be required here. Again, look at "Breaking Bad" as the model, and not just because both deal with high school teachers resorting to a life of crime to pay the bills. "Hung" is going to take its time getting Ray's career as a male prostitute(*) -- and Tanya's parallel career as a pimp -- off the ground. As "Breaking Bad" has shown (and as "The Wire" has, though I'm not yet prepared to set the bar remotely that high), series that show a little patience in depicting people learning how to do their jobs can reap big rewards as their characters get better at them. I've seen Ray make some progress in his man-whoring in later episodes, and it feels much more satisfying than if things had worked out just fine with the lady in the hotel who slipped the 50 under the door for his trouble.

(*) And if you're of a certain age, you can't hear that phrase without thinking of Dan Aykroyd as the decidedly less-glamorous Fred Garvin: Male Prostitute.)

The third, which I didn't have room to deal with much in the column, is that Ray's ex-wife and maybe his kids are on probation for me. Anne Heche is usually an acquired taste for me (while I didn't like "Men in Trees," it at least seemed to dial back her quirks a bit), and the role of Jessica seems to play to her more annoying qualities.

But for me, the show is about the reluctant partnership between Ray and Tanya, and the interplay between our two acting Janes, and I look forward to seeing more.

Keep in mind that the show isn't on next week because of the holiday weekend. (Which makes premiering it tonight odd, other than that the extra length would mean "Entourage" might need to be pushed back another week.)

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

Doctor Who, "The Next Doctor": Double vision

I offered up my thoughts on the latest "Doctor Who" movie in Friday's column (and if you didn't see it before, don't miss my Russell T. Davies interview), but I'm curious what your opinion was. The only thing I'll add to the original column is that the Mercy Hartigan character was terribly underwritten, and I say that having watched the original British cut.

Same rules as always applies to "Doctor Who": talk only about the episodes that have aired here in America. So no discussion about "Planet of the Dead," which ran in England back in April. Anything I consider questionable gets deleted. Clear? Click here to read the full post

Virtuality: Is that all there is?

Okay, I wrote about "Virtuality" in Wednesday's column, but what did you all think? If this winds up being the only episode ever, are you glad you watched, or frustrated that there's nothing resembling an ending? And in the unlikely event that this rises from the dead, would you watch? Would you want to tweak anything? Click here to read the full post

Russell Davies Q&A on 'Doctor Who' and 'Torchwood'

In conjunction with tomorrow's American debut of "Doctor Who: The Next Doctor," the first of five "Doctor Who" specials that will conclude the tenure of both star David Tennant and producer Russell T. Davies (you can read my review here), I spoke with Davies about saying goodbye to the character he helped resurrect, and about the upcoming miniseries "Torchwood: Children of Earth," which BBC America will be airing July 20-24.

Davies called me as I was finishing up the third episode of "Children of Earth" -- an exciting, epic story in which Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) and his team deal with alien invaders who can make our world's children do whatever they want -- and so our discussion begins with that.

What was the impetus behind telling this particular "Torchwood" story?

The main impetus came because in Britain, we were shifting channels. We'd been on a smaller channel as a sci-fi cult show, but this is moving it onto BBC1. It's the main primetime channel, so we needed to do something bit. Also, although I created "Torchwood," I'd been away from it for a while. I wanted to do something new, a different type of storytelling, to give it a big kick and stretch myself as well. So all of that thinking led to a new format. They've been doing this (miniseries) format quite a bit in Britain, where you'll do five shows in five nights. It's a new form of storytelling that I loved, and when the offer came to make "Torchwood" part of this five nights a week thing, I jumped at it. I loved it.

So do you think, if BBC orders another series, you'll stick with this format?

I think it's hard to revert to the previous format having done this, but if BBC1 says, "We want to do 13 weeks like before," of course we're going to do 13 weeks. We can do all sorts of things. The six-part weekly thriller is another standard British format that we haven't tried yet. That's what's nice in this digital world: the platforms change, the digital tier gives you new options, and "Torchwood"s been at the forefront of it, since we started on a digital channel.

"Children of Earth" seems more epic, both in its scope and in the production values, than anything you did in the first two series.

Glad you said so. That was the aim. "Epic" was one of the keywords that we used. And it's quite important for newcomers to the show to know they can watch it from scratch. We're going to give them this big huge story where they can understand everything important in the first five minutes and go from there. I love telling stories about scale, and it's a big international story. But at the same time, even if you make things epic, no matter how big the threat is, you've got to have great characters, great actors at the center of it, so everything works on a personal level. So we've got John Barrowman doing wonderful work as Captain Jack, Eve (Myles) as Gwen Cooper, and everyone.

But when you're making an event, five nights a week, it would be wrong to tell a small, detailed domestic story. It's a brilliant production team, because we didn't have any increase in budget. It just looks like we did because they simply worked like dogs. The cast have worked hard, and it's made by people who love this, and with real passion. And the end result shines through.

You said before that you love stories about scale, which anyone watching your version of "Doctor Who" would already know. Every year, it seemed like the finales got bigger and bigger. Is one of the reasons you're leaving that you realized you couldn't top yourself anymore?

There's always further to go. I don't just increase things in scale because I'm mad. With "Doctor Who," every year the finale got bigger, and every year the rating got bigger. We were adding, like, 2 million viewers every year. That's been a great joy, and part of the whole game of "Doctor Who" is that the public joins in, word spreads, and more people watch. Increasing the scale of the program has literally paid off. If the viewers had been deserting the show, I would have done something different. When we get to David Tennant's finale, you will not believe the scale of it. But it's all about the acting in the end. Wait till you see David Tennant in his last episode, and John Barrowman in his last episode of "Children of Earth."

I'm unclear on the timing of this: were these five specials always designed to end David Tennant's time in the role, or did that happen after you started doing them?

No, we always knew they were going to be his last specials. It was his choice. When Steven Moffat took over the show, of course David wondered if he should be continuing, because of course Steven will be the most brilliant showrunner in the world.

It's funny, we've now all moved on, for the most part. We all feel that we've done the right thing. There's not one moment where we'd want to use a TARDIS to go back in and do over again. It's been good, it's been healthy, no regrets. If the handover had gone wrong, I would have felt terrible. We've protected the show, and kept it enshrined for the people in the UK.

I've only seen two of the specials so far, but there's this recurring theme about The Doctor not wanting to take on a new companion because of what happened in "Journey's End."

Poor Donna Noble.

You're a bastard, by the way.

Ha ha ha! He just called me a bastard. Ha ha ha ha!

Well, is there a specific character arc to these specials?

It's what I love about "Doctor Who." It's 46 years old, and now in my final year, we discover there's still a brand new way of telling the stories, which is The Doctor traveling on his own, which was done only once in the old years, Tom Baker with "The Deadly Asssassin." it gives us a chance for him to have a different companion every time. In "Planet of the Dead," we have Michelle Ryan, and in "The Waters of Mars," we've got Lindsey Duncan as the companion; she's almost 60 years old, quite a brilliant actress, a different way than we've gone previously. In the finale, it's Bernie Cribbens, who played Donna Noble's grandfather.

The bigger picture is why The Doctor's traveling alone -- because he's heartbroken, because he loses too much in the end (each time). This is an arc over these last few specials, gradually, especially in "Waters of Mars," which comes up in November, we discover that he travels with a human because he needs a human. He's too powerful, and without that (human with him), he can become a dangerous man. Donna pointed that out to him in her very first story, "The Runaway Bride." That is a story we're telling. We're sort of all heading towards series 5 and the new Doctor and the new companion, played by Karen Gillan. I think it's a nice set-up for her, in that The Doctor needs a companion and we're going to understand why.

Given what you said before about the lack of regrets, I'm guessing the answer's no, but are there any stories you wanted to tell with this series that you didn't get to?

Not really. Obviously, because I knew almost two years ago that I was leaving, I started thinking about stories. Other dramas I wanted to tell. Every now and then an idea will come into my head, though. I think there's a very good "Doctor Who" story to be told about Twitter, about the idea of communicating in 140 characters. There's a story somewhere, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone on the (new writing) team is thinking of that. They don't need me anymore. And I cannot tell you how much I'm looking forward to being a viewer. Other than the movie (1996's American-produced "Doctor Who" pilot), the last time I got a chance to sit down and watch a brand new series was 21 years ago. So I'm dying!

So have you asked Steven not to tell you anything about what he's doing?

I can't help overhearing little things. I already know far too much. And one or two things he had to check with me to make sure we could overlap material. What I do know is so exciting.

I want to go back to when you took over the franchise. What was the mandate you had in mind for yourself?

Simply, the one very clear thing I wanted to do at the beginning was to get a new audience, and a permanent audience. Because of "Doctor Who"'s long history -- he ran on BBC1 for so many years -- I knew we would get some old viewers who remembered the character fondly, but that simply wasn't enough for me. The BBC is funded by the public in Britain. So we're making a very expensive show, paid for by the public, so I thought I had a duty to spend that money well, and get as many of the public watching as possible, This wasn't a time to make a niche show, and that's so foften what British science fiction is. I knew it had to be lifted out into the mainstream. There was no precedent for that ever happening in Britain.

I wanted children watching. I thought if you're going to bring back this character, you want him to appeal to children; you want a child who, in 40 years time, will be me, bringing the character back again. It deserves the status of being like Robin Hood or Merlin or James Bond -- those rare British cultural figures who just run and run. I worried that, if I'd fumbled it on this reusrrection, it would have been fumbled for a few decades.

And we got lucky in the timing, If we'd been five years later, we would never have been able to afford the program I wanted to make. I wanted it to be expensive. I'm not saying all good television is expensive, because I've worked on some of the cheapest shows in trhe world. But the ambition, and the big picture, and the epic intimacy demanded that. And then all of this was theory, and none of us knew if it would work, but we got on air, and it worked, and it's been wonderful.

And all of that money is very clearly there on the screen, where the original series always looked so incredibly cheap: lots of stories with only one or two settings and minimal movement, where you're all over the place with the action and the special effects.

I so respect those old production teams because having made the show, I can't imagine how they made it on 1/10th of the budget that I had. And they made something I loved all my life. They found different ways of launching themselves into children's memories.

Was Christopher Eccleston always only going to do it for a year?

That was always the plan, and then the plan got fumbled because the newspapers found out about it. Can you imagine what a shock that regeneration would have been if they hadn't known? We got better at that over the years, found ways to keep other secrets. Nonetheless, Chris Eccleston is just a blazing comet of talent, and we are lucky to have had him for even a short time. I'm so grateful to have had him.

And then you got David Tennant, who many people insist is the best Doctor ever.

We cast Chris, and we thought, "Brilliant, but what the hell do we do next? Surely, there's no one who can be on a par with Chris." And the gods were smiling with us when we found David. Just to see him do this, at the same time he's doing "Hamlet" at the Royal Shakespeare Company, I'm so lucky just to have caught hold of that man for a short while.

Was it a coincidence or by design that all of the major companions during your run were women?

It's by design, to be honest. The show has had male companions in the past, and there have been times when he's had three or four companions at the same time, but if you strip the show down to its essentials, it's one man, and one woman. I don't think I would have been happy if it was just two men in the TARDIS. In the year 2009, still, there aren't enough lead roles for women, anyway. At the same time, we introduced Captain Jack, who was a companion for a time before we put him in "Torchwood."

There was that moment where you revealed that Jack would eventually live so long that he'd become the Face of Boe. Was this something you planned all along with the character?

It wasn't exactly planned. I did spend a long time thinking about Jack's immortality, and one day it occured to me there was another immortal character on the show. It made me laugh. To be honest, on the screen, it's couched in terms that are not absolute gospel. There are these spin-off books and comic books, and every now and then I'll see a script for one where they say definitively that he's the Face of Boe, and I always stop those from being printed. I have my own personal theories, but the moment it became very true or very false, the joke dies.

In general, though, how much long-term planning was there in the series? You got a lot of mileage out of cutting off The Doctor's hand in "The Christmas Invasion," for instance.

I did, didn't I? It's hard to say. Some things are planned. There was never a rigid plan that I followed for five years and never deviated. But the important thing is, I was thinking about "Doctor Who" more than I should have every day. Even the strongest fan of "Doctor Who" will think about "Doctor Who" a lot, then go on to their regular job, and I was thinking about "Doctor Who" all day, every day.

It's like having a great big play shop, I would introduce things like The Doctor having his hand cut off, and I realized I could bring it back in "Torchwood." What you don't notice are the things I introduce that I don't bring back. It's a more ruthless process than it is whimsical. Actually, it's very diligent about what makes sense, and I'm very careful about not losing an audience. If their enjoyment depends on them emorizing a bit of dialogue for 40 episodes earlier, you're in trouble. But we cut his hand off in a special that aired on Christmas, that almost ten million people in Britain watched at the time, and I thought they'd remember that. I can't say that I ever knew that three years later it would end up saving his lfie, but the potential was there. I know my own mind and it's always prodding the idea and finding ways to push it forward. If "plan" means having everything constantly in flux, then that is what we had.

In terms of an idea that you introduced and didn't bring back, it's implied at the end of "Journey's End" that Martha and Mickey are going to join "Torchwood," but they're not in "Children of Earth."

That was genuinely a potential idea. We did actually investigate that, and we did plan to use Martha and Mickey, and then Freema (Agyeman) was cast in "Law & Order: UK," and she was absolutely fantastic in it, and this was before we could confirm the commission of "Torchwood," and it's 13 episodes a year instead of five besides, so lovely, lovely Freema has got a job for life, so of course she went and did that. We're friends, we're in constant contact, and we were able to adapt, so we brought in Cush Jumbo as Lois Habiba, who's kind of the Martha figure. She doesn't act like a Martha clone at all, she's much more innocent and out of her depth. It's plate spinning, it's like that, you just keep things spinning. It was a possible plan, didn't work out, but if there's a "Torchwood" 4, and Freema's available, maybe we could use her again.

Getting back to the idea of scale, one of my favorite "Doctor Who" episodes that you wrote was sort of the opposite of that: "Midnight," which was this low-budget but extremely creepy story with The Doctor stuck on the train with the woman who kept repeating everything and the paranoid passengers.

You'd be surprised by how not low-budget that is. That set is four walls, and a very robust set, and we had to book a whole cast every day for two weeks, because they had to be there all the time. Actors are normally split up, and that was very actor-intensive. We didn't do it to be cheap, but I thought with the great big epic arias at the end of that series, it was time to be more intimate right beforehand. I thought of that idea as I was coming to the end of my time on "Doctor Who." That idea had been in my head itching away -- "What if you spoke to someone who repeats everything you've said for the whole episode?" -- and I had to do that episode before I left. I had to see if it worked. And it worked. That's a great big token of the freedom that the BBC gives us. On a great big popular expensive show, they allowed me to experiment.

If you had to pick a moment, or several moments, from your tenure that you're especially proud of -- that exemplify what you were trying to do with "Doctor Who" -- what would you pick?

The problem is, there's hundreds of them. Because I was so stepped in the show, it's very interesting to go back to the very first episode -- and to be blunt, we hit the ground running with it. That episode is the template for everything we did since. It has the companion being as strong as The Doctor, it brings back an old monster. It's in modern-day urban London. The companion's family is important, the emotion is at the forefront, but there's comedy and chase scenes. Normally, you look at episode one of a long-running series and it seems ancient, and I'm very proud of it because I look at it, all your favorite (kinds of) moments are in episode one.

But there are so many. It ranges from Lesley Sharp in "Midnight" giving the most brilliant performance with David Tennant, to when we won the BAFTA Award. When they played the clips of the nominees for Best Drama in this big posh ceremony, those clips are very often people crying in the rain about serious issues -- Iraq war, or illness, or drug addiction, because that's what usually wins awards -- and in the middle of all this, the "Doctor Who" clip played of thousands of Daleks flying through the air, and then we won the award! It just showed that a program that is so much fun and has so many children watching and so much fantasy, to win a big proper televiison award like that was genuinely wonderful.

Can you go back and watch episodes that you wrote and produced and appreciate them as a "Doctor Who" fan? Or are you too occupied thinking of how the sausage got made?

I don't know if this is good or bad, but I've always been able to sit and watch my own stuff and enjoy it. Sometimes, I'll sit down and I'll just catch an episode by chance. I caught the Shakespeare episode ("The Shakespeare Code") by chance the other night and I thought it was magnificent. I really, really can watch it as a viewer. I always cultivated that in my head, you have to train yourself to watch it as brand-new, so you can see its faults and its strengths, so I've always been good at it. So I can watch it on repeats. I still love them. And thankfully, I love watching the old show as much as I did. I can still watch the old classics from the 70s and be as happy as I was when I was a kid. Click here to read the full post

'Doctor Who: The Next Doctor' review - Sepinwall on TV

In today's column, I review "Doctor Who: The Next Doctor," the first of the five "Doctor Who" specials that will bring an end to the David Tennant/Russell T. Davies era of the series.

As both "The Next Doctor" and "Planet of the Dead" have already aired in England -- and have also therefore been illegally downloaded by many fans in America -- I'm going to remind you of the usual rule about how we're sticking to the American broadcast schedule in terms of spoilers. So no talking about any plot specifics of this movie (or the next one) in this post. I'll have a separate post up tomorrow night for discussion of "The Next Doctor" (and "Planet of the Dead" will still be verboten there). And you can read the transcript of an interview I did with Davies about "Doctor Who" and the upcoming "Torchwood: Children of Earth." Click here to read the full post

The Wire, Season 2, Episode 5: "Undertow" (Newbies edition)

Once again, we're revisiting season two of "The Wire" in two versions: one for people who have watched the entire series and want to be able to discuss it from beginning to end, and those who aren't all the way there yet and don't want to be spoiled about later developments. This is the newbie post (click here for the veteran version).

Spoilers for episode five, "Undertow," coming up just as soon as I take the Fifth Commandment...

"It's just business. Everything is just business with us: Buy for a nickel, sell for a dime." -Vondas

The Sobotka detail gets moving in "Undertow, but while they don't need to learn each other's strengths and weaknesses the way they did last season, they don't really have the first clue what kind of opponent they're going up against.

Herc suggests that the port guys must be involved in drugs -- because what other kind of major crime is there in Baltimore? -- and while we learn in this episode that Vondas and company are involved in that trade, we also know by now that their interests range wider and deeper than dope. And we know by now that they're far more ruthless, and efficient, than even the mighty Barksdale/Bell outfit. Sobotka isn't who the detail should really be after, and drugs shouldn't be their primary focus, but it's going to take them a while to recognize the magnitude of the problem before them.

"Undertow" features a lot of characters underestimating their opponents. Ziggy again gets in way over his head trying to play dope dealer, letting Frog rip him off and then letting Cheese steal (and later torch) his beloved Camaro. Nick thinks he can out-clever Vondas by having Ziggy look up what the chemicals might be used for, and while their deduction about drugs seems to be right, they really have no way of knowing. When Nick asks Vondas if it's drugs, he more or less invites Vondas to lie to him, and we've seen by now what kind of a poker face that guy has -- a poker face he puts on display when he talks a reluctant Frank into staying in business with The Greek. (Vondas also knows how to twist a metaphorical knife, as he does by pointing to the defunct steel factory and reminding Frank of how easily a Baltimore industry can disappear.)

None of the Sobotka men understand what kind of people they're putting themselves into business with, and you don't need to have seen the first season to suspect this will end badly for some or all of them.

Even Avon seems stuck in circumstances more dire than he cares to admit. Avon doesn't want to acknowledge how bad things have gotten with the Atlanta package, or how strained his relations are with D'Angelo, or even that Stringer seems eager to be done with D.

Stringer, on the other hand, is more than aware of the state of the operation. While he's not quite the pure capitalist that Vondas and The Greek are (he has his passions and pretensions, where they're all about the cash and nothing but), he's still a cold enough businessman to want to cut D'Angelo loose, and to realize that something has to be done about their pathetic dope supply.

The latter problem leads to another inspired "big business meets dope business" comedy set piece, as Stringer's macroeconomics professor (not recognizing what his prize student's real business is) teaches him about Worldcom, and Stringer in turn tries to pass the lesson along to the likes of Bodie and Poot. To the crew's credit, they seem to grasp an outside-the-box concept more easily than they often do, but it's still hilarious to watch these worlds collide.

And speaking of thinking outside the box, with Lester assigned to Lt. Daniels' detail -- and Daniels adamant about not taking on the Jane Doe murders unless they're gift-wrapped as clearances -- Bunk finally starts coming around to Jimmy's way of thinking about Homicide's way of doing things (instant gratification) and the right way to handle a sprawling case like this. He's one of the few characters in "Undertow" (other than Vondas and The Greek themselves) who seems to recognize exactly what he's up against -- he just has no way to adequately deal with the problem.

Yet.

Some other thoughts on "Undertow":

• Before this season of "The Wire," my only significant exposure to Paul Ben-Victor was as hustling snitch Steve Richards on "NYPD Blue" -- possibly my least favorite recurring character in the history of one of my favorite shows. Ben-Victor's performance as Steve was so mannered, so cartoonish, that when I saw him turn up on a completely unmannered show like "The Wire" -- and realized how well he was fitting in -- I was stunned. His portrayal of Vondas is such an economical performance, saying so much with so little, that I remain kind of in awe that a man who could be so irritating and over-the-top on one show could be so quietly menacing on another.

• Method Man makes his first appearance as Ziggy's new nemesis Cheese. David Simon told me at the end of the series that many rappers tried to get parts on the show over the years, "and this was the only guy who walked into a casting office and (auditioned) and said, 'Okay, tell me about the part.' We didn't take him because he was Method, we took him because he was the best read for Cheese."

• Once again, we see that Ziggy is pretty good with computers (or, at least, better than Nick), and it makes me wonder how differently his life would have been if he hadn't been raised by a stevedore who didn't want to prepare him for anything else.

• And speaking of computers, this episode offers the kind of scene you never would have gotten with the detail's season one target, as Frank himself offers to show Beadie and Bunk how the checker computer system works. There are many key differences between Frank and Avon (really, the comparison should be Avon and Stringer with The Greek and Vondas), but foremost is the fact that Frank has a legitimate career and is only dabbling in crime.

• And Beadie starts to demonstrate that, whatever her initial interest in policework may have been, she's both willing and able to learn from Bunk, as she turns her former fling (and Ziggy hater) Maui into her own confidential (if unofficial) informant.

• Lots of good comedy moments in this one, from Herc with the toothpick (which amuses Carver and Kima at first, then slowly drives them nuts) to Jimmy taking Omar clothes shopping. ("It's a look." "No, it ain't.") For that matter, I love Omar's reaction to Ilene Nathan's confusion when Omar mentions another of Bird's murders: "Fish gotta swim, you know what I'm saying?"

• And still more hilarity: Carver listens to the white drug dealers trying to sound black and complains to Kima, "Thieving motherf--kers take everything, don't they?"

• While Nat Coxson is terrified of the grain pier being turned into condos, Nick gets a first-hand look -- courtesy of Jimmy's ex-wife Elena, who turns out to be a realtor -- at how gentrification is already affecting his neighborhood. A house that belonged to Nick's aunt, and that he might have been able to afford a few years back, has now been fixed up enough -- down to a fancy new nickname for the neighborhood -- that he has no shot at it.

• Also, Nick mentions that he gave Aimee money to get furniture at Little Pages, a real-life Baltimore store that was also mentioned by Beau Felton in the "Homicide" pilot.

• Speaking of "Homicide," the grand jury prosecutor is played by Gary D'Addario, who was the shift commander when Simon was following the real Baltimore Homicide unit to write his first book. (D'Addario also played the head of the QRT team in a number of "Homicide" episodes.) Oddly, Bunk refers to him as "Charlie" here, when in later appearances, the character will be named Gary DiPasquale. A rare continuity flub, or Bunk using an odd nickname?

• Is this the first time Kima has referred to Lester as "Cool Lester Smooth"? The nickname doesn't come up often, but it's so perfect that it's hard not to think of the guy that way.

• So bizarre -- and more than a little scary -- to see Stringer Bell with a small child.

• Jimmy's attempt to identify his own Jane Doe more or less hits a dead end in my own backyard of beautiful Newark, NJ. Probably the most interesting part of that subplot in this episode -- and very fundamentally "The Wire," in the same way as Carver's "same as it ever was" line -- is the bit where the Baltimore INS office gets its logo converted to Homeland Security office and the agent sarcastically asks Jimmy if he feels any safer.

Coming up next: "All Prologue," in which D'Angelo gives a book report, Maury Levy goes up against Omar, and Sergei helps Nick with a problem.

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

The Wire, Season 2, Episode 5: "Undertow" (Veterans edition)

Once again, we're revisiting season two of "The Wire" in two versions: one for people who have watched the entire series and want to be able to discuss it from beginning to end, and those who aren't all the way there yet and don't want to be spoiled about later developments. This is the veteran post (click here for the newbie version).

Spoilers for episode five, "Undertow," coming up just as soon as I take the Fifth Commandment...

"It's just business. Everything is just business with us: Buy for a nickel, sell for a dime." -Vondas

The Sobotka detail gets moving in "Undertow, but while they don't need to learn each other's strengths and weaknesses the way they did last season, they don't really have the first clue what kind of opponent they're going up against.

Herc suggests that the port guys must be involved in drugs -- because what other kind of major crime is there in Baltimore? -- and while we learn in this episode that Vondas and company are involved in that trade, we also know by now that their interests range wider and deeper than dope. And we know by now that they're far more ruthless, and efficient, than even the mighty Barksdale/Bell outfit. Sobotka isn't who the detail should really be after, and drugs shouldn't be their primary focus, but it's going to take them a while to recognize the magnitude of the problem before them.

"Undertow" features a lot of characters underestimating their opponents. Ziggy again gets in way over his head trying to play dope dealer, letting Frog rip him off and then letting Cheese steal (and later torch) his beloved Camaro. Nick thinks he can out-clever Vondas by having Ziggy look up what the chemicals might be used for, and while their deduction about drugs seems to be right, they really have no way of knowing. When Nick asks Vondas if it's drugs, he more or less invites Vondas to lie to him, and we've seen by now what kind of a poker face that guy has -- a poker face he puts on display when he talks a reluctant Frank into staying in business with The Greek. (Vondas also knows how to twist a metaphorical knife, as he does by pointing to the defunct steel factory and reminding Frank of how easily a Baltimore industry can disappear.)

None of the Sobotka men understand what kind of people they're putting themselves into business with, and you don't need to have seen the first season to suspect this will end badly for some or all of them.

Even Avon seems stuck in circumstances more dire than he cares to admit. Avon doesn't want to acknowledge how bad things have gotten with the Atlanta package, or how strained his relations are with D'Angelo, or even that Stringer seems eager to be done with D.

Stringer, on the other hand, is more than aware of the state of the operation. While he's not quite the pure capitalist that Vondas and The Greek are (he has his passions and pretensions, where they're all about the cash and nothing but), he's still a cold enough businessman to want to cut D'Angelo loose, and to realize that something has to be done about their pathetic dope supply.

The latter problem leads to another inspired "big business meets dope business" comedy set piece, as Stringer's macroeconomics professor (not recognizing what his prize student's real business is) teaches him about Worldcom, and Stringer in turn tries to pass the lesson along to the likes of Bodie and Poot. To the crew's credit, they seem to grasp an outside-the-box concept more easily than they often do, but it's still hilarious to watch these worlds collide.

And speaking of thinking outside the box, with Lester assigned to Lt. Daniels' detail -- and Daniels adamant about not taking on the Jane Doe murders unless they're gift-wrapped as clearances -- Bunk finally starts coming around to Jimmy's way of thinking about Homicide's way of doing things (instant gratification) and the right way to handle a sprawling case like this. He's one of the few characters in "Undertow" (other than Vondas and The Greek themselves) who seems to recognize exactly what he's up against -- he just has no way to adequately deal with the problem.

Yet.

Some other thoughts on "Undertow":

• Before this season of "The Wire," my only significant exposure to Paul Ben-Victor was as hustling snitch Steve Richards on "NYPD Blue" -- possibly my least favorite recurring character in the history of one of my favorite shows. Ben-Victor's performance as Steve was so mannered, so cartoonish, that when I saw him turn up on a completely unmannered show like "The Wire" -- and realized how well he was fitting in -- I was stunned. His portrayal of Vondas is such an economical performance, saying so much with so little, that I remain kind of in awe that a man who could be so irritating and over-the-top on one show could be so quietly menacing on another.

• Method Man makes his first appearance as Ziggy's new nemesis Cheese. David Simon told me at the end of the series that many rappers tried to get parts on the show over the years, "and this was the only guy who walked into a casting office and (auditioned) and said, 'Okay, tell me about the part.' We didn't take him because he was Method, we took him because he was the best read for Cheese."

• Once again, we see that Ziggy is pretty good with computers (or, at least, better than Nick), and it makes me wonder how differently his life would have been if he hadn't been raised by a stevedore who didn't want to prepare him for anything else.

• And speaking of computers, this episode offers the kind of scene you never would have gotten with the detail's season one target, as Frank himself offers to show Beadie and Bunk how the checker computer system works. There are many key differences between Frank and Avon (really, the comparison should be Avon and Stringer with The Greek and Vondas), but foremost is the fact that Frank has a legitimate career and is only dabbling in crime.

• And Beadie starts to demonstrate that, whatever her initial interest in policework may have been, she's both willing and able to learn from Bunk, as she turns her former fling (and Ziggy hater) Maui into her own confidential (if unofficial) informant.

• Lots of good comedy moments in this one, from Herc with the toothpick (which amuses Carver and Kima at first, then slowly drives them nuts) to Jimmy taking Omar clothes shopping. ("It's a look." "No, it ain't.") For that matter, I love Omar's reaction to Ilene Nathan's confusion when Omar mentions another of Bird's murders: "Fish gotta swim, you know what I'm saying?"

• And still more hilarity: Carver listens to the white drug dealers trying to sound black and complains to Kima, "Thieving motherf--kers take everything, don't they?"

• While Nat Coxson is terrified of the grain pier being turned into condos, Nick gets a first-hand look -- courtesy of Jimmy's ex-wife Elena, who turns out to be a realtor -- at how gentrification is already affecting his neighborhood. A house that belonged to Nick's aunt, and that he might have been able to afford a few years back, has now been fixed up enough -- down to a fancy new nickname for the neighborhood -- that he has no shot at it.

• Also, Nick mentions that he gave Aimee money to get furniture at Little Pages, a real-life Baltimore store that was also mentioned by Beau Felton in the "Homicide" pilot.

• Speaking of "Homicide," the grand jury prosecutor is played by Gary D'Addario, who was the shift commander when Simon was following the real Baltimore Homicide unit to write his first book. (D'Addario also played the head of the QRT team in a number of "Homicide" episodes.) Oddly, Bunk refers to him as "Charlie" here, when in later appearances, the character will be named Gary DiPasquale. A rare continuity flub, or Bunk using an odd nickname?

• Is this the first time Kima has referred to Lester as "Cool Lester Smooth"? The nickname doesn't come up often, but it's so perfect that it's hard not to think of the guy that way.

• So bizarre -- and more than a little scary -- to see Stringer Bell with a small child.

• Jimmy's attempt to identify his own Jane Doe more or less hits a dead end in my own backyard of beautiful Newark, NJ. Probably the most interesting part of that subplot in this episode -- and very fundamentally "The Wire," in the same way as Carver's "same as it ever was" line -- is the bit where the Baltimore INS office gets its logo converted to Homeland Security office and the agent sarcastically asks Jimmy if he feels any safer.

And now it's time for the veterans-only section, where we talk about how developments from this episode will play out over the rest of the season, and the series:

• From such humble beginnings is one of the series' more loathed characters born in Cheese Wagstaff. I guess you had to figure they wouldn't cast Method Man in a walk-on part, especially once he auditioned well.

• How differently would things have gone for the Sobotka men if Frank and Nick had both declined Vondas' offer in this episode? The detail was only able to follow the cans and the rest of the trail because Frank kept working for The Greek, and Nick's going to wind up getting caught up in the dope trade -- which, in turn, will only fan the flames of Ziggy's resentment, leading to the explosion with Double-G.

• Ilene Nathan should have been more specific than "anything with a tie," shouldn't she? Not that Omar will need to suit up, as it turns out.

• Though Avon doesn't want to admit his distance with D to Stringer, you can see in that scene that he's preparing himself to let go of his nephew -- not to kill him off, obviously, but to cut him off. And Stringer more or less reads the latter as license to do the former.

Coming up next: "All Prologue," in which D'Angelo gives a book report, Maury Levy goes up against Omar, and Sergei helps Nick with a problem.

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

Burn Notice, "Fearless Leader": Stacy's mom has got it going on

Spoilers for tonight's "Burn Notice" coming up just as soon as I deduct a mojito...

After the awesomeness of last week's Westen-Brennen II rumble, a letdown was inevitable, and while I enjoyed parts of "Fearless Leader," it played to disappointing type.

Detective Paxson remains something of a dud character (and I think that's on the writing as much as it's on Moon Bloodgood), so an episode in which she was more central wasn't as much fun as I suspect the producers were hoping. And for a character sold as being so tough and smart, Erik Palladino's Matheson made a real rookie mistake by letting Nick Turturro's Tommy (whom he viewed, rightly, as an untrustworthy loser) and his random new crew play such a big role in his next heist. (I assumed at first he was setting Tommy up to be humiliated or worse while he went off and did a job elsewhere.) And because Michael had such an easy time evading the police tail, we had an episode where neither of Michael's adversaries were nearly as potent as they were being sold as.

And yet there was a real charm to Michael's interactions with Tommy, to seeing Michael have to carry this guy while making it seem like he was buttering him up, and then to see him realize that both he and Tommy were better off if he turned Tommy from sap into ally. Admittedly, I have a soft spot for Nick Turturro due to his time as Flying James Martinez on "NYPD Blue," but I thought he and Jeffrey Donovan worked well together.

But the real highlights of "Fearless Leader" were the personal subplots, both the comedy of Sam suffering through an audit from what turned out to be the grown-up son of one of his old flames (though was the headache in his eye from the audit, or from Madeline's inedible cookies?), and Fiona's frustration at everything Michael has been up to, from screwing up the gig at the start to his insistence on getting back in the spy game. When you see what a soft touch Michael was with a guy like Tommy, you understand where Fi's coming from. He's not cold enough to be a spy anymore, not that he seems to realize it.

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

Farrah Fawcett, RIP

Over at NJ.com, my Farrah Fawcett obituary. Click here to read the full post

NBC fall premiere dates announced

Over at NJ.com, I have details on NBC's fall premiere dates. Of note is that most of the Thursday comedies will debut a week before the season starts, and "30 Rock" will wait until Oct. 15. Click here to read the full post

Band of Brothers rewind, episode 8: "The Last Patrol"

Getting very close to the end of our trip back through "Band of Brothers" -- close enough, in fact, that I'm going to break my rule about who lives and who dies to discuss the fate of the episode's central character -- so know that there are bigger-than-usual spoilers for "The Last Patrol" coming up just as soon as (and I mean that) I divvy up the PX supplies...

We're close enough to the end of the series -- and Easy Company is close enough to the end of the war, with "The Last Patrol" offering up the last significant combat action we'll see -- that I'm going to violate the "who dies" rule. There are still some casualties to come, but I don't think I can properly discuss "The Last Patrol" without saying that David Kenyon Webster did, in fact, survive the war, but died decades before Ambrose's book was written.

Webster was a would-be author himself, and while he never found a publisher for his combat diaries while he was alive (though he did put out a book about sharks), Ambrose was so enamored with his writing that he helped get them published in the early '90s, under the title "Parachute Infantry: An American Paratrooper's Memoir of D-Day and the Fall of the Third Reich." And before that, Ambrose liberally quoted from Webster's unpublished manuscripts in "Band of Brothers" (several passages of which are turned into voiceover narration here), and talks quite a bit about Webster beyond that -- arguably moreso than any other Easy Company soldier who wasn't with the company for either Normandy or Bastogne.

I say all of this because it's obvious Ambrose had some affection for the Webster he met in those unpublished pages, no doubt finding a kinship with the Harvard-educated English major, and I have this feeling that he looks on Webster more fondly than the men who actually served with him. Ambrose doesn't judge Webster for his refusal to be promoted above Private First Class, or to volunteer for any kind of hazardous duty, or to bolt out of the hospital early to get back to the men -- as we've seen Popeye Wynn, Joe Toye and others do in previous episodes. (Toye lost a leg as a result.) And Ambrose's account of the Hagenau patrol doesn't in any way mention the hostility that Liebgott and others show for Webster upon his return. (Nor does it deal with the switcheroo in who got to lead the patrol, which was actually led by Ken Mercier, who's not a character in the miniseries.)

The way I see it, there are two possibilities: 1)Erik Bork and Bruce McKenna needed an easy way to illustrate how much Bastogne changed the men who were there -- and how much they resented those who weren't there -- and Webster was an easy choice, given the timing of his return from the hospital; or 2)The survivors didn't much like Webster, and when they were talking to the producers, they gave them more dirt than either Ambrose knew or wanted to get into.

Now, I suspect little to none of this matters to your appreciation of "The Last Patrol." But given that Webster will be fairly prominent in these final three episodes, and is one of the more unusual characters of both book and miniseries, I'm curious about which portrayal is the more accurate one.

Either way, "The Last Patrol" works as a sequel of sorts to "Replacements," only instead of showing how the newcomers were in awe of the tested and heroic Normandy veterans, we see how an actual veteran could become so disconnected from the company because he wasn't in Bastogne. And, through Webster's eyes, we see just how devastated the company was in those months while he was away.

Compare the welcome Webster gets when he returns (surprised, begrudging, irritated) to the enthusiastic one given to Perconte, who was not only present for the Battle of the Bulge, but has busted out of the hospital to rejoin the company only a few weeks after getting shot at Foy. Or compare the way Webster still reacts to exploding mortar rounds to the way the Bastogne veterans just shrug them off, because they heard and felt worse out in the forest. Or compare the Malarkey from even as recent an episode as "Crossroads" (where he's giddy to show off his gambling winnings to Skip Muck) to the shell of a man he is after losing so many friends in the Ardennes.

(Though this is primarily Webster's episode, Malarkey is the one who has to symbolize the sorry state of Easy after the Bulge, and Scott Grimes and the hair and makeup team do a terrific job of capturing that. He looks so much older, and emptier -- particularly in the shower scene -- and all the red color has vanished from his hair. He's seen too much, and lost too much, to resemble the enthusiastic, foolhardy kid he was in the early episodes.)

In addition to the depression of the men, what "The Last Patrol" shows is that, despite Speirs' appointment as the new company commander, not all is right with Easy's leadership. Speirs is in charge, but with Lipton sidelined by pneumonia and Harry Welsh not returning until episode's end, they're still so short on experienced officers to lead the platoons (since Colonel Sink kept promoting the best ones to batallion or regimental staff) that newbie Lt. Jones gets sent on the patrol to secure prisoners -- and even Jones has the perspective, after an initial burst of enthusiasm, to realize he's not qualified to do anything but observe.

As the real-life Easy veterans talk about in the introductory piece, they were now close enough to the end of the war that everyone was particularly self-conscious about not being in a position where they could get killed. (Or, in the case of Jones or the soldier from the PX who asked to be put on the patrol, concerned about seeing some action before the war stops.) So "The Last Patrol" focuses more on combat fatigue, and on paranoia, and on the careful preparation each man puts into so minor an action as the combat patrol.

Again, this is the last major action set piece of the series, and it's a good one, suitably chaotic and intense, with the ante upped by Pvt. Jackson's screams as he dies slowly from his own grenade.

And in the end, we find out that Dick Winters continues to look out for Easy Company even though he's no longer their direct commander, as he disobeys Col. Sink's order for a second patrol because he knows it would be as dangerous as it would be pointless. In real life, Winters' promotion to major didn't come for another couple of weeks, but it feels appropriate to see him getting those oak leaf clusters immediately after one of his braver bits of leadership in the war.

Some other thoughts:

• The miniseries isn't exactly consistent on how well Webster speaks German. He can make basic conversation and shout out commands here and in "Replacements," while his command of the language seems far less (if not non-existent) in "Why We Fight" and "Points." And Wikipedia (I know, I know) suggests he didn't speak it at all.

• As with the Jimmy Fallon cameo in "Crossroads," I find Colin Hanks' presence as Lt. Jones much less distracting this time than I did in 2001 -- though in this case, it's because I've seen Hanks do enough good dramatic work elsewhere (most recently on "Mad Men") that I can accept that, while nepotism undoubtedly got him the part, he fits it well.

• Ambrose writes that Webster and another private tried and failed repeatedly to use grenades to kill the wounded German on the opposite bank, before Cobb (who, again, gets the short end of the stick in this episode and is depicted as a cowardly bully) got sick of the wheezing and killed the German with a more accurate throw.

• Rick Gomez has some fine comic moments throughout the series as George Luz, but none may be better than the scene where he's dealing with the chocolate bars and the order to blow up a house across the river.

Coming up next (probably on Monday): "Why We Fight," in which Nixon runs low on his preferred brand of booze, while Perconte makes a horrifying discovery.

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

'Hung' review - Sepinwall on TV

In today's column, I review HBO's "Hung," the new comedy with Thomas Jane as... well, I want to avoid making the obvious jokes:

It's difficult to write about "Hung," HBO's new comedy about a well-endowed gym-teacher-turned-male-escort, without making an accidental double entendre or 12. After I watched the first episode, which runs about 42 minutes, and the second, which was only 26, I started asking questions about its length (it's a half-hour with a super-sized debut), and the first draft of this paragraph began with a synonym for "difficult."

Not helping matters is the way "Hung" itself embraces every joke you could make about its premise. Main character Ray Drecker (Thomas Jane), for instance, is inspired to join the world's oldest profession after attending a get-rich-quick seminar where the teacher advises each student to identify their "one winning tool."

If "Hung" were just a lot of obvious punch lines about the male anatomy -- and about the mortification of an aging jock having to sell his body and work for a female pimp -- well... well, then it would still be a funny, albeit completely juvenile comedy about the state of 21st century American masculinity.

But "Hung" has more to offer than just John Thomas jokes. Amidst all the sniggering humor about how Ray has been taught to "do your best with the gifts God gave you" is some smart comedy about the state of 21st century America in general, as well as a superb lead performance from Thomas Jane.

You can read the full "Hung" review here.

As the review suggests, I'm a fan, and this will be working into the regular blog rotation starting Sunday night (or Monday morning). Click here to read the full post

The Philanthropist, "Nigeria": This guy walks into a bar...

I offered up my own thoughts on "The Philanthropist" pilot -- specifically, that James Purefoy is so damned charming that I liked it more than I expected to -- in Tuesday's column, but what did you guys think? And was I the only person distracted by the stunt double's shoes? Click here to read the full post

CBS fall premiere dates announced

Over at NJ.com, I have details on CBS' fall premiere dates. As per usual, nearly all of the shows are premiering during the first week of the official 2009-10 TV season. Click here to read the full post

Sports Night rewind: "Mary Pat Shelby" & "The Head Coach, Dinner and the Morning Mail"

Okay, I'm going to give this another try and review two "Sports Night" episodes in one go. Spoilers for "Mary Pat Shelby" and "The Head Coach, Dinner and the Morning Mail" coming up just as soon as I take a vacation from my values...

"I sent her there on purpose." -Dana

I don't know that I want to keep reviewing these episodes two at a time -- particularly since the next two, "Dear Louise" and "Thespis," are both unrelated and good enough to deserve their own reviews -- but as these particular episodes are more or less a two-parter (no "to be continued..." at the end of the first, but a "previously on..." at the start of the second), I'm okay with it here.

More than sports, or politics, or wacky romantic misunderstandings, "Sports Night" is first and foremost about work -- about the kind of workplace many of us would like to have, and about the challenges of keeping it as idealized as we want. Frequently, the threats to the sanctity of Sports Night(*) come from above, in the form of Luther Sachs's minions, but here the problems come from within, which makes the conflict feel that much more potent. Most of the time, the people at Sports Night are as much friends as colleagues, and these episodes -- "Mary Pat Shelby" in particular -- show how tricky things can get when you need a colleague to do something you would never ask a friend to do.

(*) For the sake of my sanity -- and/or to avoid using the phrase show-within-the-show 8 million times this summer -- I think I'm henceforth going to use italics to refer to the CSC version of it, and quotes to refer to the ABC version.

While Sports Night is supposed to be this wonderful place to work, filled with eccentric but supportive people, they're not saints. They make mistakes, or they make bad choices for ostensibly noble reasons, or they put their faith where they shouldn't. And when that happens, we get a fiasco like Dana sending Natalie to interview Christian Patrick in the hopes of sparking a controversy which will be good for the show -- and we have Natalie going along with it because she trusts Dana a little too implicitly.

While Natalie is Patrick's victim in "Mary Pat Shelby," and continues to suffer the emotional fallout of the incident in "The Head Coach, Dinner and the Morning Mail," these episodes feel like more of a showcase for Dana than for her. It's Dana who makes the choice to do the Patrick interview even with the restrictions from his lawyers, it's Dana who sends Natalie instead of Jeremy, it's Dana who kicks Patrick and his crew out of the studio, and it's Dana who tells Natalie that -- unofficial family or no -- she needs to get her act together, or else. And Felicity Huffman is wonderful throughout.

"Mary Pat Shelby" is the stronger of the two, and not just because it's the first episode of the series to ditch the laugh track.(As I recall, Sorkin and Schlamme got ABC to relent as a one-time experiment to see how viewers responded; obviously, response wasn't good enough, and it was back the next week.) The conflict is greater in "MPS," but it's also a better illustration of what "Sports Night" could be at its best. Like "The Apology," it contrasts a fairly dark main storyline (Christian Patrick assaults Natalie) with a subplot that seems fairly goofy (Dan wants to grow a goatee), then finds a way to combine the two at the end to create a moment that's simultaneously funny and moving, as Dan and Casey have Dana's back by standing up to Patrick's lawyer in this exchange:

"This is a third-place show on a fourth-rate network." -Evans
"Yeah, but that's all about to change once I grow a goatee." -Dan
"He's just crazy enough to do it." -Casey

It's not quite "Can I just say one more thing about the Starland Vocal Band?," but it's awfully close.

"Morning Mail" is, by design, a less intense episode. We're now a little removed from the Patrick incident, and everyone but a distracted Natalie and a sleep-deprived Jeremy has more or less moved on from it. Dan is trying to get Casey to stop talking about Rostenkowski, and Casey in turn is obsessed with Gordon -- until, in a nice moment, Gordon tries to bond with Casey over their shared hatred of Rostenkowski, and inadvertently makes Casey realize he's being too hard on the coach -- and so things are a bit lighter throughout.

But Sabrina Lloyd and, especially, Joshua Malina (who by this point has left the over-the-top mannerisms of his pilot performance long behind) both do fine jobs of playing their characters at the end of their respective ropes. And while Sorkin will drag out the Dana/Casey stuff past all reason, I like that he more or less puts Jeremy and Natalie together by the end of the sixth episode, and does it in an unusual way. These are two people getting together at their worst, not their best, and yet being together (even if, right now, Jeremy's just napping at their newsroom picnic) seems to make the bad stuff feel okay.

A lot of good stuff to discuss here. And speaking of which, some other thoughts:

• In my quest to keep track of recurring Sorkin-isms that will continue to pop up in his other series (and/or ones that had already appeared in the likes of "A Few Good Men" and "The American President"), I couldn't help but notice the use in "Mary Pat Shelby" of the gag where a character gives a long speech and the intended audience retorts with, "I wasn't really listening." It's Sorkin's way, I suppose, of trying to self-regulate his tendency to write these long-winded, preachy monologues in the first place.

• More recurring Sorkin devices: Natalie rattles off her resume near the end of "MPS." And Jeremy runs down some of his credentials -- including a degree in Applied Mathematics -- in "Morning Mail."

• While you would assume Ray Wise is great enough that he would have become a Sorkin repertory player, he didn't turn up on the "West Wing" until years after Sorkin had left.

• The Boston reporter Natalie is referring to in "Mary Pat Shelby" is Lisa Olson, who was more or less driven out of town after she accused several players on the Patriots of sexually harassing her. She wound up moving to Australia to work for a sister newspaper, though by the time this episode aired (or maybe a little bit afterwards), she returned to the States as a columnist for the New York Daily News. (She left that job last year after allegedly getting sick of dealing with Mike Lupica.)

• The other ripped-from-the-headlines aspect of the story is that Christian Patrick is undoubtedly named after Christian Peter, who, during his time as a defensive tackle at Nebraska, was arrested and/or convicted of multiple crimes, and most infamously was accused of raping a freshman girl twice in two days. The Patriots drafted Peter, then freaked out after he was convicted for trying to choke a woman in a bar, and refused to sign him. At the time of this episode, Peter was a backup for the Giants, who signed him on the condition that he attend counseling for alcohol abuse, anger management, etc.

• Patrick is played by Brad Henke, who was causing trouble on "Lost" towards the end of this season.

• I love the "MBS" scene where Dana tries to convince Dan and Casey that she's right to trade Natalie's story for Mary Pat Shelby's, and Dan hits her with "You had me until the last part." It's so rare to see characters on television having an ethical debate like this where no one's getting too upset or arguing the point too much -- these are just adults trying to convince each other of their position.

• Dan has some fine moments in both episodes, but I particularly like the scene in "Morning Mail" where he talks to Jeremy about the majesty of New York, which perfectly sets up the use of "Someone to Watch Over Me" -- written, of course, by the Gershwins -- at the episode's end.

• The running gag in "Morning Mail" about Casey's conversational anal-retentiveness is very funny.

Coming up next: Definitely "Dear Louise," and maybe "Thespis" as well. Gonna play that by ear.

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

'Virtuality' review - Sepinwall on TV

In today's column, I review Fox's "Virtuality" -- and wonder what, if anything, is behind the network's decision to air the pilot for a show (created by Ronald D. Moore and Michael Taylor from "Battlestar Galactica") they declined to order. Click here to read the full post

Rescue Me, "Disease": Veggie heaven

A quick review of tonight's "Rescue Me" coming up just as soon as I say Grace...

"Disease" wasn't as strong as last week's "Mickey," though it featured an even more elaborate Garrity fantasy musical number, this one complete with Busby Berkeley choreography that has to be viewed from overhead to be truly appreciated.

(And did I miss the explanation for why Sean was in a coma? I know surgery can have complications, but I don't recall hearing them mentioned at any point in the episode.)

It wasn't a bad episode, necessarily, but it felt like there was way too much of Tommy and Janet, and Tommy and Sheila, at the expense of everything else, other than the musical fantasy and more inexplicable time with Lou and Candy the hooker. (And should we take Tommy's comment about how Lou should have kids as foreshadowing that Candy is trying to tell Lou that he's her baby daddy?) Given that my brain starts to tune out any lengthy scene with Tommy and his women, as a defense mechanism, when I got to the end of the episode it felt like it was only 10 or 15 minutes long.

Hope there's a point to all of this, and/or that we get a significant change in direction soon.

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

Better Off Ted, "You Are the Boss of Me": Complete fit-shaced

I shared my delight about the return of "Better Off Ted" in Monday's column. What did you all think? Click here to read the full post

'The Philanthropist' review - Sepinwall on TV

In today's column, I review NBC's "The Philanthropist," which I enjoyed a lot more than I expected, thanks largely to James Purefoy:

Teddy Rist, the hero of NBC's summer drama series "The Philanthropist," is described in the publicity materials as a billionaire vigilante. This job description is less unusual than it sounds at first. After all, you could pin the same tag on Bruce Wayne, Tony Stark, Scrooge McDuck and possibly Ross Perot.

Rist doesn't have a utility belt, a suit of armor, a vault full of gold he can swim in, or presidential campaign experience, so he has to get by on charm. And, fortunately, Rist happens to be played by British actor James Purefoy, who showed in his performance as Marc Antony on HBO's "Rome" that he has more than enough charm to spare for friends, Romans, countrymen and even NBC viewers.

Please forgive the Shakespeare joke; tight deadlines sometimes lead to obvious gags.

Not sure if this one's going to work its way into the regular blog rotation -- between the summer rewinds, ongoing stuff like "Nurse Jackie" and "Burn Notice," plus the debut of HBO's "Hung" (which I really liked, and will have a column about in a day or three), I'm kinda swamped -- but I imagine I'll put up some kind of "what'd ya think?" post tomorrow night, and after that, it'll depend on how good the post-pilot episodes are. Click here to read the full post

Nurse Jackie, "Chicken Soup": Eli's going

Spoilers for tonight's "Nurse Jackie" coming up just as soon as I marry my cat...

Eli Wallach is nearly 94 years old. Even though his acting career didn't really take off until he was in his 40s, he's worked with the likes of Clint Eastwood, Peter O'Toole, Audrey Hepburn and Steve McQueen. He's played Mexican banditos (check out this montage of some of his best moments as Tuco in "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly"), "Batman" villains (he was one of the Mr. Freezes) and a Corleone family advisor (albeit in "Godfather Part III"). He's in his 90s, still working, and either makes good things better or briefly elevates bad things (like his "Studio 60" cameo, or his appearance in "The Holiday.")

The point being, Eli Wallach represents many things that are awesome, and his presence in "Chicken Soup" -- working alongside both Edie Falco and the always-welcome Lynn Cohen -- helped elevate the episode above the usual medical show cliches about the wisdom of dying elderly patients.

There's been some discussion in the posts on the first two episodes about the tone of "Nurse Jackie" -- whether we're supposed to take this all at face value, as some kind of satire or as Jackie's perspective through the Vicodin haze. Having seen six episodes of the show, I'm not sure I have an answer yet, because I'm not sure the "Nurse Jackie" production team has quite decided what it to be. As Falco told me a while back, the original pilot script was quite a bit darker than what the show is now, and I imagine there are some growing pains, and a little creative tug-of-war with Showtime.

But it doesn't feel like the pieces are that mismatching (save maybe the stuff with Anna Deavere Smith, and even she got a few moments of humanity in this one before Cohen cursed at her in Yiddish), and I'm glad that we're getting more and more of a sense of the supporting cast with each episode.

Peter Facinelli, for instance, has turned out to be almost shockingly likable as the goofball Coop ("Captain, we are powerless against the overwhelming force of the Pyxis!"), and Merritt Wever and Eve Best are turning out to be a wonderful little comedy duo as Zoe and Dr. O'Hara.

But what I really want to discuss with "Chicken Soup" is a question I asked last week, and which this episode made me ask myself repeatedly: how much of Jackie's thing with Eddie ties in to his ability to provide her with Vicodin? We see that they click on some level, but we can also see how impatient she gets when he tries giving her a back rub instead of pill samples. Jackie's attempt to get Coop to speak out against the pill-dispensing robot -- complete with hilarious cut to her and Eddie having their routine noon quickie -- could be read as her trying to help out a friend, or her trying to maintain her drug supply, as she can't trade sex for pills with a machine. (Unless, of course, that machine is the PimpBot 5000.)

Keeping in mind, once again, that we're discussing the episodes via the air schedule (and, therefore, not going to talk about the fourth episode, which was available On Demand starting today), what did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Chuck: More Comic-Con details

Okay, I now have some details of the "Chuck" panel I'll be moderating at Comic-Con. It's definitely Saturday (July 25), probably in the morning, with Josh Schwartz, Chris Fedak, and virtually the whole cast: Zachary Levi, Yvonne Strahovski, Adam Baldwin, Joshua Gomez, Ryan McPartlin, Sarah Lancaster, Mark Christopher Lawrence, Vik Sahay and Scott Krinsky.

I'm still feeling my way around all the Comic-Con stuff, but word on other panels keeps coming in elsewhere, including Mo Ryan (who'll be moderating a "Supernatural" panel) with the news that "Burn Notice" will be there, at the very least with Bruce Campbell and Matt Nix, which of course, prompts me to play my Michael Westen narration game and imagine what he'd have to say about Comic-Con: "When you're at Comic-Con, the natural impulse is to get up at the crack of dawn and be on line for the 'Lost' panel, but what you really want to do is to make friends with the ushers..." Click here to read the full post

In Plain Sight, "Who's Bugging Mary?": Family affairs

Some quick thoughts on last night's "In Plain Sight" coming up just as soon as I accuse a widow of inventing her dead husband...

"In Plain Sight" isn't a "mythology" show in the sense we think of, ala "The X-Files" or "Fringe," but there tends to be the same kind of breakdown of episodes, where some are purely self-contained work plots, and others are about the larger backstory driving the series. It's just that this time the mythology is about a dysfunctional family, and about a magic suitcase of crystal meth.

And where the mythology episodes are often the ones to be looked forward to the most on those other series, they tend to be the weakest parts of "In Plain Sight." I would, frankly, take a dozen stories about murdered witnesses before we got another episode dealing with Jinx and/or the magic suitcase, the latter of which I thought we were finally rid of at the end of last season.

I recognize that David Maples and company are trying to tell a story about a character as much as about her work, and Mary's family is a fundamental part of her character. She wouldn't be the hard-ass she is if her dad hadn't run out on her, and if she hadn't been stuck taking care of her idiot mother and her flaky sister. But I understand that by now, and I still find her family to be abrasive, annoying and a large distraction from the chief appeal of the show, which is the interplay between Mary, Marshall and the witnesses. And the FBI agent is almost as irritating a character as Jinx, even if they explained his motivation for being so irritating at the end of "Who's Bugging Mary?"

(Speaking of which, the Mary who has held grudges for decades against mom and sis, and the Mary who can't stop being nasty to Eleanor for the sin of moving Mary's desk, does not seem like the kind of person who would be all "I look forward to working with you" to the FBI guy after he tried to destroy her life twice, and has still left her house looking like a complete wreck.)

When the episode opened with Mary dreaming that Brandi was going into WitSec, all I could think was, "Why can't this be real? And why can't she take Jinx with her?"

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

Kings, "The Sabbath Queen": The night the lights went out in Gilboa

I don't have the time or heart to keep writing about the burn-off run of "Kings," but feel free to offer your thoughts on "The Sabbath Queen." Click here to read the full post

Band of Brothers rewind, episode 7: "The Breaking Point"

In the home stretch now on "Band of Brothers." Spoilers for the seventh episode, "The Breaking Point," coming up just as soon as I link up with I Company...

"Alright, I want mortars and grenade launchers on that building till it's gone. When it's gone I want 1st to go straight in. Forget going around. Everybody else, follow me." -Lt. Speirs

Because I just never get tired of that moment, do I?

As I said when I reviewed "Bastogne," "The Breaking Point" seems to be the consensus favorite episode of the series, and I can certainly understand why. It combines the point-of-view storytelling, which makes the second half of the series so much more intense than the first, with the amazing spectacle that we so often got in the first half of the series. It features both one of the lowest points of the series (Buck losing it as he stares at Toye and Guarnere's broken bodies), and one of the highest (Speirs running to Easy's rescue during the attack on Foy). And it has a superb central performance by Donnie Wahlberg as 1st Sgt. Lipton, the man holding the company together while the officers are flaking out.

But I had two fundamental issues with the episode back in '01, and I still have them now, that keep me from ranking it quite as highly as most of you do. (Still, I'd probably put it at least third, after "Bastogne" and maybe "Why We Fight.") I want to get those out of the way so we can talk about all the brilliance.

My first issue is with the narration. It's probably necessary to help fill in the gaps of an episode where so much is happening, and to help underline certain points, like how the men didn't hold Buck's departure against him. But while Wahlberg is a terrifically expressive actor who says so much with a simple look, he (like his brother) has a fairly flat, thin speaking voice that doesn't hold up under such prolonged scrutiny. The first time I watched this episode, on an HBO review screener (it was a videotape, I believe, which is how long ago this was), I thought for several minutes that it was a temp track recorded quickly and without emotion by a production assistant. But it was Wahlberg, and compared to Damian Lewis in "Points," or even Eion Bailey in "The Last Patrol," something always feels lacking in the voiceover to me.

There are also moments where the voiceover feels unnecessary, as if writer Graham Yost didn't trust the audience to grasp certain things (say, Lipton's mistrust of Lt. Dike) without spelling it out for them. That was also a problem I had with "Boomtown," the show Yost created directly after this, co-starring Wahlberg and Neal McDonough. "Boomtown" (at least, the first season) had its ardent supporters, but I often found it guilty of telling rather than showing, and thought that most of its appeal came from the actors and the production values.

All of which brings me to my second issue with "The Breaking Point," which is the closing scene with Speirs and Lipton at the church, where again Yost has to put into words an idea -- the amazing job Lipton did holding Easy together during its lowest point of the war -- that any viewer who's been watching the preceding hour-plus should understand by now. I could almost live with Speirs' speech about the one man Easy could count on at Bastogne if the scene ended with Speirs realizing that Lipton is so selfless he doesn't understand whom Speirs is describing. But having Speirs say, "Hell, it was you, 1st Sergeant!" is just too much, a really false, forced moment that drives me crazy every time I watch it. There isn't a similarly jarring note for me in, say, "Bastogne."

But beyond those two points... holy cow. What an amazing 69 minutes of storytelling by Yost, director David Frankel, and everyone else involved.

Where "Bastogne" was following Doc Roe, and therefore cut away from the battle whenever he was focusing on saving a wounded soldier, "The Breaking Point" offers no respite from combat. We're there as the trees explode, as some men are killed for stupid reasons (Hoobler shooting himself with the Luger) and others are horribly wounded for noble ones (Guarnere gets out of his foxhole to drag his buddy Toye to safety), and as some die simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time (Muck and Penkala had the deepest foxhole in the company and were killed by a direct hit). There's no let-up as morale goes from bad to worse under Lt. Dike, as Compton and Malarkey suffer differing levels of combat fatigue (Malarkey can stay with the men, while Buck... can't, and can you blame him?) and the attack on Foy begins to go awry because Dike freezes up.

But amid all the spectacle and horror and dread is a pretty inspiring story of leadership, and of the different kinds of it that served Easy over the years.

Dick Winters led by example -- by being the best at everything, and filling the men with such confidence in him that they would follow him into Hell if need be.

Lipton is also a fine soldier, but his approach is as much about understanding the individual needs of the men as inspiring them as a whole. He knows, for instance, that Malarkey needs some time away from the line, and that maybe he can make some good out of Hoobler's death by giving Malarkey the Luger. He knows that Luz's Dike impression is just going to increase the panic level, but he makes sure to compliment George on the quality of it before asking him to stop. And he knows that Winters really isn't in a position to remove Dike until something more egregious happens, but he knows that his old CO will at least listen.

Dike, of course, is an utter failure as a leader. He doesn't make decisions, doesn't make himself available when needed, and even his attempts to connect with the men are half-hearted, as we see when he disappears as Lipton is in the middle of telling him his life story.

Ronald Speirs, on the other hand, is a killer. Whatever the truth is about the German POWs and the cigarettes, or about the man he killed in his own platoon(*), he does not suffer from indecision. His mind and body work as one as he marks a course of action -- just watch the way Matthew Settle moves without a trace of hesitation when Winters sends Speirs into Foy, or how the words fly out of his mouth as he's telling Lipton what to do to take out the sniper -- and while he may lack for warmth or conscience, his decisiveness is an asset Easy desperately needs at this moment in the war.

(*) This episode is as close as we're ever going to get in the miniseries to answering the question about either incident, as we find out that Speirs is too pleased with the power those stories give him to confirm or deny them. The book "Beyond Band of Brothers" gives a more concrete explanation for the one about shooting his own man, and says that Speirs did it because the man was refusing to take orders in the middle of combat -- which is as justifiable a reason for execution as any in the military.

Again, I think "The Breaking Point" has some flaws, but for the most part it works brilliantly, and features one jaw-dropping moment after another. Even though I disagree that it's the best episode of the series, I'm not going to argue the point very strongly with those of you who do, because so much of it is so great.

Some other thoughts on "The Breaking Point":

• This is Wahlberg's episode, but it's not hard to see why Yost also wanted to hire McDonough for "Boomtown." His portrayal of Compton's breaking point, and the empty shell he is after it, is superb.

• For that matter, Rick Gomez is mostly comic relief as Luz, but he's wonderful in the sequence where Muck and Penkala are calling for Luz to join them, only for the shell to hit their foxhole before he could get there. How do you keep going on after something like that? I know I'd pull a Buck Compton if I was in that position.

• This will, not surprisingly, be the last we'll see in the miniseries of Kirk Acevedo as Toye and Frank John Hughes as Guarnere. Their presence (both the soldiers and the actors playing them) will be missed in the upcoming chapters. Though both lost their legs, Toye would live until 1995, and Guarnere is still with us. (His grandson maintains WildBillGuarnere.com, a good message board to talk about "Band of Brothers." One word of warning, for the spoiler-phobic: a key member of Easy Company died last week, and there's a post near the top of that site about it.)

• I also love that Guarnere is able to crack a joke about getting back home ahead of Toye. Though he doesn't get his own spotlight episode, he still makes one of the biggest impressions of any character in the series.

• Jamie Bamber, aka Apollo from "Battlestar Galactica," makes his first appearance of the series as Lt. Foley, whose most notable moment here is yelling at Dike to make a decision as they're stuck behind the haystack. If you're watching for the first time, don't expect to see much more of Bamber in upcoming episodes, as Foley is a fairly minor character in the scheme of the miniseries.

• Shifty Powers is only slightly more prominent than Foley, though "The Breaking Point" gets to show off the man's amazing marksmanship when he takes out the sniper at Foy. As Popeye Wynn said of his friend, "It just doesn't pay to be shootin' at Shifty when he's got a rifle."

• I haven't talked much about the opening sequences with the surviving members of Easy Company, in part because I'm trying to stick by the who lives/who dies no-spoiler rule. (Though I should warn you that I'm going to break it very early in my review of "The Last Patrol.") So if you're somehow not to the end of the miniseries yet, I won't say who the man is who breaks down at the thought of seeing his buddies all torn up, but it's an incredibly affecting moment -- especially since you can tell these are the type of men who rarely opened up like that in the half-century since the war.

• This is TV, so a few moments get exaggerated for dramatic purposes, but not by much. In real life, Winters stopped himself from running across the field at Foy, rather than needing Colonel Sink to stop him. And some of the surviving members of Easy said that Speirs' dash to hook up with I Company wasn't quite as superheroic as Frankel makes it look. But as Lipton puts it when describing the moment, "Damn that's impressive."

Coming up next (probably on Thursday): "The Last Patrol," in which Private Webster returns from the hospital to find Easy Company much changed after its time in Bastogne.

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

'Better Off Ted' returns - Sepinwall on TV

In today's column, I talk about how happy (and yet slightly puzzled) I am about tomorrow's return of "Better Off Ted" with original episodes. Click here to read the full post

Royal Pains, "Strategic Planning": Should I get in the hot tub? Yeah!

Just got done watching the third (or, rather, second-produced, third-aired) episode of "Royal Pains" on Hulu. I don't have much to say about it, save three things: 1)I was glad to see Campbell Scott back briefly, 2)I was glad they finally started giving some background on Divya, and 3)It was weird to hear The Thermals' "Now We Can See," since it's now forever tied to the "Chuck" season two finale for me.

Beyond that? I think "Royal Pains" is the kind of show I'm going to have on while I'm cleaning my desk or doing some other mundane task, but barring some kind of major jump up in quality, I can't see myself finding things to blog about every week.

What did everybody think of this one? Click here to read the full post

'Kings' vs. 'Merlin' on NBC - Sepinwall on TV

In today's column, I look at the premiere of NBC's "Merlin" and how it relates to the demise of "Kings" (which, as of now, is still scheduled to air tomorrow night). Click here to read the full post

The Wire, Season 2, Episode 4: "Hard Cases" (Newbies edition)

Once again, we're revisiting season two of "The Wire" in two versions: one for people who have watched the entire series and want to be able to discuss it from beginning to end, and those who aren't all the way there yet and don't want to be spoiled about later developments. This is the newbie post (click here for the veteran version).

Spoilers for episode four, "Hard Cases," coming up just as soon as I buy a leather coat...

"You ever miss it, Pop?" -Nick Sobotka
"Wouldn't do no good." -Louis Sobotka

I want to start by continuing last week's discussion of the parallels between Nick and D'Angelo, which only feel more overt in "Hard Cases," even though their situations here are in some ways opposite. Where Nick is plunging even deeper into this criminal business than his uncle wants, D'Angelo is rebelling against his uncle's entire way of life. In both cases, we have the young men rebelling against what their uncles want, though for Nick that means getting more involved in dirty business, while D'Angelo is trying to live cleaner.

Beyond that, what's interesting is that each man has been raised in a very insular community where he's been taught by family and friends that there is one and only one way to live (picking up shifts at the port for Nick, slinging dope for D'Angelo), and that there's no point in even trying anything else.

D'Angelo learned last year that the world doesn't have to work that way, and that lesson is driven home as he realizes that Avon arranged the deaths of a bunch of inmates who meant nothing to him (more collateral damage) so he could scam some years off their sentences.

Nick, meanwhile, is realizing that his uncle's way of life (and his father's, for that matter) is dying, and because no one wanted to see that coming, no one prepared young guys like Nick and Ziggy to do anything else. And while Nick's options in life are probably greater than D'Angelo's (he's uneducated and unskilled, but a white guy with no criminal record still gets through more doors), he can't fathom what they are, and instead has to glom onto his uncle's side business with Vondas and The Greek.

And in rebelling against their respective uncles, albeit in different directions, both young men are placing themselves in dangerous situations: D'Angelo because Avon and Stringer (particularly Stringer) are already wary about his loyalty, and Nick because he's getting more into bed with The Greek and company at the exact moment that police investigation into the port is about to intensify.

(A bit lost in the shuffle of all this family drama is that Frank treats Nick more like a son than he does Ziggy -- or, at least, that he treats Nick more like a man than he does Ziggy. He's mad at Nick, but they have a conversation about it, albeit a heated one. Ziggy he just slaps and scolds.)

Now, the danger isn't that great for Nick just yet, because both the Bunk/Lester/Beadie team and the reconstituted version of the Sobotka detail have a couple of hard (as in difficult) cases in front of them.

Having let the Atlantic Light sail away from Philly (even though they really had no choice), Bunk and Lester have set themselves up to be scapegoated by Rawls, and neither man realizes that Lester's about to be reassigned to the detail -- nor that Lester will wind up investigating the same case from a different angle. (And, again, you either have to admire the patience of "The Wire" or grow frustrated with it. How many other series would be a third of the way through their season without having all the good guys realize they're essentially chasing the same bad guys?)

Daniels, meanwhile, takes advantage of the leverage he realizes he has with Burrell, arranging not only to have his own people (instead of some Rawls-handpicked humps) work the case, but to turn the detail into a permanent Major Crimes Unit should they make any kind of case here. But they have no idea what Frank is up to, or what kind of cases are available for them to make. By this point in season one, the detail had at least made a little bit of progress with the Barksdale crew, where here we're basically starting at square one.

But one thing we learned from the first season is that, just as it seems like nothing is happening, many things start happening at once. Daniels knows what he's doing this time, doesn't have deadweight like Polk and Mahone, and when Lester shows up, he's going to realize there's a lot more to the case than he thought.

Buckle up, folks.

Some other thoughts on "Hard Cases":

• McNulty's quest for his Jane Doe's identity doesn't seem to be getting anywhere, but his search for Omar at least brings Bubbs and Johnny back into the picture. Who doesn't love Bubbs? (And who wouldn't want to see a CBS sitcom with that title, starring Andre Royo as a charming homeless dope fiend?)

• I haven't had a chance yet to really sing the praises of Chris Bauer as Frank Sobotka, but this is an especially strong episode for him, between the opening scene where he tells off Nick (and again reiterates that he's not doing any of this for personal gain) and then the closing where he studies his reflection in the grubby bar mirror and realizes what he's becoming and what he's invited into his world. Bauer tends to get cast as two-dimensional jerks who yell a lot (see "Third Watch"), and while Frank certainly raises his voice from time to time (several times in "Hard Cases," in fact), he's a much more nuanced character, and Bauer finds every single layer of him at the same time he's holding the screen by just standing (or sitting) still. A great, great performance.

• Lester and Bunk together make a rare-for-TV partnership between two black cops. Back when I watched this episode the first time, I suggested to David Simon that some of the stevedores' discomfort (Horseface in particular) with having them in the bar stemmed from that fact, but Simon more or less reiterated Beadie's theory that the stevedores are enough of a melting pot that their only issue was with the badges, not the skin color. All these years later, I see that interpretation more than I did at the time, but I'm curious if anyone else had my initial reaction, if only because it's still kind of startling, unfortunately, for a show to feature an African-American duo.

• A nice moment that the show doesn't feel the need to underline: as Ziggy is explaining about how the digital camera works, Nick realizes that they're going to make photo developing shops obsolete, just as advancements in technology are endangering so many other traditional businesses, including the port here, and newspapers in season five.

• Speaking of forced obsolescence, this episode introduces Nick's father, Louis, who was a shipbuilder forced out of work when that industry died in Baltimore. Note that despite spending his "retirement" working on a gambling system, Louis never actually places wagers; his wins and losses are all hypothetically recorded in his notebook.

• Can any Baltimoreans identify that giant wall at the end of Nick's block?

• Two bits of "It's not TV. It's HBO"-style humor in this one, first with Nick indelicately copping a feel off baby mama Aimee (not Amy, as I spelled it last week) because, quote, "They were staring right at me!," and then with Ziggy getting revenge on Maui (the beefy checker who sits next to Johnny 50 and resents Ziggy for stealing stuff and making life harder on the honest guys) by leaving a digital photo of Not-So-Little Ziggy as Maui's computer wallpaper.

• While struggling to work their case, Bunk and Lester also get Beadie to give up some background on herself, and discover they're working with someone who has neither the training nor, apparently, the desire to be a real investigative cop. She's nice, and she means well, but at this point, she seems in it for the bigger paycheck than she got as a toll-taker.

• While Avon is busy cutting a deal to shorten his prison stint, we get a brief glimpse of how desperate things are growing for his operation out in the real world, as the quantity and quality of the package Stringer has been getting from Atlanta keeps getting worse.

• I love that Prez, a character considered a joke by the rest of the detail for most of season one, gets to have his big moment where he stands in a corner of the new detail HQ and asks everyone, "What kept you?"

• This episode also features the hilarious montage of Daniels and Kima telling their wives about the detail, as the camera keeps swirling around each table to make it look like they could all be at the same dinner party. The candles, the wine and the use of classical music neatly illustrate how Marla Daniels and Cheryl both have different tastes and ambitions from their respective partners. They want them to be lawyers, but as Cedric and Kima show by signing up for the detail -- and as Kima shows by slapping bracelets on the d-bag at the traffic light -- these two are natural police who don't want to be anything else.

• I always forget that Jimmy gives Bubbs' stolen Walkman to Elena, and it always makes laugh.

• Also worth some chuckles in a particularly funny episode: Lester and Bunk's reaction to Beadie asking who Omar is. How exactly do you explain Omar to someone like Beadie?

• Maury Levy again shows that, while he's a disgusting sleaze, he's an incredibly talented sleaze, getting Avon's seven-year sentence reduced to only one. Even the prosecutor seems to acknowledge the state cop's theory that Avon is responsible for the hot shots, but Maury recognizes that, in the system, the charge you can make is sometimes more important than the charge that's right.

Coming up next: "Undertow," in which the detail's roster expands, Stringer tries to work around his inferior product, and Ziggy again tries to get into The Game.

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

The Wire, Season 2, Episode 4: "Hard Cases" (Veterans edition)

Once again, we're revisiting season two of "The Wire" in two versions: one for people who have watched the entire series and want to be able to discuss it from beginning to end, and those who aren't all the way there yet and don't want to be spoiled about later developments. This is the veteran post (click here for the newbie version).

Spoilers for episode four, "Hard Cases," coming up just as soon as I buy a leather coat...

"You ever miss it, Pop?" -Nick Sobotka
"Wouldn't do no good." -Louis Sobotka

I want to start by continuing last week's discussion of the parallels between Nick and D'Angelo, which only feel more overt in "Hard Cases," even though their situations here are in some ways opposite. Where Nick is plunging even deeper into this criminal business than his uncle wants, D'Angelo is rebelling against his uncle's entire way of life. In both cases, we have the young men rebelling against what their uncles want, though for Nick that means getting more involved in dirty business, while D'Angelo is trying to live cleaner.

Beyond that, what's interesting is that each man has been raised in a very insular community where he's been taught by family and friends that there is one and only one way to live (picking up shifts at the port for Nick, slinging dope for D'Angelo), and that there's no point in even trying anything else.

D'Angelo learned last year that the world doesn't have to work that way, and that lesson is driven home as he realizes that Avon arranged the deaths of a bunch of inmates who meant nothing to him (more collateral damage) so he could scam some years off their sentences.

Nick, meanwhile, is realizing that his uncle's way of life (and his father's, for that matter) is dying, and because no one wanted to see that coming, no one prepared young guys like Nick and Ziggy to do anything else. And while Nick's options in life are probably greater than D'Angelo's (he's uneducated and unskilled, but a white guy with no criminal record still gets through more doors), he can't fathom what they are, and instead has to glom onto his uncle's side business with Vondas and The Greek.

And in rebelling against their respective uncles, albeit in different directions, both young men are placing themselves in dangerous situations: D'Angelo because Avon and Stringer (particularly Stringer) are already wary about his loyalty, and Nick because he's getting more into bed with The Greek and company at the exact moment that police investigation into the port is about to intensify.

(A bit lost in the shuffle of all this family drama is that Frank treats Nick more like a son than he does Ziggy -- or, at least, that he treats Nick more like a man than he does Ziggy. He's mad at Nick, but they have a conversation about it, albeit a heated one. Ziggy he just slaps and scolds.)

Now, the danger isn't that great for Nick just yet, because both the Bunk/Lester/Beadie team and the reconstituted version of the Sobotka detail have a couple of hard (as in difficult) cases in front of them.

Having let the Atlantic Light sail away from Philly (even though they really had no choice), Bunk and Lester have set themselves up to be scapegoated by Rawls, and neither man realizes that Lester's about to be reassigned to the detail -- nor that Lester will wind up investigating the same case from a different angle. (And, again, you either have to admire the patience of "The Wire" or grow frustrated with it. How many other series would be a third of the way through their season without having all the good guys realize they're essentially chasing the same bad guys?)

Daniels, meanwhile, takes advantage of the leverage he realizes he has with Burrell, arranging not only to have his own people (instead of some Rawls-handpicked humps) work the case, but to turn the detail into a permanent Major Crimes Unit should they make any kind of case here. But they have no idea what Frank is up to, or what kind of cases are available for them to make. By this point in season one, the detail had at least made a little bit of progress with the Barksdale crew, where here we're basically starting at square one.

But one thing we learned from the first season is that, just as it seems like nothing is happening, many things start happening at once. Daniels knows what he's doing this time, doesn't have deadweight like Polk and Mahone, and when Lester shows up, he's going to realize there's a lot more to the case than he thought.

Buckle up, folks.

Some other thoughts on "Hard Cases":

• McNulty's quest for his Jane Doe's identity doesn't seem to be getting anywhere, but his search for Omar at least brings Bubbs and Johnny back into the picture. Who doesn't love Bubbs? (And who wouldn't want to see a CBS sitcom with that title, starring Andre Royo as a charming homeless dope fiend?)

• I haven't had a chance yet to really sing the praises of Chris Bauer as Frank Sobotka, but this is an especially strong episode for him, between the opening scene where he tells off Nick (and again reiterates that he's not doing any of this for personal gain) and then the closing where he studies his reflection in the grubby bar mirror and realizes what he's becoming and what he's invited into his world. Bauer tends to get cast as two-dimensional jerks who yell a lot (see "Third Watch"), and while Frank certainly raises his voice from time to time (several times in "Hard Cases," in fact), he's a much more nuanced character, and Bauer finds every single layer of him at the same time he's holding the screen by just standing (or sitting) still. A great, great performance.

• Lester and Bunk together make a rare-for-TV partnership between two black cops. Back when I watched this episode the first time, I suggested to David Simon that some of the stevedores' discomfort (Horseface in particular) with having them in the bar stemmed from that fact, but Simon more or less reiterated Beadie's theory that the stevedores are enough of a melting pot that their only issue was with the badges, not the skin color. All these years later, I see that interpretation more than I did at the time, but I'm curious if anyone else had my initial reaction, if only because it's still kind of startling, unfortunately, for a show to feature an African-American duo.

• A nice moment that the show doesn't feel the need to underline: as Ziggy is explaining about how the digital camera works, Nick realizes that they're going to make photo developing shops obsolete, just as advancements in technology are endangering so many other traditional businesses, including the port here, and newspapers in season five.

• Speaking of forced obsolescence, this episode introduces Nick's father, Louis, who was a shipbuilder forced out of work when that industry died in Baltimore. Note that despite spending his "retirement" working on a gambling system, Louis never actually places wagers; his wins and losses are all hypothetically recorded in his notebook.

• Can any Baltimoreans identify that giant wall at the end of Nick's block?

• Two bits of "It's not TV. It's HBO"-style humor in this one, first with Nick indelicately copping a feel off baby mama Aimee (not Amy, as I spelled it last week) because, quote, "They were staring right at me!," and then with Ziggy getting revenge on Maui (the beefy checker who sits next to Johnny 50 and resents Ziggy for stealing stuff and making life harder on the honest guys) by leaving a digital photo of Not-So-Little Ziggy as Maui's computer wallpaper.

• While struggling to work their case, Bunk and Lester also get Beadie to give up some background on herself, and discover they're working with someone who has neither the training nor, apparently, the desire to be a real investigative cop. She's nice, and she means well, but at this point, she seems in it for the bigger paycheck than she got as a toll-taker.

• While Avon is busy cutting a deal to shorten his prison stint, we get a brief glimpse of how desperate things are growing for his operation out in the real world, as the quantity and quality of the package Stringer has been getting from Atlanta keeps getting worse.

• I love that Prez, a character considered a joke by the rest of the detail for most of season one, gets to have his big moment where he stands in a corner of the new detail HQ and asks everyone, "What kept you?"

• This episode also features the hilarious montage of Daniels and Kima telling their wives about the detail, as the camera keeps swirling around each table to make it look like they could all be at the same dinner party. The candles, the wine and the use of classical music neatly illustrate how Marla Daniels and Cheryl both have different tastes and ambitions from their respective partners. They want them to be lawyers, but as Cedric and Kima show by signing up for the detail -- and as Kima shows by slapping bracelets on the d-bag at the traffic light -- these two are natural police who don't want to be anything else.

• I always forget that Jimmy gives Bubbs' stolen Walkman to Elena, and it always makes laugh.

• Also worth some chuckles in a particularly funny episode: Lester and Bunk's reaction to Beadie asking who Omar is. How exactly do you explain Omar to someone like Beadie?

• Maury Levy again shows that, while he's a disgusting sleaze, he's an incredibly talented sleaze, getting Avon's seven-year sentence reduced to only one. Even the prosecutor seems to acknowledge the state cop's theory that Avon is responsible for the hot shots, but Maury recognizes that, in the system, the charge you can make is sometimes more important than the charge that's right.

And now let's have some veterans-only talk about how some of this episode's developments will play out through the season and down the road...

• Whatever her interest in policework is now, Beadie will turn into a pretty good cop over the course of the season, and one of the small tragedies of the year is that, after all she learns from Lester and Bunk, she has to go back to driving around the stacks with her headphones on.

• Ziggy keeps piling on the reasons for Double-G to dislike him, which will eventually lead to the "Malaka" breaking point.

• Louis doesn't appear much this season, which only makes it more amazing that he has such presence and impact when he shows up to tell off Frank in "Bad Dreams" and to make Nick turn himself in in "Port in a Storm."

• We see the beginning of the end of both Kima and Daniels' relationships here, though his will end before hers.

• For that matter, D'Angelo's refusal to go along with Avon's plan no doubt sends a dangerous signal to Stringer.

• McNulty is an idiot for signing that separation agreement.

Coming up next: "Undertow," in which the detail's roster expands, Stringer tries to work around his inferior product, and Ziggy again tries to get into The Game.

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

Burn Notice, "End Run": Smarty-cat and mouse

Spoilers for tonight's extra-special-y awesome "Burn Notice" coming up just as soon as I park eight inches off the curb...

"You're not this good. Nobody is this good." -Brennen

Actually, he is this good, Brennen. And in episodes like "End Run," so is "Burn Notice."

Jay Karnes' first appearance as Brennen in "Sins of Omission" was one of the highlights of season two. When you have a hero whose brain is his greatest weapon, it's always more fun to pit him against an adversary who's as smart -- or almost as smart -- as he is, and to see how the hero reacts when his usual tricks won't work. Because Brennen more or less knows what a guy like Michael is capable of, and because Karnes plays him with such confidence, it's a lot more fun to see Michael triumph over him than it is to see him outwit some of the other people he's scammed over the years.

Brennen did, of course, get over-confident in allowing Michael to operate without being watched, and in underestimating Michael's ability to hack a cell phone using nothing but a potato chip can, a hanger and some metal washers. The Cantenna may be my favorite bit of improvised "Burn Notice" technology to date, and not just because it got its own chyron in an episode full of good chyron humor (see also Brennen quickly going from "Arms dealer with a grudge" to "Michael's new boss"). One of the things that got cut from the Matt Nix interview (because it gave away too much about the plot of this episode, which he also referred to as the show's homage to "Collateral") is that their tech advisor, Michael Wilson, had been telling them about different methods of Bluetooth snarfing for a while, and they'd been waiting to find the perfect story to use it in. This was that, and it was great to see how that one maneuver gave Michael enough intelligence to carry the day.

And while he was waiting for Sam, Fi and Barry the money launderer(*) to help him out on that front, we got to see him do his usual Michael Westen thing, switching into different identities (alcoholic custodian, d-bag aging frat boy) to handle each situation, then efficiently taking out all the security guards, just because he could, before confronting Brennen and getting his brother back. As Nix says, the show never tries to hang an episode on whether Michael can win a physical battle, because we know he'll win every one of those, but it's still a pleasure to see him do it so easily, even when it turns out to be non-essential to winning the day.

(*) Best Barry episode ever? Not only does he go to a salon near Madeline's neighborhood, but he's now hired both a life coach and an intern.

My only real concern is that Detective Paxson is still not that exciting. Also, wouldn't she find out about Nate showing up in a hospital with a bullet wound? Or is that another counter-intuitive spy lesson that got cut for time? ("A lot of people think that if you go to the hospital with a bullet wound, the doctors have to call the cops. But if you happen to coat the wound with lime and salt...")

The rest of it, though, rocked. Hard.

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

Shakespeare vs. The Hangover

As a few of you might have guessed from the lack of posting (other than the pre-written "Sports Night" piece) and commenting, I took yesterday off to enjoy a day in New York that included Anne Hathaway in "Twelfth Night" at Shakespeare in the Park, plus a matinee of "The Hangover." Some thoughts on both experiences (first Shakespeare, then "Hangover") coming up just as soon as I cross my garters...

Shakespeare in the Park is one of those New York experiences that anyone in the area should try if they have the opportunity -- specifically, if they have the time to wait on the line outside the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, as there's no way to get a ticket in advance. (In recent years, they have added a virtual line, but that's more of a lottery than a guarantee.) The waiting on the line is, to me, half the experience, particularly on a nice day. (And, in an otherwise soggy June, yesterday qualified.) My friend Steve and I showed up at 9 a.m. and the line was already hundreds and hundreds of people long -- so long, in fact, that our part of the line was no longer on an asphalt path, but on a mulchy area. (One of the Delacorte volunteers yelled out, "Hello, mulch people!" whenever he came out to give us an update.) And the line stretched far, far beyond us by the time it began moving near 1 o'clock. In the interim, I got to stretch out, read a good book (Dick Winters' "Beyond Band of Brothers," which some of the posters in the "Band of Brothers" discussion kept mentioning), play backstop for some kids who turned the mulch field into a baseball diamond to pass the time, etc.

And the play itself made the wait worth it. "Twelfth Night" is still in previews for another week, so I shouldn't say too much, but this seemed like the best of the recent SitP productions of it. (It's a crowd-pleaser that tends to attract big -- as in movie/TV -- stars like Hathaway; about 20 years ago, I saw a production with Michelle Pfeiffer and Jeff Goldblum, and only a few years backthey did one with Jimmy Smits, Julia Stiles and Zach Braff.) Hathaway (who plays the cross-dressing Viola) is the biggest outside name, but the cast features some heavy hitters from the Broadway world, including Raul Esparza (Orsino), Audra McDonald (Olivia), Julie White (Maria) and Michael Cumpsty (Malvolio). From the TV world, there was also Hamish Linklater from "Old Christine" (who, as the son of an acting teacher who ran a Shakespeare troupe, has a lot of experience with the material) as Sir Andrew and Stark Sands (Lt. Fick from "Generation Kill") as Viola's sort of identical brother, Sebastian.

Everyone was great, but especially Linklater and McDonald, and director Daniel Sullivan found a way to organically insert some musical numbers so Esparza, McDonald, Hathaway and company could sing.

But here's the thing: even a bad Shakespeare in the Park production is worth seeing in that venue: outdoors, in the round, on the edge of one of the lakes in Central Park. The atmosphere brings up the energy level of the people on stage as well as the people in the audience, and the unpredictability of nature keeps the actors on their toes. There was apparently a scene-stealing raccoon in an early performance of this production, and last night, after the skies being cloudy all day, rain finally began to fall with about five minutes left to go in the play. This conveniently happened at the exact moment David Pittu, as Feste the fool, was singing a song about "the wind and the rain," and the crowd went nuts, and the actors in turn fed off that reaction and seemed especially excited as they worked through the closing number and the curtain call. (Though I wouldn't put it past this cast to be that exuberant at the close of every show.) A fine time was had by all, and as my wife and I walked out of the theater, we could hear a ton of applause and laughter coming from underneath the bleachers, where the actors had retreated after the curtain call.

In between my time on line and my time in the Delacorte, I went to see "The Hangover." Usually, when a comedy like this explodes out of nowhere (sort of; I'd been hearing from friends who saw early screenings that it was going to be huge) and everyone's raving about it, if you don't see it right away, the hype can overwhelm the movie. But "The Hangover" was nearly as funny as advertised. It didn't feel as sloppy as some of director Todd Phillips's previous movies like "Old School" (where the good Will Ferrell and Vince Vaughn bits kept being interrupted by the soggy Luke Wilson/Ellen Pompeo romance), Zach Galifianakis is insanely funny as the groom's socially-awkward future brother-in-law, and Bradley Cooper is shockingly, amazingly, absolutely a movie star. (I liked the guy in "Kitchen Confidential," but who would have thunk it back in the Will Tippin days?) And Ken Jeong (aka Mr. Duk from "Party Down") steals the show every time he turns up as an eccentric Chinese gangster.

My only major complaint is that the slide show over the closing credits fails to answer the one mystery that we were promised it would: how did Cooper get his concussion?

All in all, a very rewarding, relaxing day that mixed high and low culture -- and a burger and fries at Shake Shack. (Mmm... artery-clogging...)

Feel free to talk about the movie (spoilers are fine), or your own Shakepseare in the Park experiences (or other memorable outdoor theater experiences). Click here to read the full post

Band of Brothers rewind, episode 6: "Bastogne"

We're now into the second half of our trip through "Band of Brothers," and if you don't have the DVDs, or missed HBO's On Demand window, History Channel is doing another marathon this weekend, with the first five episodes Saturday afternoon (1:37-8), and the next five on Sunday (12:16-7, and don't ask me about the weird start times).

Spoilers for "Bastogne" coming up just as soon as I go in a dell...

If you polled fans of the series for their favorite installment, I imagine the next episode, "The Breaking Point," would win in a landslide. And while I certainly have a lot of affection for that one, "Bastogne" was and remains the hour that sticks in my head the most. It's the episode that, on first viewing, was the point where I began to feel confident distinguishing all the characters (ironically, in a show that spotlighted a character who had barely any previous screentime), and it remains the episode that does the best job of making me feel like I understood, even on a superficial level, what the men of Easy Company went through.

The Battle of the Bulge, and, specifically, the siege at Bastogne, is where the legend of the 101st Airborne was made, and I've seen some complaints that the series miscalculated by choosing this moment in the war to show through the eyes of the company medic, Eugene "Doc" Roe (Shane Taylor). These people aren't objecting to the idea of a Roe episode so much as its timing.

For me, though, the "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" approach(*) to the Battle of the Bulge works beautifully. There's still plenty of time for exploding trees and other combat in and around the Ardennes in "The Breaking Point," but in terms of the emotional experience of the siege, I think "Bastogne" absolutely nails it. Even more than "Crossroads," "Bastogne" marks the point when the series shifts to a more overt point-of-view narrative style, and these episodes feel more personal -- and much more involving -- for it.

(*) For those of you not up on your literary devices, this is re-telling a famous story from the perspective of a minor character, and only seeing the major events and players as he sees them. There are a couple of breaks from Roe's POV, notably the combat patrol where Babe Heffron has to watch Pvt. Julian bleed to death, but for the most part, we only find out things if Roe is there to eavesdrop.

The story of Bastogne is that the 101st was terribly short on bodies, and even shorter on supplies, and yet somehow they were able to hold off everything the Germans (who had more men and more materiel) threw at them. And therefore, it feels absolutely right that we should see it as Doc Roe's story. It's more of an abstraction, I think, to talk about how many rounds of ammo each man had than it is to show Roe down to his last Syrette of morphine, or being happy Captain Winters captured a German prisoner because the guy had a spare bandage on him.

More importantly, though, "Bastogne" -- through Bruce McKenna's script, David Leland's direction, and Shane Taylor's performance -- made me look at the position of Army medic, a staple of these sort of movies and TV shows, in an entirely new way. On the surface, the medic seems to have it (relatively) easier than the grunts: he doesn't have to kill, he's far less likely to get shot at, etc. But what we see, over and over in "Bastogne," is the psychic cost of the job. In the heat of combat -- particularly combat as intense as at Bastogne -- when a comrade gets shot, the other soldiers can't focus on it all that much, because they're too busy shooting back and trying to save their own skins. But the man bleeding to death is all that the medic gets to focus on. He can't use his rifle as a distraction, because he has to stick his hands into the wound and try to make the bleeding stop, at least long enough to get him back to the aid station. And whether the men live or die, you see the toll each of them take on Roe, and you begin to understand why he seems to hold himself apart from the men -- why he eats apart from them, and why avoids using their nicknames. It's only after his friend Renee the nurse(**) dies in a shelling of the town that Eugene seems to recognize this approach is futile -- that it hurts just as much whether he gets close to people or he doesn't -- and he lets himself call Heffron "Babe."

(**) The scenes with Renee seem to be the other source of complaint about "Bastogne." As Roe is such a minor character in Ambrose's book -- and as Roe died years before the miniseries was made -- I have no idea if there really was a Renee, or if that was just an invention of McKenna's. But I don't have much of a problem with the character, as she allows Roe to open up about his feelings in a way he simply wouldn't with the other guys in Easy, even the other medic. If she's a dramatic device, she's not a bad one.

Some other thoughts on "Bastogne":

• Leland and the production team do an amazing job of conveying just how bloody cold it was in Bastogne, and how much the men suffered for not having proper winter gear. We open with a shot of endless white, then see Roe's purple fingers shivering from the cold, and from there it's one bit of frozen-over Hell after another.

• As I so often make fun of the Louisiana accents on "True Blood" (if only because they all sound different from one another), I have to ask any locals who are reading: how do you think Shane Taylor (one of many Brits in the "Band of Brothers" cast) tackles Roe's Cajun accent? Authentic, or overcooked?

• We're still trying to be vague about who lives and who dies, but as Smokey Gordon doesn't appear again, I can say that Roe and the surgeons not only saved his life, but helped him recover a fair amount of his mobility. (So much, in fact, that, per the epilogue in Ambrose's book, the Army briefly tried to get out of giving him full disability, until Gordon's father threatened to have his son strip naked on the floor of Congress to show off all his wounds.)

• While the other men (Wild Bill Guarnere, in particular) are growing beards while out there in the woods, I like that Winters is still making an effort to shave every day, even if it's with freezing cold water.

• General McAuliffe's response to the German offer of surrender -- "Nuts!" (short for "Nuts to you!") -- would, 60+ years later, be appropriated by Skeet Ulrich on "Jericho," and in turn become the centerpiece of one of the more (temporarily) successful Save Our Show campaigns ever.

• This episode also has one of my favorite end title sequences of the series, though the question of whether Easy needed to be "rescued" by Patton seems more a matter of semantics than pride.

• We get more signs that "Foxhole" Norman Dike isn't up to commanding the company, particularly at this point in time. And between Harry Welsh's Christmas injury ("in a dell") and Buck Compton's increasing PTSD symptoms (check out how panicked he got by the singing), Easy is going to have a major leadership vacuum, which is the subject of "The Breaking Point." But we can talk about that sometime next week, likely on Monday.

Keeping in mind the who lives/dies thing, what did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Sports Night rewind: "The Hungry and the Hunted" & "Intellectual Property"

As mentioned over the weekend, I'm going to double up on the "Sports Night" reviews this week, tackling both "The Hungry and the Hunted" and "Intellectual Property." This may turn out to be a one-time thing, as I'm primarily doing it because I didn't want to waste a whole post/week on "Intellectual Property," but we'll see how my workload is going forward. But if you're trying to watch these episodes at the rate I'm writing them, maybe take in both "Mary Pat Shelby" and "The Head Coach, Dinner and the Morning Mail" before next Wednesday, just in case.

Twice the spoilers coming up just as soon as I sing you a song from the public domain...

"If you're dumb, surround yourself with smart people. And if you're smart, surround yourself with smart people who disagree with you." -Isaac

"Sonvagun..." -Dana

As I mentioned last week, the Dana/Casey romance was the part of the series I was least looking forward to revisiting, and neither of these episodes did much to change my mind on that score.

There are certain kinds of stories I'm congenitally predisposed to mistrust. One is Unresolved Sexual Tension, which only in rare cases is anything more than a desperate attempt to create some buzz while delaying the inevitable. Another is a story that has characters otherwise known for their intelligence acting like complete idiots. The Dana/Casey story arc is a combination of both of those, and I spend the majority of those scenes rolling my eyes, gritting my teeth and otherwise conveying my dismay. It's often been said of "Sports Night" -- including in some of the comments for previous reviews -- that it's hard to tell sometimes whether you're watching one of the best shows ever, or one of the worst. For me, Dana/Casey is pretty much non-stop "worst."

When I did the weekend post about disliking "Intellectual Property," a couple of readers wrote that, while they also weren't crazy about the relationship overall, the fight at the end of that episode is a very good scene, and one that does an important job of framing the relationship as something more than the traditional Will They Or Won't They? nonsense. Certainly, there are good moments in that scene (I like the way that Felicity Huffman's voice breaks as Dana asks Casey to knock it off already), and the idea that Casey has been playing this game with Dana for the last 15 years does theoretically add an edge to the relationship that you don't get in a comparable storyline from, say, "Ed." But that edge, even when it's there -- and my (admittedly shaky) memory is that it wasn't there often -- isn't enough to compensate for how often I want to slap the both of them and yell, "Quit acting like 14-year-olds! The writer says you're meant for each other, so get to it, already!"

"The Hungry and the Hunted" at least has the Jeremy storyline to compensate for the Dana/Casey idiocy. I don't know that it works 100% -- Jeremy's speech about hunting feels more out of left field than Dan's monologue in "The Apology," even though we'd been given more hints about Jeremy not fitting in than we had about Dan's brother -- but Isaac's speech, quoted above, is the kind of wish fulfillment Sorkin does so well. Where "Sports Night" and "West Wing" excelled -- and where "Studio 60" ultimately failed -- was in creating these fantasy workplaces that we all wish we could join. You don't have to care as much about the infield fly rule as Jeremy, or share Josh Lyman's views on the GAO, to admire not only the passion of these people, but their high standards for their own work, and their support for each other. I don't have the temperament to ever be a manager of people, but if I did, I would put Isaac's quote on a plaque above my desk, and check it whenever I was faltering on a decision about whom to hire (or what to have for lunch, for that matter).

Dan's subplot in "Intellectual Property," on the other hand, isn't really notable for anything other than a chance to hear Yeardley Smith (aka the voice of Lisa Simpson) speak Sorkin-ese. And it's not very good Sorkin-ese, at that -- the stuff about her predecessor in the job is among the more arch, awkward-sounding dialogue he wrote for the show. Like Casey's concern about being cool in "The Apology," the whole subplot feels like Sorkin trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to prove he can write more traditional comedy, but where the Starland Vocal Band had a beautiful payoff by tying it into Dan's storyline at the end, this one goes nowhere.

Ah, well. We get to the good stuff next week with "Mary Pat Shelby" (and, possibly, its sequel).

Some other thoughts on both episodes:

• The scene where the crew debated about poetry brought back painful memories of the "Studio 60" episode where the writers all argued about Samuel Taylor Coleridge trivia.

• Where "West Wing" more or less took place in a parallel universe with its own politicians, "Sports Night" was always a mix of fictional athletes and real-world ones, as Bobby Bowden and Pete Sampras both get name-checked in "The Hungry and the Hunted," and there's a season two episode built around the show's attempt to get a Michael Jordan interview. In retrospect, would you rather they have stuck entirely to inventing their own athletes, or did the show need to invoke real names from time to time to seem vaguely realistic?

• And speaking of realism, or the lack thereof, I go back and forth on the "Hungry and the Hunted" scene where Kim and the gang school Dan on the names of all the MLS teams. On the one hand, it's kind of funny. On the other, it sacrifices credibility -- even if Dan doesn't like soccer, you would think the show-within-the-show has done enough soccer highlights that he would remember some of the names.

• Nice use of The Pretenders' "Hymn to Her" as Jeremy calls his dad to tell him about getting The Call.

• We know "Sports Night" is a third-place show on a third-place network, but I'm still not clear whom they're behind. ESPN is one, obviously, but when I made a reference to Fox Sports as the second-place network a couple of weeks ago, some readers e-mailed me to say that, back in '98, Fox's cable operations were still too regionalized, and it would have been CNN/SI ahead of CSC. But when Isaac talks ratings in "Intellectual Property," he says they took ratings equally from ESPN and Fox.

• Getting back to the fake name thing, it's amusing to see which last names Sorkin liked to recycle from project to project. In "Intellectual Property," there's a reference to a soon-to-be-fired coach named Landingham -- which, of course, will be the name of President Bartlet's trusty executive secretary.

One final thing: I've had a few complaints from readers who are watching the show for the first time, and even trying to follow along at the pace of the reviews, so let's try to be reasonably vague about what happens in upcoming episodes. (The Michael Jordan thing I consider fair game, as it's a standalone premise, and really only a jumping-off point, at that.) We can allude to things, but let's not blatantly spell out that X is going to happen to Y in episode Z.

Keeping that in mind, what did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Cupid, "My Fair Masseuse": Baby, we were born to run?

ABC snuck the finale of the "Cupid" remake onto the schedule tonight. If you cared, hopefully you still had a DVR season pass like I did and caught it. (If not, have fun grappling with the ABC.com player.) Some thoughts on the finale, and the remake as a whole, coming up just as soon as I fix a sink...

If, like me, you were a fan of the original "Cupid," then you figured out pretty quickly that "My Fair Masseuse" was a remake of the Piven show's second episode, "The Linguist." This was part of ABC's attempt to keep the budget down, as Rob Thomas got paid less to rewrite his own script than he would have to write a brand-new one. But I give Rob credit for putting in an effort on a job he could have coasted through. Other than the bit about the linguist fixing his freshman roommate's sink -- specifically, the line "I grew up smaht in a paht of town where smaht got yer ass kicked" -- there wasn't much in the way of recycled dialogue, and the relationship took several different twists before ending up in the same place as the original. I'll still take Tim DeKay as my reformed Southie linguist, but I had fun watching this.

In fact, there was probably more recycling going on in the other borrowed plot from the original series, as Claire mistakenly came to believe that Trevor was a college professor who had slept with a student and gone nuts when the girl overdosed on sleeping pills. That's from the original pilot, and was one of the things whose absence from the new pilot was emblematic of one of the fundamental problems with the remake: too much of the Couple of the Week, not enough of Trevor and Claire.

The series had started to course correct on that in the last few episodes in early May. I kept meaning to write about "Left of the Dial," the previous original episode, and never did, but it was the first one that felt like it could have fit in comfortably with the original series.

By then, of course, it was too late. The show was already dead with ABC -- was, I'm guessing, dead within a week or two of its debut, in fact, based on the numbers and whatever was going on between the network and Thomas. (He hints about the problems in his answer to the question about working with Starz in the interview I did with him about "Party Down.") But let's leave the ratings, and the backstage drama, aside, and very quickly ask ourselves why the new "Cupid" didn't work at first, and whether, in a more patient, forgiving world, it might have been able to right itself.

Problem #1: Not enough Trevor and Claire. I have to assume this was a network push -- that someone at ABC felt the show's chief appeal was the matchmaking, and not the banter. But however well-executed those stories might have been (and they weren't always that great), it left viewers with no real hook to watch from week to week. The balance shifted a bit in the final episodes, so maybe that's a fight Thomas could have eventually won, had the ratings been better.

Problem #2: Not enough Trevor/Claire chemistry. This is a tougher problem to fix. Bobby Cannavale and Sarah Paulson were both fine on their own (though Paulson at times struggled to elevate Claire above her usual brittle WASP type), but the spark unfortunately wasn't there between them. You can't fake that.

Problem #3: Too much audience hand-holding. Again, I'm guessing this was from ABC, based on how so many of their other shows roll, with the hateful Please Laugh Now music and the way characters on all their series need to constantly monologue about their motivation for doing anything. I never felt like the romances had a chance to breathe, as we had to spend half of each storyline with the characters delivering exposition to Trevor. Part of this, I think, can also be pinned on Thomas and the other writers, who for some reason chose to build most of the episodes around two people with an established history who hadn't quite fallen in love yet. (It always felt like watching a play that began with the second act.)

I was probably harder on a couple of the episodes than I should have been, just based on my frustration with it not being as perfect as the original show. But "Cupid" 2.0 was, at best, flawed but sometimes entertaining, and I don't know that it could have ever risen above the chemistry problem. But I feel better about having watched it at the end than I suspected I would at the beginning.

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

Rescue Me, "Mickey": The singing fireman

Spoilers for tonight's "Rescue Me" coming up just as soon as I taunt you with my sandwich...

"What are you singing for? You sound gay!" -Terrance Garrity

Whatever reservations the last few episodes may have created in me were temporarily eased by "Mickey." It still had elements that drove me nuts -- "Rescue Me" is probably genetically incapable of not driving me nuts on occasion -- but the fun stuff was so, so much fun that the irritating parts were easier to shrug off than usual.

Start with the climactic fantasy musical number as Garrity was prepped for surgery. That kind of scene feels all but obligatory on any show featuring any actors with musical theater background -- which Steven Pasquale has(*) -- particularly in the decades since the original "The Singing Detective." When it works, as it did here, it does so because the show commits to the idea while still staying true to itself. So the song (with lyrics by Peter Tolan) sounded good, the production (with the nurses as angels, then Valkyries) looked good, and then it took a very "Rescue Me" turn where Terrance wandered into the shot to heckle his brother's singing, and Sean in turn grabbed a shotgun to deal with the problem. Hilarious.

(*) Pasquale also just released an album of showtunes. I know some people have complained that the scenes with Mike's band are just a blatant commercial for Mike Lombardi's own musical career, but so far neither musical subplot has felt that intrusive to me.

Meanwhile, Tommy's futile attempt to "control" his drinking continues to be fascinating. I loved him calling Mickey's bluff and confessing to/telling off the entire AA meeting (including poor, disillusioned Derek), but what made that scene work was the later moment where Tommy's home alone watching Mickey Mantle's famous "Don't be like me" interview shortly before his death. For all of Tommy's bravado, the show is making it clear, repeatedly, that Tommy is fooling himself even more than usual -- that this is a stupid plan that's doomed to cause Tommy and the people around him more pain.

And while the actual concept of Janet and Sheila throwing themselves at Tommy is still grating, some of the material on the fringes of that has been funny, like Needles' delight (well-played by Adam Ferrara) at discovering Tommy and Janet in the car together.

Similarly, Black Shawn/Colleen remains lame, but Tommy hosing down Black Shawn and the ensuing Birmingham discussion ("Footage? I was there!") was funny.

I still wish they'd get back to 9/11, and I'm not feeling optimistic about either Franco with the female boxer (which looks like another of the show's awkward attempts to talk about gender roles) or Lou with Candy the hooker, but overall, I was relieved enough with this one to not feel the need to dive through the rest of my screeners.

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

'Hawthorne' review - Sepinwall on TV

In today's column, I review TNT's irritating, cliche-riddled new nursing drama "Hawthorne" and note how it's impossible to not compare it to the nearly identical and far superior "Nurse Jackie." Click here to read the full post

Nurse Jackie, "Sweet-N-All": Waiting for the God particle

Spoilers for the second episode of "Nurse Jackie" coming up just as soon as I get ready for a modeling shoot...

"Doctors don't heal. We heal." -Jackie

Series pilots, as a rule, tend to be flashier than the series on average will be. They're designed as a selling tool, and therefore are loaded down with the biggest, most memorable elements that might convince a network executive to pick up the show, or a casual TV viewer to set a DVR season pass.

Second episodes, when they're done right (as opposed to when they just have to repeat the pilot all over again for the benefit of viewers who didn't watch the previous week), tend to go a little deeper -- to show angles to the characters we couldn't see in the pilot, to reveal the mundane reality behind some of the pilot's more shocking moments, etc.

"Sweet-N-All" is very much in that tradition. After giving us a whole lot of Jackie as vigilante nurse in the pilot, and surprising some (but not all) of the audience with the last-second reveal that Jackie is married with kids (and, therefore, that her relationship with Eddie the pharmacist is adultery), "Sweet-N-All" dials things back a bit, while offering more insight into Jackie and the people around her.

Where the comparable second episode of "Mad Men" showed us the reasons why Don Draper might be stepping out on his trophy wife, this one offers no obvious explanation for why Jackie needs to cheat on her husband Kevin -- at least, no obvious fault of Kevin's. He makes pancakes for dinner, is an enthusiastic and uncomplaining primary caretaker parent, and the sex scene in the Peyton family kitchen (on top of either Fruity Pebbles or Cap'N Crunch) suggests that the couple has a relatively active and healthy sex life (as active as any couple with two relatively small kids can have, at any rate).

But that lack of obvious character flaw on Kevin's part so far tells us more about Jackie, and allows us to ask more questions. Is she restless? Weak? She and Eddie get along well enough, as we see in the discussion of the "God particle," but would she even be sleeping with him if she didn't so badly need a painkiller supply?

Beyond Jackie, "Sweet-N-All" goes deeper into the rest of the cast(*). We discover that Coop isn't a 100% incompetent doctor -- and that this, in turn, threatens the worldview of Jackie's lunch buddy, Dr. O'Hara. (I love her description of Coop as "nothing but a big girl's blouse.") Zoey continues to be funny, but also seem human, as she understandably freaks out after Jackie gets slapped by a patient, and again after Jackie tries to pass the buck to her for the ear Jackie flushed in the pilot.

(*) Most of them, anyway. Anna Deavere Smith is again stuck with a goofy subplot, as Mrs. Akalitus accidentally takes one of Jackie's secret painkiller packets. It's also one of the few times in the episodes I've seen where I noticed them employing the obnoxious "Grey's Anatomy"-style Please Laugh Now music.

And speaking of the unflushed ear, while the second episode doesn't feature Jackie doing anything quite as extreme as that, or illegally turning a dead patient into an organ donor, we do still see her going beyond the line of duty (or simply crossing a line) a few times, as she tells off the skater kid's mom for putting his modeling career over his safety, and as she helps out the cab driver after his heart attack. What makes those moments work, where on other shows (like, again, "Hawthorne," which I'll be panning in tomorrow's column) the nurse just seems insufferably self-righteous, is the matter-of-fact nature of Edie Falco's performance in those moments. She sees the cabbie arresting and very calmly asks burnt-face Eileen to wheel herself back into the hospital to get help, then barely blinks before she offers the guy her very last painkiller packet. This isn't a big dramatic moment; this is just Jackie doing what she does -- which, more often than not, lives up to what she tells Zoey about how nurses are healers.

Some other thoughts:

• Unless they added it to the pilot after the version I saw, this is the first episode with the opening credits sequence. As with most Showtime and HBO series, it looks amazing, but I'm not at all a fan of the music that goes with it. It sounds too brassy, like an outtake from the scoring sessions for the "Boston Legal" theme, and it doesn't seem to match the visuals.

• Somebody reminded me that Dominic Fumusa, who plays Kevin, is another "Sopranos" alum, albeit far more obscure than Falco or Paul Schulze. He played Christopher's cousin, Greg Moltisanti, who introduced Chris to the Alicia Witt character (aka Greg's fiancee) in season one's "D-Girl." IMDb (which is admittedly always iffy about ages) has Fumusa as six years younger than Falco, but the age gap looks wider than that. Either way, I have to assume they cast a more boyish-looking actor as Jackie's husband for a reason.

• Not surprisingly, Mo-Mo isn't the only gay nurse at All Saints, as we're introduced to the imposing but very effeminate Thor, played by Stephen Wallem, who's related (the Showtime publicist thinks they're siblings) to "Nurse Jackie" co-creator/showrunner Linda Wallem.

Keeping in mind, once again, that we're limiting our discussion to only the episodes that have aired (as opposed to what's available On Demand a week in advance), what did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Fox fall premiere dates announced

Over at NJ.com, I have details on Fox's fall premiere dates, including a two-hour "House" premiere. Click here to read the full post

Double linkage: Reader mail + DJ & The Fro

I've got not one, but two stories up on NJ.com this morning, and one of them (for now, anyway) is online-only.

The first is my latest reader mailbag column, which includes letters on Kim Bauer's biological parentage, the return of "Mad Men" (mostly stuff discussed in last week's post on the subject), the allure of self-contained repeats vs. serialized ones, and more.

The second is an interview with Dave Jeser and Matt Silverstein, two Jersey-born comedy writers who created Comedy Central's "Drawn Together" and have a new daily strip show launching today at 5 on MTV called "DJ & The Fro," which is sort of a 21st century "Beavis & Butt-Head" about two losers who spend way too much time watching and commenting on viral videos. (There's an embedded clip in the story.) Click here to read the full post

Band of Brothers rewind, episode 5: "Crossroads"

We're up to episode five of our look back at "Band of Brothers." Spoilers for the fifth episode, "Crossroads," coming up just as soon as I do my John Wayne impression...

"Band of Brothers," like "From the Earth to the Moon" before it, was a labor of love for Tom Hanks, and I imagine he could have had his pick of directing assignments for both series. In each case, though, he took one for the team, selecting a transitional episode that may have been necessary to the larger story, but that almost certainly wouldn't be remembered as one of the series' high points. With "FtEttM," it was the opener, "Can We Do This?," which gave all the backstory on NASA in the pre-Apollo days. Here, it's "Crossroads," which spans the period from the end of Easy's time in Holland -- and, more importantly, the end of Dick Winters' tenure as Easy's commander -- through Easy being deployed, undermanned and undersupplied, to the town of Bastogne for what will be known as the Battle of the Bulge.

Now, that isn't to say these episodes lack memorable moments. "Can We Do This?" has a couple of great Mercury and Gemini recreations (I'm always fond of the Alan Shepard mission in particular), and "Crossroads" is bookended by two terrific sequences: Winters leading the charge on what would turn out to be his final combat mission with Easy, and the men of Easy trying to stock up on ammo from the shell-shocked troops retreating from the Ardennes.

But the middle section of the episode, while important, feels a little flat. Some of that may be by design -- trying to depict how bored and out-of-sorts Winters was once he got that promotion he didn't want -- but it means that "Crossroads" is lacking a vitality that's present throughout all the other episodes of the series, even the relatively low-key finale, "Points."

Still, that battle at the crossroads is pretty amazing, and illustrated just what an amazing leader -- not just a master tactician, but a guy willing to lead a charge rather than following one -- Easy lost after it. The image of Winters charging alone across the field, and then the men of Easy following in the thickening red smoke, is one of the series' most hauntingly beautiful.

After that, we deal with Winters' struggle to accept that he's now part of the Army bureaucracy, forced to do paperwork while Moose Heyliger gets to lead Easy on Operation Pegasus, then unable to do anything after Heyliger is wounded by friendly fire and replaced by "Foxhole" Norman Dike, who seems woefully unprepared for the challenges ahead.

The interlude in Paris, where Winters is more or less forced to go on a brief leave, is, I suppose, trying to depict Winters' difficulty in being even further removed from a combat context, and in trying to put away memories of killing when placed in a peaceful setting. But it goes on too long. Of all the actors/characters in the miniseries I'd have the least problem spending idle time with, it would be Damian Lewis as Winters, but watching him take a bath, ride the subway, etc., I couldn't help wishing we were instead seeing what was going on back at Mourmelon.

But after meandering for a while, we get the chilling closing scenes on the march to Bastogne, as Guarnere and the other men start to realize the kind of hell they're headed for. Michael Kamen's score has rarely been used as well as it is over that closing shot of the rolling convoy.

And if "Crossroads" is largely about set-up, at least it's setting up some amazing episodes.

Some other thoughts on "Crossroads":

• This episode gives us our first indication of the severity of Nixon's drinking problem -- and of Winters' refusal to indulge the side effects of it, even as he didn't object to the drinking itself. Winters really did dump a pitcher of Nixon's own urine on him to wake him up, though it's not clear in either real or TV case if he knew what was in the pitcher.

• The real Liebgott apparently had a reputation for being rough with prisoners -- as the only Jew in the company, I imagine he had a chip on his shoulder about the Germans, even if he didn't yet know the full extent of the Final Solution -- which is why Winters takes all but one of his bullets. (Oddly, that's how Andy Griffith always treated Barney Fife, but there he was never afraid of ol' Barney shooting the prisoners, just himself.)

• Pvt. Webster, who got wounded at the crossroads and will now disappear for several episodes, was an aspiring writer whose journal of his time in combat is one of the go-to sources for Ambrose's book. So it makes sense, and is amusing if you understand this detail, that he'd be annoyed with himself for uttering a cliche like "They got me!" after being shot.

• While Webster is gone, Buck Compton returns from the four-hole buttocks wound he got in "Replacements," but it's clear he's a changed, haunted man from his time in the hospital, and Neal McDonough does a hell of a job depicting the transformation from the cocky, outgoing Buck of the earlier episodes.

• I had completely forgotten the bit about Guarnere returning from a jeep accident. Feels like one of those situations where they had to cut the scene where he actually gets sidelined, but needed to keep in the return scene because of the other exposition in it.

• The movie the men are watching when they're ordered to Bastogne is "Seven Sinners," with John Wayne, and with Marlene Dietrich doing her usual butch cabaret thing.

• Thoughts on the Jimmy Fallon cameo? Maybe it's because I've recently warmed to his talk show, but I don't mind it that much. Yes, it's a little jarring to see a relatively recognizable, incongruous face in the middle of these men we've now started to believe as their characters, but it's a small part, and the overall troop transport scene is so well done that it's a relief to have anyone bringing these guys some ammo, even if it's the mumbly guy from "SNL."

Coming up next (probably Thursday): "Bastogne," maybe my favorite episode of the series, as we get a medic's-eye-view of the Battle of the Bulge.

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

Sports Night: A programming note

For this coming week, and possibly the week after, I'm going to review two episodes of "Sports Night" on Wednesday instead of one.

People have been requesting that I go at a faster pace so we get through more of the series before the summer is out. But the actual driving factor behind this (possibly temporary) shift is that I was so unhappy with "Intellectual Property," which would be the episode I'd review next week, and didn't want to waste a whole week of this project on it. I thought I'd double it up with whatever the episode after that is, but that one is "Mary Pat Shelby," which is itself the first half of a two-parter, so that made no sense. So instead, I'm going to double up "The Hungry and the Hunted" and "Intellectual Property," which are both fairly heavy on the Dana/Casey stuff, and if the two-in-one format seems workable, I'll try it again the following Wednesday with "Mary Pat Shelby" and "The Head Coach, Dinner and the Morning Mail." After that, we'll see if I can keep working at that rate.

It seems like most of you are way ahead of my one-a-week pace, anyway, so hopefully nobody will be too out of sorts by the shift. Click here to read the full post

Pushing Daisies, "Kerplunk": Cleaning up on the way out

So, thoughts on the "Pushing Daisies" finale? Do you think that the combination of Jim Dale, stock footage and computer animation were enough to give the show proper closure under the circumstances? Click here to read the full post

Kings, "Brotherhood": Cain you help a brother out?

So "Kings" came back tonight, for the start of its Summer Burn-Off Theatre run(*), with a fairly strong episode. Yes, there was a lot of the weaker younger characters, but there was more than enough of McShane, Eamonn Walker, Dylan Baker, Wes Studi and Susanna Thompson to compensate.

(*) And I'll believe they'll air all the remaining episodes when they get done airing them. If the ratings for this are as low as I assume they're going to be, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see "Kings" replaced in a week or two by a weekly "I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!" recap show.

But as this is a dead show walking, I can't find it in me to do much more than acknowledge the presence of each episode and move on. Talk about it as much as you like, if you're still watching at this point. Click here to read the full post

Royal Pains, "There Will Be Food": The gluten glutton

Spoilers for episode two of "Royal Pains" coming up just as soon as I give you a severance check...

Even though I believe "There Will Be Food" was produced as the series' third episode, rather than its second, it felt like an extra pilot -- as if someone on the show or at USA felt they had neglected to establish the "give to the poor" aspect of Hank's new Robin Hood existence in the original pilot(*), and that they'd best do that quickly before telling other stories.

(*)That, of course, ignores the fact that the pilot already made clear that Hank was doing a public service by catering to these rich people, by keeping them from wasting hospital resources on minor problems.

Because they had to spend so much time on additional premise-building, and because the ballerina's case didn't offer any opportunities for Hank to do his Dr. MacGyver thing, "There Will Be Food" was less entertaining than the real pilot. On the plus side, though, I thought Mark Feuerstein was much more relaxed and engaging here than he was a week ago. Whether or not he's too bland to carry a series is still an open question, but a Hank who embraces this new life, even a little, is more interesting than a Hank who's always "aw, shucks, this isn't really what I do."

What did everybody else think? And are you surprised they did the Michael Westen-ish expositional narration at the top, and then did a long credits sequence with theme song on top of that? What is this, 1983? Click here to read the full post

Reviewing (or not) 'True Blood' season two

I've been having some technical issues with the work computer that's prevented me from posting today's column, which offers my review of "True Blood" season two. I have a lot on my plate today, so I don't know that I'll get a chance to rectify this, particularly since the column is more or less an 800-word expansion on the idea that Sookie Stackhouse is too stupid to live, and I have no patience for her or the show that's been built around her.

In other words, don't expect to see "True Blood" in the blogging rotation this summer. Click here to read the full post

The Wire, Season 2, Episode 3: "Hot Shots" (Newbies edition)

Once again, we're revisiting season two of "The Wire" in two versions: one for people who have watched the entire series and want to be able to discuss it from beginning to end, and those who aren't all the way there yet and don't want to be spoiled about later developments. This is the newbie post (click here for the veteran version).

Spoilers for episode three, "Hot Shots," coming up just as soon as I dump all my telecom stocks...

"Mishy gishy gushy gushy mishy mushy mooshy motherf---er." -Lester

We're still a long way from what will pass as major progress in the story arcs of season two, but "Hot Shots" features a variety of characters from the different worlds "The Wire" follows making one kind of dangerous power play or another:

• Nick Sobotka, fed up with not getting enough shifts down at the docks and under pressure from baby mama Amy to do right by her and their daughter, decides to go in with Ziggy and Johnny 50 on a scam to steal a can full of digital cameras and sell them to Vondas' associate, Double-G.

• Valchek, with much prodding from Prez, realizes he's been pacified with a detail of humps and threatens to ugly up Ervin Burrell's coronation as commissioner if Erv won't give him a real detail, led by Cedric Daniels -- who has just made a bold move of his own in deciding to retire from the force to put his law degree to better use.

• Failing to get anywhere with the polyglot crew of the Atlantic Light, Bunk, Lester and Beadie Russell agree to let the boat sail out of Philadelphia, even though they don't have any better leads in the case of the dead girls.

• McNulty resolves to identify the girl he found in the water so at least one of the 14 can be spared the indignity of a Jane Doe disposal.

• Avon and Stringer put together a plan that will get Tilghman off of Wee-Bey's back -- and, Avon implies to D'Angelo, a plan that will lead to Avon and D getting earlier releases -- by swapping out his usual drug supply for poison.

• We hear two of the happiest words in the English language -- "Omar back." -- and then see the man who makes the grandest gestures in "The Wire" universe decide to partner up (along with new boyfriend Dante) with a pair of lesbian thieves now that he's back in Charm City.

Omar's mostly a sideshow for now (albeit a damned welcome one), so let's focus on the other happenings, starting with young Nick.

This season is going to turn into his story at least as much as it is Frank's, if not moreso. Frank and Horseface and Ott and those other guys came up in an era when the port was still a relatively thriving place, where there was more than enough work to go around. It lived up to the unwritten American promise that David Simon likes to talk about in regards to this season, the one that says something like, "You may not be highly-educated, or even highly-skilled, but if you're willing to work, and work hard, America will find a place for you." Nick, on the other hand, is coming of age after that promise has been broken, with the industrial base and the blue-collar employment it offers shrinking by the day. Whether the promise ever really existed or not, it's one that Nick has been taught from a young age, growing up in this family and this world, and now he's finding out that it doesn't apply to him. So what's he supposed to do?

We know "The Wire" is fond of its parallel structures, and "Hot Shots" starts drawing lines between Nick and D'Angelo Barksdale. Both are nephews of the detail's main target. Both have kids with women they like well enough, just not enough to really want to marry them. Both are finding that the family business isn't as rosy as they were raised to believe, and both are letting their relatives suck them deeper into a life of crime than they intend.

It's one thing for Nick to go get the can number from Vondas to pass it along to Frank, even after discovering that they're aiding and abetting human trafficking; it's something else entirely for Nick and Ziggy to start stealing cans themselves and selling the contents to The Greek and his people. But when there aren't enough ships to work, too many guys with seniority, and pressure coming from Amy to do something for their makeshift family, Nick decides he has no choice but to become an active criminal.

What Nick doesn't know is that the police pressure on the port is about to get a lot tighter, now that Valchek is arranging to have the hump detail replaced with actual police. It's hilarious -- and more than a little sad -- to see Stan listen to Prez's story of the Barksdale case and extract only the realization that he can use this knowledge to get over on Burrell. Imagine what this guy could accomplish if he actually cared about anything other than self-preservation. Of course, if he did, he likely wouldn't have the power that he does, which is why the show's version of the Baltimore PD remains a mess.

And elsewhere in the department, it's equally funny -- and, in this case, frustrating -- to watch Bunk, Lester and Beadie struggle to make any headway on a case that we all know, based on the end of last week's episode, is probably a lost cause. Lester is usually so cool and composed and erudite that it was hilarious to see him lose his cool and curse out the Atlantic Light crew. But Bunk and Lester still have 14 red names to try to turn black, and they're nothing if not tenacious -- as, it seems, is Beadie Russell.

Maybe my favorite scene in the episode is McNulty riding into the Homicide office on his white horse to save the day with his brilliant insights -- only to find out that Bunk and Lester beat him to all those insights. That speaks to both the cleverness of the current Homicide duo and the ego of Jimmy, but it also is a reminder that Jimmy, for all his narcissism, does mean well. He instigates the Barksdale detail to prove how smart he is, but he does recognize on some level that these are dangerous people who should be stopped. Here, his decision to put a name to the Jane Doe from the water is classic Jimmy, in the good and bad sense; he's trying to do right by this one girl and her family, but he's also doing it so he can feel a little like a cop while he's stuck riding the boat.

And Avon seems determined to keep playing kingpin even while he's stuck in prison. There was some debate in the later seasons about whether Avon was more or less ruthless than some other criminals the series introduced, and I think the people trying to argue for Avon as a relative softie might want to revisit the final shot of this episode. Avon has just arranged to fatally poison a bunch of convicts who've done nothing to him, just to get back at Tilghman (and, perhaps, to finagle his way into an even shorter sentence), and he sits calmly in his little corner suite, enjoying the book he took from the library when he went to see D, not a bit of concern for all the collateral damage he's created. (McNulty, for all his faults, at least feels bad when he learns that Bunk and Lester got stuck with the dead girls because of him.)

On the chess board that is season two, the pieces are starting to move into place. Get ready for some clashes, soon.

Some other thoughts on "Hot Shots":

• Poor Ziggy. Even when he pulls off (with a lot of help from Nick and Johnny 50) a successful and relatively lucrative theft, he can't enjoy the moment, because he has to be at the bar to witness Dolores handing cash from Frank to the hard-up stevedore who'd been thinking about switching unions. Everywhere Ziggy looks, he gets reminders that his father cares more about the union than he does about his own son.

• By now, the show's stylistic template is so firmly established that it's a little jarring to watch the "mishy gishy" montage sequence, funny though it is. Yes, it detailed Lester and Bunk's mounting frustration in short order, but "The Wire" usually isn't about telling you things in short order. Not bad, but different.

• Is there a "no animals were harmed during production" disclaimer at the end of this episode, or did they actually film a dog eating a rat? Either way... ugh!

• Loved Stringer making stock portfolio decisions based on what he sees down at the Pit. But given the way the cell phone market has only gotten bigger in the years since, was this a poor business decision on his part?

• Speaking of Stringer, I don't want to overlook his seduction of Donette. He's usually depicted as being so consumed with business that it can be jarring to see him just act like a man, with needs and a libido. But Idris Elba played it well; just because he's taking his shirt off and kissing somebody, doesn't mean he stops being Stringer Bell.

• I want to hire Jay Landsman to be my own personal fashion critic. "Tweedy impertinence" is never not funny.

• Confusion over "prostate" vs. "prostrate" seems to be a favorite joke of language-obsessed TV scribes. David Milch got a lot of mileage out of Sipowicz confusing one with the other, and here Landsman laughs a lot at Crutchfield using the wrong one in a report.

• How do you feel about Nick using an old-fashioned phrase like "I haven't got a pot to piss in"? Does it feel right (like this is the world Nick grew up in, and/or he thinks that's how a stevedore's supposed to talk), or is it a too self-conscious attempt to link the character back to the days of "On the Waterfront"?

Coming up next: "Hard Cases," in which Burrell tries to talk Daniels out of retirement, Avon tries to exploit the Tilghman situation, and McNulty reaches out to an old friend for help finding Omar.

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

The Wire, Season 2, Episode 3: "Hot Shots" (Veterans edition)

Once again, we're revisiting season two of "The Wire" in two versions: one for people who have watched the entire series and want to be able to discuss it from beginning to end, and those who aren't all the way there yet and don't want to be spoiled about later developments. This is the veteran post (click here for the newbie version).

Spoilers for episode three, "Hot Shots," coming up just as soon as I dump all my telecom stocks...

"Mishy gishy gushy gushy mishy mushy mooshy motherf---er." -Lester

We're still a long way from what will pass as major progress in the story arcs of season two, but "Hot Shots" features a variety of characters from the different worlds "The Wire" follows making one kind of dangerous power play or another:

• Nick Sobotka, fed up with not getting enough shifts down at the docks and under pressure from baby mama Amy to do right by her and their daughter, decides to go in with Ziggy and Johnny 50 on a scam to steal a can full of digital cameras and sell them to Vondas' associate, Double-G.

• Valchek, with much prodding from Prez, realizes he's been pacified with a detail of humps and threatens to ugly up Ervin Burrell's coronation as commissioner if Erv won't give him a real detail, led by Cedric Daniels -- who has just made a bold move of his own in deciding to retire from the force to put his law degree to better use.

• Failing to get anywhere with the polyglot crew of the Atlantic Light, Bunk, Lester and Beadie Russell agree to let the boat sail out of Philadelphia, even though they don't have any better leads in the case of the dead girls.

• McNulty resolves to identify the girl he found in the water so at least one of the 14 can be spared the indignity of a Jane Doe disposal.

• Avon and Stringer put together a plan that will get Tilghman off of Wee-Bey's back -- and, Avon implies to D'Angelo, a plan that will lead to Avon and D getting earlier releases -- by swapping out his usual drug supply for poison.

• We hear two of the happiest words in the English language -- "Omar back." -- and then see the man who makes the grandest gestures in "The Wire" universe decide to partner up (along with new boyfriend Dante) with a pair of lesbian thieves now that he's back in Charm City.

Omar's mostly a sideshow for now (albeit a damned welcome one), so let's focus on the other happenings, starting with young Nick.

This season is going to turn into his story at least as much as it is Frank's, if not moreso. Frank and Horseface and Ott and those other guys came up in an era when the port was still a relatively thriving place, where there was more than enough work to go around. It lived up to the unwritten American promise that David Simon likes to talk about in regards to this season, the one that says something like, "You may not be highly-educated, or even highly-skilled, but if you're willing to work, and work hard, America will find a place for you." Nick, on the other hand, is coming of age after that promise has been broken, with the industrial base and the blue-collar employment it offers shrinking by the day. Whether the promise ever really existed or not, it's one that Nick has been taught from a young age, growing up in this family and this world, and now he's finding out that it doesn't apply to him. So what's he supposed to do?

We know "The Wire" is fond of its parallel structures, and "Hot Shots" starts drawing lines between Nick and D'Angelo Barksdale. Both are nephews of the detail's main target. Both have kids with women they like well enough, just not enough to really want to marry them. Both are finding that the family business isn't as rosy as they were raised to believe, and both are letting their relatives suck them deeper into a life of crime than they intend.

It's one thing for Nick to go get the can number from Vondas to pass it along to Frank, even after discovering that they're aiding and abetting human trafficking; it's something else entirely for Nick and Ziggy to start stealing cans themselves and selling the contents to The Greek and his people. But when there aren't enough ships to work, too many guys with seniority, and pressure coming from Amy to do something for their makeshift family, Nick decides he has no choice but to become an active criminal.

What Nick doesn't know is that the police pressure on the port is about to get a lot tighter, now that Valchek is arranging to have the hump detail replaced with actual police. It's hilarious -- and more than a little sad -- to see Stan listen to Prez's story of the Barksdale case and extract only the realization that he can use this knowledge to get over on Burrell. Imagine what this guy could accomplish if he actually cared about anything other than self-preservation. Of course, if he did, he likely wouldn't have the power that he does, which is why the show's version of the Baltimore PD remains a mess.

And elsewhere in the department, it's equally funny -- and, in this case, frustrating -- to watch Bunk, Lester and Beadie struggle to make any headway on a case that we all know, based on the end of last week's episode, is probably a lost cause. Lester is usually so cool and composed and erudite that it was hilarious to see him lose his cool and curse out the Atlantic Light crew. But Bunk and Lester still have 14 red names to try to turn black, and they're nothing if not tenacious -- as, it seems, is Beadie Russell.

Maybe my favorite scene in the episode is McNulty riding into the Homicide office on his white horse to save the day with his brilliant insights -- only to find out that Bunk and Lester beat him to all those insights. That speaks to both the cleverness of the current Homicide duo and the ego of Jimmy, but it also is a reminder that Jimmy, for all his narcissism, does mean well. He instigates the Barksdale detail to prove how smart he is, but he does recognize on some level that these are dangerous people who should be stopped. Here, his decision to put a name to the Jane Doe from the water is classic Jimmy, in the good and bad sense; he's trying to do right by this one girl and her family, but he's also doing it so he can feel a little like a cop while he's stuck riding the boat.

And Avon seems determined to keep playing kingpin even while he's stuck in prison. There was some debate in the later seasons about whether Avon was more or less ruthless than some other criminals the series introduced, and I think the people trying to argue for Avon as a relative softie might want to revisit the final shot of this episode. Avon has just arranged to fatally poison a bunch of convicts who've done nothing to him, just to get back at Tilghman (and, perhaps, to finagle his way into an even shorter sentence), and he sits calmly in his little corner suite, enjoying the book he took from the library when he went to see D, not a bit of concern for all the collateral damage he's created. (McNulty, for all his faults, at least feels bad when he learns that Bunk and Lester got stuck with the dead girls because of him.)

On the chess board that is season two, the pieces are starting to move into place. Get ready for some clashes, soon.

Some other thoughts on "Hot Shots":

• Poor Ziggy. Even when he pulls off (with a lot of help from Nick and Johnny 50) a successful and relatively lucrative theft, he can't enjoy the moment, because he has to be at the bar to witness Dolores handing cash from Frank to the hard-up stevedore who'd been thinking about switching unions. Everywhere Ziggy looks, he gets reminders that his father cares more about the union than he does about his own son.

• By now, the show's stylistic template is so firmly established that it's a little jarring to watch the "mishy gishy" montage sequence, funny though it is. Yes, it detailed Lester and Bunk's mounting frustration in short order, but "The Wire" usually isn't about telling you things in short order. Not bad, but different.

• Is there a "no animals were harmed during production" disclaimer at the end of this episode, or did they actually film a dog eating a rat? Either way... ugh!

• Loved Stringer making stock portfolio decisions based on what he sees down at the Pit. But given the way the cell phone market has only gotten bigger in the years since, was this a poor business decision on his part?

• Speaking of Stringer, I don't want to overlook his seduction of Donette. He's usually depicted as being so consumed with business that it can be jarring to see him just act like a man, with needs and a libido. But Idris Elba played it well; just because he's taking his shirt off and kissing somebody, doesn't mean he stops being Stringer Bell.

• I want to hire Jay Landsman to be my own personal fashion critic. "Tweedy impertinence" is never not funny.

• Confusion over "prostate" vs. "prostrate" seems to be a favorite joke of language-obsessed TV scribes. David Milch got a lot of mileage out of Sipowicz confusing one with the other, and here Landsman laughs a lot at Crutchfield using the wrong one in a report.

• How do you feel about Nick using an old-fashioned phrase like "I haven't got a pot to piss in"? Does it feel right (like this is the world Nick grew up in, and/or he thinks that's how a stevedore's supposed to talk), or is it a too self-conscious attempt to link the character back to the days of "On the Waterfront"?

And now we've come to the veterans-only section of the review, where I talk about how certain parts of this episode echo down the line of the season and the series:

• In agreeing to Valchek's demand to keep Daniels on the force, Burrell unwittingly sets up the circumstances under which he'll lose his position as commissioner. (You could argue that Carcetti would have looked to dump Burrell no matter what, but having Daniels around as a counter-example of what a cop could be doing certainly didn't help Erv's case to stay.)

• I imagine this is a subject we're going to be talking about for the next several episodes, and maybe even into the season three reviews (which I'm hoping to do next summer so I have the complete series done), but how big a factor does the fling with Donette play into Stringer's decision to have D'Angelo killed? Is it the majority factor? Minority?

• Dante pouts over the presence of Kimmy and Tosha, worried that Omar might leave him for one of them (even though Omar "don't bed no babies") and jealous of anyone splitting the attention. It feels appropriate then, even though the act isn't intentional on Dante's part, that he winds up killing Tosha with a stray round during the gunfight outside the Barksdale stash house in season three.

• I had forgotten it took us this long to meet Blind Butchie, and will take even longer for us to find out his connection to Omar.

• Jimmy will really regret not reading the separation agreement, but he's too blinded by his belief that Elena wants to take him back. (And Elena seems to recognize this belief and is playing along to get what she wants from Jimmy.) At the same time, "Hot Shots" offers up yet another hint that Jimmy and Beadie will wind up together, as they briefly bond over their mutual discomfort about the girls being stuck as Jane Does.

Coming up next: "Hard Cases," in which Burrell tries to talk Daniels out of retirement, Avon tries to exploit the Tilghman situation, and McNulty reaches out to an old friend for help finding Omar.

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

Burn Notice, "Question and Answer": Nightmare on Michael's street

Spoilers for tonight's "Burn Notice" coming up just as soon as I snort lactose...

"Loving Michael is always trench warfare." -Madeline

"Question and Answer" continues to get good mileage out of Michael being a man without a country, or a protector, by introducing Moon Bloodgood as Detective Paxson, aka "Michael's worst nightmare." She's very much in the mold of Carla from last year -- gorgeous actress, knowing more about Michael than he wants her to know, and frequently getting in the way of his jobs -- and while I don't think Bloodgood's nearly as good an actress as Tricia Helfer, I like the way they're using the character so far. We've talked so much in the past about why the cops never seem interested in this guy who's been blowing up half of Miami -- now, thanks to Management cutting its strings, we have a cop all up in Michael's business.

Still, the heart of "Burn Notice" is and should be the episodic missions, and we got a very good one here. The kidnapping case gave all the characters some nice moments -- I was particularly amused by Fi helping the mom meditate by feeding her a fantasy about killing the kidnappers ("You're taking a rock from the stream...") -- and Michael and Sam's reverse interrogation scam was a great two-hander by Jeffrey Donovan and Bruce Campbell. The junkie snitch ID was one of Donovan's better cover performances to date, and Campbell had fun playing dirty cop. And, as Matt Nix said in our interview, "there probably aren't other TV shows where the two main characters are beating the crap out of each other for the benefit of the bad guy." It does end, once again, with the bad guys being tricked into killing each other, which Nix said he was going to try to do less of this year, but it felt less like a solution to the problem (Michael had already grabbed the kid by then) than a public service, so I was okay with it.

I also continue to love what they're doing with Madeline. By making Sam her temporary roommate (which also gives us the delightful image of Sam talking to his borrowed car) on the heels of him blowing up her sun room at the end of last season, the writers have knocked down most of the remaining barriers between Michael's mom and his work life, and it's fun to watch a Madeline who knows pretty much everything.

Good stuff all around, and this wasn't even the best of the three episodes USA sent out for review. (That would be next week.)

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

Chuck vs the Sepinwall, take two

For those of you making the pilgrimage to Comic-Con in San Diego, I'm going to be moderating the "Chuck" panel. My first trip to SDCC; any tips on what to do when I'm not interrogating Schwartz, Fedak and company?

(And I have no details beyond my own presence.) Click here to read the full post

Band of Brothers rewind, episode 4: "Replacements"

Okay, we're up to episode four of "Band of Brothers." Spoilers for "Replacements" coming up just as soon as I remember to stop throwing left-handed...

In the initial run of "Band of Brothers," "Replacements" came in the middle of a trio of episodes I wasn't especially fond of. But where "Carentan" and, to a lesser extent, "Crossroads" suffer from problems I still see all these years later, my issue with "Replacements" turns out to have been largely about unfamiliarity with the characters. My recollection was that it might have been stronger had it been told primarily from the point of view of either a Toccoa veteran (presumably Bull Randleman) dealing with the replacements, or of a replacement (maybe Hashey?) in awe of these men who jumped into Normandy. But when I watched it this time, having a much stronger idea of who everybody was, I could just appreciate it as a strong ensemble episode that managed to tell both sides of that story while also giving a snapshot of Easy's role in the mess that was Operation Market Garden, the first time in the war that the 101st got its rear end kicked.

"Replacements" is another episode filled with spectacle, from the gorgeous daytime jump into Holland through the impromptu parade through the tank battle between the Brits and Germans. (And the battle alone has a bunch of amazing technical beats, notably Bull trying to crawl away from the fiery tank, in a scene evoking Harrison Ford's getaway in "The Fugitive," but constructed by director David Nutter more like a Spielberg set piece, in the way it seems to be taking forever for the damn thing to slide down the hill.)

But some of the best things about it are the small moments, like Guarnere baiting the replacements into mocking Bull so he can scold them for it, or Bull showing Garcia how to carry his gun on the jump, and looking very much like a father showing his son how to tie a necktie. For the biggest guy in the cast, playing a character known as Bull, Michael Cudlitz delivers a very economical performance in his biggest spotlight of the series. And even the moments that seem like they have to have been invented, like Nixon surviving the headshot because of his helmet, or Bull having the bayonet fight with the German in the barn, turn up right there in the pages of the Ambrose book. (Though Ambrose makes no mention of Bull hiding out with a Dutch farmer and his attractive but frightened daughter.)

The tension between the Toccoa men and the replacements will be an issue for the rest of the series, and I liked the way it was handled here. Some replacements are absorbed quickly into the orbit of the veterans, like Babe Heffron (who shares a Philly background with Guarnere); some will slowly assimilate themselves, like Hashey; and some won't survive long enough to fit in, like Miller. For those of you watching the series for the first time, get used to the influx of new faces, particularly once we approach the Battle of the Bulge episodes.

Some other thoughts:

• Who do you think has the most inverse ratio of "Band of Brothers" screen time to current fame: Simon Pegg (blink and you'll miss him in the first couple of episodes as Easy's original 1st Sergeant), or James McAvoy, who has a scene or two at the start of this one as Private Miller, before dying of a grenade during the firefight?

• Two notes about Buck Compton in this episode. The first is that, despite Winters' admonishment against gambling with the men back in "Currahee," Buck opens the episode hustling (with the help of the ever-hilarious George Luz) poor Heffron at darts. The second is that the bit with Malarkey and the others dragging Buck away from the attack on a door because he was too heavy to carry is undercut, just a little, by the fact that Neal McDonough doesn't look nearly like the biggest man in Easy Company, which the real Buck (who played on the UCLA baseball team with Jackie Robinson) was. McDonough is so wonderful in every other aspect of the role that I don't want to ding him much for this, but the gag works much better if the actor were built more like Michael Cudlitz, who's taller and broader than McDonough.

• "Replacements" also features the first appearance of Eion Bailey as Harvard-educated PFC David Webster (for you newbies, he's the guy who gives the chocolate to the little boy). The first time through the series, Webster's role confused me -- here, he's new and seems like he could be a replacement, while a later episode will make a big deal out of Webster having been at Camp Toccoa -- and I wished they could have found a way to include Bailey somewhere in "Currahee." But in re-reading Ambrose's book, it turned out that while Webster was at Toccoa, it was with another company, and he didn't technically transfer into Easy until after they were pulled off the line and sent back to England (the period depicted at the tail end of "Carentan" and the start of this episode). Given the number of other characters who had to be introduced, I'm not sure what could have been done differently.

• Cobb, the soldier who gives Miller a hard time for wearing the Normandy pin, gets a bit of a raw deal in the miniseries based on my reading of the book. Both here and in "The Last Patrol," he's depicted as a bit of a bully, and a cowardly one at that. While Ambrose does write about Cobb's moment of fear depicted here, it was after the firefight, not during it, and Cobb was a veteran Army man whom Webster described as "invariably good-natured."

• If you want a better sense of the scope of Market Garden, and the many ways in which it became FUBAR, try to track down a copy of the DVD of "A Bridge Too Far," Richard Attenborough's 1977 movie about the mission. It's not a great movie, but it has one of the most absurdly star-studded casts ever, particularly given where all these men were in the careers at the time: Michael Caine, Sean Connery, James Caan, Gene Hackman, Robert Redford, Laurence Olivier, Ryan O'Neal, Elliott Gould, Anthony Hopkins, Maximillian Schell, etc.

Coming up next (probably on Monday): The Tom Hanks-directed "Crossroads," another Dick Winters spotlight.

Keeping in mind once again that, for the sake of the newbies, we're trying to be as vague as possible (which isn't always possible) about who lives and who dies, what did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

In Plain Sight, "Duplicate Bridge": Leaving Norman

Because "In Plain Sight" airs at 10 on a Sunday and is one of those series that Hulu can't show until 8 days after it airs, it's often taken me a few days or more to get to each episode of this season, by which point it no longer feels worth the effort to blog about it. (Or I'm tied up with more regularly-scheduled features.) But this week's episode, which I finally finished a few minutes ago, was worth commenting at any time or place, and not just because it guest starred the great Clarke Peters, aka Cool Lester Smooth from "The Wire." Spoilers coming up just as soon as I write what I think you think is my biggest flaw...

"Duplicate Bridge" wasn't exactly an "Only 'In Plain Sight' could tell this" kind of story. With a few tweaks, I could imagine it on one of at least a half-dozen other crime dramas. But where that ordinarily signals one of the series' weaker efforts, this was one of the show's best -- suggesting that the problem with the "Was a witness killed because of his old life?" episodes isn't just that they're generic, but that they're not very well-executed.

Here, the writers (specifically, Lynne E. Litt) came up with an interesting character in Norman (played wonderfully, as you'd expect, by Peters), a story with several unexpected twists (specifically, that Norman was responsible for the bridge collapse) and, most importantly, centered it all around Marshall for once. Mary's a good character and obviously the show's bread-and-butter, but it was nice to see her take a backseat in this one, to have Marshall mostly be right about everything (he didn't suspect Norman's double/triple life, but he damn sure knew Norman was going to blow up the bridge, with or without Mary on it), and to see that Frederick Weller could more than carry an episode, and go toe-to-toe with Peters while doing it.

After a bad season premiere, I've been mostly enjoying this second season of "In Plain Sight," but "Duplicate Bridge" was a cut above. Nicely-done, people.

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

'Mad Men' coming back August 16

I hadn't expected to change the blog logo so soon -- or to use this specific one -- but today AMC announced the "Mad Men" season three premiere date as August 16 at 10 (with limited commercial interruption for the premiere), so I couldn't help myself.

For those wondering when there would be a season two marathon, it'll be on August 10 starting at 7 a.m. Click here to read the full post

Sports Night rewind, episode 2: "The Apology"

Okay, let's continue with our look back at the early episodes of "Sports Night." Spoilers for episode two, "The Apology," coming up just as soon as I jinx a no-hitter...

"That was 11 years ago tonight, and I just wanted to say I'm sorry, Sam. You deserved better in my hands. And I apologize. That's all." -Dan

Whenever I think back on "Sports Night," Dan's apology to his brother is almost always the first scene that comes to mind. It's such a terrific synthesis of all the things the show did well:

• It doesn't go where you expect it to. After the earlier scene with the suits from Continental Corp., you assume it's going to be a preachy monologue about the damage being done by the War on Drugs, but instead Dan tells the story of his brother Sam and reminds us that the political and the personal can have a complicated relationship.

• It's a nice piece of writing from Aaron Sorkin, and an even better piece of acting by Josh Charles. Because Sam's story is coming to us with no introduction, it could feel like a shameless tug at our heartstrings, but it doesn't. It amplifies and alters how we viewed Dan in the earlier scenes, and Charles plays the hell out of it. Sorkin can over-write at times, but this is nice and spare.

• It ties in perfectly with the comic relief subplot about Casey's fear of not being cool. The subplot on its own still feels a little flimsy, like Sorkin was trying to do a more traditional comedy bit to please the network, but when Casey slides his chair over to Dan and starts talking about The Starland Vocal Band -- effectively telling him, "I'm here for you, man, but I know you didn't want to talk about that, so have a laugh at my expense instead" -- it's a thing of beauty. (And it's made that much funnier/sweeter because they went to the trouble of getting the rights to play "Afternoon Delight" under the scene.)

In addition to giving Dan a spotlight after the pilot's Casey-centric-ness, "The Apology" is also a very good Isaac episode. As with Leo on "The West Wing," Isaac's role here is to be the grown-up in a world of overgrown children, and Robert Guillaume, as you would expect, does a terrific job at playing both the comic and serious side of that role. It's funny when Isaac has no patience for Casey's existential dilemma about being cool, and his presence in the meeting with the network lawyers lends gravity to Dan's side of things. (And the best moment of all is after the suits leave and Isaac deservedly gives Dan grief for his most pretentious comment, telling him, "And because I love you, I can say this: No rich young white guy has ever gotten anywhere with me comparing himself to Rosa Parks.") I grew up on Guillaume in "Benson," but it wasn't until "Sports Night" that I had a real appreciation for the man's range and depth.

Some other thoughts on "The Apology":

• On the negative side, this episode introduces the Unresolved Sexual Tension between Dana and Casey, and while the actors have good chemistry and the storyline occasionally yielded good moments (notably "You're wearing my shirt"), for the most part it featured the two of them acting like idiots, and I cringe during most of those scenes. (The Dana/Casey stuff from next week's "The Hungry and the Hunted" is all but unwatchable.)

• The Jeremy/Natalie relationship, on the other hand, is often very funny, and here leads into more Casey comedy goodness as he lets Natalie talk him into helping Jeremy edit down his first, monstrously-long highlight package.

• Unless I missed one in the pilot, this episode gives us our first mention of Luther Sachs, the mysterious owner of Continental Corp. (and, therefore, CSC). Many bad things will be done (or attempted) in Sachs's name over the course of the series.

• I had forgotten how much I liked Kayla Blake as Kim. Wish she worked more after the series ended.

• Sorkin has a unique authorial voice, and he often struggles when trying to write as anyone else. The alleged Howard Stern joke -- "Dan Rydell lends a whole new meaning to the word 'highlight.'" -- doesn't sound remotely like something Stern would say.

Coming up next Wednesday: "The Hungry and the Hunted," in which Jeremy gets The Call, Dana wears a swank dress, and Dan professes his ignorance of soccer.

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

'Top Chef Masters' review, 'The Shield' season 7 on DVD - Sepinwall on TV

I don't do two-fer columns much anymore, but today I review both the debut of "Top Chef Masters" and "The Shield" season 7 DVD set. Click here to read the full post

Rescue Me, "Control": Bad old Tommy

Spoilers for tonight's "Rescue Me" coming up just as soon as I absorb a muffin...

"I'm not an alcoholic." -Tommy

I feel like I may have to spend the rest of this season -- and maybe the series (unless the stress of producing 22 episodes in a year leads them all to give up the ghost after this) -- prefacing each review with a list of the things I'm trying to ignore so I can enjoy the good stuff. For "Control," that list would have to include the Teddy stuff in the VA hospital(*) and most of the stuff with Sheila.

(*) Actually, I think I'm done with that storyline, which has nothing to do with the show, always ends with the cheapest and most obvious punchline, and is just an excuse to keep Lenny Clarke (and Tatum O'Neal) hanging around. Somebody let me know if/when it starts tying back into the main story again, if ever, so I know if I should stop fast-forwarding through it.

Sheila's attempt to control Tommy's drinking was moderately less annoying than her seduction of him last week, but it still feels like her great monologue about 9/11 was just a blip on the radar, and she and Janet are back to being characters the writers don't know what to do with except make as broadly comic and hateful as possible. And that's a shame, because Callie Thorne showed that she's capable of so much more.

Speaking of 9/11, I'm starting to worry that we're dropping away from all that material. Sure, there was the joke here about Franco decking the guy he was told hated 9/11 conspiracy theorists, and Sean still has his kidney cancer, but we haven't seen Genevieve in while, have we? (IMDb has Karina Lombard listed as being in the last few episodes -- which, admittedly, I watched a few months ago -- but I don't remember her in them.) It'd be disappointing if this was all of that just a pretext for Tommy's latest fall off the wagon.

That said, the idea of Tommy trying to chart a path between "sober" and "alcoholic" is an interesting one (albeit one that I assume is doomed to failure), and worked well for both comic and dramatic purposes as he dealt with the rest of the firehouse. Those scenes, and the hilarious interludes with Sean and his family (and then the sweet moment where his mom told him about her own cancer scare), were the highlights of an uneven but interesting episode.

And yet, in going over my notes, I keep being pulled back to the negative things. Was anyone really looking for the return of Lou's con artist hooker girlfriend? And wouldn't the idea of Mike finally standing up to Tommy be a lot more interesting if the show didn't constantly arrange to give Tommy the moral high ground? Last week, he was punching out Tommy over a screw-up (Damien in the fire) that he caused himself, and tonight he starts yelling at Tommy right before he panics over the realization that he didn't refill the oxygen tanks. In the moral universe of "Rescue Me," all of Tommy's failings pale before being either a coward or a bumbler as a fireman, so the Mike/Tommy scenes don't have the heft they should.

I said I wasn't going to watch the rest of my screeners (the five episodes after this) in a rush, so it would be easier to blog as if I was watching along with the rest of you. But part of me wants to just dive through them to see if my fears are unfounded. Remember: I didn't like the first couple of episodes this season, but I powered through and got to the good stuff before I lost my patience with the bad.

I have too much else on my plate right now for a mini-marathon, but don't be stunned an episode or two from now to find out I did it, if only so I can know whether I want to keep watching/blogging. I still think the better parts of the show are outweighing the parts I dislike, but as we saw last season (and for large parts of season 4), it's not hard at all for the bad stuff to overwhelm everything else.

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

ABC fall premiere dates announced

Over at NJ.com, details on the premiere dates for most of ABC's fall shows. Click here to read the full post

Comment problem

Hey all, when I changed the template of the blog a while back, for some reason that altered the comment settings without my knowing it. Thanks to somebody's e-mail today, I discovered about 200 comments that were waiting for approval, and they (other than the spam) have since been approved.

Apologies to anyone wondering why their comment never showed up. Click here to read the full post

Better late than never review: Tosh.0

I didn't get a chance to watch Comedy Central's "Tosh.0" in time for its premiere last week, but a bout of insomnia(*) had me watching the rerun last night and laughing so much that I immediately set up a DVR season pass. More after the jump...

(*) It's the TV critic's best friend! It also brought me the delightful Obama/Zack Morris one-two punch.

The idea is simple: comedian Daniel Tosh shows clips of viral videos, and either snarks on them, or seeks out the person involved to find out what the hell they were thinking. Poniewozik suggests, quite astutely, that it's basically FAIL Blog: The Show.

The execution is uneven, but there were two great segments: Tosh giving the Afro Ninja a second chance to execute a backflip, and then Tosh trying to pull off four separate web challenges at once in under a minute. (The bit with the coconuts is a callback to a clip from earlier in the show.)

Between this and "Important Things with Demetri Martin" (which got a second season order last week), Comedy Central has come up with some interesting twists on familiar concepts (the sketch comedy show, and snarky clip shows, respectively). I am pleased.

"Tosh.0" airs Thursdays at 10. Click here to read the full post

Words and music

Because of my job, I'm naturally exposed to TV more than other areas of pop culture, which means I often wind up finding out about those areas when they happen to cross over with TV. Music's a big one in that regard; basically, the only way I hear about new (or new-to-me) bands these days tends to be when one of their songs is featured on a show I watch, like "Chuck."

One of my favorite examples of this is Rhett Miller, whose self-titled third solo CD (after many albums with his band, Old 97's) hits stores today. More on this after the jump...

I first encountered Miller when I was watching Showtime's short-lived "Going to California," where the theme, "Lost Along the Way," was performed by Old 97's. I liked the song a lot, picked up a copy of the band's "Too Far to Care" CD at Tunes in Hoboken (my brick-and-mortar music store of choice at the time) and have basically devoured everything by the band ("Battlestar Galactica" fans will want to watch the video for "Dance With Me" from the most recent Old 97's album), and by Rhett solo. ("Our Love" -- which has been played on a few TV shows, and, since I can't find an official video, which you can hear in this Veronica Mars/Logan fan video -- is one of the most-played songs in the Sepinwall household/car.)

The new album continues the Rhett/band dichotomy, in that it's a bit poppier than the stuff he does with Old 97's (but only a bit), and at times more melancholy. (Sample song titles: "Nobody Says I Love You Anymore" and "Happy Birthday, Don't Die.") And I've been listening to it pretty constantly since I got a review CD a few weeks ago.

So, two-part question: 1)What's the best musical discovery you've ever made while watching a movie or TV show? 2)Regardless of where you first learned of the singer/band, what new music is currently in heavy rotation on your music-playing device of choice? Click here to read the full post

Obama vs. Zack Morris

Okay, more impressive late night feat last night: President Obama coming on "The Colbert Report" to order Stephen Colbert's military haircut, or Jimmy Fallon getting Mark-Paul Gosselaar to come on "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon" in character as Zack Morris?

I have to go with the latter, myself. President Obama hasn't been media-shy(*), where in all the time I've known Gosselaar (going back to when he joined "NYPD Blue"), he's visibly winced when the phrase "Saved by the Bell" has been mentioned in his presence. He felt it was this huge stumbling block when he tried to transition into an adult career. I guess now that he's on his fourth or fifth show, he can have fun with it a little(**).

(*) It's at this point that I have to remind you about the No Politics rule. Talk about POTUS as comedian/TV presence, not about policy. Period.

(**) Speaking of MPG and having fun with audience perception, I was damn amused that the "Raising the Bar" season premiere was almost entirely devoted to his character's hairstyle, which everybody complained about last year, and featured a haircut as its major plot development. Click here to read the full post

Reader mail: Jay vs. Conan, 'Homicide' reruns and more

Another week, another reader mailbag, this one dealing once again with the ongoing blood feud between the Conan O'Brien fans and the Jay Leno fans. (Well, mostly from the Jay Leno fans.) Click here to read the full post

Nurse Jackie, "Pilot": Helloooooo, Nurse!

Spoilers for the series premiere of "Nurse Jackie" coming up just as soon as I flush an ear...

"I don't like chatty. I don't do chatty. I like quiet. Quiet and mean -- those are my people." -Jackie Peyton

As mentioned yesterday when I linked to my Edie Falco interview (also available in transcript form!), I didn't get an opportunity to do a proper review of "Nurse Jackie" due to space and time constraints. So this review will be a bit more general than ones for later episodes.

"Nurse Jackie," the pilot in particular, is constructed out of a lot of second-hand parts. We have the medical professional who plays by her own rules ("House" among others), knows more than the people at the hospital who outrank her (ditto), has a painkiller addiction (triple ditto) and has an ongoing relationship that we discover at the episode's end is really an affair, because our heroine has a spouse and kids at home ("Mad Men").

(Note: I'm not saying "House" or "Mad Men" invented any of those tropes. If anything, I was amused when AMC requested we not reveal the end of the "Mad Men" pilot in our reviews, since it seemed so bloody obvious that Don was married, because I'd seen that beat so many other places. I'm just saying that those are two current shows that play in a lot of the same territory.)

But my opinion is that it's not the song, but how you sing it, and Edie Falco makes some beautiful damn music as Jackie.

Forget about any "she's so different from Carmela!" commentary, since that pretty much goes without saying. (The butch haircut alone oughta end that discussion.) Just taken as an isolated performance, it's wonderful: funny where she needs to be (loved Jackie's reaction to Coop grabbing her breast), not overly strident when she's tearing into authority figures(*), just the right amount of tender (which is to say around 10%) in those rare moments where Jackie's facade cracks even a little, and compelling throughout. It took me a couple of episodes to get on board with the show beyond Falco, but she's so damn good I would have given it a whole lot of rope before deciding the rest wasn't for me.

(*) "Nurse Jackie" is gonna look even better next week when TNT's nearly-identical -- but vastly inferior in every way -- "Hawthorne" debuts. I think Jada Pinkett's hands my be surgically glued to her hips in that show.

Yes, they lay on the Jackie-as-vigilante-nurse thing a bit thick here, between the organ donor forgery, the flushed ear, giving the stolen boots and money to the bike messenger's pregnant girlfriend, etc. But pilots often have to color in broad strokes to make an impression, then get more into nuance as they go forward.

But even here, I think Falco plays well off most of the cast, I like the undercurrent of Catholicism throughout, and it works as a dramedy. That is, it doesn't feel too short at 30 minutes, has a nice balance of pathos and laughs, and left me feeling satisfied at the end. (In that way, it's not unlike another show I'm writing about this summer, "Sports Night," though the tones and worldviews of the two shows couldn't be more different.)

Some other thoughts:

• Back when he was starring in Fox's short-lived "Fastlane," I noticed that Peter Facinelli not only looks a little like young Tom Cruise, but sounds exactly like him, and it's one of those things you can't un-learn. So I unfortunately spent a lot of his screen time here noticing that he's picked up on some other Cruise mannerisms over the years, like the way he flares his nostrils. I don't think it's intentional, and this is certainly preferable to, say Brad Rowe (a guy who had a career for a few years in the late '90s because he was a dead ringer for Brad Pitt, even though he couldn't act a lick), but I don't think I'm ever going to not be distracted by this.

• The one part of the pilot I really disliked was Anna Deveare Smith as the nosy hospital administrator. And, really, it took through nearly the sixth episode (the last I've seen in advance) to warm to her. Her character is the one part of the show that feels too broad and easy, and I say that as someone who usually believes the ADS hype.

• Getting back to "Hawthorne" for a moment, that show also features an overly chatty, neurotic, eager nursing student (Vanessa Lengies from "American Dreams"), and, for that matter, NBC's "Mercy" has Michelle Trachtenberg as its overly chatty, neurotic, eager nursing student. I haven't seen "Mercy" yet, other than a clip reel, but I expect Merritt Wever to own them all in in this category. She's hilarious.

• Yes, like everyone else, I'm weirded out by seeing Falco have on-screen sex with Paul Schulze, who played Father Phil -- who very much wanted to have sex with Carmela -- on "The Sopranos." But Schulze -- who, as Falco notes in our interview, has been in more than a dozen projects with her since their college days at SUNY Purchase -- is a really good actor who does some interesting things as Eddie, and I don't want to begrudge him the work just because of the weird meta level to it. By episode 2 or 3, you'll have hopefully (as I did) forgotten about the Father Phil factor.

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

Pushing Daisies, "Water & Power": Lucky Penny

Just got through Saturday's penultimate "Pushing Daisies," which was a fine spotlight on Emerson Cod, PI. Not sure whether to be gratified or increasingly confused that they cast Gina Torres as the femme fatale in an episode that also featured Christine Adams as Simone the dog obedience lady, since I spent the first five minutes of Adams' initial appearance on the show wondering if it was Gina Torres with an accent.

What did everybody else think? And can you handle watching the last episode, knowing that it's not going to give closure on much of anything? Click here to read the full post

If I had an Emmy ballot

I want to thank the fine people of Throwing Things for pointing out that the big Emmy ballot of submitted performances is out, and therefore derailing my work for the last hour as I pored over the list and tried, as I did last year, to come up with five six nominees per category , based on where the actors submitted themselves. It's not as easy as you'd think. In some categories, the six picks were obvious, while in many others I either struggled to come up with six or struggled to pare it down to six.

As Tom O'Neill points out, the most obvious omission is Terry O'Quinn from "Lost," who won a couple of years ago and either forgot to submit himself again or decided he didn't care.

After the jump, my own picks, plus the toughest names I had to leave out of each category. Feel free to offer up your own, or simply heckle my choices.

Lead actor in a comedy

Alec Baldwin, "30 Rock"
Steve Carell, "The Office"
Zachary Levi, "Chuck"
Ken Marino, "Party Down"
Jim Parsons, "The Big Bang Theory"
Adam Scott, "Party Down"

Tough omissions: Bret & Jemaine from "Flight of the Conchords," maybe Zach Braff

Lead actor in a drama

Gabriel Byrne, "In Treatment"
Kyle Chandler, "Friday Night Lights"
Michael Chiklis, "The Shield"
Bryan Cranston, "Breaking Bad"
Jon Hamm, "Mad Men"
Edward James Olmos, "Battlestar Galactica"

Tough omissions: Hugh Laurie, Michael C. Hall, Damian Lewis, Jeffrey Donovan

Lead actress in a comedy

Toni Collette, "United States of Tara"
Tina Fey, "30 Rock"
Anna Friel, "Pushing Daisies"
Yvonne Strahovski, "Chuck"

Tough omissions: None. I couldn't come up with four from shows I watch where I like the performance enough. Amy Poehler was very good in a few eps of Parks and Recreation, but too broad in others, as they tried to find that character.

Lead actress in a drama

January Jones, "Mad Men"
Mary McDonnell, "Battlestar Galactica"
Elisabeth Moss, "Mad Men"
Jill Scott, "No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency"
Jeanne Tripplehorn, "Big Love"

Tough omissions: I would say Holly Hunter, except I stopped watching Saving Grace even though I like her performance. So I only have five, I think.

Supporting actor in a comedy

Donald Faison, "Scrubs"
Neil Patrick Harris, "How I Met Your Mother"
Chi McBride, "Pushing Daisies"
Tracy Morgan, "30 Rock"
Ray Wise, "Reaper"
Rhys Darby, "Flight of the Conchords"

Tough omissions: Scott Krinsky and Vik Sahay (if only I could nominate Jeffster! as a single entity), John C. McGinley, Brian Baumgartner (for the spilled chili scene alone), Martin Starr, John Krasinski (for the "send in the subs" scene alone), Ed Helms, Jim Gaffigan


Supporting actor in a drama

Justin Chambers, "Grey's Anatomy"
Jeremy Davies, "Lost"
Walton Goggins, "The Shield"
Michael Hogan, "Battlestar Galactica"
John Mahoney, "In Treatment"
Michael Emerson, "Lost"

Tough omissions: Josh Holloway, Aaron Paul, Vincent Kartheiser, Aaron Shaw, Bruce Campbell, Kevin McKidd, Taylor Kitsch, John Slattery

Supporting actress in a comedy

Lizzy Caplan, "Party Down"
Portia de Rossi, "Better Off Ted"
Rosemarie Dewitt, "United States of Tara"
Jenna Fischer, "The Office"
Cobie Smulders, "How I Met Your Mother"
Jane Lynch, "Party Down"

Tough omissions: Kristen Schaal

Supporting actress in a drama

Connie Britton, "Friday Night Lights"
Hope Davis, "In Treatment"
Alison Pill, "In Treatment"
CCH Pounder, "The Shield"
Dianne Wiest, "In Treatment"
Christina Hendricks, "Mad Men"

Tough omissions: Anna Gunn, Ginnifer Goodwin, Tricia Helfer, Adrianne Palicki, Katee Sackhoff, Chloe Sevigny, Amanda Seyfried, Chandra Wilson Click here to read the full post

Band of Brothers rewind, episode 3: "Carentan"

The On Demand run of "Band of Brothers ended over the weekend, so hopefully everybody either watched it or has the DVDs as we continue to revisit this great series. Spoilers for the third episode, "Carentan," coming up just as soon as I get another Purple Heart...

"Carentan" was my least favorite episode when I initially watched the series eight years ago, and although this viewing offered up some redeeming features, it remains the low point, in my mind.

I've said before, and will talk more about this when we get to "Bastogne," that the miniseries took a significant leap forward when it started doing more POV-centric storytelling. Well, "Carentan" is largely told from Albert Blithe's point of view, but in this case, it doesn't work for two reasons: 1)Because it isn't told from his point of view enough, and 2)Because he's a very poorly-drawn, and played, character.

Let's take the second point first. I've liked Marc Warren in other projects that have crossed the pond ("Hustle," his episode of "Doctor Who"), but he's terrible here. He struggles mightily with the American accent and, like a number of other Brit-as-American performances of recent vintage (see Michelle Ryan in "Bionic Woman"), he's so distracted by the issue that he fails to give much of a performance beyond that. He's whispering half the time, as if that might better hide his inflections, and he significantly overplays Blithe's moments of terror during the battle scenes. It feels like he was cast largely because of his piercing blue eyes, which always tend to look haunted, rather than anything he brought to the role.

And, unfortunately, the role itself is really undercooked. It feels like the "Band of Brothers" producers (and, specifically, writer E. Max Frye) wanted to do an episode about the way fear can paralyze men in combat, and they chose to center it on Blithe, who receives only two mentions in Stephen Ambrose's book: first when Winters cures him of the hysterical blindness, second when he suffers the wound that would eventually take his life. And because Blithe died so young(*), and was apparently not close to the Easy men who survived the war and the decades after, there's not much other color to him, and the script fails to add any. He's not a person so much as he is an archetype, and a fairly thin one at that. To bring it back to the inevitable "Saving Private Ryan" comparison, "Carentan" is an entire hour of Corporal Upham cowering outside the room where Melish is fighting for his life, only without the characterization that Upham had gotten to that point.

(*) Or not; check the comments for evidence of what appears to be the largest screw-up in the book and miniseries.

And yet, I still think it might have worked if the entire episode had done nothing but follow Blithe. Doc Roe, the main character of "Bastogne," is just as minor a character in both the book and the miniseries, but Shane Taylor is given a bit more meat to play as Roe, and simply showing the battlefield through his eyes (with one or two exceptions) makes a big difference in terms of the intensity of the experience. Here, sometimes we're with Blithe, and sometimes we're just in the middle of the chaos in and around Carentan following other soldiers. And after Blithe is wounded and sent to the hospital, the episode goes on for another 10 minutes or so, just to set up things for the next episode with the arrival of the replacements. The final scene with Malarkey picking up the laundry for all the men of Easy who fell since D-Day is an affecting, unusual way to tell that particular emotional beat, but even with Blithe's clothes in with the pile, it doesn't really feel like it's of a piece with the rest of the episode.

All that being said, watching "Carentan" now with a better understanding of who everybody is, there are a number of scenes that stood out far better than they did in '01. The two major combat scenes aren't always easy to follow in terms of who's where, but the sheer spectacle of them, and small moments within them, are amazing. I love the bit in the first battle (inside the city) where Liebgott pauses to tenderly comfort the soldier who was so badly wounded by the grenade, and the fight scene in the hedgerows has that wonderful sequence where the normally-reserved Winters has to use his force of will to urge one man after another (including Blithe) to get the hell out of his foxhole and start shooting back.

But "Carentan" remains the one episode I'm likely to skip if I ever choose to re-watch the series again (with no blogging obligation) down the line.

A few other thoughts:

• I did like the one scene Blithe (the man overpowered by his fear) shares with Speirs (the man seemingly without fear), which features one of my favorite quotes from the miniseries: "The only hope you have is to accept the fact that you're already dead. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you'll be able to function as a soldier is supposed to function: without mercy, without compassion, without remorse."

• This episode introduces a nice running thread about Harry Welsh's attempt to hold onto his reserve chute so his wife can use it to make a wedding dress. It also offers up a rare tough side to the usually genial Welsh, who seems to suspect Blithe's cowardice more than the others, and treats him suspiciously as a result.

• Ambrose's book says that the words to "The Night of the Bayonet" were lost to history, so either Frye came up with a new poem on his own, or one of the men somehow remembered them after the book came out.

• I haven't yet mentioned Michael Kamen's score, and since it's one of the best things in an episode I otherwise don't like very much, now seems as good a time as any. What I love about the "Band of Brothers" music -- both the theme song and the score used throughout -- is how counter-intuitive it is. Instead of going with bombast because of the scope of the story and all the pyrotechnics within, Kamen instead keeps things spare, sticking mainly with strings, and the theme song itself might as well be a waltz. Chokes me up damn near every time.

Keeping in mind, once again, that we're trying to be vague about who lives and who dies for the benefit of the people watching for the first time, what did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Edie Falco leaves 'Sopranos' behind for 'Nurse Jackie' - Sepinwall on TV

In today's column, I interview Edie Falco about her return to series TV with Showtime's "Nurse Jackie," which I really liked. I also have a full interview transcript.

Space issues in the paper meant I had to run the interview in lieu of a proper "Nurse Jackie" review, but look for it to join the blogging rotation starting tomorrow night. I know the pilot is already out there on-line and via On Demand, but I'm going to ask you to keep your comments vague (opinions are fine; plot details much less so) until the episode review post goes up. Click here to read the full post

The Wire, Season 2, Episode 2: "Collateral Damage" (Newbies edition)

Once again, we're revisiting season two of "The Wire" in two versions: one for people who have watched the entire series and want to be able to discuss it from beginning to end, and those who aren't all the way there yet and don't want to be spoiled about later developments. This is the newbie post (click here for the veteran version).

Spoilers for episode two, "Collateral Damage," coming up just as soon as I set up a field sobriety checkpoint...

"Anyway, there'll be other girls." -The Greek

There was some discussion last week among the veterans that, out of all five "Wire" seasons, this one has the slowest build. I'm not sure that's true -- have we already forgotten how long it took before the Barksdale task force accomplished anything of note? -- but if it is, it feels appropriate that it was in a season featuring The Greek (Bill Raymond), who's definitively identified as the old guy at the counter of the diner.

The Greek is slow. He is meticulous. He has little to no sentiment -- he has Vondas kill the shepherd not out of some need for vengeance, but because this is simply how business needs to be done, and then he shrugs off the death of the 14 girls as an accounting issue that's easily rectified -- and he takes his time because he does not want to make a mistake. And in ordering Vondas to kill the shepherd, The Greek has apparently rendered Bunk and Lester's investigation into the dead girls pointless, as the man responsible has now been murdered and will soon be butchered by Sergei.

In that way, Bunk, Lester and Beadie Russell are going to be swimming against an unwavering tide in the same way that Frank Sobotka is. While Frank's busy getting into bed with The Greek -- and lying to himself about what might be in the cans -- in an effort to rebuild the port and save his union, we see Valchek's buddy Andy Krawczyk preparing to turn the grain pier into the exact kind of condos that Nat Coxson warned Frank about last week. These people aren't just fighting a battle they can't win -- they're fighting a battle they lost a long time ago, even if they can't realize that.

At this stage, of course, no one recognizes that all is probably hopeless, so plans are being made, and pieces moved (slowly) into place. This episode would be the point in a more traditional serialized show where Lt. Daniels would be sprung from evidence room purgatory to look into the dead girls with the help of Jimmy, Kima and company. Instead, nobody wants anything to do with the case, and eventually Bunk and Lester get stuck with it. Daniels is preparing to quit, McNulty is still on the boat -- and more on Rawls' hit list than ever before -- and the detail that Burrell and Rawls put together for Valchek is both too narrow in scope (Valchek just wants dirt on Sobotka) and filled, as the first detail was, with obvious humps. (Rawls even recycled Augie Polk's drunk ass for this one, which is a joke only Prez can appreciate.)

What's amazing about this season is how so many big things are driven by such a small thing as a stained glass window at a church. With Barksdale, Jimmy was trying to show how smart he was, but there was a sense that this was a bad guy and something needed to be done. Here, this is just Valchek working out a petty grudge about the window, and about Frank belittling him in front of the other checkers. I love the scene where Valchek briefs the task force (not knowing they're humps), sitting in the middle of that decrepit old building, trying to be so dramatic, like he's been watching too many '70s cop movies(*) and has convinced himself they're going after a much bigger target than some piss-ant union leader who bought a window and made a few cracks about CYO dances. It makes me laugh every time I watch it.

(*) As Valchek, Al Brown sure looks like somebody who could have been a supporting character in "Serpico," doesn't he?

The irony is that Frank really is a big fish -- or, at least is connected to big fish like The Greek -- but that has nothing to do with Valchek's vendetta.

Sobotka is one of the few characters in "Wire" history who isn't in any way motivated by self-interest. He's not pocketing the money from The Greek, and even scolds Horseface for stealing the vodka. His attempts to save the union aren't about Frank; he's old enough, and senior enough, that he doesn't have to worry about running out of work before he's ready to stop working, even as the stream of ships coming into the port continues to slow to a trickle. He's doing this for the guys in the union -- not just kin like Nick and Ziggy, but LaLa and Johnny 50 and the rest who have the same background but a far dicier future.

But while Frank's goals may be noble, his methods are not. Before Beadie went into the can with the crushed air pipe, Frank could maybe assume that The Greek was just asking him to smuggle in cigarettes, or booze, or even drugs, and those were answers he could live with. But this is human trafficking he's involved with, and despite a brief moment of bluster with Vondas -- who implies that there might be even worse things in other cans that didn't get opened -- he backs down and agrees to keep the arrangement going. Whatever illusions Frank had about what he's doing are gone now, but he feels like he has no choice but to keep doing it.

And as Frank is busy trying to save the union, he doesn't have time to notice that his son is trying to follow his old man into the crime business -- a business that we quickly see, through his conversation with White Mike, Ziggy's as badly-suited to as he is to being a checker.

Ziggy's one of the more polarizing characters "The Wire" ever gave us. He's so pitiful, so obnoxious, that he can be easy to hate. But Ziggy's problem is less of character than of time and place. This is a kid who is terribly suited to either of his father's current professions, but it's the world he was born into. As commenter Eyeball Wit put it last week (before noting actor James Ransone's resemblance to John Cazale, and how perfectly that makes Ziggy the Fredo Corleone of the Sobotka family):

If he grew up in Towson as the son of an accountant, he'd be a senior in college, planning pranks, passing out at frat parties and chasing co-eds, with nothing expected of him and no real consequences attached to his behavior.

But he's not a college kid, and his mistakes are going to have real consequences, assuming he can ever figure out how to get a package to sell.

And speaking of packages, we get more concentrated time in the prison with Avon and Wee-Bey as they deal with the harassment of a guard who doesn't particularly appreciate Wee-Bey having murdered his cousin -- and who happens to be dealing drugs on the side to the prisoners. (Note that D'Angelo, in our brief glimpse of him, has turned to dope to deal with the weight of his 20-year sentence.)

Here's my question: if Tillman weren't dealing, would Wee-Bey and Avon be as willing to get back at the guy? Yes, he overturns Wee-Bey's tank full of (fake) fish, and he disrespects Avon to his face, but he does have a legitimate beef with Wee-Bey, which even Wee-Bey seems to recognize. If he were just a straight-arrow looking to settle a family score in a non-lethal way, would they let the harassment go on? One of the things that seems to distinguish Avon from some drug dealers we'll meet in later seasons -- or, for that matter, from The Greek and his crew -- is that he still seems to acknowledge certain parts of the social compact, but is that just a matter of convenience for him?

Or is Avon, like The Greek, and like Frank Sobotka, just about getting his, no matter the cost or consequences to others?

Some other thoughts on "Collateral Damage":

• This episode marks the first appearance of Valchek's real estate developer buddy Andy Krawczyk. Like a number of "Wire" actors, he had a recurring role on "Homicide" as defense lawyer Russom, who was sort of a prototype for Maury Levy. (Albeit not nearly as corrupt, from what we saw, as Maury.)

• I like that the "villains" on "The Wire" are at least as smart as the "heroes," and that there's often a muddy line about which side is which. Burrell is clever enough to recognize that Valchek is pursuing a grudge, but since it's politically expedient to him, he gives the guy his task force. And where Jimmy has always hated Rawls, we see here that the other Homicide detectives -- including Bunk and Lester -- have more than a bit of hero worship for the guy after seeing him (for the moment) dump the dead girls off on the state cops. Beadie, meanwhile, is horrified to realize that Jimmy is only interested in the dead girls to get revenge on his old boss, which means both avenues of investigation into the port are coming as the result of petty feuds.

• Somebody want to explain the beer with egg yolk to me? I've seen it elsewhere, and it never fails to make me queasy.

• Carver returns, now working as a sergeant in Valchek's district, and he gets one of the funniest lines of the episode: after Frank complains that "you work for a gaping a--hole," Carver pauses a beat (as if deciding how frank to be with this civilian), then says, "More than one, actually."

• Also making her season two debut: Ronnie Pearlman, getting the worst of all possible Jimmmy McNulty booty call worlds.

Coming up next: "Hot Shots," in which Sobotka and Valchek both go out to fancy dinners, Nick gets a haircut, Stringer does Avon's bidding and someone's back in town.

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

The Wire, Season 2, Episode 2: "Collateral Damage" (Veterans edition)

Once again, we're revisiting season two of "The Wire" in two versions: one for people who have watched the entire series and want to be able to discuss it from beginning to end, and those who aren't all the way there yet and don't want to be spoiled about later developments. This is the veteran post (click here for the newbie version).

Spoilers for episode two, "Collateral Damage," coming up just as soon as I set up a field sobriety checkpoint...

"Anyway, there'll be other girls." -The Greek

There was some discussion last week among the veterans that, out of all five "Wire" seasons, this one has the slowest build. I'm not sure that's true -- have we already forgotten how long it took before the Barksdale task force accomplished anything of note? -- but if it is, it feels appropriate that it was in a season featuring The Greek (Bill Raymond), who's definitively identified as the old guy at the counter of the diner.

The Greek is slow. He is meticulous. He has little to no sentiment -- he has Vondas kill the shepherd not out of some need for vengeance, but because this is simply how business needs to be done, and then he shrugs off the death of the 14 girls as an accounting issue that's easily rectified -- and he takes his time because he does not want to make a mistake. And in ordering Vondas to kill the shepherd, The Greek has apparently rendered Bunk and Lester's investigation into the dead girls pointless, as the man responsible has now been murdered and will soon be butchered by Sergei.

In that way, Bunk, Lester and Beadie Russell are going to be swimming against an unwavering tide in the same way that Frank Sobotka is. While Frank's busy getting into bed with The Greek -- and lying to himself about what might be in the cans -- in an effort to rebuild the port and save his union, we see Valchek's buddy Andy Krawczyk preparing to turn the grain pier into the exact kind of condos that Nat Coxson warned Frank about last week. These people aren't just fighting a battle they can't win -- they're fighting a battle they lost a long time ago, even if they can't realize that.

At this stage, of course, no one recognizes that all is probably hopeless, so plans are being made, and pieces moved (slowly) into place. This episode would be the point in a more traditional serialized show where Lt. Daniels would be sprung from evidence room purgatory to look into the dead girls with the help of Jimmy, Kima and company. Instead, nobody wants anything to do with the case, and eventually Bunk and Lester get stuck with it. Daniels is preparing to quit, McNulty is still on the boat -- and more on Rawls' hit list than ever before -- and the detail that Burrell and Rawls put together for Valchek is both too narrow in scope (Valchek just wants dirt on Sobotka) and filled, as the first detail was, with obvious humps. (Rawls even recycled Augie Polk's drunk ass for this one, which is a joke only Prez can appreciate.)

What's amazing about this season is how so many big things are driven by such a small thing as a stained glass window at a church. With Barksdale, Jimmy was trying to show how smart he was, but there was a sense that this was a bad guy and something needed to be done. Here, this is just Valchek working out a petty grudge about the window, and about Frank belittling him in front of the other checkers. I love the scene where Valchek briefs the task force (not knowing they're humps), sitting in the middle of that decrepit old building, trying to be so dramatic, like he's been watching too many '70s cop movies(*) and has convinced himself they're going after a much bigger target than some piss-ant union leader who bought a window and made a few cracks about CYO dances. It makes me laugh every time I watch it.

(*) As Valchek, Al Brown sure looks like somebody who could have been a supporting character in "Serpico," doesn't he?

The irony is that Frank really is a big fish -- or, at least is connected to big fish like The Greek -- but that has nothing to do with Valchek's vendetta.

Sobotka is one of the few characters in "Wire" history who isn't in any way motivated by self-interest. He's not pocketing the money from The Greek, and even scolds Horseface for stealing the vodka. His attempts to save the union aren't about Frank; he's old enough, and senior enough, that he doesn't have to worry about running out of work before he's ready to stop working, even as the stream of ships coming into the port continues to slow to a trickle. He's doing this for the guys in the union -- not just kin like Nick and Ziggy, but LaLa and Johnny 50 and the rest who have the same background but a far dicier future.

But while Frank's goals may be noble, his methods are not. Before Beadie went into the can with the crushed air pipe, Frank could maybe assume that The Greek was just asking him to smuggle in cigarettes, or booze, or even drugs, and those were answers he could live with. But this is human trafficking he's involved with, and despite a brief moment of bluster with Vondas -- who implies that there might be even worse things in other cans that didn't get opened -- he backs down and agrees to keep the arrangement going. Whatever illusions Frank had about what he's doing are gone now, but he feels like he has no choice but to keep doing it.

And as Frank is busy trying to save the union, he doesn't have time to notice that his son is trying to follow his old man into the crime business -- a business that we quickly see, through his conversation with White Mike, Ziggy's as badly-suited to as he is to being a checker.

Ziggy's one of the more polarizing characters "The Wire" ever gave us. He's so pitiful, so obnoxious, that he can be easy to hate. But Ziggy's problem is less of character than of time and place. This is a kid who is terribly suited to either of his father's current professions, but it's the world he was born into. As commenter Eyeball Wit put it last week (before noting actor James Ransone's resemblance to John Cazale, and how perfectly that makes Ziggy the Fredo Corleone of the Sobotka family):

If he grew up in Towson as the son of an accountant, he'd be a senior in college, planning pranks, passing out at frat parties and chasing co-eds, with nothing expected of him and no real consequences attached to his behavior.

But he's not a college kid, and his mistakes are going to have real consequences, assuming he can ever figure out how to get a package to sell.

And speaking of packages, we get more concentrated time in the prison with Avon and Wee-Bey as they deal with the harassment of a guard who doesn't particularly appreciate Wee-Bey having murdered his cousin -- and who happens to be dealing drugs on the side to the prisoners. (Note that D'Angelo, in our brief glimpse of him, has turned to dope to deal with the weight of his 20-year sentence.)

Here's my question: if Tillman weren't dealing, would Wee-Bey and Avon be as willing to get back at the guy? Yes, he overturns Wee-Bey's tank full of (fake) fish, and he disrespects Avon to his face, but he does have a legitimate beef with Wee-Bey, which even Wee-Bey seems to recognize. If he were just a straight-arrow looking to settle a family score in a non-lethal way, would they let the harassment go on? One of the things that seems to distinguish Avon from some drug dealers we'll meet in later seasons -- or, for that matter, from The Greek and his crew -- is that he still seems to acknowledge certain parts of the social compact, but is that just a matter of convenience for him?

Or is Avon, like The Greek, and like Frank Sobotka, just about getting his, no matter the cost or consequences to others?

Some other thoughts on "Collateral Damage":

• This episode marks the first appearance of Valchek's real estate developer buddy Andy Krawczyk. Like a number of "Wire" actors, he had a recurring role on "Homicide" as defense lawyer Russom, who was sort of a prototype for Maury Levy. (Albeit not nearly as corrupt, from what we saw, as Maury.)

• I like that the "villains" on "The Wire" are at least as smart as the "heroes," and that there's often a muddy line about which side is which. Burrell is clever enough to recognize that Valchek is pursuing a grudge, but since it's politically expedient to him, he gives the guy his task force. And where Jimmy has always hated Rawls, we see here that the other Homicide detectives -- including Bunk and Lester -- have more than a bit of hero worship for the guy after seeing him (for the moment) dump the dead girls off on the state cops. Beadie, meanwhile, is horrified to realize that Jimmy is only interested in the dead girls to get revenge on his old boss, which means both avenues of investigation into the port are coming as the result of petty feuds.

• Somebody want to explain the beer with egg yolk to me? I've seen it elsewhere, and it never fails to make me queasy.

• Carver returns, now working as a sergeant in Valchek's district, and he gets one of the funniest lines of the episode: after Frank complains that "you work for a gaping a--hole," Carver pauses a beat (as if deciding how frank to be with this civilian), then says, "More than one, actually."

• Also making her season two debut: Ronnie Pearlman, getting the worst of all possible Jimmmy McNulty booty call worlds.

And now we come to the veterans-only portion of the review, where I'll take note of a few things that will be important down the road:

• Sergei doesn't know it, but he's been caught on tape chasing down the shepherd, which will lead to his downfall.

• The task force's headquarters may not look like much now, but the Major Crimes Unit will make great use of the place over the coming seasons, and its out-of-the-way location turns out to be particularly useful when Lester and Jimmy are running Operation: Bitey in season five.

• How long do you think various stevedores around the world kept sending Valchek's surveillance van around before someone finally unpacked the thing to sell it for parts?

• Yet another sign that Carver is destined to one day be the new Daniels: he explains to Frank that the car-papering issue is all about "chain of command," which was Daniels' favorite catchphrase in season one.

Coming up next: "Hot Shots," in which Sobotka and Valchek both go out to fancy dinners, Nick gets a haircut, Stringer does Avon's bidding and someone's back in town.

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

Checking in on 'Late Night with Jimmy Fallon' - Sepinwall on TV

After talking a lot about Conan O'Brien earlier in the week, it occurred to me that the more interesting column right now is to talk about how Jimmy Fallon has been doing three months into the job. And the answer is surprisingly well. Click here to read the full post

Royal Pains, "Pilot": This is how it's done in Worsthampton

I gave my thoughts on "Royal Pains" in this morning's column. Anybody watch? If so, what did you think? Click here to read the full post

Sprucing up the jernt

Big thank you to David J. Loehr for designing the new blog logo. Expect the pictures to change fairly regularly, but I wanted to start off with the three summer rewind shows, plus the evergreen image of Tony Soprano reading The Star-Ledger. Click here to read the full post

Burn Notice, "Friends and Family": Wanted man

Quick spoilers for the "Burn Notice" season three premiere coming up just as soon as I mix beer with yogurt...

"You might as well tattoo a bullseye on your forehead." -Harlan

I already wrote a lot today about "Burn Notice," between today's column and my Matt Nix interview, and I don't have a lot to add at this point, save that, as with the introduction of Carla last season, I feel comfortable that Nix has found a way to shake up the serialized aspects of the show without in any way undermining what makes the episode-to-episode stuff so much fun. There's a lot of potential in a Michael Westen who's constantly being hunted -- by cops, by old enemies, even by old friends like Harlan -- even as he, Sam, and Fi do their usual thing.

One question: how do you feel about the use of the subtitles in this episode? There were a couple of instances -- the introduction of Harlan, and of Falcone as "the gatekeeper" -- where the subtitle flew up so fast, and just rehashed what had been in the dialogue, that it's clear the show is trying to have more fun with that device this year. But do you think it's too much fun?

Also, one observation: I was at the doctor this afternoon, and the guy brought up the column today. Turns out he's a "Burn Notice" fan, and we very quickly devolved into doing dueling impressions of Jeffrey Donovan's narration, as applied to every day situations. "When you go to to ear, nose and throat specialist, you want to make sure that..." or "When ordering Thai food, most people think..." It's fun. You can apply it to virtually any situation in your daily life.

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

Crix pix

As a TV critic type, I'm usually just supposed to express my own opinion, but every now and again, I get called upon to participate in a poll of many critics, or to choose nominees and winners in the annual Television Critics Association awards, which will be handed out at the summer press tour in early August. One of those polls I participated in was Variety's recent poll on the best shows of the '00s, and the TCA nominees were just announced. Full list of the latter, and a few of my own thoughts, after the jump:

PROGRAM OF THE YEAR

Battlestar Galactica (SciFi Channel)

Lost (ABC)

Mad Men (AMC)

Saturday Night Live (NBC)

The Shield (FX)

OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN COMEDY

30 Rock (NBC)

The Big Bang Theory (CBS)

The Daily Show (Comedy Central)

How I Met Your Mother (CBS)

The Office (NBC)

OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN DRAMA

Breaking Bad (AMC)

Friday Night Lights (NBC/DirecTV)

Lost (ABC)

Mad Men (AMC)

The Shield (FX)

OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT MOVIES, MINI-SERIES AND SPECIALS

2008 Summer Olympic Coverage (NBC)

24: Redemption (Fox)

Generation Kill (HBO)

Grey Gardens (HBO)

Taking Chance (HBO)

OUTSTANDING NEW PROGRAM OF THE YEAR

Fringe (Fox)

The Mentalist (CBS)

No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency (HBO)

True Blood (HBO)

United States of Tara (Showtime)

INDIVIDUAL ACHIEVEMENT IN COMEDY

Alec Baldwin (30 Rock)

Steve Carell (The Office)

Tina Fey (30 Rock)

Neil Patrick Harris (How I Met Your Mother)

Jim Parsons (The Big Bang Theory)

INDIVIDUAL ACHIEVEMENT IN DRAMA

Glenn Close (Damages)

Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad)

Walton Goggins (The Shield)

Jon Hamm (Mad Men)

Hugh Laurie (House)

OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN CHILDRENS PROGRAMMING

Camp Rock (The Disney Channel)

The Electric Company (PBS)

Nick News (Nickelodeon)

Sid the Science Kid (PBS)

Yo Gabba Gabba (Nickelodeon)

OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN NEWS & INFORMATION

60 Minutes (CBS)

The Alzheimers Project (HBO)

Frontline (PBS)

The Rachel Maddow Show (MSNBC)

We Shall Remain (PBS)

HERITAGE AWARD

ER (NBC)

M*A*S*H (CBS)

Saturday Night Live (NBC)

The Shield (FX)

Star Trek (NBC)

Now, obviously this was a group thing, and therefore, there are shows on there that I wasn't a fan of (say, "True Blood"), as well as the absence of shows I really like (I pushed, to no avail, for "Chuck" to get a comedy series nomination). But I'm really pleased that the TCA as a group was able to highlight the likes of Jim Parsons and Walton Goggins. Given all "The Shield" love, the easy pick would have been Michael Chiklis, and while that sure wouldn't have been the wrong pick (seriously, go watch the final minutes again), Goggins was every bit his equal, and he doesn't have any acting hardware in his trophy case. (Though, of course, he has that Oscar for producing "The Accountant.") Click here to read the full post

Burn Notice: Matt Nix talks season three

I've been doing a lot of post-mortem interviews lately, so I thought I'd try something different and chat with "Burn Notice" creator Matt Nix in advance of season three, which I also reviewed (along with "Royal Pains") in today's column. No real spoilers, though Matt does allude to some small plot points this season (like which recurring character might become a client for an episode). It's nothing I feel uncomfortable knowing about as a spoiler-phobe, but click through at your own discretion.

Let's start off with how you feel Management agreeing to leave Michael alone -- but withdrawing their protection -- changes the series.

What they've said is, "We'll leave you alone and see how you like it." They're not necessarily saying, "We're completely done with you," but for the moment, they're going to leave him alone and he'll see what life is like with no protection. That's truly a very dangerous thing for anybody who's worked in that world. What that launches him into is a circumstance where the protectiosn that they've been affording him are no longer there. There are people from his past that are going to be interested in him for various reasons, but that also includes friends. He's fallen off the grid, he's been hidden, there are potentially other people from his past that can engage with him. It means Michael's been disappearing off of police computers for a while, and that's no longer the case. That's something he has to deal with. Then there's a whole range of reasons that people might want to engage with Michael, having to do with his past, but one thing he also deals with is there are a huge number of people interested in brokering the services of people with Michael's skills and knowledge.

Overall, though, the fact that he no longer is under the thumb of the people who burned him gives him a chance to get back in with the intelligence community. While he's dealing with the cops, with this character who's trying to broker his services, he's also focused on trying to re-engage with the intelligence community, and in the process, discovering that, while it may be very easy to send out a burn notice on someone and savage their reputation, it's a lot harder to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. It is a multi-faceted situation.

In terms of him trying to get his career back, it seems like he's been developing more of a moral compass over the course of this series than he ever had as a spy. He's started to care about people now. Could he really go back to that world?

That is absolutely a question that we are exploring. One of the things that we started exploring last season, and are continuing to look at, is the idea that Michael may seem to regard taking clients as kind of an inconvenience, but really, there is something in Michael that compels him to help the underdog. There is something in Michael that needs these clients and these projects. Because otherwise, it's not enough money to justify what he does. It's something he needs to do. So, yeah, one of the things he deals with -- and it's a big subject of his discussions with Fiona over the course of the season -- there's a sort of moral clarity to the jobs that he does. He's dealing with people that he knows. Occasionally, he comes across a bad apple, but even then, he's dealing with that bad apple. Ultimately, he's dealing with bad guys on behalf of people with real problems. Re-engaging with the inteliigence community means going back into this murky world where you're never sure who's on the up-and-up. Fiona's attitude is, "Why would you want to go back to that?" Michael's attitude is, "That's what I was trained to do, that's where the real action is. Right now, I'm saving individual people, but I can do things on a much larger scale."

When you say he's not making enough for these jobs to be worth it, I've been struggling to think of any example where we've ever seen him take money -- and, in fact, there have been a few times where he outright refused payment.

It's funny, because of the questions about this, it's begun to dawn on us all as a writing staff that maybe we ought to answer the question more for the audience the way we have for ouselves. Basically, Fiona is doing a fair amount of work. She's buying and selling various bits of weaponry, she's got a lot of gear around. In our minds, it's two-fold: 1)He's getting all of his product wholesale from Fiona, and 2)Fiona has a fair amount of money. You see her apartment this year and it's pretty swank, and once she's engaged with something, there's some access to cash there. And then, though this isn't something we talk about a whole lot, but there's some thought that he may be doing money gigs off-screen. You'll see him helping out a gig with Fiona, so to some extent, there are jobs you're not seeing, but they're not the big ones.

One of the things we discovered is that there's really no amount of money that justifies the lengths that Michael, Fiona and Sam go to to solve problems. Because of that, it always feels a little bit silly to have them say, "Okay, depserate person who's trying to have their child saved, I just put myself to unbelievable danger to save you, so thank you for this $1400." It feels silly and cheap to say, "I saved your entire family from that gang of vicious criminals, now I'm going to stand in your modest middle-class home and take your cash." From a behind-the-scenes perspective, those scenes, we've filmed them, and we're terrible.

But I can think of at least one occasion, in the Method Man episode last year, where the guy wanted to pay, and had more than enough money to do so without it being a problem, and Michael still refused.

It would not have bothered me to take money there. We had two thoughts on that score. One was that Michael had been really good friends with the client's older brother, and so why did he do the job? Not really for the money Ricky could hand over, but because he was bummed one of his old friends was in jail now. The other thing, and this is a larger thing: as we go through the seasons now, one of the things we're more conscious of is we have a bit of a unvierse of characters who can recur, both bad guys and good guys. In some ways, it's more interesting for us to establish a network of favors that Michael is owed and owes. For example, this season, Barry comes in as a client, and also as a much more integral part of what they do on a regular basis. So that means that now we can bring Barry, who's a money launderer, as a client. He'd be a pretty unclean client for season one, but by now, you've seen that Barry has been actively involved in doing good stuff. Ricky was played by Ben Watkins as a writer on the show -- we look at it as, we can have that guy back any time we want.

How hard is it to write a show with a main character who's super-competent without making it dull?

Now you're making me self-conscious. Is it dull?

No, not at all -- I'm just impressed that you're able to maintain suspense when we know Michael is good at everything.

I'm glad you say that. One thing is, there are a lot of things in the show that Michael experiences as very difficult. They're just not the things you expect to be difficult: something with his mother, something with Fiona, some emotional story that he is less equipped to handle. So that's one thing. The other thing is, when we think about how Michael is solving a problem, the kinds of things that he's very good at -- like cobbling together a bug, or fighting, or tactical combat experience -- if you think about it, what carries the day is never a well-executed battle. What carries the day is never a gadget that he has assembled that solves the problem. The things he's really good at, they're instruments, they're useful, but they never solve the problem. The problem that Michael is solving involves an interaction with another character, and a set of challenges that go well beyond simple questions like, "Can Michael beat this person up?" or "Can Michael build something to get out of this situation?"

It's always hard for us to think of a really big challenge to hand Michael that is an overall strategic challenge, that's tough and that's exciting to see, while at the same time, never hanging a scene on, "Can Michael beat this person up?" Because the answer to that is always "Yes." But we've had a lot of conversations as writers about the fact that almost all of the violence on the show is part of a character interaction rather than -- we never hit someone to make them do something. It's much more likely that we'll let the bad guy hit us to make him think he's much more powerful. When we were shooting (one episode this season), I commented to the writer that there probably aren't other TV shows where the two main characters are beating the crap out of each other for the benefit of the bad guy.

It seems like a lot of what Michael does, and what he tells us in the voiceovers, runs completely counter to what we've been taught to expect by other action shows.

I feel like, what we're on the hook for, as a spy show, is counter-intuitive technique. Our goal, one of the kind of standards that we apply to voiceovers is, is this a good piece of cocktail party knowledge? Is this something fun to know? It's not fun for everybody, but if you're a fan of the show, is this fun for us? There are certain things we do that are straightforward, but we don't voiceover those. The voiceovers are the things you wouldn't expect that are interesting. I always think that what's fun for us about that is it also gives us an opportunity to showcase a kind of technique that you can't really showcase without calling attention to it and slowing things down, like letting the audience know that this is what's being done here.

If you say, for example, "This wristlock is far more effective than beating someone up," or "It's far more painful to bend someone's thumb in this way," it allows us to do a really fun and interesting scene where someone's bending the crap out of someone's thumb, and it wakes you up. It's easy to get numbed by just action or running around. So we always think like, if we're going to blow someone up, it's fun to see explosions, but it's much more fun to know, if you needed to make something blow up in this circumstance, what would you do and what would it look like and how would it work?

One of the dangers of having a super-competent hero is it can really cut down on the audience's investment in that hero, he becomes this guy who can do anything, you don't know how. By having the voiceovers and explaining some of these things, hopefully the other tone we try to strike is, "You could do this, too. You just aren't trained in this. If you put your mind to it, these are things you can understand. He's still a human being, if he gets hit in the mouth, it hurts, but this is how you get hit in the mouth so it doesn't hurt as much as the other guy thinks it will." You get that, "I may not be a spy, but this spy is not a superhero."

When Michael is cobbling something together, is it more often a situation of you having a problem and asking the technical advisor how he'd solve it, or you knowing about a weird bit of spycraft and writing a problem you can apply it to?

As you might expect, it kind of happens two ways. One is, we hear something neat, and it hangs around the writers office, and we wait until we can use it. Michael Wilson is our consulting producer who has a background in intelligence. He keeps up with those things, he's good at coming up with those. Specifically, if we have a problem to solve, we'll go to him and say, "What is a way of doing this?" And then he just has enough of a library in his head to be able to kind of generate something that fits with the show, with the characters, and explaining what's hard about it. What's nice about the fact that he's done some of these things is he'll tend to give us the details, like, "You can't use Scotch tape, because I used it once, and it gums up the works." He's very insistent about those details, but it gives it a sort of a lfie. Part of it is that, and part of it is us researching things and going, "Oh, this is cool." Last year, in doing research, I ended up getting interested in different kinds of shotgun rounds, and what they can do. I was looking for an opportunity to use that over the course of the season.

A third category would be nods to particular spy techniques or spy equipment that exist, that's in the world. One of the things we talked about is, a big thing in the spy world right now is unmanned aerial drones. Michael's not going to buy a drone, but the principals are pretty simple to get your head around, and we've talked to people about how those are built and launched, and it turns out that Michael could easily do something along those lines, and that we get to showcase all the things we think is cool about that, but we're not just going to buy it. Now we're looking for an opprotunity of where are we going to use that.

I enjoyed the show in season one, but it felt like there was this big improvement at the start of season two, and again after the summer episodes of season two ended. What was it you learned in the first season that led to that?

You sound like my wife, She always tells people, "Watch season two, not season one. Especially the second half of season two." The truth is, I can point to very specific things. Really, it's not as if, when you're making a pilot, you can necessarily project forward and go, "Okay, the actors are going to be able to do this, this is how much we're going to be able to shoot in a day." There's a tremendous learning curve. Over the course of the first season, there's not really a contemporary template for how a "Burn Notice" might work.

One of the things we talked about in the first season was that it's a procedural show in which the procedure is different every week. So this week, it is the procedure of being safecracker. Next week, it's going to be the procedure of interrogation. While other shows would do, this is an interrogation show, or an evidence show, we might do an evidence episode, or a medical episode, or anything. We could easily do an episode that turns on Michael's field medicine expertise, and is all about Michael as doctor, and it's something we've talked about doing. That's kind of all over the map, so we had to find the deep structure of the eipsodes, and how a "Burn Notice" would work on a week to week basis. The first season was trying a bunch of things and seeing which ones worked better and which didn't work as well, and I can point to some episodes from season one and go, this is what we learned from that.

Over the first half of season two, you can see us nailing down the structure. It's funny. There was actually a point in season two where we noticed some fan reactions were, like, "Oh, now we get it. This is what the format's going to be from now on. Now it's going to get repetitive." And that was exactly the point where we felt, "Ah-ha! Now we've got it! This is what a 'Burn Notice' looks like," and you can see starting at episode 7 of season two, when Michael was pretending to be the geeky chemist, that was kind of a mold breaker for us. We'd never had Michael making an approach that was totally submissive. After that, we felt, this is the essence of how this show can work on a week to week basis, knowing the technique is going to change on a week to week basis: what if we turned this part on its head, what if we changed it this way? And you can see it throughout the season, it reflects our confidence in knowing the structure.

One of the cool things is that you've created such a specific character that you can do an episode like the bank heist from season two, where we've seen this particular story on a million other shows, but because Michael's involved, it's nothing quite like what we've seen before.

This season's third episode is another example of this; it's our nod to "Collateral." This season, you'll see more of us playing with our own format. The audience knows what to expect: "Oh, this is the point in a burn Notice where they make this plan," and we can turn this upside down, and they won't be lost. One of the ways we think of episodes now is, let's think of a circumstance where everybody knows how that episode goes, like a bank heist goes. Everybody knows what that episode looks like, so let's try to turn it on its head. Our sixth episode is Michael on the run with bad guys in the wilderness, and there are some really fun things to flip around in that format. We use a booby trap in a way youy've never seen a booby trap go off before

Getting back to Michael as the geeky chemist, how long did it take you to realize just how much range Jeffrey (Donovan) could show in these undercover identities?

All of the writers go out to the set for episodes. So you end up hanging out with Jeffrey a lot. We've all become friends with him and have come to know him, and so we are very fortunate in that Jeffrey is a very flexible actor, and he has this range of characters that he can do. A lot of times, we don't necessarily know exactly what he's going to do, but we'll write to it, in a direction, and we'll give the lines a rhythm, or we'll give him a tonal touch point -- "This is a character a little like someone from this movie." -- and then we trust him to run with that and get the cadence of the lines. Usually, we're on the same page. There aren't really a lot of surprises anymore. In the first season, one of the ones that we were all, "Ohmigod, what is he doing?!?!" turned out to be one of my favorite cover identities, when he was in Little Havana and he had the eyeliner on. At first, I was getting calls (from USA) and I was going, 'No, no. I'm going to go out on a limb and say I like this. I trust him."

Jeffrey and I have always had a connection. I kind of have a sense for what he's going to do, we can kind of finish each other's sentences. That's a really useful thing, and we've learned how to set him up well. What are the things he's going to gravitate to? A lot of times, we'll ask, "What does Michael sound like yelling?" If we start with, "What is the highest point of conflict for this cover identity? What does this person look like in his most extreme moments?," that's what Jeffrey is going to key off of. It's not about giving him an accent. Michael's not doing these things to entertain himself, but because they're the most effective way of dealing with a situation. But the fun thing is, now we get to know the range of the other actors on the show as well. The episode after the ones you've seen contains Fiona's best cover ID ever. She is hilarious. It's awesome.

It felt like it took you a while to get a handle on writing both Fiona and Madeline, where Michael and Sam were more fully-formed. What was it that helped you master writing for the two women in Michael's life?

Gabrielle (Anwar) is a very instinctive actor, and she's someone who really keys into the emotion of a scenario. And so one of the things we realized in writing for her is there's so much overlap between Gabrielle's personality and Fiona's, which meant that in some ways, the learning curve was a little harder for me. Jeffrey and I tend to approach things in a similar way, it's more about the words and the logic of something, and we go from the logic to the emotion. Gabrielle, as we were working with her, we found that when we give Fiona something to be passionate about -- and you can see that especially in the second half of last season -- when she connects with a client, she comes alive on screen. She's not an actress who really wants to know first what's under the lines and find her way to that stuff. We found that giving her something to be passionate about really made her come alive, rather than explaining a situation to her. She doesn't care about the situation, she wants to know, "How do I feel and what's important to me?" That was really instrumental in getting my head around her instincts as an actor, and you can see it makes a huge difference. It's really exciting for us.

In the case of Sharon and Madeline, I've always been very upfront about the fact that Madeline is sort of one-dimensional and underwritten in the pilot. I'm not ashamed of it, but I don't look at it and go, "Yeah, that's my best work." But I was incredibly fortunate in that I had Sharon there to interact with, and I could just look at Sharon and go, "Okay, I'm now going to pull Madeline out of these aspects of Sharon Gless." So I can pretend that I had a really full-formed, three-dimensional view of Madeline, but I didn't, at all. What's fun, in the thrid season, is Madeline is completely aware of what Michael does. There's no pretending, or being shocked. At this point, her house has blown up. She can be a more integral part of his life, and she can help what he's doing. It's not in a silly way, like she's running around with a shotgun, but it's dumb for us to pretend like they wouldn't ask for help. She's like the client dormitory. Finding that, and bringing Madeline's character into that world, it's just gotten a lot richer. A lot of that was me finding Madeline in Sharon. It's a more organic way to write and a lot of fun. She's such a smart and canny actress. In our discussion of those early episodes, we said, 'In this episode, what does Madeline do that really brings home the point that she is Michael's mother? She's not just some mother." That is really the thing we key off of

Last one: There was a string of episodes last season where Michael's solution to the problem was to maneuver one bad guy into killing another bad guy, and when Michael accidentally threw the assassin to his death, and then shot Victor, those stood out to me as the first time in a long time we'd seen Michael directly (if not intentionally) kill somebody. I'm wondering if that's a rule you've imposed on yourself, something USA requested, or just happenstance that he only very rarely uses lethal force.

There are a few answers to that. There's no "rule," but: 1. It's true, that while Michael will do what's necessary, he generally avoids violence when possible. 2. Michael needs to conceal his involvement in stuff. When two bad guys shoot each other, or a bad guy gets caught by the cops in the middle of a crime, there are no uncomfortable "Who shot this guy?" questions. Michael's involvement is invisible, as a spy's should be. 3. In general, we really focus on making Michael outwit his adversaries rather than best them physically. Which is, I suppose, more or less a preference of mine.

We did have a bit of a run of that in season two, actually - the one bad guy kills the other thing. It wasn't intentional, it had to do with how the episodes laid out. In any case, while it's a useful thing to do sometimes, we try not to go to that well too often.

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

'Royal Pains,' 'Burn Notice' reviews - Sepinwall on TV

In today's column, I look at the return of "Burn Notice" and the debut of its new (and very familiar-looking) USA partner, "Royal Pains":

Imitation is the sincerest form of television. Once a network has a hit, it's going to do everything possible to copy it and copy it until viewers lose interest. It's why most of the shows on CBS involve the solving of crime with the help of electron microscopes, why every NBC sitcom of the late '90s was about attractive New Yorkers looking for love, and why tonight USA follows the return of "Burn Notice" (still the most fun you can have in front of your TV set in the summer) with the debut of "Royal Pains," which is more or less "Burn Notice, MD."

You can read the full column here. My interview with "Burn Notice" creator Matt Nix should be right above this post. I'll have some kind of post up tonight for "Burn Notice" and possibly a separate one for "Royal Pains," but given time constraints and how much I've already written, it may be a simple "What did you all think?" Click here to read the full post

Heeeeeeeeere's Conan (again)!!!!

Some quick thoughts on the second episode of "The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien" coming up just as soon as I admire that asteroid...

Much better. Much better.

Again, it's not that Conan had a bad debut show, but there were some nerves, and it didn't feel like he led with his strongest comedy material, especially after having so many months to prepare. But night two was Conan firing on all thrusters, whether with brief, surreal gags like the small Asian woman turning into Max, or with longer pieces like his shopping trip to Rodeo Rd. Twitter Tracker worked almost entirely because of Conan's reaction to the overexuberant announcer, and the asteroid gag with Tom Hanks(*) was perfectly executed. I had no idea it was coming, and I had to rewind it 2 or 3 times before I stopped laughing at it.

(*) Question: Who are the top 5 talk show guests currently alive and working enough to pop up on these shows now and again? Hanks has to be on that list, just as he's in the upper pantheon of "SNL" hosts.

All that, and he (or Brian Williams) got President Obama to crack a few jokes at his expense(**). Nice!

(**) Let me remind you once again of our No Politics rule. You can talk about whether Obama was funnier than comparable appearances by Bush or either of the Clintons, but that's as far as we go, okay?

I don't know that anything in episode two will change the minds of the Jay loyalists who e-mailed me yesterday to complain that Conan was, quote, "Unbelievably childish." (Because, of course, nothing says sophisticated and mature comedy like Jaywalking or the Dancing Itos.) But for the Conan fans, and those still on the fence, this felt much more akin to what the guy looks like at the top of his game.

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

Sports Night rewind: "Pilot"

Okay, finally time to get down to the third member of our summer rewind troika, as we look back on the first-ever episode of "Sports Night." Spoilers coming up just as soon as I tell Spike Lee to sit down, shut up, and stop making documentaries about Kobe...

"It's your call, but pretty soon it's going to be my call. Because here's the thing: I can't let it be their call." -Isaac

It's a funny thing, how magic works sometimes.

I was watching the "Sports Night" pilot for the first time in a few years, dutifully taking notes in preparation for writing this post, and all I could seem to do was find things to pick apart: Aaron Sorkin hadn't yet figured out how to write dialogue that felt suited for TV rather than the stage. Joshua Malina was playing to the cheap seats. The studio audience (which I'll get back to at the end) was a colossal miscalculation. Etc., etc., etc. I remembered that I hadn't loved the series pilot in the first place, and understood that the show would get (much) better over time, but there was a part of me that was starting to wonder if maybe I should have watched a couple of episodes before committing to a summer of this show...

...and then Dan and Casey rushed in to watch Ntozake Nelson go for the world record, and the look on Peter Krause's face made me remember exactly why I loved this show in the first place, and why I wanted to re-visit it all these years later.

Yes, it's a sappy moment, but you have to be a sap on some level to enjoy Sorkin, just as you had to be to enjoy Sorkin's spiritual ancestor, Frank Capra. And if you have a weakness for a well-executed emotional touchstone scene, then this show -- and scenes like the climax of this pilot -- will make you fall for it, hard.

A lot of what sells the scene is Krause's expression, both as he watches and then as he calls his son, but much of it comes from how Sorkin laid pipe for it throughout the episode. 22 minutes and change is not a lot of time to tell the kind of stories Sorkin likes to -- while I don't think the show's subject matter lent itself to an hour-long format, I think 30 minutes or so with no commercials would have been just about perfect -- but over the course of those 22 minutes, Sorkin manages to introduce all the characters and how they relate to each other, establish that Casey's having a personal and professional crisis, set up the tension with network management, create a battle over the Ntozake Nelson feature, and even work in Casey's rant about the evils of modern sports. Not all of it comes through cleanly -- that last scene is fairly clunky, particularly Casey's line about "a double homicide in Brentwood" -- but it all comes together very nicely in that moment, and is a promise of greater things to come.

It's easy to dismiss "Sports Night" as some kind of training ground for "The West Wing" -- the place where Sorkin learned how far he could take the repetitive rhythms of his dialogue on TV, where Tommy Schlamme mastered the gliding camerawork that would become his signature -- but that's unfair to this show. No, the stakes aren't as high at a third-place cable sports operation as they were in the White House, and there's no Earth-shaking drama like the President of the United States cursing out God in the middle of National Cathedral. But the performances are wonderful, and Sorkin manages to find the thrilling moments -- and the silly ones -- in our love of sports, and more universally in the way people can fall in love with their jobs under the perfect circumstances.

I'm really looking forward to watching more episodes and discussing them with you.

A few other thoughts:

• So, the laugh track -- or, rather, the studio audience. I think it's important to make the distinction that this was live, albeit very confused, laughter from people sitting in the bleachers watching a taping, as opposed to canned laughter mixed in during post-production. ABC was nervous about doing "Sports Night" without laughter of some kind -- this was 1998, a year and a half before "Malcolm in the Middle" became a big hit and made network executives less afraid of going without the laugh track -- and insisted on the audience. The problem was that Sorkin didn't write in the traditional set-up/punch-line language of the kind of show that traditionally has a laugh track, and the audience had no flipping idea how to respond. You can hear the first tentative chuckles during Dan and Casey's debate about cognac, and then slightly more assertive laughs during the discussion of the kicker who can't kick, but the infrequency of the laughter becomes much more of a distraction than having no laughter at all. Sorkin and Schlamme fought for a while, and eventually got rid of the studio audience by arguing that they needed the studio space taken up by the bleachers to build a few more sets. There was some kind of canned laughter, albeit more muted, for a while after that, before the show was finally free of its tyranny once and for all in season two. While a part of me wishes that the DVDs didn't contain the laughs at all, the purist in me says we should be seeing them the same way people had to watch 'em on ABC back in the day.

• I had forgotten that the opening (and often closing) shot of most episodes was of the World Trade Center. Were the CSC offices supposed to be in the towers, or just somewhere far downtown?

• Interesting that so much of the conflict in the pilot comes from the network pressuring Dan to abandon Casey and move on with a new co-host, when the second season makes it clear that Casey has always been the star, and Dan, for all his talent, is viewed as the guy riding coattails. I'm not saying the two points of view are in conflict -- if Casey had really been this angry for a long time, I don't think it would matter how bright his star used to be -- but it definitely raised my eyebrow when I revisited the episode.

• So, who does Malina sound more like in the Spike Lee scene: Woody Allen or Wallace Shawn? Or a yet-to-be-named third option? Malina would find the right level quickly, but he's really broad here.

• Sorkin really loves to have his characters rattle off their resumes, doesn't he?

• Back when the show was running, I'd get a letter or e-mail a few times a month from a "Sports Night" viewer confused by what Dan Rydell means when he says "those stories and more." ("What stories is he talking about?") The idea, of course, is that we're only seeing what's said in the studio, not what the fictional CSC viewer at home sees, and Dan is referring to the clips being shown in the opening credits for the show-within-the-show, just like the "SportsCenter" anchors did then, and still do now.

Coming up next Wednesday: "The Apology," still considered many fans' favorite episode.

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

Rescue Me, "Thaw": The gift of grab

Spoilers for tonight's "Rescue Me" coming up just as soon as I use sex as a weapon...

"Thaw" was the last episode of the season I've seen in advance. I have the next six(*), but for schedule and blogging purposes, I suspect I'm going to be watching them one at a time, not long before (or maybe shortly after) they air. But this felt like a very strong episode, give or take some of the show's usual peccadillos.

(*) At one point, there was talk that FX was going to split up the airing of the season, since there are 22 episodes, but as of now, the plan is to run them more or less straight through.

At this point, I just roll my eyes whenever Janet or Sheila are throwing themselves at Tommy -- and here, we got them both doing it in one week(**) -- and I still find the idea of Grown-Up Ghost Connor a little too weird, even by the usual standards of Tommy's alcoholic fantasies. But I really liked the rest of "Thaw," from the serious stuff like Needles continuing his pledge to be tougher on the guys (and, in this case, Fienberg) and Mike out-fighting a drunk and out-of-control Tommy, to the sillier moments like Franco being taken out by a one-eyed geezer and Dwight returning to exact his seven minutes of revenge on Tommy.

(**) I will give credit, though, to whoever came up with the idea to dress Sheila all in red and make her boudoir look like Hell itself. That was funny, even if Sheila's really only useful as a serious character these days.

Again, I don't know what's coming next, but I feel confident that it's going to be interesting, and that the good stuff is more than likely to outweigh the bad.

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

Band of Brothers rewind, episode 2: "Day of Days"

Trying to move as quickly as possible through this project, it's time to look back at episode two of "Band of Brothers." Spoilers coming up just as soon as I offer you some cigarettes...

Just as "From the Earth to the Moon" (which I'll get around to blogging one of these years; I know the damn thing by heart now) was an attempt to expand the historical world shown in "Apollo 13," "Band of Brothers" was designed to go deeper into World War II than the largely fictional "Saving Private Ryan" could. Never is the stylistic debt of gratitude more obvious than in "Day of Days," which opens with the paratrooper's-eye-view take of D-Day, and climaxes with the raid on the guns at Brecourt Manor, shot in the same grainy, kinetic, you-are-there style of all the "Private Ryan" combat set pieces. The technical achievements of "Band of Brothers" are amazing throughout, but I still get particularly big chills watching the CGI-enhanced tracking shot of Winters jumping out of his plane as the flak flies all around him, floating serenely (as only Damian Lewis-as-Dick Winters can) through all the flak and explosions and carnage around him and landing on the fields of Normandy.

Yet for all the amazing effects and photography and sound design, "Day of Days" wouldn't work as well as it does if it didn't continue to stick with Winters once he hits the ground. There are a few scenes he's not pre