'Defying Gravity' review - Sepinwall on TV

Over at NJ.com, I have my review of ABC's astronaut soap opera "Defying Gravity," which debuts Sunday night. As you'll tell from the review, I wasn't a fan, and I doubt I'll be blogging on it in the future, but feel free to discuss the premiere here if you watch it. Click here to read the full post

Burn Notice, "Friends Like These": Thrilla in the villa

In the interest of getting discussion going about last night's "Burn Notice" even as I head out to cover all things press tour, here are a few quick thoughts of mine: 1)Is Callie Thorne now going to be on every show on cable? And how much better is she these days (or, at least, how much better is the writing she gets) than when she was on "Homicide"? 2)The bit with Sam's stolen gun was wonderful, and a nice contrast to Sam whining about the villa. 3)I'm glad to see that Michael's quest to get back in is turning out to have some major personal (and, for that matter, professional) drawbacks.

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

TCA: HBO renews 'True Blood,' 'Entourage' and 'Hung,' makes more announcements

Because I was busy interviewing Ted Danson (who's in HBO's new comedy "Bored to Death," with Jason Schwartzman and Zach Galifianakis, which will be paired with the new season of "Curb") during HBO's executive session, I missed a whole bunch of announcements. But I'm now caught up on everything that happened, and I have a full account -- which will be of interest to anybody who cares about most current, in limbo, or major in-development HBO series -- up at NJ.com Click here to read the full post

TCA: 'Seinfeld' reunion on 'Curb Your Enthusiasm'

Over at NJ.com, I have details of how the next season of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" will feature the long-awaited (and entirely fictional) "Seinfeld" reunion. Click here to read the full post

TCA: 'Jon & Kate Plus 8' to continue covering Gosselins 'with great care and thoughtfulness'

Over at NJ.com, the president of TLC makes a statement about "Jon & Kate Plus 8" so we won't waste time asking questions about "Jon & Kate Plus 8." Click here to read the full post

TCA: Giuliana & Bill and the Lamas family get some marriage counseling from the critics

It was a reality show morning at TCA, and over at NJ.com, I write about how we tried to caution the Rancics and the Lamases that being one of these shows might not be so healthy for their relationships. Click here to read the full post

TCA: Why I'd rather watch '30 for 30' than blog about it

In my latest press tour blog post at NJ.com, I talk about why there haven't been a ton of blog posts so far, and talk about how ESPN's "30 for 30" trailer is among the more exciting things I've seen in the short time I've been here. Click here to read the full post

TCA: 'Mad Men' & 'Breaking Bad' own the first night of tour

Over at NJ.com, I have a brief account of last night's awesome AMC party with the people from "Mad Men" and "Breaking Bad," along with some thoughts on how I'm going to write about the third season of "Mad Men." Click here to read the full post

Chuck: The complete Comic-Con panel

Okay, the good folks at Give Me My Remote, who were instrumental in the save "Chuck" campaign, got their hands on the season 2 highlight real and Schwartz/Fedak/Levi sketch that started off the Comic-Con panel. So if you watch that, and then watch Jeffster! on YouTube, then watch the panel itself on Hulu, you'll be able to witness the event in order, in its entirety.

I'm glad this is out there. Fedak's acting debut was too funny to not be seen by the masses. Click here to read the full post

TCA: 'Man V. Food' host Adam Richman v. over-eating

Over at NJ.com, my first proper press tour blog post, in which Adam Richman talks about "Man V. Food." Click here to read the full post

Fox announces fall premiere dates... again

Gearing up for the official start of press tour in a couple of hours, but in the meantime, at NJ.com I have details of some minor tweaking of Fox's fall premiere dates. Click here to read the full post

The Wire, Season 2, Episode 9: "Stray Rounds" (Newbies edition)

We're in the home stretch on our trip back through season two of "The Wire," and as always, we're doing it in two slightly different versions: one for people who have never seen the show before, and one for people who want to be able to discuss not only season two, but everything that's coming later. This is the newbie version; click here for the veteran edition.

Spoilers for episode 9, "Stray Rounds," coming up just as soon as I say "No thank you" to drugs...

"This is about Frank Sobotka!" -Valchek
"The case is bigger now." -Pearlman

"Stray Rounds" contains one of my absolute favorite scenes in the run of the series, the one quoted above: Daniels and Pearlman brief Burrell and Valchek on everything that the detail has accomplished -- all these near-miraculous feats of investigative genius, having taken what was a simple petty grudge and used it to get a line on smuggling, drugs, prostitution and possibly 14 open murder cases -- and all Stan wants to hear about is Frank Sobotka.

This, in a nutshell, is why nothing ever gets done in the universe of "The Wire." Good work is damned hard to do, and if it doesn't help someone in power either stay in power or protect his own interests, then it doesn't really matter, does it? Daniels could close the 14 open murders, could nail the entire Barksdale/Bell gang, could find a way to put a charge on the Irsay family for moving the Colts out of Baltimore, and none of it would matter to Valchek if Frank Sobotka weren't charged as an accessory to it all.

There's a lot of hopeless, myopic, institutionalized thinking going on in "Stray Rounds." Bodie's shoot-out with the rival crew kills a little boy, and though Major Bunny Colvin, commander of the Western District, knows the usual War on Drugs tactics are pointless, Rawls tells him to go bust heads and take doors anyway. Norris and Cole assume Bodie is another idiot drug dealer, and so they fall into the trap they think they've set for him. Avon refuses to see Stringer's persuasive arguments about the Prop Joe deal, and instead arranges to hire legendary enforcer Brother Mouzone (and gets him down to Baltimore much quicker than String was expecting). And we see that The Greek is stringing along an FBI agent named Koutris by pretending to give him "terrorists" (actually, a difficult business partner) in exchange for being informed about threats to The Greek's business.

Hell, Ziggy even manages to get his duck to drink itself to death, because it never occurred to him that giving booze to a waterfowl was a health risk.

If it wasn't for McNulty's latest R-rated shenanigans -- or for the joyful performances of people like Al Brown as Valchek and J.D. Williams as Bodie -- this would be one of the darker hours of "The Wire" in which no major character actually dies.

Part of the reason "Stray Rounds" feels so hopeless, of course, is that it's our closest look to date at The Greek and his operation. While the smoke-filled dinner with The Greek and his lieutenants could resemble a gathering of the Injustice League, "The Wire" isn't interested in concepts like good and evil. The Greek does terrible things, but not out of malice -- or even out of the pride that leads to so many terrible outcomes in the drug world (like Bodie and company's stray round). Rather, as David Simon has said many times, The Greek is capitalism in its purest, most ruthless form -- a man who will do anything to keep his business viable, and the money flowing in.

While he and Vondas have their blind spots -- they're a bit too confident about being able to elude the Baltimore PD -- he's still clever enough to recognize what Fitz told Jimmy in the series premiere about the FBI abandoning the War on Drugs for the War on Terror. He has Koutris on the line, not because Koutris is corrupt, but because he's made Koutris believe he can give him information on terrorists, and Koutris has no idea that he's being played.

Against a man with that long a view, with his finger in so many pies, what chance does the detail have to make a case? And against a generation of Bodies and Avons, what chance do men like Bunny Colvin have to make a dent in the human cost of the drug trade?

Some other thoughts on "Stray Rounds":

• Maybe the most heartbreaking part of the opening sequence isn't the mom finding her dead son (though that's brutal), but the moment right before, when she has no idea what's happened and is just telling him to get to school, because the drama's over -- as if this sort of thing happens so often in the neighborhood that they treat it like just another of life's routine inconveniences.

• As if to symbolize the Valchek/Pearlman exchange, Frank is largely spectator in this one, showing up only to witness Koutris' raid on the can with the Colombian drugs, but we do learn that his plan seems to be working, as the new budget will include concessions for the port.

• McNulty is pure comedy in this one, from Dominic West -- a Brit whose American accent is sometimes spotty -- having to do a fake horrible British accent, to the reactions of McNulty and Kima at his situation during the raid, to the flare of Ronnie's eyes when she reads the incident report over Jimmy's shoulder.

• Speaking of the raid, there's a nice small moment where the uniform officer assumes that the only way to take a door is to knock it in, where both Kima and Bunk realize they can just knock and get the same result. This isn't a drug house; you can't flush hookers.

• Herc and Carver have been getting the short end of every assignment all season (down to washing windows in the previous episode), and their frustration is starting to overwhelm them at this point.

• I love the way Frankie Faison plays Burrell in the scene with Valchek, because Erv knows exactly the position Stan is in, having previous assigned Daniels to a detail that sprawled far beyond what was expected.

• We can talk more about Brother Mouzone next time, but note that the character is given the kind of dramatic entrance "The Wire" doesn't usually do -- that is, unless the series' other larger-than-life character, Omar, is involved.

• Bunny Colvin's mustachioed sidekick is Lt. Mello, played by the real-life Jay Landsman, who was the inspiration for both the character of the same name played on "The Wire" by Delaney Williams, but Detective Munch on "Homicide." He has one of the thicker (and authentic) Baltimore accents on the series.

Coming up next: "Storm Warnings," in which Brother Mouzone asks Cheese a question, Valchek makes a federal case out of Sobotka, and Ziggy gets pushed around again.

Not sure when that review will go up, as I used my last free evening before the start of press tour to write this one. Could be next week, could be a few weeks. But it'll get done.

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

The Wire, Season 2, Episode 9: "Stray Rounds" (Veterans edition)

We're in the home stretch on our trip back through season two of "The Wire," and as always, we're doing it in two slightly different versions: one for people who have never seen the show before, and one for people who want to be able to discuss not only season two, but everything that's coming later. This is the veterans version; click here for the newbie edition.

Spoilers for episode 9, "Stray Rounds," coming up just as soon as I say "No thank you" to drugs...

"This is about Frank Sobotka!" -Valchek
"The case is bigger now." -Pearlman

"Stray Rounds" contains one of my absolute favorite scenes in the run of the series, the one quoted above: Daniels and Pearlman brief Burrell and Valchek on everything that the detail has accomplished -- all these near-miraculous feats of investigative genius, having taken what was a simple petty grudge and used it to get a line on smuggling, drugs, prostitution and possibly 14 open murder cases -- and all Stan wants to hear about is Frank Sobotka.

This, in a nutshell, is why nothing ever gets done in the universe of "The Wire." Good work is damned hard to do, and if it doesn't help someone in power either stay in power or protect his own interests, then it doesn't really matter, does it? Daniels could close the 14 open murders, could nail the entire Barksdale/Bell gang, could find a way to put a charge on the Irsay family for moving the Colts out of Baltimore, and none of it would matter to Valchek if Frank Sobotka weren't charged as an accessory to it all.

There's a lot of hopeless, myopic, institutionalized thinking going on in "Stray Rounds." Bodie's shoot-out with the rival crew kills a little boy, and though Major Bunny Colvin, commander of the Western District, knows the usual War on Drugs tactics are pointless, Rawls tells him to go bust heads and take doors anyway. Norris and Cole assume Bodie is another idiot drug dealer, and so they fall into the trap they think they've set for him. Avon refuses to see Stringer's persuasive arguments about the Prop Joe deal, and instead arranges to hire legendary enforcer Brother Mouzone (and gets him down to Baltimore much quicker than String was expecting). And we see that The Greek is stringing along an FBI agent named Koutris by pretending to give him "terrorists" (actually, a difficult business partner) in exchange for being informed about threats to The Greek's business.

Hell, Ziggy even manages to get his duck to drink itself to death, because it never occurred to him that giving booze to a waterfowl was a health risk.

If it wasn't for McNulty's latest R-rated shenanigans -- or for the joyful performances of people like Al Brown as Valchek and J.D. Williams as Bodie -- this would be one of the darker hours of "The Wire" in which no major character actually dies.

Part of the reason "Stray Rounds" feels so hopeless, of course, is that it's our closest look to date at The Greek and his operation. While the smoke-filled dinner with The Greek and his lieutenants could resemble a gathering of the Injustice League, "The Wire" isn't interested in concepts like good and evil. The Greek does terrible things, but not out of malice -- or even out of the pride that leads to so many terrible outcomes in the drug world (like Bodie and company's stray round). Rather, as David Simon has said many times, The Greek is capitalism in its purest, most ruthless form -- a man who will do anything to keep his business viable, and the money flowing in.

While he and Vondas have their blind spots -- they're a bit too confident about being able to elude the Baltimore PD -- he's still clever enough to recognize what Fitz told Jimmy in the series premiere about the FBI abandoning the War on Drugs for the War on Terror. He has Koutris on the line, not because Koutris is corrupt, but because he's made Koutris believe he can give him information on terrorists, and Koutris has no idea that he's being played.

Against a man with that long a view, with his finger in so many pies, what chance does the detail have to make a case? And against a generation of Bodies and Avons, what chance do men like Bunny Colvin have to make a dent in the human cost of the drug trade?

Some other thoughts on "Stray Rounds":

• Maybe the most heartbreaking part of the opening sequence isn't the mom finding her dead son (though that's brutal), but the moment right before, when she has no idea what's happened and is just telling him to get to school, because the drama's over -- as if this sort of thing happens so often in the neighborhood that they treat it like just another of life's routine inconveniences.

• As if to symbolize the Valchek/Pearlman exchange, Frank is largely spectator in this one, showing up only to witness Koutris' raid on the can with the Colombian drugs, but we do learn that his plan seems to be working, as the new budget will include concessions for the port.

• McNulty is pure comedy in this one, from Dominic West -- a Brit whose American accent is sometimes spotty -- having to do a fake horrible British accent, to the reactions of McNulty and Kima at his situation during the raid, to the flare of Ronnie's eyes when she reads the incident report over Jimmy's shoulder.

• Speaking of the raid, there's a nice small moment where the uniform officer assumes that the only way to take a door is to knock it in, where both Kima and Bunk realize they can just knock and get the same result. This isn't a drug house; you can't flush hookers.

• Herc and Carver have been getting the short end of every assignment all season (down to washing windows in the previous episode), and their frustration is starting to overwhelm them at this point.

• I love the way Frankie Faison plays Burrell in the scene with Valchek, because Erv knows exactly the position Stan is in, having previous assigned Daniels to a detail that sprawled far beyond what was expected.

• We can talk more about Brother Mouzone next time, but note that the character is given the kind of dramatic entrance "The Wire" doesn't usually do -- that is, unless the series' other larger-than-life character, Omar, is involved.

• Bunny Colvin's mustachioed sidekick is Lt. Mello, played by the real-life Jay Landsman, who was the inspiration for both the character of the same name played on "The Wire" by Delaney Williams, but Detective Munch on "Homicide." He has one of the thicker (and authentic) Baltimore accents on the series.

And now we come to the veterans-only section, where we can talk about how developments in this episode will play out later in the season, and the series:

• It's not as grand an entrance as Mouzone gets, but the introduction of Bunny will of course be more important to the series, as he becomes one of the main characters of season three, an important part of season four, and -- depending on your views on drug decriminalization -- one of the more purely admirable characters the show will ever feature. And, yes, all of Bunny's frustration here was designed by Simon, Burns and company to lay some groundwork for season three's Hamsterdam experiment.

• "Stray Rounds" foreshadows not only Hamsterdam, but season three's other grand, doomed experiment, The New Day Co-Op, as Prop Joe mesmerizes Stringer with the story of Charlie Sollers, a heroin dealer who cared only about money, not street rep or violence, and had a long and productive career by staying off everyone's radar.

• While the name of the dope brands tended to change from season to season, Bodie's crew will still be slinging WMD in season three, leading to one of the funniest lines of the series, Santangelo telling the junkies, "I hear WMD is the bomb."

• Because The Greek's people aren't as disciplined about phone use as Avon's crew (and, in the future, Marlo's crew), Sergei dooms himself to a life in prison -- and gives Lester the necessary tip to close the 14 murders -- by reassuring White Mike that anyone he killed would be missing his hands and face.

• Yet another link in the chain that will lead to Ziggy's end: had Double-G just fronted Ziggy the cash that he asked for, Ziggy wouldn't have had to pawn the duck's diamond necklace, and therefore might not have had the opportunity to eye, then buy, the gun he uses to kill Double-G. (Then again, perhaps that's what he intended to buy all along with the cash he asked for.)

Coming up next: "Storm Warnings," in which Brother Mouzone asks Cheese a question, Valchek makes a federal case out of Sobotka, and Ziggy gets pushed around again.

Not sure when that review will go up, as I used my last free evening before the start of press tour to write this one. Could be next week, could be a few weeks. But it'll get done.

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

Nurse Jackie, "Pupil": Don't kid a kidder

Hi. As mentioned earlier, I don't have time to properly review tonight's "Nurse Jackie" because I'm busy preparing for tomorrow's start of press tour, but I do have a few quick thoughts on this one: 1)Ruby Jerins, who plays Jackie's older daughter Grace, is a terrific young actress. I suspect that if she and/or her parents want her to continue acting as she gets older, we're going to see a lot of her. 2)Always nice to see Andrea Martin working, and amusing to see Jill Flint (who's currently playing a doc on "Royal Pains") and Alexie Gilmore (who played an ER doc on Fox's short-lived "New Amsterdam") as her bickering, non-medically-trained daughters. 3)Merritt Wever continues to be hysterical ("I have, like, two more questions"), and it seems like they're setting up Zoey to figure out Jackie's pill problem through her note-taking. Click here to read the full post

Once again... Jeffster!

I head up to slightly less Southern California in a bit (would have left sooner if it wasn't for the Ben Silverman news) and will be largely radio silent until press tour(*) starts tomorrow morning, other than a "So, what did you think of 'Nurse Jackie' tonight?" post at 11.

(*) This week's blog logo is a tribute to "EZ Streets," the very first pilot I watched before my very first press tour, and still one of the biggest heart-breakers in my time as a TV critic.

Before I go, two "Chuck" links that you may not have seen in comments to the previous post: a pretty high-quality video of Jeffster! rocking out to "Fat-Bottomed Girls," and then Mo Ryan getting some more concrete answers from Schwartz and company about the nature of the Chuck Fu and how that'll impact Chuck and Sarah. (People who want those two together, like, yesterday may not want to click through, for the sake of their own blood pressure.)

UPDATE: Hulu now has the Comic-Con panel up, minus the Schwartz/Fedak video, and minus Jeffster! I'm assuming they didn't want to pay the rights for the song. Ah, well. You can see the performance elsewhere, and one day I'm going to find a way to show Fedak's dramatic debut. Click here to read the full post

Bye-bye, Ben: Silverman out at NBC

Friday is traditionally Take Out the Trash Day for bad news in both politics and entertainment, but with a lot of the national TV press preparing to travel to Pasadena today for tomorrow's start of the TCA press tour, NBC must have decided it was a fine time to announce Ben Silverman's departure from the network.

You can read the whole press release -- which buries the lead by focusing on Jeff Gaspin's promotion to being in charge of all of NBC's TV properties, both broadcast and cable -- and after the jump, I have a few thoughts on the Silverman era and the impact (or lack thereof) his departure will have on NBC...

Like his boss Jeff Zucker, Silverman wasn't a traditional choice to be the head of a network entertainment division. Though he'd worked in TV for a long time and had a good run of success with his production company, Reveille (which has given us "The Office," "Ugly Betty" and "The Biggest Loser," to name three success stories), he was much more of a deal-maker than a developer. He'd see a show in a foreign market that he liked, acquire it, and let other people figure out how to make it work here.

He would talk about how he revered the late Brandon Tartikoff, who ran NBC in its '80s golden era, and there was a period where it seemed like he was trying to recreate NBC circa 1983 with high-concept, cheesey shows like a "Knight Rider" remake and "My Own Worst Enemy." And while Reveille was placed in a "blind trust," Silverman was still making money off of its shows (until he sold it), and he demonstrated an uncanny knack for adding the company's series to his network ("Kath & Kim" being one of the more noxious examples of the trend).

In fairness to Silverman, he did also champion the highbrow, ambitious "Kings," which was one of the best dramas NBC has aired in years. But it flopped just like everything else Silverman tried, and finished up a Summer Burn-Off Theatre run over the weekend.

Because NBC remained mired in fourth place during his tenure, and because he was such a notorious self-promoter and party boy, Silverman became an easy punchline within the industry. Even his bosses at NBC seemed to recognize he was a poor fit for the job, and in recent months had moved him away from traditional programming and development roles (Angela Bromstad and Paul Telegdy were put in charge of scripted and reality shows, respectively) so he could focus on the kind of new media and product integration deals that were his biggest strength.

And because he wasn't so hands-on with the shows and the schedule anymore, I don't know that Silverman's departure is going to have that much of an impact on NBC primetime going forward. The plan to give 10 p.m. to Jay Leno Monday through Friday (which was as much Zucker as Silverman) is already in place, but it's not like Silverman was the lone champion of that move, or of any shows remaining on the schedule.

The Silverman era was a failure, but NBC and Silverman had both more or less recognized this a while ago. The last few months, everyone's just been playing out the string, waiting for Silverman to find another job more suited to his skill set. And now he has, so what was already reality is now official and public. Click here to read the full post

Hung, "The Pickle Jar": Taking care of business

Quick thoughts on episode four of "Hung" coming up just as soon as I donate one and a half structural beams...

"This might be your first time, but this is what I do. I'm a professional." -Ray

"The Pickle Jar" was the last episode I saw in advance, and the one that really convinced me that "Hung" was trending in the right direction. As I've said before, the show seems to be following the "Breaking Bad" model of letting its protagonists take their sweet time at learning how to be criminals. If Ray had a successful encounter with the woman in the hotel in the pilot, it wouldn't have felt nearly as satisfying as it did after we've seen him and Tanya flail about for most of these first four episodes. Maybe, it seems, Ray really does have a future as a gigolo, and Tanya as a pimp.

The two Janes (as I think I want to start referring to our stars) were helped in this one by the presence of Margo Martindale as Ray's first real client. I wasn't crazy about "The Riches," the previous series from "Hung" co-creator Dmitry Lipkin, but I always thought Martindale was terrific as the pill-popping neighbor, and she added a lot of depth and pathos to her scenes here opposite both leads.

Speaking of pill-popping, at what point do you suppose "Hung" is going to address the role of Viagra in Ray's new career? One of the many tricks of the trade I learned from "Secret Diary of a Call Girl" -- which, in the end, was really only interesting for the tricks of the trick trade -- was that all male escorts have to keep a steady supply of ED pills handy, just in case the client doesn't stir a reaction on her own. I assumed that's where they were going with the Martindale story -- that Ray bolted because he feared he couldn't perform with an older, heavier woman -- but, no, he was really sick, and when he showed up the second time he had no problems in that area. Or are we supposed to assume that this is one of the other gifts that qualifies him to conquer the Detroit metro area male escort market?

Whether or not his physical gifts are greater than we know so far, what made the final sequence work was that we saw that Ray does, in fact, have more going for him than his anatomy. He knew what the client needed to hear, and he made her feel good about herself even before they got down to the act itself.

I remain on the fence about Ray's family, though. At least the kids are starting to get personalities and stories of their own here, as we see that Damon cares a little too much about his role in Darby's life. As for Jess, is there anyone here who doesn't think her encounter with the heinous Lenore will eventually lead to her trying to become one of Big Donnie's clients?

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

Doctor Who, "Planet of the Dead": It takes a thief

Because I'm out here at Comic-Con, I don't have much time to write about the latest "Doctor Who" special, save to note a few things: 1)Michelle Ryan remains much, much more interesting in her native accent than she was on "Bionic Woman"; 2)Special effects aside, "Planet of the Dead" felt much more like a regular "Doctor Who" episode than any of the Christmas movies (which all took place on a larger scale); and 3)Much more than "The Next Doctor," this one is offering hints to the end of David Tennant's tenure as The Doctor.

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

The Doctor comes to San Diego

I can't exactly gauge it, since I was on stage for one and in the audience for the other, but the reception "Doctor Who" -- specifically, David Tennant, Russell T. Davies, director Euros Lyn and producer Julie Gardner -- received here on Comic-Con's final morning was nearly as loud and adoring as what "Chuck" got yesterday. Some panel highlights coming up after I remind you that "Doctor Who: Planet of the Dead" airs tonight on BBC America...

Among the highlights:

• Moderator Robert Lloyd (a writer for the LA Times and an obvious fan of the series) asked Gardner to deal with the rumors of a movie right off the bat. "We are not making any announcement about a Doctor Who movie," she said. "I'm really sorry. I don't know where the rumor started. But what it's made us think is it might be a good idea to do at some point. Is this something that you want?" The crowd, predictably, roared its approval.

• They showed a teaser trailer for Tennant's farewell movie, featuring the return of several characters from earlier in the Davies/Tennant run (I won't spoil it, but it's easy to find out if you want) that looked tremendous. At the end of the panel, they showed a trailer for "Waters of Mars," the special that'll follow "Planet of the Dead." Looked like a big-budget version of the various Davies/Tennant episodes with The Doctor on a space station with some kind of monster on the loose.

• A fan asked Tennant (a lifelong "Doctor Who" fan) about his memories of when the first Doctor he knew was replaced, and whether he could understand what fans are feeling as they prepare for the transition from Tennant to Matt Smith. Tennant talked about how much he revered Tom Baker, then said, "And I never forgot him, or loved him any less, but then Peter Davison came along, and within three weeks, I thought he was the best. I think what makes the show go on forever." He suggested, to some inevitable skepticism from the room, that within a few weeks, they'd all think "Matt Smith's the greatest thing that's ever been, which he probably is... I think change is part of the show. I'm very very proud to have been part of the history, but I'm very proud that we're handing it over in good health and that it carries on!"

• And speaking of fandom, Tennant said one of his favorite personal moments from playing The Doctor came during a table read of "School Reunion," involving Elisabeth Sladen: "Suddenly, this voice from my childhood was calling me 'Doctor.' When the 8-year-old boy met the 35-year-old boy and was still being called The Doctor by Sarah Jane, that was quite special."

• Tennant's version of The Doctor will appear in an upcoming "Sarah Jane Adventures" episode called "The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith."

• A fan asked about John Barrowman's claims that he's been stealing items from the set, and what any of the panelists might have taken home. They all clammed up, and then Gardner said, "I think John Barrowman just stole things off the set so he could be strip-searched on the way out."

• A fan asked whether River Song would be returning, and Gardner noted, "We are now happy viewers to season five. We don't know anything you don't know."

• Tennant was asked if he might return, as many previous Doctors have, for charity specials or other events. He thought about it and noted that the series' 50th anniversary would be in 2013, then immediately cautioned the room, "That's not me making an announcement. There's no plan. Don't Twitter that! That's not a thing! Yet!"

I'll have a separate, extremely brief, post up tonight about "Planet of the Dead," so don't talk about it here, and I'm interviewing Tennant in a couple of days when we're both at press tour. I'm open to suggested questions if they're good. Click here to read the full post

Lost: It's so hard to say good-bye to Comic-Con

As soon as I saw the final Comic-Con schedule, my heart sank, because "Chuck" and "Lost" were scheduled back-to-back -- in two different rooms, with "Lost" in Hall H, which is legendary for both its size and the length of its line. I had joked with Schwartz and Fedak that I might just bail on the "Chuck" panel 10 or 15 minutes early and let them conduct the fan Q&A portion, but thanks to some kind people and a willingness to sprint from Ballroom 20 to Hall H, I was able to stay for the entirety of "Chuck" and get into "Lost" with a minute or two to spare.

And it was worth the effort, I thought. I've seen Damon and Carlton in action before at TCA (where the above photo was taken last January), and I enjoy their podcast (more for the comedy value than for anything they reveal about the show, because they're so damn cagey), but I had always heard that, just as Reggie Jackson tended to play his best in the World Series, the Comic-Con stage was the idea venue in which to experience Darlton in action. They did not disappoint. I mentioned a lot of the good stuff on my Twitter feed, but I'll try to capture the some of the highlights after the jump...

After a few video clips (including fake opening credits for an '80s TV show about the Dharma Initiative, which is up on ABC.com), Damon and Carlton came out and said that, since this would be their final Comic-Con experience (they're not coming after the finale), they wanted to thank the fans and also to answer some long-standing questions. One of those was the famous "Are you making it up as you go along?," and they said they had a method to prove that they knew the ending from the beginning: they inserted the script pages for the final scene of the series into a vault with two keys, and promised to open it after the finale on "Jimmy Kimmel Live." (*)

(*) Said method was in service of a comedy bit, or else I'd point out that it wouldn't prove anything, unless they had locked away some notes five years ago.

From there, it was time for a mix of questions -- "We will be as honest and forthcoming as we never were," Lindelof promised -- fan videos (including a great mock opening credits sequence that made the show look like an '80s action series, complete with use of the "Magnum, PI" font (which was also used in that cool YouTube mash-up of Magnum and Han Solo) and a hilarious freeze-frame on the "Lost" logo over Hurley running one of The Others over with the magic bus.

A fan asked about recent Darlton statements that season 6 would resemble season 1 in some ways.

"You'll be seeing many characters you haven't seen since the first season," Lindelof promised.

"There was a certain feel" to season 1, said Cuse. "They were running around in the jungle. Things felt intense and surprising...We feel we have a way to do that in the final season of the show that we like, and we hope you will too."

"It's really our goal to have you watch the final season of the show and not know what we're going to do next," Lindelof added.

Paul Scheer from "Human Giant" showed up to present the guys with a painting of them giving a thumbs-up while being embraced by a polar bear, and after some hedging on the fate of Daniel Faraday, vis a vis Juliet setting off Jughead, another fan asked about flashbacks.

"We are doing something different in season 6," Carlton said. "The time travel season is over, the flash-forward season is over. We have something different planned. Hopefully, you will like it, but we are not going to commit to what it's going to be."

Jorge Garcia appeared in a mock commercial for Mr. Cluck's chicken, then appeared in Hall H itself to ask his bosses if they were going to answer every question, noting, "The last time I trusted you guys, you said Nikki and Paulo were going to be awesome."

Damon cleverly said "Everything that matters is going to be answered," which gives them a ton of wiggle room in terms of what they feel matters.

Michael Emerson then came out to heckle Garcia's heckling of Darlton, and this turned into an argument about whether Emerson didn't like him because he really wanted to play Hurley, and when Emerson (who was, as you can imagine, hilariously sarcastic) denied auditioning for the role, Lindelof played some mock audition footage of Emerson, circa 2004, dressed as Hurley. Very disturbing. Very funny.

There were several Richard Alpert questions -- Cuse promised some Alpert backstory this season -- and when a fan with a thick Boston accent asked the inevitable eyeliner question, we cut to Nestor Carbonell backstage talking to himself in the makeup chair mirror -- "Richard Alpert's not immortal. You are!" -- and, of course, applying a ton of eye makeup. Carbonell would join Emerson, Garcia and other special guests on the stage.

Getting back to Jughead, Lindelof hedged about the survival of Juliet, noting that if the plan worked and time reset, she's fine, and if not, not, but, as with Faraday/Jeremy Davies, he expects to see Elizabeth Mitchell on the show this year in some capacity.

Emerson fielded a question about the fans' nicknaming Jacob's rival "Esau" by saying, "We sometimes deal in Biblical iimagery, but we tend to dance in and back away from it. That might be too much, but I like the way your mind is working."

"You're good at this!" Damon told Emerson, marveling at how impressively he non-answered that.

After a Sawyer tribute clip, Josh Holloway came out with a prop taser and pretended to stun Lindelof to steal his key to the script vault. (It was particularly funny because the taser sound effect was a good five seconds after Lindelof pretended to spasm, and because Lindelof had a hard time not moving around as Holloway stole the key. At one point, he had to lift his head up to help out.) After Holloway stuck Lindelof's hand in a pitcher of water, he threatened Cuse by telling him, "I will shock your friend JJ Abrams again!" (This led to one of the more overt references I've heard Cuse make about how Abrams hasn't worked on the show since season one.) Then he unlocked the box and struggled to read it, so Emerson (who's a great audiobook narrator) took over and began to read the following stage directions:

"'Exterior, circus tent, night... As the flames die, we find Sylar and Parkman...' What the f--k is this?"

We got one final montage, a necrology of all the dead characters set to Boyz II Men's "It's So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday," with the biggest applause going to, in order, Charlie, Faraday and Mr. Eko. Charlie's segment was the last, and longest, because Dominic Monaghan (already at Comic-Con, having joined the cast of ABC's "Flash Forward") came on stage to wave to the crowd. He had something written on his palm, presumably "Not Penny's Boat."

And with that, the final "Lost" Comic-Con panel was over, and if we didn't know much more about the last season than we did going into it, at least we were darned entertained. Click here to read the full post

Chuck vs. the (San Diego) Comic-Con

Hey, all. Having sprinted from the "Chuck" panel to the mammoth Hall H for the final "Lost" panel, I'm going to camp out here for a while so I can see the "Iron Man 2" panel in a few hours. (Though if the movie panels in between seem particularly bad, I might bail before Tony Stark and company show.) So while my laptop battery lasts, I'm going to write up some thoughts on the day's first two panels: first "Chuck," then "Lost."

"Chuck" stuff coming up -- and full credit to Fienberg's live-blog of the panel for all quotes -- just as soon as Chris Fedak gives me back my pen...

As you might guess from the above photo (h/t to ChuckTV.net for the screencap) -- or as you might have assumed ever since the Comic-Con announcements started hinting at a special surprise from the cast -- the panel opened up with Jeffster! themselves, Vik Sahay and Scott Krinsky, rocking out to Queen's epic "Fat-Bottomed Girls."

UPDATE: Thus far, this is the best version I've seen of the performance, shot by someone up close.

Actually, no: it began with a season 2 highlight reel, followed by a very funny pre-taped video with Josh Schwartz and Fedak in their office a month ago, asking Zachary Levi what he's going to do since they're going to be canceled. Levi is floored by this idea, but Schwartz and Fedak are adamant, when Josh gets a call from the NBC executives. (Fedak tells Josh to say hi; Josh: "They don't know who you are.") Amazingly, they have been renewed, and as Levi bounds out to tell the rest of the cast, Fedak and Schwartz begin to panic: they don't have any ideas for a third season, and in fact only did the "I know kung fu" gag because the assumed they'd never have to follow up on it. As Chris gets his head stuck in a Stormtrooper helmet, Josh suggests one thing they can do that they know will work: Jeffster!

The video cuts out, Sahay and Krinsky (with keytar in hand) storms the stage and the crowd goes bananas for "Fat-Bottomed Girls." So does the cast, who first sprint around to the side of the hall so they can watch themselves, then go on-stage to dance and clap along with the performance. Sahay got incredibly into it, as you might expect, with all the faux-Mick Jagger moves, and by the time I came on stage, the crowd was whipped into such a frenzy that I wasn't sure if I'd be able to get in a few questions.

We opened with a little Jeffster! chat, as Sahay joked that people would probably pay him not to sing in the future; someone in the cast -- I think it was Adam Baldwin -- then slipped him a twenty to confirm the theory. Levi sang the virtues of all the fans who were so passionate about helping to save the show -- Wendy Farrington, who came up with the Subway Finale Footlong campaign, was in the audience and got singled out (and got to pose with the cast for pictures afterwards) -- and Schwartz listed a bunch of media and/or blog types (Mo Ryan, Fienberg, Ausiello, Joe Adalian, Televisionary, Give Me My Remote, ChuckTV.net and me) for their own efforts on behalf of the show.

Schwartz and Fedak were predictably non-commital on what's coming up next season. Schwartz said details on Subway's involvement within the story is TBD, and later said, "Something very emotional and traumatic is going to have happened between Chuck and Sarah" -- and, as the crowd groaned, added -- "But it's gonna be really really good. Is that vague enough?"

Zachary Levi did get dispensation to reveal one thing about the nature of Chuck's new kung fu powers. Since spoiler-phobe Schwartz okay'ed it, and because it's going to be so long till the season three premiere (though Schwartz said several times that they might come back sooner than March, depending on NBC's needs), I'm going to say what it is, but not till the end of the post. So if you don't want to know about that -- or about a couple of other vaguely spoiler-y things -- stop reading before you get to the italics.

There's a new official site, ChuckMeOut.com, that's going to be the place for all "Chuck" news, behind-the-scenes info, etc., that went live this morning. Fedak also talked a little about the season 2 DVD (which right now is tentatively set to come out in early 2010, I guess because they want it to be close to the season three premiere) and said that one of the features would be Baldwin/Casey teaching How to Be a Spy.

I tried not to ask a lot of questions, since I knew the Jeffster! performance would take up some time and the event was for the fans. Schwartz and Fedak kept up the running gag from the clip by acting as if every suggestion the fans offered would be used in the season to compensate for their own lack of plans, and Fedak borrowed my pen to dutifully jot down ideas like:

• Chuck's powers now come with the catch that after he uses them, he can't walk for a half-hour;

• Chuck's dad may have also programmed him with language and other skills. The crowd started throwing out language suggestions, and when several screamed out "Klingon!," Levi (who had the crowd predictably eating out of his hand) said, "Chuck already knows Klingon! Duh!"

• Someone asked if there would be a musical episode, preferably featuring Jeffster! "Now there will be," Schwartz said.

There were also a lot of running gags on the panel: Baldwin took great pleasure in discussing, and eventually goading Josh Gomez to reveal, his bright pink boxer shorts. Baldwin also played into the crowd's predictable "Firefly" love, joking that his internal monologue whenever Casey grunts is "Joss Whedon," and, when a fan asked if there would be "Chuck" action figures, noting that he already had his own action figure. (Levi then did a pantomime of a Chuck action figure beating the snot out of a Jayne Cobb action figure through the use of his kung fu grip.)

Again, not a lot of news (save for the stuff below), but this was largely an excuse for the cast to shower its love on the fans, and vice versa, and everybody seemed to have a good time. Frankly, it seemed like the crowd was livelier for the "Chuck" panel than for the "Lost" panel that followed (though that may just be the hugeness of Hall H swallowing up a lot of the noise).

Anyway, a few things you won't want to read if you're 100 percent afraid of spoilers. Since I'm posting this, it's okay to discuss them in the comments. Stop reading if you don't want to know. Seriously, stop. Now. Stop.

Okay. We all good?

So, the nature of "Chuck-Fu," as one fan dubbed it earlier at the Con: the kung fu abilities and other physical stuff is there, but there's a glitch in the program that means they don't tend to last for very long in any circumstance. Fedak added that the software was designed to be installed in cold, remorseless Bryce Larkin, not big ball of emotions Chuck, and this will also cause problems.

Also, as Ryan McPartlin discussed Captain Awesome finding out Chuck's secret identity, Schwartz added that "Awesome will start to be submerged into the spy world as well."

And in other spoiler minutiae, "The Buy More will still be a part of the show," per Fedak, and Corina, the rival spy from season one's "Chuck vs. the Wookie," will be back, and that Morgan will again try to seduce her.

UPDATE #2: After the panel, Mo Ryan got more out of Schwartz and company about the limitations of the Chuck-Fu. Click here to read the full post

Dollhouse, "Epitaph One": To have and have not

So the big TV event of the day at Comic-Con was the screening of "Epitaph One," the 13th episode of "Dollhouse" season one, which Fox the TV studio produced to help the foreign/DVD sales, but which Fox the network hasn't bought because they already paid for 13 episodes (counting the original, scrapped pilot).

Now, I suspect many of you who care enough about "Dollhouse" to be reading this entry have already illegally downloaded the episode since it leaked last week, or perhaps you were in Ballroom 20 to watch it with me and 4500 of my closest friends. If not, and you intend to watch "Dollhouse" season two in the fall, I strongly recommend at least renting the DVD after it comes out on Tuesday, both because "Epitaph One" is easily the strongest episode to date, and because it's going to be crucial to how season two plays out. Really, it's one of the most important DVD extras ever.

After the jump, I'm going to discuss the episode -- and the weird implications it will have on the series -- in abstract, relatively spoiler-free terms, including some quotes from Joss from the panel. Because the episode has now been screened via legal means, I'm going to say that it's okay to spoil the episode in the comments, so read anything after the initial post at your own risk. Thoughts coming up just as soon as I enjoy some shellfish...

So, "Epitaph One" begins in 2019, in a nightmarish future where a small band of would-be heroes (including Whedon favorite Felicia Day, plus Sepinwall favorite Zach Ward) stumble across the abandoned Dollhouse. Using the imprint chair, they figure out how the larger Dollhouse organization is responsible for the state of the world, while at the same time we get to see some major developments in the future for all the series' regular characters as the larger global scenario played out.

Written by Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen and directed by David Solomon, "Epitaph One" takes the moral implications of the Dollhouse to their horrific extreme, and its vignette-laden narrative plays to every actors' strengths: Eliza Dushku doesn't have to do too much heavy lifting, Enver Gjokaj gets to show off several very different personas, etc. I'm really glad I got to see it, and on a big screen in a room full of so many enthusiastic fans.

What concerns me, though, is that "Epitaph One" is such a game-changer for the series -- revealing so much about what the show is really about, and what the future has in store for all the regulars -- that it's somewhat alarming to think it's only going to be on the DVD, especially since Joss said they fully intend to follow up on it over the course of season two. We'll check in on some of the 2019 characters, Whedon intends to explore the parameters (logistically and morally) of what can be done with the imprinting tech, along similar lines to what's discussed in "Epitaph One," and the new season is even going to be shot in the same more immediate (and inexpensive) visual style as this episode.

But while I expect a lot of the show's fans to care enough to seek out the DVD, my guess is that less than half of regular "Dollhouse" viewers who will have seen "Epitaph One" by the time season two begins. Whatever the percentages, we're heading for a scenario where some of the audience will be awash in this huge bath of new information, while others will have no idea who the 2019 people are, or about what we glimpsed of, say, Echo's future. I talked briefly with Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen after the panel, and they said there will likely be some repetition of information from "Epitaph One" to explain things to the viewers who didn't see it, but I can't imagine that explanation being nearly as powerful as simply watching "Epitaph One" itself.

Joss also said that those of us who watched "Epitaph" shouldn't automatically take all the flashbacks as gospel, as they're presented as memories, and memories aren't always what actually happened.

"What we intend to do is honor what you've seen here today," he said, "but also to question the veracity of what you've seen here today." He also said that "The future will inform where we go with the show," but, "it's not going to inform the show so much that it becomes a post-apocalyptic-sometimes show... We're going to use it to take the show slightly on a new tack, but it's still what we wanted to do had we not done the future -- which was twist the knife."

Again, I think "Epitaph One" is an incredible hour of television -- and, more than "Man on the Street," or "A Spy in the House of Love," or any of the episodes from the stronger second half of "Dollhouse" season one, makes me think Joss actually did know what he was doing with this premise, even if the execution of the early episodes was disappointing -- but I don't think it was a good idea to do such a monumental, series-altering episode as one that everyone involved had to suspect might never air on Fox. (At the time it was produced, "Epitaph One" was being made only for the DVD.) Of course, the counter-argument would be that Joss and company couldn't have known that they'd be renewed, and "Epitaph One" would have functioned as a brilliant series finale had Fox not ordered more. Better to have it, and the complications it now creates with renewal, then for Joss to have commissioned another standalone episode where one of Echo's assignments goes awry.

As Joss joked when a fan asked about how the show would deal with all the issues raised in "Epitaph One" during season two, "We talked about a lot of things, when we accidentally forgot to get canceled."

What did everybody else think? Do you think the show can easily bring non-viewers of the episode up to speed early next season? Click here to read the full post

Torchwood Children of Earth, part 5: Sacrificial lambs

We've come to the end of "Torchwood: Children of Earth," which means we can all openly discuss the whole series. Unfortunately, my Comic-Con stint means my review won't be much longer than for any of the previous chapters. Spoilers coming up just as soon as I stand back...

"That's what Torchwood does, you see: it ruins your life." -Gwen

So who's feeling upbeat right about now? Anyone? Ready to party? No?

I have to applaud Russell T. Davies and company for having the courage of their convictions. While I took issue with a few things in the finale, overall it felt very much of a piece with the thrilling, squirm-inducing four hours that preceded it. There was no attempt at false uplift. Yes, The 4-5-6 are killed(*), and the British Prime Minister is basically stripped of his power, but his replacement is the equally odious Denise. John Frobisher kills his family and himself for what turns out to be a solveable problem. Many are still dead, many others are still traumatized, and in the end, our hero -- smiling Captain Jack, the man who's supposed to be perfect at everything, who can conjure a solution to any problem out of thin air, who lets the world wash off his back -- is left with the image not only of his dead lover, but of the grandson he chose to kill in order to save millions of other children. In that moment, he has to make a similar decision to the one Denise was proposing last night -- needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few (or the one) -- but he does it in a very different way. Where Denise and the rest of the British government were all about protecting their own kin at all costs, Jack has to sacrifice his grandson, because there isn't any time to find someone to take Steven's place.

(*) Or, at least, their Earth-bound representative is; I wasn't entirely clear on whether the rest were also slaughtered, or simply turned tail and ran once it became clear they weren't going to win.

And it's with the matter of timing that I take my biggest issue with the finale. I realize that Davies wanted to create a scenario where Jack had no choice but to use Steven to save the world, and it feels like much of the episode was structured to lead us to that point. Jack is kept on the sidelines, brooding over Ianto's death, for much of the hour, so that when he finally takes action and comes up with a solution, there just isn't time to look for another sacrificial lamb. And that doesn't track with the Jack we know, even after Jack tried to tell Ianto (and us) last night that we don't know him nearly as well as we think we do. Even in mourning, Jack would have taken action, would have fought to make sure Ianto's death wasn't completely in vain, rather than throwing in the towel until Agent Johnson goaded him into saving the day.

I know Jack being useless ties into the general apocalyptic feeling of the first two-thirds of the episode, with Frobisher's murder-suicide and Gwen and Rhys frantically trying to protect the "bad kids" from the neighborhood of Ianto's family from the army, but it was so out of character that it felt like a cheat to get the desired result. And what I think could have made Steven's death even more powerful -- and, admittedly, it was plenty powerful -- would be if he wasn't Jack's only choice. What if Jack is working on this plan all along, does have time to get access to some other random kid, but realizes in the end that he can't be a monster like the PM or Denise -- that if he's going to do this monstrous thing, then he has to suffer personally for it?

Or maybe I should stop trying to rewrite Davies, who, as I've written all week, really delivered the goods throughout "Children of Earth," with the help of a great cast (and I again want to praise the work of Peter Capaldi as the doomed Frobisher, who wasn't quite the unfeeling bastard the PM took him for), director Euros Lyn, and everyone else. Just a superb week of television, and a quantum leap forward for "Torchwood." Assuming the show's going to be back -- and based on the ratings in the UK, it almost has to -- I think the miniseries format is the way to go.

Now Davies just needs to find a way to bring Jack back to Earth, and maybe deputize Rhys and Lois Habiba (and, if he can be found, Mickey Smith) so that Gwen isn't a one-woman agency.

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

Burn Notice, "Shot in the Dark": Michael gets domestic

The usual jet lag at the start of one of these California trips means I woke up early enough to watch last night's "Burn Notice," but also means I'm not quite coherent enough to comment on it. (Though it's now startling to see Jay Harrington away from "Better Off Ted.")

Instead, let me point you to two accounts of Bruce Campbell's time here at Comic-Con(*): Fienberg's highlights of Campbell predictably owning the room for the "Burn Notice" session, and Mo Ryan doing a video interview with Campbell.

(*) That "Burn Notice" panel was one of two events I'm bummed I missed because I chose to fly in during day one -- the other being the cast of "The Middleman" doing a table read of the script for the unfilmed final episode, which was also turned into a graphic novel that I saw several fans toting around yesterday afternoon. Don't forget that the complete series DVD comes out on Tuesday. I didn't have much of a chance to peruse the special features before I left for California, but the episodes alone are as joy-inducing as ever. Click here to read the full post

Comic-Con day 1: Chuck poster, Dexter, and lines. Very long lines.

I wound up making slightly more than a cameo on day one of Comic-Con. Parking and getting my credential proved so relatively easy that I got on line for the "Dexter" panel, then spent an hour with Fienberg wondering if we had even a prayer of getting in, given that the line snaked around for-ev-er. Luckily, we did, and just before they started showing a trailer for "Dexter" season 4, featuring the great Jean John Lithgow as this year's very special guest. (You can read some of the highlights of the panel -- and the line -- on my Twitter feed.)

As I suspected, both the availability of outlets and Internet connectivity is spotty at best, so whatever blogging gets done will happen on an irregular basis. Based on the experience with the "Dexter" line, and what Dan has been telling me about the lines in general this year, I suspect my plan each day is going to be to park in a given room all day (most of the TV panels tend to be in the same place), so in theory I can try to blog during the panels I don't care about. (I'm hopefully going to spend a lot of Saturday in the famously huge Hall H, where the things I'm really looking forward to -- "Lost," Mike Judge's "Extract," "Iron Man 2," Kevin Smith -- will be sandwiched around a bunch of horror/sci-fi movies I don't care about, so maybe I'll do a lot of catching up then.)

I obviously won't be able to blog, or even tweet about, the "Chuck" panel as it's going on on Saturday (from 10-11 a.m. local time), but Fienberg has promised to liveblog it on his blog the same way he did today for the "Twilight" press conference.

And in the meantime, the "Chuck" guys wanted me to give you guys the first look at the special poster they had made for Comic-Con. (Click on it to see the full-sized version.) I think it looks suitably awesome, and I'm especially happy that they drew Jeff holding his keytar. Click here to read the full post

Torchwood Children of Earth, part 4: Endless love

Once again, I don't have time to give each episode of "Torchwood: Children of Earth" the proper review it deserves, so I'm going to offer up a few quick thoughts after the jump and then open it up to you. Spoilers for episode four coming up just as soon as I bump up the numbers...

"A man who can't die has got nothing to fear. So you watch it. And you keep watching." -Alice

And now "Torchwood" is not playing around, at all. Rest in peace, Ianto Jones. The line to pillory Russell T. Davies forms after all the Donna Noble fans have had their say.

Ianto's death in Thames House is the climactic, tragic scene of episode four, but the hour has several sequences that are more horrific, even if they don't bring about the end of a popular ongoing character (and Captain Jack's boyfriend).

The first is our glimpse of what The 4-5-6 actually look like -- and, more importantly, what was done with the kids Jack gave them in 1965. "Children of Earth" has gotten a lot of mileage out of using The 4-5-6 as an implied, unseen threat, and even here, the sequence is cleverly shot from the POV of the soldier's video camera, so the picture quality is poor and intermittent. We see everything we need to see to be disturbed, but not so much that we can start to spot the seams of the trick, you know?

Even more disturbing, though, is the scene where the Prime Minister and his people hash out how to select the 10 percent of their children who will be turned into immortal, catatonic fanny packs for The 4-5-6. Davies' work has never shown much fondness for politicians, but Denise's speech about the necessity of discrimination at a time like this -- "Should we treat them equally? God knows we've tried and we've failed." -- are among the most chilling words ever uttered by a "Doctor Who" villain -- if not moreso, because she's not an alien invader bent on global domination, but a scared human being trying to protect what's hers by passing the burden on to someone else.

(There aren't a lot of commonalities between "Doctor Who"/"Torchwood" and "The Wire," but I could sure imagine Tommy Carcetti participating in the American version of that meeting, couldn't you?)

But getting back to Ianto's death, what makes it especially crushing is that it comes almost immediately after it seems that Torchwood has successfully turned the tables on both the government and The 4-5-6. They can blackmail the PM into getting whatever they want, and they have knowledge and technology that the aliens might not be ready for -- but they, in turn, aren't prepared for how quickly and fatally this one representative could strike back. So Ianto (and a bunch of MI-5 employees without easy access to HazMat suits) is dead, Torchwood is now down to a team of two (three if you want to count Rhys), and it looks like the bad guys -- both the aliens and the humans -- are going to win. What now?

Keep in mind, as always, that we're following the American broadcasting schedule of this show, so talk about the first four episodes and only the first four, even if you've already seen the whole series because you live in England or are handy with illegal downloads. Any comment I consider the least bit over the line gets deleted, period.

Considering that, what did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Comic-Con/Press tour preview - Sepinwall on TV

Today's column previews my travels to California for Comic-Con and the TV critics press tour, and goes into more detail about how I'll be covering both events.

I don't expect to do more than cameo at Comic-Con today, if that, but I'll be parked at the convention center for the next three days and will report what I can, when I can. As for press tour, keep in mind that all the actual press tour blog posts will be NJ.com-only, just like my newspaper columns, though I'll be linking to them here.

Still not sure how much review blogging I'll be able to do when I'm out there. I have posts set to go for the final two chapters of "Torchwood," and will hopefully have stuff on the next episode of "Hung" and Sunday night's "Doctor Who: Planet of the Dead," but beyond that, there may be a whole lot of "What did you guys think of this thing I watched but don't have time to write about?" posts.

Starting to get anxious about the "Chuck" panel, since it'll have more panelists and more audience members than the New York event. I remain open to suggestions. How do you think the crowd will respond to some puns? People like puns, right? Click here to read the full post

Torchwood Children of Earth, part 3: They are here

Once again, I don't have time to give each episode of "Torchwood: Children of Earth" the proper review it deserves, so I'm going to offer up a few quick thoughts after the jump and then open it up to you. Spoilers for episode three coming up just as soon as I hit the Army surplus store...

"We want your children. We will take your children." -The 4-5-6-

When I interviewed Russell T. Davies last month, he said that the budget for the new season of "Torchwood" hadn't gone up at all, and that the improved production values for "Children of Earth" were the result of a lot of hard work by his crew. If so, then part 3 in London was simply gorgeous, arguably the single most impressive bit of VFX of the RTD era of both "Doctor Who" and "Torchwood."

With The 4-5-6 ensconsed at Thames House, the third episode's narrative shifted a bit away from our Torchwood heroes and towards John Frobisher and his colleagues in the British government, who seem as much the villains of "Children of Earth" as the aliens do. And Peter Capaldi is doing such a good job of playing Frobisher -- as a man who isn't so much bad as weak (and who, as we learn in his phone conversation with Jack, is fully aware of his own weakness) -- that I'm okay with him taking on more story burden in this chapter.

At the same time, we got some more Jack/Ianto romantic sweetness (including a reference to The Doctor), Jack dealing with the abduction of his daughter and grandson, and Gwen hooking up Lois with the super sci-fi contact lenses, so it's not as if the team vanished altogether from the narrative.

Keep in mind, as always, that we're following the American broadcasting schedule of this show, so talk about the first three episodes and only the first three, even if you've already seen the whole series because you live in England or are handy with illegal downloads. Any comment I consider the least bit over the line gets deleted, period.

Considering that, what did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Rescue Me, "Clean": Weak against the strong

Quick thoughts on tonight's "Rescue Me" coming up just as soon as I clean under the truck...

The deeper we get into this season of "Rescue Me," the more I'm coming around to the viewpoint, expressed off and on by some commenters here, that doing 22 episodes instead of the usual 13 was a mistake.

Even under the old format, "Rescue Me" was a shaggy dog kind of show, meandering at its own pace, presenting episodes where the scenes seemed to be ordered at random, sometimes following through on ideas, sometimes not. But if a season was never as tightly-plotted as "The Shield," doing 13 usually meant that we got to the end before things felt too shaggy.

And while this year has overall been much stronger than either of the previous two seasons, it's also felt looser and more random than usual, either doubling back over the same material too often, or simply dragging things out past the point of interest.

Take the reverse intervention Tommy pulled on his family(*), which might have seemed funny if it hadn't come so close on the heels of Tommy trying a similar stunt at his AA meeting. Or look at the ongoing Tommy/Sheila/Janet love triangle; admittedly, I wouldn't find it interesting under any timeline, but dragging it out as long as they have (because they can, and because they have episodes that need filling) is just making things worse.

(*) Speaking of Tommy's family, whatever happened to his other brother Timo, played for a few first season episodes by James Badge Dale? At the time, I got the sense that they hired Dale because Dean Winters had a scheduling conflict, but given all the tragedies Tommy has suffered in the years since, shouldn't Timo have turned up again? And was he ever memorable enough to be considered a 21st century Chuck Cunningham?

Now, an argument could be made that because they have so much time to fill, they can let scenes run longer than normal, and then we get terrific sequences like Tommy vs. Needles in Needles' office, or even the pre-credits stuff in Sheila's kitchen. The latter is an instance where I was starting to get irritated (oh, look, Sheila's being an unreasonable shrew again!), then I started to laugh (around the time Callie Thorne started saying the word "fluffy"), and then it really all clicked in when Sheila brought out her pill dispenser and we remembered that Sheila does (understandably) have severe emotional problems, and that the show occasionally takes them seriously.

For scenes like those two, I'll suffer through a lot of fluff. But I still think 13 is a better number for season six (assuming there's going to be a season six).

Given my press tour commitments over the next several weeks, and vacation time after that, I'm not sure how often I'll be able to weigh in on the rest of the season. If nothing else, if I've seen an episode, I'll make sure to put up a post so those of you who are watching can discuss it.

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

Torchwood Children of Earth, part 2: Three fugitives

Once again, I don't have time to give each episode of "Torchwood: Children of Earth" the proper review it deserves, so I'm going to offer up a few quick thoughts after the jump and then open it up to you. Spoilers for episode two coming up just as soon as I hide in a potato truck...

"If I can't kill you, I can contain you." -Johnson

With Captain Jack dead and/or regenerating and/or encased in concrete for most of this episode, night two of "Children of Earth" falls on Ianto, and, especially, Gwen, to show they can be just as cool and swashbuckling as the guy in the retro RAF duds. Though the circumstances Torchwood finds itself in are grim, and though the world itself seems to be in a lot of trouble from the poison-breathing members of The 4-5-6, it's fun to see Gwen so convincingly kick butt for much of the hour, to see Ianto ride to Gwen and Rhys' rescue on heavy machinery, even to see Ianto's obnoxious brother-in-law turn out to be an okay sort in the end as he provided cover with the black ops surveillance crew.

But part two also provides some smaller moments, like Gwen telling an overjoyed Rhys about her pregnancy, or Gwen again trying to play Torchwood recruiting officer with Lois Habiba. (Given what happened with the doctor in part one, maybe they're better off sticking with known quantities for a while. Stupid Martha Jones vacation, razza frazza...)

Keep in mind, as always, that we're following the American broadcasting schedule of this show, so talk about the first two episodes and only the first two, even if you've already seen the whole series because you live in England or are handy with illegal downloads. Any comment I consider the least bit over the line gets deleted, period.

Considering that, what did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Sports Night rewind: "The Quality of Mercy at 29K" & "Shoe Money Tonight"

Okay, in between the end of my vacation and the start of my Comic-Con/press tour wanderings, I'm going to crank out one more "Sports Night" rewind, this time looking back on "The Quality of Mercy at 29K" (heretofore referred to as "29K") and "Shoe Money Tonight" (heretofore referred to as "Shoe"). Spoilers for both coming up just as soon as I go to Dickensian London...

"I didn't know we could do that. Did you know we could do that?" -Dana

"But mostly, I want you to trust me -- just once -- when I tell you that you have three sevens, and I have a straight." -Jeremy

Unlike some of the past episodes I've doubled up on, "29K" and "Shoe" don't have an awful lot in common, either thematically or in terms of continuing plotlines. The former is Aaron Sorkin, cockeyed optimist that he so often is, musing on how much human beings can accomplish with the right amount of imagination and hard work, the latter a comic romp in which jealousy rears its ugly head for both our actual couple (Jeremy/Natalie) and our inevitable couple (Dana/Casey).

The one clear thing they have in common (other than featuring the Sports Night staff stuck at the office to do a telecast in the middle of the night) is that they're each illustrative of one of Sorkin's recurring flaws: for "29K," his tendency to sometimes overargue a point; for "Shoe," his tendency to get a little patronizing when it comes to the opposite sex.

Now, these are both very good episodes, and they're maybe the first two where I feel my retroactive opinion is being significantly colored by my viewing of "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip." Because I've seen how awkward those tendencies can feel on a Sorkin show that isn't working, I get uncomfortable noticing them even in the midst of a good Sorkin show.

"Shoe" is more problematic in this respect. Yes, Sorkin lays on the "Look at what we can do" stuff a little too thick in "29K," just to make sure we get the point, but it's still a sunny episode, and features one of my favorite Felicity Huffman performances in depicting Dana's over-the-moon reaction to seeing "The Lion King" on Broadway.

"Shoe," on the other hand, very much fits into the Sorkin pattern of creating female characters who are mostly very strong and great at their chosen professions, but who, from time to time, need the men in their lives to tell them what to do and explain how the world really works. This pattern was most evident in Harriet Hayes on "Studio 60," but even vintage Sorkin-era "West Wing" had stray moments like this.

Now, as to the Jeremy/Natalie poker confrontation at the end of this episode, it's hard to look at it without thinking of what commenter Hal Incandenza wrote in our discussion of "The Apology":

A friend of mine can't stand the Jeremy-Natalie dynamic (though, I believe, he likes both the characters) for the simple reason that Jeremy wins every single argument the two ever have. I re-watched the eps, and it's kind of true. See if that influences your viewing experience.

Natalie is smart, and she's tough, and she's likable, but of course Jeremy knows what the cards are and she doesn't, and the only real trump she has over the guy is her sex appeal. In this relationship, Jeremy's smart and kind and thoughtful, and she... looks really hot in one of his white shirts. In my review of "Thespis," I wrote that Natalie is like every nerd's dream girl, and the way the card game only enhances that idea. What geek wouldn't want a hot woman who gets turned on by his command of trivia, and who also acknowledges that, in the end, she's clearly his intellectual inferior?

And the thing is, I think Sorkin could have told the exact same Jeremy/Natalie story and accomplished the same character arcs for both, even if he had flipped things at the end and shown that Jeremy's count of the cards wasn't as good as he thought. If Jeremy gives the speech about how Natalie needs to recognize that he's not some d-bag like every other guy she's dated, I think she still forgives him for the Judy-Rootie-Tootie thing even if it turns out that she had four 7's instead of three to beat his straight. I think it's a little more unexpected(*), and it makes Natalie seem stronger and more interesting for recognizing that Jeremy is right about the larger point even though he was mistaken on the specific point.

(*) Admittedly, it's more unexpected in hindsight, when we're aware of the pattern of this relationship, and of Sorkin's handling of female characters in general.

And I don't want to bag too much on Sorkin's feminist credentials given the conflict between Dana and West Coast Update producer Sally Sasser (played by Brenda Strong, who would get more work, I believe, if she wasn't taller than most of her insecure potential male co-stars). Yes, there's some amount of jealousy in how Dana reacts to Sally -- not about Sally's looks, but about how Casey drools over them -- but mostly, it's clear that what bothers Dana is that Sally is the kind of professional that Dana never wanted to be. Dana is beautiful, and she's feminine in a job where it would be very easy for her to play the tomboy, but she has never traded on her sexuality in the way that Sally does. She got to where she is because she's talented and driven, and it's those qualities that Casey is drawn to as much as he is to her appearance. And it's that, I think, that really bugs Dana about Sally: if Dana defines herself largely by how good she is at her job, and if Casey can leer over someone who isn't 1/10th as good at it as Dana, just because Sally has long legs and a big chest, does that mean Casey really doesn't care all that much about Dana the professional? And does that, in turn, mean that Dana herself has spent all these years mooning over the wrong guy?

Of course, in the end, Dana realizes that the way into Casey's heart is through his favorite camera angles and a lack of puns (it's an argument where she's right about everything and he's wrong) and everything works out in the end.

Some other thoughts on both episodes:

• At the time "29K" aired, the episode caught some grief from critics who thought Sorkin was being forced to plug another Disney product (or that he was choosing to do it to suck up to his new corporate overlords). He would later say that he just really enjoyed seeing "The Lion King" and wanted to try to convey that experience to the audience, and didn't even think about the synergy thing. As this was 10 years before product integration became the be-all, end-all of network TV, I'm inclined to believe him.

• West Coast Update is kind of a lame name for the 2 a.m. show, unless its full title was supposed to be Sports Night: West Coast Update. Also, the idea that Dan and Casey would be the only anchors available to fill in for the guys stuck in Pittsburgh doesn't track with later episodes, which will reveal a relatively deep bench at CSC.

• And speaking of that, without getting too spoiler-y for the newbies watching these episodes only as I write about them, Dan's on-air plea for food during "29K" seems like a big no-no, given the trouble a fill-in anchor named Steve Sarris will get into for a similar stunt in a season two episode. (Try to be vague if you want to compare the two situations, please.)

• In what circumstance is "The Weight" by The Band not the perfect song to end any episode of anything, as it does "29K"?

• "Shoe Money Tonight" was the first episode of the series not directed by Tommy Schlamme, and it shows, particularly in the climactic poker scene, where director Dennie Gordon eschews Schlamme's trademark fluid camerawork for a lot of quick cuts and extreme close-ups. Very jarring compared to the way the show usually looks.

Coming up next: Another two-parter of sorts with "The Six Southern Gentlemen of Tennessee" and "Smoky," both of which feature Isaac going up against CSC chairman Luther Sachs.

Don't know when that will be written, given my Comic-Con/press tour commitments. I could slip it in at some point during those two weeks, or I may not get to it until mid-August. But I promise I've got at least a few more of these reviews in me before Labor Day.

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

The Wire, Season 2, Episode 8: "Duck and Cover" (Newbies edition)

Vacation's done with, so let's get back to 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 eight, "Duck and Cover," coming up just as soon as I get some scrapple with that...

"But on a good case, running front of the pack? That's as close as the men comes to being right." -The Bunk

If we accept, as we should, that Baltimore is the true star of "The Wire," then Jimmy McNulty was the city's leading co-star in season one, which is why it was so jarring to see him be sidelined for so much of this season. Oh, he set some things in motion by sticking Rawls with the Jane Doe murders, but mostly he's been directionless, and drunk, and irrelevant. In the episode before "Duck and Cover," he was virtually absent, and it was only when he appeared near the end that I realized he was missing.

But McNulty returns to the center of the narrative in a big way in "Duck and Cover," an hour that showcases the many negatives and positives of our favorite drunken Irish bimbo.

I've been accused in past "Wire" reviews of being too hard on McNulty, so I should say upfront that I don't dislike the guy. As impeccably played by Dominic West -- one of those actors with a gift for becoming more appealing, not less, the worse his behavior gets -- how could you not find Jimmy likable on some level? And in the grand scheme of "The Wire," Jimmy's sins are far lighter than those committed by an Avon Barksdale, or even an Ervin Burrell.

But fairly or not, I find myself holding McNulty to a higher standard than almost any other character on the show. Part of that comes from the way that he is, in fact, held out as the closest thing "The Wire" has to a true lead, but more of it comes from Jimmy's position in the show's universe, from his awareness of that position, from his abundant intelligence and talent, and from the way he presents himself to the world versus the way he actually is. While there's hypocrisy throughout the show's characters, I guess I expect more from McNulty than I do from the likes of Avon or Burrell -- and, like all the characters on the show who continually give him second and third chances because he's so smart, and so damned charming, I feel far more disappointed when he fails to meet those expectations(*).

(*)Now, some of this is obviously being considered with 20-20 hindsight over what Jimmy will do, and what other characters around him will do under similar circumstances, over the course of the series, which we'll save for discussion in the veterans comments if you like. My recollection is that, the first time through the series, I was completely on McNulty's side in all his early disputes with Lt. Daniels, where going back over that first season, I found myself sympathizing with Daniels more often than not.

"Duck and Cover" presents McNulty at his worst, and at close to his best, all in the course of an hour that manages to be more character-driven than usual even as it's significantly moving the plot forward. The pre-credits sequence is astonishing, horrifying, and hilarious: "The Lost Weekend" in four minutes, as we see just how low Jimmy can sink without either work or family to ground him. Exiled by Rawls, rejected by Elena, he is staggeringly drunk, even by standards of past Jimmy/Bunk alcoholic escapades. He can compose himself enough to convincingly lie to his favorite bartender about calling a cab, but is so sloshed that he gets into a hellacious car wreck -- and so stubborn, drunk or sober, in his belief in his own abilities, that he then recreates the car wreck in an attempt to prove he could have avoided it(**) -- then passes out in an all-night diner and is lucky enough to find a waitress desperate/dumb enough to take him home for a quickie.

(**) Jimmy's pantomiming of the angles required to hit/miss the bridge supports was like a parody of any scene -- notably the legendary all-F-word sequence from "Old Cases" -- where Jimmy or Bunk or another cop will silently recreate a crime scene, try to figure out the bullet trajectory, etc.

McNulty in those circumstances is no good to himself or anyone around him (I still try to fill in the blanks on how the waitress reacted when she got a look at Jimmy's car), and even The Bunk admits he's not always much better when entrenched in a case. But it's a step in the right direction, and from the moment Lt. Daniels liberates him from the boat, we see a Jimmy who's making an effort, and who's particularly self-aware (if, at times, self-loathing).

Yes, it's funny that he happens to enter the detail office at the exact moment when they're trying to pick the ideal undercover operative to infiltrate the condo/whorehouse. But as his comments to Kima in the surveillance car about the marital status of the aptly-named Robert Johnson make clear, it's funny because Jimmy's so very much like these pathetic jerks. He knows about lying to yourself, and your wife, and your kids -- about pursuing your own selfish needs at the expense of the people you care about -- and in his behavior at Beadie Russell's house, he suggests he's not a total lost cause.

Beadie and Jimmy both go back to her place fully aware that they're going to have sex, but when Jimmy gets a look at her place -- with the abundant evidence of Beadie's role as a single mom doing what she can for her kids -- he backs out. In many circumstances, a man bailing over kid-related imagery would seem cowardly, but it's the most morally upright thing Jimmy does all episode. He knows he's bad news -- as Bunk told him last season, "You're no good for people, man" -- and that even vaguely sober, he'll bring Beadie and her kids nothing but pain, so he backs out before it can go anywhere serious. When he's on the phone with the whorehouse madame, she asks him what kind of girl he wants, and we see him looking at the exact kind of girl he wants: Beadie Russell. But he knows, deep down, that he's not the kind of guy she would want if she got to know the real him -- at least, the real him at this moment.

Because the rest of the ensemble is so rich, the other actors so talented in their own right, I can't say I was disappointed to have McNulty out of action for so much of this season, but it's still nice to have him back, and at a relatively high-functioning level.

Some other thoughts on "Duck and Cover":

• As Jimmy's putting himself together, Ziggy is falling apart. He's humiliated by Maui and all the stevedores who goaded him into the fight -- And how funny is James Ransone as he stands on top of the can and spews "BAD ADVICE!" like it's the toughest insult he can think of at the moment? -- and now Nick is trying to turn him into a glorified mascot in the drug operation that Ziggy wanted so desperately to run. Everyone in Ziggy's world, it seems, is better than Ziggy at just about everything -- except, that is, clowning himself. Because Ziggy is one of the few characters on the show able to recognize that the game he's been asked to play is rigged -- that he and all the guys he knows have had their wings clipped like the pigeons -- he reaches a point in "Duck and Cover" where he understands that the guys all view him as comic relief, so the only way to survive is to take control of the joke, which he does with his bizarre bit with the diamond necklace-wearing, beer-sipping duck.

• This episode introduces McNulty's deep and abiding love for the music of The Pogues, which the series shares. Jimmy's rocking out to "Transmetropolitan" as he gets into his fender re-bender.

• After writing season one's brilliant "Cleaning Up," George Pelecanos became a full-time "Wire" producer in the second season, and "Duck and Cover" is the first of his two scripts for this year. (He also, as he does every season, whether a producer or just a writer, handles the penultimate episode.)

• Because the writers spent so much time in season one explaining how the detail goes about its business, season two can pick up the pace and assume we understand how things work. Case in point: the discussion with Ronnie about needing to meet the legal standard of exhaustion before a judge will authorize a wiretap.

• And that judge offers one of those great small moments that you know was drawn from real life, as we discover the guy is much more amenable to authorizing a warrant if he can get some free housework -- done, of course, by low men on the totem pole Herc and Carver, who get some early karmic punishment for their ongoing Fuzzy Dunlop scam -- in exchange.

• As with the Barksdale case, where a simple drug assignment eventually involved real estate, state senators, etc., the detail is finding that this new assignment goes a lot deeper than Stan Valchek's grudge against Frank Sobotka. It's a really interesting contrast to see them go against a non-street target, and to see that Vondas and The Greek have weaknesses that Avon didn't (they don't expect to be wiretapped), but also strengths he doesn't (they can afford to waste lots of time and money dumping clean cans to try to shake the detail loose).

• One of the things "The Wire" does so well, and that's so rare in the rest of popular entertainment, is spending time simply showing characters thinking. Here, we dwell for a long time on Frank as he starts to put the pieces together about the police surveillance -- aided, in large part, by the fact that the port police and the phone company are both large bureaucracies where the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing and therefore secrets aren't properly kept. It's also cool to see both sides of the case think they're outwitting each other, when in fact it's about 50-50 (the detail doesn't know Frank is on to them and dumped a clean can on purpose, while Vondas and Double-G don't know that the detail has a tap on Sergei's phone).

• Where was Jay Landsman to offer up a fashion critique when Bunk traded in his usual pinstriped lawyerly affectations for his Edmonson Lacrosse sweats?

• Getting back to last week's discussion of Sobotka's blind spots, note that he'll grease a job for his brother (albeit one that would give the guy walking-around money at best), but not for his son.

• Note that the dolls Double-G winds up with are Bobbie, not Barbie, as I suspect the Mattel people wouldn't want their product associated with this show.

• The Bodie/Poot subplot about a neighboring drug crew stealing all their business with a superior product not only reinforces Prop Joe's argument from the previous episode about product trumping real estate, it features more comedy of traditional business thinking being applied to the drug world, as the two slingers whom Bodie fires (and who wind up working for the rival crew) demand "separation pay."

• The Emmy voters ignored her for her brilliant work as Holly on "The Office," so I want to briefly sing the praises of the wonderful Amy Ryan in her role as Beadie. Just check out how many emotions wash over her face as she realizes Jimmy is about to walk out the door: disappointment that she's not going to have sex with this man she's very attracted to, guilt that perhaps getting a look at her cluttered, kid-friendly house was a turn-off (even though he knows Jimmy has kids), but also a bit of relief that her new job isn't going to be complicated by an office romance, as well as the stiff upper lip attitude that's carried her as far as it has raising two kids on her own. Great, great actress.

Coming up next: "Stray Rounds," in which Bodie's feud reaches another level, The Greek gets careful, and Jimmy has problems remembering a magic word. Can't promise when I'll be able to do the review, but it'll get done sooner or later.

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

The Wire, Season 2, Episode 8: "Duck and Cover" (Veterans edition)

Vacation's done with, so let's get back to 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 eight, "Duck and Cover," coming up just as soon as I get some scrapple with that...

"But on a good case, running front of the pack? That's as close as the men comes to being right." -The Bunk

If we accept, as we should, that Baltimore is the true star of "The Wire," then Jimmy McNulty was the city's leading co-star in season one, which is why it was so jarring to see him be sidelined for so much of this season. Oh, he set some things in motion by sticking Rawls with the Jane Doe murders, but mostly he's been directionless, and drunk, and irrelevant. In the episode before "Duck and Cover," he was virtually absent, and it was only when he appeared near the end that I realized he was missing.

But McNulty returns to the center of the narrative in a big way in "Duck and Cover," an hour that showcases the many negatives and positives of our favorite drunken Irish bimbo.

I've been accused in past "Wire" reviews of being too hard on McNulty, so I should say upfront that I don't dislike the guy. As impeccably played by Dominic West -- one of those actors with a gift for becoming more appealing, not less, the worse his behavior gets -- how could you not find Jimmy likable on some level? And in the grand scheme of "The Wire," Jimmy's sins are far lighter than those committed by an Avon Barksdale, or even an Ervin Burrell.

But fairly or not, I find myself holding McNulty to a higher standard than almost any other character on the show. Part of that comes from the way that he is, in fact, held out as the closest thing "The Wire" has to a true lead, but more of it comes from Jimmy's position in the show's universe, from his awareness of that position, from his abundant intelligence and talent, and from the way he presents himself to the world versus the way he actually is. While there's hypocrisy throughout the show's characters, I guess I expect more from McNulty than I do from the likes of Avon or Burrell -- and, like all the characters on the show who continually give him second and third chances because he's so smart, and so damned charming, I feel far more disappointed when he fails to meet those expectations(*).

(*)Now, some of this is obviously being considered with 20-20 hindsight over what Jimmy will do, and what other characters around him will do under similar circumstances, over the course of the series, which we'll save for discussion in the veterans comments if you like. My recollection is that, the first time through the series, I was completely on McNulty's side in all his early disputes with Lt. Daniels, where going back over that first season, I found myself sympathizing with Daniels more often than not.

"Duck and Cover" presents McNulty at his worst, and at close to his best, all in the course of an hour that manages to be more character-driven than usual even as it's significantly moving the plot forward. The pre-credits sequence is astonishing, horrifying, and hilarious: "The Lost Weekend" in four minutes, as we see just how low Jimmy can sink without either work or family to ground him. Exiled by Rawls, rejected by Elena, he is staggeringly drunk, even by standards of past Jimmy/Bunk alcoholic escapades. He can compose himself enough to convincingly lie to his favorite bartender about calling a cab, but is so sloshed that he gets into a hellacious car wreck -- and so stubborn, drunk or sober, in his belief in his own abilities, that he then recreates the car wreck in an attempt to prove he could have avoided it(**) -- then passes out in an all-night diner and is lucky enough to find a waitress desperate/dumb enough to take him home for a quickie.

(**) Jimmy's pantomiming of the angles required to hit/miss the bridge supports was like a parody of any scene -- notably the legendary all-F-word sequence from "Old Cases" -- where Jimmy or Bunk or another cop will silently recreate a crime scene, try to figure out the bullet trajectory, etc.

McNulty in those circumstances is no good to himself or anyone around him (I still try to fill in the blanks on how the waitress reacted when she got a look at Jimmy's car), and even The Bunk admits he's not always much better when entrenched in a case. But it's a step in the right direction, and from the moment Lt. Daniels liberates him from the boat, we see a Jimmy who's making an effort, and who's particularly self-aware (if, at times, self-loathing).

Yes, it's funny that he happens to enter the detail office at the exact moment when they're trying to pick the ideal undercover operative to infiltrate the condo/whorehouse. But as his comments to Kima in the surveillance car about the marital status of the aptly-named Robert Johnson make clear, it's funny because Jimmy's so very much like these pathetic jerks. He knows about lying to yourself, and your wife, and your kids -- about pursuing your own selfish needs at the expense of the people you care about -- and in his behavior at Beadie Russell's house, he suggests he's not a total lost cause.

Beadie and Jimmy both go back to her place fully aware that they're going to have sex, but when Jimmy gets a look at her place -- with the abundant evidence of Beadie's role as a single mom doing what she can for her kids -- he backs out. In many circumstances, a man bailing over kid-related imagery would seem cowardly, but it's the most morally upright thing Jimmy does all episode. He knows he's bad news -- as Bunk told him last season, "You're no good for people, man" -- and that even vaguely sober, he'll bring Beadie and her kids nothing but pain, so he backs out before it can go anywhere serious. When he's on the phone with the whorehouse madame, she asks him what kind of girl he wants, and we see him looking at the exact kind of girl he wants: Beadie Russell. But he knows, deep down, that he's not the kind of guy she would want if she got to know the real him -- at least, the real him at this moment.

Because the rest of the ensemble is so rich, the other actors so talented in their own right, I can't say I was disappointed to have McNulty out of action for so much of this season, but it's still nice to have him back, and at a relatively high-functioning level.

Some other thoughts on "Duck and Cover":

• As Jimmy's putting himself together, Ziggy is falling apart. He's humiliated by Maui and all the stevedores who goaded him into the fight -- And how funny is James Ransone as he stands on top of the can and spews "BAD ADVICE!" like it's the toughest insult he can think of at the moment? -- and now Nick is trying to turn him into a glorified mascot in the drug operation that Ziggy wanted so desperately to run. Everyone in Ziggy's world, it seems, is better than Ziggy at just about everything -- except, that is, clowning himself. Because Ziggy is one of the few characters on the show able to recognize that the game he's been asked to play is rigged -- that he and all the guys he knows have had their wings clipped like the pigeons -- he reaches a point in "Duck and Cover" where he understands that the guys all view him as comic relief, so the only way to survive is to take control of the joke, which he does with his bizarre bit with the diamond necklace-wearing, beer-sipping duck.

• This episode introduces McNulty's deep and abiding love for the music of The Pogues, which the series shares. Jimmy's rocking out to "Transmetropolitan" as he gets into his fender re-bender.

• After writing season one's brilliant "Cleaning Up," George Pelecanos became a full-time "Wire" producer in the second season, and "Duck and Cover" is the first of his two scripts for this year. (He also, as he does every season, whether a producer or just a writer, handles the penultimate episode.)

• Because the writers spent so much time in season one explaining how the detail goes about its business, season two can pick up the pace and assume we understand how things work. Case in point: the discussion with Ronnie about needing to meet the legal standard of exhaustion before a judge will authorize a wiretap.

• And that judge offers one of those great small moments that you know was drawn from real life, as we discover the guy is much more amenable to authorizing a warrant if he can get some free housework -- done, of course, by low men on the totem pole Herc and Carver, who get some early karmic punishment for their ongoing Fuzzy Dunlop scam -- in exchange.

• As with the Barksdale case, where a simple drug assignment eventually involved real estate, state senators, etc., the detail is finding that this new assignment goes a lot deeper than Stan Valchek's grudge against Frank Sobotka. It's a really interesting contrast to see them go against a non-street target, and to see that Vondas and The Greek have weaknesses that Avon didn't (they don't expect to be wiretapped), but also strengths he doesn't (they can afford to waste lots of time and money dumping clean cans to try to shake the detail loose).

• One of the things "The Wire" does so well, and that's so rare in the rest of popular entertainment, is spending time simply showing characters thinking. Here, we dwell for a long time on Frank as he starts to put the pieces together about the police surveillance -- aided, in large part, by the fact that the port police and the phone company are both large bureaucracies where the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing and therefore secrets aren't properly kept. It's also cool to see both sides of the case think they're outwitting each other, when in fact it's about 50-50 (the detail doesn't know Frank is on to them and dumped a clean can on purpose, while Vondas and Double-G don't know that the detail has a tap on Sergei's phone).

• Where was Jay Landsman to offer up a fashion critique when Bunk traded in his usual pinstriped lawyerly affectations for his Edmonson Lacrosse sweats?

• Getting back to last week's discussion of Sobotka's blind spots, note that he'll grease a job for his brother (albeit one that would give the guy walking-around money at best), but not for his son.

• Note that the dolls Double-G winds up with are Bobbie, not Barbie, as I suspect the Mattel people wouldn't want their product associated with this show.

• The Bodie/Poot subplot about a neighboring drug crew stealing all their business with a superior product not only reinforces Prop Joe's argument from the previous episode about product trumping real estate, it features more comedy of traditional business thinking being applied to the drug world, as the two slingers whom Bodie fires (and who wind up working for the rival crew) demand "separation pay."

• The Emmy voters ignored her for her brilliant work as Holly on "The Office," so I want to briefly sing the praises of the wonderful Amy Ryan in her role as Beadie. Just check out how many emotions wash over her face as she realizes Jimmy is about to walk out the door: disappointment that she's not going to have sex with this man she's very attracted to, guilt that perhaps getting a look at her cluttered, kid-friendly house was a turn-off (even though he knows Jimmy has kids), but also a bit of relief that her new job isn't going to be complicated by an office romance, as well as the stiff upper lip attitude that's carried her as far as it has raising two kids on her own. Great, great actress.

And now it's time for the veterans-only section, where we talk about how events in this episode will reverberate later in the season, and the series:

• By the time Jimmy goes back after Beadie, at the end of season three, he's finally turned himself into a man who might be good enough for her. Of course, he has his backsliding moments -- as in, all of season five -- but it was really gratifying to watch this relationship simmer over time.

• Louis Sobotka's refusal to take the no-show job Frank arranged for him will echo in his reaction to finding out the extent of Frank's criminal enterprise, and in finding out what Nick's been up to selling drugs.

• Like Ziggy, Marlo Stanfield knows his way around a Baltimore pigeon coop.

• Rawls' homoerotic insults -- here with Daniels -- become all the funnier once you know what will be revealed about him late in season three.

• Bodie's feud with the rival crew will have fatal consequences -- and lead to the first appearance of Bunny Colvin -- but note that at no time does he go to Stringer or Shamrock or anyone else higher up the ladder to consult about the clash. So, should he have? Or is the guy running the towers supposed to take initiative in matters like this? If it was Wee-Bey or Stinkum, would we assume they had authority to act on their own?

• The Greek's speech to Frank at the end about buying something you can touch seems to fly against what little we know of the man and his sidekick. He and Vondas seem to live without flash -- making money without seeming to need the things that come with it. Of course, we really know nothing about either man -- including both of their real names, and The Greek's true nationality -- so this could be like when McNulty found Stringer's apartment and was stunned to realize who he'd been chasing all those years.

Coming up next: "Stray Rounds," in which Bodie's feud reaches another level, The Greek gets careful, and Jimmy has problems remembering a magic word. Can't promise when I'll be able to do the review, but it'll get done sooner or later.

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

Nurse Jackie, "Steak Knife": Talking to God

Quick spoilers for tonight's "Nurse Jackie" coming up just as soon as I give a baby some paperclips to play with...

"Too bad it's not made of Vicodin." -Eddie

If last week's wonderful episode felt like a breakthrough for this uneven series, then "Steak Knife" was a bit of a step back. There were still a number of extremely strong things in it -- notably Jackie's increasing doom spiral, reflected in her bad reaction to her one-year anniversary with Eddie, and in her struggling to be the shoulder for Dr. O'Hara to lean on rather than vice versa -- but there were also other parts that suggest a show that's still finding itself.

Specifically, I could do without the show hammering us over the head with the parallels between the patients and their caregivers (here with Jackie and the woman who can't let herself be with nice guys). If I want that, I'll watch "Grey's Anatomy" or "House," thank you very much. One of the advantages of cable dramas, in theory, is that because they're catering to a more select audience, they don't need to dumb things down as much as a broad-tent show like "Grey's." The "Jackie" writers would do well to keep that in mind and try for a little more subtlety on subplots like this.

Along similar lines, Mrs. Akalitus wandering around the hospital with an abandoned baby? Really? Last week's episode briefly turned her into someone resembling a human being, rather than the cartoonish authority figure she'd been previously. But this was right back to her being a buffoon.

But, geez, Edie Falco is so terrific, as was Paul Schulze in the scene where Eddie finally acknowledges that Jackie cares more about the pills than about him. I will forgive a lot for a great performance or three -- and I can never leave out praise of Merritt Wever, who may be the most endearingly funny character on my TV set at the moment -- so I'm hanging in with "Nurse Jackie" even as the growing pains resume.

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

Torchwood Children of Earth, part 1: Big science fiction super-mess

As I wrote this morning, I don't have time to give each episode of "Torchwood: Children of Earth" the proper review it deserves, so I'm going to offer up a few quick thoughts after the jump and then open it up to you. Spoilers for episode one coming up just as soon as I smell a hand...

"It's like the whole wide world is bigger. My life is bigger." -Gwen Cooper

I used that quote already in my "Torchwood" column, but Rupesh and Gwen's exchange neatly sums up the awesomeness of "Children of Earth." You can look at the BBC reducing the third season from 13 episodes to 5 as a demotion, or as an opportunity for Russell T. Davies and company to expand the boundaries of what they were doing before -- which is exactly what they've done here.

Some people have compared "Children of Earth" to Davies' annual end-of-season, end-of-the-world extravaganzas on "Doctor Who." While those were never my favorite parts of their respective "Who" seasons, the apocalyptic scope works here because "Torchwood" operates on a more human scale, even though its lead is a time-traveling immortal alien. When all the earth's children stop simultaneously, or when they start broadcasting a warning from The 4-5-6, or when the British government decides it's time to blow up Torchwood, it feels more ominous than if these events were occurring in The Doctor's more whimsical corner of this fictional universe.

The one point I want to dwell on with episode one was how completely suckered in I was by the introduction of Dr. Rupesh Patanjali. I just assumed -- as I was meant to -- that he was the producers means of coping with the unavailability of Freema Agyeman, and that Rupesh would either be a temporary or permanent addition to the team. So I was floored when he turned out to be working in cahoots with the black ops people, and then when he got killed by them to help preserve the story. Well-played, sirs.

Keep in mind, as always, that we're following the American broadcasting schedule of this show, so talk about episode one and only episode one, even if you've already seen the whole series because you live in England or are handy with illegal downloads. Any comment I consider the least bit over the line gets deleted, period.

Considering that, what did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Glad to see me? I guess we're in the next life!

Howdy, folks. Had a fine time on vacation, including stops at Hershey Park (which, while fun, was sadly unlike The Land of Chocolate from Homer's dreams) and the Jersey shore, and randomly shared an elevator with the hilarious Ken Jeong (of "The Hangover" and "Party Down") at a remote Massachusetts hotel. (He couldn't have been more polite, by the way, even as the ride threatend to turn into an episode of The Chris Farley Show.)

I wasn't able to completely unplug, but for the most part, it was nice to be able to watch something like "Better Off Ted" without having to think about what to write about it, whether ABC had a photo or I'd need to make a screencap, etc.

Now I'm back, and after the jump we'll have a link to my latest column, and some other talk about how the next few weeks (involving Comic-Con and the TV critics press tour) will go.

The first order of business is to link to my review of "Torchwood: Children of Earth," which BBC America is running tonight through Friday at 9 p.m. As you can tell if you click through, I loved it, even though the ending was a bit rushed.

I'm aware that reaction to the final chapters was more mixed in the UK, where "Children of Earth" aired a couple of weeks ago, and it's at this point that I remind you of the U.S.-only codicil to the No Spoilers rule. I'm aware that this blog has some international readers, and/or readers who download shows that have aired in other countries rather than waiting for them to air here. And you're all welcome here -- just so long as you don't give away plot details about things that haven't aired here yet. Don't even try to cleverly hint at something; anything I see as over the line gets deleted.

I loved "Children of Earth" enough that I'm frustrated it's airing in a week that's being cleaved in two for me by travel (and was preceded by a vacation week). Ordinarily, I'd love to do in-depth reviews of each night, but that's not going to be possible here. Instead, look for a post to go live around 10:15 (when the eps are scheduled to finish airing) each night this week, possibly with a few thoughts from me, possibly just asking for your own thoughts. I'll try to do something slightly longer for the finale, but time will be a factor. And, again, I'm going to ask you to abide by the spoiler rule. If you've seen all five episodes but only one has aired here in America, talk only about things in that episode. Do not allude to stuff down the line. Got it?

Now, as for other stuff this week, it's up in the air. I have a lot of screeners to watch and other prep work to do before I head to California on Thursday. I've seen the next few "Nurse Jackie" eps, and I've watched the next episodes of "The Wire" season two and "Sports Night" for those reviews, but I don't know how much time I'll have to work on any of them. With ongoing shows like "Jackie," "Burn Notice" (which I watched last week but didn't write about because of vacation), etc., I may just wind up skipping episode reviews for the next few weeks, unless something's either really special or I have an unexpected pocket of free time. With projects like "The Wire" and "Sports Night," they'll get done when they get done, as I've been saying.

Gonna be a lot of playing by ear around here for a while, and that includes how I wind up covering Comic-Con (which I've never attended before) and press tour. I'm not sure what my technological capabilities are going to be at Comic-Con during the daytime, so the best I may be able to do is post a comment now and again on Twitter with my phone. (Though I imagine Schwartz and company will frown on that during the "Chuck" panel.)

And speaking of tweeting, this'll be my first press tour with an active Twitter account, but I'm not sure how much of it I'll be doing there. It's enough of a distraction as is to be blogging so much that if I was tweeting about every funny and/or newsworthy moment on top of that, I'd barely feel like I was present. A guy like Fienberg is wired to be tweeting, blogging and paying attention simultaneously; I'm not sure I am.

So, to wrap things up, I can't really give you a firm schedule for when posts will be up, how I'll be writing, etc. I just know I'll be writing things at various times. Wish I could be more clear, but I've never done Comic-Con before, Comic-Con has never been before press tour before (which means a lot of news may break at the con instead of the tour), etc.

Got all that? Click here to read the full post

Hung, "'Strange Friends' or 'The Truth Is, You're Sexy'": Public indecency

If I wasn't on vacation, I'd write about how I think "Hung" continues to get more fun -- highlighted in this episode by Tanya's loud defense of her pimping credentials -- but since I'm not back on the clock until tomorrow morning, I'll simply ask what you all thought of it. Click here to read the full post

RIP, Walter Cronkite

My Walter Cronkite appreciation is up at NJ.com. Click here to read the full post

The official Emmy grousing thread

I'm on vacation, and hopefully doing my best to avoid all manner of entertainment news, so I have no idea who got snubbed in the Emmy nominations, who was a pleasant surprise, etc. But those of you who want to praise or complain about the nominations (which, in theory, should be available by now at the official Emmy site), have at it.

UPDATE: In a wi-fi/smart-phone world, it's hard to get completely disconnected, so I saw the full nominations list earlier today and have a few brief thoughts after the jump before I return to relaxing.

First of all, I never had any hope that "Battlestar Galactica" or "Friday Night Lights" had a prayer of any kind of serious nominations. The former is sci-fi, which the Emmys don't know what to do with. The latter is low-rated, films in a non-industry town (and therefore doesn't employ many Emmy voters) and features a cast that's terrific but too low-profile for anyone to notice. So their snubs, while irritating, weren't a surprise.

I probably shouldn't have gotten my hopes up for "The Shield," given that the Academy has for years acted like Michael Chiklis' win in the first season was the most embarrassing award they've given in the last 20 years. It's just a show they refuse to acknowledge the existence of, unfortunately, but the final season was so amazing that I briefly deluded myself into thinking Chiklis or Walton Goggins or CCH Pounder at least had an outside shot. Instead, bupkes. And that stinks.

Now, of the people/shows who I thought had a realistic chance at nominations but didn't, I'm disappointed about the lack of nods for Christina Hendricks, John Mahoney and "In Treatment" as a series. ("Big Love" and/or "Breaking Bad" appear to have taken its spot, and those shows are good enough that I can't complain too much. I'd take it easily over "House" or "Damages," on the other hand.)

On the pleasant surprise front, after I chose his picture as a sign of what I assumed would be a whole bunch of irritatingly predictable nominations, Jeremy Piven was snubbed. I'd like to think it was karma for me picking that photo (it'd be like a weatherman pre-taping a forecast for sunny skies and getting a torrential downpour instead), but I suspect Piven's abrupt departure from "Speed the Plow" (and the lame sushi excuse that went with it) had more to do with it. And his non-nomination hopefully clears the field for a long-overdue Neil Patrick Harris win. (Though, knowing the way the Emmy voters roll, it'll probably go to Jon Cryer or Kevin Dillon.)

Jemaine Clement getting a nomination for "Flight of the Conchords" was unexpectedly awesome, and while I still think it's fairer to nominate him and Bret as a team, if I had to pick one as even slightly funnier (or, at least, asked to carry more of the comedy on the show), it'd be Jemaine. And Aaron Paul is wonderful, and absolutely deserving of his nomination.

As for the people upset that "Family Guy" was nominated for best comedy when "The Simpsons" never has, keep in mind that "The Simpsons" annually submits itself only in the animation category, so it isn't eligible. (I'm on vacation and therefore don't want to take time looking it up, but I vaguely recall they submitted themselves for best comedy once or twice in the early years, were ignored, and went back to the animation categories for the rest of time. But it's entirely possible that they never bothered.)

Anyway, back to my book, then the swingset. Catch you all on Monday. Click here to read the full post

Dark Blue & Michael and Michael Have Issues: Thoughts?

If I weren't on vacation this week, I'd have written reviews of one or both of "Dark Blue" (TNT's cliche-ridden undercover cop drama with Dylan McDermott doing his usual Extremely Loud Or Incredibly Close, But Nothing In Between schtick) and "Michael and Michael Have Issues" (uneven but promising Comedy Central series featuring 2/11 of The State or 2/3 of Stella, depending on your point of view). But I'm on vacation, so I didn't.

Anybody watch? If so, what'd you think? Click here to read the full post

Leverage, "The Beantown Bailout Job": A thief, a con artist and a hacker walk into a bar...

I'm on vacation, but I did get a look at the "Leverage" season premiere before I left. The show still doesn't feel like it's living up to the potential of the premise and the cast, but I think it's found an equilibrium where I like the characters enough to enjoy it as a summer diversion, if nothing else.

That said, the new opening title sequence is very cool. What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Warehouse 13, "Resonance": Number Six with a bullet

I'm on vacation at the moment you're reading this, but I liked this week's "Warehouse 13" enough that I wanted to say a couple of things about it before I stepped away from the laptop. Quick spoilers coming up just as soon as I huff and puff...

My concerns with the "Warehouse 13" pilot had less to do with the characters and the concept than the story they chose to tell in the first episode. The business with Lucrezia Borgia's comb was too complicated, and really not that interesting, even with Saul Rubinek riding a zipline.

Pete and Myka having to deal with the world's most perfect pop song, on the other hand? A cool idea, well-executed, particularly in the assault on the federal building where we finally got a good long look at its effect. I don't know that a 45 rpm record quite qualifies as steampunk, but it fits into the retro-tech vibe the show has going, and I liked it.

A few issues: I wish they'd given Tricia Helfer more to do, Myka using the case to reconnect with her dad (who she earlier made sound like a total bastard) felt trite, and by showing this episode slightly out of order (it was the third produced, and the second after Jack Kenny took over as showrunner), it feels like we're moving too fast in the partners coming to accept each other's way of working. The whole "she looks, he leaps" thing felt trite in the pilot, but at the same time, it's jarring to hear her already telling him to trust his instincts in the face of other evidence.

But it's always a good sign to see a show get better after its pilot, rather than worse.

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

'Mad Men' season two DVD review - Sepinwall on TV

In today's column, I look briefly at the season two DVD set for "Mad Men." As the warning at the top of the article says, though, if you didn't watch the season and were waiting to watch the DVD, you're not going to want to read, as I discuss a major plot development pretty early. Click here to read the full post

Nurse Jackie, "Tiny Bubbles": Toast up. Toasting.

I'm on vacation at the time you're reading this, but tonight's "Nurse Jackie" was so outstanding -- and was a big reason why I gave the show such a positive review at the start in spite of some unevenness in the other early episodes -- that I wanted to give it a quick write-up before I left. (In an ideal world, I'd write more, but I gots to go.) Spoilers coming up just as soon as I get you to walk with me...

"F--k you, and here's to me." -Paula

The comedy and drama sides of "Nurse Jackie" haven't yet learned how to co-exist, and an episode like "Tiny Bubbles" suggests that until they do, the writers should err on the side of drama. Because where some previous episodes felt interesting but slight, "Tiny Bubbles" felt solid and powerful throughout. Even the relatively lighter moments -- like the Coop Has Two Mommies subplot -- had more weight, and felt more satisfying.

Much of the credit for all of this goes to Tony-winning Judith Ivey, who was wonderful as Paula, turning a character who could very easily have been a cliche into a very real person whose life and death had an obvious impact on the rest of the cast. Hell, even Mrs. Akalitis seemed like a human being for most of this one.

Great work, also, by Blythe Danner and Swoosie Kurtz as Coop's aforementioned two mommies, who went a long way towards deepening a character who'd previously been there just as comic relief.

But the regular cast was great, too. I loved Eddie setting Zoey straight on the subject of how unusual this situation is, and O'Hara being mildly serious for once as she offered to help Jackie. And, of course, Edie Falco was outstanding throughout, especially during the moment where Jackie learned she isn't the first nurse to get pain pills from Eddie, and in the final sequence (wonderfully scored to Patty Griffin's "It Don't Come Easy") where Jackie went to pack up Paula's apartment and found that Paula beat her to the punch.

I have a DVD with episodes seven through twelve, and if I do anything vaguely work-related over this vacation, I suspect it'll involve watching those episodes to see if "Tiny Bubbles" was an aberration or the episode where the pieces all started clicking into place.

Keeping in mind that we are not going to discuss the seventh episode, which went up On Demand today, what did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

"This is crazy, this is crazy, this is crazy..."

Okay, folks, as I mentioned a few times last week, today begins an extended period of blog disruption. I'm on vacation this week, and for the sake of both my psyche and my budding case of carpal tunnel, I'm hoping to stay far away from the computer.

That said, there will be several short, pre-written posts going live at various points while I'm gone. I've seen this week's "Nurse Jackie," "Warehouse 13" and "Leverage" (the season premiere is on Wednesday night at 9), and there will be some kind of post about each -- even if it's something as brief as "Hey, what did you think of it?" In addition, tomorrow's paper has a column on the release of "Mad Men" season two on DVD, and that'll be linked to here, and I've also set up a post to go up Thursday morning so anyone who wants to can discuss the Emmy nominations.

Behave while I'm gone, y'all. (And if you need help, just go read the commenting rules.) I'll be back next week, but that'll be a short (and likely light-posting week), as I'm heading out to California for Comic-Con and the TV critics press tour, and those two events will be dominating most of my writing time for the two-plus weeks I'll be there. But we'll cross that bridge when the Family Truckster comes to it. Click here to read the full post

Hung, "'Great sausage' or 'Can I call you Dick?'": Pimpin' ain't easy

Quick thoughts on the second episode of "Hung" coming up just as soon as I give you my list of do's and don't's...

"I'm a normal guy. I do normal things. Why don't you market me that way?" -Ray
"What's normal?" -Tanya

Having spent the pilot showing us why Ray's life is pathetic enough that he'd consider a career as a hooker, episode two of "Hung" spends more time on the pimp half of the equation, exploring Tanya's own sad existence as a failed poet and unfulfilled temp. By the end, it's very clear why she might think being a "happiness consultant" is her best option right now -- and that, while she and Ray have as steep a learning curve at their new career as Walter White did as a drug lord, she's not as ill-equipped as you might think. Hooking up with Lenore the personal shopper is actually a damned clever idea, especially given the kind of guy Ray wants to sell himself as.

While Thomas Jane is the main reason I'm watching, Jane Adams is a whole lot of fun in this episode, particularly in the moment where we see Tanya so excited by the possibilities of her plan that she literally skips through the chain restaurant's parking lot.

Overall, "'Great Sausage'" is quite a bit funnier than the pilot, which I know some people dismissed as being too dark and depressing. The addition of Rebecca Creskoff as the epically hateful Lenore is a strong step in a more comic direction, as we see both Ray and Tanya struggle mightily with how to deal with this forceful, nasty but not uncharismatic piece of work.

The half-hour length (which will be standard from here on out) also suits the show better, I think, than the 45 minutes or so of the pilot. (Feel free to make all the "Hung" length jokes you want, folks; I've been telling them for a few weeks now.) There are still some bumps ahead -- even with her minimal appearances so far, Anne Heche/Jess is really annoying -- but I was glad I watched this one back-to-back with the pilot, as it gave me a much better sense of what "Hung" could be like.

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

Entourage: That's it for me!

"Entourage" has become a kind of no-win show for me. When I criticize it (as I've often done the last few seasons), its fans complain that I'm just watching to pick it apart. On the rare occasions when I praise it, the people who, like me, are still watching for reasons they don't really understand, complain that I'm going too easy on the show. And when I don't bother to write up an episode at all, both sides complain about that, usually by disrupting discussion of other shows.

Having seen the first two episodes of the new season (which begins this Sunday, after a new episode of "Hung"), I realized that I just don't care enough anymore to keep watching, let alone to keep blogging about it. I won't even rehash my usual complaints about the show (if you've been reading me long enough, you know what they are, and if you don't, click on the "Entourage" tag below for some hints).

So, barring something unusual, this will be my last post on the subject, and the only reason I'm doing it is to avoid more "Hey, where's the 'Entourage' post?" comments. For those looking forward to more posts, whether you like the show or hate it but can't stop watching, my apologies. File this under life being too short. Click here to read the full post

The Wire, Season 2, Episode 7: "Backwash" (Newbies edition)

We're now into the second half of our trip through season two of "The Wire." As always, we're doing this 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 seven, "Backwash" -- including some thoughts from the episode's author, Rafael Alvarez -- coming up just as soon as I enter the modern urban crime environment...

"What do you think they grew up to be? Stevedores. What the f--k you think?" -Frank

The drug characters who were so important to season one of "The Wire" have mostly been sideshow players in season two. And even in "Backwash," they're only slightly more prominent than they were in the season's first half. But before we get to talking about the stevedores, and Daniels putting his career (and marriage) at risk, I have to start with Stringer Bell.

How cold is Stringer? He moves through this episode, visiting the loved ones of D'Angelo Barksdale, the man whose death he ordered, and he's as calm and smooth as if he were waiting on a customer at his copy shop. He puts into motion a deal with Prop Joe -- some of their superior real estate in exchange for the superior package Joe is getting from Vondas -- and even though Avon clearly wants no part of it, you can see that Stringer is going to go ahead with it, anyway. Hey, he killed off D'Angelo without anyone the wiser; what else can he get away with?

Because Stringer so rarely shows emotion -- and when he does, it's anger -- it would be very easy for him to come across every bit as robotic as the Rotterdam equipment Frank Sobotka is so afraid of. But Idris Elba shows Stringer always thinking, always calculating the angles in any encounter, whether he's seducing D's girl to get more information on him or offering a comforting hand to Brianna Barksdale while she suffers a tragedy that he knows he caused. Though Avon was technically the boss of the organization, there's a reason the first season focused more on Stringer, and it's the same reason I suspect Stringer was left free at the end of that season while Avon went to jail: he's the more original, compelling character, and Elba's is one of the show's most electrifying, if subtle, performances. (Which isn't a knock on the terrific Wood Harris, by the way.)

Great as Elba is, though, the episode still belongs to the stevedores -- particularly to Frank, whose motives begin to seem a bit less pure, and Nick, whose actions begin to seem a bit less clever.

While Frank's actions with The Greek have always been questionable, there wasn't previously much chance to argue with the goal he was trying to achieve with those actions. He wasn't buying anything for himself, was using Vondas's money either to pay for Bruce the lobbyist or to help out union men down on their luck. But two sequences in "Backwash" suggest that he's not only a criminal, but a tunnel-visioned one.

When Frank gets a look at the documentary about the robot-equipped Rotterdam port, it's like the worst horror movie he's ever seen. The speaker ducks his question about stevedore hours, because both men know that these robots will be putting men like Frank and Nick out of business. But at the same time, the man's comment about the increased safety of these machines is driven home at the episode's end, when New Charles loses a leg during a night off-load. Robots aren't at risk like that -- and, for that matter, they can't steal cans and aid smugglers the way that Frank and Horseface can.

As Frank notes, "Can't get hurt if you ain't working," and the robots would certainly put more of Frank's union brothers out of a job. But as we see in his argument with Bruce, what Frank should have been concerned about -- and a long time ago, at that -- wasn't the fate of himself and Horse, but that of younger guys like Nick and Ziggy and Johnny 50. As I've written before, these guys were raised in an environment where they were taught that this was the only possible lifestyle for them, when other men in similar situations made sure their kids were prepared to do something different, and better, than his old man. Maybe the kids with the stolen Tang couldn't have grown up to become astronauts, but they surely could have grown up to be something with more of a future than a stevedore. But Frank doesn't want to see that. He thinks his way is the only way, and he's become so obsessed with his plan that he's willing to violate the long-standing black/white turn-taking arrangement so he can run for a second term as union treasurer.

(Rafael Alvarez will have many more thoughts on the subject of Frank's goals in a bit.)

Whatever you think about Frank, there's no question Nick isn't thinking smart with his foray into the world of drug dealing. Sure, he's better-qualified and more competent than Ziggy -- frankly, I think I'd have a better chance of moving a package than Zig -- but there's too much risk for this reward. We see Nick already starting to develop a big head as he sits on the stoop lecturing Frog (even if he's briefly shamed by the disapproving look from the woman next door), and then he has to go and ignore Frank's advice -- not to mention the warnings Nick himself gave to Ziggy -- about not flashing around money. It's one thing to help Aimee get a nicer apartment, and another to be driving around in a brand-new truck for all the world -- including two knuckle-headed cops by the name of Herc and Carver -- to see.

And if Herc and Carver are going to have trouble explaining how they found out about Nick's business relationship with Frog, let alone how he connects with the murdered girls in the can, at least the detail has started to make enough progress that Daniels can let Lester guilt him into taking the 14 Jane Doe murders off of Rawls' hands.

The inner battle between Cedric Daniels, politically-ambitious ladder climber and Cedric Daniels, natural police, was a running theme in season one. From the moment Valchek rescued him from evidence room purgatory, it seemed like Daniels had struck some kind of balance between the two. He declined Burrell's offer of a district command post in favor of turning the detail into a Major Crimes Unit, but he also refused to make the murders part of the Sobotka case because he suspected it would ruin his MCU plan before it started.

But as we saw last season after Brandon's death, Daniels will, in the end, always choose the right path over the politically-expedient one, even if it hurts his career, and even if it puts a massive strain on his marriage to Marla, who loved that other Daniels more than this one.

Before we get to the bullet points, we're going to do something a little different this week. This episode was written by Rafael Alvarez, who was one of David Simon's old colleagues at the Baltimore Sun (and who has authored the short story collection "Orlo & Leini," and "A People's History of the Archdiocese of Baltimore," which you can read more about, along with Alvarez's own story, by clicking on his name). Alvarez also write "The Wire: Truth Be Told," the only official companion book the series ever got, and after some readers last week asked me about rumors that Alvarez would be doing an updated version covering all five seasons, I e-mailed him for confirmation. He explained that an updated "Truth Be Told" would, in fact, come out by Christmas -- albeit only in the UK, through Canongate Books, but there are easy ways to order that here through the series of tubes -- and then we got to talking about "Backwash."

Alvarez grew up in a family with connections to the Baltimore ports, and had worked there himself, which made his expertise invaluable to the writing of this season. I asked for his own take on the nobility of Frank's goals -- particularly in light of New Charles' injury and the argument with the lobbyist -- and if he had any other memories of the making of the episode. Here's what he wrote:

Frank Sobotka was a very smart man who often mistook his heart for his brain.

A problem with technology is that it now moves faster than the span of a single human lifetime.

One of my first assignments as a 19-year-old reporter in Baltimore was a longshoreman's strike (1977) over complete implementation of containerization on ports that had been worked by muscle for 200 years.

An old union man named Gilbert Lukowski (told me) that no matter how convenient and affordable new technology made life for management "you can't just take a man in the middle of his working life and throw him on the junk pile."

I never forgot that and I tried to instill as much of that philosophy as possible into Frank Sobotka as we built that character. Frank was prescient enough to know that the future was coming no matter what he did but soft-hearted (some might say soft-headed) enough to see a dependent family in the face of each of the men he was responsible for.

(The bigger irony to me is how much of a "dutch uncle" or father figure he was to the union men while his blood son went awry because - in part - frank was so distracted by union business.)

There were two main themes of my childhood as the grandson of a seafarer turned union shipyard worker and the son of a seafarer turned union tugboat engineer: hard work and education.

My own experience was much more Bruce the lobbyist than Frank the union man. My father always held education above everything because he knew it was the only way a man could respond to changes in the economy beyond your control. He never wanted my brothers or I to work on the waterfront with him. And when my one brother (a natural mechanic) truly desired that work, my old man made him get there through a respected maritime academy instead of just following him down to the waterfront the way Ziggy followed his father.

So my argument would be that if the waterfront (or any industry) is a pie, technology is going to change the way that pie is made, sold and distributed. If union men are willing to put some of their hard earned salaries and whatever influence a father can have with their children toward education, the next generation can have a piece of that pie even if it doesn't resemble anything the old man would recognize.

They may not be running the show, but at least they'll be able to get in the door.

It might be noted (by me if not Simon) that Frank Sobotka had a little bit of a Messiah complex, even to the point of laughing when the polish priest asked if he had been to confession lately.

The most memorable story I would tell about writing "Backwash" are two things that please me greatly.

No. 1 - I was able to get Robert Irsay's face in the middle of the union shack dartboard (it flashes on the screen for half a second when Bruce leaves Frank's office). Maybe six people in the country got that when it first aired and I promise you that all of them are scholars of pro football Baltimore.

No. 2 - The story that Bruce the lobbyist tells frank (I liked that the lobbyist was Italian-American and not a WASP because it proved my point about education serving a working class eager enough to get a degree any way they can) about his grandfather pushing the knife sharpening wheel, that was taken directly from a story Frank Zappa (born in Baltimore Dec. 21, 1940) told me in a 1986 interview about his early Baltimore roots.

When Zappa's grandfather (Charlie Colimore) died in 1941, Frank and his family moved to a rowhouse apartment in the 4600 block of Park Heights Avenue. Zappa remembered there was "an alley in the back and down the alley used to come the knife sharpener man-you know, a guy with the wheel. And everybody used to come down off their back porch to the alley to get their knives and scissors done."

Some other thoughts on "Backwash":

• Getting back to the idea of season one characters taking a backseat so far in season two, McNulty makes his first appearance of the episode at the 55-minute mark. And as much as we all love Dominic West in the role, and as crucial as he was to the first season, it's a testament to how strong the ensemble is -- and how well Simon and Burns and company have already established the city as the real star of "The Wire" -- that I didn't even notice his absence until he turned up in Elena's backyard.

• Herc and Carver provide particularly strong comic relief in this one with their misadventures in "the modern urban crime environment," and Carver's fake British accent as he declares Herc to be "Head. Dick Head." Also, Herc raving about the wonders of technology is nicely intercut with Frank's reaction to the Rotterdam film.

• Bodie's visit to the florist was more in the "so sad it's funny" category, but I have no doubt that there are many inner-city florists that have a back room featuring Uzi-shaped arrangements made up of flowers with "strong colors."

• Wee-Bey's line about how D'Angelo killed himself in a way he knew his loved ones would have to carry is very similar to a line from both "Homicide" book and show about cops who commit suicide knowing that colleagues will have to deal with the crime scene.

• Ziggy gets punked by Maui with the fake paternity suit papers, whose obsession with playing "Love Child" on the jukebox over and over and over should have been a bit of a tipoff, no?

• Joe says his philosophy is "Buy for a dollar, sell for two," which makes him an ideal business associate of Vondas and The Greek, who say it as "Buy for a nickel, sell for a dime."

Coming up next: "Duck and Cover," in which McNulty practices a new driving technique, Frank pays his bills, and Ziggy gets a lift.

As to when you'll see this review? That's an open question. Like I mentioned earlier in the week in the "Sports Night" review, I'm on vacation next week, and late the following week I'll be heading to California for Comic-Con and then the Television Critics Association summer press tour. So these reviews are going to be published on a very irregular schedule from now until at least early August, if not for the rest of the summer. You may not get any reviews in a given week (and I wouldn't be holding my breath next week), or you might get two in one week, at any day or time when they're done. It's unfortunately the best I can do given all the time I'll either be off or occupied with other business. But we'll get it done, fret not.

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

The Wire, Season 2, Episode 7: "Backwash" (Veterans edition)

We're now into the second half of our trip through season two of "The Wire." As always, we're doing this 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 seven, "Backwash" -- including some thoughts from the episode's author, Rafael Alvarez -- coming up just as soon as I enter the modern urban crime environment...

"What do you think they grew up to be? Stevedores. What the f--k you think?" -Frank

The drug characters who were so important to season one of "The Wire" have mostly been sideshow players in season two. And even in "Backwash," they're only slightly more prominent than they were in the season's first half. But before we get to talking about the stevedores, and Daniels putting his career (and marriage) at risk, I have to start with Stringer Bell.

How cold is Stringer? He moves through this episode, visiting the loved ones of D'Angelo Barksdale, the man whose death he ordered, and he's as calm and smooth as if he were waiting on a customer at his copy shop. He puts into motion a deal with Prop Joe -- some of their superior real estate in exchange for the superior package Joe is getting from Vondas -- and even though Avon clearly wants no part of it, you can see that Stringer is going to go ahead with it, anyway. Hey, he killed off D'Angelo without anyone the wiser; what else can he get away with?

Because Stringer so rarely shows emotion -- and when he does, it's anger -- it would be very easy for him to come across every bit as robotic as the Rotterdam equipment Frank Sobotka is so afraid of. But Idris Elba shows Stringer always thinking, always calculating the angles in any encounter, whether he's seducing D's girl to get more information on him or offering a comforting hand to Brianna Barksdale while she suffers a tragedy that he knows he caused. Though Avon was technically the boss of the organization, there's a reason the first season focused more on Stringer, and it's the same reason I suspect Stringer was left free at the end of that season while Avon went to jail: he's the more original, compelling character, and Elba's is one of the show's most electrifying, if subtle, performances. (Which isn't a knock on the terrific Wood Harris, by the way.)

Great as Elba is, though, the episode still belongs to the stevedores -- particularly to Frank, whose motives begin to seem a bit less pure, and Nick, whose actions begin to seem a bit less clever.

While Frank's actions with The Greek have always been questionable, there wasn't previously much chance to argue with the goal he was trying to achieve with those actions. He wasn't buying anything for himself, was using Vondas's money either to pay for Bruce the lobbyist or to help out union men down on their luck. But two sequences in "Backwash" suggest that he's not only a criminal, but a tunnel-visioned one.

When Frank gets a look at the documentary about the robot-equipped Rotterdam port, it's like the worst horror movie he's ever seen. The speaker ducks his question about stevedore hours, because both men know that these robots will be putting men like Frank and Nick out of business. But at the same time, the man's comment about the increased safety of these machines is driven home at the episode's end, when New Charles loses a leg during a night off-load. Robots aren't at risk like that -- and, for that matter, they can't steal cans and aid smugglers the way that Frank and Horseface can.

As Frank notes, "Can't get hurt if you ain't working," and the robots would certainly put more of Frank's union brothers out of a job. But as we see in his argument with Bruce, what Frank should have been concerned about -- and a long time ago, at that -- wasn't the fate of himself and Horse, but that of younger guys like Nick and Ziggy and Johnny 50. As I've written before, these guys were raised in an environment where they were taught that this was the only possible lifestyle for them, when other men in similar situations made sure their kids were prepared to do something different, and better, than his old man. Maybe the kids with the stolen Tang couldn't have grown up to become astronauts, but they surely could have grown up to be something with more of a future than a stevedore. But Frank doesn't want to see that. He thinks his way is the only way, and he's become so obsessed with his plan that he's willing to violate the long-standing black/white turn-taking arrangement so he can run for a second term as union treasurer.

(Rafael Alvarez will have many more thoughts on the subject of Frank's goals in a bit.)

Whatever you think about Frank, there's no question Nick isn't thinking smart with his foray into the world of drug dealing. Sure, he's better-qualified and more competent than Ziggy -- frankly, I think I'd have a better chance of moving a package than Zig -- but there's too much risk for this reward. We see Nick already starting to develop a big head as he sits on the stoop lecturing Frog (even if he's briefly shamed by the disapproving look from the woman next door), and then he has to go and ignore Frank's advice -- not to mention the warnings Nick himself gave to Ziggy -- about not flashing around money. It's one thing to help Aimee get a nicer apartment, and another to be driving around in a brand-new truck for all the world -- including two knuckle-headed cops by the name of Herc and Carver -- to see.

And if Herc and Carver are going to have trouble explaining how they found out about Nick's business relationship with Frog, let alone how he connects with the murdered girls in the can, at least the detail has started to make enough progress that Daniels can let Lester guilt him into taking the 14 Jane Doe murders off of Rawls' hands.

The inner battle between Cedric Daniels, politically-ambitious ladder climber and Cedric Daniels, natural police, was a running theme in season one. From the moment Valchek rescued him from evidence room purgatory, it seemed like Daniels had struck some kind of balance between the two. He declined Burrell's offer of a district command post in favor of turning the detail into a Major Crimes Unit, but he also refused to make the murders part of the Sobotka case because he suspected it would ruin his MCU plan before it started.

But as we saw last season after Brandon's death, Daniels will, in the end, always choose the right path over the politically-expedient one, even if it hurts his career, and even if it puts a massive strain on his marriage to Marla, who loved that other Daniels more than this one.

Before we get to the bullet points, we're going to do something a little different this week. This episode was written by Rafael Alvarez, who was one of David Simon's old colleagues at the Baltimore Sun (and who has authored the short story collection "Orlo & Leini," and "A People's History of the Archdiocese of Baltimore," which you can read more about, along with Alvarez's own story, by clicking on his name). Alvarez also write "The Wire: Truth Be Told," the only official companion book the series ever got, and after some readers last week asked me about rumors that Alvarez would be doing an updated version covering all five seasons, I e-mailed him for confirmation. He explained that an updated "Truth Be Told" would, in fact, come out by Christmas -- albeit only in the UK, through Canongate Books, but there are easy ways to order that here through the series of tubes -- and then we got to talking about "Backwash."

Alvarez grew up in a family with connections to the Baltimore ports, and had worked there himself, which made his expertise invaluable to the writing of this season. I asked for his own take on the nobility of Frank's goals -- particularly in light of New Charles' injury and the argument with the lobbyist -- and if he had any other memories of the making of the episode. Here's what he wrote:

Frank Sobotka was a very smart man who often mistook his heart for his brain.

A problem with technology is that it now moves faster than the span of a single human lifetime.

One of my first assignments as a 19-year-old reporter in Baltimore was a longshoreman's strike (1977) over complete implementation of containerization on ports that had been worked by muscle for 200 years.

An old union man named Gilbert Lukowski (told me) that no matter how convenient and affordable new technology made life for management "you can't just take a man in the middle of his working life and throw him on the junk pile."

I never forgot that and I tried to instill as much of that philosophy as possible into Frank Sobotka as we built that character. Frank was prescient enough to know that the future was coming no matter what he did but soft-hearted (some might say soft-headed) enough to see a dependent family in the face of each of the men he was responsible for.

(The bigger irony to me is how much of a "dutch uncle" or father figure he was to the union men while his blood son went awry because - in part - frank was so distracted by union business.)

There were two main themes of my childhood as the grandson of a seafarer turned union shipyard worker and the son of a seafarer turned union tugboat engineer: hard work and education.

My own experience was much more Bruce the lobbyist than Frank the union man. My father always held education above everything because he knew it was the only way a man could respond to changes in the economy beyond your control. He never wanted my brothers or I to work on the waterfront with him. And when my one brother (a natural mechanic) truly desired that work, my old man made him get there through a respected maritime academy instead of just following him down to the waterfront the way Ziggy followed his father.

So my argument would be that if the waterfront (or any industry) is a pie, technology is going to change the way that pie is made, sold and distributed. If union men are willing to put some of their hard earned salaries and whatever influence a father can have with their children toward education, the next generation can have a piece of that pie even if it doesn't resemble anything the old man would recognize.

They may not be running the show, but at least they'll be able to get in the door.

It might be noted (by me if not Simon) that Frank Sobotka had a little bit of a Messiah complex, even to the point of laughing when the polish priest asked if he had been to confession lately.

The most memorable story I would tell about writing "Backwash" are two things that please me greatly.

No. 1 - I was able to get Robert Irsay's face in the middle of the union shack dartboard (it flashes on the screen for half a second when Bruce leaves Frank's office). Maybe six people in the country got that when it first aired and I promise you that all of them are scholars of pro football Baltimore.

No. 2 - The story that Bruce the lobbyist tells frank (I liked that the lobbyist was Italian-American and not a WASP because it proved my point about education serving a working class eager enough to get a degree any way they can) about his grandfather pushing the knife sharpening wheel, that was taken directly from a story Frank Zappa (born in Baltimore Dec. 21, 1940) told me in a 1986 interview about his early Baltimore roots.

When Zappa's grandfather (Charlie Colimore) died in 1941, Frank and his family moved to a rowhouse apartment in the 4600 block of Park Heights Avenue. Zappa remembered there was "an alley in the back and down the alley used to come the knife sharpener man-you know, a guy with the wheel. And everybody used to come down off their back porch to the alley to get their knives and scissors done."

Some other thoughts on "Backwash":

• Getting back to the idea of season one characters taking a backseat so far in season two, McNulty makes his first appearance of the episode at the 55-minute mark. And as much as we all love Dominic West in the role, and as crucial as he was to the first season, it's a testament to how strong the ensemble is -- and how well Simon and Burns and company have already established the city as the real star of "The Wire" -- that I didn't even notice his absence until he turned up in Elena's backyard.

• Herc and Carver provide particularly strong comic relief in this one with their misadventures in "the modern urban crime environment," and Carver's fake British accent as he declares Herc to be "Head. Dick Head." Also, Herc raving about the wonders of technology is nicely intercut with Frank's reaction to the Rotterdam film.

• Bodie's visit to the florist was more in the "so sad it's funny" category, but I have no doubt that there are many inner-city florists that have a back room featuring Uzi-shaped arrangements made up of flowers with "strong colors."

• Wee-Bey's line about how D'Angelo killed himself in a way he knew his loved ones would have to carry is very similar to a line from both "Homicide" book and show about cops who commit suicide knowing that colleagues will have to deal with the crime scene.

• Ziggy gets punked by Maui with the fake paternity suit papers, whose obsession with playing "Love Child" on the jukebox over and over and over should have been a bit of a tipoff, no?

• Joe says his philosophy is "Buy for a dollar, sell for two," which makes him an ideal business associate of Vondas and The Greek, who say it as "Buy for a nickel, sell for a dime."

And now we're up to the veterans-only section, where we talk about how developments in this episode will echo over the rest of this season, and the series:

• The florist Bodie visits is the same one Prop Joe will use when arranging Blind Butchie's funeral in season five.

• That light going out in Marla's bedroom more or less signals the end of the Daniels marriage. I'm not all the way through the episodes yet, but as I recall, we don't even see her again until we find out Cedric's sleeping on the couch, right?

• As one marriage ends, another is born, with Prop Joe planting the seeds with Stringer that will grow into the New Day Co-Op.

• Based on the way the rest of the season plays out, how necessary is Fuzzy Dunlop, anyway? It's not like they actually hear anything valuable on the mic before Frog throws it away. I suppose an argument could be made that Herc and Carver wouldn't have bothered watching Frog at the moment when Nick drove up if they weren't listening in on the mic. Either way, ol' Fuzzy will not only provide additional comedy, he'll serve as the template for Jimmy and Lester's homeless killer scam in season five.

• Here we see the first bits of bad advice that Ziggy will complain about after he fights Maui in the next episode. And speaking of which...

Coming up next: "Duck and Cover," in which McNulty practices a new driving technique, Frank pays his bills, and Ziggy gets a lift.

As to when you'll see this review? That's an open question. Like I mentioned earlier in the week in the "Sports Night" review, I'm on vacation next week, and late the following week I'll be heading to California for Comic-Con and then the Television Critics Association summer press tour. So these reviews are going to be published on a very irregular schedule from now until at least early August, if not for the rest of the summer. You may not get any reviews in a given week (and I wouldn't be holding my breath next week), or you might get two in one week, at any day or time when they're done. It's unfortunately the best I can do given all the time I'll either be off or occupied with other business. But we'll get it done, fret not.

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

Royal Pains, "No Man Is An Island": Drill bit

After being ready to dismiss "Royal Pains" a couple of weeks ago, tonight's was surprisingly entertaining, with a high concentration of Macgyver medicine, and even some comic relief moments for the brother that didn't completely annoy me. Still probably not enough to merit a full post, but I thought the uptick in quality worth mentioning. Anybody else still watching? (Based on the ratings, which are higher than "Burn Notice," and among the most popular things on cable this summer, somebody is.) If so, what did you think? Click here to read the full post

Burn Notice, "Signals and Codes": Michael Westen vs. Michael Weston

Some quick thoughts on tonight's "Burn Notice" coming up just as soon as I lie about ice cream cake...

The meta-joke aside, Michael Weston the actor fit in very well with the world of Michael Westen the character, and it was fun to watch our usually super-cool, ultra-rational Michael struggle to keep his temper under control while dealing with a client who's anything but rational -- and, for that matter, to see a situation where Fiona gets to be the one keeping a cool head.

I'm still taking a wait-and-see approach on Michael's quest to get back in with the CIA, but swapping out Detective Paxson for Michael's reluctant new government contact seems like an upgrade so far.

All that, and Sam Axe leading a team-building seminar. How can you not like that?

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

The State on DVD: David Wain Q&A

No, David Wain isn't either of the men pictured above (they would be Michael Ian Black and Kevin Allison), but he did help write my favorite "The State" sketch of all time, and he talked to me about "Taco Man," and many other things "State"-related, in a Q&A about Tuesday's long-awaited release of the series on DVD. (You can read my review here.)

Many thoughts from Wain -- including some surprising news about the music rights issues -- coming up just as soon as I travel to a horrific world where all the words that should start with H's instead start with M's. Ma ma ma ma ma!....

So what's taken so long?

I wish there was a more fun, interesting answer. But the truth is that we started trying to make a DVD of "The State" maybe 10 years ago, and it's been caught in this nameless bureuacratic molasses labyrinth of Viacom. Everything took, like, four months. Every step. And it just took this long.

How much of it was the music rights, and how much was other things?

I would say none of it was the music rights. When they finally greenlit the making of the DVD, we went in to deal with the music. We knew that would be a problem because the music world has changed so much. So we just set about to figure out what we could license and what we had to replace, and we did that. That wasn't really part of the delay. As was true when we were on the air on MTV, we never quite got their attention or their respect the way we wanted to.

How much of the show was a learning experience for you guys?

It was total boot camp in every way. We did a lot of our own everything. We didn't have much of a support group -- we had some, but we did our own shooting and a lot of of our own editing and costumes and everything. It was a great, great training ground.

I don't want to dwell on the music too much, but you said that you were able to get one or two songs, and I have yet to hear anything in the sketches so far that is the original music. Are there some sketches that still use the old songs?

I think there is one or two, honestly. But you are basically right. We were unable to secure the rights to almost any music. And the truth is, it wasn't that it was too expensive. Almost everyone we went to, they were, like, "Not available to you." They allocated quite a generous music licensing budget for this DVD project, and the powers that be that owned the rights to this music were just like, "No. We don't care how much you want to offer us." And it was kind of shocking. There were certain ones where we were like, "Let's really make sure we get this one, because the sketch is so designed around the piece of music." And we went to the people and they said no.

So, like, The Breeders' management, all these years later, is being that tough?

I knew you'd pick that one. I don't know if it was the management or the publisher or the label, but I do know that that didn't work out.

That's a real shame. Because that's one ("Pants") where it's built entirely around that song.

You are correct.

And there's a couple of others, like in one of the Barry and Levon sketches, they talk about how they're dancing to Marvin Gaye, and it's not Marvin.

I'm not going to try to pretend that we're thrilled about it, but I will say, we worked with Craig (Wedren), who did the original music for the show, and for everything we've done since, and we did our very best to maintain the feel of the sketches.

The truth is, at the time, we hated doing that. We hated that we had to use MTV music in a sketch comedy show and all this current stuff that would date the show. Of course, now, it's become in retrospective an element of what it was, and the DVDs should have it, and it's a shame that it doesn't.

It's funny: when "Pants" comes up in the DVD commentary, Ken (Marino) immediately points out that the music is different, and Tom (Lennon) jumps down his throat and is, like, "Shut up, Grandpa! Nobody wants to hear that!"

I'll agree with both.

Other than stripping out and then replacing the music, what else had to be done to put the DVD together?

We scoured through all of our basements and archives and attics and found all of these extra sketches that had never aired, and all these other extra random stuff. We also had to go back and find -- some of the sound wasn't quite right. It was like one of thsoe things where the show was finished before DVDs even existed. It was never archived properly for DVD distribution, and so we had to do some detective work. But then we did the design for it, and the commentary, etc., etc.

A friend of mine has the "Skits & Stickers" tape, which had a few of the unaired sketches on it, and I'd watch something like "Super XIII" (a horror movie parody about a killer movie camera) and wonder, "How did this not wind up on the show?"

Frankly, a lot of the stuff that we didn't put on the show, most of it was just not the best. But some of the pieces, we didn't have anyplace to put it. The show had to be exactly 22 minutes, 30 seconds long. We packed it with sketches, and we always shot more than we needed. That was part of our formula to have a good show. Sometimes, we just ran out of room.

I want to get back to the relationship between you and MTV, because that was an obvious source of tension even when I was watching it in college in the '90s. They wanted the show to be one thing, they wanted it to be something else. If you were to put it into simple terms, how would you describe the conflict?

I can only look at it through the lens of my current perspective, but I would say a lot of it was just a function of our own age at the time. We were in our early early 20s, just out of school, and pretty much anything anyone ever said to us, we took as fighting words. At the same time, as always is the case, they had some silly things they wanted us to do, in terms of trying to make it an MTV show and mix it in with popular culture. I don't think we appreciated at the time how much control we were given as a bunch of 20 year olds who had never done any work before. We played the role of the rebels, and we got yelled at a lot, but when the show did well, they kept asking us to come back. We left MTV in the face of an offer from them to stay with a big raise. We said, 'Screw you, we're going to make a jump to the networks,' we crashed and burned, and there you go.

Was it MTV pushing for recurring characters?

As would be the sort of obvious thing, they said, "You're doing a sketch show, you need to do memorable, sort of franchise-able characters." And we considered ourselves more in the vein of Monty Python, where it wasn't about pop culture references and specific spoofs, and we wanted to do more universal humor that wasn't about repeating the same characters over and over again. As our way of answering their note but doing it in our way, we decided to do the most blatantly obvious franchise recurring character, that's literally nothing more than a name and a catchphrase, and that ironically became our most popular character.

You'd say Louie was your most popular?

We only had a few. We had Louie and Doug and Barry and Levon, and a few others, like Inbred Brothers, but recurring for us means we did two or three of them. Whereas on Saturday Night Live it meant they did it every week for two seasons.

What were some of the other things they were pushing you for, that you either wound up doing or were able to fight off.

One of the most memorable ones was when they wanted us -- they had this set of criteria, that every sketch had to be in the first season. It had to be pop cultural, TV parody, MTV parody or "sick and twisted." Those were the four things, as I recall. We were like, "What?" So we tried to follow that the best we could. You'll see a lot more of that music/MTV spoofs in the first season. After that we stopped doing it so often. But one of the most famous stories, which you might have heard, we did a sketch about "90210," and we had some joke about Dylan and then making reference to Bob Dylan, and then the MTV people were like, "No. Nobody knows who Bob Dylan is. So that got under our claw, so we proceeded in the first season to make a Bob Dylan reference in nearly every sketch.

Like when Doug says, "You mean Uncle Robert?"

Yes, but if you look carefully, it's on the menus, on the walls, it's mentioned under the breath. It's kind of everywhere in the first season.

You watch something like Python or "Kids in the Hall," where it's five or six guys, after a while it becomes relatively easy to tell whose sketch this is, what everybody's sense of humor is. Because you were such a large group, I never was able to peg that with you guys. I guess it's become easier now that you've moved on to different projects, but what are some sketches that you would say typify your sense of humor and what you were trying to do on the show?

"Taco Man," the "Cannonball Run" credits, the dentist who goes not through the mouth, "The Jew, the Italian and the Red-Head Gay." But just to comment on your first part of it, I think more than those other troupes, we had such a long history of doing it together before we went on MTV, that the voice was a lot more unified by the time we got there. Much of the material was really very much a group product. Certainly, I can easily recognize the earmarks of every single guy in the writing. By the time we did it, everyone in the group put their stamp on every sketch.

"Taco Man" is possibly my favorite of them all.

Thank you very much. That was one where it was like, I don't think MTV approved of us to shoot it, but we just had a camera out and did it run and gun while we were filming another sketch nearby.

In listening to the commentaries, it seems like a lot of the ones that people were really fond of were filmed in that way.

The ones that I loved were the ones that we did second unit, just grab a camera and do it ourselves without the crew. There was a certain feel I try to maintain with my web series "Wainy Days," to maintain that spirit of keeping it really small run and gun.

Were you ever as satisfied with the sketches you did on the stage as you were with the ones you could shoot yourselves.

Yeah. Our history was as a live performing troupe. We were very cognizant of not wanting to give up the energy of sketches that are done with an audience... I'm so glad that we had that as an element of the show. We would hire a TV studio director to come in and direct those pieces. I liked the bounce, personally. Not everything needs to be a big visual feast. Not that we necessarily had big visual feasts on everything, but you know.

Well, every now and then you'd do something really visually impressive, like that black and white travel commercial with Kerri (Kenney) and Mike Jann.

Mike Jann in particular is such a visual encyclopedia. I pretty much learned a lot of what I know about directing from watching him. He really had an incredible feel, and still does, for creating those kinds of moods. We did do a lot of cool stuff. The State in college, we were half film majors and half theater majors, so it was in our DNA.

Was there ever any tension between the two factions?

We didn't forget who was who. But you'd be surprised by some of who were the film majors and who were the theater majors. Tom Lennon and Joe Lo Truglio and Kevin Allison were the film majors, and Michael Black and Ben Garant, both of whom have gone on to direct feature films, were theater majors. What's crazy is, of the 11 people of The State, I think 7 of us have directed feature films.

(NOTE: A quick perusal of IMDb finds feature directorial credits for Wain, Jann, Black, Garant, and Michael Showalter, though several others like Lennon and Lo Truglio have directed episodic television.)

What's nice is that sometimes a comedy troupe comes along, then splits up, and that's the last you see of anyone, and for the most part you guys are still out there working.

Part of the reason might be that we've continued to work together. We've all worked together a lot.

Was that something anyone was reluctant to do? To get it back to Python, the Pythons would wax and wane and want to do their own thing.

It was both. We were all very strong personalities, and strong of what we wanted to do. When the group split up, we took our opportunity to make our own voice, but at the same time we recognized that each other were some of the best collaborators and continued to work in various configurations. I love the fact that we're doing it, I still work with many people of the group every year in many things.

How would you describe the difference between what you and Showalter and Mike Black have done with Stella and those projects and what Tom and Ben have been doing?

They've supported themselves? They've made a beautiful livings for themselves and their families, and we've garnered cult fans. That's sort of a kidding way to say the true thing, which is they've done something really right. With "Reno 911," they've been able to keep a very specific and edgy voice and still appeal to a wide audience that has great longevity. And I really admire them. But Stella is something that has lasted in various forms for 12 years now and is still going, and I'm proud of what we did in our shorts and on Comedy Central and on tour. We have a DVD coming out in the fall of our more recent live show.

Is there any chance that the CBS special will be on DVD?

Yes. What's nice is that we actually own that. That's the one thing that we did sort of on our own. So whenever we get a chance to, or somebody gives us the money to do it, we'll release that.

In going over the sketches to make the DVD and do the commentary, how long had it been since you'd watched the show?

Oh, god. I don't think I'd really watched it, other than maybe a tiny snippet here or there, since we did it. So it was a trip. I think you can tell from the commentary that we all felt very old.

Did it all hold up?

I'm teased as the member of the group that's most in love with our own work, but I think it does. I think a lot of it is surprisingly good. I've watched a lot of the pieces and been pleased and kind of scared that we haven't gotten much better than that. Some of the stuff is really really good. And then some of it clearly isn't. Some of it is either just dated or doesn't hold up. I'd put it against any sketch show. I was very happy about "The State."

I'll tell you one thing: a lot of us came to New York City specifically with the goal of being on "Saturday Night Live," as many people do. We're here, the big goal is can we do that. And once we started doing The State, even before we were on MTV, there was this shift where we were, like, "This is cooler than that. We don't need to be on 'Saturday Night Live.'"

Could you give me a couple of examples of either sketches where you were surprised they were as good as they are, or that in retrospect didn't hold up as well?

To be honest, I haven't watched the whole thing through yet. We each took turns on some of the commentaries and I worked a lot on the music stuff. Ones I never really thought much about were some of the more filmic ones, like Mime Crash or International Signs. And some of the stuff that just cracks me up that are just stupid, like "H's and M's," or ones that I've seen a lot because people put them on YouTube, like "Taco Man." But I get a kick because I think they're funny and it's like seeing my old college videos.

And what about ones where you felt they were a product of their times?

I can't think of an example, but believe me, there are plenty.

A lot of you have worked together in things like "Wet Hot American Summer," and you all at least cameo'ed in "Reno 911" and "The Ten," but what are the chances that there might ever be a full-on State movie or TV project?

We did a full show of brand-new material in San Francisco in January. We decided if we were going to get the whole group together, we didn't want to look back on our pasts, but do what we do. We've had various pushes towards doing a movie or a special or a series, there's plenty of interest among ourselves for doing that, but it's certainly a logistical nightmare.

And how was it being together on stage again?

They were great, it was like going back in time. One of the saddest, most tragic things is that the show we did in San Francisco was in a 200-person theater, and the video didn't work. They didn't get the sound or something. Click here to read the full post

"I'm a god. I'm not THE God... I don't think."

Given that it's a slow week, and that I'll either be on vacation or traveling on business for the next several weeks, and that it's been a while since I did this, it's another open thread time. For the next eight hours or so (let's set the deadline as 5:30 Eastern), talk about and/or ask what you want, and I'll do my best to respond to what I can.

Hey, it's a slightly more productive procrastination tool than Flickchart (where "Groundhog Day" presently resides at my #1, leading a top 10 of "Lawrence of Arabia," "Three Kings," "Midnight Run," "The Shawshank Redemption," "The Big Lebowski," "The Princess Bride," "Die Hard," "Hoosiers" and "Children of Men").

First potential topic for discussion: can anyone identify the theme of the new blog logo?

UPDATE: 100+ questions later, we're wrapping it up for this time. Thanks, guys! Click here to read the full post

Rescue Me, "Wheels": Runaway truck

Because I had jury duty yesterday -- and because, frankly, I didn't really like this episode -- I'm eschewing a "Rescue Me" review this week, but feel free to talk about your own thoughts on it. Click here to read the full post

Michael Jackson memorial service upstaged by Paris's tears

Over at NJ.com, I have some thoughts on Michael Jackson's memorial service. I had to watch it for work; what did the rest of you who watched think? Click here to read the full post

Sports Night rewind: "Thespis"

I continued my streak of never making it even as far as voir dire in the jury selection process, and while I sat in the jury room, I got to do my latest "Sports Night" review, which I'm posting a day early for reasons that I'll explain at the end.

Spoilers for "Thespis" coming up just as soon as I rehearse the route...

"Ladies and gentlemen, Thespis has left the building!" -Dana

There are deeper episodes of "Sports Night," and probaby even funnier ones (I laughed more at the running gag with the water glasses in "Dear Louise" than I did at anything here), but "Thespis" is probably my favorite episode of the series. Just pure fun, a supremely confident farce that still finds time for a few heavy moments without ruining the tone.

Sorkin's fond of this Murphy's Law structure (he did a similar storyline on the "Studio 60" episode with Allison Janney, which was one of the less-bad episodes of that series), and where I think he finds the alchemy here is the decision to so quickly set up the idea of Thespis and have everyone buy into it. I think if everyone were in denial about it for more than the few minutes it takes Dana to slip and fall, it might have felt labored, but because we and the character understand by now that Jeremy knows of which he speaks, we and they just go with it. Whether there really is a Greek ghost in the studio or not doesn't matter, because it's in everybody's heads. And once the premise is accepted, Sorkin and Schlamme can quickly accelerate the level of disaster, from Dana's slip, to the falling turkey, to the entire signal dropping out for several minutes(*).

(*) Time to call on the expertise of the commenters who say they worked on cable sports shows during this period: is that really plausible? What combination of factors would have to happen for a national cable sports network to just drop off the face of the earth in the middle of a show?

What also makes it work, I think, are those serious moments I mentioned earlier -- the idea that the bad luck afflicting Sports Night doesn't just involve defrosting turkeys, but could lead to a tragic event for Isaac's daughter. (That, I think, is the most significant difference between "Thespis" and the "Studio 60" episode, which was played entirely for laughs, when the genius of Sorkin is the mix of jokes and pathos.) That storyline, or Dan's lecture to Casey about his decision not to take the job that went to Conan O'Brien, don't get in the way of the laughs; if anything, they make the laughs bigger, because they're a respite from thoughts about what might be happening in that labor and delivery room 3000 miles away.

And once again, how great is Robert Guillaume? The scene where Isaac is refusing to let Dana comfort him was expertly set up with the earlier scene about his son-in-law not rehearsing the route. Because Isaac is, like most Sorkin characters, smarter than the average bear, we know that he's already thought of all of the myriad things that could go wrong for his daughter, and the way Guillaume plays that moment of mental torture is a reminder of the bliss that ignorance can provide.

But really, I just feel happy when Dana says the line I quoted at the top. As I've said before, what makes "Sports Night" cool is that it creates this vision of a fantasy workplace where everyone is like family to one another. And more than most episodes of the series, "Thespis" creates the illusion that we're part of the family, sucked into the wacky hijinks and possible darkness, so the feeling of relief when Thespis allegedly attacks Frank and Kathie Lee Gifford across town is palpable.

Some other thoughts on "Thespis" (and say that five times fast, why don't you?):

• We get a bit of background continuity, as the telecast mentions Jason Grissom's no contest plea; Grissom was the guy whose arrest was a hot topic in the pilot.

• Note how turned on Natalie gets when Jeremy is answering all the questions about the Greco-Roman pantheon of deities. She's kind of the ultimate geek fantasy: a pretty girl who's attracted to men for their command of trivia.

• Sorkin's repetitive dialogue can get irritating at times, but I always laugh at Casey's run of Alberto Salazar/New York Marathon guesses to Dan's question about the anniversary.

• "Sports Night" takes place in a parallel universe for a number of reasons, not least of which is the idea that Lorne Michaels, given the power to pick Letterman's replacement, would have thought to hire a sportscaster with no national profile. (Conan had no profile of any kind, of course, but he had worked on "SNL" for years.)

Coming up next: As I mentioned last week, the summer is about to derail any hope of keeping on a strict schedule. I'm taking my first real vacation in what seems like forever next week. Then late in the week after that, I'll be in California, first for Comic-Con, then for the Television Critics Association summer press tour. And I'll likely be taking some more days off in late August. (Between unused vacation days and mandatory furloughs, I'm required to take a lot of time off in the second half of this year.)

So we're going to have to play things by ear for the rest of the summer, with me doing the reviews whenever I'm able, and just posting them when they're done (as I did here). If it makes you feel better, this is how I did the "Freaks and Geeks" reviews two summers ago (several of which were written at press tour), so I imagine I'll still get a fair number done between now and Labor Day (or between now and Premiere Week of the new TV season, depending on how productive I am with these and how many other things wind up on my plate).

Short version: bear with me. They'll come when they come. But to make up for these disruptions, I'm going to try to double up the rest of the way, whether the episodes are thematically linked or not. So at the very least be up on "The Quality of Mercy at 29K" and "Shoe Money Tonight" before the next review goes up, whenever that is. Heck, thanks to the short/productive jury duty stint, I might (repeat: might) be able to do another before the end of this week.

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

'Warehouse 13' review - Sepinwall on TV

In today's column, I review "Warehouse 13," the first series to debut under Sci Fi Channel's dopey new name of Syfy. (And a good chunk of the column is devoted to making fun of that name some more.)

Because I'm still getting caught up from my time on jury duty, no time to do a separate spoiler post for the pilot, so feel free to discuss it here after it airs tonight. Click here to read the full post

Nurse Jackie, "Daffodil": When Coop met Eddie

Because I had jury duty today, I don't have time to write up tonight's fifth episode of "Nurse Jackie," but feel free to discuss it on your own. (And, as always, keep in mind that we're not going to talk about the next episode, which went up On Demand today.) Click here to read the full post

The two faces of Jack Foley

A random topic to potentially keep you occupied while I'm on jury duty: movie or TV adaptations of books that, through casting, significantly change the nature of a main character -- and those rare occasions when the change winds up reflected back in the literary world. Some more thoughts on this coming up just as soon as I go to Detroit...

So over the holiday weekend, inspired by the many hours I've been wasting on Flickchart (and I strongly suggest you avoid the site if you also play fantasy sports or do something else of a similar time-sucking nature), I watched "Out of Sight" for the first time in a few years, and I also picked up Elmore Leonard's "Road Dogs," which is a sequel to several of his books, featuring Jack Foley from "Out of Sight," Cundo Rey from "La Brava" and Dawn Navarro from "Riding the Rap."

"Out of Sight" the movie holds up incredibly well, but a funny thing has happened to the book version of Jack Foley in the years since his first adventure was published: he's gotten younger, and better-looking.

In the original book, Foley is described as looking like Harry Dean Stanton, and is a lot older than Karen Sisco. On the DVD commentary, Steven Soderbergh says he didn't want to do another story about a much older, less attractive man landing a young and gorgeous woman, which is one of the reasons he went for Clooney. And Leonard apparently liked the casting so much that the Foley of "Road Dogs" is more or less supposed to look like Clooney circa the film. (Though, as an in-joke, he has another character namecheck Clooney while discussing the movie business with Foley.)

Now, it's well within Leonard's right to do this -- especially given how well Clooney did, in fact, play the part -- and he wouldn't be the first author to be so tickled by the on-screen interpretation of his hero that he'd start hearing the actor's voice as he typed. Ian Fleming, for instance, made James Bond Scottish in one of the later novels because he liked Sean Connery in the role so much.

And while I doubt the percentage of Leonard fans who aren't at least aware of "Out of Sight" the movie is pretty darned small, I wonder how someone would react to reading the two books back to back with their very different takes on Foley.

So, feel free to answer any or all of the following:

1)What is the best example you can think of of unconventional casting in a literary adaptation either equaling or surpassing the quality of the character in the book?

2)What's the best example of against-the-grain casting completely ruining the character and/or the adaptation? (I'd probably go with swapping in Morgan Freeman for Alan Arkin as the judge in "Bonfire of the Vanities," but I'm sure there are more egregious instances. For that matter, "Striptease" would have been a really funny movie if they'd cast an actress with the sense of humor of the woman in the book.)

3)How do you feel in those instances where a character continues from book to book and it becomes clear that the author is letting himself be influenced by the actor cast in the adaptation?

Try to avoid going too much into plot, if you can help it, but beyond that, have at it. Click here to read the full post

I, the jury

Things are going to be quiet in these parts for the next couple of days as I serve my civic responsibility and head to the county courthouse for jury duty. In past experience on jury duty, I've never made it to voir dire, and if I make it that far this time, I have no idea how the lawyers will react to the phrase "I'm a TV critic." But we'll see.

In theory, I'm going to be out of action for two days, and possibly more if I get paneled and the trial runs long. So here's the deal: I'm setting up a brief "What did everybody think of 'Nurse Jackie'?" post to go live tonight at 11 (and no talking about that episode sooner, On Demand people), a similar one for tomorrow's "Rescue Me," and I have a column about "Warehouse 13" going live tomorrow morning, which you can also use to discuss the show after it airs tomorrow night. And in a few minutes I'm putting up one other post for you guys to talk about amongst yourselves.

Beyond that, don't expect much out of me until at least Wednesday morning, and I doubt the "Sports Night" review is going to get done on time, unless I A)Wind up spending the two days in the waiting room, and B)Have access to a power outlet. And I fear the next "Wire" review might be delayed, too.

So play nice while I'm gone -- when in doubt, look at the commenting rules and remember that I'll be checking the comments when I can -- and hopefully we can get back to this TV thing we do on Wednesday. Click here to read the full post

The Wire, Season 2, Episode 6: "All Prologue" (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 six, "All Prologue," coming up just as soon as I light a $100 bill on fire...

"He's saying the past is always with us. Where we come from, what we go through, how we go through it -- all this s--t matters." -D'Angelo Barksdale

Designed as a novel for television, each season of "The Wire" is usually greater than the sum of its weekly parts, but every now and then you get a particularly extraordinary part of the whole. Season one gave us "Cleaning Up," with the death of Wallace, Avon's arrest and Daniels standing up to Burrell and Clay Davis. And midway through season two, we get the brilliant "All Prologue."

"All Prologue" moves the plot along a fair amount: the detail figures out what the checkers are doing and how to track it, Nick gets deeper into bed with Vondas (and prepares to embark on a third career as a drug dealer), and Stringer makes a bold move of his own in hiring a hitman to murder D'Angelo. But it's also as character and theme-driven as any episode of the season so far, densely packed with one hilarious, or moving, or outright tragic moment after another.

It gets much of its power from focusing on McNulty and D'Angelo, who were the defacto co-leads of season one, and who have been intentionally marginalized to this point in season two. After trying to think outside the box of their respective institutions, each was severely punished: D'Angelo by having to take the biggest fall of anyone in the Barksdale crew, Jimmy with his exile to the boat. And "All Prologue" -- which is actually something of an epilogue to season one -- sees both men approaching what could or should be the end to their respective stories.

D more or less severs ties with his family and the larger Barksdale organization. The tragic irony of his death is that, while this decision is the last straw for Stringer, it plays out to us as evidence that Stringer had nothing to fear from D'Angelo. When you see D telling his mother to leave him alone -- in a moment as wonderfully played by Larry Gilliard Jr. as the famous "Where's Wallace?" scene -- you see that he is stronger, and better, than the family that raised him. He doesn't need them, not even to get out of prison sooner, and had Stringer not hired his hitman, D very likely would have spent the decade leading up to his parole hearing being a model prisoner, not worrying about selling out his family for a deal. This is the bed he made, and he was going to lie in it for 10-20 years. But because Stringer was so paranoid, D'Angelo is dead. And, as it does whenever a good person (as good as anyone can be, especially someone we met when he was skating on a murder charge) dies on "The Wire," it hurts, deeply, even though we know it's a fictional character.

It took some bravery on the part of David Simon, Ed Burns and company to bump off one of their two original leading men -- most showrunners would have seen how white-hot flaming incredible Gilliard was and contrived an excuse to keep him around -- just as it's brave to have McNulty be such a non-factor to this point of season two. Even Jimmy recognizes how useless he's become as a cop (the only thing he's ever really cared about being), so after failing to identify his Jane Doe and seeing Omar through the Bird trial, Jimmy prepares for "retirement." He'll still wear the badge, but he knows he has no hope of getting off the boat so long as Rawls has power, so he's just going to put his head down and slog through the days until he gets his 20-year pension. This would, appropriately, take about as much time as D would have needed to serve before being eligible for parole.

And where D'Angelo tries to separate himself from his kin and is killed for it, Jimmy desperately wants back in with his own family -- if he can't be a cop, maybe he can be a husband and father, and better than he was the first time around -- and is cast out by Elena (after one for the road, of course). No one trusts either man's motivations, even though D seems resolute about carrying his burden, and even though a Jimmy who isn't working murders might be capable of being a more functional human being.

Simon often compares "The Wire" to Greek tragedy (and has offered us a remorseless criminal organization whose head man is known as The Greek). He talks about how the characters are all set on a specific path -- by their families, by their socio-economic circumstances, by the institution they belong to, and by their own past actions -- that is all but impossible to get off of. The characters are only occasionally aware of how their lives are governed that way, but as D'Angelo discusses "The Great Gatsby" with the prison English class, he gets it -- even though he doesn't recognize how soon fate and his own past deeds are going to catch up to him.

But before we get the tragedy of D'Angelo, and the continued purgatory for McNutly, we get the comic masterpiece that is Omar Devone Little (who is himself a fan of Greek mythology) versus Maury Levy, JD.

Every other time we watch Maury at work, we have to cringe at his complete amorality even as we admire his tenacity and gift for turning pathetic-looking hands into winning ones. But damn, it's so nice to see him go up against a man who's not only just as smart, but beholden to no one and nothing but his own conscience. Maury can't outwit Omar, can't apply any sort of institutional pressure on him, and is left utterly speechless when Omar turns Maury's accusation of being a parasite of the drug game around on him: "I got the shotgun, you got the briefcase. It's all in The Game, though, right?"

But that moment is only as fun to watch because we're aware of what an anomaly it is -- that the Omars of this world are few and far between, and that it'll likely be a long, cold time before we see Maury go down in utter defeat like this. The criminal justice system, for all its good intentions, is ideally set up for opportunistic parasites like Maury to make a meal of it, all while being treated as a respected (and feared) upright citizen of the community, where Omar is a loathed outlaw (albeit one who knows how to buy a snazzy track suit while still sticking to the letter of Ilene Nathan's "Anything with a tie" request).

I have so much more to say about "All Prologue," but I'm trying to get this done in advance of a holiday weekend (and I sincerely hope most of you have more exciting outdoor activities to do today and are reading this post on Monday), so we're going to go to the bullet points.

Some other thoughts on "All Prologue":

• Kima and Cheryl's relationship, and Cheryl's frustration at Kima's decision to return to active detective-work, comes to the forefront again beautifully as she insists on tagging along for Kima and Prez's strip club scouting mission. I particularly like the scene where Kima shows Cheryl a can like the one the girls died in to explain why she cares so much about these cases, because of the complicated way Melanie Nicholls-King plays Cheryl's response to the gesture. Cheryl does understand the importance of the case, but she also fears for her lover's safety, doesn't want to go through another shooting (or worse) like she did in season one, and would be much more comfortable if Kima's job didn't lead her to hanging around strip clubs. And, as Shardene's friend points out, can you blame her?

• On the Sobotka side of things, we see Sergei intervene with Prop Joe (who turns out to be Cheese's boss). And as Nick explains to Vondas why he doesn't just want to have Cheese taken out, Vondas' respect for the intelligence of Frank's nephew grows -- enough that he offers to pay Nick, Ziggy and Johnny 50 (who wants no part of it) in dope for the chemicals used to make it, since he knows Nick is smart enough to make a bigger profit on the drugs. Frank is a means to an end for Vondas, but he sees other possibilities for young Nico, no?

• Having yelled at and/or smacked Ziggy around for most of the first five episodes, Frank finally has a real conversation with his son here, and we get a much better understandings of the origins of the resentment that fuels so much of how Ziggy behaves. Though we've seen that Ziggy is good with computers, he didn't get to go to community college like his brother, but was instead drafted into the family business -- for which he was so ill-equipped, and for which he received virtually no benefit from being the son of the mighty Frank Sobotka. Most of the time, Frank seems like a noble villain -- he's working with The Greek for the good of the union, not himself -- but a scene like their conversation at the docks makes you wish he had been a little less selfless at some point, or at least willing to extend his beneficence to his real family at least as much as to his union brothers.

• Beadie continues to show growth as a smart detective, as she's the first member of the detail to recognize the criminal value of what the checkers do.

• Between Vondas (Greek), Sergei (Ukrainian) and now Etan (Israeli) -- not to mention Prop Joe (East Baltimore) -- The Greek has himself quite the international crime cartel, doesn't he? No concern about national or tribal loyalty -- just a shared love of profit.

• Dominic West has a lot of fun in the scene where McNulty is undressing the mannequin to distract Elena.

• Given how much of this episode functions as a season one coda, it feels appropriate -- and funny -- to have Judge Phelan back to tear into Bird during the sentencing. ("Are you Jesus Christ come back to Earth?")

• The ceremonial eyef--k that McNulty and Omar give Bird is a detail from David Simon's "Homicide" book, and was mentioned once on the "Homicide" series, though there it was referred to as "the ceremonial eyescrew" by Beau Felton.

• The prison English teacher is played by Richard Price, whose Dempsey novels are thematically very similar to what "The Wire" is doing -- and who will begin writing for the series starting in season three.

• I love Prop Joe's gift for turning a phrase, like when he tells Nick that, if not for Sergei, he and Ziggy would be "cadaverous motherf--kers."

Coming up next: "Backwash," in which Bodie goes flower-shopping, Joe has a proposition for Stringer and Rawls tries to dump the Jane Doe cases on the Sobotka detail.

I have jury duty early next week, and depending on how long it lasts, the next review may be pushed back a few days. Based on my past experience, I'm probably not going to get paneled, but if I do, I hope we get a witness one-tenth as colorful as Omar.

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

The Wire, Season 2, Episode 6: "All Prologue" (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 six, "All Prologue," coming up just as soon as I light a $100 bill on fire...

"He's saying the past is always with us. Where we come from, what we go through, how we go through it -- all this s--t matters." -D'Angelo Barksdale

Designed as a novel for television, each season of "The Wire" is usually greater than the sum of its weekly parts, but every now and then you get a particularly extraordinary part of the whole. Season one gave us "Cleaning Up," with the death of Wallace, Avon's arrest and Daniels standing up to Burrell and Clay Davis. And midway through season two, we get the brilliant "All Prologue."

"All Prologue" moves the plot along a fair amount: the detail figures out what the checkers are doing and how to track it, Nick gets deeper into bed with Vondas (and prepares to embark on a third career as a drug dealer), and Stringer makes a bold move of his own in hiring a hitman to murder D'Angelo. But it's also as character and theme-driven as any episode of the season so far, densely packed with one hilarious, or moving, or outright tragic moment after another.

It gets much of its power from focusing on McNulty and D'Angelo, who were the defacto co-leads of season one, and who have been intentionally marginalized to this point in season two. After trying to think outside the box of their respective institutions, each was severely punished: D'Angelo by having to take the biggest fall of anyone in the Barksdale crew, Jimmy with his exile to the boat. And "All Prologue" -- which is actually something of an epilogue to season one -- sees both men approaching what could or should be the end to their respective stories.

D more or less severs ties with his family and the larger Barksdale organization. The tragic irony of his death is that, while this decision is the last straw for Stringer, it plays out to us as evidence that Stringer had nothing to fear from D'Angelo. When you see D telling his mother to leave him alone -- in a moment as wonderfully played by Larry Gilliard Jr. as the famous "Where's Wallace?" scene -- you see that he is stronger, and better, than the family that raised him. He doesn't need them, not even to get out of prison sooner, and had Stringer not hired his hitman, D very likely would have spent the decade leading up to his parole hearing being a model prisoner, not worrying about selling out his family for a deal. This is the bed he made, and he was going to lie in it for 10-20 years. But because Stringer was so paranoid, D'Angelo is dead. And, as it does whenever a good person (as good as anyone can be, especially someone we met when he was skating on a murder charge) dies on "The Wire," it hurts, deeply, even though we know it's a fictional character.

It took some bravery on the part of David Simon, Ed Burns and company to bump off one of their two original leading men -- most showrunners would have seen how white-hot flaming incredible Gilliard was and contrived an excuse to keep him around -- just as it's brave to have McNulty be such a non-factor to this point of season two. Even Jimmy recognizes how useless he's become as a cop (the only thing he's ever really cared about being), so after failing to identify his Jane Doe and seeing Omar through the Bird trial, Jimmy prepares for "retirement." He'll still wear the badge, but he knows he has no hope of getting off the boat so long as Rawls has power, so he's just going to put his head down and slog through the days until he gets his 20-year pension. This would, appropriately, take about as much time as D would have needed to serve before being eligible for parole.

And where D'Angelo tries to separate himself from his kin and is killed for it, Jimmy desperately wants back in with his own family -- if he can't be a cop, maybe he can be a husband and father, and better than he was the first time around -- and is cast out by Elena (after one for the road, of course). No one trusts either man's motivations, even though D seems resolute about carrying his burden, and even though a Jimmy who isn't working murders might be capable of being a more functional human being.

Simon often compares "The Wire" to Greek tragedy (and has offered us a remorseless criminal organization whose head man is known as The Greek). He talks about how the characters are all set on a specific path -- by their families, by their socio-economic circumstances, by the institution they belong to, and by their own past actions -- that is all but impossible to get off of. The characters are only occasionally aware of how their lives are governed that way, but as D'Angelo discusses "The Great Gatsby" with the prison English class, he gets it -- even though he doesn't recognize how soon fate and his own past deeds are going to catch up to him.

But before we get the tragedy of D'Angelo, and the continued purgatory for McNutly, we get the comic masterpiece that is Omar Devone Little (who is himself a fan of Greek mythology) versus Maury Levy, JD.

Every other time we watch Maury at work, we have to cringe at his complete amorality even as we admire his tenacity and gift for turning pathetic-looking hands into winning ones. But damn, it's so nice to see him go up against a man who's not only just as smart, but beholden to no one and nothing but his own conscience. Maury can't outwit Omar, can't apply any sort of institutional pressure on him, and is left utterly speechless when Omar turns Maury's accusation of being a parasite of the drug game around on him: "I got the shotgun, you got the briefcase. It's all in The Game, though, right?"

But that moment is only as fun to watch because we're aware of what an anomaly it is -- that the Omars of this world are few and far between, and that it'll likely be a long, cold time before we see Maury go down in utter defeat like this. The criminal justice system, for all its good intentions, is ideally set up for opportunistic parasites like Maury to make a meal of it, all while being treated as a respected (and feared) upright citizen of the community, where Omar is a loathed outlaw (albeit one who knows how to buy a snazzy track suit while still sticking to the letter of Ilene Nathan's "Anything with a tie" request).

I have so much more to say about "All Prologue," but I'm trying to get this done in advance of a holiday weekend (and I sincerely hope most of you have more exciting outdoor activities to do today and are reading this post on Monday), so we're going to go to the bullet points.

Some other thoughts on "All Prologue":

• Kima and Cheryl's relationship, and Cheryl's frustration at Kima's decision to return to active detective-work, comes to the forefront again beautifully as she insists on tagging along for Kima and Prez's strip club scouting mission. I particularly like the scene where Kima shows Cheryl a can like the one the girls died in to explain why she cares so much about these cases, because of the complicated way Melanie Nicholls-King plays Cheryl's response to the gesture. Cheryl does understand the importance of the case, but she also fears for her lover's safety, doesn't want to go through another shooting (or worse) like she did in season one, and would be much more comfortable if Kima's job didn't lead her to hanging around strip clubs. And, as Shardene's friend points out, can you blame her?

• On the Sobotka side of things, we see Sergei intervene with Prop Joe (who turns out to be Cheese's boss). And as Nick explains to Vondas why he doesn't just want to have Cheese taken out, Vondas' respect for the intelligence of Frank's nephew grows -- enough that he offers to pay Nick, Ziggy and Johnny 50 (who wants no part of it) in dope for the chemicals used to make it, since he knows Nick is smart enough to make a bigger profit on the drugs. Frank is a means to an end for Vondas, but he sees other possibilities for young Nico, no?

• Having yelled at and/or smacked Ziggy around for most of the first five episodes, Frank finally has a real conversation with his son here, and we get a much better understandings of the origins of the resentment that fuels so much of how Ziggy behaves. Though we've seen that Ziggy is good with computers, he didn't get to go to community college like his brother, but was instead drafted into the family business -- for which he was so ill-equipped, and for which he received virtually no benefit from being the son of the mighty Frank Sobotka. Most of the time, Frank seems like a noble villain -- he's working with The Greek for the good of the union, not himself -- but a scene like their conversation at the docks makes you wish he had been a little less selfless at some point, or at least willing to extend his beneficence to his real family at least as much as to his union brothers.

• Beadie continues to show growth as a smart detective, as she's the first member of the detail to recognize the criminal value of what the checkers do.

• Between Vondas (Greek), Sergei (Ukrainian) and now Etan (Israeli) -- not to mention Prop Joe (East Baltimore) -- The Greek has himself quite the international crime cartel, doesn't he? No concern about national or tribal loyalty -- just a shared love of profit.

• Dominic West has a lot of fun in the scene where McNulty is undressing the mannequin to distract Elena.

• Given how much of this episode functions as a season one coda, it feels appropriate -- and funny -- to have Judge Phelan back to tear into Bird during the sentencing. ("Are you Jesus Christ come back to Earth?")

• The ceremonial eyef--k that McNulty and Omar give Bird is a detail from David Simon's "Homicide" book, and was mentioned once on the "Homicide" series, though there it was referred to as "the ceremonial eyescrew" by Beau Felton.

• The prison English teacher is played by Richard Price, whose Dempsey novels are thematically very similar to what "The Wire" is doing -- and who will begin writing for the series starting in season three.

• I love Prop Joe's gift for turning a phrase, like when he tells Nick that, if not for Sergei, he and Ziggy would be "cadaverous motherf--kers."

And now it's time for the veterans-only section, where we talk about how things in this episode will play out later in the season, and the series:

• Stringer arranging D'Angelo's murder is the beginning of the end for him. That he gets away with it emboldens him to cut the deal with Prop Joe behind Avon's back, which leads to him pitting Omar against Brother Mouzone, etc. And while Avon eventually accepts the logic of Stringer's position after he finds out what happened to D, I don't know that he so easily rolls on his best friend if Stringer hadn't killed his nephew.

• At the time of this story, Kima is still faithful to Cheryl, but Cheryl will be proven right in the end about her partner's wandering eye.

• Here's a question: given how we saw Jimmy behaving with Beadie and her kids after he went back in uniform, might things have worked out for him and Elena had she taken him back here? He'll go on an alcoholic bender a few episodes from now, but that's only after she gives him the boot again and he feels completely hopeless. We see at the end of season three, and throughout season five, that his drinking and bad behavior are inextricably tied to him working as a detective. Had he and Elena reconciled here, he would have stayed in the stress-free life of a marine unit cop, would never have needed Bunk and Lester to plead for Daniels to rescue him from that purgatory, would never have been in a position to go after Marlo, etc., etc. I know with "The Wire" I'm always asking "What if?" even as David Simon tells me that the characters can't escape their destinies, but... what if?

• There was some debate in later seasons about whether Cheese was always written as Prop Joe's nephew, since early in season three there's talk of a mid-level dealer named Drac being Joe's nephew. But here, Joe complains about having multiple nephews in the game, all of them bumbling in some way, which allows for both Cheese and Drac to be kin.

• D'Angelo's killer is clever enough to fool the disinterested state cops, who'd rather not add an unsolved homicide to their stats, but not clever enough for McNulty, who'll figure out what really happened within minutes of entering that prison library next season.

• Omar will make use of the Get Out Of Jail Free card Ilene Nathan gives him in season four, and for a much greater charge than aggravated assault, after Chris Partlow frames him for murder.

• Nick's decision to take half the payment in dope is yet another brick in the path that will lead to Ziggy's ruin. Had Nick not chosen to sell drugs -- and proved to be so much better at it than Ziggy -- Ziggy would have one less resentment brewing inside himself when Double-G insults him for the final time.

• This is the last we'll see of Shardene until the series finale, I believe. Not a lot of room in "The Wire" to tell continuing stories of the characters who get a happy ending.

• Both Joe and Shardene's stripper friend say "Sheeeeeeeeit," which won't become Clay Davis's catchphrase until season 3.

Coming up next: "Backwash," in which Bodie goes flower-shopping, Joe has a proposition for Stringer and Rawls tries to dump the Jane Doe cases on the Sobotka detail.

I have jury duty early next week, and depending on how long it lasts, the next review may be pushed back a few days. Based on my past experience, I'm probably not going to get paneled, but if I do, I hope we get a witness one-tenth as colorful as Omar.

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

The Philanthropist, "Myanmar": Yankee swap

Some quick thoughts on episode two of "The Philanthropist" coming up just as soon as someone tells me if they were properly pronouncing "Myanmar" (I always thought it was "mee-ANN-mahr")...

I'm not sure if "Myanmar" is confirming certain aspects of "The Philnathropist" formula, or if it's just following the old network TV adage that a new series is supposed to more or less duplicate its pilot episode 3 or 4 times in a row for the benefit of hypothetical viewers who might be tuning in a few weeks late. But it's very much of a piece with the pilot, continuing both the good and bad parts of it.

The good: James Purefoy, charming as hell, and also capable of bringing the right amount of sincerity to moments like Teddy under the table with the little boy, or Teddy at the ruby mine. The relationship between Teddy and Dax (which got more play here than it did in "Nigeria"). The international flavor.

The bad: The awkwardness of Teddy as the great white hope for these poor minority people. The framing device, which might have been necessary in the pilot but added nothing here, and seemed to completely change the Jesse Martin character's attitude from the pilot. (If the show were being told out of sequence, ala "Boomtown" or "How I Met Your Mother" or "The Black Donnellys," then I could see the framing sequences having some value, but here it just filled time.)

It's summer, not much else is on, and I like Purefoy, so I guess I'm watching for a bit. But if the show doesn't start changing things up and/or getting better, I doubt I'll feel compelled to write about it much.

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

Band of Brothers rewind, episode 10: "Points"

And so we've come to the end of our trip back through "Band of Brothers," so all bets are off in terms of talking about what happened to these characters after the war ended. Spoilers coming up just as soon as I shoot a bazooka at a rockpile...

"I cherish the memories of a question my grandson asked me the other day, when he said, 'Grandpa, were you a hero in the war?' Grandpa said, 'No, but I served in a company of heroes.'" -Mike Ranney

Because the war more or less ended for Easy Company with the Battle of the Bulge, give or take some minor skirmishes like the one depicted in "The Last Patrol," there was a danger that these last two episodes of the series could have felt terribly anti-climactic. But "Why We Fight" found power by dealing with the liberation of the concentration camp outside Landsberg (which only merits a few paragraphs in Stephen Ambrose's book). "Points," meanwhile, turns the lack of action into its primary theme, showing both the advantages of life in an occupying army (more free time, gorgeous scenery, grand moments) and the drawbacks (the men all want to go home, and they keep dying or being wounded for stupid reasons). Anchored by Damian Lewis' narration and some of Michael Kamen's most beautiful music of the series, it feels like a fitting epilogue to all that came before.

Though "Points" isn't precisely Dick Winters' story in the way that "Crossroads" was, the miniseries as a whole has been his story, and so it feels right that he be allowed to narrate its concluding chapter, and to tie together all the small vignettes of Easy's time in Germany and Austria in the war's final days. His courtesy interview for a transfer to the Pacific turns into a kind of Dick Winters' Greatest Hits montage, and throughout the episode we get small callbacks to previous events. Winters' closing narration tells us that he eventually bought the farm he dreamed about at the end of "Day of Days." When Easy Company captures the Eagle's Nest, we hear the men yell "Hi-yo, Silver!," which was Sobel's pathetic battle cry, and Sobel himself pops up again so Winters can humiliate him one last time by demanding a salute. (How you feel about that moment depends, I suppose, on where you stood in our discussion about "Curahee" and whether Sobel is depicted fairly.) We hear again about Welsh's reserve chute, Shifty's marksmanship and many other running character points from earlier episodes.

What I love about "Points" is the larger-than-life quality that writers Erik Jendresen and Erik Bork and director Mikael Salomon give it -- drawing heavily, as always, on real events. The Alps look so beautiful in the background of the baseball game, as does the view from the Eagle's Nest balcony. Winters' gift to his buddy Nixon is staggering when viewed from a 21st century perspective -- how do you give an alcoholic the keys to Hermann Goering's wine cellar? -- and yet in the context of the time, and this particular friendship, it makes perfect sense, and is oddly touching. Winters doesn't judge Nixon, doesn't try to fix him, and thinks this is the nicest thing he can possibly do for him. And after all they've been through, who can say they didn't all need some fine German liquor?

Oddly, in a few cases, the stories told in "Points" are actually toned down from the real-life versions described by Ambrose. For instance, the story of Sgt. Grant being shot in the head, and Captain Speirs going to extraordinary lengths to save his life and then punish his shooter, actually took some stranger turns. After Speirs pistol-whipped the guy for failing to call him "sir," a buddy of Grant's not only pointed a gun at the man, but pulled the trigger as he was being held back, only his pistol misfired. Later, Speirs would claim that Col. Sink "said I should have shot the son of a bitch."

Like the rest of the miniseries, "Points" can't possibly hope to cover everyone's story to the fullest, and there are occasional awkward moments where minor players are shoved into the spotlight as the clock is running down. Alton Moore suddenly becomes relevant because he stole Hitler's photo album, and the scene where Floyd Talbert resigns as 1st Sergeant doesn't really work because Talbert -- described by Dick Winters as the best soldier in the company, and the one he'd most want by his side in a battle -- hasn't had much to do in previous episodes.

(In his book, "Beyond Band of Brothers," Winters writes that Talbert actually resigned his position because he and Speirs didn't get along, and both Winters and Ambrose write at length about how Talbert, more than any other man in the company, never quite recovered emotionally from the things he did and saw during the war. At the time the miniseries originally aired, Bruce McKenna, who wrote several episodes of this series -- and is a producer on "The Pacific" -- apparently said on the HBO.com boards, paraphrasing Shifty Powers, "we could completely redo the entire miniseries and focus on completely different men and not repeat one single scene." I imagine this parallel universe version of "Band of Brothers" would have a whole lot more of Talbert.)

There's also the odd sequence with Webster and Liebgott arguing about what to do with the alleged concentration camp commandant, which seems to fly in the face of Webster's behavior with the German baker in "Why We Fight." Much as Ambrose wrote more about Webster than was probably warranted given his role in the company, the miniseries leans on him pretty heavily in these last few episodes, inserting him into events where he wasn't present or wasn't a factor, and changing his characterization based on the needs of a particular scene. In real life, Don Moone was the soldier objecting to the mission (which was ordered by Captain Speirs, on dubious authority).

As for Liebgott, he's involved in the episode's centerpiece, and a fitting capstone to the series, as he translates the German officer's speech to his defeated troops. The German is, of course, saying the same sorts of things to his men that Winters no doubt thinks about his, but Winter isn't the kind of man who would ever say such things, especially not in victory. So the script cleverly puts the words in the mouth of an opponent trying to put a good face on defeat for the benefit of his men. And, don't forget how "Why We Fight" opened with the real men of Easy Company talking about how much they realized they had in common with the German soldiers -- Ross McCall does a wonderfully subtle job of showing how, as the speech goes along, German-hating Liebgott begins to recognize the shared experience.

Rather than begin the episode, as all the others did, with interviews with unidentified Easy survivors (their names withheld, no doubt, to preserve suspense about who lived and died), "Points" closes with them, and finally puts names to some faces. We get confirmation that the thin, confident gentleman with the glasses is Dick Winters, realize that the man who broke down crying in the "Breaking Point" interview was Donald Malarkey, and see just what perfect casting Frank John Hughes was as Bill Guarnere. And (after Carwood Lipton gives us the St. Crispin's Day speech from "Henry V") Winters gets to repeat the closing anecdote from the book, quoted above.

There isn't time to identify all the men interviewed in previous episodes -- just as the baseball scene, by design, doesn't allow Winters to tell us what happened to men who survived the war but weren't with the company at the time, like Guarnere, Malarkey and Joe Toye -- but for that, I highly recommend the bonus disc in the DVD set, which includes the outstanding documentary "We Stand Alone Together," featuring lots of interview material that otherwise would have been left on the cutting room floor.

Speaking of the baseball game, what really strikes me about Winters telling the story of everyone's post-war life is how absolutely normal most of them are. Lipton and Johnny Martin made a lot of money, and Buck Compton achieved some fame as an LA prosecutor, but for the most part these men who jumped through flak on D-Day, who survived freezing cold and exploding trees in Bastogne, who were both very lucky and very good to survive everything the Germans threw at them, went home to be postmen, and handymen, and cab drivers, and to live completely average lives. In "Beyond Band of Brothers," Winters writes about George Luz's funeral, and how even his own family members were stunned to see the medals he had won during the war; it had never occurred to Luz that this was something his nearest loved ones ought to hear about.

And yet, that's the story you could tell about so many veterans who survived World War II, in either the European theater or the Pacific. They saved the world, and then they came back home to live like the rest of us. And in that way, as much as any other, "Band of Brothers" symbolizes the story of all of our troops over there.

Some other thoughts on "Points":

• It amuses me that even the normally squeaky-clean Winters isn't above a little looting, if for no reason than that he knows Speirs will take the silverware if he doesn't.

• Along similar lines, I love the smirk on Nixon's face after Winters makes Sobel salute, like he's happy to see that his perfect friend is capable of being ruled by emotion from time to time.

• Shifty Powers was the Easy veteran whose recent death I alluded to a few episodes back. The story of Shifty's bad luck lottery win was even more frustrating in real life. After he won the ticket home, an officer offered him a large sum of money buy the ticket from him. Shifty declined, wound up injured (as mentioned here), and then all of his backpay and valuables were stolen while he was convalescing in the hospital.

• The officer interviewing Winters about the transfer is played by David Andrews, who was a key figure in "From the Earth to the Moon" as astronaut Frank Borman.

• If you're interested in more detail, I highly recommend reading Ambrose's book, and then "Beyond Band of Brothers," and to do it in that order, as Winters treats his book as a companion to Ambrose's, and deliberately omits details about things he felt Ambrose covered sufficiently. In particular, it's worth it for the section where Winters reprints excerpts from letters he received from men who were storming Utah Beach at the time Winters, Compton and the others took out the guns at Brecourt Manor (or from their children and grandchildren), and who talk about how much easier it was to get across the beach after the guns were silenced. Good luck getting through that chapter without some tissues handy.

Finally, now that we've come to the end, I guess it's time to rank the episodes. A few years after the miniseries first aired, I remember ranking them on a Usenet newsgroup, but that post seems lost to history. Regardless, the order is different now than it would have been at the time. As I said back when I reviewed "Curahee," rewatching the miniseries was a far more rewarding experience than watching it the first time, and some episodes like "Replacements" held up much better once I didn't have to keep asking, "Wait, who's that guy again?"

Maybe the order changes again if I take another look at the series five or ten years from now, but at the moment, I'd rank them as follows:

1) "Bastogne"
2) "Why We Fight"
3) "The Breaking Point"
4) "Day of Days"
5) "Points"
6) "Replacements"
7) "The Last Patrol"
8) "Currahee"
9) "Crossroads"
10) "Carentan"

Feel free to offer up your own rankings, or any unanswered questions you have about the series and the lives of the men depicted within it, or anything you want at this point. We're all done, so everything's game.

Also, for those of you who are Star-Ledger print readers, it looks like we're going to be running slightly edited versions of these reviews in the paper as a summer series, most likely starting Saturday, July 18.

For the last time on this great, great series, what did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

'The State' & 'Parker Lewis Can't Lose' DVD reviews - Sepinwall on TV

In today's column, I check out the new DVD sets for "Parker Lewis Can't Lose" (which came out on Tuesday) & "The State" (which comes out on July 14). On the latter, I'm supposed to be talking to David Wain later today, for something to run on or around the official release date. Click here to read the full post

Better Off Ted, "Bioshuffle": Close quarters

In this summer dead zone, it's nice to have original "Better Off Ted" episodes around, albeit sporadically (next week is a rerun of the one where Phil and Lem accidentally drug Linda). Last night's episode was a good showcase for the whole cast, plus it brought in Joy Osmanski from "The Loop" as Lem's statistically average love interest, plus it had funny jokes like Phil's abbreviation for "acid interface." Good times.

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

Sports Night rewind: "Dear Louise"

Okay, for this week and next week, we're back to one "Sports Night" review at a time, as I enjoyed both "Dear Louise" and "Thespis" too much -- and couldn't manufacture enough of a connection between the two -- to try to mash them together in a single review. Looking down the line, I suspect there will be more two-fers to come, but not at the moment.

Spoilers for "Dear Louise" coming up just as soon as some stamps materialize...

While the forced marriage of Aaron Sorkin to a live studio audience was a bad idea on ABC's part, "Dear Louise" is one of the few episodes where the laugh track doesn't feel out of place. That's because, for one week, at least, Sorkin, Tommy Schlamme and the entire cast seem to be making an effort to play to the audience in the studio at least as much as the viewers at home.

When I talked about how uncomfortably broad Joshua Malina's performance was during the Spike Lee scene in the pilot, several people pointed out that it's the only part of that episode that the studio audience responds to enthusiastically. It was aimed at them, and the rhythms of it were more familiar than most of Sorkin's repetitive, deadpan banter.

But it's jarring there because Malina's the only one in the cast who's playing to the cheap seats, where in "Dear Louise" everybody seems to be on the same page. Early in watching the episode, I would make notes about how Josh Charles was playing Dan's writer's block very big, or how Robert Guillaume was doing the same with Isaac's angst about his daughter's Republican boyfriend. After a while, though, it became clear that everyone was doing it -- that, in addition to being a series of mood-setting vignettes, "Dear Louise" was pitched at a different comic speed than most "Sports Night" episodes -- and it worked for me. And it clearly worked for the audience, since the laughter throughout the episode sounds heartier and more genuine than in nearly any other episode of the series. For one week, at least, the laugh track isn't an awkward intruder, but a willing collaborator.

And yet even in an episode that has Natalie throwing water in Dan's face not once, not twice, but thrice, and that climaxes with Dana drunkenly blasting "Boogie Shoes" through the newsroom, Sorkin and company find a way to make it still be "Sports Night." Even in the midst of the wacky hijinx, they slip in the A.K. Russell carjacking tragedy, and a sweet moment for Jeremy and Natalie, and even the way the gang assimilates the news that Louise is deaf and quickly moves on. It doesn't feel like pandering, even though there's more slapstick, and the performances are bigger than usual.

I really wish this was one of the episodes featuring a commentary track, because I'd love to hear the backstory. Was this Sorkin and Schlamme trying to make nice with the network? Were they ordered to do this? Or was it just something they tried, seeing as this was only Sorkin's seventh episode ever of writing for television, and he was learning as he went?

Whatever the reason, "Dear Louise" doesn't feel quite like the other episodes so far, but it works.

Some other thoughts:

• Sorkin will recycle both the letter-writing device and the writer's block gag on "The West Wing," the former in "The Stackhouse Filibuster" (which features three different characters e-mailing loved ones), the latter in "Enemies," where both Sam and Toby are afflicted. ("Somewhere in this building is our talent.")

• Was the third water splash improvised by Sabrina Lloyd? Or, at the very least, a surprise to Josh Charles and Peter Krause? Their reactions, particularly Krause's (see the photo), seem too genuine to be faked, even by good actors.

• Though Sorkin is often dinged for stacking the deck against conservative characters on his shows, I like that Isaac's fear and loathing about the Republican boyfriend is supposed to be completely ridiculous, as Dana tries to point out after Isaac lists the kid's impressive resume.

• For that matter, the letter-writing format allows Sorkin to drop in two more resumes, for both Dana and Isaac. I thought it was a nice touch that Isaac is said to have won a Pulitzer for his coverage of the Gemini missions -- the unglamorous but essential intermediate step between the trailblazing Mercury missions and the climactic Apollo lunar missions -- as it not only shows that Isaac could make any subject sound exciting, but that he, like Sorkin, has a fondness for history's leftovers.

• Ted McGinley also often makes an easy punching bag -- he is, after all, the patron saint of Jump the Shark -- but he's very good as Gordon, and Sorkin makes an effort here to turn Gordon into a tough adversary for Casey when it would be very easy to make him this loathsome empty suit.

Coming up next: "Thespis," in which the studio comes under siege from a frozen turkey and a Greek ghost. This may be a day or so late, as I have jury duty early next week. And the week after that I'm probably on vacation, and the week after that I'm heading to California for Comic-Con and then press tour, and then there may be more vacation, and then... sigh... maybe I should've tried to find some way to combine this with "Thespis." I'll figure this out. That, or the summer 2010 lineup is already locked up (Wire season 3 and more of Sports Night).

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