Round-up time, with spoilers for, in order, "Secret Diary of a Call Girl," "In Plain Sight" and "My Boys" coming up just as soon as I take a suggestion from the audience...Nobody seemed too put out by my lack of blogging on last week's "Secret Diary of a Call Girl," and based on the early reactions and the declining ratings (it's now drawing about half of the "Weeds" audience, despite debuting at the same level), I doubt anybody cares at this point. But I watched all the episodes and thought this was one of the better ones, so blog it I shall.
Despite the general sauciness of Billie Piper, I find Hannah/Belle to be quite a bland, empty character, and so when the show focuses on her and her various existential crises, I don't much care. But when it focuses on the minutiae of life as a call girl, it can be entertaining in the same way that "Burn Notice" is whenever Michael's explaining how to kill a man using nothing but duct tape and a melon baller. So while Hannah's schism with Ben, and her eventual decision to come out of the ho closet for him, wasn't very interesting, Belle walking us through her fitness/grooming routine and then getting a crash course in dominatrix work was amusing.
That's two "In Plain Sight" episodes in a row now where I spent the entire time staring through the holes in the plot. So it's bad for someone in WitSec to have their picture appear in a wedding announcement in the local paper, but it's totally fine for someone else in the program to be the star player on a successful college basketball team, even if it's in Division-II? Huh? And is there any circumstance in which a player got caught up in fixing games -- even though he was doing it under duress, it was his own gambling problem that put him in this situation -- would only get a one-year suspension that wouldn't derail his NBA prospects? (And, again, shouldn't Mary be shutting down any talk of going pro, vis a vis the whole anonymity thing? I get that he was just a kid when he went into the program and looks different, but it still makes no sense.) The stuff about Mary's dad the gambler, and about Marshall hooking up with his old prof weren't bad, keeping with the tradition of the character work being much better than the plots, but next week's episode is going to seem like it takes place in a completely different universe from the last two.
Finally, the latest "My Boys" made me want to retract the previous week's statement about Brendan being the least relevant character on the show, because the Dr. Brendo running gag was the funniest part of this episode. (I had a stomachache over the weekend and wandered around the house declaring my intention to place ice on my belly.) Unfortunately, it was really the only funny part. Mike being terrible at improv and using it to blatantly and unsuccessfully hit on women was both labored and a pale imitation of Michael Scott's improv classes from "The Office," plus it continues the transformation of Mike from abrasive goofball to possibly brain-damaged loser. I'm assuming the bit about Nia Vardalos being Andy's new best friend will be some kind of ongoing storyline, which doesn't exactly excite me, and the writers are going to have to be very careful with the PJ/Bobby/Elsa triangle to avoid making their heroine look bad.
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