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

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

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

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

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

The plan for 'Friday Night Lights'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Among my problems:

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

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

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

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

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

Sepinwall on TV: 'Knight Rider' review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"How is that our problem?" -Shane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Skins, "Michelle": Leave it to beaver

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few random thoughts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sepinwall on TV: 'The Mentalist' review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The busy season begins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sepinwall on TV: 'Heroes' season 3 review

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

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

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

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

Sepinwall on TV: 'Worst Week' review

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

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

Sepinwall on TV: Recapping the Emmys

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sepinwall on TV: Handicapping the Emmys

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

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