Mad Men, "Meditations in an Emergency": Truth in advertising

Spoilers for the "Mad Men" season two finale coming up just as soon as I order room service...

"Well, one day you're there, and then all of a sudden, there's less of you, and you wonder where that part went, if it's living somewhere outside of you, and you keep thinking maybe you'll get it back, and then you realize it's just gone." -Peggy

As the wondrous second season of "Mad Men" comes to an end, it's October 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis is underway, and as far as the men and women in the orbit of Sterling Cooper know, the world could be coming to an end at any moment. And that sense of impending doom shocks all of our major characters out of their comfort zones, forcing them to do or say things they might never have considered if there wasn't a chance that bombs could start dropping. And in their words and deeds, they acknowledge that they've had to leave a part of themselves behind -- sometimes a very large part -- to become the person they are right here, right now, waiting and wondering about the nukes.

This is a show about Don Draper, and this season has been predominantly about the Draper marriage, but I want to start off by talking about Peggy. If there's a moment from the finale that's going to haunt my dreams in the same way that Don's Kodak sales pitch did last year, it's Peggy and Pete alone in his office, Pete trying to sincerely profess his love for Peggy and Peggy shutting him down by telling him (and us) the truth about their baby.

What an amazing scene, so expertly-played by Elisabeth Moss and Vincent Kartheiser. I've given them both a hard time in the past -- Moss for sometimes (mostly last year) being a little too inscrutable even by "Mad Men" standards, Kartheiser for trying too hard to seem like a man of 1962 (though, as I said in my "Flight 1" review, that approach really fits the way Pete's been written as an artificial human). But both were note-perfect here.

Pete has, shockingly, grown up over the course of this season, to the point that when Don praises his maturity, we realize that he's not just shining him on to cover for bailing on the rocket fair. And Peggy and Pete of them have gone from dysfunctional lovers to genuine creative partners, maybe even each other's best friend in that office. The Pete trying to tell Peggy he loved her isn't the petulant child who told her he didn't like to see her happy; he's a man who, though his motives and timing may be suspect, has realized just how much he really cares about this woman. Pete is human around Peggy in that scene, in a way he's never been before -- not play-acting, not taking his behavioral cues from the other men around him, just a happy version of Peter Dyckman Campbell -- and so when Peggy finally takes Father Gill's advice (in spirit, if not in letter) and confesses her sin, it broke my heart almost as much as it did Pete's. When Pete first bought that rifle last season (using the money he got from returning the Chip 'N Dip), it was funny, a symbol of Pete battling his own emasculation. But watching him there in his office at the end, sitting in the dark, wondering if Armageddon is coming, clutching that rifle (and understanding again that his own equipment does not shoot blanks), the gun was no longer a joke -- and neither was Pete.

As for Elisabeth Moss... wow. Maybe Peggy was in denial at the moment she gave birth, maybe even in the weeks to come, but what she makes clear in that speech is that the Peggy of 1962 knows exactly who she is, and what she did to get there. She has no illusions about abandoning that baby, but also no regrets. And what's amazing about Moss in that scene is watching Peggy's mood change as she delivers the news to Pete. At first, she's simply trying to shut down Pete's advances once and for all -- and to unburden herself from the secret -- but as she talks, and especially as she sees the hurt and confusion on Pete's face, she begins to realize what a cruel thing she's just done. Pete didn't need to know -- Peggy is now assured enough personally and professionally that she could have fended off his passes forever and a day -- and though she feels much better for telling the truth, she realizes that some secrets are better off being kept.

In our post-season post-mortem interview, Matthew Weiner said that Peggy isn't literally referring to the baby in the quote at the top of this review. Peggy, as Don's protege, had to give up more than the baby to become the independent career woman she is at the end of this season. She had to give up her innocence, and some of her compassion, and many of the other qualities that defined her when we met her back in the pilot. In most ways, Peggy's station in life has been vastly improved. But just as we saw how at peace Don was as Dick Whitman during his trip to San Pedro last week, and how much he had to sacrifice along the way to his Coupe de Ville, in that speech Peggy is recognizing the cost of her own success.

And what's interesting about Don's return to New York is the way that he seems to be integrating his two personas. The man we see in "Meditations in an Emergency" isn't the cold bastard who reacted so cruelly to seeing Betty "flirt" with Roger Sterling (Don Draper), nor is he the coward who told Rachel Menken he wanted to run away with her (Dick Whitman). He was, at least for this hour, during this crisis in both the world and in his own personal life, an amalgamation of the best qualities of the two: able to stare down Duck Phillips' power play but also be so warm around Peggy and Joan and even Pete, pleased just to be in a moment with the kids, fessing up to the truth (at least, as much as Betty wanted to hear) about his affairs, being as open and vulnerable about his feelings for his wife as he could. If Don and Betty are going to have a chance together -- and I feel like the final shot suggests they will -- then he doesn't necessarily have to tell her all about his true identity, but he has to be more honest in some way. He seems off to a good start.

It was another tour de force by Jon Hamm (I don't know that I'll ever get tired of watching the moment, screencapped at the top of this post, where Don finds out that Betty's pregnant and so many emotions wash over his face) in a season where he somehow topped the brilliant work he did last year.

Now, the reconciliation was helped along by another end-of-the-world piece of news for Betty, as the odd "Mommy, you're bleeding" moment from last week was explained as spotting in the early stages of pregnancy. I lost count of the number of times Betty plainly tried to explain that this was not a good time for her to have another child, and between those declarations and her attempts to force a miscarriage through horse riding, I didn't feel particularly confident for the possibility of a third Draper child. But between Don's return, his repeated apologies, and -- perhaps most importantly -- Betty finally giving in to her season-long desire to see what adultery is like and to have a sexual secret of her own to keep from Don, Betty eventually found herself willing to take Don back, and apparently to see this pregnancy through.

I don't know what a pie chart of Betty's reasons would look like -- 50 percent baby, 30 percent Don's apologies, 20 percent anonymous sex in a bar manager's office? -- but whatever the proportions were, the Drapers are back together. Where last season ended with Don finally wanting to do right by Betty, it didn't take (Weiner expands on exactly what went down in the interview), because he hadn't examined himself as thoroughly as he did this year, and because Betty hadn't openly confronted him about his cheating. Last year ended with Don alone; this one ended with Don holding his wife's hand. If Weiner's right that Betty went through adolescence this year and came out the other side a grown-up, then maybe we come back in season three to find a relatively healthy, much more mature Draper marriage.

Don's return from California also found him having to repair the state of his professional life, though not in nearly the apologetic manner he applied to his marriage. It's funny how we all thought that Don going walkabout would blow up in his face at work, when instead it saved him. It created a situation where he had to pay several big (and, again, sincere) compliments to Pete -- giving Pete the affirmation he's been waiting the entire series to hear from Don -- and that in turn inspired Pete to give Don fair warning about Duck's power play.

We learned last year in "Shoot" that Don insists on working without a contract (the better to suit his inner hobo), and we were reminded of this by Roger earlier this year in "Six Month Leave." So when Duck made it clear to Pete that his entire plan to get Don in line hinged on the non-compete clause in this non-existent contract, it was obvious how things would play out. But it was still a pleasure to watch his face fall when Don calmly informed St. John Powell what was what. It's not that Duck was a two-dimensional villain who deserved this defeat. We'd learned a lot about him that made him more sympathetic, and whatever his reasons for engineering the merger, he was absolutely right when he told Powell and company that he put all that work in while Don was off on holiday for three weeks. I just have enjoyed Mark Moses' work so much this season, particularly in the second half as Weiner started to peel Duck's onion, that I was glad to see him get one final acting showcase before he's presumably written off the series.

Whoever is in charge of the newly-merged Sterling Cooper when the show returns -- and would Don even want that job if offered? -- we're in a very interesting place going into next season, whenever it will be set. (The most Weiner would commit to is that he doesn't want to deal directly with the JFK assassination, but then he also said he might have it take place during that season, just as in the background as possible.) Don is back with Betty and committed to making a more sincere go of it than last time. Duck is likely gone, Pete may yet get the head of accounts job, Sterling Cooper is now part of a larger machine and can work on a bigger stage, and no matter when season three takes place, we'll be heading deeper and deeper into the period that we actually think of as the '60s, rather than the chronological decade.

I can't wait. Can you?

Some other thoughts on "Meditations in an Emergency":

• One of my favorite small touches of the hour, meticulously set up over the previous two episodes: Don is the only guy in the office to immediately recognize that Peggy got a new haircut, and Peggy is so pleased by her mentor's attentiveness that she smooths her dress after he walks away. Almost as funny: Peggy's slightly defensive tone whenever she mentions the Popsicle account as justification for getting the office. ("Popsicle" is just a funny word.)

• One nice thing they can do with the period setting is to show Don returning to Betty with hat literally in hand.

• I had to fight very hard not to make some kind of Captain Awesome joke in the subject line. For those of you who don't watch NBC's "Chuck" (not remotely as deep as "Mad Men" but easily the most fun show on television right now), Betty's anonymous paramour was played by Ryan McPartlin, whose "Chuck" alter ego has been nicknamed Captain Awesome because... geez, look at the guy. And start watching "Chuck." Immediately.

• In the Weiner interview, we talk about how frequently we see characters lie about things where we got to see what really went down. Tonight, it was Roger trying to play to Don like he didn't want to do the merger and had to be talked into it by the Cooper siblings.

• After disappearing once Don kicked her off his desk in episode three, Lois resurfaces from switchboard purgatory to fill in the chipmunks on what's happening with the merger. Which circumstance do you think will lead to more misery for all involved: the chipmunks going back on their word and leaving Lois on the switchboard, or one of them attempting to make her into a secretary again?

• It's amazing how much I've grown to hate Harry this year, after he was arguably the most likable of the chipmunks last year. Where the other guys are cruder and far more abrasive around women, they at least seem good at their jobs, which is the real mark of status on "Mad Men," and they're at least somewhat politically aware. Harry just has his head in the sand, not caring about anything but what directly affects his fiefdom; the Cuban Missile Crisis only annoys him because it means "The Lucy Show" won't air in pattern. Perhaps the best (and funniest) example of his myopia: his panic at seeing that there are canapes ("Good ones!") in the office fridge for the meeting with P,P&L.

• Apropos of nothing, my daughter loves the "Dwayne the bathtub" knock knock joke that Sally tells to Don. As my daughter's five, I'm wondering how long I have to wait before I can show this episode to her, and whether she'll remember her love of the joke by then.

• In what I'm assuming will be Colin Hanks' final appearance, we see that despite his fondness for folk music and unorthodox versions of Grace, Father Gill still believes deeply in Church dogma, to the point where he feels he has to scare Peggy into confessing her sins before the end of the world comes. And after assuming all season that Peggy was agnostic at best -- just went to mass to appease her mother -- we see her cross herself before going to sleep. As she says to Father Gill, she believes in God -- she just doesn't believe that He is as strict and judgmental as Gill kept insisting He would be.

• Betty's moment alone in the Draper kitchen, munching on a chicken leg, worked as a nice bookend to Don alone and swigging milk back in "Maidenform." The key difference is that Betty actually had sex, where Don's alone with the milk bottle because Bobbie was busy and he doesn't have anything better to do.

Finally, as we come to the end of another season of "Mad Men," I want to thank you all for both the quantity and quality of your comments each week. I thought that nothing would top the interest and level of discourse that I got for my "Sopranos" posts, and then for my "Wire" reviews, and yet you people have been bringing it, week after week, to analyze every small point in the Sterling Cooper universe. It's been a pleasure to read so much articulate, enthusiastic fan response; this kind of the show is the reason I do this blog.

When you have an hour or so to set aside (and that's only a slight exaggeration), I highly recommend reading the Matt Weiner interview. Even in the course of a 90-minute interview, we couldn't touch on every detail of the season (I would have loved to get some of his thoughts on Salvatore's marriage and his reaction to Kurt's coming out party), but we go through a whole lot in there, including Weiner (who isn't currently under contract) expressing his desire to stick with the series for a very long time.

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

Because people have been asking...

...I am still employed by The Star-Ledger. The paper's not being sold or closed (for the time being), and I did not take a buyout. So I'm here, doing my thing. Click here to read the full post

SNL: Jon Hamm's handsome comedy acting school

Spoilers for last night's "Saturday Night Live" coming up just as soon as I enjoy some ham in the john...

To Jon Hamm's annoyingly perfect CV -- charismatic, great actor, damned handsome -- we can apparently now add good comedian. If he starts playing in Hugh Laurie's band, something may have to be done about the guy before he begins his plans for world domination.

Hamm's episode didn't necessarily have the highs of the Tina Fey-as-Sarah Palin sketches, but it was one of the more solid 90-minute episodes they've done in a while, and Hamm proved to be a great sport and an even better mimic. His James Mason impression in the Vincent Price Halloween episode was brilliant, and his JFK (admittedly, an easier impersonation to pull off) in the "Solid as Barack" variety special was very good too.

(Speaking of Mason, I must once again ask a question that went unanswered the last time I raised it about a year ago: can anyone identify the comedian who does a bit in which he imagines Mason replacing Moe as leader of The Three Stooges? It's driving me nuts.)

For a show that even the monologue acknowledged is fairly obscure, "Mad Men" got a lot of love -- and, in some cases, did jokes that depended on (and, thankfully, got) the studio audience's knowledge of the series to work.

(For a counter-example of this, I think back to when John Travolta hosted right as "Pulp Fiction" was coming out and they did a long sketch mashing up "Welcome Back, Kotter" with "Reservoir Dogs," and it died because nobody in the theater appreciated Barbarino dancing to "Stuck in the Middle with You" while slicing someone's ear off.)

Of the two most explicit "Mad Men" sketches, I thought Don Draper's guide to picking up women was the funnier idea -- and also the one where Hamm seemed more in character, though that may just be because they had the time to get his hair done right for video, but not for a live show where he couldn't be greased down all night -- but the Two A-Holes shooting down a classic Don Draper pitch was funny in its own right. Will Forte's Pete Campbell sounded weird, and Bill Hader overplayed Salvatore's queenier qualities, but Hamm playing it straight worked, and on a meta level I loved the contrast between Elizabeth Moss trying very hard to fit in and be Peggy and John Slattery being unable to resist showing how amused he was to be there.

I also thought the sex criminal Halloween sketch was a good example of a strong premise that they introduced, told a few jokes about, then got out as quickly as possible (so quickly they didn't even bother to end the sketch, in fact) before it got overplayed.

Finally, I'm reluctant to bring this up because of how nasty and juvenile everyone tends to get whenever politics and this show are discussed -- and, as a reminder, play nice and talk about the show and not about the politicians, or each other, or I start deleting comments -- but after reading complaints here and elsewhere that the show was giving Joe Biden a pass on all his recent gaffes, I was amused to see not one but two sketches -- both the Obama variety show and the opening sketch with Biden and John Murtha saying crazy things -- mocking Biden.

What did everybody else think? And are you as bummed as I am that Amy Poehler (who gave birth over the weekend) likely made her final appearance ever on the show in the Don Draper's guide video? Click here to read the full post

Mid-Friday catch-up: Grey's Anatomy, ER and Life on Mars

Quick spoilers for last night's episodes of, in order, "Grey's Anatomy," "ER" and "Life on Mars" coming up just as soon as I make sure my floor is clean...

"Grey's Anatomy" continues its recent streak of solid, back-to-basics episodes. The things that either annoy me or that I don't care about (say, the Mer/Der tension) are things I never liked in the first place, while there's been much more focus on the part of the show that I do enjoy, like the cutthroat nature of the surgical program (the cafeteria scene was a highlight) or relationship stories that don't make me want to slit my throat (like Callie turning to McSteamy for sub-equatorial advice, a decision that will no doubt backfire amusingly in an episode or two). Plus, they continue to do a stellar job of guest casting. How perfect was Carl Lumbly as the estranged dad?

Speaking of perfect guest casting of African-American actors of a certain age, it was a pleasure to see Glynn Turman show up on "ER," though he didn't have as much to do as I would have liked. (For those of you who were as knocked out as I was by Turman's Emmy-winning appearances on "In Treatment," keep an eye out for "Scrubs" when it returns: Bill Lawrence and Zach Braff were just as blown away by Turman's work there and crafted a whole episode around him.)

The rest of the episode was a mixed bag. It's always a pleasure to watch Angela Bassett beat people up (if the "X-Men" movies had been made even a few years earlier, she would have been a perfect, studio-acceptable choice to play Storm), and the necessary softening of Dr. Banfield is beginning. On the other hand, even if every commercial for hadn't screamed that the little sister was eeeeeevil!, the episode way telegraphed it, which ruined what should have been a wonderfully creepy moment when her true sociopathic colors came out at the end.

Also, two annoying things from a longtime "ER" fan standpoint. First, I'm sure the show has occasionally recycled guest stars (though never with the frequency of an "NYPD Blue" or "Law & Order"), but it bugged me to see Molly Price as the mom, since I had only recent channel-surfed past the "ER"/"Third Watch" crossover where Susan Lewis goes to New York so Yoakas and Bosco can help her find her sister. Second, late in the hour there was a plug for NBC's website where Linda Cardellini asked, while discussing a poll about best "ER" characters of all time, "Dr. Ross or Dr. Gates? It's a tough question." Um, no. Stamos has been just fine the last few years, but no. Not even in the same ballpark.

Finally, the ratings for "Life on Mars" continue to slide right along with my interest in it. I continue to enjoy some of the '70s touches -- the unexpected song choices, the "Starsky & Hutch"-esque score, Michael Imperioli's amazing mustache -- but the heart of the show is starting to feel as thin as I began to find the British show by its second season. It's just too close to an actual '70s cop show -- and a middle-of-the-road one, at that -- for me to stick around much longer, cool music and moostashes or no. This show needs some weird in a hurry.

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

SNL: Thursday night live, take three

Spoilers for the third and final Thursday night, pre-election "Saturday Night Live" thingee coming right up...

Took 'em three tries, but that one was solid just about all the way through. Maybe it was the fact that there was no debate this week and therefore they didn't have to be beholden to a format that hasn't worked much for the show lately, or maybe it was Will Ferrell cameo'ing in the show's best Dubya sketch in a long time, or maybe they just had better ideas this week, but this one was solid virtually all-around. (Outside of the predictable and predictably lame repetition of Keenan's "Fix it!" guy.)

Getting back to President Bush, Seth Meyers was on Bill Simmons' podcast a couple of weeks ago, and he talked about how the show really struggled to do Bush sketches in the wake of 9/11. Ferrell's impression hadn't changed, but people's willingness to laugh at it had. Seven years later, and the president reduced to either an afterthought or someone that both presidential candidates are attempting to run against the memory of, and Ferrell's Bush is funny again. It helped that he was paired with Tina Fey's continually brilliant Sarah Palin -- and that the writers seemed willing to be take a point of view in suggesting that Bush and Palin might be kindred spirits. Regardless of which side you're voting for, political comedy is always better when it has a specific point of view; the reason that last week's debate sketch was so lame, for instance, is that you could tell the writers had nothing to say, other than to keep invoking the name of Joe the Plumber early and often. This one was about something, it had bite, and it was a vast improvement.

Keenan aside, I liked most of the Weekend Update segments, whether it was Fred Armisen making fun of John King's interactive map on CNN, or the recreation of the first cell phone conversation, or, especially, Andy Samberg's "Jam the Vote!" Samberg's stuff always operates on such a strange wavelength that it either strikes you perfectly or it's a complete disaster. For whatever reason, this one clicked, and the moment when Andy asked for some crackers to settle his stomach, only to be handed the spicy hot dog that caused the problems in the first place, made me wheeze with laughter for a good 30 seconds. (It would have been longer, but my wife finally demanded that I press play so we could finish watching.)

Once again, I'm going to ask you to try to be civil here, and apparently I wasn't clear enough the last time, so I'll put it this way: Play nice. Talk about the show -- not the candidates, and not each other. Any comment I find to be the slightest bit questionable -- no matter what your party affiliation -- will be deleted, and if we get more than a few, I'm shutting down comments altogether. Are we clear?

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

The Office, "Crime Aid": Lovers in a dangerous time

Spoilers for tonight's "The Office" coming up just as soon as I find out what kind of product integration deal Huey Lewis & The News struck with NBC...

"No, I did not know that Michael was dating Holly." -David Wallace

They are going to break my heart. This show is going to break my heart, dammit.

It's one thing to intellectually know that Amy Ryan only signed to do a handful of episodes, that she's an in-demand film actress with one Oscar nomination to her name and, presumably, more to come, that a version of "The Office" where Michael is in a semi-functional relationship might get old after, oh, eight or nine more seasons. But dammit, I'm not ready for Holly to go just yet. And it's hard for me to stay in denial when they close such an otherwise perfect episode on such an ominous note.

Just look at that screencap. Look at the expression on Holly's face, knowing that she so eagerly will discuss her sex life with the camera crew (who got more overt acknowledgment than in any episode to date), and try not to have that same goofy grin spread to your own face. Much like Jim, I'm amazed by the possibilities of a world where Michael Scott can find love, and where he can, for the most part, function like a human being. Unless this is one massive fake-out and Amy Ryan has signed a 12-season deal to stay with the show, I'm almost going to be afraid to watch next week.

What I liked about "Crime Aid," beyond the obvious, was how even before we realized how Michael and Holly's romance was likely to end, the other stories were all about men being afraid of losing their loved ones. Jim's fear is fairly minor (mine, too; I trust the writers implicitly on all matters PB&J at this point, though I wish Pam was around more right now), but I thought Dwight's panic over Angela setting a date played out beautifully as both comedy and tragedy. Using Phyllis (in easily her best showcase ever) for advice was hilarious, and then we got this great look of humanity on Dwight's face when he realized what he had just said about Phyllis trying to help him.

I'm sure that story isn't done yet, but it's amazing just how well "The Office" has handled not just the initial PB&J romance, but all the love stories on the show. (And that's not even factoring in Bob Vance's adoration for Phyllis, or the currently backburnered Kelly/Ryan/Daryl love triangle, or my secret fear/hope that Creed and Meredith will hook up one day.) Who would have thought this show would turn out to be one of the great TV romantic comedies of all time?

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

Sneak preview: The '30 Rock' season premiere

Continuing the trend they've followed this fall with most of NBC's shows, Hulu has the "30 Rock" season premiere up already, and you can watch it here. I'm not going to get around to reviewing it until it airs next Thursday, but feel free to talk about it here (and not anywhere else on the blog) if you watch it early. Click here to read the full post

Pushing Daisies, "Frescorts": Big Gumshoe

Brief spoilers for last night's "Pushing Daisies" coming up just as soon as I get my taxidermy license...

There were so many things to enjoy in "Frescorts" -- the sound of Jim Dale saying "badass," the bond between Emerson and his awesome mama (played by the great Debra Mooney from "Everwood"), inflating a dead woman's collapsed lung with a bicycle pump, all the duvet double-entendres ("Selfishly, I want to duvet you all night long") -- that I didn't even mind that this was one of the more forgettable mysteries they've done to date.

In general, the actual plot of a "Pushing Daisies" seems to be the very last thing on the writers' minds -- hence wrapping most of them up with Dale's "The facts were these..." monologues -- but there's generally some kind of visually-intoxicating element to compensate for the thin plots. The idea of platonic prostitutes was a clever one, though, and that compensated for the fact that, outside of the expression on Ned's face when he wrapped his arms around the hug-testing machine, there wasn't anything particularly memorable to look at.

Ratings were, once again, lousy. Sigh... Enjoy it while you can, folks.

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

Sons of Anarchy, "The Pull": Sex and death

Spoilers for "Sons of Anarchy" coming up just as soon as I steal an ambulance...

Whoa. I think any reservations I had left about "Sons of Anarchy" went out the window after that one.

After a relatively slow build over the first seven episodes, everything begins to hit the fan with "The Pull." The Aryans make the mistake of trying to ally with the Mayans, the Mayans decide they're going to take everybody out and SAMCRO goes to the mattresses. And just as we're bracing for all-out war, the episode takes a massive zig when we're expecting a zag with the return of Agent Kohn, whose crazy stalker hostage scenario is just as creepy as intended -- but nowhere near as disturbing as Tara and Jax making the beast with two backs while Kohn's bloody corpse lies on the carpet a few feet away.

Again... whoa. Kurt Sutter seems determined to wear the "It's so wrong" mantle now that "The Shield" is winding down, doesn't he?

As I wrote last week, angry, vengeful Jax is a lot more interesting than thoughtful surfer dude Jax. And the only reason those last 15 minutes weren't as tense as the corresponding final 15 minutes on Tuesday's "The Shield" is because we didn't have seven years of history with these characters the way we did with Vic, Shane and Claudette.

I can't wait to see what happens next.

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

Sepinwall on TV: 'Mad Men' creator Matthew Weiner talks about the season two finale

In today's column, I talk to "Mad Men" creator Matthew Weiner about the season two finale (absolutely no spoilers, don't worry), the overall arc of season two, and the future of the series (which has been renewed for a third season even though Weiner isn't under contract yet).

I will have a much, much, much longer version of this Q&A (Weiner can talk a little) up on Sunday night immediately after the finale airs, along with my usual episode review. Click here to read the full post

My Own Worst Enemy, "The Hummingbird": Childhood's end

Brief spoilers for the second episode of "My Own Worst Enemy" coming up just as soon as I introduce Henry to the concept of Facebook...

Well, that was something of an improvement over the pilot. Both episodes have a fundamental logic problem where if you stop to think about anything -- why it would actually be advantageous to make agents with oblivious cover personalities, why Alfre Woodard would send Mike O'Malley out on a mission with only clueless Henry as his backup -- but the difference is that this one was just engaging enough that I didn't keep stopping to think. (Not as much, anyway.)

With the basic exposition out of the way in the pilot, we got to focus more on character this time. The whole experiment still doesn't make any sense, but at least we got to see Henry react the way an ordinary man might when faced with this ridiculous circumstance: he would do everything possible to prove the reality of his own life. That was kind of interesting, and Christian Slater did a better job of modulating between Henry and Edward than he did in the pilot. The show's still doing a lot of hand-holding about the identity switches, but that's the sort of thing you have to do early in a series. (See previous timeslot resident "Journeyman," which had to wait at least a half a dozen episodes before it could let its hero start treating time travel as a fact of life rather than an excuse to bug his eyes out and act confused.)

I still don't care enough about the show to want to watch it every week, especially with such a traffic jam of programming earlier in the evening, but maybe I'll check back in from time to time to see if it improves -- and/or if they can come up with some vaguely plausible explanation for the Jekyll/Hyde set-up.

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

House & Fringe: The personal vs. the professional

Thematically-linked spoilers for last night's episodes of "House" and "Fringe" coming up just as soon as I puff on my inhaler and enjoy some onion soup... "House" and "Fringe" are far, far from the first TV shows to make their procedural storylines have some kind of thematic parallel to the personal lives of the regular characters. "Grey's Anatomy" does it four or five times a week, "ER" perfected the art of the sledgehammer parallel well before that, and even more high-falutin' dramas like "Mad Men" are fond of mixing its characters work and home lives. (Don Draper's ad campaigns are usually inspired on whatever problem he's dealing with at home, after all.) But there's an elegant way to do it (again, see "Mad Men") and then there's the clumsiness that's infused so much of this season of "House." I don't miss the old team, exactly (though the Foreman/Chase scene reminded me that I did rather like Chase back when he got to say more than two lines an episode), but I do miss the days when the writers would try to make the patient of the week's story interesting in its own right, as opposed to an excuse for House or one of his associates to learn a valuable lesson about their own lives. As I've said before, I think the writers find Thirteen to be vastly more interesting than she actually is, and I say this as someone who thinks Olivia Wilde is quite talented. I even liked a lot of her work in this episode, particularly the moments where Thirteen opened up a little with her patient/girlfriend and we got to see a human being instead of this not-so-fascinating thematic plot device. I'd even go so far as to say that "Lucky Thirteen" was one of the stronger episodes this season, and not for the promo-tastic girl-on-girl action. I'm just tired of the doctors and the patients having the exact same problem, week after week. That's not what I watch "House" for, and I hope the writers eventually remember that. (On an unrelated note, this is, as far as I know, Michael Weston's final episode. Ausiello said the spin-off's no longer happening, and if that's true, maybe Lucas can pop up again from time to time. He turned out to be far more entertaining than I expected.) "Fringe," meanwhile, tried to address the gaping charisma vacuum that is its lead actress by making this week's case an excuse for Olivia to deal with some (step)father issues. (Why is Tony Soprano the only character on television who's allowed to be mad at his mother instead of his father? Is there some correlation between poor paternal relations and screenwriting careers?) There were ways in which "The Cure" was better than many "Fringe" episodes to date. It was the first one, I think, where the case had absolutely zero link to Walter's old research, and possibly to the Pattern, and those repeated links were getting old. Several scenes were genuinely disturbing -- notably the mouse crawling all over the strapped-down kidnap victim before exploding, and then Olivia trying desperately to get her to inject the antidote into her neck before the head on top of it went boom -- though another one (the doctor shooting himself) didn't really work in retrospect. (Unless there's a lot more to come from Chris Eigeman, the doc didn't seem in danger of a fate worse than death that would merit suicide as the only alternative.) And, yes, we need to on some level be invested in Olivia if we're going to care about the show. We've learned a fair amount about Walter and Peter's backstory already, so it seems only fair to do it with the other lead. I just continue to find both Olivia and Anna Torv to be flat and uncompelling, with or without the revelation about her past. What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Heroes, "Dying of the Light": Sucks to be him

Spoilers for Monday night's "Heroes" coming up just as soon as I hit the novelty shop...

If nothing else, I have to give the "Heroes" writers some attaboys for having Papa Petrelli siphon away all of Peter's powers (including, I'm assuming, the ability to copy other people's). Not only does it (temporarily) solve the problem of how to deal with one character being more powerful than everyone else on the show combined (and in a better way than the usual "Let's just make Peter an imbecile" approach), but it places them in the hands of one of the better actors the show's ever featured in Robert Forster. As I wrote about last week, the "Heroes" writing is never really going to get much better than it is, but when you give material to guys like Forster, Adrian Pasdar and Jack Coleman, they have the superpower to make it seem better than it actually is.

(It's just a shame that Peter hadn't used his borrowed healing powers to live for several centuries the way Adam Monroe had, or else he also would've crumbled to dust and we would have been rid of him forever.)

As for the non-Forster portions of the episode? Eh. Not as good as last week, not as awful as some of the earlier parts of the season, and a perfectly acceptable time waster while doing other things. I even laughed a few times at things that were supposed to be funny, like Hiro repeatedly getting hit with the shovel right after looking at a painting of it happening. Things are finally beginning to happen in the present instead of the future, and even the really stupid stuff -- like the completely inconsistent nature of the power-dampening capabilities of Level 5 -- just makes me roll my eyes instead of angering me these days.

I guess what I'm saying is that I've exhausted all my "Heroes" hate. It's a profoundly stupid show, but there are just enough good things going on to keep my inner fanboy interested in watching. And if they can bring in any more "Wire" alums (or, for that matter, give Jamie Hector something to do), so much the better.

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

The Shield, "Parricide": It's kiss my ass time

Spoilers for "The Shield," season seven, episode eight, coming up just as soon as I sign everybody up for the precinct softball team...

"Y'all about bringing force down on the street. Why don't y'all take a look at what ya got going on in your own roof?" -Two Man

You lucky, lucky, lucky bastards.

As I think I mentioned a few months back, FX sent out the first eight episodes of this season in advance, and being "The Shield" addict I am, I devoured them over the course of a few days. So the last episode I got to see for a very, very long time was one in which several metaphorical atom bombs were detonated in Farmington.

Shane tries (and fails) to kill Vic and Ronnie!

Shane is found out and turns fugitive!

Mara confirms for Corrine every bad thing Vic has done in his life! Including killing Terry!

VIC TURNS IN HIS BADGE TO HUNT SHANE?!?!?!?!

Well, let's just say that there are certain advantages to watching things a week at a time like a civilian, because it was killing me having to wait so long for more, or to be able to talk to other people about what had happened.

(I know, I know. To quote Livia Soprano: poor you. Let's talk about the episode already instead of my whining.)

As if the episode where Vic and Ronnie tried to kill Shane wasn't tense enough, "Parricide" upped the ante considerably. I knew Shane wouldn't succeed on his end -- you don't kill of Michael Chiklis this early in the season -- but I wasn't feeling too good about Ronnie's safety until Two Man blew it. And to have the failed assassinations go down at the start of the episode, with both sides then scrambling for most of the hour to either solve the case or cover it up, made for as taut an hour of the show as I can remember.

And then, on top of that, to have so much of the show's foundation ripped apart in the episode's final third? Good lord. No more messing around with the Armenian mob; Shawn Ryan and company are playing for keeps. This was like the penultimate episode of "The Sopranos," where Phil Leotardo almost casually bumped off half of Tony's crew and showed Tony and us how vulnerable he really was -- only it came with five episodes to go, and with a show far less likely to get philosophical in its final minutes.

The really shattering moment to me wasn't the gang at the Barn realizing that Shane plotted to kill Ronnie, or even Vic turning in his badge, though both were major freak-outs. For me, it was Corrine confronting Vic with all of the things Mara told her, and Vic admitting, "I did a lot of things I shouldn't have done, for reasons that made sense at the time but are hard to defend now." For Vic to even come close to confessing to Terry and all the other crimes he's committed -- especially for him to do it to his wife, the one person he's been most stubborn in his denials and manipulations over the years -- shows just how fragile his world is right now.

Corrine insists that after she helps him this one last time, "You have to pay some kind of price." Based on how things are going for him lately, I'd say Vic is already starting on the installment plan.

Some other thoughts on "Parricide":

• I would have been frustrated with Vic constantly leaving the investigation to play footsie with Pezuela if it wasn't for him attempting to make ICE into a comfy landing place when all this stuff with Shane and the department goes from bad to worse. Everything's tied together now, and it's all a big mess.

• Even though he hasn't been on "Prison Break" in a while (at least as far as I can tell from IMDb; been a long time since I actually watched it myself), Silas Weir Mitchell is keeping busy. He was on the "My Name Is Earl" season finale in the spring, then popped up on both "Burn Notice" and "The Closer" and here gets to play the troubled but ultimately good priest. Still, he'll always be Haywire to me.

• That storyline also gave Vic a chance to utter the priceless "I wouldn't want to piss off Jesus on top of everyone else." Uh, Vic? I suspect Jesus is already plenty pissed at all the things you've done in your life.

• Another great Vic one-liner: "Why is Montalban crawling out of his fine Corinthian skin," which is funny if you've ever seen the legendary Ricardo Montalban commercial for the Chrysler Cordoba.

• After all this time, you would think Claudette would insist on having the camera in the interrogation room rigged up in a way that doesn't make it so easy to unplug. Think of how many shenanigans the strike team has pulled by disconnecting that thing at opportune moments.

Finally, since the FX previews now seem determined to spell out almost everything that happens in each episode (the ads I saw for this one gave away a huge chunk of the plot), I'm going to remind everyone again about the rules here: No talking about the previews. No talking about interviews you've read elsewhere that give away stuff in the future. No talking about preview copy on network websites that hint at spoilers. No spoilers of any kind. Anything I consider the least bit spoiler-y is getting deleted.

What did everybody else think? I've been waiting a very long time to start talking about this one. Click here to read the full post

NBC gives 'Knight Rider' the back nine

NBC has ordered a full season of "Knight Rider," even though it's consistently finishing in third place in its timeslot.

Why would Ben Silverman do this to us? Three reasons: 1)At least "Knight Rider" is doing better than "Pushing Daisies" head-to-head (sigh...); 2)NBC has trouble in so many places, and so little ready to plug in immediately, that they can't just cancel everything; and 3)Silverman is apparently an "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" fan and has decided to usurp Charlie's role as the wild card. Click here to read the full post

Showtime orders two more seasons of 'Dexter'

Showtime just announced that they're ordering a 4th and 5th season of "Dexter," with 12 episodes set for each season.

Now, I loved the first two seasons of "Dexter" and I continue to think Michael C. Hall is doing great work here. But if you've been reading my reviews this season, you already know I don't think this is a good idea. If three seasons already seems like too much "Dexter" to me -- the concept gets diluted the longer they do it -- than four and five are definitely too much.

Then again, based on a lot of the comments, I appear to be in the minority on this view. Maybe I'll just stop watching after this year. But "Dexter" seems like a classic example of a show that should be done on the British model: one or two seasons, then stop unless the creator has an absolutely brilliant idea that he feels he has to write. Click here to read the full post

Terminator, "The Tower Is Tall But the Fall Is Short": Suicide is painless

Spoilers for tonight's "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" coming up just as soon as I tell a third grader a joke...

Wow. That was the first episode of the series I haven't had to judge on a curve. My praise isn't qualified with thoughts like "I don't think there's a long-term series here, but..." or "If you can ignore that John and Sarah aren't that interesting..." That was just an extremely taut, involving hour of television, a rare (outside of "Battlestar Galactica," anyway) episode of a TV sci-fi series that was at least as interested in the psychological implications of the story as in the whiz-bang explosions and technobabble.

(And, I should add, the whiz-bang stuff was awesome. Cameron twisting the latest bad Terminator into a pretzel was as cool as it was funny.)

Now, my daughter's not too far in age from the poor little girl being "raised" by Shirley Manson, and so the notion of her being in the care of a machine was even more horrifying than it might have otherwise been. But even if I didn't have that personal connection to the material, I think my blood would have been chilled by the scene where Shirley gets the girl to pee herself and we realize beyond a shadow of a doubt that the kid isn't some small piece of T-1000, but the real daughter of the real (and dead) Catherine Weaver, being kept around because she helps the Terminator maintain its cover. For the first time, I'm starting to see why the producers cast Manson -- like Summer Glau, she has a physical presence that's really disturbing if you know what you're looking for, but would probably go unnoticed (or dismissed as Asperger's or another spectrum disorder) to anyone who doesn't believe in robots from the future -- and I'm finding myself engaged by her story. At the very least, I really want the season to end with Ellison somehow saving the daughter from an upbringing that would make Sally Draper from "Mad Men" seem lucky in comparison.

And while I cringe when some shows put their characters in therapy -- it's usually a clumsy excuse for characters to monologue about thoughts the writers couldn't find a more elegant way to have them express -- I thought it worked beautifully here. What the hell must it be like to be John Connor, to be told practically from birth that you're destined to be the savior of humanity, to get at the age of 13 incontrovertible proof that your mom's crazy doomsday prophecies are all very real, and now to have all these people from the present and future sacrifice their lives to ensure your existence? Even if he hadn't recently killed a guy himself(*), it'd be a miracle if he wasn't massively, massively damaged.

(*) And the episode's final scene solved the one major qualifier I was going to have -- that John shouldn't be so freaked out by seeing his mom kill someone, given all they've been through in the past -- with the surprising (to me, anyway) twist that it was John who did the deed during the denouement they didn't show us in the season premiere.

I liked that, in the same episode where one robot was struggling to simulate a maternal instinct, the show's human mother was oblivious to her own son's pain while her robotic daughter knew to start looking for the suicide prevention pamphlets. (And, in another neat parallel, Cameron looked at the fused chip and realized that the new line of T-888's are essentially kamikaze pilots.) As I've said many times before, I think it was a mistake to make TV Sarah so relatively well-adjusted, but recent episodes have started to take us in a direction where she seems normal but is in her own way just as disconnected from reality as the Linda Hamilton version. If the writers keep playing on these emotional beats for John and Sarah, I think we may have to stop complaining about Headey and Dekker being weak links.

Hell, I didn't even mind yet another character from the future casually showing up in the past. (How much of Los Angeles' population is made up of time travelers at this point? Is that how Jack Bauer gets so much done in a day?) Anything that gives the Notorious BAG some emotional material to play is okay in my book, and I look forward to finding out exactly why his shell-shocked friend is so interested in present-day John. What might the machines have promised her that would make her want to kill mankind's only hope?

I really, really dug this one. When Fox gave this show a full-season order last week, I was relatively pleased, since I enjoyed it well enough to be glad it was continuing, even if it wouldn't be near the top of my best-of list. But if they can come even close to this intensity level every week (in an episode that was actually fairly light on the action, even with the pretzel-twisting), I may have to reassess the situation.

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

Chuck, "Chuck vs. the Cougars": Way of the Rat

Spoilers for "Chuck" season two, episode four coming up just as soon as I admit that I have "MMMBop" on my iPod...

"Chuck vs. the Cougars" wasn't quite as strong as the season's first three episodes -- Heather being an ass-kicking villain wasn't explained very well (even by typically implausible "Chuck" standards), and the running gag about Mark Ratner believing Chuck to be a stone killer didn't quite work (I blame Ben Savage for playing it too broadly) -- but enough parts of it worked that I still had a whole lot of fun. And, in the end, isn't that really all that matters?

The news of Nicole Richie's casting made me wince, but Josh Schwartz did a much better job the second time around with a "Simple Life" co-star. (Paris Hilton's "OC" guest spot was painful.) Richie may not be a master thespian, but mean girl is the part she was born to play, baby. And whatever physical limitations she might have compared to Yvonne Strahovski (starting with what looked like a three-foot height differential) were made up for by the cool staging of their fight in the girls' shower -- scene of so much real and cinematic mean girl cruelty -- with the two women kicking holy hell out of each other, soaking wet, while Chuck the fake deejay played "Smack My Bitch Up."

I also thought this episode continued the trend of the writers figuring out how best to use Strahovski. Not that I ever had a big problem with her in season one, but looks aside she was my least favorite of the "Chuck" big three: good chemistry with Zachary Levi, pretty good at the dramatic scenes, but not especially funny and only so-so in the fight scenes. The writers have done a good job of finding ways to make her physicality and aggression into good gags, whether it was the Lambada last week or her using a pencil to remind Chuck that she doesn't like questions about her past. The action scenes have been markedly better this year, with the shower fight possibly the best of the season.

And Strahovski's biggest strength -- her work in the more emotional territory that Adam Baldwin's almost never asked to visit -- has gotten even stronger so far. (Earlier today, Marc Bernardin at EW argued for her as one of TV's most underrated actresses.) Whether in or out of that perfectly hideous blonde wig, Strahovski did a great job at showing an insecure, wounded side of our resident glamazon. And the final flashback, with Tony Todd briefly returning to life to recruit Jenny/Sarah, made Sarah's obsession with secrets and maintaining cover identities a whole lot more interesting. It's not just that she's a spy -- Casey, after all, doesn't seem too bothered to be using his real name -- but that she's the daughter of a traveling con man. For her, maintaining cover has been a way of life since long before she joined the CIA. (So has throwing knives, for that matter.)

This one felt brimming with even more pop culture references than usual. Both the shower fight and Sarah's return to the gym, wet and bloody and barefoot, to be named reunion queen evoked "Carrie." The mayhem at the high school reunion took many pages from "Grosse Pointe Blank" (which came out in 1997, a year before Sarah graduated), but avoided being a straight lift because Sarah's enemy turned out to be her high school tormentor. Heather Chandler was named after the meanest (and first to die) of the three title characters from "Heathers." Mark Ratner was, of course, named after the geek who loves Jennifer Jason Leigh in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High." And the kegger at the Buy More evoked many, many, many '80s and '90s high school films where some kid throws a raging party while his folks are out of town, with Lester playing the role of the host who freaks out because the guests are messing up all of his parents' stuff.

(One major missed opportunity: rather than have Lester accidentally break the marlin while playing tug of war with some guy, the writers should have made the "Risky Business" parallel more explicit by having the guy drop it from a height and force Lester to dive for the thing, Tom Cruise-style.)

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

• Even if Jenny Burton had turned out to be Sarah's real name, I wouldn't have minded them giving up that piece of her backstory this early, because Zachary Levi was having so much fun playing Chuck's glee at getting this scrap of news. And I love how they turned that into a sweet moment between the two at the end -- after seeing first-hand how rough Sarah's past must have been, Chuck decided to ease up on her and just enjoy a burger in peace.

• Again, I wasn't in love with the "Mad Dog" mistaken identity stuff because Savage the younger made it seem too goofy, but I did like how Casey's irritation with it lasted all of a half-second before he realized how to take advantage of it to get the info they wanted. The easier joke would have been to have big John fuming for the entire hour over not getting credit for his bad-assery, but it was funnier to see Casey the professional just roll with it and try to play up Chuck as much as possible.

• Also a splendid Casey moment: his brief turn at the deejay booth. It's so rare to see him looking happy about anything other than Ronald Reagan or the chance to kill people.

• Chuck's geek orgasm at seeing the mainframes inside the Orange-Orange was both funny and a good reminder that, despite the hot fake girlfriend and his improving status as a field agent, he's still a dork at heart. (And this is now two episodes out of four where Sarah's dork love has blinded her to the reality of a mission. In "Chuck vs. the Seduction," she couldn't see that the Black Widow wouldn't be attracted to Chuck, and here she couldn't see that Heather might have ulterior motives for being with the Rat.)

• Was I the only one who saw this episode title and initially assumed it would involve Chuck getting involved with a much older woman?

• Funnier Buy More management comment: Lester's "Since this is a teaching hospital..." or Big Mike suggesting that Lester had a Bay City Rollers hairdo?

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

HIMYM, "Shelter Island": A Mother one bites the dust

Spoilers for tonight's "How I Met Your Mother" coming up just as soon as I work out a problem on my whiteboard...

Okay, now what?

We can strike Stella from the list of potential Mothers, along with Robin. And that's fine, I suppose. I really like Sarah Chalke, and thought she and Josh Radnor were terrific together way back when in "Ten Sessions," but ever since then, Stella's been a frustrating character. I have to assume that Thomas and Bays knew all along that she wouldn't be the Mother, but that she and Ted would be together for a while -- only they didn't know what to do with her between the get-together and the break-up. I know Sarah Chalke wasn't very available last year, but "Scrubs" wrapped production in August, and I think if we could have seen an episode or two where Stella was just Ted's girlfriend hanging out with the others in the middle of a non-relationship storyline, it would have been easier to buy into the idea of her as the woman of Future Ted's past. At the very least, it would have made me miss her more after she left.

But Ted and Stella spent most of their episodes together having various fights designed to warn us that they weren't right together, and so the point was... what? Just another red herring? Something to fill time for parts of two seasons? Or will Stella somehow play a role in the meeting of the actual Mother?

All of which brings me back to a fundamental question about "How I Met Your Mother" which is this: at this point, early in the fourth season, how much do any of us really care about who the Mother is and how Ted met her?

What we have here is a very funny show, one that can be really clever and creative and even romantic, one that features one sublime comic character (Barney), three very good ones (Marshall, Robin and Lily) and one who can be funny or extremely annoying depending on the week (Ted) -- and who happens to be our main character.

I don't think it's a coincidence that we all think of season two as the strongest to date. It was the only one where Ted was in a relationship -- with a woman we know he wouldn't marry -- for virtually all of it, and which therefore allowed the writers to focus on other, more interesting, much funnier things than the guessing game about the Mother's true identity.

And with Stella now mostly out of the way (I've heard vague things about Sarah Chalke being in at least one more episode, possibly to sort out the aftermath of Stella running out on the wedding), I'd like to see the search put off for a very long time. In fact, there's a part of me that wishes that the very final scene of the series is Ted bumping into a woman with a yellow umbrella, followed by Saget saying, "Oh, yeah kids, and that's how I met your mother," followed by the producer credit.

I don't want this to sound like a screed. Still love the show, and in fact liked a lot of things about this episode (most of which I'll get to in the bullet points). But they've been doing this a while now and it should be pretty clear that the hunt for the mom is sill getting so much prominence only because it's in the title. I didn't feel bad when Stella ran off with her baby daddy, nor did I feel relieved, or any other strong emotion. My only thought was, "Okay, so how many more times do we have to go through this before the real mom shows up?"

Now, for some specific thoughts on "Shelter Island":

• The episode itself didn't try to hide how it was going to end. And in case all of Future Ted's narrative hints weren't enough, we got that funny alternate future of some blonde children and Stella (whose dark roots were showing way too much given the joke) urging Future Ted to shut up already.

• I'm not sure what the point of putting Jason Jones into a karate gi was other than as a sight gag, but Jason Jones in a gi was, in fact, funny.

• My wife took Robin's speech to Ted as a sign that the show would return to Robin pursuing Ted, but I don't think so. For one thing, there's still the large matter of Barney's crush on Robin to deal with. For another, the speech didn't play to me as "Don't get married because I'm still in love with you." I think Robin and Ted still are in love with each other on some level. They didn't break up because of that; they broke up because they realized they wanted different things, and that's not going to change. Robin was just saying that, given her feelings for him, it stunk for her to have to be there -- and, given how well she knew Ted, she suspected this wasn't the right match for him.

• I like that both Barney and Lily were right about Barney's plan: he knew that getting Robin drunk at the wedding would get her in bed with him, and Lily knew that Barney would screw it up by not being able to resist temptation. I did like the added wrinkle that the naked woman tied to Barney's bed wasn't Stella's sister -- and that sis didn't object when she arrived.

• The song playing whenever we see characters driving to or from Shelter Island is "Monday" by Mikey and the Gypsys, and I have not been able to get the damn thing out of my head for days now.

• It's too bad Sarah Chalke wasn't available for last week's Super-Canadian moment from Robin. Judging by the way Stella said she didn't feel comfortable "aboot" Robin coming to the wedding, I think Stella and Robin could've had quite the Canuck throwdown.

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

Post-weekend catch-up: Life, ER, Entourage, Crusoe and Easy Money

Time for another ever-unpopular grab-bag post, in which I attempt to briefly address the latest episodes of, in order, "Life," "ER," "Entourage," "Crusoe" and "Easy Money," just as soon as I tear the nameplate off my locker...

Not one of the better "Life"s of the season, I thought. The image of the guy crushed inside the car wasn't as disturbingly pretty as the show usually goes for, and Bethany's lookalike mom (who's also playing a nasty mom on "90210," I believe) was the obvious killer at least 20 minutes before they revealed the truth. Not a very engaging major case, and my interest in the conspiracy isn't very strong at the moment. Other than some isolated moments like Ted's students being impressed by his real resume (which I assumed would have come up back when the class was full of laptop-wielders) or Charlie's ex messing with his head at the storage locker, it was forgettable, and a real comedown after the great Stanford Prison Experiment ep the week before.

I wasn't wild about Maura Tierney's "ER" farewell, either. I've always loved Tierney, though my like for Abby has waxed and waned over the years. The period when she was just a black hole of misery -- I want to say around the time she got beat up by her neighbor and started drinking again, but all the mishaps of that era all blend together, which is part of the problem -- was what led me to kick the "ER" habit for a while. But I recognize that she's a terrific actress, that she has one of the longest tenures in the history of the show (I'm guessing, though I haven't done the math, that only Noah Wyle and Laura Innes put in more time at County) and that, once the writers let Abby smile now and again, she could be a very appealing character.

I just prefer the less-is-more approach to "ER" character exits. I was always fond of the way that Jeannie just walked out of the ER one day, or how what was supposed to be our last glimpse of Peter Benton (until some executive decided to make Eriq La Salle earn every cent of his contract) was him jogging away from Carter after cracking a joke at his protege's expense. For that matter, I really liked the first of the two Mark Greene exits -- Mark's last day in the hospital, which was also Pratt's first day -- and if that had been Anthony Edwards' final appearance (before the flashback he's doing later this season), followed by the episode where the ER got the letter about his death, people might think more fondly on that story arc.

So doing a whole hour of Abby unfiltered, and of every single character getting an individual goodbye scene with her, seemed a bit much. I liked several of them individually -- particularly the bit with Haleh and the nameplates(*) -- but I think the writers needed to pick just one or two and scrap the rest.

(*) If you freeze-framed the nameplates, you'd see not only the name of every former regular character, but most of the show's long-time former producers, like Lydia Woodward and Jack Orman. The entire thing works better as a meta moment than an actual in-character bit -- it's hard to imagine the nurses caring enough to put Dave Malucci's name up there, for instance.

I really don't have anything to say about "Entourage," but I know a lot of you are like me and can't stop watching. Other than being amused that Alan Dale now must play every high-powered CEO on television, there wasn't anything worth laughing at, and Ari's job offer mainly seems like yet another excuse for the writers to put Vince into "Smoke Jumpers" -- which, for some reason, is the only project of interest to him in all of Hollywood.

I also don't have much to say about "Crusoe" other than what was in my initial review, but since I did have a surprising amount of fun watching it -- and since nobody had much to say on the initial post, I thought I'd bring it up here. I can see this one taking a steep dive off a cliff (much like both Crusoe and Friday did at various points in the pilot) starting with episode two, but this one played like a higher-end Robert Halmi production.

Finally, I'm not even sure there's much point about writing about "Easy Money." Even by the historical standards of how both the CW and the WB previously did on Sunday nights, this outsourced lineup is a ratings catastrophe. All the shows are well under a million total viewers, and "Easy Money" got a zero share of the 18-49 demo. Zero. Both "Easy Money" and "Valentine, Inc." have already shut down production in a move that's billed as "temporary." Uh-huh.

But I bring it up because three episodes in, "Easy Money" is one of the few newbies still holding my interest. Laurie Metcalfe is doing really strong work as the conniving Bobette (as soon as the blonde showed up, you just knew Bobette was going to lop off that braid, didn't you?), and this world continues to interest me enough that I'll be disappointed but not surprised when the episodes run out.

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