Monday, August 21, 2006

What if I was to tell you...

... that in today's column, I review the season premiere of "Prison Break" and the debut of "Vanished"? Is that something you might be interested in? And what if I was to tell you that today's paper also features Matt's review of Spike Lee's Katrina documentary? Now, is that something you might be interested in? And what if I was to tell you...

...sorry, had to get that out of my system. Martin Landau does that to me (or, at least, he has for the last eight days). "Entourage" wasn't as good this week as last -- not enough Bob, the sneaker story wasn't very funny (even if it did do a good job of showing where Vince and Turtle's heads are at after the last few weeks) -- but I can't complain too much about any episode featuring a mic'ed Drama practicing the self-love that dare not speak its name, or one that allowed Bob to be so gloriously vindictive at the end. For him, it's clearly not about the money. He wanted to be a player again, and Ari tried to deprive him of that. We'd heard that Carla Gugino was going to pop up at some point this season as an agent who interests Vince; based on the previews, I'm guessing we see her next week.

(The Drama scene reminded me a bit of the classic scene in "The Naked Gun" where Drebin, still wearing his radio mic, takes the world's longest, noisiest piss in the middle of a press conference -- and in turn reminded me of something that happened on the L.A. trip. When we were leaving the "Rock Star" mansion, I checked my digital recorder to make sure all the interviews had gone over okay, and discovered that I had accidentally left the recorder running for the entire two-hour jam concert. Excited to have an accidental bootleg, I was preparing to send copies to some of the other reporters who had been there when I went back to the beginning to discover that, in addition to the concert, the tape also included a couple of trips to the bar and a Drebin-esque men's room stop. To quote Frank, "Whoops." Suffice it to say, the recording remains unshared.)

Even though Fox has been jumping the gun on the season for years, it still feels odd to have two network dramas premiering this early. Time to start prepping tomorrow morning's "Prison Break" review -- after, of course, I finish with "Deadwood."

4 comments:

Philip said...

I think this may not be the end of Bob as we know it. I did notice that we had a Bob sighting in next week's previews.

Todd said...

I watched Vanished twice. The first time, I was sort of entertained -- enough where maybe I thought I just wasn't paying good enough attention.

When I rewatched it, it all just fell apart for me. I didn't really like it much at all, Mimi Leder's efforts aside.

Anonymous said...

I hated that they buffooned Bob's character in this episode. A deck of cards? Pulling a coin from the President's ear? It just didn't work for me.That angle ruined it. I'd love to see Bob as part of the regular cast, or at least a semi-regular.THAT is something that I would have an interest in...
One more thing...I still hope to hear Joey Ramones version of "What a wonderful world" to close out this season.
Later Alan!!

Alan Sepinwall said...

Tom, good to have you here. I don't know that they made Bob into any more of a buffoon than he was last week, when it was pretty clearly established that he was out of touch with modern Hollywood. And he still had enough on the ball to A)figure out that Ari had screwed him, and B)figure out the perfect way to screw Ari and Vince back.