All TV: CBS comedies return

Today's column looks at the beginning of the end of the strike drought:

The package arrived on my desk Friday morning like manna in the desert: new episodes of "Two and a Half Men," "How I Met Your Mother" and "The Big Bang Theory," the first scripted series to get back on the air since the end of the writers strike.

(The CBS comedies are several weeks ahead of the curve; most other network series' won't be back until sometime next month, so don't get too excited yet if you're dying for new "30 Rock" or "House.")

I'm a big fan of "Mother" and agnostic about the other two - sometimes they make me laugh, sometimes they make me cringe, sometimes both simultaneously - but by the time I finished all three, I had a huge smile on my face.

Sometimes, you just don't know what you've got till it's gone, do you?

To read the full thing, click here. Obviously, there will be a proper "HIMYM" review tonight at 9 (as mentioned in the column, it swaps timeslots with "Big Bang Theory" starting tonight). Click here to read the full post

Mad Men redux: Gianni on the spot

(Note: Because AMC is rerunning the first season of "Mad Men" every Sunday at midnight, and because a lot of people missed the show the first time around, I'm reposting my blog reviews for each episode the morning after. These are written as they were back in the summer/early fall; if I feel differently about anything in retrospect, I'll mention it in the comments. Also, while comments from both newbies and people who watched the first time are welcome, if you've seen these episodes before, please be vague about events in later episodes so as not to spoil things for the newcomers.)

Spoilers for episode nine of "Mad Men" (titled, appropriately in more ways than one, "Shoot") coming up just as soon as I start a diet...

How many different types of splendid was that final shot? Scary, funny, tragic and kinda hot, all in one. But we'll get back to that, after looking at all the forces that conspired to have Betty in her nightie (at 1 in the afternoon) casually shooting at her neighbor's pigeons.

Betty was a model, you know. She'll tell you (in nearly identical words each time) if you raise the subject. It's her crutch, her way of dealing with this desperate housewife life she absolutely doesn't want. In the back of her mind, she knows that she was once a model -- and still has the Grace Kelly looks to potentially be one again -- just as in the back of her closet she keeps the designer clothes given to her by "Gianni." (BTW, Gianni Versace would have been about 14 in 1960 -- and practically fetus-sized back in Betty's modeling days -- and it's a common Italian name, so I don't think the show was going there.)

Back in the day, modeling wasn't really something looked at as a long-term career. There were, as Betty notes, some women who became very rich and famous doing it, but the era of the model as routine celebrity was still a bit off in the future (thanks to Andy Warhol and Twiggy) and Betty no doubt looked on the profession as a means for landing a man just as obviously as Joan thinks Peggy should be doing. (More on that in a minute.) But the choice was also tied into her mother's "painting a masterpiece" philosophy expressed a few episodes back (when Joan looked even more Grace Kelly-ish than she did last night); Betty no doubt thought her mom would be pleased she chose a job that highlighted her beauty, but instead her mom called her a prostitute for it. (The more we learn about Betty's late mom, the more I think Betty isn't so much grieving as letting out a few decades of repressed anger.) So she modeled for a while until she got with Don and became trapped in suburbia.

Jim Hobart offers her a lifeline -- only as a means to get at Don, which Betty doesn't realize -- but I'm really fascinated by Betty's reaction to getting fired by the Coca-Cola people. She gets upset, but not in a defiant, "I'll show them" way where she intends to use those gorgeous photos to get another gig; she just gives up, surrenders back to her stifling life in Ossining, where she's bored but at least not subject to rejection. Don consoles her by telling her what an amazing mother she is -- and of course that's Don's chief attraction to her, given his upbringing and the fact that he seeks sexual and intellectual satisfaction from outside women -- and she responds by showing the neighbor what a real protective mama bear looks like, casually shooting away at his stupid birds in response to his threat to shoot her children's beloved dog Polly. She gets to show off her matriarchal side while also taking out her agression on the world that she feels has confined her to this house, this lawn, this life where she can still be in a nightie in the afternoon and it won't really matter. Ronnie, the Salvatore-esque art director for Coke, tells her that getting fired "has nothing to do with" her. The problem is, nothing has anything to do with her, and that's slowly driving Betty crackers.

Meanwhile, Don's reaction to all of this was equally interesting and unexpected. I just assumed he would be against the modeling thing from the start, want to keep Betty confined to her motherhood box, but he seemed genuinely supportive throughout, even after the incident with the kids and the neighbor suggested that Betty was falling down on her original job. Then Hobart made the mistake of sending over the photos and Don finally recognized that the whole thing was just another set of golf clubs. So if you're Don, what do you do? You do love your wife and want her to be happy (even as you pursue relationships with other women) and know how much she cares about this job -- which will disappear if you don't sign on at the bigger firm. But you also hate being manipulated by others -- if Hobart would pull this stunt with your wife now, what might he try in the future if you and he clash? -- and are, at heart, a selfish Ayn Rand man. I guess you do exactly what Don did; you finagle a ginormous raise out of Roger and tell Hobart to cram it. Still, it's really sad that Betty got turned into a pawn in all of this.

Some minor bits of business with Peggy, Pete and Joan this week. I really liked Joan and Peggy's talk about the dress and Peggy's motivations for doing the copy-writing thing, as it clarifies once and for all that Joan isn't jealous of Peggy, just confused. The notion of trying to play the man's game at Sterling/Cooper has never even occurred to her.

I also liked Pete repeatedly getting shot down in his attempts to celebrate his big triumph with the laxative/Nixon stunt, whether it was Don responding to Pete's "Are we done here?" with a simple "No" or Pete's poor secretary refusing to drink or even flirt with him and the other chipmunks. I don't read too much into him taking a swing at Kenny for trash-talking Peggy, as there was a definite "nobody picks on her but me" vibe to it all, as opposed to Pete realizing he had treated her like garbage last week. (Also, vis a vis Kenny's "lobster" description of Peggy, I suddenly imagined him as an old man today complaining that J-Lo and Jessica Biel are too fat because they have some junk in the trunk.)

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

Sepinwall on TV: 'John Adams' review

Today's column reviews "John Adams":

In the new HBO miniseries "John Adams," history comes alive -- then frequently pauses to nap.

The mini has an impeccable cast, led by Paul Giamatti as Adams and Laura Linney as his wife, Abigail. It's based on beloved source material, the Pulitzer Prize-winning David McCulloch book that everybody seemed to have tucked under their arms for much of 2002. (How many people actually read it, as opposed to showing it off, is an open question.) But too much of the finished product feels like required homework.

McCullough's goal, in part, was to shine a light on one of the less-revered founding fathers -- to show that Adams was more than just the guy who ran the country in between Washington and Jefferson. More often than not, though -- particularly in the first four chapters (out of seven) that HBO sent out for review -- the miniseries seems to be implying that maybe this man's life isn't worth a big-budget, six-week, seven-part epic.

To read the full thing, click here. Click here to read the full post

In Treatment week 7 open tread

Okay, we seem to be in a good groove here. One post, five episodes of "In Treatment," with me struggling to remember to bump it up every night. Please honor the on-air schedule, so no posting about the Sophie episode until after Wednesday night at 10, etc. Click here to read the full post

Remakin' Rob Thomas

Was a little too busy yesterday to get around to the double shot of Rob Thomas-related news: the CW has hired him to write a "Beverly Hills, 90210" spin-off/remake/sequel, while ABC finally gave the go-ahead for him to make a pilot for the long-discussed (around here, anyway) "Cupid" remake.

No doubt the two are related -- I'm assuming ABC heard about Thomas' "90210" deal and quickly moved to take "Cupid" from script to pilot -- and if both networks try to take these pilots to series, "Cupid" would have contractual priority for Thomas' services because he started working on it first. (Though that wouldn't doom the "90210" remake; Thomas could either try to do both, ala Josh Schwartz with "Chuck" and "Gossip Girl" this year, or else hand "90210" off to someone else.)

I'll cop to a certain amount of "90210" nostalgia, as those characters (but not actors) were all my age -- or, at least, they were after the producers had everybody but David Silver repeat a grade without anyone noticing or commenting on it. It was cheeseball as hell, sincere to a fault, and the best performance in the show's history probably came from Tiffani-Amber Thiessen (future Oscar winner Hilary Swank got fired after a season because they didn't think she had "it"), yet if I pass a rerun while channel-surfing, I can usually identify the season within seconds, and if I actually put it on during the opening titles, I'm pretty much stuck for the rest of the hour. I'm not proud of it but I imagine slightly younger viewers feel the same way about "Saved by the Bell" or "Dawson's Creek" (or, one day, "One Tree Hill").

Rob showed with "Veronica Mars" that he could tell high school stories dealing with the standard topics in a smart, involving way (though he'd obviously have to ditch the noir), and Schwartz showed with "The O.C." that there are other fresh ways to approach this kind of material, so if that remake goes forward, I'd definitely be interested. No idea whether it'll be a remake, or a sequel where one or two of the characters are the kids of original "90210"-ers, ala the new "DeGrassi." (How old would Andrea's kid be by now? Gabrielle Carteris would probably come cheap and not be a headache, and they could still deal with the class-consciousness stuff, since Andrea was always ambivalent about going to that school.)

As for the "Cupid" remake, it'll be set in LA to allow for stunt-casting. (You may remember Rob saying that the network was always pushing him to stunt-cast the guest stars on the original; the executives may change and 10 years may pass, but the attitudes are the same.) And its success is going to depend almost entirely on who they get to play the Jeremy Piven part (and then whether they can find an actress who clicks with him as well as Paula Marshall clicked with Piven). I still haven't heard a Eureka-level casting suggestion, but the floor remains open. Click here to read the full post

Sepinwall on TV: 'Jezebel James' review

Today's column reviews "The Return of Jezebel James," which was a big disappointment:

When it debuts tonight, "The Return of Jezebel James" won't be the worst comedy on television. It won't even be the worst comedy on Fox. But it's a very special, frustrating kind of bad, one with the power to actually change history. Not only does it make me wonder how so many talented people could create such a lousy show, it makes me question whether I was wrong for liking what these people did in the past.

Specifically, it's dumped all over my memories of "Gilmore Girls," the previous series from creator Amy Sherman-Palladino and husband/partner Daniel Palladino. So much of "Jezebel James" feels like a continuation or spin-off of "Gilmore," particularly the snappy dialogue and the central relationship between two female relatives (on "Gilmore," it was a mother and daughter who were more like sisters; here, it's the opposite), yet almost none of it works.

To read the full thing, click here. Click here to read the full post

Lost, "Ji Yeon": Baby daddy

Spoilers for "Ji Yeon," the latest episode of "Lost," coming up just as soon as I get a squeegee bucket...

How did I miss that? How did I miss that Jin was in a flashback while Sun was in a flashforward? I took mental note of his bulkier cell phone (Jack's sleek phone was the first giveaway for me in "Through the Looking Glass") and I also noted that the comic tone of his scenes with the stuffed panda was wildly at odds with what was going on with Sun, and yet I still didn't put 2 and 2 together until Jin invoked his old job with Sun's father's car company and then told the nurse he'd only been married for two months.

Now, I can't decide whether to be pleased or annoyed with the narrative shenanigans. On the one hand, there was no way to save the news of Jin's death(*) until the end of the episode without it, because an episode where the off-island scenes only feature Sun would have been a giveaway.

((*) And, yes, I believe that Jin is dead. I know the date on the tombstone was 9/22/04, the date of the crash, but remember: according to "Eggtown, the cover story is that all but eight passengers died in the crash, and two more died later. I don't know the reasoning behind that lie, but it would certainly cover Jin dying at any point pre-rescue. Sun's grief seemed too real -- not just a "We're separated by an ocean and I don't know if I'll ever see you again," but real, honest mourning -- for me to think anything else.)

On the other hand, by structuring the episode the way they did, the writers made the news of Jin's death feel almost gimmicky. I know that many of the show's best episodes featured some kind of big twist at the tail end of the flashback (Locke is paralyzed! Sawyer's the little boy in the story, not the con man!), and I know I was suitably impressed by "Hi, Aaron" only a few weeks ago, but here the stagecraft got in the way of the emotions.

Part of that, I think, is because the present-day island material with Jin and Sun was so moving that it made the twist seem more gimmicky than it would have when paired with a more plot-driven island story. As with the Sayid episode much earlier in the season, "Ji Yeon" was a reminder of how underused these two great actors and characters have been. Daniel Dae Kim and Yunjin Kim may not appear much anymore -- and Daniel Dae may not be appearing much longer, period -- but they have superb chemistry together, and the characters have come so far that Jin's devotion to his wife had real power. These two have been through so much together, done terrible things to each other and for each other, but there can be no doubt that there love is back and very strong.

(And good on the writers for using fellow married guy Bernard to bring Jin around and make him realize this was karma for the man he used to be, not the man he is now. Bernard rules -- between the fishing expedition and the Hurley cannonball scene, he's got the golden touch of late for classic "Lost" moments.)

Also gimmicky -- and not offset by any tear-jerking declarations of eternal love and devotion -- was the long-awaited introduction of Michael (aka former Phoenix Suns point guard Kevin Johnson) as Ben's man on the boat. If there's a "Lost" fan who hadn't guessed that it would be Michael -- and hadn't guessed that three or four episodes ago -- I'd be stunned. Now, Cuse and Lindelof brought this on themselves by announcing Harold Perrineau's return back at Comic-Con, but they've also had him in the opening titles for every episode this season, allegedly for contractual reasons, so this may be an instance where they wanted to keep things a surprise but knew they couldn't. In that case, though, they should have structured things differently -- should have known that their fans are smart and obsessive and found a way to re-introduce Michael several episodes ago, even if it was just a glimpse of him on the freighter moments after Ben discussed having a spy there. Trying to turn his intro into a shocking, full string orchestra-worthy moment didn't work, because we all knew it was coming.

Still, the freighter scenes were far from a total loss, given our introduction to the "surprisingly forthcoming" (especially for this show!) freighter captain. Of course, the captain (and the show) could afford to be forthcoming with information we already knew (notably that it's Penny's father's boat), but now Sayid and Desmond are in the loop, and there are more signs that something besides time travel sickness is amiss with this crew. (At first, I was annoyed that they brought in Zoe Bell for her to talk on the phone for several episodes and then jump in the ocean minutes after we first saw her, but I have to think we'll see her again whenever we get the inevitable Michael flashback about what he's been up to.)

So, to sum up before the bullet points, not as brilliant an all-around episode as "The Constant" or some of the season's earliest episodes, but some great performances and moving moments for two of the show's underrated players, and enough hints about the bigger picture to satisfy me. Moving on:

• Hurley in a suit! Did not expect to see that. Very interesting that he would be the only one of the Six to show up to see the baby. Obviously, Kate can't leave the country, and we don't know how quickly post-rescue that Sayid became a globe-trotting assassin, but you would at least assume Jack could drag his annoying self across the Pacific to see the kid. Perhaps a rift between him and Sun?
  
• Does this definitively establish Aaron as the last of the Six? The ads said the episode would tell us who the rest of the six were -- another way we were set up to believe Jin survived -- so I'm assuming the group is Jack, Kate, Hurley, Sayid, Sun and Aaron?
  
• I loved how Sun refused to trust Juliet. We know that Juliet's absolutely telling the truth about this, but it's about time someone among the Lostaways finally got fed up with the constant obfuscation and half-truths coming from Jack's new squeeze.
  
• Was the TV show that Sun turned off before feeling her labor pains supposed to be a dubbed-into-Korean version of that thing Nikki was on?
  

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

American Idol Top 12: Elimination

Brief as possible spoilers for the first elimination show of the "American Idol" finals coming up just as soon as I pop my collar...

Thank God for DVRs, as they allow me to watch these heinous Wednesday monstrosities in 10 minutes or less. Bullet-points:

• I figured the forgettable Syesha would be in more trouble than the truly bad David Hernandez (or even Kristy Lee), but I have no problem with David's elimination. He was capable of better (his "Papa Was A Rolling Stone" was one of the stronger semi-final performances from either gender), but I didn't like his song choices, and his "I Saw Her Standing There" was a real fiasco, especially from a guy who took a college course on the Fab Four.
  
• The bulk of the 10 minutes I watched consisted of the group-sing -- the first I've experienced this season, and as heinous as I remember from seasons past. No one knows their cue (Michael Johns seemed to randomly drift from girl to girl, never sure who he was supposed to be dueting with), none of the voices blended together, and it made me want to spin up my entire Beatles collection to cleanse myself of that mess.
  
• The other five minutes or so went to Katharine McPhee's not so triumphant return. I'll forgive the contestants for muffing lyrics to a certain degree -- the producers work them like dogs and they have only a week to learn songs (many for the first time) -- but a trained veteran of sorts like Kat, shouldn't have been screwing up the lyrics to one of the greatest love songs ever written. It's "You know I believe and how," not "You I know I believe him now" (even allowing for the gender switch). The fact that she did it three different times made me wonder if David Foster or some other idiot rewrote the thing, but either way it bugged me. Also bugging me: Kat sucking all the feeling out of what is, again, a masterpiece. From what I remember of Kat during her season (when I liked her), she wasn't a belter and didn't have extraordinary tone to her voice, but she was really good when she could connect to the emotions, like her "Over the Rainbow" or even "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree." This was a Fembot version of "Something," and while Kat's pretty enough to be a Fembot, her voice isn't special enough to get away with that on this song.
  

What did everybody else think? And how awkward were all the Jim Carrey appearances I kept fast-forwarding past? Click here to read the full post

Hulu goes live

After several months of beta testing, Hulu, NBC and Fox's answer to YouTube, went live today. The site, as you probably know, has authorized clips and many full episodes of several hundred TV shows, from the great ("The Office," "The Simpsons," "Battlestar Galactica," "Hill Street Blues") to the completely awful ("Tequila & Bonetti").

I played around with Hulu a lot during the beta run, and, if you can deal with all the ads (they've now started putting in banner ads during the shows, which is annoying), it's a tremendous time-waster. Whenever work was going bad, I'd pop on an "Arrested Development" episode, for instance, to cheer myself up.

One of the especially nice features of the site is the ability to embed only portions of a clip, so over at the NJ.com blog (to avoid complaints from people who can't access this site when it features embedded clips), I included one of the funniest "Arrested" scenes of all time, which is part of a longer (but equally funny) clip. Enjoy. Click here to read the full post

American Idol, top 12: Beatles Night

Spoilers for tonight's Beatles-themed "American Idol" coming up just as soon as I find out how easily I can retract this morning's column...

Boy, a lot to talk about with this one, huh? In aggregate, maybe the best "Idol" performance show in quite some time -- and certainly with this huge number of contestants -- with several really memorable performances. But there were also a few duds, and a few outright disasters -- one of them including the guy I just annointed as a mortal lock to win the thing.

Before getting into the song-by-song thing, I'll say this: for all of Nigel's boasting about what a coup it was to get the Lennon/McCartney catalog (which ignores the fact that at least one other Lennon/McCartney song, "Here, There and Everywhere," was sung by Clay in season two), Beatles songs aren't really singers' songs -- at least, not in the way we usually associate with "Idol." Paul was the only one of the four with above-average range, and so the songs depend either on harmonies (the early stuff) or on the band, or on the feeling that the performer brings to the song. So to impress in the "Idol" venue, the contestants either needed to find some kind of emotional hook, or they needed to change things up significantly. The best performances of the night did one of those two things.

In order...

Syesha Mercado, "Got To Get You Into My Life": Nigel told EW that the contestants got a list of only 25 Beatles songs to choose from, so I can't complain too much about song choice, but this wasn't a good call by Syesha. Her strength is her power, and there's nowhere for her to force in the belty notes, and so what we get is a very monotonous, somewhat pageant-y, competent but forgettable rendition. She wasn't the worst of the night, but she's in trouble, I think.

Chikezie, "She's A Woman": I could pick nits with the vocals (he began to sound strained late in the song), but I dug the arrangement way too much to care. Just a very smart reinterpretation of the song. Had he kept it on the Soggy Bottom Boys tip the whole way, I still would have enjoyed it, but once Chikezie's voice dropped down into its normal register and the band kicked in, I had an enormous smile on my face throughout. Chikezie! Who the hell knew he had this in him? The Roger Daltrey-esque stuttering alone might inspire me to vote for him if I actually voted. He's still cannon fodder, but the kind I'd like to see stick around for a while.

Ramiele Malubay, "In My Life": Like Syesha, competent but dull. It's a very beautiful song, but a lot of that comes from the original arrangement (the "Idol" band's version sounded very lounge act circa 1978) and from the wistfulness in John Lennon's voice that Ramiele couldn't quite find. I appreciate that she has a strong voice but doesn't feel the need to glory note her way through more subtle songs, but she brought nothing interesting to the table.

Jason Castro, "If I Fell": Not as good as some of the performances to follow -- very Sensitive Dreadlock Man, and often verging on goofball -- but pleasant, and the vocals were quite pretty in spots. His fanbase is going to eat that one up.

Carly Smithson, "Come Together": Automatically gets points for not making the "Hold you in his armchair" lyric mistake that everybody makes (particularly in light of what would happen at the end of the show), and was vastly more confident than we've seen previously. Her semi-finals performances, while showcasing a good vocal instrument, featured practically Albert Brooks-ian levels of flop sweat, as if you could see Carly overthinking every note and worrying that she's going to blow her second and final chance at this. Whatever nerves she had before were gone, and even though her "changing it up" was essentially the Aerosmith version, she knows what she's doing on stage, particularly in the way she brought things down after the power notes for "Over me." Very, very nice.

David Cook, "Eleanor Rigby": So if Cook could make a heinous song like "Hello" sound so good, what can he do with one of the best songs Paul McCartney ever wrote? I could do without the smirking on such a melancholy track -- Cook can't help but seem overly pleased with himself at all times -- but beyond that, I thought this was a terrific update of the song, a way to make it sound like a modern rock tune without in any way undermining its original intent. I just wish he had more than the usual 90 seconds so he could have worked in a second chorus at the very top of the song.

(Paula, meanwhile, has gotten the "Let's downplay the awesome might of Archuleta" memo with her "There's more than one horse in this race" comment.)

Brooke White, "Let It Be": Remember what I said above about either changing it up or finding an emotional hook? Brooke, as you would expect her to do, takes the latter route, doing a very simple version of the song and working herself into tears doing so. Wonderful. I still worry about her on some of the other themes, but this was just as much in her wheelhouse as the Carly Simon and Carole King songs she's done earlier in the season.

David Hernandez, "I Saw Her Standing There": Oh, and I was feeling so good about the show after those three performances (four, really, as Castro wasn't bad), and then David has to go and spoil the party. Again, I don't want to get on these people too much given the 25 song list, but the guy has taken a college course on The Beatles and this is the song he chooses? The one that's so simplistic that Tiffany covered it? Chikezie before him and Amanda after him show that it's possible to find an interesting approach to the group's more primitive tunes, but David's approach is to throw a lot of things at the wall and see what sticks: starting on the riser behind the judges, running around (and losing his breath doing so), throwing in runs, etc. No. Just no. (And, again, how does a guy who took a college course on the band mess up the lyrics? It's "way beyond compare," not "far beyond compare.") The first out-and-out mess of the evening.

Amanda Overmyer, "You Can't Do That": I know some people worried that this theme would kill Amanda, but keep in mind that the bands that influenced The Beatles' early stuff are the same kind of raunchy, honky-tonk R&B groups that influence whatever the hell it is Amanda does when she's on stage. Even when rebounding from the "Wayward Son" disaster with last week's Joan Jett number, Amanda kinda looked like she wanted to go home, but here she's enjoying herself, scatting and throwing in "Oh, Child"s and generally seeming not like a run of the mill bar band singer, but someone not out of place on this stage, on this show. That is why I still wanted her around even after the Kansas massacre.

Michael Johns, "Across the Universe": Like Brooke, he's obviously touched to be singing this song (which he implied in the clip package has personal meaning for him), and he shows greater passion and control of his instrument than he did in any of his lazy semi-finals performances. That said, I'm sort of in the middle between Pauler and the male judges on this one: I liked the emotion and sincerity, but I also think he's capable of being more memorable than this (albeit not by getting all glory note-y the way Randy obviously wants him to be). He still has a few more weeks before the obvious cannon fodder is gone to turn things around, but he has yet to kick ass the way he seemed so capable of in Hollywood week.

Kristy Lee Cook, "Eight Days a Week": Paula, shockingly cogent on this one, nailed it: it was like Kristy Lee heard all of Simon's pleading for her to be more country and chose the most literal translation of that, with the fiddles and the ripped jeans and the sparkly top and the yodeling and the twang in her voice that was never really there before tonight. It was like a parody of a Kellie Pickler performance. And, once again, I have no idea about the 13 songs that were available but weren't chosen, but The Beatles did a lot of songs that were either straight country or easily capable of being countrified, and this wasn't one of them -- at least, not that way.

David Archuleta, "We Can Work It Out": Ye gods! From the most inevitable winner in the show's history to complete catastrophe in the space of 90 seconds. It was almost like the producers had heard all the comments about how everybody else was competing for second, pulled young David aside and told him to screw up as many lyrics as possible. When it happened the first time, I winced almost as much as David did, but for it to happen three times? You want to talk about flop sweat, rabbits in headlights, etc. -- that was David by the end of that performance. In previous weeks, he seemed like he'd been training his entire life for a moment like this; here, he looked like he would give up everything to be anywhere but on that stage, botching the words and bouncing around awkwardly to the Stevie version of the song.

Best of the night: I'm almost tempted to make it a four-way tie between Chikezie, Carly, David Cook and Brooke. Gun to my head, I guess I take Chikezie just for the surprise factor of it, but I dug all four a lot.

Worst of the night: Davids Hernandez and Archuleta were pretty terrible, as was Kristy Lee.

In trouble: As always, it's better on "Idol" to be bad than to be mediocre. If you're mediocre, people forget to vote for you; if you're bad, your fans mobilize to save you. Keeping that in mind -- as well as the previously-unstoppable Archuleta juggernaut fanbase -- I'd say Syesha and Ramiele have just as much to worry about as Hernandez and Kristy Lee, if not more. One of those four is going home, and if you ask me to pick which one, I'd say Syesha. Going first in a two-hour show and being dull doing it can be the kiss of death.

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

Sepinwall on TV: David Archuleta, inevitable 'American Idol'

Today's column previews the "American Idol" finals -- specifically, the question of how the show can/should deal with the inevitability factor:

David Archuleta will be the next "American Idol."

This is not a prediction. This is a fact.

If you were to breed a potential "American Idol" winner in a lab, you could not do better than Archuleta, the 17-year-old kid from Utah who effectively ended the competition two weeks ago with his performance of John Lennon's "Imagine."

Archuleta ticks every possible demographic box for the tween girls and grandmothers who are the two dominant "Idol" voting blocs. He's cute but non-threatening, polite and terribly sincere. Think back to previous seasons and how long contestants like one-note crooner John Stevens IV or tone-deaf Sanjaya Malakar lasted, solely for ticking those same boxes.

Now imagine if one of them were a terrific singer -- which Archuleta most certainly is.

To read the full thing, click here. Beatles songs tonight. I love the Beatles. I fear this theme will ruin my appreciation for certain songs. Click here to read the full post

Breaking Bad: The junkman cometh

Brief spoilers for the "Breaking Bad" finale coming up just as soon as I bake cookies for my open house...

I'll be honest: I watched this episode on Friday morning on a review screener, enjoyed it well enough, and made a mental note to find time to write a blog entry to go up in time for the end of the episode. But one thing led to another, and I got so caught up in all my coverage of "The Wire," that "Breaking Bad" eluded my mind altogether until I saw the finale on my DVR's hard drive.

Which, again is not a knock on the episode. I've just had my brain on 24/7 focus on the end of the best drama series of my lifetime, and so almost anything else would seem somewhat forgettable in comparison. So I'll be quick and then get out of the way to let people with less clouded minds offer up their thoughts on Walt and Jesse's junkyard adventure.

A week or two ago, I talked about how the show was finally finding its footing just as its strike-abbreviated season was coming to an end. The finale definitely felt abrupt, like a middle chapter of the story rather than something to tide us over until the second season comes (if it comes; I have no idea how the ratings have been or what AMC considers the bar for success, post-"Mad Men"). That's not Vince Gilligan's fault -- a number of other scripted shows that got shut down by the strike ended abruptly, whether they'll be continuing ("Pushing Daisies") or not ("Las Vegas"). It happens. It's frustrating, but what can you do?

I liked several moments, notably Walt once again using imminent death to boost his sex life (though wouldn't the treatment at some point impair his libido?) and Walt and Hank's conversation about where to draw the line on drug laws. Hank's been a good comic relief character, but this is the first time he felt like more than a clown.

The real stand-out, though, was Walt on the video at the baby shower. It's an obvious tear-jerker moment -- the dying father recording a message for the daughter he may never get to know -- but the amazing frigging Bryan Cranston plays it so quietly, with such dignity (no way Walt's going to let Skyler's annoying friends see him lose his composure) and with such sincerity that it earned whatever tears it may have jerked.

Walt and Jesse's caper was fun, and yet another reminder that you really don't want to mess with your local chemistry teacher, lest he blow you up real good, but those boys seem beyond screwed with their association with Tuco. (And am I the only one who wonders if Tuco's name is a tribute to the Eli Wallach character from "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly"?) That man is a sackful of crazy.

What did everybody else think? If the show continues, what would you like to see from season two? Click here to read the full post

Sepinwall on TV: 'The Wire' ends

If last night's review of "The Wire" series finale, and/or my interview with David Simon were too long for you to read, I combined and condensed elements of each for my column in today's paper. Click here to read the full post

All TV: 'Canterbury's Law' review, 'In Treatment' revisited

Today's column reviews "Canterbury's Law," about which all you really need to know is what's in that picture:

When Julianna Margulies left "ER" in 2000, turning down a $27 million contract extension, she said she was burnt-out on playing the same character and the same situations for so long, and she needed a change. And that's fair. Money isn't everything, and if you're unhappy in your current job, you have the right to do something else that pays less.

And yet, watching "Canterbury's Law" (8 p.m., Ch. 5), Margulies' first regular series since, I wonder if she would have stayed on "ER" had the producers gotten her out of those scrubs and into a miniskirt.

"Canterbury's Law" is a show that's almost entirely about Margulies' legs. That, or her shoes. Practically every scene opens with a fetishized close-up of Margulies' latest stylish pair of stilettos, then a pan up her stockings. When she complains that a co-worker is overshadowing her, he says, "Relax. You've got better legs." You know things are getting stressful for her when you see she's chosen to wear pants.

To read the full thing (including a brief plug for the final weeks of "In Treatment"), click here. Click here to read the full post

Mad Men redux: Trapped in the closet

(Note: Because AMC is rerunning the first season of "Mad Men" every Sunday at midnight, and because a lot of people missed the show the first time around, I'm reposting my blog reviews for each episode the morning after. These are written as they were back in the summer/early fall; if I feel differently about anything in retrospect, I'll mention it in the comments. Also, while comments from both newbies and people who watched the first time are welcome, if you've seen these episodes before, please be vague about events in later episodes so as not to spoil things for the newcomers.)

Spoilers for "Mad Men" episode eight coming up just as soon as I find a piece of chalk...

Poor Salvatore. Poor damn Salvatore.

There was simultaneously a lot going on in this episode (more Dick Whitman backstory, lots of character work) and not very much (what there was of the plot ended at the 15 minute mark), and I want to write about it all, but I really feel the need to start with Salvatore because... damn. I actually had to pause my review screener for a moment to shake some dust out of my eye, you know?

Just as episode four added major shadings to the previously two-dimensional Pete, so does episode eight transform Salvatore from chronological inside joke -- he's a big fat queen and nobody gets it! -- into a fully-realized, tragic character. And in a completely unexpected way, at that.

I had assumed that the storyline would end one of two ways: Salvatore completely misreads the guy, who turns out to be straight and none too happy at another man making a pass at him; or the guy is gay but too afraid to do anything with Salvatore the accomplished homosexual. I never for a second would have thought it would be the other way around, because Salvatore has been written (and played by Bryan Batt) with so much confidence and energy and life force that I just assumed he had some kind of rich sex life in whatever underground gay scene New York had at the time. The notion that he's too afraid to act on his feelings, that he's a 40-year-old (gay) virgin, never even occurred to me, and yet when Salvatore revealed that he wouldn't know what to do in bed, then ran off altogether, well... like I said, dust. As with the Pete episode, it completely changes the way I view a lot of his prior behavior without in any way contradicting it. Who would have thought that Salvatore might genuinely feel more comfortable flirting with the pretty phone operator (who apparently replaced Mel from "Conchords") than the handsome cosmetics salesman, if only because he knows the former will never go anywhere? Just a superb scene, and a character I'm really going to have my eye on in the future.

Meanwhile, Don smokes enough primo kush to give us an extended flashback to his childhood. If nothing else, this episode should put the "Don is a closeted Jew" theory to bed once and for all, unless you want to assume that the mother who made him a "whore child" was Jewish. (Given how seriously Christian Dick's stepmom was, by the way, "whore child" could mean anything from his mom being an actual whore to his dad knocking up his mistress to his dad knocking up some random girl before he even got married. Obviously, far more onions to peel here.)

The hobo (played by Paul "Father Phil" Schulze from Matt Weiner's old show), meanwhile, turns out to be an enormously influential figure in Don's life, far more than the old man from whom he only inherited his looks and smoking habit. The notion of being a traveling man, able to just walk away from a bad situation, has stuck with him. Don walked away from being Dick Whitman (and, more recently, from his own half-brother), walked away from his farm life and into first the military, then the hobo's hometown of New York. Throughout this series, when Dick's closely-guarded emotions come to a boil, his response is to flee, whether driving away from his daughter's birthday party or trying to fly Midge to Paris so he won't have to think about the validity of Mr. Cooper's Ayn Rand lecture. The episode's last shot asserts this again; Don's office is his ultimate retreat, a place that bears the mark of another man (and/or marks him as a liar like his father), and a place where he can get away from it all... at least until Pete or Roger or Kenny barges in to tell an off-color joke Don will be required to laugh at.

So is Don done with Midge? We've already established that he'll pay people off to get them out of his life, and that he's uncomfortable with her bohemian world, and that he suspects Rachel Menken is out there waiting for him. (Dumping Midge would also make Rachel more amenable; as I wrote a few weeks ago, I think she could deal with being The Other Woman, but not The Other Other Woman.)

The third of this week's storylines (if you can call any of them that) was its weakest, with Pete and Peggy hooking up again. After I said I was puzzled by Peggy's reaction to Pete's hunting fantasy last week, a bunch of you chimed in to say she was clearly turned on by it. I went back, watched again and could see what you were saying, even as I was repulsed by Pete's monologue. The problem, I think, is that Peggy, more than any character who's not Don, is written in a way that leaves the big motivational burden on the actor -- she's complicated and slightly mysterious, and there's no one she can deliver explanatory monologues to -- and I don't know that Elisabeth Moss is as up to that challenge as Jon Hamm clearly is. I know there's a way to reconcile Peggy's independent streak with her attraction to the oiliest, most juvenile man at Sterling/Cooper (smart women, foolish choices and all that), but I don't think Moss is bridging the gap between those two sides of her.

I also don't know how much she's being helped by Vincent Kartheiser, who often seems like he's trying too hard to disappear into this character from another era. He's very mannered, particularly in the way he talks, and while some of that can be written off as Pete the character trying too hard to assert himself as a man in front of people who don't respect him, I don't think that all of it can. So when you put these two actors in a scene together, it can be an uphill battle. Hopefully, Pete sniping that he doesn't like to see Peggy "like this" -- i.e. happy, successful and assertive -- may be enough to make her realize what a childish putz he is and move on, if only so we don't have to see this pairing of actors going forward.

On the plus side, we got to see Peggy's lipstick ad campaign work -- with some blunt force salesmanship from Don, in my second favorite scene of the episode after Salvatore's dinner -- without the predictable, "Melrose Place"-style twists where Pete or Joan sabotage her, take credit for her work, etc., etc. And the other two-thirds of the episode were superb. Even when nothing happens, everything is happening.

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

The Wire, "-30-": Farewell to Baltimore

Moment of silence as we mourn the loss of the most amazing drama in TV history.

Okay. Very, very, very long spoilers for "-30-," the series finale of "The Wire," coming up just as soon as I find an up-and-coming TV critic to one day replace me...

(Also, if you're looking for the David Simon Q&A, click here. It's very long, and I'll have an abbreviated version both in the paper and on-line tomorrow morning.)

"Let's go home." -McNulty

Of course the final shot of "The Wire" is of Baltimore. Of course it is.

As David Simon says in our interview -- and as he has said throughout the show's run -- "We knew that the ultimate star of the narrative was Baltimore, and by extension the American city, and by extension America." No final image other than the Baltimore skyline -- particularly seen from the distance of the highway, a remote view seen by travelers who would be terrified to ever set foot in the West Baltimore the show has depicted for five seasons -- would have been appropriate.

The finale provided closure by the barrelful for all the human characters -- in many ways, it was the antithesis of "The Sopranos" ending -- but the one character whose fate remains very much up in the air is Baltimore itself. When the cycle turns round and round -- when a Bubbles escapes the junkie life only to be replaced by Dukie, when Carcetti sells out every last principle in order to become governor, when the keys to the police department are taken from Cedric Daniels and handed to Stan Valchek -- what can be done to save the city (and, by extension, America)? Can anything? Or was Bunny right last week when he said that there was nothing to be done?

I should say upfront that my experience of watching "-30-" will be different from yours. I got the final three episodes a few weeks ago, and after using a lot of willpower to tend to more pressing professional and familial obligations, I stayed up until 2 a.m. that night watching all of them. (And another hour past that, just trying to get my brain to stop replaying certain moments over and over.) So I view "-30-" and "Late Editions" and even "Clarifications" as one large chunk of the greater whole. (Ideally, "The Wire" is a show that should always be experienced at least three episodes at a time.) So my feelings about it are tied up with my feelings about "Late Editions," which in turn are tied up with my feelings about "Clarifications."

Stepping back and rewatching each one a week apart to take notes for blogging purposes, though, I can see how someone might find "-30-" (the title, for those who don't know, comes from a now largely outdated bit of newspaper shorthand to point out the proper end of an article) a bit of an anti-climax of "Late Editions." And, certainly, there's nothing quite as affecting as Dukie and Michael in the car.

But if you've been watching this show long enough to care about Bubbs' trip up the stairs (and, okay, I teared up at that) or Kima and Bunk presiding over a crime scene on the same sidewalk where William Gant was killed, then you should know by now that, like "The Sopranos," "The Wire" usually puts the emotional fireworks into the penultimate episode (The George Pelecanos Tearjerker Special) and then spend the finale on resolution.

And boy, there was a lot of resolution here. You can wonder about what might happen with certain characters -- specifically, how McNulty and Marlo each deal with becoming a man without a country -- but for the most part, we know exactly how everyone ended up, and if they've stepped into another character's role, then we have a pretty good idea what the future holds for them. Sure, Michael's having fun taking Omar's place as the Robin Hood of West Baltimore, but we also know that most Omars (albeit not all; see the real Donnie Andrews) wind up catching a bullet. The best case scenario for Dukie is that he drags himself out of addiction one day many years from now the way Bubbs did, but I don't even know if that's realistic; Bubbs had a sister who could provide the slimmest of support systems when he needed one, where Dukie has no one.

('Scuse me while I go find my David Simon voodoo doll.)

Now, some people I know who have already seen the finale thought it provided too much closure, that Simon tried to rush too many endings into 93 minutes -- or that he spent time spelling out fates (like Dukie and Michael) that should have been clear from previous episodes. I've also heard some complaints that too many characters get something too closely resembling a happy ending (McNulty seems okay with losing his badge, Daniels looks happy as a lawyer) or the direct opposite, that the ending is far too dark (Carcetti is governor, Nerese mayor, Valchek commissioner, Marlo is a free man, Jimmy and Lester and Daniels aren't cops anymore, Templeton gets a Pulitzer while Gus and Alma are demoted, Dukie's a junkie, etc.).

Me, I thought it felt just right.

First, some of the endings are ambiguous enough that they could be read as either happy or sad. Yes, Marlo is technically unpunished by the law for his role in those 22 murders (and many more), but Ronnie's deal with Levy winds up being the worst possible punishment for the man. In jail, he's still making money off the co-op (as Slim notes he could) and no doubt doing easy time like we saw Avon doing in season two, and his name lives on in the streets as the man responsible for all that killing. Death is something he was prepared for, too; as he told Vinson a season or two back, he knew his reign would likely be short and end in incarceration or death, but he thought it was his time to wear the crown.

But to be excommunicated from The Game? To be granted money and freedom but lose his power and his rep and the only world he's ever known or cared about? That's some "Twilight Zone" stuff right there. As Simon (who refused to elaborate on whether Marlo's return to the corner was a one-time thing or the beginning of his attempt to return to that life under the cop's noses) puts it in our interview:

Marlo is cut off from the source of his power, desperate to rescue his name. To me, the great irony is that Marlo ends up being granted what Stringer wanted -- and he has no use for it. To me, to a guy like Marlo Stanfield, hell is a business meeting with a bunch of developers. For Stringer, it was all he wanted.

Similarly, Jimmy's early retirement can be read as either his salvation or a cruel punishment. Throughout the series, it was suggested that his whole life was the job -- hence the mock wake when he had to leave it -- but we also saw, over and over, that the job was killing him. The policework fueled the booze, the booze fueled the anger, the anger fueled the work, and on and on. Stringer's death was enough of a shock to make Jimmy take a step back to at least something simple like going back in uniform, and for a while, he seemed happy.

But he was still a cop, still close enough to his old shenanigans that he was able to get sucked back in by the bodies in the vacants and his role in Bodie's death, and here he hit rock bottom. He drank, he whored himself around, and he invented this bogus serial killer that helped bust Marlo (sort of) but that also hurt -- and in two cases, resulted in the deaths of -- innocent people. Losing his badge was the very least he should have been punished, and yet it's also the best thing that could happen to Jimmy McNulty the man. When he sits with Beadie on her front steps, he looks a little lost (I can't see him taking a job like Herc's with Levy or the one Bunny had at the hotel) but not unhappy, exactly. If he wants to have a chance to be a real person with a real life, he needed to get away from that job, and his behavior this season guaranteed that he would. He can't bring back those two homeless men the copycat killed, but at least he went to the trouble to undo Larry's kidnapping and bring him home. When he tells Kima (in another moment that made my eyes a wee bit moist) that, if she thought she needed to turn him in, then she was right, he's not just trying to make her feel better; he believes that he shouldn't be a cop anymore.

As for the rest of it -- and I'll be hitting the fates of every major character at some point during this review -- I thought most of it worked perfectly. Some things may have felt rushed -- specifically Dukie's scam on Prez, which I'll get back to -- but others were perfectly-timed. The show spent a season-long story arc on whether or not a man would get to go up a staircase and through a door, and all the set-up was worth it for that brief glimpse of Bubbs bounding up the steps and sitting down with his family at the dinner table. You want to talk about earning a moment? That, there, is an earned moment.

Some characters got better than they deserve (Valchek, Rawls, Templeton, Herc and Levy, the politicans), some got worse (Dukie, Gus) and others came out about right (Cheese, Chris, Lester), but The Game is The Game, the system is the system, and life goes on. Until something fundamentally changes, there will always be another Marlo, another Omar, another Burrell, etc. The show has always been cyclical. Remember the end of season one, with Poot having absorbed some of D'Angelo's lessons about slinging and passing them on to the new version of himself? This is what the show is, was and always will be, because, as David Simon sees it, this is what the system is, was and always will be.

(Ironically, one of the episode's biggest victims is not a person but an institution. Think how much better off the Baltimore Police Department would have been with Daniels as its commissioner. Valchek's just another symptom of the same disease. In this show's fictional universe, what's done to the BPD is just as tragic as what happens to the kids who aren't Namond.)

Before I get to individual characters and moments from the finale, I want to say a few words about the Baltimore Sun story, which was supposed to be the spine of the season just as much as the kids were for season four, Hamsterdam was for season three, etc. Again, Simon is going to go into great length about this in the interview, but his fundamental argument is that all the stuff with Templeton is a smokescreen. As he sees it, the real problem at the Sun isn't what Scott's doing, but what isn't being done by everyone else: covering all the stories we're aware of this season, but that the Sun omits from its pages (Joe and Omar's deaths, the disbanding of the MCU, Carcetti pressuring the cops to cook stats, etc.).

"That is the last piece in the ‘Wire’ puzzle: If you think anyone will be paying attention to anything you encountered in the first four seasons of this show, think again."

And I see what he's saying, to a point. I certainly took notice of those various moments when Alma would pitch a big story (to us) to Gus and it would wind up as a brief, or out of the paper altogether. And I think the Templeton story did add some value, both as a parallel/aid to the McNulty story, and as a reflection of some of the bigger lies that have been foisted on us by politicians and the press in recent years. (Like so many things in "The Wire," the serial killer storyline can be read as an Iraq parallel, which I guess would make Marlo into Afghanistan, but maybe that's a stretch.)

My problem is that, especially from the moment Twigg took the buyout and left, the screen time has been so disproportionately in favor of Templeton making stuff up and against incidents of the rest of the Sun staff failing to adequately report what's really happening in Baltimore that the story completely overwhelms the subtext. Worse, it feels like it runs counter to everything "The Wire" is about.

Simon has said time and time and time again that network TV dramas take the easy way out and portray corruption and other villainy as an individual problem. Get rid of the one dirty cop on the force, the one crooked politician at City Hall, and everything will be fine. "The Wire" doesn't believe that, and yet it spent so much time in its final season on a story of one individual causing all these problems for his institution. Firing Templeton from the Sun wouldn't come close to solving the paper's many problems, but the amount of time spent on him makes it seem like it would, you know? "If only Gus didn't have to waste so much time chasing down this jerk's lies, things might get done around here!" And, yes, Scott is very much enabled by Whiting and Klebanow, and by what Simon sees as a prize-chasing culture that's now endemic to places like the Sun. But I feel like the problems plaguing newspapers and other media (and just in the week between "Late Editions" and the finale, I've heard of half a dozen friends at various papers either getting laid off or reassigned to jobs designed to make them quit, so it's bad, people) go much, much deeper than the various incidents of fabulism. I don't object to it being included -- my first editor at the college paper was a fella by the name of Steve Glass -- but I wish it had been balanced in with more incidents of why the Sun never properly tells the stories we know are out there.

Now, with a finale so wide-ranging and dealing with so many people, I feel the best way to proceed is to take it character-by-character (or group-by-group) and discuss their fates, what that implied, and whether I liked it, then hit some other unrelated points before opening up the floor to everyone else. Even though there's nothing remotely as baffling as Tony Soprano with the onion rings and the Journey, I imagine we're going to have a lot to talk about for a while, still. Since I largely dealt with Jimmy and Marlo above, let's start with....

Dukie (and Prez): I can't tell you the number of e-mails and comments I've gotten in the last week along the lines of "If they make Dukie into a junkie, I'm going to kill David Simon." If I was Simon right about now, I'd want to see if Donnie Andrews does bodyguarding work (or maybe some of the recon soldiers from "Generation Kill" can moonlight). Talk about a stomach punch. On the one hand, they absolutely set this up last week -- have been setting it up practically since they introduced Dukie as the one clean member of a family of junkies. (I'm far from an expert on addiction, but even I know that if you're raised in that environment, even if you hate it and understand how destructive it is, when things go bad it can be very hard to resist the temptation.) So I should have been prepared for the image of Dukie shooting up, or before that, of Dukie scamming money from Prez. But even so...

(stream of curses deleted)

(another stream of curses deleted)

(tissue box reached for)

One of the surprising things Simon mentioned in the interview was that the writing staff, early in season four, wasn't sure whether it would be Dukie or Randy who would wind up taking Bubbs' place. Randy was my favorite of the boys, so I'm not sure I could bear to see that, but Dukie stayed with us even longer, was even more innocent and more put-upon, and to have him go down the exact road his family did...

(resisting urge to curse again)

I do find it surprising, and yet not, how myself and so many other "Wire" fans seem most invested in the fate of the boys, who didn't even show up until the series was 60 percent over. It's a testament to the great job the writers and those four actors did with these characters, but it's also a mark that they're, well, kids. Tragedies suffered by anyone are bad, but by kids -- especially three nice, warm-hearted, well-meaning boys like Dukie and Michael and Randy -- the pain feels magnified a hundred-fold. I feel bad that D'Angelo and Omar died, that Bunny lost his pension, that Daniels had to retire, but few things on this show will ever sting as badly as seeing Wallace die, or hearing Randy yell down the hallway at Sgt. Carver, or seeing Dukie in that alley, tying off a vein.

If I have one issue with the story, it's what I alluded to above: I think, within the chronology of the episode, his scamming Prez should have come much closer to the end than the beginning. If we assume that the meeting in Carcetti's office is the morning after Daniels and Pearlman found out what McNulty did, and that Lester running into Ronnie at the courthouse takes place, at most, a day later (and more likely on the same day; I didn't think to check the wardrobes), then Dukie goes to Tilghman Middle either the day after he's dropped off with the Arabers, or the day after that. And while I have no problem believing he'd fall that quickly into the lure of dope -- given the hopeless circumstances, wouldn't you? -- I feel like running a con on one of the few remaining human beings who knows or cares about him is something he would have needed just a little longer to fall into. Again, I'm no addiction expert, and maybe Dukie's new mentor guilted him into it in exchange for letting him stay at the stables, but dramatically, I would have liked more passage of time for that.

Now, remember what I said a few weeks back about how I hoped we didn't see Prez again? At the time, I was worried he might get laid off as a casualty of the budget games with the serial killer, but even with his job secure, I still wish he hadn't come back. Sure, he looks to have gotten the hang of being a disciplinarian without losing his innate Prez-ness, but I didn't want to have to see him encounter Dukie that way. All season, and especially in the last week, people have been hoping that Dukie would go to Prez for help, and I'm sure the writers knew people would be thinking that, so they take our expectations and use them to club our heartstrings to death.

While Prez may be naive in some ways, he was a po-lice long enough to know what Dukie was up to from the minute he got a good look at him, but he went along with it, anyway, either on the minute off-chance that he was wrong, or, more likely, because he feels guilty for Dukie being in his current circumstances. Maybe, Prez thinks, if he had been warmer towards Dukie when he visited him with the little present at the end of last season, instead of taking Ms. Donnelly's advice to try to divorce himself emotionally from ex-students, Dukie would have come to him much sooner than this moment. And now, if he sticks to his promise to not want to see Dukie again, who does that leave for Dukie to run to if he decides he wants out? Nobody, goddammit. And I'm going to move on before I begin ranting and raving about the fate of a fictional character who from minute one was designed to break my heart, and onto the only slightly more optimistic fate of....

Michael: I'll admit it: while a lot of the commenters over the last two weeks (beginning with when "Late Editions" first played On Demand) have been predicting Michael as the new Omar, his raid on Vinson's rim shop took me by complete surprise when I first saw it -- and yet it was one of those glorious moments where everything makes such perfect sense that it put a big smile on my face.

It's funny how, for the better part of this season, and even last season, many people (including me) have been declaring Michael to be "the new Bodie," "the new D'Angelo," "Marlo in training," "Avon in training," etc. As some of the commenters last week noted, Michael has always been written and portrayed as kind of a mirror character. Other characters look at him and see something of themselves in him, which is why so many people were eager to mentor him last year. Bodie saw another great corner boy, Marlo a fellow self-made man, Cutty a great boxer, Prez a good student, etc. He has traits in common with other characters, but the one that's always defined him has been his independence, his lack of interest in being beholden to anyone. He worked Bodie's corner to make money, and willingly took instruction from Chris and Snoop, but that was to pay off the debt for them killing Bug's dad. He's always been his own man, even though he's still technically a boy.

So even though his path and Omar's only crossed twice, and neither occasion was what you would call a mentor/mentee opportunity, it makes perfect sense that this is the man whose footsteps Michael would ultimately choose to follow. Michael's too independent to function properly within any institution, and his experience of the last year or so has made him unfit to do anything but be a criminal, so that leaves a role that's in The Game but not of The Game. Plus, he's shown in the past a certain flair for the dramatic, notably in his plan to humiliate Officer Walker and his theft of The Ring from Walker. Is Tristan Wilds aping Michael K. Williams a little too much in that scene at the rim shop? Maybe, but Michael's young yet; I imagine he'll develop his own style over time. I doubt, for instance, that we'll ever hear him whistling nursery rhymes.

Reginald: Should we even call him Bubbles anymore? Is that the name he should be known by, or just the name he used when he was on the street? Last week, he introduced himself at the NA meeting as Reginald, but quickly slipped in a reference to his nickname. Names do have power on this show (just ask Marlo), and I like to think of the guy who read his story in the Sun, who wears sunglasses to keep his mind clear on a sunny day, who gets to go up those steps and through that door and eat a meal like a member of the family instead of an untrusted burden, as Reginald. In my dream world where HBO revisits "The Wire" every five years or so, I'd like to think that Reginald would barely factor into the new narrative, that he might get a cameo like Namond and Bunny to show how well he's doing, but that he wouldn't get sucked back into storylines and communities that he's graduated from. And I smile every time I think of him casually jogging up those steps, like it ain't no thing that he gets to do it.

Lester: Like Jimmy, he seemed at peace with retirement. He had already spent 13 years (and four months) in a kind of retirement in the pawn shop unit, and he had lectured Jimmy in the past about the importance of having a life outside the job. I'm sure Lester will miss the work, miss being able to pull off his usual investigative miracles, but he has his dollhouses, and more importantly has Shardene, who all but worships him. (Look at how happy she is just to be with him while he works on that tiny furniture.) I think Jimmy came to realize much sooner what a mistake the serial killer scam was, because he was at the center of it while Lester was just using it as a tool to focus on Marlo, but when Ronnie points out that he's the reason they lost the money trail, I think Lester finally gets it. This is, in fact, on him, and it's time to go and enjoy other things.

(With 20/20 hindsight, I suppose there was a way to pull off the scam without having it taint the Marlo investigation, but it would have involved a lot more patience and the hope that, as the money tap stayed on, he would have eventually been able to get approval for a legal wiretap. Then again, a legal wiretap might have gotten Levy's attention, depending on whether Lester had plugged the courthouse leak by that point. As with so many things about this show, I keep looking for ways that things could have turned out better than they did, but in "The Wire," the fates are the fates.)

Kima & Bunk : There remains debate over who did the right thing with their knowledge of the phony serial killer: Bunk, for keeping silent to protect his friends Jimmy and Lester; or Kima, for ratting them out and endangering the Marlo case in the process because it was the right thing to do. As I said last week, I have no problem with what Kima did, just as Jimmy and Lester themselves don't seem to by the end.

That said, whether or not Bunk tattled to Landsman, he and Kima were the straight cops of this season, Kima by telling the truth when she knew it, Bunk by finding a way to put a murder charge on Chris without having to resort to Jimmy-level shenanigans. So I like that they wind up as partners at the end (and, as mentioned above, are working a murder at the same location where Bird killed Gant for being a witness in D'Angelo's trial). But though Bunk quotes his "There you go, giving a fuck when it ain't your turn" line from the pilot, Kima isn't the new McNulty; she's the new Bunk. (Sort of.)

Sydnor & Carver: If there's a cyclical bit of recasting that felt a little abrupt, it was Sydnor as the new Jimmy. Until he got sucked into the fake serial killer scheme a few episodes back, Sydnor had always been one of the cleaner characters on the show, arguably the only cop with no dirt on him, or who never did things that he knew would hurt other people for selfish reasons. Once he got in with the plan, he certainly soaked up a lot of knowledge from Lester, but this is one of those things that probably would have benefited from an extra episode or two, so we could have seen some signs that Sydnor was starting to enjoy his role as a renegade cop.

I have no problem whatsoever, though, buying Carver as the new Daniels. (You'll note that, when Sydnor is bitching to Judge Phelan the way Jimmy used to, he complains about "Lt. Carver" getting the run-around from some major, in the same way Jimmy used to argue on Daniels' behalf. I'm sure Carver's just as in the dark about Sydnor's "help" as Daniels was.) Carver was Daniels' protege before he was Bunny's (and again after, when Daniels was running the Western), and I'd argue he's grown and changed as much as or more than any other character on the show. Season one, Herc and Carver were interchangeable. Now, Carver's a natural po-lice, the type who, in a less dysfunctional department, might make one hell of a commissioner some day. It's good to know that the department hasn't lost all of its good cops overnight.

Daniels: Again, Daniels for Valchek is one of the most lopsided trades this side of Lou Brock for Ernie Broglio, or Scott Kazmir for Victor Zambrano. It sucks that Daniels loses his shot at the top job -- and that the BPD loses an upstanding reformer in favor of the hackiest of all possible hacks -- but like Jimmy and Lester, Cedric at least has the love of a good woman (depending on your opinion of Ronnie), and he seemed okay with finally putting his law degree to use. (Interesting that he would choose to be a defense attorney, but I suppose staying away from the State's Attorney's office keeps him out of the sphere of influence of people like Nerese.) It's also interesting that he chooses to sacrifice his career for Ronnie's -- he probably could have fought Nerese and won, but at the cost of Ronnie's job (and maybe Marla's) -- where Ronnie isn't willing to sacrifice herself to blow the whistle on Jimmy, Lester and Carcetti. I'm not saying the situations are completely analogous, or that Ronnie should be forced to give up her job instead of Cedric, especially since she does put herself at considerable risk with Levy. And speaking of which...

Ronnie, Levy & Herc: ...where the hell did that Bawlmer accent come from in the Levy negotiation scene? A very odd choice. I can see where they were coming from with that -- in a completely desperate moment, when Ronnie's risking her career and even freedom to get some kind of justice for Marlo and company, she drops whatever cultured airs she's taken on over the years and reverts to the scrappy native girl I'm assuming she used to be -- but they've never gone into her backstory enough for it to quite work.

Still, I really enjoyed that scene and the way that Maury, once again, finds a way to turn an impossible situation to his advantage. Along with Clay, Maury's one of the true villains of "The Wire" -- people like him allow the Marlos and Stringers of the world to thrive -- and so it's appropriate that he comes out of the series stronger than ever, much as I would love to see him and Herc (who has now unambiguously sold what's left of his soul for more attaboys and brisket invitations) doing hard time for their various infractions over the years. A "Wire" where Maury Levy gets caught isn't the show we know, is it?

But back to Ronnie for a moment. I didn't catch it until the second viewing (a lot going on in this one, sorry) that her judgeship comes directly from Steintorf's promise that he and Carcetti would remember whatever she did to salvage as much as possible from the Marlo case (specifically, the conviction for the murders in the vacants). So her motives still aren't 100% pure when she goes to barter with Levy. But that seems about right for the honorable Ms. Pearlman. On a show full of characters who either battled in vain to change the way their institutions operated or who rolled over and supported the status quo, she was one of the few who fell in between those extremes. She usually did mean well, but she also never wanted to upset her bosses, or her pals across the aisle. This was about as heroic a Rhonda Pearlman as you're ever going to see. And whatever issues I may have had with the sudden appearance of the accent (not to mention the execution of same, though the locals can defend or assail that better than I can), I thought Deirdre Lovejoy did a great job in that scene where she defended herself and the plea to Lester and Jimmy.

Carcetti and company: Behold, the triumph of the hacks. Norman is now reduced to playing the jester (we only ever see him anymore when there's a joke to be made), while the odious Steintorf is the real power behind the throne. Tommy the reformer has become everything he swore he would fight against, and in the process has helped elevate fellow hacks like Nerese, Rawls and Valchek. Nothing will be done to fix Baltimore with those people in charge, and with half the state money already committed to PG County, and no doubt with Tommy already trying to position himself for a presidential run a few terms down the line. I cringe thinking about how I let the show lull me into believing in Carcetti's "new day" back in season four. And speaking of New Days...

Cheese, Slim & the co-op: The finale didn't offer much in the way of viewer gratification, but Cheese taking a bullet to the head certainly qualified. Excuse me while I get all action movie fan and say hell yeah!

I've noticed in some fan circles that Cheese evinces even more hatred than Marlo. No doubt it's because he betrayed his own kin, and after said kin had already risked his own neck to protect Cheese. (Remember, if Joe had given up Cheese to Marlo after Omar robbed the re-supply, Joe wouldn't have had to introduce Marlo to Vondas, and he might still be alive because Marlo didn't want to lose the connect.) So on that level, Cheese's death -- particularly at the hands of master-less samurai Slim Charles -- was awfully satisfying. There were many points during the series when I wanted to see Snoop dead, but the actual moment of her demise deliberately denied us any real visceral pleasure, because she took it with such dignity and because it was another part of Michael's slide into hell. But Slim putting a bullet in Cheese's head while Cheese was in the middle of a bile-filled monologue celebrating the lack of loyalty and nostalgia in the drug game... that was nice. After Bubbs walking up the stairs, it may have been the most uplifting moment of the whole finale.

("The Wire": a guy goes up some stairs, and another guy takes a bullet to the head for being an asshole, and these are the feel-good moments!)

It's unclear exactly how the new version of the co-op is going to work -- or even that it's a co-op, as opposed to Fat Face Rick and Slim somehow scrounging up 10 million on their own or finding some other way to get an in with Vondas. (Given that Slim was Joe's #2, and that Vondas had established with Marlo that he dealt with both bosses and their seconds, I wondered why Slim didn't just try to go directly to Vondas. Surely he knew him and where to find him, and it's not like Marlo was the most reliable of referrals given his current situation.) What really struck me about that whole part of the story was how much trouble these drug lords were having coming up with that much money, especially all together. From what I remember of Lester and Prez's calculations of Stringer and Avon's profit margin back in season one, those guys were much better with their money than the old hands in the co-op.

The Greek & Vondas: Same as it ever was. "Always business." With The Greek as the representative for pure capitalism, I knew there was no way the cops would even get close to him and Vondas. As with Levy, Clay, etc., a "Wire" where Vondas wound up in bracelets wouldn't be true to itself.

I know there was grumbling about why The Greek gave Marlo the okay to kill Joe (Simon explains it in the interview), just as I imagine there will be some more about why The Greek continues to do business in Baltimore given that they've lost two shipments (three, if you count the one they left on the docks at the end of season two) due to their various partners getting sloppy. And, again, I view it as The Greek deciding that these are acceptable losses and risks when weighed against the benefit of having the entire city all to themselves. If one distributor falls, even if a shipment or two gets taken, there will always be a new distributor, and enough demand for the product to make up for what was lost. And The Greek will always be so far removed from the action that he can easily flee for a little while should things get the slightest bit hot.

Chris & Wee-Bey: It oddly warmed my heart to see these two stone killers as prison yard buddies. There are, of course, many parallels. Both were their boss' top enforcer, just as both were either father or father figure to one of the boys to season four. Wee-Bey did the right thing by Namond in giving him up to Bunny, just as Chris thought he was doing the right thing by Michael in beating his stepfather to death and then training Michael to be a killer himself. (Hey, intentions count for something, don't they?)

Rawls: I know I mentioned him briefly in the passage about Carcetti, but I think Rawls deserves his own entry, if only for uttering one of the funniest lines in "Wire" history, when he asked McNulty whether he was really killing the homeless guys himself.

The thing about Rawls is that he's not a Valchek, someone who wouldn't know his ass from a hole in the ground. There were plenty of signs over the years that Rawls knew what he was doing (him figuring out that the street signs at Kima's shooting had been turned, him being the first one at COMSTAT to understand what Bunny was doing with Hamsterdam), and even a hint or three that he might have been interested in properly fixing the department if the opportunity were given to him. (He didn't seem displeased to witness Daniels dressing down Steintorf last week, for instance.) But between his own petty grudges and the realities of the department and City Hall, he settled into his role as attack dog guardian of the system. Even McNulty, desperate to dig himself out of the damage he created with the serial killer scam, refused to go along with Rawls' order to coerce a confession to all of the "murders," and as Jimmy, Bunk, Jay and then Daniels all walked away from him, you could see that Rawls knew it was too much, too. Still, I doubt he'll run the staties any differently than his predecessor.

Templeton, Gus & The Sun: I discussed my larger beefs with this story way up top. In the end, things played out about as expected, given the show's worldview and what each character had done to this point. Gus doesn't get fired, but him being sent to the copy desk is every bit a waste of his talents as putting Jimmy on the boat or Lester in the pawn shop unit. Alma, who might have been a good cop shop reporter one day -- and who was still preferable to whatever rookie they throw into that beat next -- gets banished to the county bureaus, and I would even argue that putting Fletcher into Gus's job just as he was starting to show real talent as a reporter is a waste of resources. It's typical of Klebanow and Whiting that they get tumescent over this nonsense homeless series about which many obvious questions have been raised -- if nothing else, you would think the undercover cop's account of what really happened with the myserious gray van would have finally given those two some pause -- while completely ignoring what sounds like a tremendous piece of narrative journalism by a less-favored son.

(This, by the way, is one of those areas where telling a story about a newspaper on a TV show gets tricky. Were this a book, they could run some significant excerpts, if not the whole version, of Fletch's profile of Reginald/Bubbs, but instead we have to take the word of Gus, and of Walon, that it's so wonderful. Be a nice web or DVD extra if Simon were to bang out his own faux-profile under Fletcher's byline.)

As for Templeton, yes, he gets his Pulitzer. (And, while I initially questioned whether Klebanow and Whiting would risk submitting the story when several staffers could bring great humiliation on the paper by ratting it out, Simon said that in real life, Marimow and Carroll did submit the lead paint series written by the alleged fabulist.) But he has to live with the knowledge of what he did to get it, and that other people know, too. It was one thing for Scott to get so much attention for a situation where he thought he was making stuff up to add to a real story, but to find out that even the parts he thought were true were bogus -- to find out that he was played by a fabulist just as much as he played his bosses -- clearly messed him up. (Jimmy spilling the beans to Scott was one of the finale's highlights. "The Wire": a guy walks up some stairs, another guy takes a bullet in the head, and one liar tells the truth to another! The upliftingest show ever!)

And, sure, Gus could try going public with the file he and Robert put together, but it would no doubt get him fired -- and given the vast number of newspaper vets around the country who are suddenly in need of work, this isn't a good time to get yourself fired.

A few other random thoughts on "-30-":

-With Clark Johnson back in the director's chair for the first time since season one, we saw a couple of visual signatures that the show stopped using after he left -- specifically, the use of black & white surveillance footage (as in McNulty and Daniels on the elevator), security mirrors (Levy meeting with Marlo) and other viewpoints designed to show how often we're being watched -- and how many ways there are of seeing a single situation.

-Another obvious full circle choice was the use of the Blind Boys of Alabama's version of "Way Down in the Hole" from season one (still my favorite of the five) as the song over the final montage, which was itself filled with images, locations and people from seasons past. In addition to the final fates of all the above characters (and of Crutchfield busting Kenard for the Omar killing), we saw the original basement headquarters of the Major Crimes Unit, the low-rise courtyards where D'Angelo once ran things (plus, later, a glimpse of D's hand showing off the chess pieces), a Port police car (presumably Beadie's) driving through the stacks, the police boat on the harbor, and Old-Face Andre's corner store, among other familiar sights.

-Even more poignant was the interlude of sunrises and sunsets over various Baltimore neighborhoods that separated the episode proper (the resolution of the serial killer story and Marlo's case) from the extended epilogue. The city seemed so peaceful and beautiful in those shots -- a place worth fighting to save, you know?

-A number of people last week "guessed" that the business cards at Christenson's murder scene meant that the copycat was the homeless guy who collected cards. That was the closest anyone here came to posting something I worried might be a disguised spoiler, but I left it in because, frankly, they spent so much time on the guy earlier in the season that I suspected he would come up again, and as soon as we saw cards scattered at that first crime scene, I knew what was what. And I'm not so smart that other people couldn't have figured out the same thing.

-In case you were wondering, the courthouse leak was grand jury prosecutor Gary DiPasquale, played by Gary D'Addario, the Homicide commander during the year that David Simon was writing "Homicide" the book, and the inspiration for Gee on the TV show. He's popped up on "The Wire" a handful of times over the years (his most memorable appearance was earlier this season, when he heckled the guy who complained that he was too important to wait his turn). I'm fine with the leak being a very minor figure like that; the leak itself wasn't a major storyline, but rather a plot device to enable the deal Ronnie brokers with Levy.

-Look closely, and you can see David Simon in the Sun newsroom, typing next to Zorzi, at the very start of the scene where Scott tells Klebanow he doesn't feel well enough to write about the killer's capture. And the sign in front of Simon reads "Save our Sun."

-Among the many, many, many things I'm going to miss about this show is Lance Reddick's perfect posture and dead-eye stare, two traits he got to show off during several encounters with McNulty.

-I like how we transitioned from Jimmy, back in the good graces of Beadie's kids (if not Beadie herself), showing them "the dreaded crab claw," to Reginald and Walon eating actual crab claws.

-Whatever hatred I now have for Carcetti doesn't extend to Aidan Gillen's portrayal of him. Carcetti's struggle to find something, anything, to say about the truth about the serial killer was one of the most priceless moments all season.

-How much do you think everyone at the faux-wake knew about the real reasons for Jimmy and Lester's retirement? Is the serial killer/Marlo story going to become the cops' own version of the death of Omar, where the story keeps getting elaborated upon as time goes on, but no one from outside the culture ever hears about it? And I hope you caught, after "The Body of an American" came on one last time, that glimpse of the photos of Det. Cole (aka Bob Colesberry, late "Wire" producer) and Col. Foerster (aka late "Wire" actor Richard DeAngelis) on the wall at the bar.

-Two things of note from Marlo's return (temporary or not) to the corner: 1)The legend of Omar's death continues to grow and grow, now involving hitmen from New York; and 2)After three years of people questioning why Marlo had the power when Chris and Snoop were doing all the heavy work, we see that Marlo can handle himself just fine in a fight, thank you. Admittedly, those two corner boys didn't look like they'd been through Chris' combat training school, but winning one against two when the other two have a gun and a knife is still impressive.

Lines of the Week:

"I wish I was still at the newspaper so I could write on this mess. This is too fucking good." -Norman

"I believe he's about to have one of those 'road to Damascus' moments." & "See? The police commissioner done fell off his ass." -Norman

"Shit is like a war, ain't it? Easy to get in, hell to get out." -Bunk

"To be continued." -Daniels

"I remember 'clean.'" -Gus

"You're not killing them yourself, McNulty -- at least assure me of that." -Rawls

"You're mishpacha now." -Levy
"If you say so." -Herc

"Though had he lived, his dick would have been 134." -Carver

"Detective, if you think it needed doing, then I guess it did." -McNulty

"That was for Joe." -Slim Charles

"This sentimental motherfucker just cost us money!" -Tall Man

"There you go, giving a fuck when it ain't your turn to give a fuck." -Bunk

"You just a boy." -Vinson
"BANG!" -Michael's shotgun
"That's just a knee." -Michael

Whew.

Well, that's all I've got for the moment, so fire away. I'm going to dearly, dearly miss this show, but I'll say this: in the '80s, I never thought TV drama could get better than "Hill Street Blues" and "St. Elsewhere," and then it did. In the '90s, I didn't think cop shows could get better than the early seasons of "Homicide" and "NYPD Blue," and then they did. It's easy to look on the final episode of "The Wire" -- and of an HBO schedule that's now devoid of "The Wire" and "The Sopranos" and "Deadwood" -- and wonder if the latest golden age of drama is over. But I can see myself 5, 10 years from now writing something like, "I know this sounds like blasphemy, but (insert name of new show written by some guy named David here) may be even better than 'The Wire.'" Whoever wants to try to get to the top of this mountain has his or her work cut out, but I think it can be done. "Hill Street" taught people to watch TV in a new way, which in turn led to "St. Elsewhere" and "NYPD Blue." "Homicide" allowed "The Wire" to exist. I'm sure somehow, someone's going to figure out how to build on what Simon, and Burns, and Colesberry and Pelecanos and Price and Lehane and everyone else here created. And I look forward to watching and writing about that show when it comes. Watching "The Wire" may have made me terribly pessimistic about the future of our country, but it fills me with hope for the future of TV.

Months back, I said that I intended to immediately follow the end of the series with a rewind back to the beginning, so I could blog about seasons 1-3 in the same depth I gave to season four and season five. And I still want to do that, but, frankly, I need a break. As you can imagine, these reviews take a lot of time to do properly, and with the rest of primetime TV weeks away from returning, my schedule's going to get even busier in a hurry. I want to say that I'm going to try picking up with season one in two or three weeks (and I'd post them on Sunday nights or Monday mornings as if they episodes were still airing), but in case it takes longer than that, please understand. But I'm looking forward to going back to the beginning to see what other "Yo, my turn to be Omar"-esque moments were planted early, and to relive great moments like the chess lesson, the F-word crime scene, Bubbs on the park bench, etc. If everything about "The Wire" is circular, then it feels right as we come to the end to go back to the beginning, and very soon.

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