How much is too much?

So I've noticed that the comments for the "Cupid" posts have been dwindling as we've moved along, and I'm wondering why. Are people just not that into the show? Or is two episodes a week too many, even during the strike?

The reason I ask, in part, is because Monday brings the debut of "In Treatment," the latest in a long tradition of HBO shows about people in therapy (see also "The Sopranos," "Tell Me You Love Me," "Sessions," etc.). What makes this one unique is that it's a five night a week show. On each of the first four nights, Gabriel Byrne's shrink sees a different patient (including Blair Underwood, Josh Charles and Melissa George), and on the fifth night, he goes to see his own shrink (Dianne Wiest).

Now, admittedly, I'm the guy who got all sucked into "Tell Me You Love Me" and watched all 10 episodes in a day and a half or something, even though I hated two-thirds of the characters, so take this opinion for what it's worth. But after starting off somewhat cool to "In Treatment," I'm really enjoying it, and the only thing preventing me from watching more (HBO has already sent out seven of the nine weeks of the first season) is the number of hours in the day and the other stuff I have to do. Byrne is brilliant, as he almost always is, and the format (all therapy, all the time) is surprisingly engrossing. A few of the characters have problems similar to the people I hated on "Tell Me You Love Me," and I'm much more into it here; I wonder what that show would have been like had it all taken place in Jane Alexander's office without all the genitalia.

But even I recognize the kind of commitment you need to make with this show. I know daytime soap fans watch their shows every day, and fans of shows in other formats ("Jeopardy," Conan, "The Daily Show") do that, too, but it still feels like a lot. There's some modularity to it -- if you only care about Blair Underwood, you could probably just watch his episodes -- but there's enough crossover from patient to patient (something that happened with George may affect Byrne's behavior with Underwood the next day, that kind of thing) that you'd feel like you were missing out if you didn't watch it all.

I'm going to deal with this more in my column review of the show on Monday, but I'm wondering how many people are going to want to put in the time for this, even with little other scripted programming at the moment. I'm not even sure I'll have the patience to blog it five nights a week; since HBO is airing it in a variety of formats and platforms, including a Sunday marathon of the previous week's episodes, maybe I'll just hit it at the end of each week. I don't know.

Just thinking out loud. Don't mind me. Click here to read the full post

Sepinwall on TV: NBC serves up a 'Chuck' sandwich

When I posted that DVR alert for tonight's "Chuck" double feature yesterday, I didn't think I'd be writing much in my column about it, but things at work got switched up enough that I wound up writing a few hundred words on the show's return. I'll obviously have more tonight at 11 after the second one ends. Click here to read the full post

Life on Mars: What is life, anyway?

I've been lax in blogging about "Life on Mars" this year, for reasons I'll get into after the jump, but now that it's all over, I wanted to talk about the ending, the meaning of the series, Bowie, etc. So spoilers coming up just as soon as I change my name...

Like I said, I had planned to make this show a part of the regular strike blogging rotation, but as I watched each season two episode, my interest began to fade. I don't even know that they were appreciably worse than season one, but I think once the novelty of the idea wore off, it became clear that "Life on Mars" was just a procedural cop show with an anachronistic twist, and that twist wasn't enough most weeks to overcome the procedure-fatigue I've written about so often of late. It was amusing to see what kind of Sipowicz-esque bit of crudeness would escape Philip Glenister's lips, but I had nothing much to say about the episodes themselves. So I figured I'd wait for the finale, find out exactly what was up with Sam, and then write about that.

And now that I know... whoa.

No time travel here, folks. Our boy was just in a coma, and now he's... what, dead? Is 1973 Manchester supposed to be Heaven, or some kind of endless "life flashing before your eyes" fantasy for Sam?

The finale tried to head fake us with the attempt to make Sam think he was actually from 1973, that it was the 21st century that was the fantasy. But given that what we saw of Sam's life in the present so closely resembled the actual present, I knew that was bogus. What are the odds of a guy from 1973 imagining the iPod all on his own? So when he bailed on the shootout in the tunnel and woke up in a modern hospital, I wasn't surprised.

But when Sam, completely adrift and unable to feel anything back in his real life, went up on the roof, the complete Bowie song played again, and he jumped off the roof? Again... whoa.

I can't for the life of me imagine the David E. Kelley version (if it ever gets made at this point) climaxing with the main character committing suicide because his coma life was more appealing than the real thing. American network TV has gotten more daring, but I imagine most American viewers would consider that as big a middle finger as the "Sopranos" finale. But good on Matthew Graham for taking the dark, unexpected way out. I understand there's going to be a spin-off built around Gene Hunt in the early '80s (or the coma version of same); very strange.

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

DVR alert: A 'Chuck' sandwich tomorrow night

I'm gonna mention this in tomorrow's column, but given how people have already gotten out of the habit of looking for new episodes of scripted network shows, I wanted to throw in an early reminder that NBC has two episodes of "Chuck" scheduled to air tomorrow at 8 and 10, flanking an episode of "Celebrity Apprentice." I've seen both "Chuck"s, and they're good (especially the first one). And depending on how much longer the strike goes, they may be the last ones we see for quite some time. Click here to read the full post

Heath Ledger, R.I.P.

I don't ordinarily get into celebrity news (gossip or otherwise), but the unexpected death of Heath Ledger (only 28, and with a two-year-old daughter), on the day that the Associated Press had to defend the practice of preparing obituaries for at-risk celebrities under 30, is very strange, and very sad.

The above picture is of Ledger's one brief TV stint, as the star of "Roar," a Shaun Cassidy-created swords and sorcery series that was part of a late '90s Fox push into original scripted programming in the summer.

Life is weird -- and, for some, far too short. Click here to read the full post

Strike Survival TV Club: Cupid, "Meat Market"

Spoilers for the "Cupid" episode "Meat Market" coming up just as soon as I inspect a few tattoos...

This one's just plain fun.

There are episodes of "Cupid" that are more insightful about relationships, or have magical moments, or emotionally powerful ones. "Meat Market" has some sprinkles of all that, but mostly what it's about is a balls-out, raunchy, joke-filled drunken good time. Seems about right for a Halloween episode, no?

So it is, in fact, Halloween, which Claire declares the worst day of the year to be single after New Year's Eve. (You would think Valentine's Day would come up, especially with its Cupidian elements, but whatever.) The members of Claire's singles group, all feeling demoralized from their lack of success (every person who finds someone doesn't come back, after all), don't want to go out on the night, but Trevor goads them into it in typical fashion, with a speech that's sort of like Henry V's St. Crispin's Day address if Henry happened to throw in a line like "Hey, hey, hey, you wouldn't know a good time if it gave you a reacharound." (For more on how that line, plus a few other all-time dirtiest "Cupid" zingers made it past the censors, look below to Rob Remembers.)

Trevor and Champ team up with three guys from the group -- guitar-playing sports fan Mike, oily lounge guy Nick and diminutive Laurence -- to dress up as a half-assed version of the Village People to attend a meat market at a warehouse called, appropriately, Gomorrah's. (As a reminder of who the regulars on the show are and who are the day players, Trevor gets to be the cop and Champ gets to be the construction worker, while the other three look dorky as the cowboy, the Indian and... a milkman. More on that below.) None of the guys save Trevor wants to be there, and to keep them from playing wallflower or, worse, leaving, he throws some reverse psychology at them, enlisting them in a game to see who can collect the most rejections. As any good relationship guru knows, the hardest part about finding love is just putting yourself out there, and by creating a scenario where the guys not only don't fear rejection, but embrace it, Trevor puts all four of them in situations where they at least have a chance of getting lucky, even though they don't realize that's what he's doing.

The guys' respective methods of getting rejected are all funny -- Mike's spastic dance makes me laugh no matter how many times I see it -- and provides a good showcase for some of the less-utilized members of the show's extended family. Champ, because he looks the way he does, has the hardest time getting actual rejections (though I like the moment where he games the other guys by asking a girl if she can explain Stansilavski to him), and eventually winds up in a situation where he has to choose between his libido and his artistic standards. (A woman who thinks Quentin Tarantino's an underrated actor? Really? The horror!) Laurence, the most reluctant meat marketer, gets a case of dance fever with a woman in a cat lady costume who, in the light of day, turns out to be fellow singles grouper Tina, who had been taunting him at the previous meeting. (Maybe she needs to buy some eggs to throw at him.) Mike's the only one who actually has sex, but in a situation that's eerily, creepily prescient for the character Paul Adelstein now plays on "Private Practice." (Does the guy just bring his own handcuffs to the set at this point in his career?)

The one somewhat sad story -- and, from our 2008 standpoint, the most interesting -- has Nick's array of cliched pick-up lines turn out to amuse a woman in a bumblebee costume named Heidi, who happens to be played by Adelstein's future co-star Kate Walsh, almost unrecognizable as a bohemian blonde instead of the carefully-coiffed redhead she is today. Even if I couldn't identify her by the voice, though, I think I would have figured it out in the moment where Heidi tries to encourage a sheepish Nick to dance, as Walsh uses the exact same gesture (fists together, eyebrows raised, grin enormous) that I've seen her use a few times as Addison Montgomery. (In particular, there's an episode of "Grey's Anatomy" where she gets the chief to dance that's like a mirror image.)

While the other guys' connections turn out to be as tawdry as you'd expect at a place like Gomorrah's, Nick seems to be really bonding with Heidi. He tells her the story of being left at the altar and how that made him more guarded around other women (and also led him to tune up the Camaro that she hated), and later she tells him a similar story about being dumped by the guy she thought she might marry after a pregnancy scare. After finishing the story, Heidi gives Nick the green light to kiss her, but he can't do it, instead kissing her hand and looking very unhappy with himself -- because, as we learn when the guys all reunite at Taggerty's to swap war stories, the Camaro story is completely made-up, a line he uses on women all the time to make himself seem more vulnerable (and desirable). Confronted by a nice girl who has a genuine version of his made-up story, all he could do was slink away and feel sorry for himself. (Rob Thomas confirms that the Camaro story was purely BS; more below in Rob Remembers.)

As convenience/contrivance would have it, Claire's also at Gomorrah's, as a "celebrity judge" for the costume contest (does anyone from Chicago know if the other judges are local celebs I didn't recognize, or just extras?) and inadvertently baits Trevor into fixing her up with her first significant love interest of the series: newspaper boss-turned-colleage Alex DeMouy.

Any amateur psychologist, let alone a well-credentialed professional like Claire, should be able to see that Trevor, even though he doesn't realize it, is falling madly in love with Claire, and sends Alex at Claire to prove a point. If she's such a killjoy that she can't have fun at a bacchanalia like this, if she's a relationship expert who preaches about finding good on paper matches but then can't click with a guy who seems so ideal for her (which is what Trevor assumes will happen), then maybe it's time for her to start questioning some of her fundamental assumptions. Assumptions like, "Is my favorite patient crazy, or is he really a love god?" or "Does Trevor annoy me, or do I want to tear all his clothes off and make crazy crazy love with him?" Trevor, because he's in denial, is only going for the first of those two, but the look on his face when he shows up outside her apartment the next morning and sees that she and Alex hit it off makes it pretty clear that deep down, he wishes for the animal love, too.

In between setting up the guys to succeed through failure and making a match he doesn't really want to make between Claire and Alex, Trevor helps lovestruck runaway teen Jill, played by Anna Chlumsky in between her Vada Sultenfuss and Liz Lemler days. The story doesn't feel all that necessary to this episode, either thematically (though Halloween is the reason they meet in the first place, and the reason he's able to save her from getting slashed by the neighborhood mohel) or as filler (there was no doubt lots more material to be mined in the rejection contest) but Piven proves he can trade barbs with a much younger, non-romantic female opponent just as well as he can with Paula Marshall.

And, once again, it's time for Rob Remembers, where "Cupid" creator Rob Thomas (who, before the strike began, was working on a remake for ABC, and hopefully will continue to whenever the strike ends) offers a behind the scenes look at each episode:

I got a couple things in this episode past the censors. Certainly the "You guys wouldn't know a good time if it gave you a reach-around" was one that surprised me. The other one was a bit more clever. Later, Trevor is trying to convince the guys not to head home and drown their sorrows with Cinemax.

The line was, "How about tonight we try for some flesh-and-bone women."

Jeremy and I discussed the line, and with a bit of a pause in the delivery, it became, "How about tonight we try for some flesh. And bone women."

When we were preparing for the episode, the director wanted so many changes in the script that I began to think he simply "didn't get it." I actually flew to Chicago for the production of this episode, because I didn't trust him with the material. Once we got in the same room, I discovered we really were on the same page. The director, Michael Fields, ended up doing a bunch of Veronica Mars for me including some of our best episodes. It was an extremely expensive episode. We shot for three nights with 100 extras in full costumes, but it ended up working out.

The episode also featured Anna Clumsky of MY GIRL fame. She was fantastic. I was so pleased this year when I saw her pop up on an episode of 30 Rock.

At the end of the episode, Nick is feeling terrible about the "big lie" he told the Kate Walsh character. When he says he won't go out with her because she's not his type, he's suggesting she's a sweet and honest -- a "nice"girl. He won't go out with her again, because he's not the type who does well with "nice girls."

Jeremy and I both wanted to get more work for the group guys. I think Jeremy was exhausted from memorizing seven pages of very wordy material each day, and he wanted the load shared a bit more. I also liked the scenes with the singles group guys. I just thought they generally played well. I love Paul Edelstein's rejection dance.

The Rejection Game was a game that my buddies and I would play in our college days. Go to dance club and see who could get shot down the most. You'd intentionally tap a girl on a shoulder who was making out with a guy on a couch and ask her to dance. These are the things we found funny in those days. Naturally, this involved a high intake of alcohol, but you'd frequently find someone who found you charming.

Another funny note about the episode. That English-accented voice coming out of the closet "Sorry, Luv" in the scene where Paul Edelstein takes his "date" home is Daran Norris -- Cliff McCormack on Veronica Mars, Spotswood in Team America.

Some other thoughts on "Meat Market":

-I have checked and checked on line and can find no evidence supporting Mike's theory that the original Village People lineup included a milkman. Anyone with a better memory of the '70s care to confirm or deny?

-I know bartenders and bouncers don't work every single night of the week, but every now and then I wonder how Trevor and Champ are able to be off on various nocturnal adventures when you'd expect them to be at Taggerty's -- especially on a big party night like Halloween. Or would a hopping urban bar like Taggerty's close down on Halloween? The place was sure deserted when Trevor brought Jill there for some food.

-Those of you who read the script excerpt from the pilot episode's opening scenes will recognize the discussion at the start of the singles group meeting where Nick complains about how hard it is to ask a woman to dance. That happens all the time in episodic TV, especially on a formula-driven show like this; if a line or scene gets cut for time in one episode, it can always be refashioned down the road.

-I love how thoroughly dumb they make Champ's woman. Not only does she love Tarantino, thespian, but when Champ explains that he did an audience response commercial for "Sphere," she asks what Sam Jackson was like.

-I haven't done a Lines of the Week feature the way I do for "The Wire," but this episode in particular was so damn quotable that I'm gonna throw out a few of my favorites:

"Oh, you thought this is where the Saul Bellow book signing is. That's a common mistake." -Trevor

"Check the album covers! In the early days, one of them was a milkman!" -Mike

"I want you to get out there and party like it's 1999." -Trevor
"Party like it's two months from now?" -Mike

"I am the Chocolate Lover from Planet Funktron. You will be my mistress of dance." -Champ
"Okie-dokie." -smitten woman

"You're a dead ringer for my mom. Wanna boogie?" -Mike

"Do you think the Counting Crows are derivative neo-hippie self-indulgent hacks, providing a lifetstyle soundtrack for annoying, self-aware yuppies in training?" -Trevor seeing if Alex is a good match for Claire

"You played that reckless rookie who got shot because of his disrespect for protocol!" -woman discussing Champ's "Sunset & Vaughn" guest spot (from "The Linguist")

"I don't know about the rest of them guys, but the cowboy was a straight shooter!" -Nick on The Village People

Coming up on Friday: One of the series' lightest episodes is followed by one of its darkest, "Pick-Up Schticks," which you can watch here, here, here, here and here.

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

Terminator: Might as well jump

I'm both kind of swamped and not feeling enthusiastic enough about the latest "Sarah Connor Chronicles" episode to blog on it, so I'll open it up to you to discuss. One thought from me: this is two episodes in a row now where I feel like someone at Fox gave the producers a memo saying, "Could we make Sarah a little less, you know, homicidal?" Talk amongst yourselves, and I'll try to weigh in with the comments when I have a chance later in the day. Click here to read the full post

All TV: NJ online

As you probably know by now, my TV tastes gravitate towards the scripted, but now and then I wind up sampling non-fiction, whether pure documentary or more contrived reality TV. Today's column features one doc, one reality show, both with Jersey roots: a "Frontline" episode about teens and the series of tubes we call the Internet, and Bravo's "Millionaire Matchmaker":

Early in tonight's episode of "Frontline," titled "Growing Up Online" (9 p.m., Ch. 13), we see a montage of news reports about online stalkers and pedophiles done in the usual sky-is-falling style that's become the currency of modern TV news. But the "Frontline" franchise has never been interested in promoting panic at the expense of good reporting, and "Growing Up Online" quickly establishes itself as an even-handed look at the generation gap between teenagers who have never known life without e-mail and their parents who are all-thumbs with text messaging.

Its message: Sure, there are scary things about the Internet, but there are scary things about life, you know?

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

The Wire week 4 thread for the On Demand'ers

Once again, this is the place to talk about "The Wire" episode 4, "Transitions," until my review goes live after Sunday night's HBO airing. Do not talk about this episode in the episode 3 review thread, and do not discuss anything you may know about future episodes. Any spoilers will be deleted by me. Click here to read the full post

Mad Men redux: Smoke gets in your eyes

(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 the debut of "Mad Men" coming up just as soon as I smoke up a pack of Old Golds...

Well, that was fun, wasn't it? I mean, there's some problem with subtlety from time to time (gay Salvatore butching it up at the burlesque club, the Nixon/Kennedy and Xerox jokes), and I know I wasn't the only critic who was confused at first when AMC asked us not to spoil the ending with January Jones (since we didn't think it was surprising enough to qualify as a twist), but beyond that... pure coolness.

I spent a while with Matthew Weiner at AMC's press tour party (a swinging affair at the Friar's Club, with Jeff Goldblum and his jazz band playing songs from 1960), and when I mentioned that I hadn't seen a particular episode, he smiled and said, "You're gonna love it. It's about time travel." I cocked my head, raised my eyebrows and tried to figure out whether he'd had a few too many Old Fashioneds, or if he was taking the show into David Lynch territory.

But when I finished the episode in question, I understood what he meant. Where some shows set in the past can't help but feel like it's a bunch of actors playing dress-up, "Mad Men" made me feel like I was getting a glimpse of what New York of that era really looked, sounded and smelled like.

It helps that, with the exceptions of Elisabeth Moss and John Slattery, I don't have much of a history watching these actors, so I didn't spend a lot of time admiring how the hair and makeup people had transformed them. (From what little I remember of Connor-era "Angel," Vincent Kartheiser is unrecognizable as Pete the account rep weasel.) But there's a real commitment to period detail: the clothes, the hairstyles and, especially, the cigarettes and attitudes.

The two come together in the opening scene, where we meet our hero Don Draper (Jon Hamm, looking like he's on his way to audition for "Superman") working on an ad campaign for Lucky Strikes, now that the government has ruled that tobacco companies can't promote their products as healthy. He asks a black waiter named Sam why Sam smokes Old Golds; Sam's not used to rich white customers trying to engage him in conversation, and Sam's boss automatically assumes Sam is harassing Don. (Because even in 1960 Manhattan, why would a man like Don want to talk to a man like Sam?) Don waves the boss away without exactly getting indignant on the black waiter's behalf, and the two men talk tobacco. Sam explains that he smokes Old Gold because that's what they gave him in the Army (an early crossover between government and corporate marketing interests), and as they banter back and forth, he mentions that his wife wants him to give up smoking because of an article she read in Reader's Digest, Sam and Don both laughing at how ladies just love their magazines. Don scans the crowd and sees men and women of all ages (but one color) smoking and laughing, and he wonders why he can't feel as happy as they all look.

Give me a great opening scene(*) and I'll stick with a show through a lot of faults. "Deadwood," for instance, had that amazing sequence where Bullock holds off a lynch mob so he can hang a horse thief under the banner of law, and because of that, I didn't get too worked up that I was having trouble keeping track of all the characters for the next few episodes. The "Mad Men" intro is so perfect in the way it takes you into its world and lays out all the series' key themes -- marketing, casual racism and sexism, the ennui that can come even when you have it all -- that I'll forgive the copier joke, or the fact that I figured out Don was married as soon as Midge (Rosemarie DeWitt, who was the best thing about "Standoff") suggests she'd make a good ex-wife.

(*) A kick-ass title sequence helps, and "Mad Men" has one, that sequence of Don's silhouette falling through various idealized illustrations of late '50s life before winding up seated in an art deco chair, his back turned to us, a cigarette dangling from his hand. Weiner says the idea came from director Alan Taylor, who took a look at Hamm and said, "Have you seen the back of this man's head? Have you seen what that is, what presence that is? Who is this person, this mystery?" (Note that the first time we see the flesh and blood Don, it's from that same vantage point.)

There's a lot to digest here, a lot of characters to meet, a lot of casually offensive dialogue to adjust to (I'm fond of Don telling Rachel Menken, "I'm not going to let a woman talk to me like this," but almost every line uttered by Pete and his cronies does the same trick), and Weiner uses the patented pilot device of My First Day At The New Job to smooth the transition, turning Moss's Peggy into our eyes and ears -- at least until she winds up inviting the engaged Pete into her apartment, the aftermath of which I'm grateful we didn't have to see nor hear.

A few other thoughts:

• Though a few characters come across as very broad here, I've now seen the first four episodes, and if the Pete spotlight in episode four is any indication, Weiner's going to get around to plumbing everyone's hidden depths by the end of the season.


• "It's Toasted" was an actual Lucky Strikes slogan, but one that dates back to 1917. Over the run of the series, Weiner's going to be playing a little loose with this area, using actual brands but either inventing new campaigns or giving Don credit for other men's work.


• Nice to see John Cullum as the Lucky Strikes boss, the first of some very cool guest-casting that the series will use. (Also, did you catch Mel from "Flight of the Conchords" as one of the switchboard operators? She's the one in the middle.)


• I really loved Peggy's visit to the judgemental, chain-smoking gynecologist. Just thought that warranted mention.

What did everybody else think?

Click here to read the full post

Breaking Bad: This guy walks into an oncologist's office...

Spoilers for the debut episode of "Breaking Bad" coming up just as soon as I check eBay...

I talked in general about the series in my column on Friday -- short version: I love Bryan Cranston, here and elsewhere, and found the show overall interesting but not really engrossing or fully-formed yet -- so I'll hit the usual bullet points and then open it up to anybody who watched:

• As rote, lifeless sex scenes go, the eBay/birthday gift thing was especially mortifying (and funny), and of course worked as a nice counterpoint to Walt being sexually aggressive with Skyler in the final scene. Being diagnosed with terminal cancer and getting caught up in the meth world is 95 percent awful for Walt, but there's five percent positive, as he's been woken up from a long slumber.
• The scene where he confronted the bullies at the clothing store reminded me a bit of George Costanza in "The Opposite," where he acts so obviously crazy with the guys behind him that they didn't even dare finding out if he could fight. Obviously, Walt took it a step further by assaulting the biggest guy first, but I wouldn't have been surprised at all if he had finished his rant with, "We're gonna take it outside and I will show you what it's like!"
  
• I like how chemicals are omnipresent in Walt's life -- not just in his class or cooking meth in the RV with Jesse, but in all the cleaning products and fumes he has to deal with at the car wash, or the way he tries to calm himself after getting the bad news by lighting a series of matches and just appreciating the combustion reaction of it.
  
• There are a few different scenes where Gilligan trying to make a grand point gets undercut by the reality of the situation. For instance, Walt's big speech to his disinterested class about why he loves chemistry is followed by the revelation that they're already on Chapter 6; isn't that monologue something for earlier in the semester? And even though Walt is saved by the fact that the sirens represent fire trucks and not cops (and by his ineptitude with firearms), wouldn't at least one of the trucks have stopped, even for a second, to see if there were any people injured in what looked like a bad car crash?
  
• "Mad Men" is pretty much a PG-13 kind of show, in terms of language, skin, etc. The screener version I watched of the "Breaking Bad" pilot was definitely R, with the naked woman helping Jesse escape, Walt and Jesse arguing over the s--t he cooks, etc. But it's still the "Shield" version of R, which means no F-words, as the sound drops out quite noticeably when Walt tries to drop an F-bomb on his car wash boss when he quits.
  
• Walt literally launders the drug money. Nice.
  

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

The Wire: Western civilization

Spoilers for "The Wire" episode three, "Not For Attribution," coming up just as soon as I put some backspin on my throws...

"We have to kill again."

It's in that moment -- with Lester having signed on to the fake serial killer plan, with Bunk looking on in horror, with Jimmy hip deep in a pool of booze and his own arrogance -- that this final season announces itself as pure farce.

There were complaints last week after Jimmy desecrated the first corpse, and more this week from the On Demand viewers after Lester joined in, that a shark had just arrived to be leaped over. As I said before, this is a show where a character spent an entire season legalizing drugs in his district, and here we're dealing with two characters with a long, long history of obsessive, self-destructive behavior that's either in the interest of proving how smart they are (McNulty) or doing good policework (Lester). This story is several orders of magnitude more self-destructive -- now they're risking their freedom as well as their livelihood, as Bunk points out -- but we've also seen how at the end of their rope each guy is. Jimmy's drinking is worse than ever, and he feels completely betrayed by the city for the broken promises of Carcetti's new day. Lester has now spent several years (from the end of season three through now) chasing Marlo, and feels that he's justthisclose to getting the mass murdering sonuvabitch.

It's an extreme story, but it works for me because, as I said above, it's being played for the black comedy of it as much as anything. So Jimmy does this horrific thing, and not only does no one notice what he's really doing, but no one cares about the cover version of his master plan. Barlow needs to be prodded for a day and a half to remember the red ribbon, Jay thinks the entire exercise is masturbation, and the Sun gives the story even worse play than Alma's story about Chris and Snoop's triple-homicide. On "The Wire," no grand plan ever comes easy -- remember Bunny trying to educate the middle school age hoppers about Hamsterdam? -- and this one is coming harder and more ridiculous than most. When I spent so much of my column reviewing this season on the series' comic brilliance, it was moments like the "We have to kill again" -- and similar scenes to come -- that I had in mind.

(The use of Barlow -- last seen in the pilot episode not paying enough attention to the D'Angelo Barksdale murder prosecution that inspired McNulty to first defy command, leading to the creation of the MCU -- was an inspired full circle choice.)

Jimmy makes it clear that he doesn't actually care about Marlo -- the line about how Marlo doesn't get to win sounded dangerously close to Carver's rant on top of his police car at the end of the "Shaft" chase scene early in season three -- but Mr. Stanfield's actions here mark him as a dangerous and worthy target. He's simultaneously preparing for war with the unwitting Prop Joe and semi-retired Omar, and based on his track record, I wouldn't bet against the man.

Joe doesn't get it. Marlo has no interest in being civilized. He barely understands civilization (witness how out of sorts he was in the French Antilles, or even with the concept of being able to keep track of your money electronically; it was like Namond at Ruth's Cris all over again in showing how limited these characters' world is) and has no use for it beyond using it to further his power and legend. But Joe tries to civilize him, even as Marlo's tricking Joe into cutting his own throat with the "clean" bills and the financial advice. If Marlo gets an in with both Joe's drug connect and his money people, what use does he have for Joe, exactly?

His obsession with Omar, on the other hand, smacks of Avon's obsession with Marlo in season three. Business is good, Marlo seems close to mastering all he surveys, and the only person who even cares about Omar ripping him off is Marlo himself. The man was gone; let him stay gone. I'm not sure which was more chilling: the usually gentle and businesslike killer Chris deliberately being angry and cruel with Blind Butchie (RIP) to send a message, or the look on Omar's face when he realized he would have to go back to Baltimore. How long do you think he's going to keep his promise to Bunk about no more killing?

This episode is filled with characters stepping, however briefly, out of The Game. Marlo goes to check on his money, Omar is beloved by the little kids in Puerto Rico, and Dukie talks Michael into taking a day off from his corner. It should be a relief to see Michael briefly act like the kid he still is, but instead it's painful, because I know that he's already given up his childhood to become one of Marlo's soldiers. He couldn't even enjoy the trip longer than the time it took to get out of the cab, because there was Monk to lecture him about responsibilities. Back when I covered "The Sopranos," I used to write about how the glamorous mob life that Christopher dreamed of growing up was really just a ball-busting, more dangerous version of the same workaday life he thought he was escaping. Same thing for Michael here. He may have the roll of money and the respect of people on the street, but in ways beyond his conscience he's worse off than the average kid his age. If he was still in school, the day off would have been a real day off, you know?

I really wish my comrades in the media weren't so obsessed with themselves, because it feels like the thousands of articles written about the Simon/Marimow/Carroll feud have spelled out half the plot points in the newspaper story. People have complained that this season feels preachier than past years, and while there may be something to that (even though every scene with Prez and his fellow teachers last year was preachy as hell), it isn't helping that these stories (with or without interviews with Simon) keep explaining all the themes before we get to them.

Here, it's buyout time at the fictional Sun. Having worked at a newspaper through several rounds of buyouts, and having friends at other papers where the layoffs aren't even that gentle, I can say the entire scenario played out just right. Layoffs/buyouts go different ways at different papers, depending on the strength of the union and the nature of what's happening (here it was a layoff disguised as a buyout, with people like Twigg being given offers they were strongly discouraged from refusing). Sometimes, last ones hired are the first ones fired, but lots of times it's the people who have been around the longest and therefore make the most money, but who also bring the most value to the place, like Twigg.

If I didn't loathe Scott enough already, him cavalierly referring to the "deadwood" they'd be losing put me over the top, which put the moment where Twigg badly upstaged him on the Daniels question feel extra sweet. And then Scott -- Out of laziness? Frustration? Awareness that he'd gotten away with it before? -- doesn't even bother to call around for react quotes, just makes one up that, like the EJ story, is so on the money that it pings Gus's radar. I'm sure some instances of journalistic fabulism are relatively victimless (other than damaging the reputation of the place that published them), but as we see with this quote -- and with our knowledge that Daniels did something very crooked in his early days on the force -- making stuff up can have horrible unintended consequences.

Of course, if Burrell could actually pull his head out of his stats and understand that Carcetti genuinely wanted clean numbers, neither he nor Daniels would be in their current messes. It's a credit to the otherwise hopeless social climber Tommy's become that he was going to keep Erv around if he just told the truth, but Erv's habit of juking the stats was so ingrained he couldn't understand that.

And if Burrell falls, can his buddy Clay be far behind? He no longer has juice with the mayor's office, he's got Ronnie and the grand jury on him like white on rice, and now he's about to lose his most valuable remaining ally. Though Lester is currently going off the deep end with Jimmy to get Marlo, he's made it clear in the past (including last week's episode) that he (and, by extension I think, Simon and Burns) considers the Clay Davises of the world far bigger problems than the Avons and Marlos. So which would be a more satisfying ending for you in the audience: Marlo gets busted while Clay gets off, or vice versa? Or has the ending to every previous season by now conditioned you to the inevitability of an ending where nothing goes quite the way you'd want it to?

Some other thoughts on "Not For Attribution":

-Taking the whole phony serial killer plan out of the equation for a second, which is the more pathetic/funnier drunk-ass Jimmy moment: him trying to recreate his car crash in season two, or him bending the cheap blonde over the hood of a car, and continuing to do it after he badged the two patrol cops? Admittedly, it's been a while since season two, but my sides hurt by the end of the car hood scene here.

-From the funny/pathetic department: Ronnie asking her expert witness to explain every single word of his previous sentence, "starting with the word 'non-profit.'" With a case this complicated, I'm sure half the grand jurors (if not more) need every minute detail spelled out for them in language my pre-K daughter might understand.

-For much of the show's run, Richard Price has had the honor of writing each season's re-introduction of Omar scene. But even though this episode marks Omar's first appearance of season five, and even though the song on the jukebox at the bar where Jimmy is drunk is "96 Tears" (which was a recurring motif in Price's "Freedomland" novel), this one was written not by Price, but by Chris Collins. (Price wrote the script for episode 7.)

-I really liked the scene where Slim Charles and Chris wait outside while Joe and Marlo meet with the money launderer. Each, naturally, sees his own boss as the ideal drug lord, with Chris not appreciating Joe's fondness for talk and complex financial arrangements and Slim not appreciating Marlo's fondness for killing anyone he feels like, whenever he feels like it.

-When Twigg starts talking at the bar about forgiving some sinner and winking your eye at some homely girl, he's quoting H.L. Mencken, the legendary reporter, editorialist and author who wrote for the Sun for most of the first half of the 20th century. (Gus, feeling bitter, then drops an F-bomb on the late Henry Louis.)

-Norman having worked at the Sun in a previous life was mentioned at least once before. During the election story last season, when Royce's people tried to smear Tommy with a doctored photo, Norman mentioned his career at the Sun and how he should have enough contacts left there to get to the bottom of this. Nice seeing him in a scene with Gus, one of the few other largely pure characters on the show. If we could get Lester and Bunny (and, I guess, Sydnor) into the room with them, we'd have the whole set.

-Good to see that Marla and Cedric still have feelings for each other, which are being brought out in this time of crisis. They had their problems that brought about the marriage's end, but you can't be with a person as long as they were and completely discard the emotional attachments.

-Semi-hidden product placement: just as Renaldo was spotted reading a George Pelecanos novel last season, we have Barlow here reading "Generation Kill," which is the basis for Simon's next HBO project.

-I can't help but notice all the Homicide guys are now using Toughbook laptops. While no laptop is that cheap, a Toughbook definitely isn't on the low end of the spectrum. Seems an odd choice for a department that we're always told is strapped for cash, but for all I know, that's what the real Baltimore PD uses.

-Donnell Rawlings makes his first appearance since season one as Clay Davis' driver, Damien Lavelle "Day-Day" Price. In between, he gained some measure of fame as one of the second bananas on "Chappelle's Show," and I worried that I would have a hard time taking Ashy Larry seriously back in this world. Fortunately (and no doubt intentionally), Rawlings is mainly used for comic purposes, notably his scolding of a distracted Clay. (See below.)

Lines of the week:

"We have to kill again." -Jimmy

"Shit like this actually goes through your fucking brain?" -Lester

"It ain't easy civilizing this motherfucker." -Prop Joe

"Focus, motherfucker! Focus!" -Day-Day Price

"Fuckin' Burrell's asshole must be so tight you couldn't pull a pin from it with a John Deere tractor." -Valchek

"Most of the guys here couldn't catch the clap in a Mexican whorehouse." -Jimmy

"I'm the vice president of a major financial institution." -Grand jury witness
"Who the fuck isn't?" -Grand jury prosecutor (played by Gary D'Addario, the real-life inspiration for Gee on "Homicide")

As always, same spoiler police is in effect: talk about this episode and the ones that came before, and that's it. There will be a separate post for the On Demand episode tomorrow morning, and if I see any comments about that one (or later episodes, for that matter), I'm just going to delete them.

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

FNL: Everything in black and white

Spoilers for "Friday Night Lights" coming up just as soon as I bring over a box...

For an episode that was so much about the ugliness of stereotypes, "Who Do You Think You Are?" sure trafficked in a lot of them. We got the hood trying to drag down the buddy who just wants to get out, the racist bullies, the racially disapproving parents, the sexist good old boy giving his friend bad advice, even the ever-popular declaration of love that's so belated that the object of it is already kissing someone else.

The ideas behind all these scenarios were fine, but the execution of most was as subtle as an air horn.

I'm not saying that racism doesn't exist in small Texas towns, or even that it doesn't sometimes get as overt and ugly as it did in that movie theater, or even with Noelle's parents. But "Friday Night Lights" handles social issues best when it doesn't feel the need to present them in all-caps with yellow highlighter. The last time the show did a racism storyline, with Mac's comments to the TV reporter, the genius of it was the ambiguity of what Mac said and how he said it. You could see how what he said was offensive, just as you could see how Mac would never think that it was, you know? The premise of Noelle's parents and/or Mama Smash trying to break the two of them up over the interracial thing isn't a bad one, but I think it would have worked much better if her folks kept going on about how enlightened they are in the kind of patronizing fashion that makes it clear how much they aren't. There were a couple of lines where the scene almost seemed to go there, but most of the dialogue could have been straight out of the original "Guess Who's Coming To Dinner?" from 40 years ago.

The Buddy/Santiago story, meanwhile, featured the usual stellar work from Brad Leland (particularly the moment where Buddy slaps the watch down on the floor because he no longer gives a damn about it compared to the welfare of his foster kid), and some really nice characterization for Buddy, who's trying really hard to be as open-minded as any car salesman from Dillon can. But did they really have to make Francis Capra (Weevil!) utter a line like "When did you forget where you came from?" That's like a cliche of a cliche, and shouldn't be allowed in any script produced from about 2003 on, if not 1993. I winced when I heard it.

Of our stories dealing with prejudice and preconception, the best by far, as usual, was the one with the Taylors, because it was always aware of the stereotypes it was addressing. (And because, as always, Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton rock.) Even the scene with Eric and Mac was fine, because Eric rejected Mac's caveman attitude out of hand. Even though he knows it would be easier for Tami to quit her job, that's not the kind of husband and father he wants to be -- and good on the writers for having him point out that one of the main reasons Tami didn't follow him to TMU (and, therefore, why Eric gave up on the college coaching career he'd always dreamed of) was so she wouldn't have to quit her job. The argument at the dinner table -- one of those overly-polite, seemingly-reasonable fights where even Julie had to ask if they were fighting -- was hilarious and dead-on. (And it was, of course, elevated to another comedy stratosphere when Buddy showed up with his Box Of Stuff, which none of the Taylors wanted anything to do with. Britton's delivery of "Buddy's here. He's got a box" may be the funniest line reading she's ever given.) Wherever else the show may stumble, it always gets the little details of marriage right.

The Lyla/Tim/Logan from "Gilmore Girls" love triangle? Meh. When the show bothers to remember that Lyla's still a regular and that she's supposed to be a good Christian and not just a poseur, she can be kind of interesting. And Tim prank-calling the radio show while Herc cackled in the background was damned amusing. (One question: if Tim's on such good terms with Herc and blink-and-you'll-miss-him Street, why couldn't he have crashed on their floor during his homeless odyssey?) But of all the various storylines the writers have tried out with Riggins this year, the only one I'm less interested in than his pursuit of Lyla is the money he and Billy stole from Ferret Guy, which blessedly wasn't mentioned.

Finally, did my eyes deceive me or did we get an honest to goodness scene of Landry and Matt hanging out together and acting like best friends? What's up with that? Is that still allowed?

And so Carlotta's gone, and I'm still not sure what the point of that story was, other than to fulfill the show's quota of age-inappropriate romances. As I noted a while back, it's been kind of unremarked upon that Grandma's mental state improved dramatically under her care, and the one way in which the story could have been justified was if the relationship went south, Carlotta left, and Grandma backslid as a result of Matt not thinking things through. She may still have a problem (though I suppose the insurance company should be sending a replacement), but Carlotta's exit had nothing whatsoever to do with Matt. I'm guessing he'll wind up back with Julie in a few episodes, which would make the point of Carlotta a stalling tactic while the writers got Julie through the end of her bratty phase.

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

Strike Survival TV Club: Cupid, "First Loves"

Spoilers for "Cupid" episode five, "First Loves," coming up just as soon as I buy some eggs...

I don't own an entire Lisa Loeb album, and yet she's been this weird recurring presence for important signposts in my life. Just as I was really starting to get my act together as a critic for the college paper, I wrote a whole lot about "Reality Bites," which prominently featured her first big hit, "Stay." Early in my relationship with the woman who would become my wife, "I Do" was on the radio so often that we half-jokingly began referring to it as our song. And now my daughter is obsessed with Loeb because she sang "Jenny Jenkins" on an episode of "Jack's Big Music Show."

Loeb's presence alone in "First Loves" would probably predispose me to like the episode. (That and the road trip format, given that my favorite movie is still "Midnight Run.") But Loeb or no Loeb, it's one of the series' highlights, an entertaining, formula-busting story that gives us insight into Champ, Claire and, yes, Trevor in sometimes surprising, sometimes moving, sometimes funny ways.

So Claire's singles group is hanging out at Taggerty's to cheer on Mike in some kind of music competition. His self-penned song includes lines like "Big love, baby, is what you need, big love, baby, doing the deed," and yet he still seems like the best contestant until a cute woman with horn-rimmed glasses named Sophie Gill (Loeb) takes the mic and impresses everyone with a wistful but ironic love song. Trevor interprets the lyrics as Sophie needing a good man, but Claire correctly interprets that she had a good man and lost him. As it turns out, Sophie and Champ are old friends (but only that), and she tells him that she signed a record deal but has been playing hookie like this instead of being in the studio "spinning pain and isolation into gold."

With the very generous record company hiring a limo to bring Sophie back to them (an awkward but necessary plot device), Trevor talks himself and Champ into coming along so they can stop and visit the man she loved and lost, her childhood sweetheart Paul Lister, whom she last saw when her family moved away at 13. And Claire, trying to prevent her superior, Dr. Greeley, from giving Trevor's case over to a fellow shrink who wants to try a new chemical castration drug on him, tags along so she can get a 24/7 view of Trevor and decide how dangerous he really is to himself and others. So they all hang out in the limo, trade stories of their own first loves (for Claire, a bad boy at summer camp; for Champ, the girl who got him into acting in high school) and very slowly edge towards Paul's house.

The episode is at once simple (just our three main characters plus a guest star swapping stories in the back of a car) and complex, with the interweaving flashbacks to Sophie, Claire and Champ's first loves and the specter of Trevor getting chemically reprogrammed by the oily Dr. Frechette.

Midway through the episode, Trevor overhears just enough of Claire dictating notes about the situation to mistakenly believe that she is the one who wants to dope him up. Because of that, he begins to get too aggressive in his attempt to reunite Sophie and Paul, which in turn makes Claire more inclined to go with the drug therapy option. Ordinarily, I disdain stories that involve some kind of misunderstanding that would be solved if the characters involved just had an honest conversation with each other (suffice it to say, I wasn't a "Three's Company" fan), but over such a short interval, and with the stakes this high, it works. There are times when this series tries to ignore the possibility that Trevor has deep mental problems -- or, at least, that Claire believes that he has them (though she finds the delusion relatively benign and somewhat charming) -- but it's a fundamental part of the premise, and something that needs to be addressed from time to time.

This story walks the usual comedy/drama knife edge. We see Claire amused by the fact that Trevor has conned a bunch of young women into believing he's Dave Matthews (at the time, Piven's hairline wasn't too far off), and we see Trevor deliver a rambling monologue about how Claire is a woman of numbers and he's a man of letters -- all 24 of them. (When she corrects him, he says, "Who else would take the time to count all the letters in the alphabet but the numbers lady?") But both of them are obviously afraid throughout: Trevor of having his personality and shot at returning to Mt. Olympus destroyed, Claire of having to so change the psyche of a man who, irritating as he can be, she so obviously likes and cares for. (Claire has her faults, but a lack of empathy for her patients isn't one of them.) The scene when Claire figures out what's been going on this whole time and hugs him is a really sweet, unguarded moment between two characters who are usually bickering.

For someone whose only previous screen credits were a role as "Angry Woman" in an indie film and a guest spot on "The Nanny," Loeb acquits herself well when thrown into that limo with Piven, Marshall and Sams. As Sophie rattles off her list of doomed relationships with needy losers, the script keeps nibbling around the idea that Champ wishes she had once noticed what a good, handsome guy he is. Addressing that concept full on would get in the way of the twisty conclusion -- Sophie kisses the man she thinks is Paul, then discovers that he's Paul's formerly annoying kid brother Brian, who always had a crush on her and turns out to be the good guy for the adult Sophie -- but Loeb and Sams play well off each other.

Though the episode is largely about Trevor and Claire's doctor/patient relationship, it contains several teases throughout about the obvious potential for them to be so much more to each other. The opening scene (which we'll get back to in a second with Rob Remembers) has Trevor and Claire watching "Dawson's Creek" (not that you can really see what show it is) while Trevor complains in meta fashion about how the hero of that show talked way too much and took too long to figure out that he was in love with the smart, slightly icy brunette. When Sophie hooks up with Brian, we find out that he was such a pest way back when because he was attracted to her. And just in case we don't grasp the point, while the two of them have sex (in full view of a window looking down on the street), Trevor talks to a kid on the football team Brian coaches about the way that boys often tease and harass the girls they like. When he runs into the kid again at a nearby convenience store, the kid witnesses enough Trevor/Claire metaphorical pigtail-pulling to know what's what.

Now, once again, it's time for Rob Remembers, where the creator of the original "Cupid" (and the man who's attempting to revive the show with a new cast), Rob Thomas, gives us some behind the scenes dish about each episode:

A few fun facts about "First Loves."

The network was always on us about stunt casting. Our intention, when scripting, was to get an actress who could sing, rather than to attempt to do the opposite. But the network read the script, and they're standard reaction was, "Offer it to Madonna." This may only be a slight exaggeration. Every episode of Cupid, they would force us to try to stunt cast the anthological guest star. They had "Love Boat" casting in mind. We'd always spin our wheels offering it to people on "their" list. We'd get passes. Then we'd have to cast last minute.

Those of us on the show were happy about getting Lisa Loeb, though I doubt she was quite the draw the network would've liked.

A couple notes...

Trevor and Claire begin the show watching Dawson's Creek and commenting on the characters. I had just come off a year on Dawson's Creek and we shared a building with them. Things didn't end particularly well for me on the show, and I don't think they planned on having me back. There was a certain amount of unhealthy pleasure I took in poking at Joey and Dawson as a means of commenting on our leads. I'm a small person in that way.

Also, this was Hart Hanson's first episode for us. He was a Canadian writer. Cupid was his first U.S. job. He'd been offered other jobs on procedural, action shows, but I hired him off a particularly bizarre Ally McBeal spec. I ended up giving him 30 pages of notes on his first 60 page draft of the episode. We may have both thought at the time we'd made a mistake. His second draft, though, was exactly what I was looking for. Hart continues to be one of my favorite writers and people in town. He's now the creator, EP of BONES.

Finally, I had one major problem with the end of the episode. Lisa Loeb changed one of her lines. She's performing at the bar at the end of the episode, and this ironic, tough, alt-rocker sings the Turtles' "Happy Together." Her scripted line was "Trevor, this is for you. I used to be much cooler than this." She changed it to, "I never used to be this cool." Later, when I asked her why, she said it was because she thought the Turtles were cool, and she didn't want to put them down. Of course, the IDEA was that this jaded girl was singing a song that was hopelessly romantic. Instead, I had Lisa Loeb commenting on how cool the Turtles were.

Once I explained myself, she looped in the appropriate line, but we have to cut off her face during the line, and it was really an important line to me. C'est la vie.

A few other thoughts on "First Loves":

-I really like the look of the flashback scenes, which aren't quite black and white, but rather sepia-toned with only one or two colors popping out in each (the blue of young Sophie's shirt, the yellow of the camp uniforms from Claire's story, etc.).

-In past reviews, I've talked about the various pop songs that got worked into episodes. The instrumental score for the series was by the prolific W.G. "Snuffy" Walden, and the music for these flashbacks sound like a mash-up between his theme for "thirytsomething" and some of his score work for "My So-Called Life." (The aural similarities will be even more overt two episodes from now, which sounds like Walden just dusted off an old "thirtysomething" composition.)

-I really like Paula Marshall's dance at the end, which seems like a very uptight woman trying to be funky and not quite succeeding. I've seen her dance better in other roles, so it's definitely not an Elaine Benes situation.

-My favorite guy on Sophie's list of losers, the guy who "found the female orgasm unattractive."

-The perils of watching low-quality video versions of this stuff: there's a scene in the limo (the one where Claire explains how the summer camp fling was doomed when the second kiss wasn't as good as the first) where Trevor's massaging somebody's foot, and based on the body positioning and the image quality, it's hard to tell whether it's his own or Claire's. I'm going to assume it's his, because I don't think she'd let him go there, protective feelings or no, but the first time I watched the scene it was like the only thing I could look at.

Coming up on Tuesday: "Meat Market," maybe the funniest "Cupid" episode of them all, featuring a pair of "Private Practice" stars before anyone knew who they were (not that they share any more screen time here than they do on their current show). You can watch it here, here, here, here and here.

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

Mad Men, redux

As mentioned in the "Breaking Bad" review, AMC is going to begin rerunning "Mad Men" season one on Sundays at midnight.

I reviewed every episode of "Mad Men" over the summer, but because the show was new, not available on most cable systems On Demand services, and it took word of mouth a while to spread, I know lots of people didn't get to see it the first time around. So get those DVRs set for some midnight recordings, and I'll be reposting my reviews of each episode the morning after they're repeated.

And for the pre-existing "Mad Men" fans, co-star Rich Sommer, who plays glasses-wearing family man Harry Crane, sent out a very cool "Mad Men"-themed holiday card, which he posted to his blog. (Hat tip to Mo Ryan for bringing it to my attention.) Click here to read the full post

Sepinwall on TV: An experiment that's part comedy, part tragedy

Today's column previews the new AMC drama, "Breaking Bad":

Walter White, the anti-hero of the new AMC series "Breaking Bad," is a chemist, and always defines himself as such. Twenty years earlier, he was part of a Nobel Prize-winning research team, and though he's down on his luck now and teaches science to bored high-schoolers, his voice still breaks a little as he describes the wonders of chemistry, how it features "growth, then decay, then transformation." And when he discovers he has inoperable lung cancer, he decides the only way to care for his wife and disabled son after he's gone is to put his lab skills to use cooking crystal meth.

"Breaking Bad" is itself a chemistry experiment, an attempt to combine several unstable compounds - one part "Weeds," one part "The Bucket List," one part "Falling Down" and 12 parts Coen Brothers - to see whether they lead to synthesis or combustion. I've seen three episodes, and while the show hasn't blown up yet, I still have no idea what it's going to look like when all the elements fully mix together.

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

Directors deal finished; could writers deal be far behind?

Over at the NJ.com blog, news of the first step in what's hopefully the end of the WGA strike. Click here to read the full post

American Idol: Kinder and gentler?

Ordinarily, I have little use for the "American Idol" audition episodes, either for viewing or for blogging, but with all the talk about how this season would be "fixed," plus the fact that my usual Tuesday shows have been swallowed up by the oblivion that is the writers strike, I decided to watch and write briefly about night one. Spoilers coming up just as soon as I buy a barrel horse...

Well, you could tell the difference immediately, as the season started off with somebody who could actually, you know, sing, in Skinny Joey. We saw, I think, 10 of the 29 people who got Golden Tickets, including kickboxing Kristy Lee Cook (who once upon a time had a record deal, though this isn't an "Idol" no-no; I believe Tamyra had a similar deal that fell apart before season one), former child singer Beth Stalker, R-rated movie opponent Brooke White, and legacy-minded Chris Watson.

As Fienberg argued, though, is there any way that Angela Martin -- pretty, outgoing, not a bad singer, and mother to a cute little girl with a debilitating medical condition -- doesn't sail through to, like, top 3? At least? She's like the perfect "Idol" storm; the only thing that would make her more electable is if she was a Marine who would get sent back to Iraq the minute she gets voted out.

We still saw the freaks, of course, though the show pretended to be nicer to them. The judges apologized for laughing at that guy who thought he sounded like Paul Robeson, and they were beyond gentle with middle linebacker Temptress, who was sweet and polite, but couldn't sing a lick. At the same time, once you know that contestants go through two or three rounds of producers before they even get to the judges table, it makes the new Up With People spirit ring as false as most things "Idol." Everyone knew Temptress couldn't sing, but they put her on camera so they could show how Simon had learned his lesson from last year's "bush baby" incident. The producers and Simon loudly insist that they won't send people through who are just trying to get on camera, but the hairy guy in the belly dancer costume couldn't have been more blatant about his intentions. ("I was gonna sing 'Dontcha' until you stopped me" is about the most self-aware line I've ever heard on this show.)

So, yeah, we saw more talent than we usually do this early in the season, and the judges were nicer to the people whose only sin was self-delusion. But this portion of "Idol" is still largely about the freak show, which is why the ratings will be higher than for any other chunk of the season save maybe the last two episodes.

And now I'm going to watch an episode of AMC's new Bryan Cranston show, "Breaking Bad," to cleanse myself.

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

Strike Survival TV Club: Cupid, "A Truly Fractured Fairy Tale"

Spoilers for "Cupid" episode four, "A Truly Fractured Fairy Tale," coming up just as soon as I study some surveillance footage...

Even great TV shows aren't great every single week. While "A Truly Fractured Fairy Tale" isn't really a bad episode of "Cupid," there's a part of me that just wants to skip over it and move straight to talking about "First Loves" and then "Meat Market" (two of the series' highlights). Still, I resolved to talk about each and every episode, so talk about each and every episode we shall.

"Fairy Tale" does some interesting things -- it's the first time Trevor fails to make a love connection, the first time Claire is unequivocally right and Trevor's absolutely wrong, and I really liked the design of the secret admirer's fairy tale gifts -- but overall it doesn't quite come together.

Sooner or later, the show needed to do an episode where Trevor's metaphorical arrow missed its target, both to keep things unpredictable and to give Claire some credibility when she clashes with him in the future. The problem, I think, is that the Couple of the Week and their dilemma aren't that interesting.

Valerie (Kate Hodge) is a regular at Claire's singles support group, and in the middle of a slow session admits to having a crush on the model in a Marlboro Man-style billboard across the street from her office window. Trevor wants to fix her up with her dream man, model/teacher Scott (Robert Mailhouse), but Claire warns that the reality of the man will never live up to the fantasy of the billboard...

...which is exactly what happens, with a minimum of twists and turns. Turns out Scott's not the rugged nature lover he plays in the ad -- "The closest I get to the outdoors is a John Denver album" -- and despite Trevor's attempt to make him embrace his inner outdoorsman, including a horseback riding date where he makes an impromptu save of Valerie when her horse goes wild, it's not for him. Claire helps Valerie realize the attraction has less to do with the man than the way he represents the Montana home she left behind, and so Valerie decides to return to the country, single but more fulfilled.

It's a really straightforward story, and one where Claire's initial concern is so obvious that I can't imagine anyone but the most hardcore of Cupidians seeing that she has a point and Trevor is setting these two up for failure. No real stakes -- the relationship doesn't work out, but neither party seems that hurt by it -- and none of those magical moments that the series does so well. In an episode whose chief theme is the difference between the fantasy and the reality, this story had too much of the latter and almost none of the former. That may have been the point, but it's not that interesting to watch.

The other story, in which a secret admirer gives Claire one lavish fairy tale-inspired present after another, is almost all fantasy. In many ways, it's more whimsical than the song-and-dance plot from "Heaven... He's in Heaven," complete with David Johansen returning as Zeus the Bum to provide fairy tale-style narration. (In the end, we find out that he's simply reading from Claire's latest column, a payoff that doesn't quite work; in retrospect, none of what Zeus reads aloud sounds like the sort of thing I could imagine Claire writing in that context, even having just had this strange experience.)

Like I said above, I really dug the creation of the various gifts: a spinning wheel (Rumpelstiltskin), the golden egg (Jack and the Beanstalk?), the frog (Frog Prince), etc. And, as we discover at the end of the episode, Trevor slipped a letter P scrabble tile into Claire's couch cushions to keep her from sleeping on it (Princess and the P? Get it?).

The actual resolution to the story is fairly slight -- the gifts were intended for a woman who used to live in this apartment (I'm assuming she was the previous tenant and not Claire's ex-roommate, or else the guy would know Claire), and after resisting the concept of fairy tale love all episode, Claire gives the guy his dream woman's contact info -- but the interesting part to me is how Trevor responds to all of this. Even though he's normally pro-fantasy and Claire is anti, he's the one trying to convince her that these presents are coming from a stalker. ("To paraphrase a friend of mine, you should beware freaks bearing gifts.") Obviously, the sexual tension between the two of them is a key part of the series, but this is the first time -- and definitely not the last -- that we've seen Trevor get just a wee bit jealous about the attention Claire's getting from another man.

Before we move on to the bullet points, it's time for another installment of Rob Remembers, where "Cupid" creator Rob Thomas (who, before the writers strike began, was working on a an updated version of the series for ABC, which will hopefully still get made whenever the strike ends) shares some behind-the-scenes thoughts on how these episodes came together:

"A Truly Fractured Fairy Tale" was written by a freelance writer. The Writers Guild requires that two scripts a year are farmed out to writers not on staff. What typically happens in these situations is that the episode is largely re-written by the showrunners. In this particular case, I know that Reno and Osborne did a pretty extensive pass on the script.

Interestingly, the new Cupid pilot I'm writing, posits the same question as this particular episode of Cupid. Can we fall in love with someone who we've barely met? In the new pilot, Trevor's answer is absolutely yes. Claire, naturally, has grave doubts.

I was never fully invested in the notion of this Zeus character. I think Ron and Jeff had an idea for where they wanted to take the character, but once I was handed the reigns of the show, we never saw him again. Zeus is a Greek god. Cupid is a Roman god. Technically, the character should've been called "Jupiter."

The network was never thrilled with episodes in which the two anthological characters didn't get together, but I thought it was important to include these episodes from time to time, so that the audience couldn't predict every outcome. It was also important to me that Claire was "right" her fair share of the time.

I believe it was also supposed to be our fifth episodes, but it got pushed up by one episode, because of production complications on "First Loves" which was actually written before it.

Some other thoughts on "A Truly Fractured Fairy Tale":

-Though Trevor takes a bit of a backseat to Claire in this one, he has the usual choice one-liners. My favorites: when Claire worries that Scott might hurt Valerie, Trevor says, "He promised no more enslaving women and sticking them in foreign ports," and, after an especially wordy Claire line, "Is it true what you can tell about a woman by the length of her sentences?"

-Another thing not helping the episode is a particularly extraneous Champ story where he gives up his artistic integrity for a lucrative pants modeling contract, only to be betrayed in the end when the ad execs decide to build the campaign around a hot blonde instead of him. Outside of him trying to defend commercials as "like 60-second plays" and saying of the Maytag repair man, "Tell me he doesn't evoke a Samuel Beckett-like pathos," it's another strained attempt to give the third castmember something to do. Things improve significantly, Champ-wise, starting with the next episode, "First Loves."

-I was in my early 20s when this show was on the air, and it makes me irrationally happy to hear songs that I was addicted to at the time -- in this case, Barenaked Ladies' "One Week" over the montage of Trevor and Champ visiting modeling cattle calls looking for Scott.

-A random story about Robert Mailhouse that's unconnected to the episode but always amuses me: a while back, he was on an NBC midseason replacement sitcom called "Battery Park," an attempt at a 21st century "Barney Miller." The critics were so unenthusiastic about the show that its press tour session was filled with awkward silences as people struggled to come up with questions to ask. Finally, one critic started thumbing through the actors' bios and noticed that Mailhouse played drums in Keanu Reeves' band, Dogstar, and proceeded to ask, like, six or seven questions in a row about what it was like to be in Dogstar. After each answer, the critic paused, hoping someone else in the audience had something to ask, and when no one did, he plowed forward. It wasn't a Rule of Jay moment (named in honor of a critic who, if he asks seven or more questions at a session, guarantees the show will fail), since Jay wasn't there, but as the Dogstar questions kept coming, you could see on the faces of Mailhouse and his co-stars that they knew they were in trouble.

-An odd artistic choice at the end of this one, as the theme song plays over Claire journeying out into the park to blow bubbles. I've seen shows discover their theme song after it plays well in an early episode -- "California" in "The O.C." pilot, or "Angela's Theme" in the second episode of "Taxi" -- but I'm assuming they already had The Pretenders' "Human" lined up as their theme by the time a fourth (or in this case fifth) episode was being produced.

Coming up on Friday: "First Loves," featuring Lisa Loeb, a limo and other non-alliterative things. You can see it here, here, here, here and here.

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Sepinwall on TV: How to polish a tarnished 'Idol'

Today's column previews the new season of "American Idol" and offers some suggestions for how it can rebound from the mostly-forgettable season six:

Hit TV shows become big, ungainly ocean liners after a while. There may be troubled waters ahead, but they can't see them until it's far too late to steer around. So give some credit to the producers of "American Idol" for recognizing a major problem with their franchise and course-correcting at the earliest possible moment.

In an industry where "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" is one of the governing philosophies, it would be easy to assume nothing was wrong with the most popular show on TV. Though last season crushed everything in its path, and though the writers strike means there won't be much in its path to crush this time around, there are going to be changes made, according to the man at the top.

Even as "Idol" season six was dominating the Nielsens, "Idol" nation didn't seem too crazy about the product -- in particular, in the way the contestants became afterthoughts in their own show, taking a back seat to celebrity mentors, more product placement, even the otherwise well-intentioned "Idol Gives Back" charity event.

To read the full thing, click here. As with previous seasons, don't expect much "Idol" blogging from me before the semi-finals begin. Even in a strike season, my patience for the audition episodes only goes so far.

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