- Desperate Housewives--Enjoying the Huffman/Williams plotline, if just for giving Lynette something to do other than bitch about her kids, and Longoria is selling the "switched at birth" plotline as best she can, but someone needs to find a storyline for Susan or send her off to Mandyville ASAP. The Bree plotline is meh, but I understand the need for male beefcake.
- Brothers & Sisters--Look, I know you've had budget cutbacks (Emily Van Camp and Patricia Wettig are gone) and cast shifts (Calista Flockhart and Giles Marini didn't want to do every episode), but the abrupt writeouts/disappearances/reappearances are too much. The show's at its best when the characters are clashing over stakes that matter and/or political issues, rather than the umpteenth "William had a secret!" storyline.
- Hawaii Five-0--Like its timeslot competitor, Castle, it's taking some time to balance the elements (procedural, family, and mythology). Based on recent episodes, they're bagging the family stuff altogether and adding more mythology. That seems like a decent idea, since Alex O'Loughlin and Taryn Manning lacked the Fillion/Quinn/Sullivan chemistry that works so well on Castle. Still, an entertaining way to spend 44 minutes.
- NCIS: Los Angeles--For a show that debuted with a massive audience and has held on to it, it's surprising just how much tinkering has gone on. Some are subtle (pushing Chris O'Donnell more and more to the background) and some not (writing out two of the original six cast members, adding 3 new cast members). For once, though, all the tinkering has worked well, and we're getting legitimately fun banter, bromantic (O'Donnell and Cool J), quasi-romantic (Ruah and Olsen), and geektastic (Foa and Felice Smith).
- No Ordinary Family--The mythology stuff is way too drawn out and boring, but it's nice to see a superhero show that's not so relentlessly dark. Kay Panabaker has actually proven to be the strongest story-generator, in part because her mind-reading power is easier to hang story hooks on than super-strength, super-speed, or super-brains. The sidekicks (Reeser and Malco) remain the most fun part of the show, but it's a good time as a whole.
- Better With You--Remains an adequate sitcom where the cast is much better than the material it's given. Right now, seems noteworthy primarily because they're using the traditional "hide a pregnancy" methods (laundry baskets, couches, counters, shooting from the chest up) to disguise the fact that JoAnna Garcia isn't pregnant, even though her character is.
Sunday, January 16, 2011
HALFTIME REPORT: With us about halfway through the TV season, I wanted to toss together an omnibus post to quick-bullet a few shows that I at least have been watching, but that we haven't blogged about, to give y'all a chance to speak out on the things we don't cover week to week. In Sunday-Friday chronological order:
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Based on Firewall and Iceberg's comments, do we need to cover Harry's Law as aggressively as Shit My Liberal Lawyer Ghost Day Says?<span> </span>
ReplyDeleteWow, that's six shows that I'm not watching. I did not pick up Off the Map, don't even know what Fairly Legal is, and after the hideous reviews for Harry's Law (we're not even in the so-bad-it's-hilarious category, near as I can tell) I'm not eatching it even with the patent law hook.
ReplyDeleteLooking forward to having a semi-normal TV schedule back this week, and to the return fo Big Love tonight!
i used to watch most of these shows, but they are all out of my rotation at this point. i am, however, very excited about the return of justified and white collar over the next few weeks. i may give fairly legal a tryout as i do like sarah shahi.
ReplyDeleteBeing sick this weekend, I caught up on my guilty pleasure, which is Castle. So awesome. When it's bad, I assume it's tongue in cheek and laugh with them, and when it's good, it's awesome. I haven't so badly both wanted two fictional characters to get together and so dreaded the inevitable suckiness afterwards since Moonlighting.
ReplyDeleteWill watch Harry's Law, though I assume that committment is max 2 hours 20 minutes (3 episodes minus commercials).
I continue to watch Desperate Housewives and Brothers and Sisters, if only because there's nothing else on Sunday nights that interests me (aside from Golden Globe Sunday, of course). I do like No Ordinary Family and wonder if they're going to write Autumn Reeser's pregnancy into the show.
ReplyDeleteThey have confirmed that Reeser's pregnancy will be written in.
ReplyDeleteI'm still watching No Ordinary Family, although it's pretty much just for Autumn Reeser at this point. It does have a good cast, and some occasionally interesting moments, but it's also very lazy (especially with how they use the son's powers). Plus, almost all of the serialized elements they've had haven't actually involved the family! And they have a bad habit of ending on a cliffhanger, and then handwaving it away in the first 2 minutes.
ReplyDeleteTo me, the 2 best new network shows this year, suprisingly enough, have been on the CW. (Maybe it's not surprising. I do watch a lot of stuff on there.) Nikita is pretty straightforward, but it has a good cast and is successful at what it's doing. I'd like a little more of Melinda Clarke, but they do make her appearences count. And Hellcats is just a lot of goofy fun. It's the one show out there that's emulating Glee, and even though it's much less over-the-top, it's also much less annoying.
I still watch Brothers & Sisters and I agree the show is in trouble. The first season was really great, but now... meh. It's a shame because they created some excellent characters but the story seemed to get lost somewhere along the way.
ReplyDeleteI read somewhere that the show is in danger of being canceled after this season. Wouldn't surprise me at all.
I'll miss Kevin and Scotty the most, followed closely by Rachel Griffiths. I will not miss scruffy Dave Annable talking out of the side of his mouth like Fred Flintstone -- or his real-life wife who clearly cannot act but is playing his girlfriend on the show anyway. Blargh.