A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

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:

• 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.

I'll also be picking up a few more shows over the next few weeks--Off The Map (like the cast, and it looks gorgeous, even if writing is thus far more than a bit derivative), Harry's Law (primarily for the snark value), and Fairly Legal (which, as best I can tell from the poster, involves Sarah Shahi's legs solving legal problems).