fastidium

Its been a whirlwind of television viewing this past week. I’m just now getting to writing down what I saw were glaring holes and promising starts to the new fall shows. I wrote earlier about Chuck and Reaper, the rest are here.

The Simpsons

Just where the movie left off, the show picks up with its first episode of season 19. Yes, that’s right, season 19. Can it be that long ago that the chippy satire of popular culture was unleashed from the Tracy Ulman show? The best line of this episode was a jab at US foreign policy, something along the lines of “we don’t realize that we’re the empirialists and we don’t care what others think of us”. Classic Simpsons.

Heroes

I’ve already reviewed season two’s first episode in Buy More, Large Mart, and Kopy Kingdom. Let me go on the record here and say that this show will be looked upon in television history as one of the greats, along side Roots, Dallas, and The Powers of Matthew Starr. Yes, you read that right … The Powers of Matthew Starr.

Eureka

I wish more shows could be like Eureka. SciFi afforded the writers of this show the time they needed to develop Eureka into the character-driven show that it is today. But it took time. It took a whole season for Sheriff Carter to get acclimated, just like it took Joel Fleischman awhile to get used to living in the eccentric town of Cicely, Alaska (I’ve got a list of Eureka/Northern Exposure comparisons). Now we have the major plot surrounding the “entity” and its connection to Allison Blake’s son Kevin. We have the death of Kim and Henry’s unrelenting quest to find out why. And, Henry is the only one who knows that in an alternative timeline Kim is alive and they are married. That timeline can’t happen though without other repercussions to Eureka.

In the first part of the season 2 finale, we find out that Nathan Stark (named after Iron Man Tony Stark I think) has known the whereabouts of detained spy Beverly Barlowe and has her secretly flown back to Eureka. She’s knows something about the entity and Kim’s death but won’t tell. Meanwhile there’s a deadly bacteria threatening the town that Carter and Stark have to figure out how to stop.

All of this is the backdrop to each episode’s main plot but none of it could have developed without SciFi allowing the show to progress and develop. I think Eureka has had a pretty strong viewership but we’ve all seen shows that have big fanbases and get canceled (Firefly anyone). Thank you SciFi Channel for not being like Fox.

The conluding episode of the season 2 finale is Tuesday night (October 2nd). Eureka has just been given the go-ahead for season 3. Hoorah!

Bionic Woman

I wasn’t sure what expect after all the mixed reviews this show received prior to its network airing. I’m just old enough to remember the original series and having Katie Sackhoff as a main character was just enough to get me intrigued. I’m going to give this show a C+ for its pilot episode but the plus means that it may grow on me. But I’m pessimistic.

The big problem I have with the pilot of Bionic Woman is that we, as the audience, need time to get to know people before a plot develops too quickly. I think the first sentence out of Jamie Summers mouth was a question to her boyfriend, “Why are you with me?” Is it just me, or is it too soon to be asking questions like that. We don’t know your background or his. Why should we just assume that you question whether or not you should be together? We need to see more interaction between the couple before we can jump to questions like that.

This show could have benefited from a mini-series first. That’s the way Battlestar Galactica started out and Bionic Woman would have been more promising with that kind of head start.

Mad Men

We got to see a true Draper-ism come out in this last episode, Long Weekend. He’s in a meeting with the whole gang from Sterling Cooper and Abraham and Rachel Menken, of Menken’s Department store. The young daughter Rachel wants to store to go in a more elegant direction while father Abraham is determined that customers like good ol’ fashioned stores. The world around them is changing. Customers aren’t dedicated to brands any longer, they are fickle because they have become the centers of commerce. Don says to Abraham:

The unpleasant truth about Menkens: Your customers cannot be depended upon. They’ve changed, they’re prosperous, they know full well what they deserve and they’re willing to pay for it.

And then to address the fact that young people are the ones who should be targeted and not the old, Don tells Abraham that Menkens will not be able to keep up with the consumer world because the young don’t care what grandpa buys:

As much as grandpa liked that old marble palace, the kids will not. They will say to grandpa, “it must have been hard back in the olden days”.

We also learn a little bit more about Don’s hidden childhood. His mother was a prostitute who died giving birth to Don. As a baby, Don was brought to his father and his new wife. But his father was a drunk and when Don was 10, his father was kicked in the face by a horse and was killed. The rest of his childhood was spent with “two sorry people”, his father’s wife and her new husband. It was the depression - they didn’t have much - so holding onto an unwanted child must have been hard. It sounds like they didn’t let Don forget it.

Roger Cooper, Don’s boss, has a close shave with death as he has a heart attack in his office. Actually, he was trying to “do it again” with a young girl that was going to be used in an ad campaign. Roger has an emotional breakdown in the hospital and decides he needs to change his ways. This is another haunting event of real life that invades the unrealistic, mediated world of Mad Men.

Pushing Daisies

Wednesday, October 3
Every reviewer says this will be an exceptional show. I’ll write about my impressions on Thursday.

Others

Thanks to the wonderful DVR fairies, I finally watched the premieres of Life and Journeyman too. They were better than expected but we’ll see this week whether or not they will be go on my list of must-see TV. I’m still concerned about the premise that Charlie Crews would care about who framed him when he got $50 million as a settlement. Where did the money come from? The police department? And, the writers of Journeyman better make it apparent real quick why Dan Vassar is traveling through time and not someone else. Both shows are on the maybe list.