TV Thoughts

I have actively chosen to watch One Tree Hill instead of Heroes, which is just the latest indicator of this TV season's general suckitude.  Generally speaking, I usually give shows I like a lot of leeway when they have dips in quality, but this season I've basically given up on multiple shows mid-season, with only vague intentions of ever catching up. Brothers and Sisters is more or less spinning its wheels, and I have my doubts about the writers using the departure of Balthazar Getty in a dynamic, story-propelling way.  Ugly Betty seems to have regained some of its momentum, but the "Betty gets condemned by her family for having a job and a life of her own" storyline earlier this season was really kind of gross.  The fourth-season finale storyline of the tumor trial resurrected my faith in Grey's Anatomy, which was then squandered by the Denny hallucinations, which started to actively erode the goodwill Shonda Rhimes and co. built up with the stellar second season.  Heroes is just...boring.  

There just seems to be a giant gulf in quality between the really good shows and those that are...less so.  It certainly doesn't help that interesting shows like the cancelled Pushing Daisies or the low-rated, seemingly not long for this world Kings get astonishingly few viewers.  Cable's got most of the good stuff these days, but the narrative control that comes with shorter seasons is offset by months and months between each season.  This past season of Big Love, which concluded last night, was an amazingly multifaceted study of womanhood.  All I could do when it ended was hope that the time it takes for Season Four to come to the screen will be less than a year. (The same goes for Mad Men) ER's run up to its series finale has been history-honoring and heartrending, but that's only because the show is ending.  Similarly, Lost will leave its own void in the schedule when it ends next year.  I want to write about the Battlestar Galactica finale after I've had a chance to watch it again (unlike some critics, my read on it was positive), but again, it's another departure of a quality show. I don't know, I guess I'm just feeling pessimistic about my favorite medium.

On a lighter note (kind of), I've been catching up via DVD with the thoroughly excellent Veronica Mars.  The first season of that show is an unbelievable example of the mystery genre executed nearly flawlessly.  The penultimate episode of that season, "A Trip to the Dentist" is one of my favorite episodes of TV ever, if not the favorite:

Ignore the hateful fishstick commercial.  "A Trip to the Dentist" is show continuity firing on all cylinders, taking the universe constructed around Veronica throughout the season and bringing it all together.  The characters who reappear in the episode all come from their own great one-off Mysteries of the Week, but their place in Veronica's past and present in this episode grounds them in the world of Neptune High in this mind-blowing sort of way.  Additionally, I was a die-hard member of the small minority of the show's fans who preferred Duncan to Logan, and the scene where Veronica confronts Duncan remains amazing, even after I've seen this episode who knows how many times (it's also probably Teddy Dunn's best scene in his entire run on the show) Add to that the final creepy-video-room clue to the Lilly Kane mystery, and this episode just becomes legendary.  As good as "Leave It to Beaver," the finale that follows with the epic Aaron Echolls reveal, is, it pales in comparison to "A Trip to the Dentist."

This ended up much longer than I thought it would.  I'm trying to get back into writing semi-regularly - Spring Break caused an unfortunate complication since my computer and the wireless router at home don't get along with one another.  I've got plans, though. April, I think, will be good.