Week in TV: August 15-21

True Blood

- It's time to pull the cord on both the "What is Sookie, really?" story and the "What's the deal with Jason's girlfriend and her weirdo relatives?" story. They passed suspenseful a few weeks ago, and we're heading into "audience impatiently twiddles their thumbs" territory. Having read the books just means that I'm that much less interested in the overplayed mysteriousness of it all. It's answer time.

- I understand why, narratively, there's no incentive for the characters to all go to therapy, no matter how much they may need it, but I was glad to see Tara going to the rape survivors meeting this week. I like that the writers have imbued her with a new sense of perspective in the aftermath of last season and the Franklin debacle. Heaven knows, someone in this story needs to make strides towards consistently embracing logic.

- Denis O'Hare's agent must've clapped their hands with glee upon the conclusion of this episode - that last scene is one for the reel.

Mad Men

- A great episode, well-directed by John Slattery. I particularly liked the way he utilized the show's set to give a sense of layout to the new office - Pete's office, Peggy's office, the setup of the focus group, the shot down the hallway as Allison finally snaps and yells at Don, the hilarious shot of Peggy peeking into Don's office after the fight, the final shot of Peggy and Pete looking at each other through the glass wall. SCDP is finally starting to approach the familiarity of its predecessor. Slattery also got the best tandem performance from Elisabeth Moss and Vincent Kartheiser since "Meditations in an Emergency."

- There's something very satisfying about seeing Peggy make friends with other people her age who work in creative fields. Where it was once a radical step for her just to be a woman copywriter at her firm, now she has to decide whether she wants to become a radical woman in her 1965 milieu. Weiner willing, this will coincide with a decreasing interest in tolerating Don's shifty bullshit. I hope we'll see more of Joyce - I really liked Zosia Mamet in United States of Tara and The Kids are All Right. I'll also say that I loved Joey's "yeah, duh" reaction to Peggy asking if he'd heard about Malcolm X being shot. She's still got a ways to go.

- So, a Gen-X Campbell in the pipeline. I can't be the only one imagining a St. Elmo's Fire-style preppie nightmare, right?

Rubicon

A good episode, in that it stepped back from the conspiracy a bit to tell the audience more about the analyst group - a necessary, but deftly executed expository episode. The discussions among Will's co-workers reminded me a bit of The West Wing in the pure wonky delight of watching a debate play out.

Huge

- After watching the pilot weeks ago, something prompted me to dive back into Huge with a Hulu/On Demand mini-marathon. I'm glad I did - it's in the same camp (no pun intended) as other well-written, well-acted ABC Family shows like Greek and 10 Things I Hate About You. It's refreshing to see a show where the writers understand how teenagers speak and interact with one another, and that features a varied ensemble of characters without valorizing or demonizing any out of proportion.

- One of the best things about the Twilight phenomenon? Satiric fake Twilights in teen shows. The girls-bunk hysteria over "Phantasma" (about a girl who moves to a new town and falls in love with a mysterious boy...who's a ghost from the 1700s. They can never touch! It's so romantic!) was pitch-perfect and completely hilarious.

- I'm pretty sure me as a tween is encapsulated by some combination of Becca from Huge and Alex from Modern Family. As someone who once got called "that girl who reads" by a contemporary, I identify so much with the shy girl who keeps her head in a different book every day. True Confessions of Nerdy Youth: Once upon a time, like Becca, I went through a period where I wrote my journal in runes as an extra privacy safeguard. I know.

Also Watched: The Big C, Top Chef, Degrassi: The Boiling Point

Ongoing:

Deadwood, Season 3, Episodes 8-12

- A good run up to the end, though you could see the effects of the show being written without its creative team initially knowing that they weren't getting a fourth season. However, the episodes did a beautiful job of showing the sense of community that grew around the characters of Deadwood. There was something oddly touching about the scene of Al's men standing sentry in the street as Alma completes her walk to the bank post-shooting in "A Constant Throb," and the sense of grief around Ellsworth's death in "The Catbird Seat" made up for the loose ends remaining in the finale.

- I've got other shows in the pipeline, but I wouldn't be averse to someday taking on John from Cincinnati. Certainly this new acquaintance with the David Milch oeuvre makes me more interested in checking out Luck when it comes along.

Rewatched:

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 2, Episode 17, "Passion"

- Now that I've finished my month-and-a-half race through Buffy's entire run, I can pick and choose among the reruns aired daily on Logo. In retrospect, this may be my favorite episode of the series. I had enjoyed the show up until this point, but this was the first one that I watched where at the end I couldn't wait to start the next. The episodes I liked best were the ones that clearly demonstrated the stakes involved in challenging whatever villains were at hand - a necessary part of building tension over a 22-episode season is talking (a lot) about the threat, but the moments where that threat really lands are the best. "Passion" is an exquisitely tense episode - it's clear that the newly de-souled Angel is going to do something terrible, just not where or when. The episode's use of a particular piece of vampire mythology - the need for an invitation into a home - only heightens the sense of creeping menace. (It's in episodes like this that you can really see what Stephenie Meyer lost in discarding traditional vampire mythology for Twilight - if I were doing work on either one, I'd definitely try to remark on the polar opposite ways the whole "vampire boyfriend watching you sleep" thing works in this episode and that universe.) The scene where Giles discovers the horrifying tableau set up at his house is one of the series' best. By adding a familiar face to the list of Angel's terrible deeds, the show dramatically underscored the stakes involved in him losing his soul, which would resonate through both Buffy and Angel.

- I'll probably talk more about Bones once the regular season starts, but I will say that watching Buffy and Angel has made me appreciate Bones more. Bones managed to find the happy medium between David Boreanaz's performances as good Angel and bad Angel - Booth is driven and principled, but also has the joie de vivre that makes Angelus kind of fun, even when he's being evil.

Week in TV: August 1-7

True Blood

More Action Tara - I'm particularly impressed by her dogged refusal to forgive Bill for leaving her at the mercy of Franklin and the Mississippi vamps (in addition, as of this episode, to nearly killing Sookie). This season has dragged a bit with the plot-stretching between the more over-the-top sequences - like this week's detour to wherever Sookie went in her blood-free coma (Fairy Heaven? Fairy Purgatory?) - but I'm optimistic about the coming weeks. It looks like most everybody's returning to Bon Temps and Denis O'Hare is really dishing out some scenery-chewing fabulosity, so hopefully the run up to the finale will be as wonderfully crazed as it was last year.

Mad Men

- Man, even for Mad Men that episode was grim. I love that the episode drew on the show's past - Glen Bishop returns to offer Sally the sympathetic ear she's been craving since even before her parents' divorce, Freddy Rumsen gets back into the game with his former employees, newly sober but feet still firmly planted in the prior decade, and the Christmas party recasts Sal's Lee-Garner-placating firing as establishing a dangerous precedent for the men in charge of SCDP. It makes the show's universe feel more lived-in and cohesive, and respects the audience's ability to engage intelligently with the show without being too "hey, check out our righteous continuity" about it.

- The A.V. Club did a great Q&A recently about distracting actors, a concept to me that is particularly relevant in period television. Some actors just don't blend into the Mad Men milieu - they read as too 21st-century, or I've seen them in too many other things - Nora Zehetner (Don's indulgent neighbor), for whatever reason, is one of those for me.

Rubicon

I'm reserving judgement for a few weeks - right now, it's intriguingly oblique, but that could quickly turn into "frustratingly mysterious" depending on how long it takes for the show's conspiracy to unfold.

Friday Night Lights

If this season finale was any indication, next year I'll be drowning in tears when FNL comes to a close. While I liked the new characters introduced this season, I loved that "Thanksgiving" drew upon some of the show's best-established relationships - Matt and Landry, Tim and Billy, the Taylors - for the grandest emotional beats of the finale.

Ongoing:

Deadwood, Season Three, Episodes 5-7

- It feels like Deadwood added a few too many new characters in the third season (I like Brian Cox, but the theater troupe is not working for me) but I'm a big fan of Cleo King as Aunt Lou and the way that she infuses her performance with subtle code-switching based on Lou's varied interpersonal relationships.

- Speaking of distracting actors in period shows, something about Omar Gooding showing up really threw me. I guess I just watched too much Wild & Crazy Kids back in the day.

Star Trek: The Original Series, Season Two, Episodes 1-4

I watched all of the first season in a week-long binge last year right before the movie came out, and this week finally decided to start back up.

- A lot of the Star Trek 2 speculation seems to have focused on which classic villain might get a reboot with the new movie's altered timeline, but I'd really like to see them give the ass-kicking 21st-century makeover treatment to Christine Chapel. An assertively reimagined Chapel could make a great foil for McCoy and/or Kirk.

Also Watched: Degrassi: The Boiling Point, Covert Affairs, Top Chef, So You Think You Can Dance

Week in TV: July 25-31

True Blood

Fantastically gory, with special merit for the excellent new badassedness of Action Tara. And with shapeshifter dogfighting, Sam's messed-up family finally becomes as interesting as the rest of the active stories. Hopefully the latter half of the season will grant Sookie a degree of perspective and a renewed sense of self-preservation, since she's been behaving as though she doesn't have any sense at all. I don't want to become one of those people who harps on the differences between the books and the show, because I do believe that the show has distinguished itself as its own distinct entity. However, I do think they could introduce some more of the essence and tonal beats (and timeline spacing) of the books alongside the characters they've started to bring in. In the books, especially the later books, Sookie has a very clear "better the devil you know" sense of what her relationship is with the vampires in her life - for all of Sophie-Anne's foibles, Sookie recognizes that she allows her to live her life in Bon Temps where other monarchs would force her into service. There's no sense of a comparable sort of recognition in the show, and I think Sookie's character this season has suffered because of it.

Mad Men

- 1964 and 1965 were such major years for civil rights, this has to be the season the show stops being polite and starts getting real with race, right? It's easy to point to political advancements - the Civil Rights act in 64 and the Voting Rights Act in 65 - but there are also social and cultural shifts happening that would be impossible to ignore, particularly for an agency selling itself as being on the cutting edge. A lot of reviews I've read have wondered if the show will directly acknowledge Beatlemania, but it's also the heyday of Motown - the Beatles frequently traded number ones with the Supremes. Sidney Poitier won his Oscar in 64, and at this point was on his way to becoming a marketable star in his own right in a way a black actor had never been before. Add this to the increasing visibility of the civil rights movement on television - for example, Fannie Lou Hamer's speech for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the Democratic convention the summer before this season starts - and it seems pretty clear that this is the time for Mad Men to venture beyond elevator operators and maids.

Don and Roger specifically cite Pete's recognition of the potential in marketing to a black audience in "Shut the Door. Have a Seat," and it would seem to be a rich well to go to if SCDP continues hurting for clients. What the show really needs, in my opinion, is a black Rachel Menken - it doesn't have to be a woman, though that would be pretty awesome - a client who comes into the agency with a forthright manner, a clear sense of what they want and no illusions about the personnel. The show sketched Conrad Hilton so vividly last season - why not do something similar with, say, the Johnsons (or a New-York-based contemporary)?

- Joan got an office!

- Aaron Staton stays in (though no sight of Ken in the premiere), Michael Gladis and Bryan Batt leave. (While Jared Harris and Kiernan Shipka get bumped up to regular cast member status. It's astonishing how much older she looks, just in a year's time.) With Lucky Strike still a major client of the firm, it's sadly unlikely that we'll be seeing Sal again anytime soon. I'm intrigued to see how Ken comes back into play - I believe he was the highest-ranking person left at Sterling Cooper after the events of the finale, so presumably he stayed there, but I wonder if the creative elements of his character (short story-writing and such) that the show has introduced in the past will come into conflict at all with McCann's allegedly soulless way of conducting advertising.

- It's a small thing, but I love that Don did bring Allison over to SCDP to be his secretary. Compared with, say, Lois and Jane, she was like a shining beacon of competence in the third season.

Degrassi: The Boiling Point

Two favorite characters getting spotlights this week, which is always awesome: Riley, who is such a tormented wayward soul, and Claire, who rocks because a) she's smart, b) she's willing to be a voice of reason where there frequently is none, c) she's way better than her lame, nutty sister, and d) she never lets the opportunity to tell Jenna what a man-stealing ho she is pass her by.

Friday Night Lights

Vince's story got a little too Boyz N The Hood there for me, but Michael B. Jordan and Jurnee Smollett made it work on the emotional side. All in all, a pretty smooth penultimate episode, what with all the piece-moving that needs to happen for the finale.

Ongoing:

Deadwood, Season 3, Episodes 1-4

- As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, there's a lot of shows I'd like to watch or revisit now due to Deadwood. The terrific slow burn Timothy Olyphant does in these episodes made me regret missing Justified when it aired earlier this year. One for the Netflix queue.

- It wasn't as bad as the second season's "Al passes a kidney stone" story, but Alma's pregnancy woes just made the show's depiction of nineteenth-century frontier medicine *that* much ookier.

- Janie Bryant's received a lot of press in the past few years for her work as a costume designer on Mad Men - it makes sense, as the fashions of the 1960s are easier to incorporate into twenty-first century wardrobes than those of the 1870s - but her work on Deadwood is gorgeous too. Joanie's top hat with the long trailing scarf may be one of my favorite accessories on either show.

Also Watched: Intervention, Covert Affairs, Top Chef