The Wire, Season 2, Episode 6: "All Prologue" (Newbies edition)

Once again, we're revisiting season two of "The Wire" in two versions: one for people who have watched the entire series and want to be able to discuss it from beginning to end, and those who aren't all the way there yet and don't want to be spoiled about later developments. This is the newbie post (click here for the veteran version).

Spoilers for episode six, "All Prologue," coming up just as soon as I light a $100 bill on fire...

"He's saying the past is always with us. Where we come from, what we go through, how we go through it -- all this s--t matters." -D'Angelo Barksdale

Designed as a novel for television, each season of "The Wire" is usually greater than the sum of its weekly parts, but every now and then you get a particularly extraordinary part of the whole. Season one gave us "Cleaning Up," with the death of Wallace, Avon's arrest and Daniels standing up to Burrell and Clay Davis. And midway through season two, we get the brilliant "All Prologue."

"All Prologue" moves the plot along a fair amount: the detail figures out what the checkers are doing and how to track it, Nick gets deeper into bed with Vondas (and prepares to embark on a third career as a drug dealer), and Stringer makes a bold move of his own in hiring a hitman to murder D'Angelo. But it's also as character and theme-driven as any episode of the season so far, densely packed with one hilarious, or moving, or outright tragic moment after another.

It gets much of its power from focusing on McNulty and D'Angelo, who were the defactor co-leads of season one, and who have been intentionally marginalized to this point in season two. After trying to think outside the box of their respective institutions, each was severely punished: D'Angelo by having to take the biggest fall of anyone in the Barksdale crew, Jimmy with his exile to the boat. And "All Prologue" -- which is actually something of an epilogue to season one -- sees both men approaching what could or should be the end to their respective stories.

D more or less severs ties with his family and the larger Barksdale organization. The tragic irony of his death is that, while this decision is the last straw for Stringer, it plays out to us as evidence that Stringer had nothing to fear from D'Angelo. When you see D telling his mother to leave him alone -- in a moment as wonderfully played by Larry Gilliard Jr. as the famous "Where's Wallace?" scene -- you see that he is stronger, and better, than the family that raised him. He doesn't need them, not even to get out of prison sooner, and had Stringer not hired his hitman, D very likely would have spent the decade leading up to his parole hearing being a model prisoner, not worrying about selling out his family for a deal. This is the bed he made, and he was going to lie in it for 10-20 years. But because Stringer was so paranoid, D'Angelo is dead. And, as it does whenever a good person (as good as anyone can be, especially someone we met when he was skating on a murder charge) dies on "The Wire," it hurts, deeply, even though we know it's a fictional character.

It took some bravery on the part of David Simon, Ed Burns and company to bump off one of their two original leading men -- most showrunners would have seen how white-hot flaming incredible Gilliard was and contrived an excuse to keep him around -- just as it's brave to have McNulty be such a non-factor to this point of season two. Even Jimmy recognizes how useless he's become as a cop (the only thing he's ever really cared about being), so after failing to identify his Jane Doe and seeing Omar through the Bird trial, Jimmy prepares for "retirement." He'll still wear the badge, but he knows he has no hope of getting off the boat so long as Rawls has power, so he's just going to put his head down and slog through the days until he gets his 20-year pension. This would, appropriately, take about as much time as D would have needed to serve before being eligible for parole.

And where D'Angelo tries to separate himself from his kin and is killed for it, Jimmy desperately wants back in with his own family -- if he can't be a cop, maybe he can be a husband and father, and better than he was the first time around -- and is cast out by Elena (after one for the road, of course). No one trusts either man's motivations, even though D seems resolute about carrying his burden, and even though a Jimmy who isn't working murders might be capable of being a more functional human being.

Simon often compares "The Wire" to Greek tragedy (and has offered us a remorseless criminal organization whose head man is known as The Greek). He talks about how the characters are all set on a specific path -- by their families, by their socio-economic circumstances, by the institution they belong to, and by their own past actions -- that is all but impossible to get off of. The characters are only occasionally aware of how their lives are governed that way, but as D'Angelo discusses "The Great Gatsby" with the prison English class, he gets it -- even though he doesn't recognize how soon fate and his own past deeds are going to catch up to him.

But before we get the tragedy of D'Angelo, and the continued purgatory for McNutly, we get the comic masterpiece that is Omar Devone Little (who is himself a fan of Greek mythology) versus Maury Levy, JD.

Every other time we watch Maury at work, we have to cringe at his complete amorality even as we admire his tenacity and gift for turning pathetic-looking hands into winning ones. But damn, it's so nice to see him go up against a man who's not only just as smart, but beholden to no one and nothing but his own conscience. Maury can't outwit Omar, can't apply any sort of institutional pressure on him, and is left utterly speechless when Omar turns Maury's accusation of being a parasite of the drug game around on him: "I got the shotgun, you got the briefcase. It's all in The Game, though, right?"

But that moment is only as fun to watch because we're aware of what an anomaly it is -- that the Omars of this world are few and far between, and that it'll likely be a long, cold time before we see Maury go down in utter defeat like this. The criminal justice system, for all its good intentions, is ideally set up for opportunistic parasites like Maury to make a meal of it, all while being treated as a respected (an feared) upright citizen of the community, where Omar is a loathed outlaw (albeit one who knows how to buy a snazzy track suit while still sticking to the letter of Ilene Nathan's "Anything with a tie" request).

I have so much more to say about "All Prologue," but I'm trying to get this done in advance of a holiday weekend (and I sincerely hope most of you have more exciting outdoor activities to do today and are reading this post on Monday), so we're going to go to the bullet points.

Some other thoughts on "All Prologue":

• Kima and Cheryl's relationship, and Cheryl's frustration at Kima's decision to return to active detective-work, comes to the forefront again beautifully as she insists on tagging along for Kima and Prez's strip club scouting mission. I particularly like the scene where Kima shows Cheryl a can like the one the girls died in to explain why she cares so much about these cases, because of the complicated way Melanie Nicholls-King plays Cheryl's response to the gesture. Cheryl does understand the importance of the case, but she also fears for her lover's safety, doesn't want to go through another shooting (or worse) like she did in season one, and would be much more comfortable if Kima's job didn't lead her to hanging around strip clubs. And, as Shardene's friend points out, can you blame her?

• On the Sobotka side of things, we see Sergei intervene with Prop Joe (who turns out to be Cheese's boss). And as Nick explains to Vondas why he doesn't just want to have Cheese taken out, Vondas' respect for the intelligence of Frank's nephew grows -- enough that he offers to pay Nick, Ziggy and Johnny 50 (who wants no part of it) in dope for the chemicals used to make it, since he knows Nick is smart enough to make a bigger profit on the drugs. Frank is a means to an end for Vondas, but he sees other possibilities for young Nico, no?

• Having yelled at and/or smacked Ziggy around for most of the first five episodes, Frank finally has a real conversation with his son here, and we get a much better understandings of the origins of the resentment that fuels so much of how Ziggy behaves. Though we've seen that Ziggy is good with computers, he didn't get to go to community college like his brother, but was instead drafted into the family business -- for which he was so ill-equipped, and for which he received virtually no benefit from being the son of the mighty Frank Sobotka. Most of the time, Frank seems like a noble villain -- he's working with The Greek for the good of the union, not himself -- but a scene like their conversation at the docks makes you wish he had been a little less selfless at some point, or at least willing to extend his beneficence to his real family at least as much as to his union brothers.

• Beadie continues to show growth as a smart detective, as she's the first member of the detail to recognize the criminal value of what the checkers do.

• Between Vondas (Greek), Sergei (Ukrainian) and now Etan (Israeli) -- not to mention Prop Joe (East Baltimore) -- The Greek has himself quite the international crime cartel, doesn't he? No concern about national or tribal loyalty -- just a shared love of profit.

• Dominic West has a lot of fun in the scene where McNulty is undressing the mannequin to distract Elena.

• Given how much of this episode functions as a season one coda, it feels appropriate -- and funny -- to have Judge Phelan back to tear into Bird during the sentencing. ("Are you Jesus Christ come back to Earth?")

• The ceremonial eyef--k that McNulty and Omar give Bird is a detail from David Simon's "Homicide" book, and was mentioned once on the "Homicide" series, though there it was referred to as "the ceremonial eyescrew" by Beau Felton.

• The prison English teacher is played by Richard Price, whose Dempsey novels are thematically very similar to what "The Wire" is doing -- and who will begin writing for the series starting in season three.

• I love Prop Joe's gift for turning a phrase, like when he tells Nick that, if not for Sergei, he and Ziggy would be "cadaverous motherf--kers."

Coming up next: "Backwash," in which Bodie goes flower-shopping, Joe has a proposition for Stringer and Rawls tries to dump the Jane Doe cases on the Sobotka detail.

I have jury duty early next week, and depending on how long it lasts, the next review may be pushed back a few days. Based on my past experience, I'm probably not going to get paneled, but if I do, I hope we get a witness one-tenth as colorful as Omar.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

The Wire, Season 2, Episode 6: "All Prologue" (Veterans edition)

Once again, we're revisiting season two of "The Wire" in two versions: one for people who have watched the entire series and want to be able to discuss it from beginning to end, and those who aren't all the way there yet and don't want to be spoiled about later developments. This is the veteran post (click here for the newbie version).

Spoilers for episode six, "All Prologue," coming up just as soon as I light a $100 bill on fire...

"He's saying the past is always with us. Where we come from, what we go through, how we go through it -- all this s--t matters." -D'Angelo Barksdale

Designed as a novel for television, each season of "The Wire" is usually greater than the sum of its weekly parts, but every now and then you get a particularly extraordinary part of the whole. Season one gave us "Cleaning Up," with the death of Wallace, Avon's arrest and Daniels standing up to Burrell and Clay Davis. And midway through season two, we get the brilliant "All Prologue."

"All Prologue" moves the plot along a fair amount: the detail figures out what the checkers are doing and how to track it, Nick gets deeper into bed with Vondas (and prepares to embark on a third career as a drug dealer), and Stringer makes a bold move of his own in hiring a hitman to murder D'Angelo. But it's also as character and theme-driven as any episode of the season so far, densely packed with one hilarious, or moving, or outright tragic moment after another.

It gets much of its power from focusing on McNulty and D'Angelo, who were the defactor co-leads of season one, and who have been intentionally marginalized to this point in season two. After trying to think outside the box of their respective institutions, each was severely punished: D'Angelo by having to take the biggest fall of anyone in the Barksdale crew, Jimmy with his exile to the boat. And "All Prologue" -- which is actually something of an epilogue to season one -- sees both men approaching what could or should be the end to their respective stories.

D more or less severs ties with his family and the larger Barksdale organization. The tragic irony of his death is that, while this decision is the last straw for Stringer, it plays out to us as evidence that Stringer had nothing to fear from D'Angelo. When you see D telling his mother to leave him alone -- in a moment as wonderfully played by Larry Gilliard Jr. as the famous "Where's Wallace?" scene -- you see that he is stronger, and better, than the family that raised him. He doesn't need them, not even to get out of prison sooner, and had Stringer not hired his hitman, D very likely would have spent the decade leading up to his parole hearing being a model prisoner, not worrying about selling out his family for a deal. This is the bed he made, and he was going to lie in it for 10-20 years. But because Stringer was so paranoid, D'Angelo is dead. And, as it does whenever a good person (as good as anyone can be, especially someone we met when he was skating on a murder charge) dies on "The Wire," it hurts, deeply, even though we know it's a fictional character.

It took some bravery on the part of David Simon, Ed Burns and company to bump off one of their two original leading men -- most showrunners would have seen how white-hot flaming incredible Gilliard was and contrived an excuse to keep him around -- just as it's brave to have McNulty be such a non-factor to this point of season two. Even Jimmy recognizes how useless he's become as a cop (the only thing he's ever really cared about being), so after failing to identify his Jane Doe and seeing Omar through the Bird trial, Jimmy prepares for "retirement." He'll still wear the badge, but he knows he has no hope of getting off the boat so long as Rawls has power, so he's just going to put his head down and slog through the days until he gets his 20-year pension. This would, appropriately, take about as much time as D would have needed to serve before being eligible for parole.

And where D'Angelo tries to separate himself from his kin and is killed for it, Jimmy desperately wants back in with his own family -- if he can't be a cop, maybe he can be a husband and father, and better than he was the first time around -- and is cast out by Elena (after one for the road, of course). No one trusts either man's motivations, even though D seems resolute about carrying his burden, and even though a Jimmy who isn't working murders might be capable of being a more functional human being.

Simon often compares "The Wire" to Greek tragedy (and has offered us a remorseless criminal organization whose head man is known as The Greek). He talks about how the characters are all set on a specific path -- by their families, by their socio-economic circumstances, by the institution they belong to, and by their own past actions -- that is all but impossible to get off of. The characters are only occasionally aware of how their lives are governed that way, but as D'Angelo discusses "The Great Gatsby" with the prison English class, he gets it -- even though he doesn't recognize how soon fate and his own past deeds are going to catch up to him.

But before we get the tragedy of D'Angelo, and the continued purgatory for McNutly, we get the comic masterpiece that is Omar Devone Little (who is himself a fan of Greek mythology) versus Maury Levy, JD.

Every other time we watch Maury at work, we have to cringe at his complete amorality even as we admire his tenacity and gift for turning pathetic-looking hands into winning ones. But damn, it's so nice to see him go up against a man who's not only just as smart, but beholden to no one and nothing but his own conscience. Maury can't outwit Omar, can't apply any sort of institutional pressure on him, and is left utterly speechless when Omar turns Maury's accusation of being a parasite of the drug game around on him: "I got the shotgun, you got the briefcase. It's all in The Game, though, right?"

But that moment is only as fun to watch because we're aware of what an anomaly it is -- that the Omars of this world are few and far between, and that it'll likely be a long, cold time before we see Maury go down in utter defeat like this. The criminal justice system, for all its good intentions, is ideally set up for opportunistic parasites like Maury to make a meal of it, all while being treated as a respected (an feared) upright citizen of the community, where Omar is a loathed outlaw (albeit one who knows how to buy a snazzy track suit while still sticking to the letter of Ilene Nathan's "Anything with a tie" request).

I have so much more to say about "All Prologue," but I'm trying to get this done in advance of a holiday weekend (and I sincerely hope most of you have more exciting outdoor activities to do today and are reading this post on Monday), so we're going to go to the bullet points.

Some other thoughts on "All Prologue":

• Kima and Cheryl's relationship, and Cheryl's frustration at Kima's decision to return to active detective-work, comes to the forefront again beautifully as she insists on tagging along for Kima and Prez's strip club scouting mission. I particularly like the scene where Kima shows Cheryl a can like the one the girls died in to explain why she cares so much about these cases, because of the complicated way Melanie Nicholls-King plays Cheryl's response to the gesture. Cheryl does understand the importance of the case, but she also fears for her lover's safety, doesn't want to go through another shooting (or worse) like she did in season one, and would be much more comfortable if Kima's job didn't lead her to hanging around strip clubs. And, as Shardene's friend points out, can you blame her?

• On the Sobotka side of things, we see Sergei intervene with Prop Joe (who turns out to be Cheese's boss). And as Nick explains to Vondas why he doesn't just want to have Cheese taken out, Vondas' respect for the intelligence of Frank's nephew grows -- enough that he offers to pay Nick, Ziggy and Johnny 50 (who wants no part of it) in dope for the chemicals used to make it, since he knows Nick is smart enough to make a bigger profit on the drugs. Frank is a means to an end for Vondas, but he sees other possibilities for young Nico, no?

• Having yelled at and/or smacked Ziggy around for most of the first five episodes, Frank finally has a real conversation with his son here, and we get a much better understandings of the origins of the resentment that fuels so much of how Ziggy behaves. Though we've seen that Ziggy is good with computers, he didn't get to go to community college like his brother, but was instead drafted into the family business -- for which he was so ill-equipped, and for which he received virtually no benefit from being the son of the mighty Frank Sobotka. Most of the time, Frank seems like a noble villain -- he's working with The Greek for the good of the union, not himself -- but a scene like their conversation at the docks makes you wish he had been a little less selfless at some point, or at least willing to extend his beneficence to his real family at least as much as to his union brothers.

• Beadie continues to show growth as a smart detective, as she's the first member of the detail to recognize the criminal value of what the checkers do.

• Between Vondas (Greek), Sergei (Ukrainian) and now Etan (Israeli) -- not to mention Prop Joe (East Baltimore) -- The Greek has himself quite the international crime cartel, doesn't he? No concern about national or tribal loyalty -- just a shared love of profit.

• Dominic West has a lot of fun in the scene where McNulty is undressing the mannequin to distract Elena.

• Given how much of this episode functions as a season one coda, it feels appropriate -- and funny -- to have Judge Phelan back to tear into Bird during the sentencing. ("Are you Jesus Christ come back to Earth?")

• The ceremonial eyef--k that McNulty and Omar give Bird is a detail from David Simon's "Homicide" book, and was mentioned once on the "Homicide" series, though there it was referred to as "the ceremonial eyescrew" by Beau Felton.

• The prison English teacher is played by Richard Price, whose Dempsey novels are thematically very similar to what "The Wire" is doing -- and who will begin writing for the series starting in season three.

• I love Prop Joe's gift for turning a phrase, like when he tells Nick that, if not for Sergei, he and Ziggy would be "cadaverous motherf--kers."

And now it's time for the veterans-only section, where we talk about how things in this episode will play out later in the season, and the series:

• Stringer arranging D'Angelo's murder is the beginning of the end for him. That he gets away with it emboldens him to cut the deal with Prop Joe behind Avon's back, which leads to him pitting Omar against Brother Mouzone, etc. And while Avon eventually accepts the logic of Stringer's position after he finds out what happened to D, I don't know that he so easily rolls on his best friend if Stringer hadn't killed his nephew.

• At the time of this story, Kima is still faithful to Cheryl, but Cheryl will be proven right in the end about her partner's wandering eye.

• Here's a question: given how we saw Jimmy behaving with Beadie and her kids after he went back in uniform, might things have worked out for him and Elena had she taken him back here? He'll go on an alcoholic bender a few episodes from now, but that's only after she gives him the boot again and he feels completely hopeless. We see at the end of season three, and throughout season five, that his drinking and bad behavior are inextricably tied to him working as a detective. Had he and Elena reconciled here, he would have stayed in the stress-free life of a marine unit cop, would never have needed Bunk and Lester to plead for Daniels to rescue him from that purgatory, would never have been in a position to go after Marlo, etc., etc. I know with "The Wire" I'm always asking "What if?" even as David Simon tells me that the characters can't escape their destinies, but... what if?

• There was some debate in later seasons about whether Cheese was always written as Prop Joe's nephew, since early in season three there's talk of a mid-level dealer named Drac being Joe's nephew. But here, Joe complains about having multiple nephews in the game, all of them bumbling in some way, which allows for both Cheese and Drac to be kin.

• D'Angelo's killer is clever enough to fool the disinterested state cops, who'd rather not add an unsolved homicide to their stats, but not clever enough for McNulty, who'll figure out what really happened within minutes of entering that prison library next season.

• Omar will make use of the Get Out Of Jail Free card Ilene Nathan gives him in season four, and for a much greater charge than aggravated assault, after Chris Partlow frames him for murder.

• Nick's decision to take half the payment in dope is yet another brick in the path that will lead to Ziggy's ruin. Had Nick not chosen to sell drugs -- and proved to be so much better at it than Ziggy -- Ziggy would have one less resentment brewing inside himself when Double-G insults him for the final time.

• This is the last we'll see of Shardene until the series finale, I believe. Not a lot of room in "The Wire" to tell continuing stories of the characters who get a happy ending.

• Both Joe and Shardene's stripper friend say "Sheeeeeeeeit," which won't become Clay Davis's catchphrase until season 3.

Coming up next: "Backwash," in which Bodie goes flower-shopping, Joe has a proposition for Stringer and Rawls tries to dump the Jane Doe cases on the Sobotka detail.

I have jury duty early next week, and depending on how long it lasts, the next review may be pushed back a few days. Based on my past experience, I'm probably not going to get paneled, but if I do, I hope we get a witness one-tenth as colorful as Omar.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

The Philanthropist, "Myanmar": Yankee swap

Some quick thoughts on episode two of "The Philanthropist" coming up just as soon as someone tells me if they were properly pronouncing "Myanmar" (I always thought it was "mee-ANN-mahr")...

I'm not sure if "Myanmar" is confirming certain aspects of "The Philnathropist" formula, or if it's just following the old network TV adage that a new series is supposed to more or less duplicate its pilot episode 3 or 4 times in a row for the benefit of hypothetical viewers who might be tuning in a few weeks late. But it's very much of a piece with the pilot, continuing both the good and bad parts of it.

The good: James Purefoy, charming as hell, and also capable of bringing the right amount of sincerity to moments like Teddy under the table with the little boy, or Teddy at the ruby mine. The relationship between Teddy and Dax (which got more play here than it did in "Nigeria"). The international flavor.

The bad: The awkwardness of Teddy as the great white hope for these poor minority people. The framing device, which might have been necessary in the pilot but added nothing here, and seemed to completely change the Jesse Martin character's attitude from the pilot. (If the show were being told out of sequence, ala "Boomtown" or "How I Met Your Mother" or "The Black Donnellys," then I could see the framing sequences having some value, but here it just filled time.)

It's summer, not much else is on, and I like Purefoy, so I guess I'm watching for a bit. But if the show doesn't start changing things up and/or getting better, I doubt I'll feel compelled to write about it much.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Band of Brothers rewind, episode 10: "Points"

And so we've come to the end of our trip back through "Band of Brothers," so all bets are off in terms of talking about what happened to these characters after the war ended. Spoilers coming up just as soon as I shoot a bazooka at a rockpile...

"I cherish the memories of a question my grandson asked me the other day, when he said, 'Grandpa, were you a hero in the war?' Grandpa said, 'No, but I served in a company of heroes.'" -Mike Ranney

Because the war more or less ended for Easy Company with the Battle of the Bulge, give or take some minor skirmishes like the one depicted in "The Last Patrol," there was a danger that these last two episodes of the series could have felt terribly anti-climactic. But "Why We Fight" found power by dealing with the liberation of the concentration camp outside Landsberg (which only merits a few paragraphs in Stephen Ambrose's book). "Points," meanwhile, turns the lack of action into its primary theme, showing both the advantages of life in an occupying army (more free time, gorgeous scenery, grand moments) and the drawbacks (the men all want to go home, and they keep dying or being wounded for stupid reasons). Anchored by Damian Lewis' narration and some of Michael Kamen's most beautiful music of the series, it feels like a fitting epilogue to all that came before.

Though "Points" isn't precisely Dick Winters' story in the way that "Crossroads" was, the miniseries as a whole has been his story, and so it feels right that he be allowed to narrate its concluding chapter, and to tie together all the small vignettes of Easy's time in Germany and Austria in the war's final days. His courtesy interview for a transfer to the Pacific turns into a kind of Dick Winters' Greatest Hits montage, and throughout the episode we get small callbacks to previous events. Winters' closing narration tells us that he eventually bought the farm he dreamed about at the end of "Day of Days." When Easy Company captures the Eagle's Nest, we hear the men yell "Hi-yo, Silver!," which was Sobel's pathetic battle cry, and Sobel himself pops up again so Winters can humiliate him one last time by demanding a salute. (How you feel about that moment depends, I suppose, on where you stood in our discussion about "Curahee" and whether Sobel is depicted fairly.) We hear again about Welsh's reserve chute, Shifty's marksmanship and many other running character points from earlier episodes.

What I love about "Points" is the larger-than-life quality that writers Erik Jendresen and Erik Bork and director Mikael Salomon give it -- drawing heavily, as always, on real events. The Alps look so beautiful in the background of the baseball game, as does the view from the Eagle's Nest balcony. Winters' gift to his buddy Nixon is staggering when viewed from a 21st century perspective -- how do you give an alcoholic the keys to Hermann Goering's wine cellar? -- and yet in the context of the time, and this particular friendship, it makes perfect sense, and is oddly touching. Winters doesn't judge Nixon, doesn't try to fix him, and thinks this is the nicest thing he can possibly do for him. And after all they've been through, who can say they didn't all need some fine German liquor?

Oddly, in a few cases, the stories told in "Points" are actually toned down from the real-life versions described by Ambrose. For instance, the story of Sgt. Grant being shot in the head, and Captain Speirs going to extraordinary lengths to save his life and then punish his shooter, actually took some stranger turns. After Speirs pistol-whipped the guy for failing to call him "sir," a buddy of Grant's not only pointed a gun at the man, but pulled the trigger as he was being held back, only his pistol misfired. Later, Speirs would claim that Col. Sink "said I should have shot the son of a bitch."

Like the rest of the miniseries, "Points" can't possibly hope to cover everyone's story to the fullest, and there are occasional awkward moments where minor players are shoved into the spotlight as the clock is running down. Alton Moore suddenly becomes relevant because he stole Hitler's photo album, and the scene where Floyd Talbert resigns as 1st Sergeant doesn't really work because Talbert -- described by Dick Winters as the best soldier in the company, and the one he'd most want by his side in a battle -- hasn't had much to do in previous episodes.

(In his book, "Beyond Band of Brothers," Winters writes that Talbert actually resigned his position because he and Speirs didn't get along, and both Winters and Ambrose write at length about how Talbert, more than any other man in the company, never quite recovered emotionally from the things he did and saw during the war. At the time the miniseries originally aired, Bruce McKenna, who wrote several episodes of this series -- and is a producer on "The Pacific" -- apparently said on the HBO.com boards, paraphrasing Shifty Powers, "we could completely redo the entire miniseries and focus on completely different men and not repeat one single scene." I imagine this parallel universe version of "Band of Brothers" would have a whole lot more of Talbert.)

There's also the odd sequence with Webster and Liebgott arguing about what to do with the alleged concentration camp commandant, which seems to fly in the face of Webster's behavior with the German baker in "Why We Fight." Much as Ambrose wrote more about Webster than was probably warranted given his role in the company, the miniseries leans on him pretty heavily in these last few episodes, inserting him into events where he wasn't present or wasn't a factor, and changing his characterization based on the needs of a particular scene. In real life, Don Moone was the soldier objecting to the mission (which was ordered by Captain Speirs, on dubious authority).

As for Liebgott, he's involved in the episode's centerpiece, and a fitting capstone to the series, as he translates the German officer's speech to his defeated troops. The German is, of course, saying the same sorts of things to his men that Winters no doubt thinks about his, but Winter isn't the kind of man who would ever say such things, especially not in victory. So the script cleverly puts the words in the mouth of an opponent trying to put a good face on defeat for the benefit of his men. And, don't forget how "Why We Fight" opened with the real men of Easy Company talking about how much they realized they had in common with the German soldiers -- Ross McCall does a wonderfully subtle job of showing how, as the speech goes along, German-hating Liebgott begins to recognize the shared experience.

Rather than begin the episode, as all the others did, with interviews with unidentified Easy survivors (their names withheld, no doubt, to preserve suspense about who lived and died), "Points" closes with them, and finally puts names to some faces. We get confirmation that the thin, confident gentleman with the glasses is Dick Winters, realize that the man who broke down crying in the "Breaking Point" interview was Donald Malarkey, and see just what perfect casting Frank John Hughes was as Bill Guarnere. And (after Carwood Lipton gives us the St. Crispin's Day speech from "Henry V") Winters gets to repeat the closing anecdote from the book, quoted above.

There isn't time to identify all the men interviewed in previous episodes -- just as the baseball scene, by design, doesn't allow Winters to tell us what happened to men who survived the war but weren't with the company at the time, like Guarnere, Malarkey and Joe Toye -- but for that, I highly recommend the bonus disc in the DVD set, which includes the outstanding documentary "We Stand Alone Together," featuring lots of interview material that otherwise would have been left on the cutting room floor.

Speaking of the baseball game, what really strikes me about Winters telling the story of everyone's post-war life is how absolutely normal most of them are. Lipton and Johnny Martin made a lot of money, and Buck Compton achieved some fame as an LA prosecutor, but for the most part these men who jumped through flak on D-Day, who survived freezing cold and exploding trees in Bastogne, who were both very lucky and very good to survive everything the Germans threw at them, went home to be postmen, and handymen, and cab drivers, and to live completely average lives. In "Beyond Band of Brothers," Winters writes about George Luz's funeral, and how even his own family members were stunned to see the medals he had won during the war; it had never occurred to Luz that this was something his nearest loved ones ought to hear about.

And yet, that's the story you could tell about so many veterans who survived World War II, in either the European theater or the Pacific. They saved the world, and then they came back home to live like the rest of us. And in that way, as much as any other, "Band of Brothers" symbolizes the story of all of our troops over there.

Some other thoughts on "Points":

• It amuses me that even the normally squeaky-clean Winters isn't above a little looting, if for no reason than that he knows Speirs will take the silverware if he doesn't.

• Along similar lines, I love the smirk on Nixon's face after Winters makes Sobel salute, like he's happy to see that his perfect friend is capable of being ruled by emotion from time to time.

• Shifty Powers was the Easy veteran whose recent death I alluded to a few episodes back. The story of Shifty's bad luck lottery win was even more frustrating in real life. After he won the ticket home, an officer offered him a large sum of money buy the ticket from him. Shifty declined, wound up injured (as mentioned here), and then all of his backpay and valuables were stolen while he was convalescing in the hospital.

• The officer interviewing Winters about the transfer is played by David Andrews, who was a key figure in "From the Earth to the Moon" as astronaut Frank Borman.

• If you're interested in more detail, I highly recommend reading Ambrose's book, and then "Beyond Band of Brothers," and to do it in that order, as Winters treats his book as a companion to Ambrose's, and deliberately omits details about things he felt Ambrose covered sufficiently. In particular, it's worth it for the section where Winters reprints excerpts from letters he received from men who were storming Utah Beach at the time Winters, Compton and the others took out the guns at Brecourt Manor (or from their children and grandchildren), and who talk about how much easier it was to get across the beach after the guns were silenced. Good luck getting through that chapter without some tissues handy.

Finally, now that we've come to the end, I guess it's time to rank the episodes. A few years after the miniseries first aired, I remember ranking them on a Usenet newsgroup, but that post seems lost to history. Regardless, the order is different now than it would have been at the time. As I said back when I reviewed "Curahee," rewatching the miniseries was a far more rewarding experience than watching it the first time, and some episodes like "Replacements" held up much better once I didn't have to keep asking, "Wait, who's that guy again?"

Maybe the order changes again if I take another look at the series five or ten years from now, but at the moment, I'd rank them as follows:

1) "Bastogne"
2) "Why We Fight"
3) "The Breaking Point"
4) "Day of Days"
5) "Points"
6) "Replacements"
7) "The Last Patrol"
8) "Currahee"
9) "Crossroads"
10) "Carentan"

Feel free to offer up your own rankings, or any unanswered questions you have about the series and the lives of the men depicted within it, or anything you want at this point. We're all done, so everything's game.

Also, for those of you who are Star-Ledger print readers, it looks like we're going to be running slightly edited versions of these reviews in the paper as a summer series, most likely starting Saturday, July 18.

For the last time on this great, great series, what did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

'The State' & 'Parker Lewis Can't Lose' DVD reviews - Sepinwall on TV

In today's column, I check out the new DVD sets for "Parker Lewis Can't Lose" (which came out on Tuesday) & "The State" (which comes out on July 14). On the latter, I'm supposed to be talking to David Wain later today, for something to run on or around the official release date. Click here to read the full post

Better Off Ted, "Bioshuffle": Close quarters

In this summer dead zone, it's nice to have original "Better Off Ted" episodes around, albeit sporadically (next week is a rerun of the one where Phil and Lem accidentally drug Linda). Last night's episode was a good showcase for the whole cast, plus it brought in Joy Osmanski from "The Loop" as Lem's statistically average love interest, plus it had funny jokes like Phil's abbreviation for "acid interface." Good times.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Sports Night rewind: "Dear Louise"

Okay, for this week and next week, we're back to one "Sports Night" review at a time, as I enjoyed both "Dear Louise" and "Thespis" too much -- and couldn't manufacture enough of a connection between the two -- to try to mash them together in a single review. Looking down the line, I suspect there will be more two-fers to come, but not at the moment.

Spoilers for "Dear Louise" coming up just as soon as some stamps materialize...

While the forced marriage of Aaron Sorkin to a live studio audience was a bad idea on ABC's part, "Dear Louise" is one of the few episodes where the laugh track doesn't feel out of place. That's because, for one week, at least, Sorkin, Tommy Schlamme and the entire cast seem to be making an effort to play to the audience in the studio at least as much as the viewers at home.

When I talked about how uncomfortably broad Joshua Malina's performance was during the Spike Lee scene in the pilot, several people pointed out that it's the only part of that episode that the studio audience responds to enthusiastically. It was aimed at them, and the rhythms of it were more familiar than most of Sorkin's repetitive, deadpan banter.

But it's jarring there because Malina's the only one in the cast who's playing to the cheap seats, where in "Dear Louise" everybody seems to be on the same page. Early in watching the episode, I would make notes about how Josh Charles was playing Dan's writer's block very big, or how Robert Guillaume was doing the same with Isaac's angst about his daughter's Republican boyfriend. After a while, though, it became clear that everyone was doing it -- that, in addition to being a series of mood-setting vignettes, "Dear Louise" was pitched at a different comic speed than most "Sports Night" episodes -- and it worked for me. And it clearly worked for the audience, since the laughter throughout the episode sounds heartier and more genuine than in nearly any other episode of the series. For one week, at least, the laugh track isn't an awkward intruder, but a willing collaborator.

And yet even in an episode that has Natalie throwing water in Dan's face not once, not twice, but thrice, and that climaxes with Dana drunkenly blasting "Boogie Shoes" through the newsroom, Sorkin and company find a way to make it still be "Sports Night." Even in the midst of the wacky hijinx, they slip in the A.K. Russell carjacking tragedy, and a sweet moment for Jeremy and Natalie, and even the way the gang assimilates the news that Louise is deaf and quickly moves on. It doesn't feel like pandering, even though there's more slapstick, and the performances are bigger than usual.

I really wish this was one of the episodes featuring a commentary track, because I'd love to hear the backstory. Was this Sorkin and Schlamme trying to make nice with the network? Were they ordered to do this? Or was it just something they tried, seeing as this was only Sorkin's seventh episode ever of writing for television, and he was learning as he went?

Whatever the reason, "Dear Louise" doesn't feel quite like the other episodes so far, but it works.

Some other thoughts:

• Sorkin will recycle both the letter-writing device and the writer's block gag on "The West Wing," the former in "The Stackhouse Filibuster" (which features three different characters e-mailing loved ones), the latter in "Enemies," where both Sam and Toby are afflicted. ("Somewhere in this building is our talent.")

• Was the third water splash improvised by Sabrina Lloyd? Or, at the very least, a surprise to Josh Charles and Peter Krause? Their reactions, particularly Krause's (see the photo), seem too genuine to be faked, even by good actors.

• Though Sorkin is often dinged for stacking the deck against conservative characters on his shows, I like that Isaac's fear and loathing about the Republican boyfriend is supposed to be completely ridiculous, as Dana tries to point out after Isaac lists the kid's impressive resume.

• For that matter, the letter-writing format allows Sorkin to drop in two more resumes, for both Dana and Isaac. I thought it was a nice touch that Isaac is said to have won a Pulitzer for his coverage of the Gemini missions -- the unglamorous but essential intermediate step between the trailblazing Mercury missions and the climactic Apollo lunar missions -- as it not only shows that Isaac could make any subject sound exciting, but that he, like Sorkin, has a fondness for history's leftovers.

• Ted McGinley also often makes an easy punching bag -- he is, after all, the patron saint of Jump the Shark -- but he's very good as Gordon, and Sorkin makes an effort here to turn Gordon into a tough adversary for Casey when it would be very easy to make him this loathsome empty suit.

Coming up next: "Thespis," in which the studio comes under siege from a frozen turkey and a Greek ghost. This may be a day or so late, as I have jury duty early next week. And the week after that I'm probably on vacation, and the week after that I'm heading to California for Comic-Con and then press tour, and then there may be more vacation, and then... sigh... maybe I should've tried to find some way to combine this with "Thespis." I'll figure this out. That, or the summer 2010 lineup is already locked up (Wire season 3 and more of Sports Night).

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Rescue Me, "Torch": A burning in his loins

Spoilers for tonight's outstanding episode of "Rescue Me" coming up just as soon as I polish my coin collection...

"The only thing he can feel is heat. Only thing that gets through that thick Irish skin of his is fire. And even goddamned flames ain't gonna make him cry." -Tommy's dad

Damn, that was good, wasn't it?

It's easy to dwell on the negative with "Rescue Me," but episodes like "Torch" are a reminder of how brilliant the show can be, and why it's worth suffering through the sloppy, self-aggrandizing moments.

Where even the better episodes of the series often appear to be a randomly-assembled series of vignettes, some stronger than others, nearly all of "Torch" (with the exception of the Garrity stuff, which was isolated comic relief, but fairly well-executed comic relief, so no biggie) felt very much of a piece, all of it tied to that amazing shot(*) of Tommy wrapping the little kid's corpse in a blanket. Every scene afterwards -- from Franco at the gym to Lou with Candy to Tommy burning himself after another round with the ghosts -- keyed off of the crew's response to seeing the burned child, and to Tommy's guilt over Connor.

(*) Major kudos to director John Fortenberry and anyone else in the crew involved with the decision to frame that as a static shot, with Denis Leary popping in and out of frame as he worked, occasionally looking directly at us in a way that didn't break the fourth wall, and the other firefighters looking on sheepishly, just out of focus. It lent an immediacy to what Tommy was doing at the same time it deliberately kept our eyes off the horror in the same way that Tommy was trying to hide it from the media and cameraphone gawkers.

"Rescue Me" is often guilty of deifying Tommy past all reason or dramatic interest, not just in the way that every attractive woman in the five boroughs throws herself at the guy, but in the way that he always seems to have the moral high ground on any subject that doesn't involve his personal life. With Leary a producer who has a hand in every script, it's easy to view the series as some kind of massive ego trip. And maybe some weeks it is. But here, Leary and Peter Tolan's script turned Tommy's super-competence and unassailable machismo on their heads.

Yes, he's the only guy from the truck who can bring himself to deal with the little corpse, and the one who can bring himself to enter the pediatric cancer ward and put on a happy face for the kids. But we see through the episode -- particularly when the ghosts come out again (in maybe the series' best use of that device since very early on, if not ever) -- that Tommy's armor comes with a cost, and in many ways is as un-admirable as his drinking, his inept parenting, his clumsy relationships and the rest of it.

Tommy may be as tough as his old man suggests, but so much of his pain in this episode comes from his realization that he's thought so little of Connor in the years since he died. Some of this seems self-corrective on Leary and Tolan's part -- the show killed off Connor at the end of season two, then ignored him as soon as it was convenient to do so -- but the end result of watching Tommy listen to his father, brother and best friend taunt him for being tougher than they are is still devastating, and wonderfully played by Leary.

Even the Sheila sex scene, ordinarily a cue to lunge for the remote or flee to the kitchen for a snack, fit. Though Sheila's concern about the burn being gross was superficial, overall Callie Thorne got to play her as an adult again, which she hasn't done since the 9/11 monologue near the start of the season. And the sex between the two of them was as raw and ugly as the wound on Tommy's leg.

Hell, the dead kid storyline even kept me from rolling my eyes at Lou and Candy for once, even though I suspect I'll be back to that pretty soon.

Strong, strong episode. Best of the season by a long stretch, I think, and that includes the more 9/11-intensive stuff.

A few other thoughts:

• Anyone with experience in makeup and/or special effects want to wager a guess on how they pulled off the thigh-burning effect? There's obviously a cut from a full-body shot of Tommy to a close-up of the thigh, but that still looks like someone's real leg.

• I don't begrudge Leary and Tolan wanting to showcase Steven Pasquale's song-and-dance skills, but these fantasy numbers are starting to feel a bit less special each time they do them. But at least this one ended with a funny payoff to the otherwise pointless storyline of Teddy playing Dr. Kevorkian at the VA hospital.

• That "New York, New York" cover at the end was by Cat Power.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Reader mail: TV shows not on DVD & reality show teases

Another reader mailbag column today, with questions about why "Ed" and "LA Law" aren't out on DVD yet, and why reality shows seem to recycle the same clips over and over in an episode. Click here to read the full post

Nurse Jackie, "School Nurse": Black and white problem

Spoilers for the fourth episode of "Nurse Jackie" coming up just as soon as I color-correct a drawing...

"School Nurse," the first of back-to-back episodes directed by Edie Falco's old "Sopranos" co-star Steve Buscemi, has children on its mind. Jackie gets into it with the teachers at her daughter's school when they suggest Grace is suffering from an anxiety disorder. Dr. O'Hara reveals, not surprisingly, a complete lack of any maternal side, while Mo Mo shows his first real signs of depth when he bonds with a little kid who reminds him of the twin brother he lost at age 1. And even Zoey, who's a grown woman, spends a large chunk of the episode acting like a kid and pouting over missing all the interesting cases, only to get some perspective after experiencing her first patient death.

I liked the parallel at the end of the episode of Zoey and Jackie both trying to improve a picture by coloring it in. But where Zoey understands that she's lost this patient, even as she performs the kind post-mortem gesture of giving her back her eyebrows, Jackie's insistence on adding color to Grace's gray drawing(*) shows that she's in denial about the problem.

(*) True story: Day after my wife and I watch this episode, I come home from work and my wife excitedly shows me a landscape drawing that our daughter did in kindergarten that day. "Look at all the colors!" my wife told me, beaming. Cable drama: always an easy way to remind yourself of all the ways your life is better than theirs.

But then, Jackie's in denial about a lot of things, from the Vicodin use to the balancing act she has going with Eddie and her husband, at one point simultaneously fielding calls from both men and telling them, "Can't talk! Love ya!" It's treated as a joke here, but Jackie's willingness to use the word "love" in connection to Eddie brings us back to last week's discussion about how much of that relationship is about the pills and how much is about genuine feelings she has for the guy. Maybe it's just because Falco and Paul Schulze have such obvious chemistry together (as you'd hope they would after knowing each other since college), but I find it hard to watch their scenes together and believe that it's just about the pills. Maybe it's somewhat, perhaps even mostly, about the pills, but Jackie does have affection, if not love, for her drug connect.

Keeping in mind once again that we're sticking with the air schedule, and therefore not going to talk about the content of the fifth episode, which went up On Demand today, what did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Band of Brothers rewind, episode 9: "Why We Fight"

We're in our final week of looking back on "Band of Brothers," with spoilers for the penultimate episode, "Why We Fight," coming up just as soon as I borrow your lighter...

There are essentially two halves to "Why We Fight" -- one of the finest episodes of this damn fine miniseries -- that seem unrelated at first by anything but chronology, but which turn out to be inextricably linked in the final moments.

The first half focuses on Captain Nixon quest for Vat 69. To this point in the series, Nixon's role has been primarily to offer exposition (as a battalion strategist, he knows more about the big picture than Dick Winters does), and to function as a kind of Greek chorus (suggesting that Sobel is a better training officer than the men want to admit, reminding Winters of how much good he did at Brecourt Manor). We've learned that he's a drunk, but also that he's brave (he declines the 30-day pass home in "The Breaking Point") and that Winters obviously thinks the world of him, but because he hasn't been a member of Easy Company since before they left America, this is his first real spotlight.

And the Nixon of "Why We Fight" is burnt out. Like all the men, he's been at war too long, has started to forget why it is this all started, and with the lack of action post-Hagenau, he has a lot of time to do nothing but think, and stew, and drink. And because he's not just an alcoholic, but a discriminating alcoholic, he's running out of the one thing he's willing to drink. And when he's one of the few survivors of the doomed jump, he gets to stew some more about what all those boys in the plane died over.

There's this amazing weariness to Ron Livingston's performance. Like Scott Grimes in "The Last Patrol," he's so much older and frailer than he was at the start of the series (when I praised Livingston for this at an awards event, he gave all the credit to the makeup department for making him look so jaundiced). And while he's always going to look and sound like Peter from "Office Space," he has a gravity and haunted quality here that works perfectly in a scene like the one where Nixon gets the Dear Lewis letter from his wife. And that, in turn, leads into the marvelous scene where the entire convoy sings "Blood on the Risers," the unofficial paratrooper anthem, and Nixon reluctantly joins in, then starts singing louder than everyone else because he's so sick of it all.

The episode's first half also offers vignettes of other characters suffering a similar level of bitterness towards their time in the Army. Perconte rants to replacement O'Keefe about how long it's been since he saw America. Webster flips out at a passing convoy of surrendered Germans: "You have horses! What were you thinking?" Replacement Janovec tells Luz that he's reading an article about how "the Germans are bad," and Luz reacts like this is the most hilarious thing he's ever heard. With few exceptions -- like Captain Speirs, who seems delighted to be able to loot everything in sight now that they're in Germany -- the Toccoa veterans are all desperate to get home, and wondering why they wound up here in the first place.

Then we come to the second half, in which the episode's title goes from being ironic to explanatory. Whether the men of Easy Company knew it or not, stopping the kind of people responsible for the concentration camp they find outside of Landsberg is exactly why they fight -- why they've given up years of their lives and risked those lives repeatedly. As the real Dick Winters (who had fewer problems with his resolve to begin with) said to himself after getting a look at that nightmarish place, "Now I know why I am here!"

As good a job as the makeup department did on Livingston, their masterpiece is their work on the camp survivors. (Amazingly, they lost the Emmy to the TNT fantasy miniseries "The Mists of Avalon.") I don't know exactly how they made some of those extras look the way they did, but the sight of them never fails to hit me in the gut, to fill me with horror and despair that this kind of thing can happen -- and I say this as the son of a teacher who specializes in Holocaust education and who frequently brought her work home with her(*).

(*) And who has asked me to put in a plug for her college's Holocaust education center.

The visceral impact of the camp sequence is just amazing. All the little beats are devastating, from the man carrying his emaciated, possibly dead friend to the prisoner who starts showering his terrified rescuer with desperate kisses.

But the most brutal part of all involves Liebgott. The earlier scene with Webster in the truck is there primarily to remind us that Liebgott is the lone Jew in Easy Company. Because he's also the German translator, he winds up in the position to be the first to discover what this camp really is, and that smacks him -- and us -- extra hard. And then an even tougher blow comes when he's asked to order the prisoners back into the camp even temporarily, for their own good. Ross McCall isn't mentioned often among the best performances of this series, but he owns those two moments.

So here's what I'm most curious about, in terms of your reaction: how do you read the faces of the German townspeople in the sequence where they're being forced to dispose of the bodies? Specifically, how do you read the German officer's widow whom Nixon had met earlier when he broke into her house looking for booze? She's furious and disgusted and mortified, but is it at the Americans for forcing her to perform this horrific task, or at her own country's leadership for creating this place (and making her husband die for this)? Or is it a bit of both?

Some other thoughts:

• I'm again going to break the who lives/who dies rule here, as we're so close to the end that it's more or less pointless, but skip ahead to the next bullet if need be. The level of Speirs' looting -- and the other soldiers' awareness of it -- becomes one of the better running gags of these final two episodes, but the miniseries doesn't have room for the big real-life punchline: Speirs was sending all the looted merchandise not back to America, but to a "war widow" he had married during his time in England, and with whom he fathered a son. One problem: the woman's first husband turned out not to be dead, but a POW, and she chose him over Speirs -- and kept every bit of loot Speirs had sent her.

• Webster's command of German in the scene with the baker seems far shakier than it was in "The Last Patrol," and his bloodlust in that scene is in marked contrast to how he'll behave in a similar moment in the series finale. (Let's save discussion on that till we get to "Points," but I wanted to bring it up now so we have it in mind in a few day's time.)

• Don't Luz and Perconte in the opening scenes feel like they could be either supporting characters in a '40s war comedy, or maybe the leads on a '50s or early '60s Army sitcom?

• In case you haven't seen it by now, HBO has released a trailer for "The Pacific," the long-awaited follow-up to "Band of Brothers" that focuses on the Pacific theater of WWII in the same way "BoB" focused on the European theater. A couple of readers expressed concern that the trailer makes it look like "The Pacific" is going to be filled with the kind of war movie cliches that "BoB" avoided, but to that I would point out that some of the promos for "BoB" featured the scene from this episode where Winters tells Nixon what to write to the families of the boys who died on the jump. In context, "You tell them they died as heroes" is about the messiness of war and the necessity of telling noble lies about it. Out of context, in a trailer, it just sounds corny, even with Damian Lewis saying it.

Coming up on Thursday: We come to the end of the line with "Points," in which the war in Europe comes to an end, and yet the men of Easy Company can't get home.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Hung, "Pilot": Tool, shed

Spoilers for the premiere episode of "Hung" coming up just as soon as I refine my search engine terms...

"Here's an idea: you want to be a millionaire, why don't you go market your d--k?" -Tanya
"She definitely meant it as an insult, but somehow, I couldn't get the idea out of my head." -Ray, narrating

I talked a lot about the reasons why I like this show in my review on Thursday, so I just want to hit a few points here and see what you all thought of it.

The first is the charming, utterly self-deprecating performance by Thomas Jane as Ray. Not many actors could make a guy this pathetic -- even someone who recognizes and even embraces his own pathetic nature -- as likable as he does, nor could many make him seem as human even as he's being such an imbecile in so many ways. He and Jane Adams (and the double-Jane thing is going to get confusing in future blog entries, I fear) work very well together, and I loved his reaction to her excessive climaxing, and then having to listen to her post-coital poetry.

The second is that patience is going to be required here. Again, look at "Breaking Bad" as the model, and not just because both deal with high school teachers resorting to a life of crime to pay the bills. "Hung" is going to take its time getting Ray's career as a male prostitute(*) -- and Tanya's parallel career as a pimp -- off the ground. As "Breaking Bad" has shown (and as "The Wire" has, though I'm not yet prepared to set the bar remotely that high), series that show a little patience in depicting people learning how to do their jobs can reap big rewards as their characters get better at them. I've seen Ray make some progress in his man-whoring in later episodes, and it feels much more satisfying than if things had worked out just fine with the lady in the hotel who slipped the 50 under the door for his trouble.

(*) And if you're of a certain age, you can't hear that phrase without thinking of Dan Aykroyd as the decidedly less-glamorous Fred Garvin: Male Prostitute.)

The third, which I didn't have room to deal with much in the column, is that Ray's ex-wife and maybe his kids are on probation for me. Anne Heche is usually an acquired taste for me (while I didn't like "Men in Trees," it at least seemed to dial back her quirks a bit), and the role of Jessica seems to play to her more annoying qualities.

But for me, the show is about the reluctant partnership between Ray and Tanya, and the interplay between our two acting Janes, and I look forward to seeing more.

Keep in mind that the show isn't on next week because of the holiday weekend. (Which makes premiering it tonight odd, other than that the extra length would mean "Entourage" might need to be pushed back another week.)

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Doctor Who, "The Next Doctor": Double vision

I offered up my thoughts on the latest "Doctor Who" movie in Friday's column (and if you didn't see it before, don't miss my Russell T. Davies interview), but I'm curious what your opinion was. The only thing I'll add to the original column is that the Mercy Hartigan character was terribly underwritten, and I say that having watched the original British cut.

Same rules as always applies to "Doctor Who": talk only about the episodes that have aired here in America. So no discussion about "Planet of the Dead," which ran in England back in April. Anything I consider questionable gets deleted. Clear? Click here to read the full post