5/27: What I Accomplished Today

1. Shopped for and prepared meal for Puzzle Day. We came in second; we audited, but we missed the spelling of a word. It happens.

2. Came home and took a nap.

3. Read a bit. Finished The Week and a few more pages in Reading Judas. Also read an issue each of The Nation and The New Yorker.

4. Pogo. Finished the last two weekly badges and worked on premium badges.

5. TV. Watched five things I wanted to talk about. (I can only remember three, but we'll see if the others come to me as I type.)

a. Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. I liked this show, but I'm not surprised it didn't do as well as it should have; Sorkin didn't quite seem up to his game here. We should have seen it in...what, the second episode, when the big huge "Here's how we'll save the show and set just exactly the right tone!" gimmick was Gilbert & Sullivan. I love Gilbert & Sullivan. I don't think life gets more clever than Gilbert & Sullivan. But is it how a 21st-century American comedy show solves problems? I would like to live in a world where it is, or at least visit that alternate reality, but that won't work here on Planet Earth.

The show's been on hiatus; they chose the end of May to show the last few episodes they had already shot. Today was with Alison Janney, and the premise was that the propmasters and cue card people were on a wildcard strike. First of all, I don't believe Matt, Danny, or Jordan appeared in this episode at all, which was certainly an unusual choice. The basic premise made me nervous: Bad Things are obviously going to happen, and the idea set my teeth on edge. Blech. Worst of all, Simon got history's stupid sub-plot: he gets dumped before big trip because new girlfriend thinks he treats women as interchangeable objects; he replaces her for big trip with someone else (because, of course, for him, women are, in fact interchangeable objects); girlfriend relents, so now he has two dates; he cancels with replacement girl; original girl learns of replacement girl, so she cancels, too. This sort of now-he-does-now-he-doesn't really dumb subplot was irritating on The Flintstones, and it's still irritating. Harriet's spiel about her & Matt's relationship was just sort of odd, given that Matt wasn't on the show at all. (I was with the rest of the cast on this one: would you two please just be together and quit being a pain about it?) Within the first five minutes, as soon as we had three of our four main plotlines (the bomb one was the best of the lot), I was furious: they made us wait three months for this?

Having said those things.

The dialog is still gorgeous. The performances by Alison Janney and Timothy Busfield were just gorgeous. The prop-and-cue-card stuff wasn't as bad as I'd been afraid it was going to be.

It's sort of a shame Sorkin chose to write a behind-the-scenes show about a comedy, because he can't write this flavor comedy. He writes lovely comedy, but not sketch comedy; his comedy is character-driven, and when that's done on sketch shows, it has to be overdrawn; there isn't time to develop the nuance required in three or four minutes.

We were so delighted when we learned Sorkin had a show this season. This miss is still better than most shows that were on this season, but it was a miss. I hope you find a better niche. (Frankly, if anybody in either political party had a brain, they'd hire you to write their speeches; the Bartlett speeches on West Wing were the most inspiring political rhetoric in decades, and it was a real shame they were fiction.)

(Couldn't somebody be persuaded to do a few more seasons of Sportsnight?)

(I don't think 30 Rock was part of the problem here, necessarily; I think television is big enough for several sketch comedy shows and several shows about sketch comedy shows. Granted, the comparison didn't hurt, because 30 Rock was the right flavor of funny.)

b. The Riches. Another lovely episode; interesting lines are being drawn as Sam, Didi, and Wayne/Doug seem to be "turning into buffers," while Dahlia and Cal are fighting that with every fiber of their beings. (Well, Cal is. Dahlia is trying to embrace this because she loves Wayne.) The addition of the fake grandmother is also fun. She's made a few calls, she kept saying. I wonder if anybody's ever going to figure out what those calls are, or what the man she insisted she saw (who was, in fact, Dale) was doing.

c. Finished watching The Quest for King Arthur, which I TiVo'd awhile ago because of the course I'm teaching in the fall. I'd seen it before, but it's a nice review. I'll have to see if the library can get a copy for me to put on Closed Reserve for the course.

d. I didn't watch this, but my Co-Vivant has been watching Robin Hood, and the season 1 finale was tonight. She's been upset all week because Marian died (she kept asking me, "When does Marian die?" My insistance that I didn't know of any version of the Robin Hood mythos in which Marian died didn't help.) She wasn't really dead, but she did run away from her wedding, which was the real cliffhanger. (Interesting call to use the better cliffhanger in the penultimate episode.)

e. Big Love. This was an episode I hadn't seen before, "The Baptism," in which Teensy and Marjean are officially baptized into the family. The entire cast of this show should just be given some sort of Group Emmy; Paxton, Sevigny, what's-her-name who plays Barb, the Benny and Sarah actors, Grave Zabriskie (whom I met once, very briefly, about four lifetimes ago)--just good, good stuff. In the promo for next season, they had the kid who plays either Wayne or Raymond, children who strike me as Children of the Corn, either scary or defective, do the voiceover, and it's the spookiest promo I've ever heard.

6. Wow. Worked on the Level 25 NIght Elf Hunter. I didn't feel like doing the Dead Mines, and I didn't feel like doing the Ashenvale/Stonetalon junk, so I went to Wetlands and did Dun Modr and Apprentice Duties. Didn't quite ding, but came close.

7. Took a look at my Health Insurance and decided to leave everything the same; I'll phone in and do the survey on Tuesday, since it's closed tomorrow for the holiday.

8. Tonight's BigFishGame is a shoot-em-up. I don't care for shoot-em-ups, so I'm excused.