MagneticMediaFed

“Is that a whale?”

I finally sat down and watched some television last night. It was a pleasurable experience. Enjoyed some Heroes, a little Friday Night Lights, some Lost, Knights of Prosperity, and even managed to formulate some thoughts on the shows, which I’d like to share with you right after the break…

Veronica Mars – There was a point in time — let’s say three years ago — when I was adamantly against plot. To me, plot was boring. Plot was just going through the motions. When it came to films and television I was much more interested in characters and their relationships with other characters than I was interested in who killed who or how the microchips were going to be smuggled.

Then something changed. Maybe it was watching The Wire, and seeing what plot could actually be. Now I can’t get enough of it, which might be why I’ve been enjoying this current batch of Veronica Mars episodes. No other show on network television winds their plot as tight as V-Mars. Even this far into the game, where a regular viewer can do a decent job of dissecting the mysteries and picking up on the show’s patterns, we’re still provided with as many twists and surprises as we’d expect the show to deliver.

That being said, I CALLED IT! I figured out it was Beaver last season, and Tim the TA was my primary suspect this time around. Still, the show did everything in it’s power to get me to jump on the Landry-ship over this past hour.

As an episode, I thought it was fine, if a little rushed in trying to reach its conclusion. I’m torn. The six or seven episode arcs really show off the series’ skill in crafting intricate plot lines, but the best episodes this season have been the one-and-done mysteries of the week. Though the chances of a fourth season are remote, so I don’t plan on getting too bent out of shape.

My only disappointment is that Tim is going up-the-river. He and Veronica working in tandem was the episode’s highlight, especially the above scene where they were trying to analyze those photos: classic Mars!

Unfortunately, the show is over for the next six (?) weeks as America spends its valuable TV watching time trying to chose the next Pussycat Doll. Veronica Mars comes back in April, presumably, to finish out their run.

Heroes — This is really the gem of the week. The best episodes of Heroes this season have had the problem of delivering a lot of information fans of the show want but doing so in a less-than-artful way. The idea of writing episodes that tell a specific story within a greater story seems to have been their biggest hurdle to overcome… until this week.

The brilliance of “Company Man” is its singular focus. There were no unnecessary characters. There were no “new” heroes. The show wasn’t trying to give us more than we could handle. They had an idea and they executed it. It’s the best hour of television the series has put together.

The irony is that the episode was built exactly like an episode of Lost. There was the action in the present, and there was the action in the past, and eventually the past influences the present. What’s funny is that it isn’t all that complex of a device to use, but it works and it works well.

Of course, it also didn’t hurt that the primary focus was HRG, who is without a doubt the brightest spot in an otherwise uneven cast. Jack Coleman is fantastic in the role. Just looking back at the past 18 episodes, think about how many incarnations that character has gone through. He’s the face of evil! He’s a good dad just trying to save his daughter. He’s killing off the Heroes. Well, as it turns out, he’s a little bit of everything. In other words: a really well developed character.

I’m dying to see what happens with his character next as the mind-erasing and the Parkman-teaming will through a serious wrench into the mix.

Lost — I really liked this episode. Why? Because it didn’t have anything to do with anything aside from just being fun… and it got me thinking. There has been so much ado over what Lost should be in this season and future seasons, I get the sense that the only thing that would really work would be to completely reinvent the show.

Here’s what I want to watch: I want Lost to be a camp-free, hour-long Gilligan’s Island. I want the castaways to make a truce with The Others, and then just ride out the rest of their days by getting into crazy island-oriented hijinx. This week’s episode fit the bill perfect: Hurley tries to start a VW Microbus! Think about the possibilities of future episodes. Locke and Charlie become roommates. Kate and Jack go on a date. Sawyer gets stuck in a tree. THAT sounds like a really fun show!

Three years ago intensive mystery was missing from most of primetime. Today that’s not exactly the case. Heroes has stepped up and delivered what Lost no longer can (and in a year or so Heroes will collapse on itself and something else will come along). Veronica Mars is another rock-solid place to turn if what you want is some mystery. So why not turn Lost from an intense mystical drama to a light-hearted island romp?

It’s funny because I can’t think of an instance where a show has actually changed genres in the middle of its run, and yet something that could be really interesting. For example: remember the end of last week’s The Office when Roy says, “I’m going to kill Jim Halpert”? Well what if he did? What if the show just quit trying to be funny and instead because the heaviest of melodramas. Everyone was always crying and the music was always swelling. Wouldn’t that be crazy?

Yes. It would be crazy. It’d also be amazing television. Though I’d totally settle for Lost turning into Picket Fences on a beach.

Friday Night Lights — I’m not going to get too into FNL today as I feel like I’ve run out of ways to say that this is the best show on television and if you aren’t watching it you’re selling yourself short.

But I do want to highlight a specific scene that was both hilarious and creepy and awesome. It was the scene in which Coach Taylor returns home and immediately gets asked by unwanted house guest Buddy Garrity why he was eating dinner with so-and-so. Taylor responds, “How did you know I was watching [insert name I don't remember]?” To which Buddy says, “A little trick I learned from Magnum P.I.” The coach looks down and sees a message pad that has been scribbled on to reveal what was written on the previous sheet of paper.

Brilliant!

Knights of Prosperity – A couple weeks ago I declared this show unfunny and basically dead to me. Well, I’ve kept watching and what do you know — it’s still on the air and it’s funny again.

Last night the team officially dropped the “Let’s Rob Mick Jagger” plot line, which was problematic since the beginning and have switched to a target that will likely work better on television: RAY ROMANO.

Sign me up… at least at an introductory rate.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 1st, 2007 at 2:31 pm and is filed under ABC, Friday Night Lights, Heroes, Knights of Prosperity, Lost, NBC, Veronica Mars. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.