You know what the chain of command is? It's the chain I go get and beat you with.

I am over in medias res openings for my shows. It seems like every episode I've seen in the last few weeks has been the middle or end of the story I haven't seen yet.

Watching: Charlie's Angels, which I decided to see to its end since it got itself canned after only 7 episodes. 7 episodes of hot women and things exploding to a guitar soundtrack and somehow they could not get people to watch it. Hot women, explosions, guitar rock, Miami setting, and to top it off a link to an iconic camp-trash franchise and a killer theme tune and still it fails. If you think about it, that is actually quite amazing.
This is trash, the audience knows it's trash, the producers know it's trash, the network knows it's trash - there was absolutely no pressure on anyone to excel or even approach competence so long as the soundtrack guy is liquored up and told to make widdly-widdly-woo noises to his heart's content, the second unit director is left to have stunt doubles kick people in the face on top of exploding speedboats, the cast - male and female - squeeze into ridiculously tight and small clothing in most scenes, and the writers are left to join the dots between all these elements in some arbitrary fashion that may or may not involve a female suspect who must be wrestled into submission after falling into something filled with oil. I'm not sure I even want to live in the kind of world where people exist that could screw that up.
Napoleon Dynamite - the new cartoon series based on the cult comedy flick of the same name. More outlandish and prone to fantasy elements than the film, which kind of turns me off even though it's a solid 'toon with some decent laughs here and there. S'okay, though.

I have made it with a woman. Inform the men.

Watching: Flash Gordon, the most recent tv adaptation that swapped rockets for wormholes to save cash. It's mostly below par, I can't dispute that, but there's the germ of a half-decent show in here and towards the end it was even entertaining in its own right to the point I shan't qualify or defend my enjoyment of it. Basically, once you get over the fact that it doesn't have the Queen theme music, I think you might be entertained by this show just as much - and possibly just as begrudgingly - as I was. Besides, the Hawkmen episode was so terrible it had to be deliberate. Speaking of Hawkmen, any excuse to link to this:

HE JUST WINGED ME
Alcatraz s01e02 - again I ask: what has this show got to do with Alcatraz? They really push the branding with the title card showing light swooshing across the name every time there's a break in the action, but Alcatraz is an afterthought to the show, which I am convinced is improvised from a bunch of post-it notes on the plot outlines, as there's this bit where a guy walks into a gun shop and rather than make a clever post-modern observation that references something like the gun-centric Call Of Duty videogame series, the character just flat-out says "Call of Duty, Modern Warfare 3" and leaves it at that. It's like the writers made a note to reference that videogame and then just didn't bother and the note got shot by the director anyway. I'll say this much, it gives me hope that I might get paid to write something someday, as there doesn't seem to be much effort or concentration involved.
Lois and Clark: the New Adventures of Superman because as with Flash Gordon, cheap dvd box sets are like catnip to me. Lois is a real bitch in this, I have no idea what Clark sees in her. The FX have dated, too, but that's never really an issue for me as much as how and why they're implemented, and to be honest there's not a great deal of invention or thought in how the FX are utilised and the show would have been just as Supermanny without their presence. A lot of duff episodes so far, and I'm beginning to wonder if my appreciation for this show stems more from the fact that they actually went and made a weekly Superman series at all. Smallville doesn't count, of course, on account of not having Superman in it. Or good writing, interesting characters, decent actors, or the balls to just admit that the audience was gay men and teenage girls who just wanted Lex and Clark (later Oliver and Clark) to just kiss already, whereas in Lois and Clark the camera unashamedly adores Dean Cain's oiled body. He gets his muskles out a lot and generally looks very buff while Smallville tended to avoid that kind of thing. IN DENIAL.

Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped

Hit and run post. Don't mind me...

I'm not even sure cats can marry outside Boston

Watching: Bones spin-off The Finderer, which I probably shan't watch again because the main character is deeply unlikeable.
Psych - highly recommended to me by multiple persons, but suffers from the same problem as the Finderer in that the main character is a huge prick impervious to ever admitting as much, though there's a vague 1980s vibe to it and it comes off as a lot like Monk, which I liked. I'll probably watch it again.

I don't read the script. The script reads me.

Watching: The Good Wife - I really have no idea why I enjoy this menopausal drama quite as much as I do, but it's one of the few shows I sit down to watch and actually pay attention to.
Harry's Law - retooled this season (it was a rush-job midseason show cobbled together by David Kelly after networks passed on his other pilot, an adaptation of DC's Wonder Woman) into something a bit more generic, HL is regularly savaged by snooty critics who pick up on the heinous crime of a main character who's politically conservative, but I like it. Kathy Bates is always watchable even when the story is a bit trite, though there are some bright spots among the backing cast - it's hard to go wrong when you've got a member of Spinal Tap onscreen.
My Sherlock theory is that he faked his death with a rubber mask or something put on Moriarty's corpse - something like that so continuity baggage can be dispensed with early in the next episode and the big mystery of the week can begin.
As a lover of the ludicrous I'd prefer something more convoluted, like the female journo being the real brains behind Moriarty and the Sherlock at the end being the person who kidnapped the children earlier in the episode, making the final showdown a ham-off between two evil doubles, but it'll likely be something simple. This episode was a bit of a cheat for me, not because of cliffhangery gubbins but because there wasn't much of a mystery in this show about a famous detective and it's just like Millennium, where the lead shows up and uses his magic seeing powers to tell everyone stuff that the viewer doesn't really have time to figure out themselves. It's all right, I suppose, but steps on the toes of the recent big-screen adaptation of the same source material, which was a little more entertaining, though equally non-mystery-ish.
Bones - I... am not sure why I still watch this show.
I watched some right at the very beginning (or rather I had Sky installed and couldn't be bothered cancelling it and just let the Sky1 programming wash over me when I was reading or too drunk to walk) and then stopped before the end of the first season, picking it up again about a year or so back as a way to fill dead air while I worked at a small design firm. I still watch it. I don't know why.
Bafling.

I don't trust his aim, I've seen your toilet. And your kids.

Watching: Alcatraz - one of those "name first, premise later" concepts that clunks everything into place really, really badly to the point you wonder if the writers put little notes on the script to themselves for later like "and then he says something like"you'll need a partner how about him" and they look at the comedy fat guy" and then then for some reason rather than think about how they might play this scene out in some way and go through the actual process of, you know, writing, the script notes get shot as they are rather than an actual script being drafted by the three - three! - writers credited with this season opener. That's what Alcatraz feels like - a bunch of script notes cobbled together from notions people took in the production meeting like "wouldn't it be great if our show could be a bit like Fringe or Lost or the 4400 or the Event or--" and then I went out to make a sandwich rather than finish this sentence where I list all the tv shows of which Alcatraz is derivative in much the same way that the writers of Alcatraz walked out and did something else rather than produce a decent season opener. It was a ham sandwich, FYI, and I find that some chedder and coalslaw help give the flavor a bit of body.
Alcatraz is a show about how everyone disappeared from Alcatraz one night in 1963 AND NOW THEY ARE COMING BACK and because we live in a world that does not have Google on your phone, this premise is watertight from the beginning, and certainly doesn't suffer from the difficulty of every other show in the sci-fi/fantasy genre in that there are no new ideas, merely different ways of telling existing stories which is why Battlestar Galactica came across as fresh despite being a remake. Presentation is everything, and yet Alcatraz is formulaic on the production score, looking like any and every other fantasy/sci-fi cop show out there. There's this vacuum in place of its identity - the use of Alcatraz itself is superfluous to the concept - and no reason why I should care to watch the next episode.
Rob - which stars Rob Schneider, and alongside American Horror Story it's one of those shows tremendously unsubtle in its construction but at least dedicated to some idea of what it's supposed to be, in this case a regular sitcom with a few of the central comedian's ad-libs thrown in to give it an identity tied to that comedian's persona a bit like How To be A Gentleman or Last Man Standing. This approach creates a clash between the demands of an actual plot with resolutions and stuff and the sensibilities of a comedian used to more misanthropic humour derived from the notion that life is inherently unfair, but the upshot is that while the happy resolutions can be a little trite in contrast to the central performance, you're never actually sure if the happy ending or the gruff central air of misanthropy is what's out of place, and the happy ending could be the way things are supposed to go and the griping of a hardened cynic is what's really out of place. I shan't lie, though, I did laugh at Rob, but mostly in a horrified way, like when he tells a Mexican family gathering "now I know what went down during all those siestas" when he notices they're a large family, and then defuses the situation with "I'm joking, you're a large family because you're catholic and you don't use protection". And then there's the hilarious sitcom staple of characters walking in on someone and seeing things out of context like when someone has their pants down when the vicar walks into the room kind of thing, the joke here being that Cheech Marin thinks his mother is being raped - fun for all the family!
Cards on table, though: this is a terrible show, a total train wreck - and I may just love it.

The dead can hold a grudge better than most Scorpios

Hit and run posting again. I hope the week finds you fully rested.