Yikes!

"I'm not SUPERstitious, but I am stitious."

I watched The Office and Earl last night. I haven't had a chance to see my other Thursday night favorites (ER and CSI) yet, but they're waiting on the DVR. My takes:

1. My Name is Earl was good, though not necessarily excellent. Sara says that she misses the original pace of the show, when Earl would cross one thing off of his list in each episode. I think I agree with her.

Nevertheless, the episode showed hints of brilliance.

The show's willingness to mess with the opening sequence (in a previous season, they did an episode where the opened each segment with a different character doing the opening monologue bit and announcing, "My name is Joy," or "My name is Darnell," or whatever, and last night, the show opened with, "My Name is Inmate 28301-016") is refreshing and funny. It's evidence of the irreverence that makes the show good.

Earl joining the white-supremacist and old-guy gangs was excellent. So was Randy showing up and asking questions off of flash cards. Randy as lovable moron is hilarious, mostly because Ethan Suplee is brilliant. I think the writers have to be careful not to take this too far... It's hard to believe that the guy doesn't know how to cross the street but he does know how to drive a car. I don't need this show to be über-realistic, but I do need to be able to maintain my suspension of disbelief.

The poster on the wall was a funny way to write Giovanni Ribisi off the series (for now, anyways... I guess he had other projects to work on), but I would have enjoyed it if they took the Shawshank Redemption joke a little further. Ribisi standing in a drainage ditch yelling at lightning would have been great, or at least Earl throwing a rock through the poster.

Joy calling Randy "big-headed hillbilly Linus" was great. So was her stained-glass Earl (Darnell: "It looks just like Earl would look if he were made of glass."). Jaime Pressly is great on the show, and she deserved her Emmy. I think it should be noted, however, that when she's given too much screen time on her own, Joy gets grating and annoying. Her comedic pairing with Darnell gets better and better as the show progresses. At this point, their contrast makes for perfection.

2. Things The Office got right:

• Including almost every character in the episode. We missed the gang at Dunder-Miff all summer, and getting to see everyone again was like coming home after a vacation. Creed got lines, Oscar got lines, Angela got her own plot line, Darryl and Pam are co-religionists, and the whole-ep revolved around Meredith. Each time we saw a character for the first time, my face lit up.
• Pam and Jim. They didn't make Pam-Jim the center of the episode, and they didn't play the kiss as this giant dramatic moment with exciting music and all that crap. Using Kevin to vocalize what's going through the audience's minds was brilliant. Making their characters respond to their kiss in instant replay was brilliant. Not messing with their flirtatious friendship while at work was brilliant. The subtlety of the whole thing was brilliant. Their relationship played as being sweet and innocent and beautiful without being nauseating. Brilliant.
• The perfect dose of Andy. Enough to get across that he's still the same old Andy, but not so much that you wanted to strangle him. The whole nipple gag was laugh-out-loud funny.
• Dwight and the cat. You know putting Angela's live cat in the freezer is exactly what Dwight Schroot would really do. Perfect.
• The entire race sequence. From the big check and the stripper nurse (and the T-shirts, which I expect to see on NBC.com any second now) and the pasta to Michael barfing, the whole 5k part of the episode had me cracking up. Andy drafting behind Kevin, the guys driving to get a drink then meeting up at the end, and Toby taking it all too seriously was all comedic genius. Toby's character is exceptionally written. On one hand, he's Michael's arch-enemy, the only voice of adult sanity at D-M. On the other hand, he has that small bit of Michael in him that pops out once in awhile, like when he was genuinely upset that he didn't get a robe, or when he took the race seriously.

That's all for now. Stay tuned for my thoughts on ER and CSI once I've had a chance to see 'em.

The New Season So Far

My stream-of-conscsiousness take on the shows I've watched so far:

1. The Heroes premiere showed some serious promise for a good season. First of all, Stephen Tobolowsky is the hardest working man in Hollywood. There is apparently an unwritten rule in Hollywood that if your show has been on the air for more than 27 episodes, your are contractually obligated to hire this guy to play some bit part. Also, he was once in a band with Stevie Ray Vaughn. For that reason, I think he's a bad-ass addition to the show. I am concerned, however, at the consequences his gold spoon thing may have on the economy. I mean... can the international gold market withstand a massive influx of solid gold spoons? Won't the price of gold just plunge through the basement?

At the moment, I think the Hiro-meets-British-drunk-Samurai is kind of boring. I think Hiro is better with Ando to play off of.

The scene where Claire climbs to the top of the cheer tower and chooses not to jump off was written brilliantly. You so want her to do a quadruple backflip with a double McTwsist and a triple salchow* just to show up the dumb cheerleaders, but she holds off and you totally feel her pain of going from being the cool cheerleader in school who can also walk through fire to being the girl that nobody knows. So far I think the guy who's stalking her (and is also a Hero, surprise-sur-fucking-prise) is lame -- a little too teenage heart-throb for me.

The highlight of the show for me was seeing Nathan as Ron Burgundy. It would have been awesome if he was drinking milk in those scenes. You know the Parkman-Mohinder-Bennett thing is gonna blow up in all their faces. And its gonna be lame when it does. The Molly stuff is fine with me for now. It's gonna be fun seeing grandma Petrelli get slaughtered. I can't wait to see ikkiN and Micah. The blogosphere says that the the Irish guy who found Peter in the shipping container also has Powers. (He can squirt Guinness out his pores at unsuspecting bad guys, apparently. Also, he can dance like a leprechaun.) I think the case might be getting too big, so they're gonna kill some people. I'm guessing Mohinder is a goner before the mid-season break, or maybe Bennett.

2. I like this "Chuck" show. It seems to me to be (a) a tongue-in-cheek homage to the spy genre; (b) a quirky character-driven ensemble show á la Ed (my favorite show about the lawyer in the bowling alley starring JD's older brother); (c) a lame-ass boy-meets-girl relationship show; (d) a slapstick physical comedy show; (e) a potato julienner. I think it has the potential to mix those ingredients to make a funny show. It could be lame, however. I like Chuck's sister and her "awesome" brother, playing beautiful-and-shallow people who work in a hospital (which I expect they'll play as a dig at Gay's Anatomy, which makes me happy, because I like it when people make fun of that ridiculously stupid show). I hate the guy who plays Chuck's best friend. If he stays on the show, it will not succeed, no matter how good the rest of it is.

3. Bionic Woman put me to sleep after about eight minutes. No thanks.

4. I want nothing to do with this Journeyman show. Quantum Leap was enough for me, thanks.

5. Things on the DVR waiting to be watched: CSI Miami and NY, L&O SVU, Gossip Girl. Things I'm looking forward to (but probably won't like): Pushing Daisies, Dirty Sexy Money.

6. I would rather eat my own barf off the floor of the Palm restaurant than watch Private Practice.

7. America's Fattest Fatty cracks me up. Sara's addicted, so I'm watching it.

I'm gearing up for Office and Earl, and you know I'm excited for ER, CSI, and (eventually, when it comes back) Scrubs.

Raspberries

I don't think I understand raspberries.

I mean, I like them fine. If you were to serve me some, I'd eat them. I just don't understand why there's a market for them. I can't imagine anyone really having a hankering for raspberries, or tasting something and thinking to themselves, "You know what would make this better? Some raspberries."