Jun 18 2008
A look back at the 2007-2008 television season, Part 3 of 3
A little bit later than I had intended, but here’s the last bit. Have at it, folks!
Lost
Maybe it was the shortened season. Maybe it was the introduction of the flash forwards. Maybe it’s that now with a drop dead date for the show, the writers actually have some inkling of where they’re going. Maybe it was a combination of those things. But whatever the cause, the result was one of the tightest and most satisfying seasons of Lost so far. Unlike the last two seasons, I wasn’t left feeling like the creators were just making it up as they went along. I read awhile back that the plan was for the next season to be about “getting back to the island.” It’ll be interesting to see how they manage the two groups of characters. Jumping back and forth between the folks left on the island and the ones that escaped could easily go sour (remember season two with the guys on the raft ending up on the other side of the island). Still, after this year’s solid offering, I’m inclined to put my faith in the Lost boys. I shall be enthusiastically tuning in next season to find out where they go. It was nice to enjoy a season of Lost without constantly feeling like they were one episode away from losing me entirely. Keep it up, guys!
Eli Stone
I had a bit of an up and down relationship with this show. I enjoy the premise, especially since it involves Loretta Devine and Victor Garber singing to me every few episodes. Eli does verge on the preachy from time to time and I that’s coming from someone who’s emphatically liberal – I should be their core audience. If they’re going to keep doing episodes about vaccines causing autism and amnesty for ilegal aliens they’re going to have to deal with the fact that there’s a large audience of people that won’t be tuning in…and they’re going to have to dial down the rhetoric a tad because they’ve been coming on way too strong. But in the last episodes of the season, the show got better at developing the characters and dropping small seeds of prophecy (like Eli’s vision of he and Maggie in the future) that have given the show a sense of momentum. And I’m enjoying Veronica Mars vet Julie Gonzalo as Maggie, she’s cute as hell.
Scrubs
It would be putting it mildly to say that this was not the best year for Scrubs. It’s not really the fault of the creators. Of all of the shows I watch, Scrubs suffered the most from the strike. The season only got 11 episodes this season and NBC aired them out of order leading some strange continuity issues. Of course, the positive side is that ABC snapped up the show for an abbreviated, but mostly full season next year and Bill Lawrence promises a return to the heyday of the show (namely season two and three) where the writers mixed the humor with more serious episodes. They’ll have a smaller budget, so each regular will be taking two episodes off – this actually how Veronica Mars operated, though Mars had three actors that were in every episode and Lawrence says that even star Zach Braff will be disappearing for two eps. The biggest shift for the next season will be the replacement of Bob Kelso as the Chief of Medicine. Other than that, little development happened in the world of the Sacred Heart clan.
Battlestar Galactica
Only ten episodes left of this fine show and they’re certainly taking us in a new direction. The final episode of first half of the recent season left only a couple of big questions unanswered, namely “What exactly happened to Starbuck?” and “Who the frak is the fifth cylon?” While I know I’m not alone in my distaste of Starbuck’s turn towards the annoying this season, there was plenty of awesomeness to fill the empty space, not the least of which was the growing romance between Adama and Roslin. Is it just me or do Olmos and McDonnell have some the best on-screen chemistry ever? There’s Baltar and his Manson-like cult, it’s kind of an odd turn but I dig it. I’ve also enjoyed the turns that the newly revealed cylon sleepers have taken. They’ve all gone a little bit batty but in their own unique ways. There’s the cylon civil war that’s brought half of the models into the mix with the humans. And then, there’s the barn-burner of an ending with the humans and cylons finally finding the long lost thirteenth colony, or, at least, what we left of it. The last Galactica episodes are wrapping up shooting now, but the current word is that they won’t air until 2009. What a wait it will be.
Law & Order: Criminal Intent
Call it blasphemy, but this has been my favorite incarnation of Law & Order for some time now, brought on by my love of Vincent D’Onofrio and the more recent cast changes of the original incarnation that have degraded it. D’Onofrio and Erbe got some meaty plotlines in this abbreviated season including Eames’s investigation of her dead husband’s murderer and Goren dealing with his mother’s death and losing his badge over an unauthorized undercover investigation of prison psych ward. The other half of the show, helmed by Chris Noth and guest detective Alicia Witt, brought a more traditional feel. It was nice to ditch Julianne Nicholson for the far more talented Witt, but sadly it was not for long. The season actually started up again a couple of weeks ago and it mostly seems to be following the same pattern. In the opening episode Eames almost killed Goren while he was working undercover to earn his badge back and now she’s made at him and dead rodents are showing up in his desk. Noth and Nicholson worked on a case that seemed to be loosely based on Heath Ledger’s death and while it featured some heavy guest appearances from Mo Rocca and Illeana Douglas, I can’t help but feel like the actors are left looking at their colleagues episodes and wondering “when do I get some of that writing.” I certainly prefer it this way, but the uneven feeling can be a bit jarring.
