TV, TV, TV

The fall season is in almost full swing, so all that free time I had over the summer is getting sucked up again. I spent the weekend watching Lost Season 2 in anticipation of season 3 starting in a couple of weeks. I watched an episode of the remastered Star Trek. It was "Balance of Terror," Das Boot in space. The effects are subtly better, but they did not take my suggestion and depicted phasers as photon torpedoes, just like the original episode. There is a funny bit where Nimoy has to run down a corridor and turn a corner; between the slick floor and the (as near as I can remember) painfully ill-fitting boots of the first season and the probably-flimsy set walls that he must avoid bumping, the run looks pretty silly.

Watched the debut of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip last night. Very funny in places, but like The West Wing, it alternates between being very funny and almost unbearably preachy. A character has an on-camera meltdown at the beginning of the show, in which he goes off on television for being dumb and offensive, but not offensive in the right ways. And given Sorkin's previous highly-publicised drug problems, it seems almost too much like a roman a clef for his main characters to be a TV writer and director, both of whom also have a history of drug problems (one of them played by Matthew Perry, who also has his own real-life history of drug problems). Maybe the drug thing will fade into the background once the show gets rolling.

I have to mention, though, that the biggest laugh I got during the episode was from the Rozerem commercial. Rozerem is a sleep aid drug, and get this: one of the side effects may be drowsiness. Alert CBS News, I think there's a scandal a brewin'.