Monday TV Recap

Prison Break is on hiatus, and I just couldn't bring myself to watch Fashion House, so this is all Heroes and Studio 60.

Three episodes in, Heroes continues to be half-interesting and half-boring as hell. TelepathiCop, Super-Hiro and the Crash Test Cheerleader continue to be the most interesting characters on the show, while Heroin Boy and Sybil and the Flying Politician continue to be meh. And the Indian geneticist searching for clues to the mystery of his dad's death is just y-a-a-a-w-n-n.

Where was I? Good things about tonight's episode: Super-Hiro stops time to rescue a little girl, the supervillain Sylar makes his first appearance, there's this awesome meta-thing going on, where Hiro has brought back a comic book from the future which he uses to guide him on his journey to America (and incidentally also makes him do this week's product placement duties - he didn't want to, but the comic book made him, y'all!), and the totally awesome ending with Claire, the indestructible cheerleader.

Studio 60 hit a milestone tonight. The bits of the show-within-a-show that we saw this week were actually kind of funny. Good and bad news about that. It's good in that maybe it won't all feel so fake, now. The recapper on Television Without Pity thinks that it's best for them to keep the fictional show off the real show so we won't be disappointed. But I don't think you can do that forever. It's like watching a show about a pianist where you never see hands on the keyboard, just the head and shoulders moving, like on Reefer Madness. If they can actually get some funny bits on the show, it helps us buy the rest of it.

The bad news is that the funny bits don't come from Comedy Jedi Matt. One comes from the roomful o' hack writers, and the other is entirely due to Sarah Paulson's performance (she's doing Juliette Lewis this week - it's not as good as the dead-perfect Holly Hunter she did on last week's episode but it's still pretty funny).

Sorkin is still pushing the whole Christianity thing as a wedge between her character and Matthew Perry's. It's the thing that's supposed to make her character distinctive, but since Sorkin can't write a halfway believable Christian character (not surprising, since he hates them), the show always falls flat when it forces her to go in that direction. When they just let her be funny, she's charming and awesome. So as pessimistic as I've been about the show for the first three weeks, I'm thinking there might be hope for it now.

Still, it doesn't help that the funniest bit we've seen on the show so far came not from the supposedly brilliant main characters, but from "Beavis and Hackboy."

I'm mulling over the North Korea situation and may comment on it tomorrow.