Joke or Hoax?

I happened onto the AOL website today and saw this headline on their front page:

X-Men Illustrator Dies Wearing Superman Pajamas

When I clicked the link, it said the page did not exist. Was this a hoax story? A joke by a headline writer? A hack by a creative teenage geek? Or perhaps some sort of viral marketing scheme, like the on-line interviews with Gary Troup, author of Bad Twin, that appeared over the summer?

Does anybody know anything about this?

UPDATE: Finally got the link to work, and now I'm sad, because it's true. Dave Cockrum was the one who died.

Cockrum's work first got on my radar when he started drawing the "Legion of Super-Heroes" backup feature in Superboy during the late 70's. Like his later work on X-Men, he redesigned costumes and brought a fresh, exciting look to a property that had become stagnant and dated. Then he moved to Marvel and did the same thing with the X-Men, not just drawing the book but creating the characters of Storm, Nightcrawler and Colossus.

Unfortunately, the property took off in a way that his career never did. When Cockrum left the X-Men, John Byrne stepped in and immediately pushed the book to greater heights of popularity, and even though Cockrum later returned for another lengthy run, his work was never as popular as that of other artists on the feature.

But I remember his work fondly, and I'm sorry to hear about this, and now I'm pissed about that flippant headline.

Plus, I was about to call out this story about Lindsay Lohan as a hoax, too, wondering if it was National Hoax Day or something. Now I'm not so sure.

The Fall Finale Bandwagon

First Lost went on hiatus after its big fall finale three weeks ago. Last night, Prison Break had its fall finale, and next week, Heroes will do the same.

As much as I love the show, I think Lost comes out the big loser here. Having a "finale" after only five episodes created a lot of resentment, first of all. Second, both Heroes and Prison Break will return before Lost, meaning they shouldn't lose as much of their audience. Third, Lost was replaced by Daybreak, which is a high-energy drama that promises to play out completely in twelve weeks; how much patience will the audience have for Lost's extended teases when Daybreak finishes? Boston Legal lost its time slot to Grey's Anatomy when it went on hiatus. Could the same thing happen to Lost?

We'll see.

Happy Feet

A while back, my family bought the DVD of "March of the Penguins." There was a movie trailer on there that just instantly captivated us, of a computer-animated baby penguin tap-dancing to Stevie Wonder. It was just a marvelous bit of animation, full of joy and charm. Most trailers on DVD, you're anxious to skip over so you can watch the movie. This one, we rewatched something like three times, and when the feature was over, we went back and watched it again. It was that cool. And of course, as soon as it was over, we were all saying that we couldn't wait to see the whole movie.

Well, on Sunday, we did. And I wish I could say that "Happy Feet" lived up to the promise of that brief teaser, but alas, it does not. Or maybe it does, depending on your politics.

Let's put it this way: if you voted for Al Gore in 2000, you're a lot more likely to overlook this film's shortcomings than if you voted for Bush.

Or I could quote the Village Voice review by Jordan Harper:

And even the wee ones may start to notice something's amiss when the movie's theme goes from "be yourself" to "we must regulate the overfishing of the Antarctic oceans." No, for real.

The thing is, technically, the movie's marvelous. The animation is amazing. And the musical numbers are awesome, combining hooky, infectious medleys of pop songs with terrific motion-captured dancing moves. But sometimes the film has to really give an artificial heave to make the plot do what it wants (like the number in which, instead of singing a duet with his love interest, Mumble taps a counterpoint to her voice instead - it gets pretty good toward the end, but it's clunky and forced at the start).

And after the movie has already kind of exhausted your suspension-of-disbelief muscles, it then sprains them altogether by veering from a Hollywood-standard self-esteem theme into trendy enviro-preaching. My eyes hurt from rolling them so much in the last fifteen minutes of the fim.

If my daughter has her way, we'll probably end up buying the DVD, but I have to say, the Pixar films do a much better job of integrating adult themes painlessly into an ostensibly children's entertainment. I would have preferred more dancing and less preaching.

An Experiment

I'm going to be trying something new here for a while. Every now and then, I'll be writing a sponsored post for cash. There's a company called PayPerPost that offers to hook up bloggers with advertisers and what they call "opportunities."

Some people see a terrible ethical dilemma with this; I don't. Sure, we look back now and think the Flintstones were awful people for advertising Winston cigarettes, but radio talk show hosts do the same thing even today. Rush Limbaugh rhapsodizes over the Sleep Number Bed and Paul Harvey is cuckoo for Citracal. And you know they're not doing all those spots for free (and don't you dare say anything bad about Paul Harvey).

But here's the bargain and the promise: from time to time, I'll include a post for which I hope to receive monetary compensation (I don't get paid until after the post has been reviewed and approved). But I won't be making such posts indiscriminately. I don't plan to get rich off these things, just earn a little beer money here and there. So I will only post about opportunities that interest me, and I will always identify these posts, in case you want to skip them, with a lead-in of "P-Three-Oh sez:" and a link back to this post so you'll know the deal.

Cool? Let's try it out:

P-Three-Oh sez:

One of the main concerns involved with this type of advertising is that folks won't disclose the fact that they have received compensation for the posts. They're worried about perceptions of blogger payola. So there's a group called Disclosurepolicy.org that will auto-generate disclosure policy boilerplate text based on your answers to a few questions. The text it generates is clunky and dry, but that just makes it sound more legal. You can use it verbatim or as a template to write your own.

Here's mine:

This policy is valid from 21 November 2006

This blog is a personal blog written and edited by me. For questions about this blog, please contact tonyfrazier62@cox.net.

This blog accepts forms of cash advertising, sponsorship, paid insertions or other forms of compensation.

This blog abides by word of mouth marketing standards. We believe in honesty of relationship, opinion and identity. The compensation received may influence the advertising content, topics or posts made in this blog. That content, advertising space or post will be clearly identified as paid or sponsored content.

The owner(s) of this blog is compensated to provide opinion on products, services, websites and various other topics. Even though the owner(s) of this blog receives compensation for our posts or advertisements, we always give our honest opinions, findings, beliefs, or experiences on those topics or products. The views and opinions expressed on this blog are purely the bloggers' own. Any product claim, statistic, quote or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer, provider or party in question.

To get your own policy, go to http://www.disclosurepolicy.org

Replacing What's Lost

Lost is on official hiatus, which may or may not be a good move on ABC's part. Luckily for us, if not for them, the interim replacement series, Daybreak, is really good. At least the pilot was.

The premise is an iffy one, a combination (as others have said) of "Groundhog Day" meets "The Fugitive." To wit: a cop keeps living the same day over and over again, and over the course of this same repeated day must find a way to clear his name (he's being framed for a murder he did not commit) and save the lives of those close to him. The pilot kept the premise from seeming hokey, and Taye Diggs is an excellent, engaging lead. It appears that the mystery will be solved in twelve episodes totalling thirteen hours, which would be excellent if true. I want this show to succeed, but I worry about what would happen if it does, because I cannot imagine how they could pull off a second season.

Then again, I thought the same thing about 24, and it's about to start season 5, so what do I know?

Studio 60 Sanctimony

"Sin City" was on over the weekend, so I watched it again. God, it's so frustrating! I loved the comics, but the movie, while translating the images with awesome fidelity, creates an absolutely unique visual experience, then kills it with these awful performances. I mean, even reliably good performers, like Bruce Willis, just seem to sleepwalk through this movie. Clive Owen and Benicio Del Toro are simply awful, Owen killing any suspense with a plodding performance and Del Toro taking what should be a fascinatingly scary character, a flirty-funny dude who can explode at any moment in frightening ways, and yoking him with this goofy voice that turns him into a boring prop-that-talks.

Heroes (Freudian typo - I originally typed "Herpes" - silly qwerty) is about to hit what we thought would be the big climactic showdown with Sylar, but looks like it's just going to be another twist. I'm looking forward to it, but I'm finding that, week by week, I keep watching "Wheel of Heroes" not because I enjoy it so much, but because I want to be there when it turns cool. There's so much pent-up potential in these characters, and I want them to start realizing some of it. It's like watching some dude drive a dragster through a school zone at the speed limit; at some point, you know he's got to open up the throttle and let it rip, and you just wish he'd get to it already.

And Studio 60...

sigh...

The two-parter in Pahrump, Nevada summarizes everything that's good and bad about this show. The cast of interesting characters played by appealing actors (Stephen Weber, who I thought was just adequate on Wings, is awesome here) gets into an amusing scrape, which rachets up through complication after complication into a potentially hilarious situation, only to fall flat because all the characters turn sanctimonious and preachy. The sermon du jour: gay marriage, with a side order of War Is Dangerous.

And on the subject of gay marriage, let me briefly dip my toe into these oh-so-treacherous waters. Mary Katharine Ham got pretty close to summing up my feelings on the subject here when she said:

I don't think all the pro-traditional-marriage amendments would have been so widely supported had conservatives not resented the redefinition of a long-standing social institution being imposed upon them by the courts and a small community of activists. It was "The Interference" more than "The Gay,"...

For my own part, I'm an atheist. I don't have a religious objection to homosexuality. But I recognize that marriage, in its various forms, has been a staple of basically every culture across the world thoughout history, and in about all of them I've ever heard of, the basic unit is man and woman. Not necessarily one-and-one, but male and female.

And suddenly, in the past couple of years, I'm being told that people want to change the meaning of this word I've known all my life, and furthermore, that if I object to this sudden political redefinition of one of the basic building blocks of civilization, I'm a terrible person. I'm a Nazi. I'm a slaver. I'm Evil Incarnate.

Dude, I just want you to leave the word alone. Sure, everything changes. According to Wikipedia, ketchup was originally the name for a Chinese fish sauce. But not everything has to change now.

The Week in TV

One thing we learned on TV this week: never trust a white guy. This season's Survivor, which started out divvying up tribe on the basis of race, quickly showed the gimmick to be insubstantial when the tribes mixed after two weeks and new alliances formed. One alliance in particular looked strong: two of the Asians allied with two of the Caucasians.

This week, we discovered that the two Caucasians, Jonathan and Candice, were merely biding their time until the merge, when they could ally with the other white folks again. And when they got the chance to jump ship and join the other tribe, they leaped for it. Bad move: now neither side trusts them.

Meanwhile, on Heroes, we have a noble Indian scientist searching for clues to his father's death, a Japanese man searching for the hero within himself, a black man wrongly convicted of a crime he did not commit and his genius, half-black son...

And a whole bunch of nasty white folks: a schizo woman who is a stripper on one side and a murderer and thief on the other, a corrupt politician, a heroin addict, a wife cheating on her cop husband with his partner, a suicidal cheerleader, her potential boyfriend/would-be rapist, and her upstanding dad, who is the head of a secret conspiracy. Oh yeah, and a super-powered serial killer who eats the brains of his victims. There are a couple of minor henchmen characters of other races, and a few decent white folks, but we can see which way the wind is blowing.

Studio 60 was pretty good this week. The behind-the-scenes part of the show is still funnier than any of the skits, although at least this week, they only showed the skit in rehearsal and acknowledged it wasn't that funy. One good thing: John Goodman guest-starred. One bad thing: he doesn't look healthy.

What else? Supernatural did some stunt-casting this week, with Linda Blair playing a cop investigating the Winchester boys. It was the weakest episode of the season as far as I'm concerned, which means it wasn't bad, because the show has been surprisingly good. But Blair is just not a strong actress. If it weren't for her famous face from a movie she made when she was 12 (?), she wouldn't get any work at all nowadays.

And Smallville keeps inching toward the Justice League, which is about the only reason to keep watching, because otherwise this season is pretty damn dull.

Geez...

Never underestimate the ability of the Dallas Cowboys to give away a game they ought to win. Missed 2-point conversion, dropped passes, and worst of all, 150+ yards in penalties.

And am I the only one who, when KFC runs their commercials for the "famous" bowls (mashed potatoes, corn, chicken, gravy and cheese in a bowl) thinks of Mr. Creosote in "The Meaning of Life" ordering everything on the menu all mixed up in a bucket?

I haven't been doing as much TV blogging the past couple of weeks, partly because we're settling into the middle of the season and the newness is wearing off. Also partly maybe because Studio 60 took a week off, and as mediocre as the show is, it always provides something to write about.

That said, Lost this past week was awesome, and the next episode, the "fall finale" as they're calling it, looks like it will be really intense.

Corrupted File?

Heroes is finally starting to come together. It looks as if they'll start accelerating the pace, now, as they get into the meat of their arc. I hope. I hope.

Finished Turn of the Screw finally, but I seriously thought I had a corrupted file, because it literally ended at the moment of the climax. It was like those kung-fu movies that freeze-frame and super "The End" at the moment the bad guy dies, sometimes as the death-blow is landing. I read the final sentence and hit the page down, and nothing happened. So I closed and reopened the file, thinking it might have frozen up or something, but it stil ended the same. So I went to Cliff's Notes on-line to find out if it mentioned a missing denouement, but no, their summary ended just like the book file.

That sucks, y'all. I know some people say this is the finest horror ever written in the English language, and yeah, I guess it was groundbreaking in its way, but that ending sucked.

The Prestige

A very good movie, although it won't be a classic. Directed by Christopher Nolan ("Memento," "Batman Begins"), based on the World Fantasy Award-winning novel by Christopher Priest, "The Prestige" is the story of two rival magicians and their escalating competition with and hatred for each other.

Nolan handles things with his usual skill. The characterization is often subtle, the structure impeccable, all the details in place. The only real problem, as far as I can see, is that the structure is so complex, telling flashbacks within flashbacks via dual diaries, that the emotional impact is blunted. It's hard to open yourself up to the catharsis because you're so busy trying to keep all the pieces straight in your head. And, of course, the big final revelation is so thoroughly telegraphed that it's no surprise at all.

The casting is a little distracting, as well. The lead roles are fine; Hugh Jackman and Christopher Bale and Michael Caine and Scarlett Johansson all do fine work. But the minor roles can be distracting. When you should be paying attention to the substance of the scene, you keep seeing these faces: "hey, that's Niles from The Nanny," hey, look, it's that dude from Cheers," "dude, that's David Bowie." Stunt casting is fun in a mindless summer action film. In an intricate mystery, I think it detracts.

But these are relatively minor quibbles in what is overall an absorbing and entertaining mystery. Now I want to read the book, and/or read Carter Beats the Devil again.

Speaking of reading, I've been slogging through Henry James's Turn of the Screw for weeks now, and it's just an incredible pain. The story itself is pretty good, but the verbal theatrics are so way over the top that I find it hard to read more than a chapter at a time.

Batman and Heroes

In honor of Halloween, I decided to read a Batman graphic novel mtreiten gave me a while back. It's called Haunted Knight, and it's actually a collection of three stories that were apparently all published as Halloween specials.

Here's the thing: I've been blogging a lot about Heroes lately. It's probably my favorite new show of the season. And it turns out, the two guys mainly responsible for Haunted Knight are both involved in that show. Jeph Loeb, the writer, is credited as co-executive producer (as spacezombie pointed out in comments a while back). And Tim Sale, the artist, does all of Heroin Boy's artwork (paintings of the future, as well as the 9th Wonders comic book from the future that Hiro reads).

Synchronicity strikes again.

TV Time

I'm noticing that several of the shows I watch play cute tricks with time. I know that they will, for instance, have a Christmas episode close to Christmas and stuff like that, but now they're getting subtle and cute. For instance, in the second season finale of Lost, they name the date of the plane crash as September 22, 2004. That's the date Lost premiered on ABC.

Likewise, on the episode of Heroes that aired on October 2, Hiro traveled forward in time to November 8, the day after the election, and what looked like a nuke went off in NYC. Then he traveled back to his "present" time, which was what date? October 2.

And on Smallville, they refer to the disaster that engulfed the world when Zod came to Earth as "Dark Thursday," because, of course, Smallville airs on Thursday. It's not as if the episodes air in real time, but the creators like to throw in Easter eggs, I guess.

Placeholder

I didn't blog Lost or Smallville this week, because they seemed like placeholder episodes. Which is not to say that they weren't interesting (Lost more than Smallville), but just that they didn't seem to advance the overall storyline very far. We got a couple of small revelations, a couple of pieces of the larger season arc, but nothing earthshaking.

The best part of Lost was not the discovery that Sawyer may have a daughter or Kate saying out loud that she loves Sawyer, but proving it by voluntarily reentering her cage when Sawyer refuses to escape with her. That was a good piece of understatement, illustrating character through action rather than dialogue (in fact, illustrating character through action that runs counter to the dialogue - she says one thing but does another - good stuff). But otherwise, it was all reinforcement of what we've seen before (the Others are skilled at deception, Jack can't stand losing, Desmond can see the future, Charlie's an insecure, jealous dick) and set up for next week.

I recorded Supernatural but haven't watched it yet, so I can't talk about it yet.

Brief Brag

Just have to say, I was a little bummed when I found out "Astromonkeys" hadn't made the cut for the Best of Universe anthology. But I take some consolation in this review, in which my story is called "the strongest piece in this issue." Here's hoping others take notice.

EDIT: It looks as if the direct link may not work. If not, go to www.tangentonline.com and click on Baen's Universe in the left hand column menu (it's under E-Market/Bi-monthly pubs). The review is of Issue 1.

Monday Stuff - Prison Break, Heroes and Bad Comedy

So Prison Break finally returned tonight, and it's still an awfully frustrating show, one part action thriller, one part conspiracy mystery, one part completely useless exercise in piling pointless complications one atop another until I almost want to scream. I still watch the show, but unlike Lost or Heroes, which seem to end too soon, when an episode of Prison Break ends, I'm ready for the break.

Heroes, on the other hand, seems understuffed rather than overstuffed. Like last week's episode, this week's ep seemed to spend an awful lot of time advancing the story by an infinitesimal degree. Call it "The Wheel of Heroes." A couple of comments:

One of SuperHiro's powers is apparently learning languages. In the first few episodes, he seems unable to say anything in English but a few standard loan words. Last week, he mentioned that he needed to learn how to say a particular phrase in English, and his buddy Ando offered to teach it to him phonetically. But when we meet FutureHiro, not only does he speak English, but he pronounces it without an accent, like a born American. And when he meets The Flying Politician, he carries on quite a long conversation with him in English, without his translator buddy Ando around to help him out.

As to the long term arc of the show, it's becoming apparent that it's not just about good guys versus bad guys, as much as it's about very flawed people making a conscious decision to do the right thing. The Flying Politician is a corrupt adulterer, StripperHulk is both a stripper and a killer, TelepathiCop has marital problems (and somewhat creepily uses his mind-reading ability to seduce his unsuspecting wife in this week's ep), SuperHiro cheats at gambling, the Indestructible Cheerleader is a serial suicide attempter, Heroin Boy is an addict, the CopyCat (the younger Petrelli) is just a whiner. None of them is particularly noble, but these very flawed people are the ones who have been chosen, almost at random, to save the world.

There are some really interesting questions to explore there, viz. inner character vs. outer deeds. Can we be evil and do good? Or conversely, can doing good make us good? It looks like the action is going to ratchet up next week; it's about time.

And, of course, Studio 60...

Okay, first, a note about my car. My new car, bottom of the Chevy line, does not have power locks. The first time I got out of my car, I hit the lock button, held up the handle and shut the door. When I came out later, I found my car unlocked. When I tried to lock the door again, it unlocked as soon as I shut it. Frustrated, I checked the owner's manual and discovered that the lock wasn't broken. It was purposely designed to lock from the outside only with the key. What I thought was a defective lock was in fact a design feature to keep me from locking my keys in thte car.

So tonight on Studio 60, we discover that the unfunny comedy is apparently also not a flaw, but a feature. Matt and Simon go to the Improv to scout for a new writer. Turns out the guy is a hack, a generic black comedian whose material was old ten years ago. But as they're about to leave, they see another guy on stage who bombs horribly. He's flop-sweaty, his timing and delivery are awful, and his punch lines are weak. He's not funny, you see, but his material is original, at least. So they hire him.

See, the comedy's not funny because they don't intend it to be.

Oh, and there was only a little bit of preaching this week - body armor for soldiers and the Hollywood Ten, if you're keeping score (maybe I should).

Writing Stuff: Back on the Horse?

Taking a break from the TV blogging for a second. I'll be back with Monday night recaps soon enough.

I've been going through a crisis for the last few weeks. I'd been getting bogged down in novel revisions, going two-thirds of the way through the second act before scrapping it and restructuring. Then I tried to write a short story for Writers of the Future, based on what I thought was an awesome idea, only it went nowhere. Then I tried to write another short story for a contest, the infamous dud I've referred to before.

And suddenly writing was becoming an incredible chore, this huge drain on my mental resources that wasn't returning any rewards. I was seriously considering chucking the whole thing, going back to being just another closeted wannabe who occasionally writes stuff, but never shows it anybody or submits it anywhere.

I'd barely managed to touch the keyboard for a couple of weeks, but last night was pretty good. Made some real progress on the book rewrite, and was inspired enough to go back and finish a second draft on the dud that de-dud-ifies it a little, I think.

So I'm feeling better, although between work (fucking World Series) and the impending holiday season, my mood will probably swing between subdued and depressed for the rest of the year.

Going to blow off NaNoWriMo in favor of doing rewrites on Hero Go Home, which is kind of depressing in its own right, considering I'd wanted to get it finished in less than a year. But I can't be too depressed, considering I took a year to write just the first draft of Blue Falcon, and another year to do the second draft. So I'm improving.

More About TV Nowadays

I've heard several people say this, but Jonah Goldberg at National Review Online says it as well as anybody:

...good TV shows have become more akin to very, very, very long movies with character arcs and storylines which stretch across TV seasons and an end goal in mind. "Lost" is one example. NYPD Blue turned Dennis Franz into the Job (as in book of) of primetime TV. Joss Whedon's work always stuck to a certain plan. The new (problematic) show "The Nine" as well as the sleeper hit "Heroes" fit this mold. And what has recently become on of my favorite shows, "Deadwood" (created by NYPD Blue co-creator David Milch), is clearly one giant movie in X number of parts.

Warren Brown, a smart guy from my local writers group, made this same argument, only IIRC he went even farther to say that TV and movies had essentially switched places. Used to be, TV was repetitive and sort of mindless, every episode returning to the status quo of the beginning. You could watch the episodes in any random order and it wouldn't matter. For more thoughtful entertainment and real dramatic writing, you had to go to the movies.

Now TV shows are taking all sorts of dramatic risks and making shows with characters that grow and evolve, while the convergence of CG effects and the blockbuster mentality have resulted in movies as mindless spectacle.

That being said, I'm really looking forward to "The Prestige."

Lost Is Back, Baby

I've been kind of standoffish about Lost this so far this season, partly because of The (Fictional) Prisoners' Dilemma I described earlier. Last night's episode, though, brought me back in. Locke is back in first season form, communing with the island, having visions, fighting polar bears. Good stuff, and a welcome return from the conflicted weakling he had become in the second season.

There was a lot of prophecy in this episode. Locke has a prophetic vision in a sweat lodge (using the same psychotropic stuff he used on Boone in season one), then later an unconscious Eko seems to come awake and deliver another prophecy to Locke, while Hurley (who last season listened to a radio broadcast of Glenn Miller and mused that the signal might be traveling through time) hears Desmond make a prophetic remark that makes Hurley think Desmond has traveled through time as well. By the end, Locke has returned to the beach settlement like Moses coming down from the mountain to give the other castaways their marching orders. Later this season, I see Locke and Eko traveling to the Others' camp to tell Ben Linus (aka Henry Gale), "Thus saith The Island, 'Let my people go!'"

So a good episode, although the flashbacks surprisingly didn't resolve, so I'm disappointed in that.

BTW, I haven't been blogging it, but Lost is followed by another surprisingly good show, titled The Nine. I'm not thrilled with the title. When I first heard it, I thought it was a show about the Supreme Court.

Basically, The Nine is another big puzzle show, with an intriguing premise. Two guys plan a simple bank robbery, in and out in five minutes. Things go wrong, and 52 hours later, the SWAT team rushes in to end a hostage stalemate. We see the customers go into the bank, and we see very different people come out, along with intriguing clues to what went on during those lost 52 hours. The series now proceeds along two tracks, telling the stories of how the nine hostages deal with the aftermath of the crisis while also flashing back to tell the events of the stand-off itself.

The premise is pretty gimmicky, but the character writing is good. But even before the show premiered, people were wondering how long it would last, being scheduled right on the heels of Lost, since both shows have large ensemble casts and complex storylines. Would viewers be willing to watch two intricately-plotted dramas in a row?

In fact, most, if not all, TV dramas follow that model, which makes it a lot more intimidating for a new viewer to drop in on an established show. Jonah Goldberg at NRO pointed to this passage in a New Yorker review by Malcolm Gladwell of the book, Everything Bad is Good For You:

As Johnson points out, television is very different now from what it was thirty years ago. It's harder. A typical episode of "Starsky and Hutch," in the nineteen-seventies, followed an essentially linear path: two characters, engaged in a single story line, moving toward a decisive conclusion. To watch an episode of "Dallas" today is to be stunned by its glacial pace--by the arduous attempts to establish social relationships, by the excruciating simplicity of the plotline, by how obvious it was. A single episode of "The Sopranos," by contrast, might follow five narrative threads, involving a dozen characters who weave in and out of the plot.

My feelings exactly. This is a double-edged sword, however. While it makes for a richer viewing experience, it can make people like me reluctant to try a show that we haven't been in on from the beginning. I keep hearing about how great Battlestar Galactica is, but the few episodes I've watched, while good, were so enmeshed in ongoing storylines and relationships that I felt kind of adrift. I occasionally catch an episode, but I don't care if I miss one. And although I hear great things about The Shield, there's no way I'm going to try to jump into it in the middle.

I've got enough on my plate with Lost and Smallville and Heroes and Supernatural and Prison Break and The Nine and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and Survivor, thank you very much.

Monday Morning Roundup

One of the best moments in Stephen King's Misery is when Annie goes into a long rant about movie serials and the way they would change stuff from last week's ending cliffhanger at the beginning of next week's episode.

That's what happened with Heroes this week. It wasn't an earthshaking change, of course, not a cheat to let the hero get out of the COCKADOODIE CAR! before it plunged off the cliff. They just had to dump a joke, because it works a lot better at the end of a scene than at the beginning.

It's a joke we've all seen before, most recently in the new Cox high-speed internet commercial. The final guests are leaving a party late at night, and the husband and wife look at this amazing pile of dishes in their kitchen. The husband says it'll take forever to clean up, and the wife jokingly suggests that they crack open the computer and siphon out a little of the "high-speed." Then they look at each other like, why not? Hubby drips a little CG mercury-looking stuff onto his palm, rubs his hands together, then does all the dishes in, like, one second, suds flying everywhere. Wife looks dumbstruck, then says, "Holy--"Smash cut to black.

It's a meta-joke, combining the raw reality of what someone probably would say in just such a situation with a wink at the audience. "I know what she said, you know what she said, we all know what she said, but TV won't allow us to actually say what she said, so we'll do a provocative cut that lets you fill in the blanks." You see it in movie trailers all the time.

At the end of Heroes last week, Claire woke up from her attempted rape and accidental murder to find herself on an autopsy table with her chest cut open in the classic Y-incision. Claire looked at herself, and at the line of shiny stainless-steel bowls awaiting her viscera, and said, "Holy--" Smash cut to black.

This week, of course, she just says "Oh my... ga..." before zipping herself back up and getting out of there. I understand why they did it, but it dropped me out of the episode a bit, right at the beginning.

The rest of the episode was pretty good, as the characters began to meet one another, finally. I'm even starting to warm up to characters I didn't like before. Heroin Boy, for instance, seems a lot cooler now that I've seen his powers in action (and hats off to the production staff, who somehow made painting look like a cool power). Likewise Sybil, the multiple-personality stripper (although if her alter is also super-strong or something, I may have to start calling her StripperHulk).

The only real problem is that, with so many parallel storylines, none of them advance very far by the end of the episode. It's like, "What if Robert Jordan wrote superheroes?"

But of course, that is remedied by the final scene, which is another awesome cliffhanger. This week, we see SuperHiro as he will appear in future, looking badass. The glasses and nerdy haircut and sarariman wardrobe are gone; now, he's got a soul patch and a katana slung across his back (it looked too long to be a ninjato) and he speaks perfect English. It's a dramatic moment that shows just how far Hiro will go.

Studio 60 was OK. I probably won't be talking much about it any more, unless something interesting happens. This week was all more of the same: Matt doesn't like Christians, except Hannah; the show isn't funny (with a really awful Nic Cage impression that seems to be a running bit on the show, since we also saw it last week), but everyone keeps telling us it is, we take time out from the "comedy" for a sermon on whatever subject Sorkin thinks we should be really angry about (this week, it's reality shows).

Before Heroes, I happened to click onto an episode of How I Met Your Mother, which I've gotta say was really funny. Or I should say, the A-plot featuring Doogie Howser and Willow was really funny, the B-plot not so much.

I Know We're All Getting Older, But...

Is it just me, or does Shatner look like a burn victim in his new DirecTV commercial? It looks like he's had some bad work done (of course, there is a limit to what plastic surgery can do, and I think Shatner has hit that limit).