It is a shame that there was only one great half hour tonight as Modern Family had me in stitches. The rest was a very mixed bag of average, including the debut of Mr Sunshine on ABC. The good news I caught up with Tuesday night’s NCIS, which more than made up for everything tonight.
8:00 – I like The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, but for the most part I feel like most of the time that I am watching the political shows on MSNBC, it is because I am killing time. I find the politics interesting, but when it hits 8:00 I feel like their should be some kind of serial drama or comedy that should be entertaining me.
9:00 – Absolute genius. I thought the Valentines episode of Modern Family a year ago was genius with Claire and Phil having their disastrous fantasy role playing rendezvous at a local hotel. This year, they went back to that idea and took it to new heights and I was rolling, especially with the other couples also hitting comedy gold. The gay couple squabbling over who the assistant had a crush on was hysterical and the unexpected conclusion to the Gloria-Jay surprise Valentines dinner was perfect.
I spent the second half hour watching the new Mr Sunshine show that followed Modern Family on ABC. I’ll have a separate piece on that.
10:00 – While I enjoyed three police shows Tuesday night, I just had no real desire to flip over to CBS to watch Blue Bloods. I like the actors such as Tom Selleck, Donnie Wahlberg, Nich Turturro and Jennifer Esposito, but the show is just a bore. So, I stayed with ABC and the upstart series Off the Map. Unfortunately, as I predicted at the start of the series, it has struggled to find depth and creativity in its characters and stories, ripping off the movie 127 Hours tonight with an amputation storyline of a girl trapped in a reef rockslide under water. Meanwhile, the show is predictable cranking up the level of romantic triangles and situations. There were several humorous moments, but in the end it is not exactly enthralling.
Catching Up on Demand – Tuesday night’s NCIS was one of the best in quite a while and will certainly be considered one of the best in series history when it is all said and done. There is just one problem: it felt like a series finale as it all unfolded. The directing with the prominence and frequency of the flashbacks was a bit too much especially considering that regular viewers know the history of the show. The directing, however, also had good moments that differed from the regular format of the series by utilizing things such as tighter close-ups to show the visiting psychologist burrowing into the psyche of the team. The writing stole the show though as it cleverly they picked up on Tony passing up on the promotion several seasons ago and things still not changing in what appears to be a stagnating career, and how Abby does not have the same ‘girlfriend’ type of relationship with Ziva as she did with Kate. Typically, episodes that are meant to look at or examine a show’s history are pretty lame because the storyline that brings it about are very simplistic and unnatural, but this was by far one of the best flashback episodes I have ever seen. I won’t spoil the conclusion, because I think it is a must-see for anyone who has watched some of the show over the years.
Unfortunately for CBS, I can’t give anywhere near the same accolades to Monday’s Hawaii Five-O episode. While Scott Caan was good in embracing his rage to protect his daughter, there were several head-shaking moments that just made me say, really? For instance, they knew the bad guys they were tracking through the jungle were close because the leaf they disturbed and was laying on the ground was green – gasp, really. The other stupid thing was the whole idea of them rushing the witness to court with a super tight deadline that apparently could not be extended, yet somehow they managed to clean her up to testify and, oh, another bad guy out to kill her was the assistant on the defense’s law team and – here it comes – she had a gun inside the garter on under her skirt. Really, in this day and age with metal detectors at every courthouse, she slipped a gun through security? This show really needs a boost, perhaps with someone inserted onto their investigative team with a little more lip and can bring some character out of the two native Hawaiians on the team who are good detectives, but dull personalities.
Tape Delay – It is very iffy whether or not I will catch up on Blue Bloods for the reasons detailed above, but Human Target from Fox certainly will be.
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