Continuity

I might give In Plain Sight another chance next week, because sometimes they’re still working out the kinks during pilots and first episodes, but I wasn’t impressed with the series debut. It seems like they haven’t decided how campy to be yet, so the show wanders from deadly serious to almost a parody. The main character’s family is absurd. Her partner, stupidly named so they can make jokes about a federal marshall named Marshal, is an annoying weenie. There is no chemistry anywhere. The show suffers badly in comparison to something like Burn Notice, where the characters sizzle, they bounce off each other well, and the dry humor works to perfection. The main character in this one isn’t a convincing narrator, in part because she hasn’t got the voice for it and in part because the writers haven’t figured out how to handle her brand of self-analysis. The scene where she has fake phone sex with a hired killer was just plain embarrassing. And I’m not usually good at picking up continuity errors, but the one I found in this episode was so glaring I had to watch it a few times to convince myself of what I was seeing. At the part where the husband and wife are being separated, Marshal goes with the wife in an SUV. “I’ll catch up with you later,” he tells Mary. Mary gets in her car, has a brief conversation with someone else and then Marshal gets in the car with her, after he rode off in the SUV!

Rather than waiting for the August release of season 2 of Dexter on DVD, I decide to go the Amazon download route. It’s cheaper and it’s NOW. Since there’s absolutely nothing else on TV at the moment, I figured it was a good time. I watched the first three episodes last night, and the series continues to impress. By the end of the first episode, Dexter has gone off his game, let one intended victim go and another escape, has fallen under Rita’s suspicious eye for his involvement in her ex-husband’s imprisonment, is being stalked by Doakes, and all of his old victims are being unearthed from his dumping spot. That’s the way to ramp up suspense—don’t create just a single crisis for a character but hit him with both barrels. I like the show much better in its original form: commercial-free with all the cusswords intact.

I’ll bet there are a lot of bleary-eyed people in Pittsburgh and Detroit this morning. Game 5 of the NHL finals went into triple overtime after Pittsburgh tied the game with only 35 seconds left to go in regulation play. The hometown Detroit fans could almost taste that Stanley Cup. I wonder how advertising works for games like that. Are there people on the phone with Budweiser making deals for new ads during the fourth-period intermission? Do they just yank out whatever tapes they have lying around once the game goes into its fifth and sixth hours of broadcast?

I think I’m done with the novel for now. I handled all my notes, added in a few details from my notepad, and searched for all my usual writing tics (excess use of the words that, just, only and simply). Time to get it off my desk for a while and onto someone else’s. I may take this week off from writing to clear my head before tackling new stuff. My agent says he’s pretty busy for the next couple of weeks but should be ready to take a look at the novel by the end of the month.