TV Catchup

I caught up on some shows I recorded during the week. I’m not sure why I’m still watching Raising the Bar, as it does absolutely nothing to raise the bar for courtroom dramas. It’s basically L.A. Law for public defenders. But it’s well put together and well acted, which is more than I can say for a lot of shows, so I’m still hanging in there.

Grey’s Anatomy was all wet. The previews made it look like some cosmic flooding event, and it was nothing more than a few broken pipes. Still, I liked the story about the guy who thought god hated him only to have his bad luck turn out to be good for him. Good on Lexie for solving the chronic pain problem of one patient (played by an almost unrecognizable Daniel J. Travanti from Hill Street Blues). Photographic memories prove to be useful from time to time. Poor Izzie got scooped on her apartment when she was trying to find a roomie. Mostly a by-the-numbers episode.

Private Practice: haven’t we seen the story about the kids who discover they’re actually siblings even though they’re already lovers plot before? It was on a Law & Order episode, I’m quite sure. Still, it proceeded on an unexpected arc. The partners aren’t in as much of a stew as I would expect people to be if they were truly on the verge of going broke. An okay episode, again, nothing to phone home about.

Now this one is good: Life on Mars. Apparently based on a British series that I’ve never seen and no nothing about—nor do I want to know anything about it. I want to experience this show as it unfolds. A cop from 2008 wakes up in 1973 after being struck by a car. He’s the same age as he was in 2008, but he’s wearing bad clothes and his car has an 8-track player. The show wants us to believe these are coma visions, but he is overwhelmed by the amount of detail in his putative vision. He’s a cop in an age when fingerprint comparisons take weeks, there’s no DNA or trace analysis, no one has cell phones, and the whole concept of criminal profiling doesn’t exist. He has the opportunity, one would think, to become immensely rich very quickly simply by taking advantage of everything he knows about the past 25 years. Hell, he could even put up a shingle and become psychic. Question is—is paradox at play here or is this truly just a complex series of hallucinations? I don’t want to know how the British series answered that question—if, indeed, it did. But I’m along for the ride with this show.

After seeing Ghost Town, I decided to give the BBC version of The Office a try a couple of weeks ago. I’ve never seen either the UK or US versions before. The first episode was so embarrassingly bad that I almost turned it off partway through. Uncomfortable humor. I liked Ricky Gervais’s humor style in the movie a lot, but not in the one episode of the show. Maybe it gets better, but I have no intention of finding out.