Screeners? Yes, this year I was actually able to get hold of a few early versions of pilots for NBC and CBS, so I’ll indicate which pilots I saw that way. I’ll also note when I saw them, since the earlier I saw them, the greater the chances that there have been significant changes made since I saw them. I’ll also note which shows I’ve been watching since they premiered.

Anything with an asterisk is something I would recommend based on whatever version of the pilot I saw. I’ll probably be watching a couple more shows than that, but those are the ones that really stood out. Anything not listed here, I haven’t actually watched and thus do not feel qualified to give an opinion on other than “that looked stupid enough that even I wouldn’t watch it.”

After the jump, the full list.

Let’s start with all the stuff I saw on screeners:

NBC

Comedy

*Up All Night (saw on screener in late May, have been watching) – Definitely the best of NBC’s comedy batch. Christina Applegate and Will Arnett are great as harried new parents, and it strikes just the right balance between humor and sentimentality. The change to a talk show instead of a PR agency for the work environment and making Maya Rudolph’s character about 20-30% less cartoonish were both improvements on the original pilot, but they’re still trying to figure out just the right balance of work stuff vs. home stuff. Very, very promising.

Whitney (saw on screener, late May, did not watch final version) – I got through eight minutes of this, had a technical issue, and decided it was not worth watching the rest. Punishingly awful laugh track, and what I did see seemed to be trying to do for casual sexism what Outsourced did for casual racism. There’s talent behind this, so maybe they can find a way to rework it to be less atrocious, but I suspect they may need to do so by just doing a different show.

Free Agents (saw on screener, late May, did not watch final version) – Yet another will-they-or-won’t they workplace sitcom, with the twist that he’s just gotten divorced and she’s getting over the death of her fiance. Anthony Stewart Head is clearly having fun reprising his role as the asshole boss of a PR company from the British original, but Hank Azaria just comes off as bland and kind of whiny. Again – good talent behind this (lots of folks from Party Down, and there’s a great shout-out to one of that show’s best episodes), but the whole thing was pretty blah considering the pedigree.

Bent (Airing midesason; saw on screener, late May, may watch if reviews indicate it’s improved) – This was moderately charming, if suffering from a serious case of exposition-itis. Characters who don’t know each other spitting out background information about their conversation partner they really couldn’t possibly know, just to communicate this info to the audience. The cast seemed to gel pretty nicely, though, so this is one where some carefully considered changes could make this a lot better.

Drama

Prime Suspect (saw on screener, late May, have been watching) – Shot a little more in a Law & Order style than I would have expected, but I like Maria Bello in this. I’ve never seen the British original, but it seems some of its vintage sexism made it into the pilot – though allegedly that’s changing in the series as it moves on (I haven’t watched last night’s episode yet). Replacing the husband character in the final version did wonders – the original guy was terrible. Seems pretty good as a cop show, but some of the attempts at making Bello a bad-ass were a little over the top (what cop slaps her gun THEN her badge up against the back window of a cab?).

The Playboy Club (saw on screener, early June, have not watched) – It’s the Eddie Cibrian show! Seriously, for a show about Playboy Bunnies, this show puts an awful lot of weight on the buff shoulders of Cibrian. I’ve got some residual affection for him since he’s very funny in one of my favorite movies, but he is just not a good enough actor to carry this show. I’ve heard this actually got substantially worse since the original pilot, which is saying something, because the original pilot was pretty blah. Also, the fact that the producers here were so lazy that they decided for their black Bunny they should cast the black Bunny from Mad Men speaks volumes about exactly how much thought goes into this show.

Grimm (saw on screener, early June, will not watch) – I’ll qualify this by noting that this sort of fantasy isn’t really my genre, and I will say that the effects were pretty impressive for having been whipped together on a pilot timeline. However, I wasn’t terribly impressed. The lead is likeable enough, but the whole thing just comes off as super-silly to me. Silas Weir Mitchell is a really undervalued actor, but his character here comes off just a shade too far on the wacky side to be effective. The music, which will hopefully be improved for the final version, was massively overbearing and drove into the ground why I don’t like this sort of thing most of the time.

CBS

Comedy

Two Broke Girls (saw on screener, late May, have been watching) – Look, I really like Kat Dennings, I think she’s damn funny. But she can’t save this on her own. CBS doesn’t do shows without a laugh track, and while they’re better at gauging what level of canned laughter is acceptable than most of the other networks, it doesn’t mean it’s not still awfully grating. The pilot was tweaked until it seemed considerably funnier than the first version I saw, but the second episode was a serious dud, and I think I may need to check back in when this has found more of its voice.

How To Be A Gentleman (saw on screener, late May, did not watch final version) – Probably the least offensive of fall the shows trying to re-embrace hypermasculinity, since at least this one says men have neutered themselves rather than saying they’ve allowed their women to castrate them. There’s a really great cast here (Rickety Cricket from It’s Always Sunny…, Mary-Lynn Rajskub, the manager from Flight of the Conchords, and, uh, Kevin Dillon), but I have a feeling you could turn the camera on their conversations between takes and have a much funnier show than the mediocre comedy this actually winds up being.

Drama

*Person of Interest (saw on screener, late May, have been watching) – My favorite description of this is “Jesus and Ben Linus solving crimes.” Jim Cavaziel and Michael Emerson are both playing variations on characters they’ve played before, but the marriage of the JJ Abrams Bizarro Technological Mystery style and the CBS House Brand Criminal Procedural style works significantly better than I would have thought. There’s a lot of babble to justify the fairly strange premise of the show, but it’s well-written babble. This is one I’m going to keep an eye on.

Unforgettable (saw on screener, late May, did not watch final version) – CBS basically takes a really fascinating 60 Minutes story (and you should really watch the video at that link, it’s one of the better pieces they’ve done in years) and turns it into…a criminal procedural! What a surprise! Poppy Montgomery is okay in the lead role, but the mechanism they use to show her perfect memory is a little cheesy. It’s also clear that the memory part was much more important than the cop part to the writer, since the cop part is pretty stupidly plotted. Will definitely appeal to CBS’s core audience, but I wasn’t sufficiently impressed to add it to my rotation.

A Gifted Man (saw on screener, late may, did not watch final version) – Desperate attempt to marry a medical procedural and The Ghost Whisperer. I couldn’t stand this, and I actually laughed out loud when the main character, who is a neurosurgeon, decides to address the hallucinations he’s having by…Googling “hallucinations.” I mean, really, people, please tell me that did not make it into the final version. The saddest part of all this is that it utterly wastes Margo Martindale as the main character’s long-suffering assistant, when she proved she was capable of SO much more in this last season of Justified.

The following shows I have watched as they’ve premiered. I didn’t see earlier versions of any of them.

FOX

Comedy

*New Girl – Basically, this show is a referendum on how you feel about Zooey Deschanel. I think she’s delightful, so I really enjoy this show. If you don’t, you will hate it with the fire of a thousand suns. It’s pretty cartoonish and a little twee, but she’s just so damn likeable that I can put up with a lot of goofiness I’d otherwise find over the top. One unfortunate thing is that Damon Wayans Jr.’s other show (Happy Endings) unexpectedly got picked up, and he made a far better impression in the pilot than the guy they got to replace him going forward. Hopefully that character will get rounded out as the season goes on.

Drama

Terra Nova – Dinosaurs! Who doesn’t like dinosaurs? Some of the CGI on this looks pretty pretty great, and some of it still looks half-baked. Which is kind of amazing, considering that this has been in the works for well over a year and a half. The pilot was a little thin on character development and heavy on laying out the plot – there were definitely a couple of ham-fisted HERE IS THE HOOK FOR THE REST OF THE SEASON moments – but I’m going to hang on for at least another episode to see how it does, mostly because I really like Jason O’Mara. Who, full disclosure, was in the pilot of the last series I worked on and was ridiculously nice despite basically not having slept for a week by the time he got to our set for reshoots because he was also starring in a totally different series which shot on the opposite side of the country.

ABC

Comedy

*Suburgatory – Great companion piece for criminally underrated The Middle and powerhouse Modern Family, with a nicely sarcastic bite and well-written characters. The actors also do a great job of quickly locking in on the characters’ personalities, and it just gels immediately. To a certain extent, it’s Desperate Housewives from the point of view of a sane father and daughter that moved to the block, but it’s much, much funnier than that description implies. Definitely one to keep an eye on.

Drama

Pan Am - It’s got style by the barrel, but substance is a little harder to gauge after the pilot episode. There was a lot of work setting up back stories for four stewardesses and a pilot (This pilot/pilot thing is going to drive me nuts). The one storyline that stood out as the most potentially interesting was the one where one of the stews is actually working for the CIA, but the other stories were just a little too thin in one episode to make a judgement about how interesting they’ll be as it goes on. If you want to look at a very pretty recreation of the early Sixties with some hilariously square-jawed men and wee tiny gorgeous women, you’ll definitely enjoy the eye candy.

Whew! And yet I still managed to get an app approved and leave the house repeatedly this week. Amazing!

Finally, I’m looking forward to the following two upcoming shows:

- Showtime’s Homeland, with two actors I really like in Claire Danes and Damian Lewis, and what I’ve heard is a much more interesting take on the War on Terror than the producers’ previous delightful let’s-blow-shit-up-athon, 24. 

-FX’s American Horror Story, which I’ve heard is 32 flavors of bonkers. Wildly divisive among all the TV critics I follow on Twitter, but they all seem to agree that it’s very, very ambitious. And frankly, I’d rather watch an ambitious failure than a boring one.

I’ll try to disclose anywhere I’ve got friends working or where I’ve worked with principals in the past, though now that I’m getting the hell out of showbiz I feel a bit more comfortable calling a spade a spade when something is terrible.

Starting on Monday nights and going in roughly chronological order, these are the shows I’ve given a chance (anything not listed, I haven’t actually watched):

The Event (NBC, Mondays at 9pm) – Though it was conspicuously lacking in information, the pilot was better than I thought it would be (minus what I found to be spectacularly cheesy visual effects). The producers seemed to quickly realize withholding too much information was going to drive the audience nuts, and they immediately dropped quite a bit of knowledge about what the hell is going on in the second episode. Spoiler (highlight to read): Kerry Weaver is a goddamn space alien! This show desperately wants to be the next Lost, but the characters are way too thinly drawn at this point for it to be comparable. However, it also seems to be avoiding some of the pitfalls that dragged down FlashForward‘s early episodes last year by actually moving the plot forward in a meaningful fashion. It’s a big if, but if they can find a way to significantly flesh out the characters, this could actually turn into a pretty good show.

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Lonestar (Fox, Mondays at 9pm, already cancelled) – Though I didn’t quite like it as much as most critics did, I thought it had a lot of potential and I’m sorry to see it go so quickly after it pulled microscopic ratings. However, I’m more depressed about what this means for intriguing dramas that require the audience to put in effort to watch them. This show could have been handled better – it got stuck with a deathly timeslot (even behind House it was still up against Dancing With The Stars and NBC’s one out-of-the-gate hit in The Event) and had a very weird marketing campaign, but good luck trying to sell any broadcast network on the idea that any drama requiring the audience to think is going to be viable in the future, even with a better slot and a better campaign.

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Hawaii Five-O (CBS, Mondays at 10pm) – This is pretty much the Scott Caan Show, and Caan even makes the purported lead, the wooden Alex O’Laughlin, seem useful as a straight man. I’ve got no attachment to the original, but this is still far, far better than I thought it was going to be given the batting average for remakes lately. However, Daniel Dae Kim needs to cut his nasty, greasy-ass hair or I’m going to fly out to Hawaii with a goddamn pair of clippers and do it myself.

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No Ordinary Family (ABC, Tuesdays at 8pm) – Fun. Needs to get rid of the talking to the camera bit right quick, but Michael Chiklis and Julie Benz are both clearly enjoying breaking out of old characters (him: monstrously corrupt cop on The Shield, her: Dexter’s pushover, now dead wife) and getting to do some much lighter work. The characters could use some more depth, but this one seems promising.

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Raising Hope (Fox, Tuesdays at 9pm) – I’ve got a couple friends working on this one, but I think I’d enjoy it even if I didn’t. Being about a family of misfits trying to raise a baby, it’s a bit of a weird match for Glee, but it’s got some very sweet humor. There’s a real fine line to walk when you have fairly dim characters between laughing at their antics and laughing at how stupid the characters are, and so far it seems to be walking it nimbly. Martha Plimpton is a real standout as the (very young) grandmother. One drawback: They should have kept the snappier original title, which was Keep Hope Alive.

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Running Wilde (Fox, Tuesdays at 9:30pm) – Probably a case of having my expectations too high, but this one is just not very good. It’s basically the Arrested Development gang trying to get the band back together, but instead of playing their original songs, they’re playing shitty covers. Huge, huge disappointment.

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Undercovers (NBC, Wednesdays at 8pm) – For a show about spies, the pilot really didn’t have a whole hell of a lot of action, which was disappointing. The leads are perfectly likeable, though the “They’re spies! Who run a catering business!” portion of the premise is clearly going to need to go away quickly, because it’s so needlessly schticky. I’m still a bit undecided on this one, but the ratings have not been promising.

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Better With You (ABC, Wednesdays at 8:30pm) – Spectacularly bland. And having one show with a laugh track on a night where none of the other shows have one is really, really jarring, and only points up what a stupid convention the laugh track can be when poorly executed.

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Terriers (FX, Wednesdays at 10pm) – Well-done little story about a couple of PI’s, which coasts mainly on the buddy chemistry of Donal Logue and Michael Raymond-James. I worked on a great pilot that Logue starred in (which sadly got bogged down in legal issues and never went anywhere), and he’s a nice, nice dude, and a great actor, so it’s good to see him on a show that makes use of all of his talents. It’s a nice blend of cop show and character study.

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Outsourced (NBC, Thursdays at 8:30pm) – Don’t make the same mistake I did of watching the show to confirm how awful it is. Please don’t. I think it was Dan Fienberg at Hitfix who gave the best quote about this show on his joint podcast with Alan Sepinwall of the same site: If nobody on this show had an accent, not only are the jokes not funny, they’re really not even jokes. Just an awful, awful show.

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Outlaw (NBC, Fridays at 10pm) – This is another one I watched to see if it was as ridiculous as the reviews made it seem, and oh dear god, is it ever. I don’t demand perfect realism out of legal shows, mostly because that would be dreadfully boring. However, I do expect them to take place in a universe that bears some relation to our own, and this one just doesn’t, which makes it impossible to watch if you know a damn thing about the law. Fun party game: Invite a bunch of lawyers over to your house and force them to watch this show. Whichever one lasts the longest without yelling or gesticulating wildly at the screen due to the mind-boggling inaccuracies is the winner.

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Boardwalk Empire (HBO, Sundays at 10pm) – This show was genetically engineered for greatness from birth, with Terence Winter from The Sopranos writing and Martin Motherfucking Scorcese directing, and it’s a mobgasm of the highest order. Scorcese does a typically outstanding job with the pilot, pulling every mob-movie cliche he can think of out of his bag of tricks and making it seem brand-spanking new, and it’s just masterful. The second episode is also really outstanding, which is a very good sign since it was shot on a significantly lower budget and, you know, not by Martin Motherfucking Scorcese. It’s hard not to talk about this show in hyperbole, and judging by some of the “Well, god, it’s the best thing since sliced bread, but couldn’t it have been better?” reaction coming from some corners, it might be possible expectations have been raised impossibly high. But really, when you strip away the hype and concentrate on the product on-screen, it’s hard to deny that this is far and away the best new show of the year.

But I haven’t read quite as good a takedown on both the mechanics of a bad show playing out the string and the mechanics of Internet Lovefest Guy commentary as the following magnificent paragraph from Todd VanDerWerff at The Onion AV Club, in his review of the penultimate episode of FlashForward:

FlashForward has been canceled. It is a dead show walking, playing out the string in hopes that it can pull enough of itself together that there will be that one guy in every comment thread on the Internet about great shows canceled too soon who will say, “HEY, YOU GUYS REMEMBER FLASHFORWARD? THAT WAS A GREAT SHOW, AND THE NETWORK TREATED IT SO BADLY, AND IT WOULD HAVE BEEN GREAT.” And, eventually, the number of people who are capable of successfully arguing with this guy that, no, FlashForward wasn’t all that great, and it received a gigantic marketing push from a network that gave it one of its best timeslots, and it debuted to an audience of some 12 million who mostly left because it WASN’T VERY GOOD, even with a mostly enjoyable pilot, will dwindle to nothing, but that ONE GUY, that ONE VOICE OF PASSION and LACK OF REASON, will be able to convince some poor souls that it IS worth checking out, and they’ll head on down to the Best Buy (or the post-apocalyptic variant thereof) and go all the way to the back of the TV on DVD section and find a DVD set on the bottom shelf of the last stand, covered in dust, and they’ll take it home, and they’ll pop it in the DVD player, and they’ll realize that guy was a fucking idiot.

Really, if you’re among the few people who’s been suffering along with me watching this stupidity, you should read VanDerWerff’s recap. FlashForward is a terrible show that could be criticized from a thousand angles, but it’s a rare treat to see someone take such a wide target and pinpoint with such surgical precision exactly what went wrong.

Normally I’d have something much longer about the whole Jaypocalypse/Conandrum fiasco playing out in slow motion on NBC, but to be frank, I really don’t have the energy to write up my feelings on what is, at its heart, a battle for the future of television.

Instead, please enjoy this embed of last night’s Jimmy Kimmel show (no, really, it is quite funny). It’s an absolutely savage parody of Leno’s show, particularly in the way that he relies on the band to prop up every single limp joke.

Hopefully more to come when I feel a bit less like I’m in certain scenes from Parasites Lost.

I speak, of course, of ABC’s Conveyor Belt of Love (Variety’s photo illustration at that link is priceless). How does it work, you ask? According to The Hollywood Reporter:

“If a woman is interested in someone, that man will step aside and wait as the rest of the men go by.  But if another man comes by on the belt that seems better than that woman’s first choice, she can swap out the man waiting off of the belt as many times as she wants until the last man has passed by. If two or more of the women are interested in the same man, the tables turn and the man on the conveyor belt gets to choose which one he would like to wait for. After all 30 men have made it through the ‘Conveyor Belt of Love,’ each woman is left with her final choice as they embark on a date in the hope of finding a true connection.”

The description is pretty stupid, not to mention overly complicated to the point where my eyes glaze over about halfway through it. The trailer THR dug up looks infinitely stupider:

Something that explains a lot about the current state of the airwaves: Television executives watched that 86 second video and determined that, stretched out over an hour, it would be even better.

I would really like to know what kind of wonderful, powerful drugs these executives were on at the time so I can get some for myself. They are clearly the best drugs ever.

So, in lieu of an actual post, please enjoy this TV/Movies mashup Casey found that kind of melted my brain:

I’ll probably have something up on the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down later this week – Today’s the actual anniversary but I just don’t have time to write up everything I’m thinking.

Until I was 28, I thought I was going to make movies and TV for a living.

Until I was ____, I thought I was going to be a professional computer nerd.

—

Life has taken a lot of twists and turns for me since the writers’ strike of 2007-2008. Since that strike began on November 5, 2007, I have spent almost twelve of these last 24 months unemployed.

Part of that was the strike. Part of that was my decision to move into the production line and out of working directly for producers, which is an inherently more volatile career path.

But much of it has been the way the bottom has absolutely fallen out of filming in L.A. The combination of the strike starting a rearrangement of the way the business works and the economy in general going down the tubes has contributed to a precipitous drop in filming here. There’s just no work.

I realized a couple months ago as I was making my bajillionth phone call looking for work that I have not received one phone call back since June. June was also my last interview, for a job I had locked down until an actor decided to put in a good word for his niece, and then she had it locked down.

I’ve offered to take PA jobs again, but they’re not looking to take someone with as much experience in higher-up jobs as I have. In some cases, they think it’s because I think I’m above the scut work (which I don’t, I wouldn’t be applying for a PA job if I did), and in some cases, it seems they think I’ll outshine them (with the people who are insecure enough to actually worry about this, that might be a more valid concern).

Everywhere I look in terms of what my skills can get me in the entertainment business, I either see jobs that are so severely overworked and underpaid that I would rather work at Starbucks again than take them, because at least at Starbucks I would get health insurance, or nothing at all.

And frankly, the way things are going right now with the economy and the out-of-state filming incentives and the studios and networks freaking the fuck out about every last penny, I don’t see that scenario changing in the next 18-24 months at the absolute earliest.

Sometimes, you just wake up and realize that the universe is trying to tell you something. And the universe is telling me it’s time to do something else with my life.

—

And now, a brief comic interlude:

Click to enlarge.

From Amazing Super Powers.

—

I’ve always been a pop-culture nerd, but I wasn’t a serious computer nerd until the last 3-4 years. I learned some HTML programming in college, and really enjoyed it, but the complete time-sink that is working in entertainment pulled me off the track that would have kept me learning more about programming.

While the primary technical things that I’ve done in the last few years have involved technical troubleshooting and working as an ad-hoc IT Guy, what I really want to learn about is how to make computers do what I want them to.

And to do that, I need to learn how to program. I need to learn about architecture and C++ and the vagaries of programming for different platforms. I really want to learn how to take some ideas I have for programs and turn them into reality, from start to finish.

This, however, will require a fair amount of school. Right now I’m on step 0.1, taking some very basic classes at the community college level, trying to figure out exactly where my interests take me in terms of how I want to program.

My ultimate goal is a Masters’ in Computer Science. I’m in the middle of a choose-your-own-adventure bit of figuring out how that’s going to happen, but I do know that I’m sure as shit not going back to school just to get a second Bachelor’s.

I’m putting together an application to Stanford to start next fall, since a) they have an extraordinarily strong program and b) they are one of the only well-respected Graduate-level CS programs that will actually accept people who don’t have a CS undergrad background as long as they’re willing to learn.

It’s an extremely competitive program, so I have a fairly comprehensive backup plan standing by. I’ll get into it at some point down the road if need be.

If I do somehow manage to get into Stanford, however, I expect to hear a lot of this [note: mp3 link].

—

I’ve talked to a fair number of you guys about all this in differing degrees of depth, but I felt like I really needed to try and bring everything together in one place, almost more for my own purposes than to try and clarify it for everyone else.

I certainly won’t say I’m never working in entertainment again. If someone offered me a job right now that would help me keep my union health insurance even a bit longer, I’d take it in a second. But I don’t see my future in production anymore, and that’s where things have changed.

This is a path that’s been slowly coalescing over the last few months, and has picked up a lot of steam since about Labor day, when I finally accepted that I probably wouldn’t work in entertainment for much of the rest of the year.

It took a long time for the pieces to come together well enough for me to see them, but once they did, my way forward became much, much clearer. I’ve got a plan, or really a bunch of plans all leading in the same direction.

Now all I have to do is try and figure out how to get there from here.

What should be on television in the middle of the day? What should fill the space between all those commercials for personal-injury attorneys, cures for urinary-tract infections and the promises of vo-tech schooling? Should anything be on? (Is “off” an option anymore, even in hospitals?)

All the available genres nearly died or migrated to niche networks — game shows, sitcom reruns, soaps, cooking demonstrations, local chatter. What programming remains will make you thank your lucky stars that you aren’t infirm or underemployed. The sound of a television turned on at high noon is the sound of utter human defeat. (The drone never ceases with the ads: bad credit, bad floors, bad living.)

As someone who is under-to-unemployed and on occasion turns on live TV in the middle of the day: Ye gods, is he ever right.

• Turned 28, to relatively little fanfare. Which is probably appropriate, because it’s not a terribly significant birthday. Drinks at the friendly local “We have a ton of awesome beer” establishment were fun, though.
   
• Found a surprisingly viable backup employment plan if I can’t get on anything for the fall season (which I’ll go into at some point later on if/when it happens). But the good news is that I am relatively confident that I will not be boiling my own shoes for dinner. At least not until after Thanksgiving.
   
• Had my phone deteriorate to the point where it’s going to take a lot of restraint for me to not smash the thing with a ballpeen hammer between now and next Friday when I get the new iPhone. Thankfully I have kept a dedicated phone replacement fund and have decided to say “Screw unemployment!” and just get the damn new one.
   
• Gotten new neighbors after 5 months of the apartment next door being empty because the landlord refused to face reality about the way rents are falling around here. They seem nice, but their cigarette smoke seeps into my apartment on occasion, and they let their cats roam about, which tends to freak Chaplin out in the middle of the night from time to time.
   
• Broke down and finally gotten myself the “Hooray, I lost 80lbs!” reward I’d been planning to get for months: An iPod shuffle/waterproof headset combo which will keep me entertained while swimming long distances. I’m now doing 2 miles with no problem, and I’m considering bumping up to 4km when I can get away with it.
   
• Watched an absolute fuckton of TV. Rewatched entire 4th season of BSG, now working through Netflix discs of Big Bang Theory (more geekily amusing than I recalled it being, since I dropped it after the pilot) and re-watching Band of Brothers, probably going to go through all of Deadwood next.
   
• Received a sternly worded letter from the landlord to the entire building that the toilets are ONLY for disposal of human waste and toilet paper. I’m not sure whether or not I want to hear the story behind that one.
   
• Have fought the good fight against my body’s natural instinct to stay awake ridiculously late and then get up mid-morning. Generally won, though this week I’ve mostly lost (as evidenced by the timestamp on this post).

The traditional, “In what universe can you get from the White House to Foxhall Road in five minutes?” complaint rears its head. This is familiar to those of us in L.A. who laugh our asses off at the thought of getting from downtown to Burbank in ten minutes in the middle of rush hour traffic.

I will grant you, the “bad guys scuba diving up to the White House” was pretty damn ridiculous, since unless the entire swamp that sits beneath the city instantly liquefies, there will be no bad guys scuba diving up to the White House.

The geographic monkeying is still not as bad as it is on some shows, like when Bones relocated Arlington Cemetery to the other side of the Potomac for their pilot.

But 24 is at least somewhat plausible in its D.C.-ness. I’ve actually been pretty impressed the way that the squat parts of L.A.’s downtown have stood in for D.C.’s legislatively height-challenged buildings.

There’s definitely aspects of it that are unrealistic, but really, there are aspects of every show in which you have to suspend your disbelief. Longtime 24 viewers with any knowledge of L.A. geography whatsoever know that the Time-Traffic Continuum is never, has never been, and never will be respected by the show.

And now, those with that same knowledge of D.C. are learning that for themselves.