Now that the new season of several of my regular televisions shows have started, I can revive my Weekly TV Roundup posts. In these posts, I’ll post a few short comments for shows that I don’t do full recaps for. So you won’t find anything about How I Met Your Mother, Grey’s Anatomy, or Desperate Housewives in here, but will find my thoughts on Entourage, House, and Bones (and Private Practice and 30 Rock once those shows start).
Why do I write full recaps for those three particular shows but not the others? Just because of popularity reasons. I always get tons of hits for HIMYM, Grey’s, and DH, while the others don’t generate as much interest.
Anyway, this first Weekly Roundup post will cover a couple of episodes because I’m starting up late.
Bones 4×01, 4×02, 4×03, 4×04, and 4×05: Yikes, five Bones episodes in here! This show started at the beginning of September, with a two-hour premiere, so that’s why there are so many. Eps 4×01 and 4×02 were called “Yanks in the U.K.”, and involved Booth and Brennan visiting England for various lectures and getting involved in a murder investigation. It was fun to see the different location, but many of the jokes felt forced, and the ep had such a different tone than the series usually has. Also, Angela and Hodges broke up, and Bones will have a rotating assistant of the week. Meh on both fronts.
The subsequent episodes, “The Man in the Outhouse”, “The Finger in the Nest”, and “The Perfect Pieces in the Purple Pond” were also less than thrilling. Bones has long been on the bubble for me. The mysteries are always dumb, so I don’t expect much on that front, but the characters used to be a lot of fun. Now the writers are just shoving the Booth/Brennan flirtation down our throats in every single episode (instead of giving us a few precious moments like in S1), and it’s getting tiresome. Oh, and Zach made an appearance in 4×05, but he was such a downer that he almost ruined the ep for me.
House 5×01 and 5×02: The season premiere was called “Dying Changes Everything” and dealt with the aftermath of Amber’s death several months later. The big event in this one was that Wilson resigned from Princeton-Plainsboro and told House that they can’t be friends anymore. Other than that, there was WAY too much 13, which was highly annoying.
The second episode was much better, since House decided to hire a private investigator to check out patients’ histories — and Wilson, too. The P.I. (his name escapes me now) was actually very funny, and even made House smile a couple of times, which hardly ever happens on the show. I like him and hope he sticks around. Other than that, not much new going on at PPTH. Cameron and Chase were barely around, Cuddy just had a couple of cursory appearances, and the new underlings were boring.
Entourage 5×01, 5×02, and 5×03: These episodes, called “Fantasy Island”, “Unlike a Virgin”, and “The All Out Fall Out”, respectively, mostly showed how Vincent Chase is coping with his new-found status as a box office bomb. I like how he’s now willing to play the Hollywood game (schmoozing and pandering the to right people in order to get a gig) instead of sticking with his whole “I don’t care” attitude. This new Vinnie seems much more realistic, so I hope the writers continue developing him this way for a while.
I still don’t like E, but he has been far less smug and therefore a bit more tolerable thus far in the season. I don’t quite buy the fact that he’s supposed to be this great script evaluator, but whatever. I hope to see him make several more mistakes this season because I love it when he’s wrong. At least he’s starting to listen to Ari too, especially about Vince’s next project needing to be a studio movie instead of an indie. That totally makes sense, so I want to see that play out the right way for once.
Ari is still the best character on the show, but in all honesty, I’m getting tired of Piven’s take on him. I mean, he just won another Emmy, which blows my mind. I guess all it takes to get one of those statues is screaming every other line….