TV-licious?

Well, I've accumulated a couple of weeks of plain ol' TV without having much time to comment on it, and really, not much inspiration to comment about either.

"Galac-oh-yeah" skipped Super Bowl Sunday, so there's only been last Sunday's continuation. A bit more on the soapbox than usual, though like I've noted before, this show has been all about the soapbox. Seemed a little more forced this week, with the racist-plague-mystery plot breaking zero new ground. But, I guess we have a slight bit of character advancement for Helo and... no, I can't use her "new" name without gagging, so I'll just call her "Friendly Boomer". Yeah, that'll do.

"Heroes" post-Super Bowl was mostly weak, with the whole George Takei cameo turning into a rather lame sidetrack that didn't serve much purpose at all. The only interesting things were involving our other guest star, Christopher Eccleston, who was still storming around sarcastically, and who played into the little "gotcha" at the end as someone who's well known by the paper-company dude. Even the escape of Sylar wasn't much of a payoff.

But this most recent episode from Monday rocked a lot harder, it seemed. We had Evil Twin Niki as a sharp-dressed girl-with-gun assassin babe. And Hiro vs. the Amazon Showgirl (spoiler: Hiro loses, go figure...). And we learn that the Flying Petrelli Brother is Hayden Planetarium's father, winding the spirals around the characters even tighter. Oh, and then Sylar manages to dupe Suresh, which means wacky hijinks are about to ensue.

So I guess I'm still glued to that show.

I'm about to be involuntarily un-glued to "Studio 60". Turns out it's "going on hiatus" for an undetermined amount of time starting in March. And I suppose it's for the best. I'm a bit annoyed that Danny's psuedo-stalker persistance routine actually worked, because that's pretty seriously unrealistic. Though the character interactions & dialogue have been pretty well done during and since. Then, through most of the most recent episode, we're subjected to flashbacks, Luke-Perryvision style. Matt is supposed to be the younger-Matt because, get this, he wears a baseball cap. Ha ha. Still better than a lot of TV, but I guess I'll hang tight until a "re-tooling" comes about. If at all.

Finally, "Rome" has been marching relentlessly into epic history, which is surprising given just how seemingly claustrophobic all of the settings seem. Which is part of the charm, I figure. When I commented earlier about Octavian's character looking different and older, well, that was just the young actor aging despite the story timeline not -- but now, because of the passage of story timeline accellerated, an actually different looking Octavian appears. He's now a victorious general at the age of 19, and when we first see him in his tent with his close advisors, it's like he went and started some sort of proto-imperial college-radio emo rock band. Hi-larious. But also very effective at communicating just how young these guys are. And when they march back to Rome, and Octavian manuevers Cicero into making him Consul, the sharp turn from inexperienced-looking youth to menacing and calculating wolves is even more effective.

And what of our two heroes? Well, they're reunited, of course, and otherwise hanging tight in the narrative background, it seems. The dramatic focus has been on the grand political scheming and the impending return of Brutus, and our lads haven't quite been able to match up to that like they did during Julius Ceasar's earlier escapades. But I'm sure they'll be back in the forefront once all the competing forces approach their impending collision.