Mon, October 4, 2004

Listen Up

(CBS, 8:30 Mondays)

Jason Alexander, whom you may remember from Seinfeld but probably not from Bob Patterson, and if you're remembering him from Britney Spears's first wedding, then it's the wrong guy, stars as Tony Kleinman, a TV sports show host loosely based on the grating, irritable, obnoxious Tony Kornheiser. I guess Kornheiser is known for a lot of yelling – I've only seen him be bald and ugly and sometimes yell a little – because Alexander plays Kleinman in a sort of constant fury. Which is unfortunate, because as much as I like him, Jason Alexander as a frenzy of anxiety and aggravation is only acceptable in the smaller doses that the Seinfeld ensemble afforded. His energy is too high and too loud to be sustained as the lead character for half an hour.

I really don't know why they decided to pay Kornheiser for the use of his books. The sitcom plots are just as standard as on a regular "original" sitcom; it doesn't seem worth the money. (I felt the same about Dave's World even though I like Dave Barry quite a bit.) Still, I sort of feel compelled to watch every episode of Listen Up because there are sure to be so few. It'll be canceled very, very soon, so I almost feel like I should watch it because a Jason Alexander sitcom episode is like a condor in the wild – you never know when you'll get your next chance to see one.

Also, the kids. (These TV shows with kids! What are they doing?) If you're going to have kids on a sitcom, adopt the Still Standing model (hire excellent, impeccable comic actors) or the Everybody Loves Raymond model (keep the kids out of the show as much as possible). Listen Up follows the Quintuplets [shudder] model of having kids in the show all the time, not using particularly good actors, and writing one of them as "the quirky one" so you can put random dialogue in his mouth when there's a lull. The quirky kid is awful.

I was ready to give up on the other kid (Tony's daughter, who I have to admit is kind of hot in a sassy way-too-young way), but then I watched the second episode. I was out of town last week, this column got delayed, I got back into town and I had a Friday night to kill with TiVo and I needed a quick 30-minute filler while I made dinner. So, I watched another episode of Listen Up. I'm sorry. Anyway, the daughter is growing on me, and not just because I'm inappropriately attracted to her. She actually does a pretty good job of delivering her lines while sounding like a person rather than a child actor. (She's not at the caliber of Renee Olstead, the amazing daughter on Still Standing who is so good that I'm convinced she was cast in 13 Going On 30 based on talent alone and not because CBS cousins Cathy Yuspa and John Goldsmith – exec producers on King of Queens – wrote it; but, she is still quite good.) Her soccer uniform bears the number 7, which I will not believe is a coincidence. And I like that a lot.

Throwing a wrench in the Listen Up math is producer/director Andy Ackerman who comes from Seinfeld and Frasier and Raymond and Curb Your Enthusiasm. He's good. He may cause this show to last a full season, which will definitely affect my decision to watch every episode.
Andy
The rest of us.

Rodney

(ABC, 9:30 Tuesdays)

Rodney is another dying gasp in the trend of Every Semi-Professional Stand-Up Comedian Gets His/Her Own Sitcom In Which His/Her Character Shares His/Her Real-Life First Name. I'd never heard of Rodney Carrington before, but he's actually not bad at all. He's like a smart Jeff Foxworthy. (Okay, a mailbox is like a smart Jeff Foxworthy. Carrington is like Kevin James with a slight southern drawl.)

In fact, speaking of accents – I never know if you're allowed to say that, since I was only speaking of them parenthetically, which I always understood to be sort of outside the flow of what I'm "speaking of" – the accents on Rodney are kind of one of the biggest problems. Actors like Nick Searcy (who isn't known for his comedy work, although he is known for being the son of a woman who owned a diner we ate at in North Carolina; she was so excited because The Fugitive was filming in town and he'd scored a bit part – which, in hindsight, has really worked out for him: he works a lot) already have southern accents, but people like Amy Pietz (from Cursed and The Steven Weber Show, although those were the same program) don't have southern accents of their own, and it's really distracting to hear them faking it. Another faker is Jennifer Aspen, which is eerie because – between Rodney and Lost – ABC seems to be suddenly and inexplicably cannibalizing the cast of Party of Five four years after the fact. It's a good thing the WB snatched up Scott Wolf and whisked him away to the relative safety of Everwood. Somebody keep an eye on JLH. (I'll take Lacey Chabert.)

If you've taken the fact that I've written two paragraphs on this show without really saying anything about it (most of that in parentheses) to mean that there isn't much to say about it, I suppose that's correct. It's not awful, just unremarkable. It's certainly better than Hope and Faith was at its start, but I know that won't mean much to you. In a way, Rodney serves as a perfect follow-up to the According to Jim time slot: it's better than Jim, but both are entirely guilty pleasures. They'll make me laugh occasionally, but not in a way that I'm proud of. I will give Rodney credit if they end up marginalizing their kids, though. This early, it's hard to tell if they plan to use the kids or just have them in the background, but if the kids get a lot of screen time, the show will be a lot harder to watch.

Apparently, a fair amount of Rodney's stand-up is done with a guitar, which can be a dicey proposition. I mean, Steve Martin did it with a banjo, but you, sir, are no Steve Martin. It can be done well (cf. the inimitable and dreamy Roy Zimmerman), but it's rare. Rodney's character on the show is trying to be a comedian, so it stands to reason that we might see a good bit of his material, and if it's guitar-based in a bad way, that could be problematic. However, he gets credit for the song he sings to his scrambled eggs at the opening of the pilot:

Eating baby chickens
Who never had a chance

To go to chicken carnivals
Or wear their chicken pants

(I'm paraphrasing, because I didn't have the good sense to write it down, but that's the gist, and it's cute. Especially given our affection for Chickenpants nobility – wink!)

This strikes a personal chord for me, because I devised a similar song – not quite as cute, but I'm no professional – when whipping eggs into my waffle batter a month or so ago.

Thank you, baby birdie
For giving up your life
So I could have waffles today!

Thank you, baby birdie
It really is so nice
That I can have waffles today!

Now you know what I do with my weekends. I called my mom and sung it to her immediately. You should hear her laundry song to the tune of "Waltzing Matilda" – it's really something. (I'm not kidding.)
Me
You
Andy

Veronica Mars

(UPN, 9:00 Tuesdays)

The reason to watch Veronica Mars (which I could swear was originally titled The Eyes of Veronica Mars, but I can't find anything to prove it) is Kristen Bell, who is really, really cute and turns out to be a week and a half younger than my sister. Neat! She's really something to look at, and quite good also. She reminds me a little of the Natalie Portman character in Garden State which is definitely not a bad thing. The show slants towards a youngish demographic, especially with Veronica's narration, but it doesn't necessarily exclude grown-ups, or at least not me. I think it's rerunning on MTV, which makes sense in a Viacom-synergy sort of way, but considering that Enterprise and All of Us don't merit that sort of thing, I'd say this solidifies the "police drama for the tween set" theory.

I like Bell a lot (anyone who can deliver a good "Yeah you do" wins points with me), and I like the tone of the show, which is sort of like old-school noir glazed with sparkly nail polish. Lots of bright, colorful lighting, but the narration and the dialogue are reminiscent of the Raymond Chandler/Philip Marlowe detective stories, just not quite as depressing.

Enrico Colantoni plays her dad, who's the professional detective – she just works in his office and takes on cases to help out – and he's adorable. He tries to be a fun dad by saying things like "Fire up the 'bachi!" when he wants to grill some steaks. I liked him in Just Shoot Me and Galaxy Quest. I like him on Veronica Mars. (And, though we don't see her in the pilot, the credits promise Sidney Poitier's daughter, Sydney, who's been great on Joan of Arcadia.)
Andy
Us

Lost

(ABC, 8:00 Wednesdays)

The "buzz" on Lost helped make it the most anticipated new show of this season, and – for me at least – it delivers. With its impressive, filmic look and its fearless ability to leave some questions unanswered, it's proof that once again J.J. Abrams (creator of Alias) can deliver a show that's slightly unlike anything else on television.

The first episode throws us right into the action, starting moments after a plane has crashed on a remote island. Our hero, Jack, goes about the process of orienting himself and trying to help survivors, and in the process we learn that he's a doctor and he's taken a few flying lessons. (Wow, that's a combo; does he just sit around waiting for a plane to crash? If we find out in later episodes that he's a licensed scuba instructor and has experience taming giant monsters, I'm going to get suspicious.) We also meet our heroine, Kate (Evangeline Lilly), who is as lovely as she is hot. I like her very much. She even looks great when she's muddy and bedraggled (and she looks positively amazing when she's bathing in the surf). She and Jack have a great chemistry, and while the romantic undertones are undeniable, I'm impressed that there's so far no overt movement on that front.

Which is most of what I like about Lost – it's in no hurry to explain itself. In quick scenes, we get rough sketches of a dozen or so survivors, but a lot of information isn't revealed yet, which allows the plot to move forward faster and the characters to be more mysterious. Already, some early impressions are being changed as the story unfolds, and I like that – it's sort of like if we were on the island, too. We have to operate on first impressions, but there's more to every story than that. Also, it makes the dialogue sound more natural for me. No long, expositional speeches. In the first episode, the only drawn-out monologue we get is Jack's story about the first surgery he performed, and I'm willing to give that a pass because he's the hero, and it's the only time it happens.

The show's style really works for me. The striking visuals of the beautiful island landscape interrupted by broken fuselage are compelling and iconic. I love the way the wreckage is sometimes silhouetted against the sky, using the torn edge to create a division between what's beautiful and what's terrifying about the experience. The sound design is excellent, in the jungle and on the plane (in flashbacks, which I normally abhor but are used to good effect on Lost). The turbulence footage on the plane is very effective at placing you within the experience, focusing on the feeling of helplessness instead of trying to get across story points – it's just chaotic mayhem, which is how it would probably be in a real plane crash. And, amid all the life-threatening drama, moments of levity – like the lifeguard with his pens, or Kate's line about the thread she's using to stitch Jack's wound, "Do you have a color choice?" – add much-needed humanity to the story.

The controversy, of course, is the yet-unseen giant monster. (I'm really hoping it's a dinosaur; that I could live with.) I agree that the monster seems unnecessary; a plane crash story is compelling enough. However, unless it becomes a Gilligan's Island-meets-The Village kind of thing, the show will eventually have to move beyond the plane crash aspect, so I guess Abrams is just doing the hard work of establishing other stuff early. There's possible monsters, and there's this mystery transmission that appears to be coming from the island. Based on how much I've enjoyed what I've seen of Lost so far, I'm willing to take a chance that these additions will also be awesome. But I'll admit I'm scared. I like what Lost is in its first (commercial-free!) 20 minutes, and any change to that has the potential to be great, or it could be terrible. I just hope it's great.

I have to give ABC credit for making a couple of grand changes to the way network shows are aired. They're aimed at making TV more watchable for the audience, and I really hope they catch on. One is their "lower-thirds," those God-awful graphic interruptions that pop up (to quote David Cross, "Brrroooop!") at the bottom of the TV screen during the show to advertise other shows on the same network. The idea of lower-thirds (which, thankfully, take up less than a third of the screen in most cases) is still despicable to me. There's plenty of time to advertise your other shows during the ads, we don't need to be bombarded during the shows we're trying to watch. However, it seems that whether I like them or not, lower-thirds are here to stay, so I'm impressed that ABC's are so classy. They're simple, straightforward text on a colored rectangular background, and they appear and disappear with a minimum of animation. (Contrast with NBC or Fox where there are people moving around and often running across the screen – Trump and his plane zoom in, or Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie wave at the camera.) ABC does have an animated version, but it's a small box in the bottom right corner and the animation (usually just a person standing) stays entirely within the box. (This is key, because it's far less visually distracting when you know that whatever pops up is going to stay in its cage.) If we're going to have to have lower-thirds, ABC's less obtrusive versions are the best kind to have. The other thing is that instead of running their closing credits down the right side of the screen, they're running them across the bottom, which leaves a lot more screen space for the scenes from next week, which can now be presented in letterbox format across the top of the screen rather than being shoved into a corner on the side. It's not much, but it's evidence that someone is thinking about how to make TV better for the viewers and not just the network and its advertisers, and I like that.

The Mountain

(WB, 9:00 Wednesdays)

The producers of The O.C. bring you further amped-up soap opera drama with youngsters and better lighting. It's not much but it has Barbara Hershey and Mitch Pileggi, as well as a cast of unknown Hollywood lookalikes which is sort of creepy. There's the one that looks like Lauren Holly (Max), doubly creepy because she looks like a circa-Dumb and Dumber Lauren Holly, which was also set at a ski resort. Then there's the main guy (David) who looks like a Steven Weber/Rider Strong hybrid, and his sister (Shelley) who looks like a slimmer Melissa Joan Hart (not that any of us can remember back when MJH was slim). The other brother (Will) has a kind of Michael C. Hall thing happening, crossed with Jim Caviezel.

Anyway, The Mountain is exactly as trashy and pointless as everyone expected it to be which, based on The O.C., should come as no surprise. The cooked-up drama comes out of nowhere, and stems entirely from the video will of a guy who owned the mountain (and the resort on it) and bequeaths it to his grandson David as a way of being unpredictable and cantankerous from beyond the grave, as so many rich old guys do on TV. (Those crafty writers – the video will is the perfect way to avoid having some stuffy lawyer type read legalese off a piece of paper, and just as plausible!) The show almost won me over by opening with this great Blink-182 song "I Miss You" that I love off my new MoveOn benefit CD. (The song is apparently "overplayed" according to Andy, whose job places his thumb squarely on the pulse of the teenybopper set – needless to say, I'd never heard it before I bought the MoveOn CD.) But it squanders whatever esteem it gained rather quickly, by tossing all the characters into ridiculously tired situations.

The main story of the pilot is that Pileggi and his kid want to buy the mountain and David is tempted to sell because he never wanted to own a mountain, he just wanted to ride his mini bike and do extreme sports and walk in slo-mo. (I swear, there is so much overcranked walking on this show – does anyone just walk in regular-mo anymore?) So there are lots of monologues from Pileggi and Hershey (the kids' mom, Richy McIronicInheritance's daughter) and Will, the brother who's been running the resort under grandpa's tutelage for years. Oo! Corporate merger drama! I'm on the edge of my seat. But that's just so I won't have to sit in the puke I ralphed up when the hackneyed romance-story-turned-corporate-espionage twist – so predictable I saw it coming halfway through Smallville – is revealed. It does allow them to work in the super-hip catchphrase of the day, "You're fired!" Though. No off position on the genius switch, people.

This show also features the famous WB Scene Leave: whenever the writers get backed into a corner in a dialogue scene, they'll just have one of the characters wander off in the middle of it. It serves the dual purpose of terminating the sloppy exposition and making whatever they last said seem that much more dramatic because they punctuated it by exiting the frame! Watch a little Mountain and you'll see plenty of it. Watch Smallville and you should be able to get in around 15 WBSLs an hour.

CSI: NY

(CBS, 10:00 Wednesdays)

I started watching CSI (the original one – CSI: Classic) kind of late, towards the end of last season, and I kind of liked it. It doesn't exactly live up to its insane popularity, but it's pretty good. The Miami version is terrible, but with David Caruso in the driver's seat, how could it be anything else? Gary Sinise, I like. So, I'm not too surprised that I like CSI: NY just fine. I'm impressed that, unlike Law & Order, the varying "flavors" of CSI are all pretty much the same in quality (Caruso aside). I'm still puzzled that, like Law & Order, they all air at different times of night. Two of each at 10:00 and one of each at 9:00. That's just weird to me.

Gary Sinise is good on CSI: NY. He's good at looking really troubled. At first I thought it was the box office returns for Impostor that were getting him down, but it turns out that his wife recently died. Gary says he "got rid of everything that reminded me of [her]," which I think would be really, really hard. Everything reminds me of the people I love. Just picking one person at random, I'd have to cut off my hands and all my hair, sell all my furniture, change apartments, and never eat, shower, or watch TV ever again. How can he live like that? Maybe that's why he's so troubled.

Gary is Detective Mac Taylor, and he's in charge of the New York CSI team, and also in charge of saying pithy things like, "Someone out there is missing a wife," when he finds a dead woman with a ring on her finger. Well, Mac, she could always be a widow. Or divorced. Or she's just wearing the ring there for fun. It seems like a wild speculative leap for a police detective to make on such simple evidence, unless maybe it's just there to be a poignant "button" on the end of the scene. (Writers!)

CSI: NY opens, as CSI shows apparently always do, with a pop song that's been repurposed as its theme. I don't like this. I really think "Who Are You?" is dumb on CSI and I don't like this song either. I came in late on the one CSI: Miami episode I watched – do they use the Will Smith "Miami" song? Wait, don't tell me. I don't want to know.

CSI: NY features a cast made up entirely of people I know, which I like because it makes me feel smart (whereas, in reality, I just watch way too much TV). There's Gary Sinise (Lieutenant Dan), Melina Kanakaredes (from Providence, I think – the opening credits shrink three font sizes to fit her name on the screen), Hill Harper (another castaway from The Handler – his buddy Anna Belknap is sexing it up on Medical Investigation), Eddie Cahill (Tag from Friends), and Vanessa Ferlito who did a memorable guest appearance or two on The Sopranos and also apparently popped up in Spider-Man 2, but I don't remember – probably during one of the parts where I was sobbing into my friend's shoulder over how poorly the movie was stacking up to my wildly overhyped expectations.

It also features sets and technology that are starting to creep away from the CSI fantasy world of unlimited police budgets and slightly closer to reality. The main set appears to be a giant, abandoned warehouse that they've built their crime lab in like that empty factory Bart bought at auction on The Simpsons. They just found it and decided to have their secret club meetings there. It's so giant and rusty and clangy, it reminds me of something from Myst. (It's a little over the top, with its gargantuan ceilings and that one colossal backlit fan, but at least it isn't the graphite-and-neon of CSI: Classic.) The technology is similarly unrealistic but at least more realistic than it could have been. At one point, Mac and Stella (Kanakaredes, in one of her four minutes of airtime this week) calculate the position of a subject in a photograph by triangulating her location using the Citibank tower and Chrysler building in the skyline. I'd have liked to see them do this on paper, using an encyclopedia to determine the buildings' heights, rather than on a computer program that happens to have an icon for every single building in Manhattan, photographed from the same angle as the angle in the picture they're matching. It's the Triangulatrix! But, still, baby steps. By 2014, when CSI: Boise hits the air, the technology on the show will be fully realistic. (Of course, by then, eight years of President Kerry will have fully funded all the nation's police forces, so CSI: Classic will start to look pretty realistic.)

So, maybe they aren't as much more realistic as I thought. But there's a lot of rust! And plenty of clanging! And the creator said they were going to be more realistic, so I have to believe that, right?

A friend pointed out that the abbreviated, lingo-infused dialogue on the show goes too far, with "Are you seeing red?" standing for "Would you like to go into a darkroom and develop this film?" – and he's right. It's so silly the way they pretend to talk like detectives, that it makes me play a game in my head where I push it even further. I hear "Call me at the Emmys" when Mac says "Call me at the M.E.'s" and means "I can be reached at the Medical Examiner's office; I'm going there to ask him some questions." Same when a second murder victim shows similar bruises on her neck to the first. Looks like a serial killer, but Mac just says, "we got a serial," so I hear, "we got a cereal."

The show moves fast, which I like. When the second victim is found, no time is wasted getting us out to the scene: "[cell phone ring]" "Detective Taylor." Helicopters! Barges! Boats! Bodies! Just like that, in less than two seconds, we've moved from the crime lab to the crime scene. Which is important, because they're busy throwing in a lot of red herrings, and multiple suspects have to be interviewed saying something suspicious that will turn out to be meaningless – that way, they have a larger group of people to draw from at the end when they pull the killer out of a hat. I wish these shows would be more comfortable producing a killer we haven't met yet, but whom we know from his profile that the team has been working on. Or narrowing down a group of suspects with evidence that weeds out a few at a time while still implicating a few, rather than every piece of evidence pointing to one person only, and then being discarded when something else comes along. (By the way, one of the non-suspects swears on his grandma that he didn't take that photograph, and Cahill steps up with a grimace: "Let me arrest him for swearing on his grandma." Somebody's been talking to the hate-bot at the CBS mixer!)

Despite its flaws, it has a good cast, and it's a CSI show, so it's hard to resist being sucked in. And it's pretty innovative. At one point Sinise and Kanakaredes are standing next to his car, talking, and the entire conversation (both angles) is filmed from inside the car. I like it! Also, CSI: NY pioneers the use of Comaxposition: where a woman in a coma moves the story along by blinking to Sinise's yes/no questions. (Oddly, he tells her to blink twice for "yes" and once for "no" which is ass-backwards from every other time I've seen this done.) He shows her photos of all the non-supsects, with each photo getting progressively grimier as we get closer to the person the audience is most suspicious of. I think the picture after him would have been a cross between that Nick Nolte mug shot and a pile of cat droppings. She blinks and blinks, and it makes me wonder if SAG would qualify these blinks as lines of dialogue. The credit, pay, and residuals are different for walk-ons and speaking roles; I think since she's essentially "saying" yes or no, that should count.

Ultimately, we'll have to wait for next week to see if CSI: NY has legs. Kanakaredes has barely done anything, except ask Sinise, "Are you okay?" a few times. Hopefully there'll be more of her, and there'll be a B-story. I'm pretty sure more than one murder happens in New York at a time. But, as these things go, it's a fine show.

Complete Savages

(ABC, 8:30 Fridays)

Complete Savages is further evidence that Mike Scully is better when he's working in collaboration with others. In collusion with a group, he's brought us The Simpsons and Everybody Loves Raymond. On his own, he's subjected us to The Pitts and Complete Savages. Even his hot daughter who has some sort of pre-emptive restraining order against me is actually his hot step-daughter. The man's just not self-sufficient. (Still, if he reads Arksie's Scrubs spec and hands him a ticket to showbiz which allows me to subsequently ride his coattails to fame and fortune, I'll forgive him. I'll forgive the hell out of him.)

The show is just dumb. Regular, boring, typical sitcom stuff about boys wanting to be messy and kids fearing dating and furious nanny/housekeepers. Entirely derivative. In fact, I think they're using the set from Married to the Kellys. And there's guitar humor, and not the halfway-passable Rodney kind, the full-on bad kind. Keith Carradine, whom I adored on Deadwood, is out of his element, and he knows it. Watch as he punctuates each punch line by rocking back on his heels as if to say, "Well, that's out there. I take no responsibility for it now." Even Warren Zevon's "Werewolves of London" is corrupted, forced into a joke where the family dog howls along with the guitar-playing brother as he sings the chorus.

There's two funny moments in the show: one in which the nervous brother is coached on his date by the dad and other brothers, who use a hockey stick poked through a hole in the ceiling to nudge him and lower cue cards into his view; and another bit of physical schtick that I've already forgotten but is only successful because the kid wildly overacts it in order to squeeze something from the crummy material.

Despite references to a "hell portal" and Vagisil, the pilot is directed by Mel Gibson. Hardly very Christlike. When it comes to sitcoms, Mel should follow the advice he gave Diane Sawyer: "Don't go there."

dr. vegas

(CBS, 10:00 Fridays)

When I first heard about this show, I thought there was no way the premise could have any merit whatsoever. (Actually, the first thing I thought was that it would feature gambling on medical procedures: "I put $10,000 on pancreas!") But then I thought about Rob Lowe and Joe Pantoliano and CBS, and somehow I became convinced that they knew what they were doing and I'd understand it when I watched the show.

So far, watching it hasn't helped.

Rob Lowe runs a medical practice on a top floor of a Las Vegas resort casino run by Joe Pantoliano. So far, it's unclear why that is; he's not just the "house doctor," because he takes on other patients. It seems like we're going to find out that he won the office space in a high stakes poker game or something, but so far it isn't explained. (Or maybe it is: perhaps Lowe once saved Pantoliano's life; I forget.) He and Joey Pants spar repeatedly. ("But I'm a doctor!" "But I've got a casino to run!") Tom Sizemore (Tom Sizemore?!) shows up as a casino host and wrangles a blackjack dealer into dealing for a high roller (we've learned the term "whale" on Las Vegas), and she's hot but sad because she watched a guy lose his life savings by splitting Aces three times, right before she hit blackjack. Randy Jackson (Randy Fucking Jackson?!) shows up as a music producer who manages the headline act at the casino, and she ends up being pregnant and addicted to smack. All of this random stuff is happening and none of it is making any sense. I have written the show off for good. None of the characters is interesting enough to stick around without something plot-based happening, and so far there's no plot. All the uninteresting mini-stories are wrapped up by the end of the pilot.

Then I find out that Lowe's weary assistant is played by Amy Adams whom I fell in love with in Catch Me If You Can (she's the cute one with the braces; Martin Sheen's daughter). So, since I already have the second episode on TiVo, I guess I'll watch that. Or pop in the Catch Me If You Can DVD.

Returning Shows

Nobody ever listens to me, but I still (ha!) think Still Standing is a very good sitcom. Maybe not excellent, but consistently funny and endearing. (And those kids! I'm not going to stop telling you how fantastic their young actors are until someone breaks down and agrees with me.) Besides, it's Monday night. You're on CBS anyway for Raymond, just get there a little earlier. What have you got to do that's so great?

Also back are the rest of the CBS Monday lineup (Raymond and Two and a Half Men). Everybody Loves Raymond may have been slumping a little lately, but it's still the only sitcom in the business with long scenes, and that makes a difference, dammit! I like the fact that they're shaking the show up right from the start this year. It should enliven the final year and give the writers some new directions to go. Two and a Half Men continues to be perfectly passable. As far as stunt-casting season premieres go, this was a pretty good one, incorporating Sean Penn, Harry Dean Stanton, and the adorable Elvis Costello into a regular story – unlike Will & Grace and J.Lo – and only resorting to fawning over their celebrity at the end, as part of a joke on the Jon Cryer character. Well played.

I haven't had a chance to watch the premiere of Gilmore Girls yet, but just now I was flipping TiVo on for another reason and I caught about five minutes of GG on ABC Family and really, really liked it. I look forward to watching the new shows, and I've got TiVo scooping up the old ones on ABC Family, so I can fill in the gaps from the very beginning – with Brandon's help, of course – as I go along. Should be quite rewarding. I'm more and more impressed by Lauren "This many purples" Graham.

I still think you should be watching Without a Trace and Joan of Arcadia. If you have to pick just one, pick Joan. It's not just me; plenty of people who didn't expect it to be that great fell in love with it.

Still Standing
Everybody Loves Raymond
Two and a Half Men
Gilmore Girls (half-blind)
According to Jim
Smallville
CSI
Without a Trace
Joan of Arcadia

Premiering Next Week

Clubhouse: CBS, Sunday at 8:00
Clubhouse: CBS, Tuesday at 9:00 in its regular time slot
Center of the Universe: CBS, Wednesday at 8:30 (moved to October)
King of Queens: CBS, Wednesday at 9:00 (October, also)
Wife Swap: ABC, Wednesday at 10:00
Kevin Hill: UPN, Wednesday at 9:00

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