Medium

• I post this entry from down in comfortable Phoenix, AZ (technically speaking, I'm in Laveen, which is just outside of Phoenix). It was roughly the same temp inside and out tonight. A bit wamer than the 17 degrees of Chicago, from whence I came.
• Great to have Medium back with a new season this week. It's one of those shows where I don't realize how much I missed it until it's back. It's also a show I don't mention enough, because it really does deserve it. It's one of the most consistently great shows on the air. It's extremely rare for there to be a less-than-solid episode of the series, and it's always striving to be creative and try something risky and interesting. And it's one of those TV shows that really understands how to visually tell a story. The show's not just about visual style (which it certainly does have), but about using the visuals to help convey the plot and characters. Hopefully, the show will survive a good while longer.
• Here's a fun new official promo from FOX for their upcoming Friday pairing of Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles and Dollhouse, done Grindhouse style. It's a fun and cool promo (particularly for being an official promo from the network), and I really do hope these two shows can help each other survive in their crazy Friday "death slot" schedule. It all kicks off on 2/13, and I can't wait. The Whedon geek in me loves seeing Summer Glau and Eliza Dushku joining forces in different shows together.
• Speaking of sci-fi on Friday nights, did y'all enjoy last Friday's Battlestar episode, "The Oath?" After two fantastic and gritty character episodes, this one launched things forward at a breakneck speed. Awesome episode. I cheered out loud when Starbuck, uh, made an appearance in the landing bay...
• Speaking of Battlestar, Universal is doing an interesting move releasing the pilot for Caprica on DVD this April, LONG before it airs on Sci-Fi in 2010 along with the episodes that will follow it.
• And just to prove that after praising the above shows so much there's the other side to the coin, here's another low for reality TV.
• The Obama administration has made their first move that annoys me.
• Doctor Who will be making the big jump to being fully produced for HD starting with the upcoming 2009 Specials.
• And you thought you've stayed at some strange hotels...
• Here's an amusing bit of subterfuge pulled off by Anna Torv and Mark Valley, stars of the series Fringe, having gotten married over the holidays without the press noticing.
• Speaking of subterfuge, looks like you'll wanna pay close attention to those M&M's you are buying.
• And if you wanna see something equally strange and cool, check out these hit songs reworked through Microsoft's rather interesting and impressive Songsmith platform. There's numerous other ones you can find on Youtube if you go looking, a number of which are quite interesting.

OK, so the 07-08 season is beginning to come to a close. The time frame for the end of the season is pretty vague this year, thanks to the big chunk of time eaten from most shows by the writers strike. I'm going to do a paragraph for each series in these posts, which will continue for the next month or two, with a final post breaking down the overall opinions of the shows amongst each other. So, without further ado, here's the first handful of entries, in no particular order.

Pushing Daisies (Season 1): The greatest new show of the year. Hands down. Without a doubt. It's a wonderful combination of fantastic casting, magically bizarre writing, genius set design and visual effects. And the snarky quirkiness is spot-on. This has been the year of Lee Pace, from his fantastic lead role in this show to wonderful movie performances in Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day and the magnificent The Fall. Add to that the rest of the brilliant cast, and things couldn't possibly fail. While this show only got 9 episodes produced before the writer strike cut it short, it made them count. I look forward to what the second season will bring.

Eli Stone (Season 1): My second favorite new series of the season. OK, so it's another series that features fantasy pretty heavily, but not nearly to the level of Pushing Daisies. It's great to see Johnny Lee Miller get a nice, high-profile role like this, cause he's a very under appreciated actor. Add to him a cast featuring the likes of Victor Garber and Natasha Henstridge and you've got a winner. But the icing on the cake is easily Julie Gonzalo, who was a regular on the third and final season of Veronica Mars. She's flat out flawless in her naive, idealistic sidekick role. As a mid-season series, I suppose the writer strike didn't have much of an effect on the fact that the first season closed out with the initial 13 episode order. I definitely look forward to what the second season will be like. They took some big steps near the end of the first, so it'll be interesting to see where they go with it.

The Dead Zone (Season 6): After appearing to cut as many corners as they could to produce this sixth and ultimately final season of the show, I will admit that despite all the production changes made they still managed to come through with a nice season. They also did a satisfying enough closing episode. Sure, they didn't manage to wrap it all up, but the final one felt right, so it works. That final episode is certainly a series highlight episode, so one can forgive some of the other loose ends. As always, Anthony Michael Hall does a great job in the lead, and the wonderful Nicole DeBoer is equally fantastic. And this final season features pretty much just them as main title leads, with a couple other regulars mixed in here and there. The excellent Sean Patrick Flannery gets in some nice episodes. And the rest of the cast do a pretty good job making their occasional appearances work. All in all, another good USA Network show comes to a nice close after a respectible 6 season run. USA is one of those networks that in more recent years doesn't know how to produce a bad series. They are the unsung heroes of the cable channel lineup.

House (Season 4): I cannot praise this fourth season of House enough. The series has never been afraid of doing big shake-ups in story, and have gotten a bit better at it with each passing season, but the big changes they made this fourth season paid off in every possible way. I won't hesitate to easily call this the best season of the series so far. It's absolutely a contender for best show of the season, either new or returning. This season had so many truly fantastic episodes, and not a lemon among them. The additions to the cast were brilliant, and the material they gave them through the "audition process" through to the "new team" dynamic was top-notch. I couldn't have asked for better.

Medium (Season 4): Of all the shows that were "on the bubble" before the upfront presentations last month, the one I was rooting most for was Medium. As many critics like to point out, this is "the best show that you aren't watching." The best way I know to compliment the series is that it's one that you can always count on to be great. No matter what the episode, they know how to make it work. And the series strikes a marvelous balance between stylistic fantasy and being grounded in reality. In fact, you're not likely to find a series more grounded in the reality of day-to-day life than Medium. Nor are there many series that feature such a well rounded cast, from both child and adult actors alike. This fourth season saw them shaking things up a bit in the overall story department, and as always, they manage to make it all work so very well.

CSI (Season 8): The original remains king, despite a few missteps here and there - such as the well-intentioned, but flawed eighth episode, "You Kill Me." However, the biggest mistake of the year is the handling of the Warrick character. While I'm a fan of this series and CSI: New York, I'll be the first to admit that none of the CSI franchise shows are particularly good at writing the characters outside their work environment, or most any other running story arcs, for that matter. Their strong suit is what they are famous for, the procedural aspects. I kinda liked the way they handled writing out Sara, and her slow burn out. But they did Warrick every which way but right. And could they have telegraphed their big shocking ending any more? Still, beyond those problems, still a mostly enjoyable season.

CSI: New York (Season 4): I might as well follow up the original CSI with the New York variety. I've not hidden my contempt for the Miami spin-off, which I quit watching a number of years ago (after the third season, I think). The New York series is one I'm still happy to enjoy, though. A couple of the weaker episodes of this season include "Down The Rabbit Hole" about some less-than-interesting Second Life online VR stuff and "Playing With Matches" about a self-cleaning rest-room (which ironically, despite how it sounds, wasn't the particular weak part of the episode). The one actually bad episode of the season without a doubt goes to the penultimate "Taxi" where almost everything was done wrong, banking heavily on the hit-and-miss "Cabbie Killer" running plot of the season. Like I said, CSI shows aren't particularly talented at big running story arcs.

• Today was the 22nd anniversary of the Challenger disaster. The previous generation will always remember where they were when Kennedy was shot, or when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. For me, my earliest "world event" memory that stuck is of the Challenger disaster (I was sitting in class in the 5th grade when it came over the intercom, and the couple TV carts were setup to pickup the news coverage).
• A nice tribute to Heath Ledger by Christopher Nolan, director of The Dark Knight.
• The cast of The Day The Earth Stood Still remake just gets more and more interesting. Now John Cleese has joined up.
• SkyFire - Finally, a real Windows Mobile browser.
• What NOT to do with a car on a runway
• It's official. The average movie going audience is so mentally challenged they can't tie their shoelaces without drooling all over themselves. Meet The Spartans took first place at the box office this weekend. That's SO depressing. Now Fox will pay writer/directors Jason Friedberg & Aaron Seltzer, who have less talent than Ed Wood (at least he could make funny funny movies, intentionally or not), more money for yet another Whatever Movie. When will it end?
• You know, as much as I like Google all around, I despise the name iGoogle (their personalized home page service). It's such a horrible little coat-tails usage of Apple's already annoying iEverything approach.
• The one show that is consistently fantastic that I never give its due for whatever reason is Medium. It's a show that pretty much never has a bad episode. It features a fantastic cast, led by the the wonderful Patricia Arquette. They portray one of the only truly believable family units on TV. For that matter, Arquette is an anomoly on American TV - a non-anorexic, realistic looking house wife. And the girls they have playing the daughters are alarmingly good actresses. On top of all that, it's filled with fantastic writing and solid leadership under the creative eye of Glenn Gordon Caron (of Moonlighting fame).
• Gartner confirms what the rest of us already knew about HD-DVD's future.
• Oh, and apparently there's a fancy new film score collection of the Superman films brewing from Film Score Monthly. Interesting.