Plus I never much cared for Starburns anyway.

But as much as I like Community, I like the moral integrity of society’s institutions more, which is why this bothered me:

I sympathize with David Simon’s frustration over television society’s incredibly superficial interpretation of The Wire. Simon’s entire point in the fifth season is that the role of the media institution as part of the social structure is to focus our attention on inane, pointless, harmless bullshit and away from our slowly eroding dignity by the government-industrial complex. Mission accomplished, person who uploaded the above clip to Youtube and titled it, all in caps, “OMAR ON COMMUNITY!!!” three exclamation points. Because it’s not Omar on Community, it’s Michael K. Williams saying that thing that he said while playing Omar on The Wire.

In fact, I’m calling for a moratorium on all out-of-context Wire references from now on. Once they’re getting particularly tepid laughs on iCarly, the joke is over. And now I’m just saddened by the thought of those kids still young enough to find iCarly bearable watching The Wire and getting that reference.

So I assume the writers are all working out of a windowless converted warehouse in East L.A., that they’re all resentful of how the production crew got to go to Europe, but they couldn’t have taken fifteen seconds to type “Prague” into Google Maps and get the geography right?

Also, again Becca earns her World’s Greatest Mom mug by leaving six-year-old Michael alone in Old Town Square with some random puppeteer. Nothing molestery about that.

It would’ve been funnier had they used a Real Doll, but I assume that would’ve crossed the same network censors who expurgated the word “bitch” from the title.

As for June, it’s only been two episodes and I’m already sick of hearing about her stupid life plan and her refusal to re-evaluate after moving across the country for a job that didn’t exist, discovering her fiancee’s infidelity, and sleeping in Chloe’s apartment with one eye open. She’s handling it all awfully well — maybe a little too well, and I wonder if June isn’t just a little bit way delusional. Chloe glosses over it in a cliched bit of breakfast advice: June could stand to wear sexier underwear and also be more spontaneous, and she should date this guy Scott that Chloe knows. Chloe — that is, Krysten Ritter — is at her most forced when she’s involving herself in June’s life. Outside of these two episodes’ tags, with the girls drinking Manhattans, Ritter plays Chloe as someone who could not be less impressed with June. I’m thinking again of Community, and the “Debate 109″ episode, where pretty much the same scene plays out between the self-involved protagonist (Jeff) and the innocuous hyper-planner (Annie). But since Community is clever and understands the relationships between its characters, so Jeff’s advice comes out of genuine concern about helping Annie outgrow one of her personality flaws instead of Chloe’s snooty bemusement.

Scott, it turns out, is Chloe’s dad — which doesn’t feel wrong on nearly as many levels as it ought to. Chloe’s spent most of her life running a resentful affection-con on her handicapped mom, whose wheelchair she refuses to see behind the woman who “never took [her] ice skating or horseback riding,” and June is an opportunity to drive a wedge between her mom and Scott in their already-fractious marriage. I liked the second reveal, that Chloe has loving parents, even if she’s too detached to appreciate them. Eventually, Eli has to puncture her defenses by pointing out that if Scott did become part of June’s life plan, then June would be Chloe’s stepmom.

This leads to a confrontation, and naturally June is angry at the wrong person.

On the Van Der Beek front, it’s only the second episode and already the Dawson’s Creek jokes are running thin. I still chuckled at the random catcalls of “Have my baby, Dawson,” but the question whether the cast ever filmed drunk felt like something straight out of a network note.

In any case, Apartment 23 isn’t daring enough, funny enough, or well-realized enough to be worth the precious time I’d otherwise spend writing this blog. We’ll see about Modern Family, but Wednesday nights might be freeing up.

The Daleks are a fictional extraterrestrial race of mutants from the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. Within the series, Daleks are cyborgs from the planet Skaro, created by the scientist Davros during the final years of a thousand-year war against the Thals. They are genetically engineered Kaled mutants integrated within a tank-like or robot-like mechanical shell.

I wouldn’t have bothered with “Blink” had I realized just how much I’d have to willingly suspend my disbelief. The Dalek description, the “genetically engineered Kaled mutants” and the thousand-year war, all sound like the hazy ramblings of a stoned Scientologist. Just like you might look at the black scrim background and have to imagine how it’s part of a larger, albeit cheeseball, universe or hear the tinny “ex-ter-mi-nate” catch phrase from a Dalek’s sound hole as if now, now that we realize it plans to exterminate, the lumbering trash can on wheels is menacing. It’s the sixties and the robo-alien technology symbolized everything that was novel and foreign and poorly-understood, but why aren’t they just pushing the Daleks over on their sides?

I’m assuming the production values on the modern Doctor Who have evolved somewhat from the early days, and “Blink” mercifully features not a single overgrown Roomba stumbling around the protagonists. “Blink” is pretty compelling, even if it does open with a blonde chick walking into a haunted house for no good reason. Exploring the house, Sally Sparrow finds a decrepit room, peeling wallpaper and scrawled underneath, “Beware the weeping angels.” There is a stone weeping angel statue outside. Then on the wall, “Duck. Duck. Duck, Sally Sparrow. I mean it, duck now,” as a brick comes flying through the window at her head. It’s a phenomenally gripping opening — especially for someone who’s new to Doctor Who and not in the mentality of time travel and ontological paradoxes.

“Blink” is unexpected, off-kilter and scary enough to turn me into… not quite a fan, certainly not a Whovian. I don’t know. “Blink” married spectacular plotting and imagery, grounded enough to let me drop my objections to a few unearned sentimental moments and to keep me from wondering, “Who came to that haunted house and put up wallpaper over the message?” The resolution to why beware the weeping angels stayed out of the half-assed backstories characterizing the Dalek history above, and it did a great job of making the denouement less creepy but more scary. The only thing I had real problems with in Doctor Who was, unfortunately, the Doctor.

He’s fairly absent through most of the episode, but David Tennant just irritated the hell out of me with his garrulous nerd personality and inane British-isms. He’s delivering exposition most of his lines, but I wanted to slap him when he was describing, “Time is not a straight line. It’s more of a wobbly-bobbly timey-wimey thing.” As if that makes his existence as a time traveler any more clear or easy to swallow. The only thing worse than a twitty nerd is a twitty nerd who won’t shut up, and I’d hate to spend more than a couple of minutes with this weirdo.

There’s a universal white-bread theme running through Canada’s contribution to the television arts, or at least the stuff that makes it onto Lifetime here in America. And that’s what makes Lost Girl such a bizarre specimen, trying so, so hard to be brazenly prurient and then trying so, so hard to hide its shame under a dopey fantasy story and the coming-of-age relationship between the Buffy Summers knock-off and her rest of the Scooby Gang smushed into a single character best friend. It’s full of contrivance, cheap and gratuitous — as if one cancels out the other — and exactly what you imagine when you think Canadian softcore nerd porn. Which, if you’re reading this blog, you probably think more than you’d like to admit.

The lost girl is the succubus Bo, played by Anna Silk. Anna Silk is like ninety-eight percent mammaries, and as a succubus, she pretty much goes around fucking anything with a pulse. Now, Canadian television is a lot more permissive than American television when it comes to sex, so I kind of wonder if Syfy is screwing with us and cutting out all the good parts, leaving just two percent of Anna Silk in the final edit. But most of the Lost Girl sexytime is of the fully-clothed variety — I believe it took the wardrobe department two seasons to put Silk in a low-cut dress. You’ll recall that Anna Silk has bigger boobs than the Republican National Convention.

Lost Girl has a pointless modern-day fairy tale backstory that recalls Charmed or The Nine Lives of Chloe King and is just too damn stupid to go into. It’s a whole magical land that’s “hidden from humans,” just in case you were missing the point and wondering why you haven’t heard anything about werewolves and luck-eaters and plant monsters on the news lately. Bo and her giant tits fall into the mythological private investigator business, because what else are you going to do when you’re living on the fringes of a superhuman race? It’s not like you’re gonna be an accountant or a chef or an ice road trucker or anything. Bo’s primary investigative technique is using her, uh, assets and whoring herself out Erin Brockovitch-ing for information. I said this back in the days of Jennifer Garner’s wacky wigs on Alias, but I’d like to just see one dude respond with an exasperated, “Honey, I’m gay.”

One thing I like about Lost Girl and the other Buffy wannabes is that I have more appreciation for the craft of building the Whedonverse, a Halloweeny mythology that the audience readily embraces. I never questioned the Sunnydale reality of Oz being a werewolf, but the werewolf-boyfriend character in Lost Girl is just one more disbelief I need to willingly suspend. Whedon’s sly trick that no one else seems to be able to duplicate is that Buffy and Angel take themselves seriously while acknowledging how completely ridiculous their premises are. It’s partly because the characters are so well drawn and partly because the dialog bounces along in its insouciant way, but I never cringed at the necessary exposition, “Giles, listen to yourself talk about hellmouths and vampires and there’s a slayer for every generation. You sound like you’re spouting Buffy fan fiction.”

I guess your experience of Lost Girl comes down to the mileage you get out of staring at Silk’s ginormous rack and how much it distracts you from Lost Girl‘s half-assed attempts to legitimize itself. Personally, I can find real porn, but I do enjoy considering our pot-legalizing, gay-marrying friendly neighbors to the north who provide all of their citizens with health insurance and at least giving them shit for their mediocre television.

Krysten Ritter plays the titular bitch, Chloe, with a habit of picking up new roommates, collecting their rent money, and then turning into an antisocial weirdo till she drives the new roommate out. But on the spectrum of irritating people you never want to meet in real life, Chloe is closer to the wacky neighbor with an underdeveloped sense of boundaries than she is to total bitch. She walks around the apartment naked — or, well, pixillated. She steals your food even though you clearly labelled it. She sells sketchy Chinese herbal pills out of Apartment 23. Not pot, not ecstasy, either of which I’d totally get from the character, but something essentially harmless, just like Chloe.

The latest roommate is June, one of those chipper midwesterners, straight off the bus, full of optimism and pluck and honestly bland as the miles and miles of cornfields back in whatever middle American hellhole she came from. The narration is June’s, and she opens by walking in on her fiance and Chloe in a frenzy of heavy petting, shrieks, and voiceovers that “it was the best thing that ever happened to me.” See, the bitch in apartment 23 really has a heart of gold.

When the toothlessness of Apartment 23 really started gnawing at me — so to speak — I actually thought a lot about the Community pilot, which asked the audience to identify with a protagonist far more sociopathic than Chloe, and which I found a lot more effective. Part of Joel McHale’s brilliance on that show, and frankly on The Soup, is his ability to be simultaneously above the Greendale nonsense that surrounds him and a totally willing enabler of it. There’s no way that Ritter, who was cast in the Gossip Girl prequel that never happened, is going to bring that much detachment, or even that much awareness, to Chloe. She mentions her lingering bitterness with her own early days in New York, then transitions right into a story about conning James Van Der Beek into buying a condominium from her.

Oh, did I mention that Chloe’s best friend is James Van Der Beek? Playing himself, so there were a few Third Eye Blind jokes that I’m embarrassed to say I chuckled at. I thought my Dawson’s Creek jealousy died ten or so years ago, when the show did. Just like Chloe, the Beek is kind of neutered, half the time playing the ex-celebrity who won’t exit the spotlight gracefully and half the time the ex-celebrity ashamed that he peaked as a thirty-five year old teenage shitty filmmaker living near a creek. He needs to pick a persona and run with it.

I’ll check out the next episode since it’s free on Hulu. The episode description is, “June begrudgingly lets Chloe set her up on a date.” The pilot ended with Chloe exposing June’s fiance as a cheater, so I’m guessing in this episode, it’ll be a good guy. He’s probably some kind of mark for Chloe, and setting up June is part of some trick. But then June falls for the guy and after moral equivocation and some girl talk with James Van Der Beek, she calls off her con so she doesn’t hurt June. If I’m right, I’m done with Apartment 23. And if I’m wrong, I’ve got my Apartment 23 spec script right there.

The duct tape episodes tend to be Mythbusters high points, relying on interesting builds and the cast chemistry for a story instead of Discovery’s usual stand-by of gratuitous explosions, or shooting shit, or demonstrating how some scene from a Michael Bay movie wouldn’t happen that way in real life. Duct tape never fails to impress, plus it’s probably the show’s most accessible building material, one that makes the frustrating pre-episode legal disclaimer even more superfluous. I could make duct tape shoes. Well, not me exactly, but someone dextrous could do it. Someone dextrous could even re-construct the saggy duct tape bridge, although maybe stringing it across a drydock is something still best left to the experts or the Mythbusters.

I was expecting “Duct Tape Island” to be one of the Jamie-heavier episodes, given his background as a wilderness survival expert. Then again, I was also expecting Adam and Jamie to film and camp on a deserted island, since spending a week in the wilderness alone with nothing but a camera crew isn’t exactly pushing the Discovery Channel into new territory here. I liked Jamie keeping his hyperactive better half out of trouble, even if the scene where Adam oh-so-nearly dove into stagnant water was so obviously staged. It was classic Mythbusters for just a second, the conflict between Jamie’s rationality-driven paternalism and Adam’s id.

I realized that Jamie is really what’s kind of eroded in the show as it’s grown more popular and more commercial. Back in the series’ younger days, Jamie was a unique presence — the TV host who had no interest in being on TV. He wasn’t just uncomfortable, he was outright contemptuous of the Mythbusters as performance troupe theme of the show. With Adam’s ever-consuming need for audience attention in frame, Jamie’s stoicism looked even more goofy than his beret and mustache. That’s what I liked so much about “Alcohol Myths” — Jamie, the grumpy, logical engineer who distills physical attractiveness down to “general signs of health,” way farther than any normal person should take the idea.

That man would not build a surfboard out of duct tape if he didn’t first know how to surf.

Coming up, myths from date-night movies. Ugh, how I yearn for the good old days.

As the latest iteration in ABC’s long and proud history of housewife-fantasy dramas, Missing is naturally dumb as box of rocks. Judd, who you’ll be shocked to learn only co-starred in three movies with Morgan Freeman — WTF?! — here would like to inform you that she is “NOT C.I.A.” With caps lock on. She is “A MOTHER” — insert gratuitous fat-ass comma here — “LOOKING FOR MY SON.” Poor Ashley could not be emoting more if she were playing a jilted drag queen mistress on a Mexican telenovela. I believe there’s my Missing spec script — Becca has to go undercover, playing a jilted drag queen mistress on a Mexican telenovela to retrieve… I don’t know, let’s just say microfilm. No one steal that.

That’s pretty much it. Not C.I.A., check. Mother, check. Looking for her son, check.

Missing hits every beat you’d expect from its two-sentence concept. Your standard nameless, incompetent henchmen get knocked out. It cuts to a room of people at their computers and describing aloud what’s on their monitors, as you do. Ashley Judd tries a few one-liners, which… crickets.

Then this scene came on:

I do not talk to the characters on the TV set, because I have long ago realized that they cannot hear me. The medium only goes in one direction. And no matter how hoarse I make myself yelling at these idiots, they always wind up doing what’s in the script. I’ve come to accept my powerlessness over the television people. But nonetheless: “Mon ami, you are aware that is a laptop, right? You don’t need to sit there, in plain sight, in what is literally the world’s most transparent secret intelligence agency headquarters, waiting for Spotlight to finish indexing the hard drive. You can take that computer with you, somewhere else, and do that when you’re not being chased by utterly disposable guards.”

Missing isn’t camp. That’s what’s so fucking bizarre about the show. It’s filmed on location and there’s a ton of money thrown at the screen, not to mention whatever Ashley Judd commands by not starring in Along Came a Spider — again, WTF?! But aside from its clunky, obvious, exposition-heavy writing, its humorlessness, its one-dimensional characters’ scenery chewing, are you telling the production designer couldn’t plug up this gaping plot hole by putting a desktop computer in that office?

Of course, if you ever need to break into a heavily-guarded government facility, Missing has some ideas for you:

That’s right, if it’s good enough for clearing a junior high school cause someone didn’t study for their math test, it’s good enough for sneaking into French national intelligence headquarters.

“Send Out The Clowns” was a massive misfire, with Manny clumsily manipulating the Pritchett household into letting cool-kid Griffin Cooper ogle Sofia Vergara’s tits being the low point in the episode, and probably the low point in the series, too. I can actually appreciate the certain amount of in-character logic driving Manny, that the boy playa’s only moves are ridiculously ass-backward and devoid of self-awareness, but someone needs to smack the Oedipal complex out of that kid when he tells Gloria, “Suck it up, Mom. I’ve done a lot for you over the years.” Chalk it up to some weird teenage hormonal changes — our little fifty-year-old in the body of a ten-year-old is growing up — and although I didn’t expect it to happen till Manny’s college graduation, I’m fine with him hitting puberty and turning into a bratty, self-absorbed teenager. But this was such an abrupt shift in the character, and so drenched in callousness that the wisps of a joke on Gloria and Jay suffocated to an icky death.

And the “Gloria has big boobs” well is one the show’s dropped its bucket in plenty of times before, so to speak. Phil and Jay have alluded to it, of course. Claire’s been jealous, Mitchell and Cam have been unimpressed, Phil’s been lascivious, Phil’s been lascivious again, that cowboy guy from the season premiere was all handsy. The only member of the family who hasn’t had a Gloria’s boobs story yet is notoriously clueless and asexual Luke “Was she hot?” Dunphy. In fact, I believe I just came up with my Modern Family spec script. Luke pimping out Haley: creepy. Luke pimping out Gloria: hi-larious.

The rest of the episode was also the largest, steamiest pile of crap Modern Family has ever excreted that didn’t involve Manny pimping out his mom. Phil got into a realtor-fight with some obnoxious stock villain who makes Cookie Kwan, number one on the West Side, seem nuanced. My bile ducts cried a little when the Fox News anchorwoman-looking real estate lady pretended that Phil pushed her into the flower bed. Ty Burrell is one of the show’s few still-consistently performing assets in the way he makes Phil such a good-natured yet utterly pathetic character, and Phil defaulting to making an ass of himself is never not funny. But he’s also so ingenuous that his deer-in-the-headlights non-reaction to someone else — especially someone outside the Pritchett-Dunphy clan — making a fool of him is excruciating. The poor man has to turn to his nine-year-old son — the nine-year-old son whose sisters and mom forced to dress in drag a few weeks ago — for support, making Phil’s psuedo-redemption at the end seem more like resignation instead.

And then there’s Fizbo and the circus funeral and reunion, which made me want to punch a clown. Although to be fair, punching a clown is a fantasy that’s pretty near the top of my bucket list, but dear God all of those sad clowns just seemed so fucking punchable. Fizbo, of course, was the apex of season one: exaggerated caricature and drama queen Cam playing an exaggerated caricature and drama queen clown devolving (or evolving, depending on how you look at it) into exaggerated caricature and drama queen Cam. Kind of like Cam, Fizbo seems subject to the law of diminishing returns, especially if he’s paired with some other dipshit clown determined to bring out Cam’s protectiveness towards Mitchell and his family. Cam’s 4-H football-playing chorus-singing past usually informs Mitchell’s present-day boyfriend without completely intruding upon his domesticated life, and he’s the last person you’d ever expect to get drunk and bring home a scraggly former partner at five in the morning. And of all the times Mitchell loses his shit over Cam singing showtunes or painting his face for some college bowl game, this he just goes along with? The show already has Phil, and one clown is more than enough.

But Henry Bromell did his job with Homeland, and it’s not too tough for me to get over my initial antipathy towards the Estes archetype and look for the point behind him. So I deconstruct Vice President Smarmy-face there, and with even less screentime and even quicker brushstrokes, he screams entitled, callous villain. The last straw was him spinning the Iraqi school bombing to fit his particular American moral narrative is lazy antagonist shorthand, inexcusable and obvious on Covert Affairs or Burn Notice — but Homeland is engaged with the realities of politics in the intelligence community in ways its romanticized little cousins aren’t. For eight years, we had a real-life vice president who shot his friend in the face, who kept a man-sized safe in his office, who had his house blurred out from Google Earth, who leaked the name of an undercover CIA agent, who was basically a cartoonish Bond villain second-in-command of the free world, so maybe Bromell doesn’t need that much nuance to fill in the character.

What’s incongruous is the first ten episodes, where the CIA is the competent branch of the intelligence community, working despite the trigger-happy nimrods at the FBI. That’s the problem with bureaucratic irony guy, that Carrie put together the entire crazy history of the terrorist that Estes knows is trying to assassinate the president, and his first priority is tearing it down. You don’t want to take a photo of that, or anything? Just gonna assume there’s no value in the clearly organized hundreds of pieces of paper on the wall?

And if this were Covert Affairs, it wouldn’t bother me, because Covert Affairs exists in a joyful fantasy spy-camp world where 9/11 only happened in an screenplay. like those poor anonymous computer-generated people crushed by cars when King Kong ran amok in downtown Manhattan. Homeland opens every week including Saul’s somewhat-oblivious quote, “Everybody missed something that day,” and I believe the question I’m trying to tease out of Homeland‘s alternate reality is whether that’s true. When Homeland is all about Carrie and Saul terrorist-hunting, even when it’s in morally ambiguous territory, the CIA is full of hard-working dedicated professionals who couldn’t piece everything together in time — and that was extraordinarily satisfying (in a cathartic, storytelling sense, I mean) on Rubicon. This week, the CIA was taken over by nameless, faceless buffoons, and the jarring switch is less satisfying.