Buckeye Road

A Fresh Pack

In other news, I have decided to watch less TV. Basically I'm not going to watch TV at all during the day, unless I'm taping something from the night before.

This seemed like a good idea, until today, because I taped too many shows last night. I enjoy James Spader, but Boston Legal is just too creepy and quirky. Everyone has to always be so completely weird. If I were one of those young playwrights who wrote weird and quirky plays, then maybe that would be my thing, but it's so not.

Also, I've finally admitted that Commander-in-Chief is like candy with way too much sugar. It rots your brain. Geena Davis is totally fierce but you have to accept either that a) the show is completely unrealistic or b) reality is too scary to think about. And despite everything I've felt for Kyle Secor in the past (Tim Bayliss, how we loved thee!), every scene he's in is an argument for not allowing presidential spouses anywhere near the Oval Office.

So those two bippity-boos are off my list.

I still have a huge soft spot for Law & Order: SVU, primarily because of Ms. Mariska Hargitay, who addition to being totally fabulous in every way is also Hungarian (and thus more fabulous) and even further, has a facial structure similar to my mom's, so Mom can judge possible hairstyles against Ms. Mariska's. (Mom and Mariska both look so much better with it grown out.)

Maybe it's because The Wire did such a number on me, but I'm really tired of TV shows where police detectives are superheroes. It's nice to think that someone would actually be able to be so resourceful in saving someone from dire straits, week in and week out, but that ain't the world.

And, as much as I enjoy Tamara Tunie in everything she does -- from SVU to 24 to As the World Turns (yes, that As the World Turns), and I was so happy to see her M.E. character taking center stage in last night's episode, and as much as I liked the moment where she had to shoot the young man in the leg so the police snipers wouldn't kill him -- it was so completely frickin' preposterous a) that all those things could actually happen and b) that, after shooting that kid AND saving his father, who he had shot, by using office supplies to put a tube in his chest, that she would shrug it all off and just walk away to pick up her daughter at school. Just another day at the office.

Which is why I'm am so glad that I watched SVU first, and then went into the season premiere of The Shield. Once again, they have managed to completely reinvent the series for a new season while at the same time staying true to its roots. On the one hand, you have the extremely effective, yet extremely amoral supercop, Vic Mickey, played with fearless bravura by Michael Chiklis -- who could ever have imagined such things from him when he was The Commish?

Mackey seems like a necessary evil for taming the mean streets, at least when the alternative is the inept bureaucracy that runs the police department, its own power inevitably enmeshed in and corrupted by the political process. It's a system in which someone like former captain, now city councilman David Aceveda -- loyal only to his own fortunes -- can prosper, while those who take on the status quo and try to work for change are crushed for it -- like Glenn Close's captain, in her deliciously subtle turn last season, or CCH Pounder's would-be captain, who spent last season paying for her refusal the previous season "to stick her conscience in a drawer."

How fitting, then, that the new season is advertised with the tagline "Conscience is a killer," and adds another intriguing cast member: Forest Whitaker as Internal Affairs Lieutenant Jon Kavanaugh, finally getting around to the murder of a cop that Vic killed (to keep him from helping the feds) in the series' very first episode.

Last season, Close's Captain Rawling set the investigation in motion, learning just after being fired that IAD had dirt on one of Vic's men, the doe-eyed Lem. And Kavanaugh set right to it last night, turning the screws first on the councilman, and then on Lem.

Whitaker is charming and conniving. He shows up at Vic's kids' school to get a feel on his ex-wife. He plays off the councilman's ambitions, suggesting that Aceveda's role in exposing police corruption could send him to the mayor's office. And in a pitch-perfect mannerism, he's always offering his witnesses -- and his perps -- a piece of JuicyFruit.

Like Kavanaugh's gum, this season of The Shield is "a fresh pack," and one that I sure as hell can't resist.

posted by BT @ 3:54 PM