The TV Season so far

Sweeps month has started. How is the TV season holding up?

Heroes is doing ok. It got off to a better start than in the first season. Still, it is lacking direction. Last year the characters seemed to cross paths more. Also, we knew that the big goal was to stop New York from blowing up. From the last few minutes of the most recent episode we might have the same sort of plot arc developing except with a plague. If so, it took long enough to tell us. Also, the mechanism - a character teleporting into the future and finding a devastated New York - seems a bit familiar.

On either end of Heroes we have Chuck and Journeyman. Chuck is ok although it seems like it could be better. By next season they will need to come up with a new premise. The current one - a nerd has a lot of secret files in his head and two rival spies are undercover with him at a Best Buy-type store - will only work for so long. Following Heroes we have Journeyman. I watched a couple of episodes but they left me cold. They seem to be taking their time explaining the premise but neither the plots nor the characters are engaging enough to make me keep watching long enough to find out what's going on.

I can say the same thing for the Bionic Woman. The show is going in two different directions at once. On the one hand they are trying for gritty realism with a woman who suddenly gains super powers and the limits that they have. On the other hand, the powers themselves are way into science fiction. They would have been better served by keeping to the original show's bionics rather than using nanites. The treatment doesn't interest me much.

I've only seen one episode of Reaper. It seems like a cross between Chuck and Pushing Daisies and would seem a lot fresher if neither of the others was on. It has its moments.

I've only seen a couple of episodes of the vampire detective show Moonlight. The premise has been done before and the writing is really bad. In the pilot I knew who the killer was within a minute of when they introduced him - not because of any clues, he was the obvious suspect's assistant and the hack writers wanted a twist.

There aren't many "regular" shows I watch. Boston Legal is one of the few. It seems a bit off. Shatner's character was always the highlight of the show but they toned him down this season. He is still over-the-top but not by much. The same thing happened to the rest of the characters. They've all been toned down.

Pushing Daisies continues to be the best show on. After five episodes they moved beyond the initial premise into weird crimes. With strong but subtle continuity and a narrator tying everything together, the best description would be Tim Burton meets Arrested Development.