The Good Wife: Threesome

E: You know one thing I love about this show?  I’ve just realized – perhaps I am slow – that Alicia Florrick has Lauren Bacall hair.  And eyebrows. She’s got the eyes of a sorrowing Madonna (the pieta Madonna, not the voguing one) framed by this glamorous, classy, untouchable movie star hair and arch, smart-allecky eyebrows.  It’s just another subtle way that this show brings us character.  Sorry for taking a little break there over the holiday weekend, but I hope you enjoy hearing about this anyway.  It was a completely fantastic episode, don’t you think?

The episode opens with Grace and Zach watching a clip of Chelsea Lately online.  They’re watching it because one of the call girls frequented by their dad is looking to extend her 15 minutes, and so pimping her would-be book.  The girl’s name is Amber Madison (the tagline under her name in the clip is “high class whore” – hee!).  She’s blond.  Ah, writers – is it horribly unkind to observe that so many of these girls are named Amber?  And that they’re pretty much all blond? I’m not making that up, am I?  Peter, who seems to be living in the courthouse now, frantically tries to reach Alicia before she sees it.  Secretary Courtney (nice to see you, finally!) makes Alicia watch it before she does anything else, so that at least she knows.  She gets to hear this girl say that Peter was going to divorce her so that they could be together and she could work on his campaign.  And there Alicia is, feeling naked again, expecting judgment and pity and scorn in every glance.

Happy Thanksgiving, and Thanks for All the Music

E: Sure, it’s random, but I’ve been really grateful for great music lately. When I was a teen, which was back when they actually played music, we didn’t have MTV. The music I listened to came from the radio, and from a ton of fantastic soundtracks.  Ah, the heady days of Pretty in Pink, Dirty Dancing, Purple Rain and Empire Records.  Not that you could prove it by this blog, but I actually see a lot of movies (we just haven’t blogged through Oscar season yet – wait a few weeks) but except in cases like Once, I’m not falling in love with the soundtracks as much anymore.  While I do listen to the radio, more often than not it’s NPR.  No, these days, I get a lot of my music off TV.

Maybe I’m a sucker for smart musical marketing, but I don’t care.  Sometimes it’s the strains from a commercial that captures me – who can resist those slick Ipod commercials?  More often, though, a song underscores a pivotal moment in a drama, provides the intention behind a montage, or the backbone of a dance.  And I can’t help but observe though it may be music I heard first on tv, there’s no way I’d ever have found most of them if I couldn’t google the lyrics. Hurrah for tv in the digital age!  Here’s a sample of my very favorites (minus the ones I’ve mentioned here):

Mads Langer, “Fact-Fiction”/Castle: This was a case where the lyrics of a song puzzled me, and then I fell in love with the music once I found it on youtube.  It’s a haunting, magnificent song about the way romances sometimes misfire when we can’t truly get to know each other despite promising circumstances.   “I fell in love with her longing/lets just say she never found out/who it was she never found in me.”

V-cap: It’s Only The Beginning

E: Yikes!  Was that an ending or what?  I cannot believe they’re not bringing this show back until March!  And will they actually, really bring it back?

Let me start by saying this.  I think the problem with V is that they really need a time line to work with; they need to know how long they’ve got to spin this storyline out.  It’s hard to build the proper amount of dread, somehow, without that deadline. Am I wrong? Maybe the pace is throwing me off because I’m used to the miniseries, but I dunno.  I think they need an endgame in order to have a decent start.

M: I think you’re wrong.  I think you need to have an endgame and a finish line to have a proper middle.  Lost proved that with its lousy (by its standards) first half of the 3rd season, then they set and end time and the second half of that season, concluding with the finale with the first flash forwards, was some of the best TV ever.  I think they are doing well with the pace, which was too fast in the beginning of the pilot, but has now settled into a “not rushing through things” flow that most shows have trouble finding.  I feel most shows feel like they need to resolve things every week, so they end up blasting through major plot items way too quickly.  I like the way that V is going with the slow build.

E: Let’s agree to differ, then.  That said, we did get some exciting stuff, mostly at the end of this episode, in three main plot lines or categories: first, The Halls of Healing, then Puppy/Lizard Love (the seduction of Tyler), and finally what I’m beginning to think of as the Idiots Revolution.

Castle Review: “One Man’s Treasure”

C: Here’s your weekly Castle review, coming in a little late thanks to a minor catastrophe in the E household.  (All’s well now, only one bone broken.)

As if the show gods heard us last week, this week’s episode treated viewers to a bit of Beckett and “Little Castle” one-on-one time (E: thanks guys!), as Alexis volunteered for three days at the station as part of a school initiative.  Cleaning out the room where victims’ belongings are stashed she stumbles on a little mystery of her own.  In the meantime, Big Castle and the gang are investigating something twistier: the death of a man with a wife and a fiancee. (E: Castle to corpse: “Dude, you are so busted.”)

ETV: Grey’s Anatomy and the Finale Finales of Project Runway Season 6, and Models of the Runway

E: Ah, Project Runway and Models of the Runway.  What a sterling season it’s been.  How will I ever live without you?  Whatever will I do?

Its seems I’m going to have to find something else to ETV about, because this is the end of PR’s dreaded, dreadful season 6 and lackluster side kick show, and Grey’s Anatomy shoved the entire holiday season into one episode starting with Thanksgiving and ending with New Years Eve.  No new episodes until January!  Yikes!

I’m thinking maybe a mystery duo of Bones and The Mentalist, what do you say?

Meanwhile, click below for the last discussion of any of these shows we’re getting until 2010.