I just want to make sure everybody else heard that, and it wasn’t just me.

In “Bionic Woman” this week, Isaiah Washington’s character interrupts the completely pointless training sessions between the Bionic Woman and Yoda-san, telling her she needs to bring out the animal inside herself, and he actually says the line, “I’m about to go analog on your ass.”

That really happened, right? ‘Cause I wouldn’t want to declare that a TV show isn’t just bad, it’s the opposite of everything that I stand for, on the basis of a single mis-heard line.

And speaking of NBC and catch-phrases: “ME WANT FOOD.” How long can “30 Rock” keep going without a single bad episode?

Tonight was a bad night for TV. Two shows on the DVR that I really tried hard to make myself like, but I just couldn’t do it.

“Bionic Woman” is just plain not good. It’ll trick you at first, because if you hear the overall concept (minus the belligerent hacker lil sister), and just catch glimpses of it, you might think it has potential. And if I didn’t mention it yet, the star is really, really pretty. But it just keeps on failing. I’ll watch one more episode just because it looks to be Bionic Starbuck-centric, but after that I’m dropping it.

I hope I’m not spoiling it for anybody, but the boring but generally likable fiance of the boring but generally likable star apparently died sometime over the last week — since he just had a clearly non-fatal bullet wound at the end of the pilot, I’m guessing he had a sudden aneurism or something. And it’s too bad, because somehow his dullness combined with hers to make a character who wasn’t exactly interesting, but was at least more appealing than everybody else back at Super Secret HQ. Miguel Ferrer, and a holy-cow-I-never-saw-that-coming Asian guy who’s a martial arts expert, and a harsh woman who drives a GTO, just can’t make up for Oscar Goldman.

And I hate to kick a jackass when he’s down, but if you’re trying to bring in fresh exciting new blood to invigorate your show, Isaiah Washington is a bad, bad choice. And then having him exchanging banter about What Color Is Your Parachute? is just embarrassing.

I hope I don’t end up sounding like Isaiah Washington when I say that watching “Pushing Daisies” just gave me the creeps all over. I watched it on the recommendation of a commenter here, and I really wanted to like it. But as I was afraid of, I had about the same reaction to it as I had to Wonderfalls. It was just way too fey and precious and pleased with itself. (And I’m the guy who loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer!)

Barry Sonnenfeld was Barry Sonnefelding the hell out of it, and it showed. Really high production values. Clever concept. Smarter-than-average dialogue. Clearly distinct from anything else on network TV. And a good bit of it hit just the right tone for a romantic black comedy.

But come on. Even Wes Anderson would call out the show for being too affected. And it’s all so brightly-colored but with a sinister undertone!, complete with the narrator from the Walgreens ads. And the characters banter with puns about rumination. And it’s just full-to-bursting with that insufferably confessional, blatant allegory, the same kind that drags down Tim Burton’s “I’m a tortured soul ’cause I’m different!” movies. Here you’ve got a woman who lives with her eccentric spinster aunts. And a taller, thinner Kevin Spacey-looking guy who was close to but tragically separated from his mother and emotionally distant from his father, who falls into a gloriously romantic but completely non-sexual relationship with his spunky dream girl.

By the end of it, I was overcome with the need to eat a steak and read Maxim.

All right, I guess I’ve got to give up fighting against “Heroes,” since somewhere along the line it beat me into submission. I can’t really complain about watching it against my will or better judgement anymore, since I’ve actually started to genuinely like it.

Sure, they have a high school class light up their bunsen burners right before a discussion about Charles Darwin. But they also have a high school girl deciding to cut off her toe with a pair of scissors, just to see what’ll happen. They’ve got goofy Irish gangsters in what’s shaping up to be some lame cliched bank heist. But the whole seven paintings and villains who can sneak into closed interrogation rooms is a great way to do a murder mystery. Plus, time-traveling samurai and wonder twins who cry deadly plague tar might be able to make up for The Incredibly Hot Hulk’s reappearance next week.

I admit it, I’m completely intrigued.

And I’m guessing that the fact we’ve got precocious little girl child star who dreams about the boogeyman, means that when Veronica Mars shows up, it’s going to be awesome.

Also: on “How I Met Your Mother” they’re totally setting up Robin & Barney to get together. Which’ll be a hell of a lot of fun to watch.

I’ve been reading Rain’s updates on the new TV shows that are coming out, but for some reason it still didn’t click with me that there are new TV shows coming out. It must’ve seemed relevant to me at some point, since my faux-TiVo has been recording all this stuff. The cat only records the “Lengths of String Moving Slowly then Very Quickly” documentary series on the Discovery channel (and, for some reason, “CSI: Miami”), so I must’ve been the one to set it.

Still, it was a surprise to come home from work and find a big chunk of programming begging to be watched. There’s no point in mentioning “How I Met Your Mother,” since that series has built up so much goodwill with me that they’d have to make an entire episode of the cast just making fun of me specifically and showing naked pictures of me while they point and laugh before I’d quit watching. I’ll never understand how a show that’s so relentlessly likeable could always be on the verge of cancellation, so I just hope that people keep spreading the word and it stays on the air. At least until we find out who the mom is, or until the slap bet runs out.

There’s not much point in mentioning “Heroes” either, since I just don’t get what’s going on between me and that show. Just like it was with most of last season, I watched the whole pilot rolling my eyes. And just like it was with last season, I’m compelled to keep watching. (Announcing that Veronica Mars is going to be on it just made it completely inevitable). I just hope that they don’t try to make the guys with the Worst Irish Accents Ever into recurring characters.

The first new show I saw was “Reaper,” which answers the question that’s been bugging every human for decades: What would it be like if Kevin Smith directed “Dead Like Me?” As it turns out, it’s not bad. I’m not jumping up and down or starting the local chapter of the fan club or anything, but it’s interesting enough, reasonably entertaining, and the writing and the performances are all above average. I don’t know if a show can just be “solid” and survive without a huge marketing campaign behind it, but I’d like to think so.

For a show with its concept (a slacker’s parents sell his soul to the devil, so he’s forced to send escaped souls back to Hell), it was surprisingly straightforward action/comedy. Still, it had just enough clever bits to stand out: Ray Wise as the devil, an interesting take on the battle between Heaven and Hell from the devil (”I’ve seen how this plays out. God wins.”), and a (bad) guy getting sucked under a zamboni and leaving a long trail of blood on the ice. It’s laughably obvious that they originally wanted it to be darker than it turned out — a friend of the leads is badly injured halfway through the episode, then the episode ends with the two leads giving a recap and setting up the rest of the series. But then the very last shot clumsily inserts badly-injured guy, as alive and kicking as LL Cool J at the end of Deep Blue Sea, as if he’d been standing there listening to the entire conversation but not saying anything. That actor must have one hell (hey, funny!) of an agent.

And speaking of wanting it dark, how about that “Bionic Woman?” After watching the pilot, I’m a little creeped out at how accurate prediction from a year ago turned out to be. It’s not dead-on, of course, but there are eerie similarities, which leads me to one of the following conclusions:

1. I have untapped psychic abilities;
2. The makers of the show have been reading my blog;
3. There’s only so much you can do with “The Bionic Woman” and a guy who likes digging up TV series from the 70s and “reimagining” them darker and edgier.

The third is the most likely, which puts me in an interesting position, because I can’t decide whether I’d rather see a darker, edgier version of “The Love Boat” or “Fantasy Island.” (Extra-credit challenge to Mr. Eick and his production house: “Three’s Company.”)

I liked the pilot well enough, and even though I wasn’t blown away, I’m hoping the series lasts a while. I’m not all that intrigued by the Black Mesa Secret Military Ops stuff, or all the predictable drama they slathered on, but I do like the cast. Bionic Starbuck is 1000 times more interesting than the main character, but the rest of the cast is still interesting enough to keep me watching. And keep me hoping for more bionic catfights.

I’m still wondering what it is about NBC that makes people look so weird, though. The aforementioned Bionic Starbuck kept reminding me of Heath Ledger as the Joker, for some reason. And Michelle Ryan is so beautiful it hits eerie, then wraps around to being beautiful again but oddly off-putting. (Plus, she does a dead-on perfect American accent.)

That’s all I’ve seen so far, and likely all I will see until the heavy-hitters of “Battlestar Galactica” and “Lost” start up again next year. Everything I’ve seen has been fine, but it says something that the best TV I saw tonight was a year-old episode of “The Venture Brothers” that I’ve already seen four times, and it still had me laughing out loud.

I’ve been hearing about the series “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” from multiple places for over a year now. I tried watching a couple episodes when I first heard of it, and hated it. I tried the other night, because they’re building up buzz because of a new season or something, and still hate it.

But wait. There are dozens of terrible TV shows on these days, and several more series that plenty of people love but just don’t work for me at all. And we’re living in a society, after all, that not only allows but encourages Dane Cook to keep making movies. So why single out this one series?

Because for a long time now, I’ve been bitching about how lame and uninspired it is to be “all edgy.” And all this time, I’d thought I was protesting against an abstract concept; I had no idea that there existed an actual physical manifestation of everything I hate about entertainment.

I’ve watched four episodes now, to give it a chance. The closest I ever came to laughing was when I started to notice the barest germ of a clever joke about Stockholm Syndrome, but that was quickly buried under attempts to over-tell the joke and a 5-minute-long sequence where one guy tricks another into smelling his fart. If the series somehow becomes the only surviving record of the early 21st century, I’m sure that future anthropologists will be able to detect that there was some kind of comedy present, but in the same sense that biologists can detect the remnants of vestigial legs in killer whales.

The series has no use for actual comedy, when it can just repeat “AIDS child abuse racism alcoholism homosexual panic” over and over again and have people applauding it for being so “irreverent.” It’s not evil, which is the heartbreaking part. It really really wants to be offensive, but it just comes across as appallingly lazy.

I’d be discouraged by the fact that so many people are going on about how hilarious it is, except for the fact that “Flight of the Conchords” is getting a ton of great buzz too, and it’s a genuinely hilarious show. So it’s not that the world has horrible taste and civilization is ending; it’s more than the world just isn’t all that discerning.

I was really impressed with the current version of “Doctor Who” when it started airing on the Sci Fi channel. It’s funny to read about just how huge it is in the UK, since it came as a total surprise to me that I’d enjoy it at all, much less think of it as must-see television. I already knew a ton of trivia about the show, but only through that mysterious process of nerd diffusion, the same process that means I can tell you character names and major plot lines from “Star Trek: The Next Generation” even though I’ve never made a point of watching the show.

But the new series started out amazing. It was like looking into a world that until now, only the most obsessive fans had been able to see. Ah, here’s the amazing show people were talking about, when I was only able to see cheap sets and terrible costumes and interminably dull “action” sequences. Finally I could see the potential of the premise and the characters. And not only that, but they frequently had single-story episodes that rank among the best television ever made — fighting zombies with Charles Dickens! Weird gas-mask wearing children in London during the Blitz! A spaceship with mirrors that lead to 18th Century France! And even the DOOM rip-off had a genius opening, with a bunch of demon-like aliens attacking our heroes chanting, “We must feed…”

The show started to wear thin, going from an excellent series punctuated by brilliant episodes, to a good series with the occasional very good episode, to about what you’d expect from “Doctor Who” but with very clever moments throughout. (And it seemed like there was some weird quota for every single episode to emphasize how much they embrace alternative lifestyles in the more enlightened future. We get it, already, Mr. Davies). It reminds me of “The X-Files” in around the end of the third season — there was still the occasional flash of genius, especially when Darin Morgan wrote an episode, but it had stopped being appointment TV and started being obligation TV. If the Doctor or Martha ever start droning on about their cancer, I’ll know it’s time to jump ship.

All that preamble was just for this: the episode that aired tonight in the US, “Blink”, is easily one of the top 10 best episodes of a television series I’ve ever seen. The kind that excites every nerd molecule in my body and makes me run to the computer to say, “Hey internet, did you just see that?”

I’m blissfully ignorant of all the fan stuff surrounding the series, but it feels like this is the UK equivalent of a “clip show.” It’s designed to let the Doctor & Martha appear very infrequently, but ends up using that to tell a story you just wouldn’t be able to get from the “normal” show. It helps a lot that it’s carried by an astoundingly beautiful and charming (and pretty young) actress; I was hoping through most of it that they were planning another spin-off based around her.

But the real appeal is the story, and the fact that they did everything right during production to make the story work. The show prides itself on being scary, and there’ve been several creepy and tense moments throughout the entire series, but this is the first one that I thought genuinely scared me when it was supposed to.

As for the story itself, all the components are familiar if you’ve read any time-travel stories, or played a Mario game. But it all just works: even when you’re sure you know what’s going on, and even when you’re right, it’s paced so well and presented so well that you dutifully suspend and restart your disbelief at all the right moments. The script is just a marvel, a suspense/horror/mystery story that unfolds through time. It does all the things I’ve always wanted time travel stories to do, but I’d never seen one pull it all off successfully.

And the most impressive thing about the script is how it uses a suspense/horror/mystery story, apparently done without the benefit of the series’ stars, to say exactly the message the series has been trying to convey for the past couple of years. The show frequently has the Doctor making a comment about his fascination with humans, and the value of human life. But it never seems to have all that much weight in the context of their usual stories (the previous episode, where the Doctor disguises himself as a human in the years just before WWI, did a pretty good job with it, although it was a little stretched out and maudlin).

This episode drives the message home as part of the horror-that’s-not-really-so-horrible. And then it all comes together by the end, when you realize that the message is in the double entendre of the title, saying “Blink and you’ll miss it.”

Jay Stephens’ blog Monsterama is great for anybody who’s a fan of cartoon monsters from the 50s - 70s (and everybody is, even if they don’t realize it yet). For the past year or so, it’s been particularly cool because he’s been tracing the concept and production of “The Secret Saturdays,” an animated series he’s developing for the Cartoon Network.

Digging back through the blog, you can find its initial concept as “The Cryptids”, inspired by Jonny Quest, the Herculoids, Alex Toth’s work in general, and his personal interest in cryptozoology. You can trace the development of it through the concept stage and into eventual production, and see how the idea grew to emphasize the family-of-scientists/Jonny Quest aspect. He’s posted some great background art, and it also sounds like they’ve secured some of the best voice-actors working today. Most importantly, see that it’s a cool idea going through the production process for a major network and still actually retaining most of its coolness.

Currently, he’s asking for followers of the site to weigh in on a name change being requested by the network. I can’t even remember the suggested title, and I just looked at the blog post not 15 seconds ago; it’s that forgettable. Cartoon Network has been shooting itself in the foot a lot lately, going crazy with attempts at re-branding and re-imagining the network from a just genuinely-cool, all-ages network focusing on animation; to a third-tier imitator of the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon that shows live-action movies like Spider-man for some inexplicable reasons. The title of this series just sounds like another attempt at that, to remove anything unique about it and have it get lost in the sea of Disney and Nickelodeon series. If you’re interested in this kind of thing at all, leave a comment at the link provided in Stephens’ blog, and help CN get their groove back.

The easiest way to tell that The Sopranos is a great show is that so far, the second season has been really good, and I’m disappointed by it. Everything that’s bugging me about it is a barely-perceptible nitpick, and each point is noticeable only because the first season set the bar so high.

Like the character of Tony’s sister Janice. She stands out as a stereotype in a series full of stereotypes — they start out laying the West Coast hippie drop-out schtick on really thick, and so far anyway, they haven’t really let up. It really shows what a remarkable thing they’ve done with the rest of the characters: they’re all stereotypes who can be easily summed up in a brief character description, but they seem real. Like real people who just tend to revert back into their predictable roles, either because it’s easier, or because they just don’t know any better.

It’s kind of the same thing with the character of Christopher, who’s transforming from a screw-up into just a frustrating screw-up. It could just be because the actor seems too smart to be doing the things his character does (his allegiance to Toshiba and HD-DVD notwithstanding). They cast a lot of young street thugs on the show, and they work because they do stupid things and they just look stupid. But Christopher just seems like he’s doing idiotic stuff because the script’s telling him to. And for all I know, that’s exactly where they’re going with the character; maybe I’m supposed to be frustrated.

And my last nitpick at the moment is a particularly unfair one, because it’s about a great scene. (Big spoilers for seasons 1 & 2 coming…) There’s a scene where Dr. Melfi has a guilt-induced nightmare about Tony Soprano having a blackout and wrecking his car. It’s perfectly paced and edited into the episode, it’s perfectly shot, and the choice of music (from The Wizard of Oz) is perfect. It’s really a creepy scene. But I knew within seconds that it was a dream, and that it was Dr. Melfi’s dream.

And that’s only a “problem” because the next-to-last episode of season 1 had the most brilliant fake-out I’ve ever seen on a TV show. It’s basically an hour-long con that I fell for completely. Every time I was supposed to believe I was one step ahead of the writers, I did; they played me like a cheap fiddle. By the final reveal, I couldn’t say anything other than “holy shit I can’t believe they just did that.”

But of course, that only works once, and every dream sequence afterwards is suspect. I’m still intrigued with the show, and I’m definitely still watching — I’ve been blown away so far, and the big surprising moments that have already been spoiled for me, haven’t even happened yet. Still, I can’t help feeling like I hit a peak, and I’m coasting downhill from here on out. More updates as the situation and my Netflix queue progresses.

And speaking of being spoiled for The Sopranos, David Chase gets +100 coolness points for this quote about the series finale at a recent awards show:

I really wasn’t going to go into it, but I’ll just say this…when I was going to Stanford University’s graduate film school and was 23 [years old], I went to see Planet of the Apes with my wife. When it was over, I said, ‘Wow … so they had a Statue of Liberty, too.’

Reading stuff like that in the context of the Sopranos is almost unnerving; you get the impression of someone who’s in total control of his art, who’s making exactly what he wants to make, with no guesswork.

And one last shallow observation: watching the series has made me see a common thread among the shows I like. At least for dramas, a show only gets me hooked if there’s some element of the supernatural, or at least the “unreal.” Battlestar Galactica has been (rightly) praised for its realism, but it never really grabbed me until they started with all of the prophecies and Lords of Kobol. Lost had me from the start, then lost me the further they got away from smoke monsters and Walt’s powers. Alias always had Rambaldi, The X-Files was The X-Files and Buffy was always Buffy. I probably would’ve started with The Sopranos sooner if I’d known it wasn’t just a New Jersey mobster seeing a psychiatrist, but was filled with dreams and omens and delusions and a bunch of consummate storytellers who have absolutely no qualms about messing with their audience’s head.