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.

Well, that didn’t last. One week and seven episodes after I started watching The Sopranos, I found out how it ended. The culprit was Ron Moore’s “Battlestar Galactica” blog, of all things. Technically, it got ruined much earlier, several times over; I just hadn’t realized that when Yahoo News changed their big headline from “Will Tony Soprano get whacked?!?” to “Did Tony Soprano get whacked?!?”, they weren’t being coy.

Of course, I can’t really evaluate the finale, because I haven’t actually seen it. And even if I watched it right now, it wouldn’t count — I’ve only got seven episodes invested in the series, instead of seven seasons. But I was already going to make a comment about the ones I’d just watched, and it’s interesting how much of my opinion of those episodes seems to apply to the finale as well.

By the time the end credits rolled on “College”, I was left thinking I’d just seen one of the best hours of television ever made. For those who don’t automatically remember TV episodes that aired eight years ago by title alone: it’s the one where Tony takes his daughter to Maine to look at colleges and happens to run into a mob informant; meanwhile back at home, Carmella spends the night with her friend the priest after they have a sexy, sexy communion. The things I liked best about this episode and the ones immediately following:

They’re not about plot. Stuff happens, but what happens isn’t as important as why it happens and how the characters react to it.

There are no sudden life-changing epiphanies. After Tony has his final meeting with the mob snitch, there’s a moment where he stands in a field, looking up as a flock of ducks — like the ones that started his anxiety attacks — fly overhead. Meanwhile, Carmella breaks down with guilt and has to confess her complicity in Tony’s crimes. Does Tony recognize the symbolism of the ducks? Not really; he just sees them. Does Carmella forsake her mob money and move out? Not yet; she wakes up and reads a newspaper.

But this isn’t the frustrating artificial gimmick typical of episodic TV, where everything resets back to the default state at the end of each hour. And it’s not the equally artificial gimmick of the current crop of story-arc-based series, where each hour has to have some life-changing event that keeps escalating the tension. Instead, it’s more like reality. Real people are resistant to change. They have moments that chip away at their world-view, leaving them subtly altered.

You never know what’s really happening. There’s a great dynamic going on throughout the series. We’re constantly led to believe we’ve got an omniscient view of Tony’s story, and then constantly jarred out of that, shown that we don’t have any idea what’s going on. We see Tony’s dreams, and his sessions at the therapist, which should be a direct insight into the character’s mind.

But dream sequences inherently put the audience on edge; after the first one, you’re never sure what you’re being shown is real. And his sessions with Dr. Melfi are filled with lies; the scene will start with him talking about something that directly contradicts what we saw in the previous scene. If he’s lying to the therapist about his mistress, what else is he lying about? Can you trust anything he says? It all works together to build the sense that no matter how much time you spend with somebody and how deeply you dig, there’s an impenetrable wall at the end of it. We can never really know what’s going on with Tony Soprano. We’re not even sure if he knows what’s really going on.

The series gets more mileage out of what’s left unsaid than what’s actually said. This is supposedly one of the prime directives of screenwriting, but you so rarely see it done well. In the “College” episode, they had the stones to attempt it on two fronts: Carmella and the priest (after watching The Remains of the Day one of the few movies that does do it well), and Tony and his daughter.

The scenes with Tony and Meadow in the car are just amazing, because so much happens with so little said. All through the episode, you’ve had the sense that they’re bonding, and it’s all felt genuine, and it’s all felt reassuring. It’s as if a great pressure that’s been building up over the past few episodes, has been suddenly released. But then, with just a few lines of dialogue and increasingly lengthy silences, she learns that there’s still a wall between them, some things that he’ll just never tell her.

And because of a couple of great performances, there’s more to that scene than the obvious. It’s not a simple case that he wants to tell her what he’s been doing, but can’t. It never even occurs to him to tell her; lying to his family has become so natural at this point, that it’s simply instinctual for him to keep his work and family completely separate. It’s not even the case that he feels guilty for what he’s done, or wants to keep her from feeling ashamed of him; if there is any of that, it’s all subconscious.

And as soon as he starts evading her questions, she starts responding to him with a simple “Nothing.” And again because of a great, subtle performance, you can detect what’s on the surface — she’s angry that he won’t come clean with her, so she keeps quiet as revenge — and also what’s underneath, her disappointment that the bonding they’ve had is over, and her realization that she’ll probably never be as close to her father as she wanted. It was a perfectly understated, realistic, and ultimately sad scene.

So, disregarding the irony of writing four paragraphs in praise of a show that works best when leaving things unsaid: at least based on the few episodes of the series I’ve seen so far, I’d say the finale sounds about right. The Sopranos doesn’t seem to be about resolutions, or realizations, or big life-changing events. It’s about normalcy, the realization that big finales and conclusions don’t typically happen in real life. It sounds like the best way for the series to end is simply not to.

Update: Hey, this post was rambling and non-sensical even for me. I’ll leave it as an example of what happens when you put stuff on the internets while tired. But here’s what I would’ve written had I been typing coherently last night:

“The Sopranos” aired its series finale this week. In the seven years the show ran on HBO, and the year or so it’s been in syndication on A&E, I’ve never seen a single episode. And because I’ve heard so much hype about it, I’ve avoided reading any spoilers about the series, knowing that at some point, I’d get around to watching it.

Still, the show is such a cultural phenomenon that just by doing what I normally do, I’ve managed to have some pretty significant points ruined for me. I know of three characters who died or were killed off, one of them involving pool cues. Just [today], I read no less than five blog posts that hinted at what went on in the finale, without really revealing anything.

So here’s the start of a reasonably interesting experiment: I started watching the series this week, and I’m three episodes in. I’m going to see how long I can go without being completely spoiled for the finale. Not looking for recaps or spoilers, just going on as I normally have been — I want to see if the show is significant enough that its finale will just leak into common knowledge, “Rosebud” style.

As for the series itself: So far, I’m liking it. There’ve been several of these series that have been highly recommended, usually by my friend Cory, but when I’ve finally seen them, they just don’t live up to the hype. My reaction to “The Sopranos” pilot was “hell yes, I’d keep watching that.” And the other episodes have me intrigued. Which is actually kind of surprising — except for Miller’s Crossing, I don’t like mob movies, and Goodfellas bores me so much I’ve never seen it all the way through.

Original:

Here’s the start of a reasonably interesting experiment:

And yeah, it’s a pretty good show. It’s been hyped a ton, and at least three episodes in, it lives up to it. Unlike some of the other HBO and Showtime series that I’ve heard about and then finally watched and been completely disappointed, this one looks like it deserves its initial hype.

Now I know how the Geico Caveman feels.

One of my friends has been complaining that a Korean R&B singer has stolen her identity. I don’t know if one Korean singer is better or worse than an entire new series (warning: that link plays video).

The series, which I decree shall never again be mentioned on this site, is supposedly a “drama” about a “Computer geek by day. Government operative by night.” Here are excerpts from two descriptions, with the most egregious segments highlighted in bold:

Chuck Bartowski is just your average computer-whiz-next-door. He spends his days working for Buy-More with his band of nerdy cohorts, longing to find a woman who can appreciate him. But when an old friend, who happens to be a CIA agent, sends Chuck a mysterious encoded email, the world’s greatest spy secrets are embedded into his brain.
He never asked to become the government’s most powerful weapon, but the fate of the country suddenly lies in his unlikely hands. Hopefully, this won’t take away from his video game time! International terrorist plots, sexy spies and cold pizza – it’s all in a day’s work for our trusty hero…Chuck.

And from one of NBC’s press releases:

From executive producer, Josh Schwartz (”The O.C.”) and executive producer-director McG (”Charlie’s Angels,” “We Are Marshall”) comes a one-hour, comedic spy thriller about Chuck Bartowski (Zachary Levi, “Less Than Perfect”) - a computer geek who is catapulted into a new career as the government’s most vital secret agent. [...] Instead of fighting computer viruses, he must fight assassins and international terrorists. With the government’s most precious secrets in Chuck’s head, Major John Casey (Adam Baldwin, “My Bodyguard”) of the NSA assumes the responsibility of protecting him. His partner is the CIA’s top agent (and Chuck’s first date in years) Sarah Walker (Yvonne Strzechowski, “Gone”). They’ll keep him safe by trading in his pocket protector for a bulletproof vest.

Haw! Nerdy computer guys are named Chuck and they can’t find a woman and they work at Best Buy and play videogames and wear pocket protectors! And hey look — it’s 1985 and that stuff is still funny!

I wouldn’t be bothered by the series appropriating my name if it could at least come up with something original. (Especially since they’re also releasing a US remake of the BBC series “The IT Crowd,” which manages to tell the same jokes, but cleverly). Is it really this easy to get a pitch picked up for TV these days? Maybe the atmosphere is exactly the right time to pitch my series about how lawyers are unethical, or how LA TV executives are vapid and unoriginal.

Until then, the only way to dispel the stereotype of computer geek shut-ins named Chuck is to complain about it on my blog.

On the other hand, the new Bionic Woman series (warning: more video, but better) looks pretty awesome. I almost feel bad for making fun of it before. Granted, it looks to be almost as heavy on the personal drama as I suspected. I expect lots of “they can repair my body, but they can’t fix the damage to my soul!” But it’s also got evil cyborg Starbuck, which makes it okay.

My favorite commercial ever, back from when Cartoon Network was still cool, has been impossible to find for years. Once again, YouTube saves the day:

I would’ve been willing to move back to Atlanta and work for Cartoon Network all based on that one ad. And the one where Jinx the Cat is riding a big wheel like in The Shining. And the one where Moltar describes back-to-back “Sailor Moon” episodes as “one solid hour of all-girl action.”