Premiering on January 20, Fairly Legal centers around an exceptional mediator, played by Sarah Shahi. I hadn’t realized how much I’ve missed the actress since the cancellation of Life until now. She’s a natural when it comes to playing smart, snarky and assertive women. She’s insanely beautiful but not threatening. She can play extremely witty and sarcastic but not come off as bitchy. And she comfortably morphs from cool and collected to klutzy and goofy.

Mostly, Kate is governed by her heart and has a free-spirited, endearing quality about her. When she mediates, she always finds herself connecting strongly to someone or something, whether it’s a client, an idea, a belief or just really good intuition. I found it really difficult to find fault in Shahi’s acting or the character of Kate. (If anything, it’s really hard to dislike any lead of a USA show.) Outwardly, Kate’s passionate about righting wrongs and injustices that the letter of the law just can’t correct or often overlooks. Internally, she’s a flawed woman dealing with the recent death of her father, head of a law firm that her stepmother Lauren (Virgina Williams from How I Met Your Mother) now runs. And let’s just say the relationship between stepmother and stepdaughter is akin to mixing oil and water.

While I found the center to be extremely solid, the periphery characters still need to be fleshed out. Each of them came off as likeable and interesting in their own ways, but nowhere near three-dimensional. That’s to be somewhat expected early on,  but with the intriguing casting of Michael Trucco (Anders from Battlestar Galactica) as Kate’s soon-to-be ex-husband Justin and assistant DA who’s still very much a part of her love life, and Ethan Embry (Brotherhood), as her brother who also turned away from his career as a lawyer, I have a lot of faith that, with time, these characters will feel as rich and deep as Kate’s character feels.

Every show needs a quintessential sidekick and classic foil and, in Fairly Legal respectively, it’s Kate’s assistant Leonardo, played by Baron Vaughn, and Judge Nicastro, played by the grizzly and established Gerald McRaney. In my opinion, both have shown the most personality and likability compared to the rest of the supporting cast but still do little more than aid or push Kate. Shahi has a big burden to bear, carrying most of the show. USA is known for its partnerships: Shawn and Gus, Michael and Fiona, Neal and Peter, Mary and Marshall, Neal and Mozzie, Annie and Auggie. Here, Kate is pretty much on her own, occasionally reaching out. Leonardo seems to be the likeliest contender, but until they pull that headset off and get him out of that office, he’ll spend most of his time shepherding her clients and keeping Kate out of trouble from afar.

Overall, Fairly Legal fits the USA mold extremely well, and Shahi is assured and approachable as the lead. Will the show be able to pull in viewers and hold their attention? That’s something we’ll have to wait and see, but I know that I’ll be tuning in. I already love legal dramas, but I haven’t seen one from a mediator’s perspective. It’s a different sort of legal show with different kinds of goals and outcomes. The originality is enough to draw me in, and Shahi’s presence and talent will keep me coming back.

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Fairly Legal premieres Thursday, January 20th at 10/9c on USA Network.

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Impossibly individualistic, the true cowboy lives simply and truly and honestly, is slow to make a promise but quick to keep one, and dispenses his own justice when the laws of the town fall short. Even though the Western genre has fallen out of fashion for quite some time, the cowboy lives on as America’s most mythologized historical figure, representing the ultimate American wish fulfillment.

The reliable folks over at FX understand all of this, and they’ve teamed up with American Western/crime fiction godfather Elmore Leonard to create Justified, a modern Western series that chronicles the life of Raylan Givens, a Miami-based U.S. Marshal who is banished to the rural Kentucky hills in which he grew up…and which he has tried so eagerly to leave behind.

He finds himself having to do a job that continues to try to take his soul and his life, and even though he now has home field advantage, he doesn’t want it. All Harlan County, Kentucky, seems to hold for him are memories and people—like the ex-wife who left him and the nasty father who abused him—that he would just as soon forget.

Out of all law enforcement types, U.S. marshals hark back to the Old West the most. They rely on themselves as much as they can and they travel the back roads hunting down outlaws who have their faces plastered on wanted posters. But Raylan—played by Timothy Olyphant with the perfect mixture of amused cynicism, sure-fire cool, savvy efficiency and submerged, angry contempt—takes it to a whole other level. No matter how much people give him crap for it, he walks, talks and breathes being a cowboy. He’s got the hat, the boots, the gold star, and has no qualms about proving that he’s the quickest draw you’ll ever meet.

It isn’t just an act with him; Raylan really is a cowboy who just happened to be born in the wrong century. There’s more than a little of Josh Randall—the star-making role Steve McQueen played on Wanted: Dead or Alive for three seasons from 1958-1961—in Olyphant’s Raylan.

Of course, the whole modern Western lawman/fish-out-of-water scenario has been done before, notably in Clint Eastwood and Don Siegel’s first collaboration Coogan’s Bluff and the Dennis Weaver tv show it inspired, McCloud. But Justified does it well and puts its own stamp on the convention. Frankly, setting up a cowboy as an anachronism in a modern context is the only narrative framework that can really stand a chance to excel in a 21^st-century America so averse to history and a leisurely pace.

By placing Raylan Givens in a world that has passed him by, by making him a bit of a dinosaur choosing not to catch up with the times, he becomes more than just a character; he becomes a symbol, and audiences can warm to him through their connections to the world that surrounds him. The other characters that populate the show, who marvel at Raylan like he is some kind of antique, speak for us as an audience. Raylan gets infused with a novelty value that is charming.

The character was created by Leonard initially in his novels Pronto and Riding the Rap. He was revisited in a short story entitled “Fire in the Hole,” and it is that short story that forms the real basis of Justified. That story is all about the match-up between Givens and an old Kentucky acquaintance: Boyd Crowder, a Bible-thumpin’ neo-Nazi with a penchant for violent crimes. Crowder is Givens’ biggest thorn so far in this first season of Justified, though he’s gone up against other criminals like an ex-Mob accountant turned dentist played by Alan Ruck, a murderous widow, and a charming middle-aged prison escapee. He also played bodyguard to a really eccentric judge and helped his ex-wife’s realtor get out from under some bad dudes.

Elmore Leonard has been adapted for film and tv many times, sometimes good (3:10 to Yuma, Get Shorty, Out of Sight, and maybe Jackie Brown), sometimes bad (Be Cool, The Big Bounce, plenty more). Screenwriter Scott Frank is the best at doing the job, but Justified creator Graham Yost—writer of great actioners Speed and Broken Arrow, as well as cancelled-way-too-soon crime shows Boomtown and Raines—is succeeding just fine.

There’s a slow-burn pleasure to watching Justified. It’s a character piece first and foremost, and Timothy Olyphant is nailing it. I was pleasantly surprised. I know Olyphant played actual 19^th-century lawman Seth Bullock on HBO’s Deadwood, but I couldn’t get into that show, as much as I love Westerns. Maybe I should try again. But I did see Olyphant as chief villain Thomas Gabriel in Live Free or Die Hard and I thought he was terrible. Truly terrible. Laughable even. I didn’t find him threatening for a second and I thought he was one of the weakest links of that still-enjoyable John McClane outing. (Although since Olyphant wasn’t cast until after they had shot half of the movie—a truly boneheaded move—and had to take direction from Len Wiseman, I’m not sure it’s totally fair to blame him for the lameness of his performance). He began to rebound for me during his stint on season two of FX’s great legal thriller Damages (please don’t cancel it), and now I’m firmly in his corner.

I’m also a big fan of Natalie Zea’s work on Justified. She plays Raylan’s ex-wife, and she plays it well. Although, in the interest of full disclosure, I initially confused her with the actress Brooke Langton, who I loved on NBC’s also unfairly-cancelled Life (they look so much alike I swear).

Since Justified has been picked up for a second season, I would recommend it thoroughly to just about anyone; it’s a satisfyingly cool blend of action, character study and wry humor.

Tuesdays at 10pm on FX.

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Photographs courtesy of FX and IMDbPro.

The episode picks up right after last week’s. Gilroy, after hoodwinking Michael and succeeding in diverting the plane with the mysterious prisoner, was double-crossed and killed by the aforementioned mysterious prisoner. How a prisoner on a maximum security transport plane managed to get a gun and shoot a devious black ops psycho like Gilroy and then attach a bomb to him is one of my head-scratchers. Maybe we’re not meant to know. Maybe the point is that all we need to know is that this mysterious prisoner—who we learned is named Simon—is even more formidable than Gilroy. Simon is played by Garret Dillahunt, who I swear to God has played a villain in just about every show and movie released in the last couple of years, including Life, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, The Road, Damages, White Collar, CSI, and Lie To Me…I’m almost sick of him.

Michael dodges the explosion that eviscerates Gilroy and takes off on foot, the cops hot on his trail. He gets away on a jet ski…and yet, immediately after, Feds show up at Michael’s loft and at Maddie’s house, demanding that she deliver Michael to them. How do they know who Michael is if they didn’t catch him? Cops just saw some random white guy running away. I mean granted, the people who burned Michael did withdraw their protection of him at the end of season two, and a local cop named Paxson was after him at the beginning of this season, so it’s likely that Michael is on some local law enforcement lists…but it still seemed a little flimsy to me. Head-scratcher #2.

Michael regroups with Sam and Fiona at their “emergency emergency spot.” Michael thinks that Simon (whoever he is) must have had some local explosives expert in Miami help him set up the bomb that took out Gilroy (though again, how a guy stuck in a deep prison in Poland could set all this stuff up in Miami is hard to believe). Fiona volunteers to use her many connections to help track the bombmaker down in hopes that if they find him, they can find Simon.

Except Michael doesn’t have to find Simon, because Simon finds him. He lures Michael to a local tv store by blowing up an adjacent food stand and then displaying Michael’s mug on all the tv screens in the front display of the store. Michael walks in and sees even more tv screens. These screens have images of past operations that, Simon explains, he was responsible for. The catch: apparently, the people who burned Michael transferred all of the incidents from Simon’s file to Michael’s. They determined Simon was a loose cannon and locked him up, and gave his reputation to Michael so that they could burn Michael in hopes of recruiting him to come work for their nefarious organization.

I think. I think that’s what the deal is. But I gotta tell you, it’s driving me crazy at this point that we have no idea who these burnmasters (yes, I’ve decided that is a word) really are and what they are grooming Michael for. I hope Matt Nix and his team give us some answers sooner rather than later and don’t emulate the ridiculously amorphous and underdeveloped dastardly organizations that are an unfortunate hallmark of NBC’s Chuck.

At any rate, Michael understandably wants to slam Simon back in…well, the slammer. The problem is that Simon has set up another bomb, this one in a hotel. If Michael doesn’t follow his instructions, he’ll detonate and kill a whole bunch of innocent souls. Simon wants Michael to get “Management,” the people who burned the both of them, back into Miami to have a little chat. “Management,” is once again represented by Frasier’s dad…er, ah, I mean John Mahoney. So once again, Michael has to play ball with a lunatic. I have to say, though, that Gilroy was a much more charismatic baddie than Simon. Maybe it was the accent. Dillahunt was better on Life.

There was a rooftop escape that involved a way too convenient garbage chute, but plenty of highlights make up for it. Some of them include: Sam and Fiona driving their car through the bombmaker’s house, defusing the hotel bomb, Michael swimming for his life and breaking into his own loft, flipping cars, a helicopter explosion, and finally, an inventive, brutal, and surprisingly bloody fight scene between Michael and Simon that showcases Jeffrey Donovan’s considerable choreography skills. Fiona doesn’t have a great deal to do, but Sharon Gless has some of her most intense scenes yet, and she nails them.

The cliffhanger is the darkest and perhaps most puzzling season ender yet. Part of me is happily impressed and intrigued by it, while another part is pissed that I have to wait another three months to see what happened.

Season 3, Episode 16: Devil You Know (Originally aired March 4, 2010)

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Thursdays at 10/9c on USA

Photographs courtesy of NBC Universal and Glenn Watson.

I can’t watch any of the CSIs or Law & Orders any more, or Criminal Minds. But the procedural isn’t going away any time soon (if ever), and it can be an enjoyable and safe framework providing that the lead character(s) can rise above the inconsequentials of the disposable investigation-of-the-week. Life was the best example of this idea, but like most great shows, it was canceled to make room for America’s Next Top Gigolo. The only show now that even approaches the greatness of Life? CBS’s The Mentalist.

The show stars Simon Baker—a CBS veteran of The Guardian and the awful and short-lived Ray Liotta starrer Smith—as Patrick Jane, a freelancer with a haunted past working for the California Bureau of Investigation (no, that’s not a real agency). Throughout the first season, the show parceled out little windows into Jane’s backstory. He used to make a sleazy living pretending to be a psychic and manipulating people into throwing money at him by telling them what they wanted to hear. He had his own bogus tv show and loved the spotlight. His fatal mistake: openly mocking the serial killer Red John on his show. One night, he went home to find that Red John had viciously murdered his wife and young daughter out of spite.

As a result, he had a breakdown and had to be shipped off to a mental ward. But he got better and got out and worked some less-than-legal magic and managed to keep his breakdown off his records. His next step was to offer his skills as a mentalist to the CBI and help them solve murder investigations. He is basically employed as a private contractor, and the cops keep him around because he has a gift for reading people and setting mental traps. In other words, he may not be a cop, but he closes cases. But really, solving murders just gives him something to do. His real motive for joining the CBI? To catch Red John. And he states repeatedly when pressed that when he catches Red John, he will kill him and he will enjoy it. He cares more about catching and punishing and killing Red John more than he cares about his own life. He is obsessed. He is singularly focused on catching this guy and avenging his wife and daughter.

What makes Jane such a fascinating and fun character is that on the surface he’s all fun and games, a coolfire bad boy mischief-maker that always finds the levity in a situation and delights in playing with people. But underneath, he is driven by an intensely dark and violent mission. Baker simply exudes charisma, and CBS was wise to realize that they had a star with this guy. The Mentalist is built as a star vehicle for Baker, but Robin Tunney brings a lot of appeal as Teresa Lisbon, a senior CBI agent who is in charge of keeping Jane on a leash. Besides Jane, she oversees three other agents: Kimball Cho, Wayne Rigsby and Grace Van Pelt. She has a difficult past of her own, but in the show she manages to be the Good Cop to Jane’s bad boy while also preserving a sense of fun for her own.

The showrunners have wisely steered clear of developing any overt romantic sparks between Jane and Lisbon. Their relationship is too complex and too interesting to resort to any of that conventional crap. The rest of the cast is appealing, but it really boils down to Baker and Tunney. Yes, we have to deal with the murder-of-the-week all the time, but how Jane solves the crimes is refreshingly low-tech and fun. Here, crimes aren’t solved by forensic techno voodoo as much as by old-fashioned detective work and deductive logic. And seeing Jane always trying to piece together Red John’s clues gives the show a serial drive, as did Life. (I’m sorry I keep mentioning that show but I still haven’t gotten over it being canceled yet).

The characters keep evolving and the show keeps pushing forward. The second season, now half over, introduced Sam Bosco, an agent brought in to take charge of the Red John case and keep Jane away. Bosco provided a nice antagonistic dimension to the show. The season has progressed smoothly and evenly—no sophomore slump. In a sea of monotonous procedurals, The Mentalist stands out—quite an achievement.

Thursdays at 10/9c on CBS

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Photographs courtesy of CBS and Michael Ansell.

The first season of Chuck, while still being lighthearted, never seemed utterly preposterous to me. It never seemed that the writers didn’t care at all about establishing a sense of reality or plausibility for Chuck and his world. This whole second season, the Buy More jokes got stale and too much time was wasted there, and the Fulcrum villains were cardboard cartoons and we still have no clue who they really are or what they’re really about. They’re just evil baddies who wear black. Instead of just having an endless progression of disposable Fulcrum baddies, I think the show would have worked better if we had been given one nemesis at the top of the organization that Chuck & Co. were after.

Mel Gibson has that great line in Payback where he’s trying to penetrate the top of this crime syndicate he’s after and he says, “you go high enough, it always comes down to one man.” The closest thing we got was Chevy Chase in these last few episodes, who I have to say really grew on me. He’s pretty hilarious this week. Why wasn’t he the bad guy the whole time? I’m sure Chase could use the money, it ain’t like he’s doing anything else these days. We should have seen that one man (or woman) who was in charge of Fulcrum, so that it wasn’t just forgettable villains each week.

The strength of Chuck, at least when it started, was that it was a fun popcorn show that took archetypal characters like Nerd, Spy Babe, and No-nonsense Curmudgeon Agent and used the charm of its cast to flesh them out into real people. The will they/won’t they dynamic between Chuck and Sarah really worked for the first season, but recently it just felt that the writers were throwing too many artificially-constructed obstacles at them to keep them apart for the sake of conflict. Obviously they have to stay apart to preserve that tension (Bones writers take note and don’t ruin your show…it’s not too late!), I just wish the writers had found less transparent and more subtle, organic ways to accomplish that.

The shame of it is, thanks largely to the presence of Sam Beckett…er, ah, I mean Scott Bakula, Chuck just started to get decent again. This finale revolves mainly around Ellie’s wedding to her nimrod boyfriend. Chuck of course has just gotten the Intersect removed from his brain, and it looks like he and Sarah might finally get together for good. Chuck follows Morgan’s lead from last week and quits the Buy More. He even gets a juicy check from the government for services rendered (yeah, sure). It looks like Chuck is finally going to get a chance to lead the life he wants.

Except then we learn that Sarah is being assigned to work on the new Intersect with none other than ex-flame Bryce Larkin. And then Ted Roark shows up to crash Ellie’s wedding. He tells Chuck that if he doesn’t bring him the Intersect within the hour, he will kill Ellie at her wedding. So Chuck tells Morgan to stall the wedding-with Jeff and Lester in tow-while he scrambles to go get the Intersect and bring it back. The new Intersect has already been shipped out, but Bryce offers to give himself up to Roark, as Fulcrum still thinks that he has the Intersect in his head.

Sarah scrambles-in a pink bridesmaid dress no less-to find something she can use as a weapon in the wedding presents (she gets some decent cutlery). Sort of like the scene in Under Siege 2 where Steven Seagal-before he ballooned into the elephant man and entered direct-to-DVD hell mind you-tells Morris Chestnut’s porter to look in the luggage for weapons on the train. And from there, we get some pretty solid action. Shootouts, knife throwing, double crosses, agents crashing through skylights. Of course Ellie’s wedding is ruined and she throws a little whiny hissy fit, telling her brother “you ruined the most important day of my life!” Boo hoo. I really wanted to punch her in the face. Who cares about some ostentatious ceremony celebrating an antiquated ritual? She’s alive, isn’t that enough?

Beyond that, there’s some solid pathos courtesy of Scott Bakula and we get satisfying closure to the Bryce Larkin character. We also get a revelation stating rather definitively that it was no accident that Chuck became the Intersect in the beginning of the show, and that Sarah found him. And it turns out that “Fulcrum is only part of the puzzle.” Good, so now the already nondescript, convoluted villains become even more convoluted. The show ends with a cliffhanger involving Chuck not being rid of the Intersect (“Just when I think I’m out…”), and he even has some snazzy upgrades. The show ends optimistically with a “To be continued,” but I think that’s probably just wishful thinking from the creative team.

I think the cast is really talented, and I’ll be sad for them if the show gets cancelled, but to sum up my feelings about Chuck, I view it as the adorable puppy I was so excited to bring home. I fell in love with it and it sure was cute, but it kept crapping on the carpet again and again and again and struggled to redeem itself.

Season 2, Episode 22: Chuck vs. The Ring (originally aired April 27, 2009)

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Mondays at 8/7C on NBC

Photographs courtesy of NBC Universal

Roman is supposed to be in prison where Charlie sent him, but he has someone serving his time for him. I’m not sure how that works, but I guess when you’re as powerful and feared as Nevikov, you can get pretty much anything you want. I sure hope to be like that some day. Meanwhile, Charlie and Tidwell are going bananas trying to save Reese. I really like how the relationship between those two guys has developed in the last few episodes. They’re not friends and Tidwell doesn’t quite approve of Charlie, but there’s a mutual respect between them and neither is afraid to bend the rules a little bit to get the results they want and need.

So what does Roman want? Simple: He wants Charlie to exchange Mickey Rayborn for Reese. But isn’t Rayborn dead? After all, a whole crapload of his blood was found on his yacht. Yeah, blood…but no body. I’ve suspected for weeks that he wasn’t dead, and it appears I was right. Charlie has to find Rayborn, but the LAPD wants to lock him in a room and interrogate him about Roman and Rayborn. Tidwell and Seever help Charlie get out of the station so he can go do what he does and get Reese.

His first step is to go back to the FBI task force that gave him and Tidwell the cold shoulder when they asked about Reese last week. Tidwell asks him how he expects to get anything out of them after they got nothing before. Charlie gives him that Steve McQueen-esque, badass stare that Damian Lewis is so good at and explains that last time he talked to them like a cop, and this time he won’t. Hell yeah! Except that before he can get there, one of the FBI “agents” kills everyone else there. I guess Roman is cleaning house, and if he’s cleaning house, his next target is probably Agent Bodner.

Charlie thinks the same thing and drives his car through Bodner’s garage just seconds before the bad fed shoots him in the head. Awesome stuff. Bodner questions why Charlie saved him, and Charlie explains that he knows that he’s not working for Roman anymore since Roman had someone sent to kill him. If Roman hadn’t sent someone to kill Bodner, I’m sure Charlie would have taken him down. So now they team up to track down Rayborn. This is an awesome dynamic and further testament to the show’s extraordinarily talented writers: two former foes now coming together as allies. Almost as cool as when former nemeses Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed team up to whoop Mr. T’s ass in Rocky III.

This is an amazing episode that typifies everything that’s phenomenal about Life, particularly the wonderfully idiosyncratic rhythm that alternates between intense character work and surrealist humor. There’s a hilarious commentary on minivans, and it’s nice to see everyone pressed into action, working as one: Charlie, Ted and Amanda, Tidwell, Seever, and Bobby Stark.  Charlie even gets an automatic weapon at one point! It’s just a kickass show, plain and simple.

I don’t want to ruin all of the developments for anyone who has yet to see it, but suffice it to say that this episode is so satisfying, it even goes back to the very roots of the show and the conspiracy involving Charlie’s frame up for murdering his friend Tom Seybolt and his family. It would have been nice to see Rachel in this episode, because she really disappeared midway through the season, but that’s a mild complaint. Charlie solves more of the conspiracy but by no means is it wrapped up. There are still things I don’t understand (and Charlie doesn’t understand), he hasn’t found everyone involved. There’s a satisfying cliffhanger involving Ted going off after Olivia, but we don’t get any scene between Ted and Charlie and that’s a shame. But to make up for it, Charlie pulls an awesome awesome awesome move against Roman that’s reminiscent of how Bruce Willis dispatches a thug in the third act of the underrated The Last Boy Scout.

Watching Life has been a true television highlight for me, and I’m really sad to see it go. I’ve lost a lot of shows over the years, but this one is right at the top of the list. I’m so in love with this character and Damian Lewis as a star and a great actor. The writing has been consistently exceptional and progressive….Life has revolutionized a genre that even I would agree has become rather stale, and I love cop shows and movies. I gotta hand it to NBC for giving the show a full second season. I don’t blame them, I blame America. I haven’t heard anything saying Life is coming back, so I assume it’s cancelled. But it’s really disheartening and I will always have a special place in my heart for the show and the creative team behind it. It has indeed been a wonderful Life.

Season 2, Episode 21: One (originally aired April 8, 2009)

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Photographs courtesy of NBC Universal, Trae Patton

But the detectives’ first order of business is to clear the husband, because you always look at the husband first when the wife gets killed, even if the husband called the police himself because, well, love hurts. Going on the timetable of when she went missing, they clear the grieving husband. So now they have to ask who wanted the victim dead? As it turns out, a lot of people: the victim was running for senator and the major piece of legislation she was passionate about pushing through was Initiative 38, a complete California ban on handguns. So that’s it! Those lunatics at the NRA did it! Okay, maybe not the NRA, but definitely PNK, a big California gun company where all the employees like to be armed to the teeth as they stroll around the office.

Except the head honcho at PNK shows Charlie and Seever that they were beating Initiative 38 four votes to one. So if the bill wasn’t a threat, then there was no reason to kill the victim was there? The detectives are at a standstill in the investigation so they go back to visit Howard and try to get some more information. Then Howard drops a bomb…literally. Yeah, they show up at his house and find Howard standing in his empty house holding a ticking bomb that’s nicely presented in a box of tasteful flowers. If you hold the wires in the box just right, the bomb doesn’t tick. But Howard is numb from holding it there for who knows how long (just like poor Danny Glover in the classic toilet bomb scene from Lethal Weapon 2). Seever takes his place and Charlie keeps her calm until the bomb squad arrives and does their thing. The upside is that there was a clue with the bomb, a card that reads “Who’s the little one now?

Charlie and Seever go to the victim’s office and speak to her red-haired manager Ella, who quickly tells them that “little one” was the nickname of the victim’s younger sister. Turns out they had a ‘falling out’ as they say a little over a year ago and hadn’t spoken since because the younger sister was a raving degenerate fruitcake who did more drugs than Tony Montana and became a park ranger. Maybe she’s a colleague of Smokey the Bear! At any rate, she sounds like a likely suspect (maybe too likely a suspect, if you get my drift). The detectives drive out to the countryside to see her and are met by a reception of rifle fire. They manage to subdue the park ranger, who claims that someone came on the radio and told her that the person who killed her sister was coming to kill her. Yes, there are characters like that in Life and in life.

But even though she may be a little nutty, Charlie doesn’t buy it. He can tell that Little One clearly loved her sister and he suspects that the falling out was engineered. Suffice it to say that Charlie’s investigation takes him full circle, and I’ll leave you with the caveat that you should never trust a redhead because they’re all nuttier than a Snickers bar.

The B storyline consists of Charlie coming to Tidwell with his concerns about his partner Dani Reese being in trouble and not being with the real FBI. Charlie and Tidwell don’t have an easy relationship. Tidwell knows Charlie has off-the-books investigations and while he doesn’t stop him, Tidwell doesn’t condone what he’s doing. But they both clearly care about Reese and will stop at nothing to find her. They go to the FBI (or is it the “FBI?”), who won’t give them anything. So Charlie commissions Ted to hire Amanda from Rayborn’s private security firm to find Reese, who hasn’t been answering her phone. She and Ted track the phone down but find it abandoned in a field, along with Reese’s gun. This looks really bad, and Charlie immediately suspects Roman Nevikov. But we’ll have to tune in next week to get the answers.

In all probability only two episodes of Life remain and I’m going to try to enjoy them as best I can and not get depressed that America would rather watch some impossibly inane reality show with Ozzie Osbourne than a brilliantly inventive, fun show that elevates and subverts its genre.

Season 2, Episode 20: Initiative 38 (originally aired April 1, 2009)

For more on Life, click here.

Wednesdays at 9/8c, NBC
Photographs courtesy of NBC Universal and IMDbPro

Charlie and Seever decide that maybe that’s a clue. Maybe someone killed the coroner because they wanted to kill his investigations. But the only notable murder the coroner was investigating was that of a celebrity chef who was found dead in his kitchen. It appears that the chef was shot in the back of the head but no bullet was found. And because there was no exit wound, it would mean that somebody would have had to have dug the bullet out of the chef’s skull. Yikes. The chef doesn’t seem to have had any enemies, but he was associated with the county’s biggest bookie. The bookie would seem to be a likely suspect, but in actuality he is so distraught over the chef’s death that he’s practically suicidal. That guy must have really been a good cook.

Charlie finds a discrepancy between the front page photo of the dead chef and the crime scene photos: in the front page photo there is a clear puddle under his hand, but in the crime scene photos there is only blood. No puddle. So Charlie and Seever question the photographer, Kathy. Kathy claims she used her winning smile to charm the cops into letting her get that close to the dead chef’s body. I could buy that if Emily Deschanel were saying it, but I don’t buy it for this Kathy person…and neither does Charlie. But without giving away the details, Charlie learns that the chef actually wasn’t murdered, so Kathy goes off the suspect radar for a while.

From there, the investigation goes in typically unpredictable, wonderfully bizarre directions, including after-hours goth morgue shindigs and pregnancy hormones. This is what Life does like no other show on tv: take a familiar genre and somehow manage to consistently put a fresh, fun, entertaining spin on it.

Meanwhile, Ted has another meeting with his daughter that leads to two hilarious and heartfelt scenes that made me laugh out loud. And the rising suspicion that has been building separately between Charlie and Reese is resolved in a really satisfying way, demonstrating the power of trust between partners, something we all should aspire to. But Charlie finds out from former enemy now tentative ally Agent Bodner that Reese’s little FBI detail is not what it appears to be, and the end of the episode gives reason to believe that Reese might be heading for some serious trouble.

The one thing I miss in Life lately is Rachel. It seems like she has been gone for a long time now and I have no idea where she is or what she’s up to. I can’t believe it has been almost a full season for Life. I’m not ready for it to end, and I’m hoping against hope that it miraculously gets a third season. Seriously, it’s such a brilliant show, I can’t understand why nobody watches it. Please please watch the last remaining episodes of the season so we can try to spike ratings. If you get nothing out of them, I will give you my firstborn child.

Season 2, Episode 19: 5 Quarts (originally aired March 25, 2009)

For more on Life, click here.

Wednesdays at 9/8c, NBC
Photographs courtesy of NBC Universal and IMDbPro

I guess I shouldn’t begrudge a show for having a formula, as that’s what the whole cornerstone of network tv is. Even Life, which I rave about, has a formula (although it’s a much more creative, innovative formula). But somehow Chuck just annoys me. I think the writing has really gotten lazy, or they’ve just run out of ideas. The charm of the cast can’t cover up how lame the storylines are anymore.

As we begin this week, Chuck is still trying to find this Orion character that has the ability to potentially get the Intersect out of his head, meaning Chuck could go back to his normal life. My question is why would he want it? The guy’s a loser. He’s so madly in love with Sarah, why wouldn’t he want to stay around her? If he loses the Intersect, he loses her. He lives with his sister, he works at an electronics store…is he really missing that much? I think dodging bullets is a small price to pay, but that’s me. Chuck does however suspect general Beckman of not really pursuing finding Orion, and rightfully so. As we learn later on, she is not exactly a beacon of light and justice.

Chuck continues to conduct his own investigation, using some internet voodoo he has cooked up. And he succeeds somehow. Orion contacts him through his computer from Hong Kong, though their conversation is interrupted by Fulcrum agents. These baddies are everywhere! This time around, the head honcho is played by Arnold Vosloo, who always plays a villain. His best roles were in Hard Target and Blood Diamond. Here he’s just slumming it.

Orion contacts Chuck again at the Buy More and tells him that he is sending a next generation, super-potent computer to Chuck there. Except, because we’re at the Buy More, you know some ridiculous shenanigans are going to ensue. This time, Lester somehow intercepts the computer and mistakes it for some new video game deal that Buy More is supposed to be getting. The fact that Buy More is getting this computer irks a rival Buy More, so the B storyline involves the two Buy Mores waging covert wars on each other, with different teams trying to break in and do damage. Tony Hale continues to be a waste on this show. His character isn’t funny, no matter how hard the writers try to make him be that way.

This is an especially weak episode, the only strong point being that Sarah realizes that Beckman isn’t a saint and doesn’t have Chuck’s interests at heart. She starts to question her orders and considers fighting back against the general. That could possibly build to some interesting tension in the last remaining episodes, which the show could desperately use. I keep hearing how the writers have all this wild, “game-changing” stuff planned for the remaining Chuck episodes. All I can say is, I”ll believe it when I see it.

Season 2, Episode 17: Chuck vs. The Predator (originally aired March 23, 2009)

For more on Chuck, click here.

Mondays at 8/7C on NBC

Photographs courtesy of NBC Universal and Adam Taylor

Imagine his surprise when, after going to all the trouble of breaking into the guy’s house and getting past his security guards…because rich video game designers have their own security teams I guess…he discovers that there is an Active there on an engagement with Mynor! And it’s not just any Active…it’s Echo, or as Ballard knows her, Caroline. Ballard has been looking to save Caroline from the Dollhouse since the beginning, and now he has his chance. He is so shocked to see her that he lets his guard down. More security guards come and attack him. Ballard eventually takes them all out in the episode’s first fantastic fight sequence, but in the chaos, Langton arrives and whisks her away, back to the Dollhouse.

That leaves Ballard alone with the Mynor. Ballard tries to get everything he can out of him, using threats and intimidation, but they both know he has nothing to arrest him on. Mynor explains why he hires an Active on the same day every year. He recounts the sad story of how his wife supported him for years while he was struggling to design games, and when he finally hit it big, he bought a house to surprise her, but on her way over, she was sideswiped by a garbage truck. So now he hires an Active on that day every year and pretends it is his wife so he can surprise her with the house. This guy is the first Dollhouse client yet that you can feel any sympathy for, though he’s still a little sick.

Mynor compares his obsession to Ballard’s obsession for finding Caroline, saying that he doesn’t just want to bring down the Dollhouse but that he specifically wants to save her-a hero complex. You get the sense that Ballard secretly questions whether this guy is right or not. Is he in love with Caroline/Echo? To distract himself from answering that question, Ballard goes home and sleeps with his neighbor Millie, who has been after him for weeks. And he starts telling her details of his case, which I’m pretty sure FBI guys aren’t supposed to do.

Back at the Dollhouse, Sierra is acting weird and screams when Victor touches her shoulder. The doctor examines her and sees that she has had sex since her last engagement, so naturally, everyone suspects Victor. Everyone except Langton, who sets up a sting to catch the real molester/rapist scum bag. Ms. Dewitt then sets up a plan to reprogram Echo to come face to face with Ballard again, but this time she will be designed to kill him. Brace yourself for another truly excellent fight scene. You can tell they put a lot of effort into shooting that baby.

There are two big twists in the episode, one of which suggests rather strongly that there may be an inside man in the Dollhouse organization who can help Ballard. But it’s still very murky, and I don’t want to ruin any of the fun surprises the episode has in store for those who haven’t seen it yet. The episode also takes a play from the Life playback and intercuts various interviews with people on the street talking about whether they think the Dollhouse is real or not and what the implications are.

Dollhouse took a big leap forward this time around, and for the first time I am truly looking forward to seeing how it develops from here.

Season 1, Episode 6: Man On The Street (originally aired March 20, 2009)

For more on Dollhouse, click here.

Fridays at 9/8C on Fox

Photographs courtesy of Fox and IMDbPro

The ex-con thinks he can take Charlie because he survived prison. Little does he know that Charlie did too. Charlie wins the fight and puts a knife to his throat. Not standard police protocol, but Charlie isn’t a standard cop. At the end of his eventful elevator ride, Charlie meets his interim partner, an attractive detective named Jane Seever (Gabrielle Union). As she tells Charlie, Seever used to be a lawyer and now she’s a cop—two of the steps in her fifteen-year plan to become mayor.

The victim’s name is Sally, and she was beaten to death with a golf club and her apartment was trashed. At the station, Charlie and Seever interrogate her suspected killer John. John insists that even though Sally’s blood was on his boots and he was trying to flee the scene of the crime, Sally was dead before he got there. So why was he there? Well John tells Charlie that Sally wrote to him while he was in prison and they were dating. Charlie gets Jane out of the room so he can go one-on-one with this guy. They’re both ex-cons, Charlie can get in this guy’s head in a way that someone who hasn’t served time can’t. He asks if John wrote to anyone else while he was in prison, though he already knows the answer is yes.

John says he wrote to another woman in prison but stopped when he got out. Jane starts proving her worth by tracking down who this other woman is. Woman #2 is Amy, one of those religious fruities who take it upon themselves to save poor unfortunate souls. Amy was initially angry that John gave her the cold shoulder for another woman, but she decided she wanted him to be happy and let him be. Charlie notes though that she would have done anything for John, and John didn’t call her when he was arrested. So who would he have chosen to call over Amy?

The answer is Nina, woman #3. Nina is a playwright who also wrote to John every day while he was in prison, but she claims she didn’t hear from him either after he got out. When he called her, she hung up on him in six seconds. But now Charlie tells her that she has to be careful, because John was transferred and is now free. Charlie tells her that if he calls her, she has to keep him on the phone this time.

Meanwhile, Jane finds out that John was in prison for a diamond heist he committed with a partner. She goes with Crews to meet the partner, who is also in prison and is expecting a conjugal visit when he runs into them. The detectives ask if he knows where the diamonds are, but the guy says that both he and John thought the other one had them. They do find out though that Sally wrote to John’s partner too. As it turns out, Sally was the court reporter during John and his partner’s trial. So maybe Sally found out where the stolen diamonds were hidden. If Amy wanted to save John and Sally wanted his diamonds, what did Nina want? The answer to that question is the key to solving the case.

Meanwhile, Charlie and Reese both begin to get suspicious of each other. Each knows the other one met with Rayborn shortly before he died but they don’t know the other one knows they know. This is a bold, interesting dynamic to introduce into their partnership after they have been through so much together. The conspiracy keeps building and I’m more curious and invested in these characters than ever. I can’t believe the second season is winding down. Gabrielle Union is a nice addition to the show, and the cases are as intricate and offbeat as ever. I truly truly truly hope Life somehow miraculously gets a third season.

Season 2, Episode 18: 3 Women (originally aired March 18, 2009)

For more on Life, click here.

Wednesdays at 9/8c, NBC
Photographs courtesy of NBC Universal

At the beach, Crews kneels over the dead guy’s body, pondering where he might have put his key since he had no pockets.  He pulls out a key to the motel, Sea Sprite, from under the victim’s hat.  Crews and Bobby find military gear, including a very small pair of boots that likely belong to a female, in the motel room.  They exit the room to find themselves surrounded by three people who had been lounging by the pool earlier.  Crews and Bobby take out their guns and order the three to put their hands up and get down on their knees.  The three suspects shared the motel room with the victim, Travis Slocum.  It turns out all four were soldiers who had served in Iraq and were supposedly in L.A. for Operation Fun in the Sun.  Tidwell and Crews are both suspicious about a woman sharing a motel room with three men, along with the fact the soldiers had left their dog tags behind.  All the clues point to a possible argument over the female soldier, which may have led to violence.  But video surveillance playback of Slocum’s stabbing on the boardwalk reveals that he was quickly stabbed after walking past people who were fighting and creating other distractions. The people on the boardwalk later turn out to be street performers who later admit they were paid $100 by an unidentifiable man in a hoodie who asked them to do performance art on the boardwalk timed perfectly with the stabbing.  To complicate matters, Crews and Bobby follow the female suspect, Marion, to her part time security job on a private jet for Chem Tech.  The dead body of a junkie and Desert Storm veteran found later and a bowl of mutated grapes found in his fridge lead to a murderer that is not a jilted lover, but a high tech game of military sabotage.

Reese, not completely MIA despite being holed up answering questions for the FBI, still manages to help Crews with his case by occasionally calling in.  Ms. Purrier returns to a rude awakening when she finds Crews has caught onto her little spy games with Ted.  With a little help from a techie geek also named Ted who helps hack into the Purrier database, Crews and Ted are able to convince Ms. Purrier to release the Rayborn records to them so that Crews can find out what happened.

Season 2, Episode 17: Shelf Life (originally aired March 11, 2009)

For another review of this episode, read No Day At The Beach by Cameron Cubbison here.

For more on Life, click here.

Wednesdays at 9/8c, NBC
Photographs courtesy of NBC Universal

With a little work, Crews and Stark learn the victim was staying in a nearby hotel with three friends—two guys, one woman—who are all soldiers on leave. They claim to have all been sitting by the pool when their friend went out for his usual run, and Crews doesn’t have any real reason to suspect any of them. He is however, suspicious of their reason for being at the beach in the first place. They claim they’re on vacation, but Crews learns that they’re really there moonlighting as security guards…an Army no-no.

See there’s a service run by a nerdy Army reject kid (only on Life) that provides enlisted soldiers with private security gigs. This service is booming because soldiers make less than minimum wage on duty and need the money. The victim was doing security for a private corporation called Chem-X-Tech. Crews tracks down the head honcho who seems like not all his dogs are barking. The guy fervently denies that the victim’s death had anything to do with his work for Chem-X-Tech. Sure, that’s what they all say.

Crews goes back to the drawing board and thanks to a little long-distance interaction with Reese, he has a breakthrough. He looks through the victim’s duffel bag and amidst the dirty clothes and medals there is a lightweight bulletproof vest from his days in Iraq. Crews looks at it and sees that it was made by Chem-X-Tech. So the same guy the victim was supposed to protect was in charge of protecting him in Iraq. Coincidence? Not in a murder investigation.

Crews confronts the Chem-X-Tech CEO who tells him that the vests were too expensive for the government to buy for soldiers (like Batman’s body armor in Batman Begins!), so he gave some to a few select units. And to prove how effective they are, Mr. CEO puts on one of the vests and shoots himself in the chest at point-blank range three times. Not a scratch. So then where did the victim’s medal come from?

Crews realizes that it wasn’t the victim’s but a fifth member of the squad who was killed by a sniper in Iraq. He was shot in the chest and was wearing a vest, so shouldn’t he have survived? Crews and Stark go back to Mr. CEO to confront him, only to find that the remaining squad members are there to kill him. Why? Because the vests only have a shelf life of two years due to the chemicals involved, but the CEO lied and told the military they worked for five. But they can’t get the CEO to confess to killing the victim on the boardwalk and engineering the whole thing. So Crews and Stark say they will march him down the hallway where the squad waits to shoot him but he’ll be fine because they’ll let him wear the victim’s three-year-old vest so he will be bulletproof right? That does the trick.

We also learn that the whole story of Ted falling for Rayborn’s security lady Amanda and letting her snoop around Crews’ house (which had me mystified and cursing Ted last week) was a setup! Crews and Ted were in on it the whole time and are now blackmailing Amanda into showing them all of her security footage so Crews can figure out whether or not Rayborn really is dead and if so, who killed him? And the last shot hints that someone you never would have expected might have had something to do with it.

This is a fantastic episode with a typically original murder investigation, no easy feat when every other show on tv is a procedural.

Season 2, Episode 17: Shelf Life (originally aired March 11, 2009)

For another take on this episode, read Operation Fun in the Sun by Elma Rahman here.

For more on Life, click here.

Wednesdays at 9/8c, NBC
Photographs courtesy of NBC Universal

Chuck meanwhile wakes up facing his own particular brand of torture: having to sleep in the same bed as Sarah when nothing is going on between them. I don’t know which form is worse. They apparently have to live together as cover because with Cole in the open, Chuck has to be protected around the clock. This is great news to Ellie, who was devastated when it appeared that Chuck was going to move in with Morgan. The problem is, Chuck has yet to tell Morgan that their uh…union…has been cancelled indefinitely.

At the Buy More, Chuck is about to tell Morgan the bad news when Casey whisks him away to the underground headquarters beneath the yogurt shop across the street. He tells Chuck that they need to take him to a secure location. But then an alarm sounds! Someone has infiltrated the base! Casey grabs his automatic weapon and stands poised. The door opens to reveal…Cole! He has escaped! And he claims he didn’t tell Fulcrum anything! Maybe Chuck doesn’t have to go into hiding after all.

Sarah questions however why Cole came back here after he escaped. Smooth MI6 man says that he came back to make sure Sarah was okay. How sweet. Speaking of sweet (or screwed, depending on which way you look at it), Anna discovers a fax of Morgan’s showing an apartment listing and thinks he is surprising her by having them move in together. Yikes. Time to cut the string on that one. Jeff and Lester come to Morgan’s aid, offering to teach Morgan in the art of repulsing women…an art they have fully mastered. Hence the Buy More B storyline.

Meanwhile, back in Spy Land, General Beckman informs everyone that their new mission is to capture a Fulcrum agent named Perseus. I didn’t quite grasp the connection to the mythic Greek hero, but maybe I’m just not as smart as the show’s writers. Apparently this dude is the lead scientist in charge of rebuilding the Intersect for Fulcrum. And this guy is going to be at some nondescript social function. Sarah and Casey are to go undercover and try to extract him while Chuck and Cole hole up in the underground bunker and watch via spy feed.

But Casey and Sarah are made by Fulcrum almost immediately (so even the professionals screw up sometimes). It’s time for Cole and Chuck to team up for a rescue mission. Cole even gives Chuck a gun, and I gotta say, even I started rooting for Chuck to shoot some bad guys and finally kick some ass. I’m not saying Chuck had to suddenly enter a John Woo movie, but a little shooting to save Sarah would have been pretty cool. Chuck has to take the lead because Cole is bleeding from his previous wounds and can’t do a whole bunch of acts of derring-do.

Chuck finds Sarah and Casey and tries to signal them from outside a window. Casey sees Chuck locked and loaded and knows he’s a dead man. But somehow Chuck manages to fire off a shot before getting stuck in the window ledge and twisting his ankle. The bullet hits the Perseus guy (played by Robert Picardo, a regular on Star Trek: Voyager and Stargate SG-1) in the leg. And more hijinks ensue from there.

Sarah and Chuck have a couple of nice scenes together that establish that there is still a possibility they will get together. And at the very end of the episode, Chuck takes down his celebrated Tron poster to reveal on the back that he has not been passive this whole time but has been making a complex diagram of the Fulcrum conspiracy, who the major players are, and how to get the Intersect out of his head. In other words, the writers of Chuck completely ripped off the writers of Life, an infinitely better and more creative NBC show…that will also be cancelled, just like Life on Mars and any show that isn’t America’s Next Top Gigolo or Dancing with the Degenerates.

Season 2, Episode 16: Chuck vs. The Lethal Weapon (originally aired March 9, 2009)

For more on Chuck, click here.

Mondays at 8/7C on NBC

Photographs courtesy of NBC Universal and Christ Haston

Pictures of Rafts with several girlfriends reveal he was a chronic dater and further investigations reveal that his dates were escorts.  Perhaps strangest of all was the fact that he was a pigeon fancier, aka a person who raises pigeon for show.  Never mind the question “Who does that?,”  during the investigation of Rafts’ apartment, Tidwell approaches Reese to let her know the FBI has taken an interest in her and requests that she be “loaned out to them” for one of their cases.  Tidwell and Crews give Reese the verbal equivalent of a huge pat on the back and encourage her to take the opportunity.  Meanwhile, Bobby fills in as a very mediocre replacement for Reese as Crews’ sidekick.

Rafts’ eccentric lifestyle reveal a whole medley of suspects, including slighted escorts, a set of twin nerds and pigeon fancying competitors, and lastly, a mysterious escort, Alexa, who had recently become Rafts’ exclusive girlfriend and who also had a healthy interest in the world of pigeon breeding.  Bobby and Crews interview those who could possibly identify Alexa on the surveillance tape of Rafts’ apartment elevator.  But Brenda Trill, Alexa’s madam, and the pigeon expert she had recently visited have a hard time pinpointing the elusive chameleon.  Even more mysterious is the fact that other escorts reported Rafts to be a generous tipper who payed his fees on time, despite the fact that the derivatives bubbles had burst a while ago and it was doubtful Rafts was still paying for his expensive apartment and extracurricular activities as a financial advisor.

At some secret FBI location, Reese answers a set of intense questions, including suspicious questions about her father and Crews.  Things only get more intense as they hook her up to a polygraph machine and continue.  Reese begins to wonder what questions about her father and Crews have to do with her “helping” the FBI with a current case.  Hmmm, looks like she was unsuspectingly recruited to help the FBI with the current case of the missing Rayborn.  And speaking of Rayborn, Amanda Purrier struts into Ted’s classroom, posing as an eager teacher’s pet.  Again, Purrier rolls some tobacco and tries to smoke a cigarette in Ted’s classroom when he tells her she can’t.  She suggests they go somewhere where she can, so he takes her to his place where she sneaks upstairs and takes pictures of Crews’ Conspiracy Theory wall.

Crews and Bobby eventually realize Alexa was possibly a hitwoman and track her pigeon to the cute, little blue beach house where the owner, a pretty blonde, sweeps the porch.  Crews notices she has a broom.  The woman’s name is Claudia, and she is a personal chef.  When they take her downtown for questioning, she brings a huge bag with her because she likes to be prepared, and excitedly tells them she has never been in a police car before.  She has Crews turn on the siren.  The madam, the twins, and the pigeon expert aren’t certain that Claudia is Alexa.  They release Claudia who hands Crews a bag of her homemade cookies and leaves.  Crews pays a little visit to Claudia and notices scratches on the back of her neck while she tries to give him a little lesson on chopping onions.  Later, Crews tries to get a DNA warrant for Claudia while Bobby stakes out her house.  As police cars rush to arrest her, Bobby sneaks inside the house where Claudia spits a pill into his mouth.  The lethal pill, she admits, was made from mushrooms she grew under her sink and first cause paralysis then go to the lungs, heart, and finally the brain.  As Bobby becomes paralyzed, she gives him a speech on how “most underestimate the value of things found in the home” and whips out a broom stick.  But Crews is on the scene, so she throws down the broomstick and flees.  But Crews has a few homeopathic tricks up his sleeve as well.

This week’s episode titled, “Hit Me Baby,” is a perfect example of how the show won over a strong fan base while defying the network executive decision for cancellation.  Refreshing plots, unique characters, and well crafted dialogue were just some of the reasons Life fans were adamant about not seeing the show’s untimely demise.  However, I found myself often wishing the show could have kept momentum as far as exciting plots, yet the plots were choppy and inconsistent at best.  Other inconsistencies included a lineup of revolving and often uninteresting cast members, including Rachel and more recently, Ted’s long lost daughter who has no desire to have any relationship with him whatsoever.  Ah well, hopefully the show will finally be able to give us some concrete answers instead of teasing us along with vague conjectures about the Conspiracy Theory and what happened to Rayborn before going off to the land of inopportunely cancelled TV shows.

Season 2, Episode 16: Hit Me Baby (originally aired February 25, 2009)

For another take on Life, check out For the Birds by Cameron Cubbison.

For more on Life, click here.

Wednesdays at 9/8c, NBC
Photographs courtesy of NBC Universal

Wagner was lead singer of Hot Lead, a cover band for Heavy Calibre.  Wagner’s voice was eerily similar to Heavy Calibre’s lead singer, Jude Hayes, who became a rock legend after dying mysteriously many years before.  Obsessed fans, a womanizing band member and drug toting dentist, a Hot Lead audition reject, and a welder who claimed he was the next Jude Hayes all compete as possible suspects.

And on the personal front, Crews receives a visit from his father who says Olivia has left him and will not marry him until he resolves his issues with his son.  Ted admits he’s still in love with Olivia, and Crews asks him to tell Olivia instead of constantly telling him.  The conspiracy theory still eats away at Crews.  And while Ted remains in limbo about his love for Olivia, Tidwell and Reese’s relationship heats up as Reese rewards Tidwell for giving up his booze for her.

Meanwhile as they go over the case, Tidwell wishes he had been a rock star, and after Crews asks him what his band name would have been, he and Reese blurt out simultaneously, The Tidwells.  And who could blame Tidwell for wanting to don heavy make-up, a big hair wig, tight pants—hopefully in a leopard skin print—and rock out with the chanting of fans and groupies who wave their flaming lighters from side to side?  This week’s episode ends on a vague, Eddie and the Cruisers style note with Crews and Reese kind of solving their case. And what could be a more appropriate ode to the age of the rock ballad, but having White Snake’s “Here I Go Again” playing during the closing scene, as Wagner’s murderer is taken away in handcuffs while implying he may be the not so deceased Jude Hayes…  I think I’ll go put another dime in the jukebox, baby.

Season 2, Episode 14: Mirror Ball (oriringally aired February 11, 2009)

For another take on this episode, read Hot Lead by Cameron Cubbison.

For more on Life, click here.

Wednesdays at 9/8c, NBC
Photographs courtesy of www.nbc.com

The Charlie Crews conspiracy is the hook of the show, and no Life fan would say differently. It is what sets the show apart from every other cop and procedural show on the air…and there are a lot of ‘em. Life is a fantastic show that somehow you have missed the boat on from the beginning. You have offered faint praise at best from time to time, so I wish you would just leave it alone.

As for episode 2.14, it’s fantastic, fun, eccentric, and unpredictable…the very qualities Life almost always captures in spades. Charlie and Reese are called to investigate the death of a guy named Mitch, who was the lead singer for Hot Lead, the cover band for fictional 80s KISS-esque band Heavy Caliber. (The rock star that Mitch spent his life impersonating was Jude Hays).  They arrive at the crime scene—the club the band played at the night before—and examine the body, though Charlie is initially more caught up in thinking of a nickname for Reese, much to her irritation. With a little solid police work, the detective duo discovers that Mitch was suffocated with a big piece of plastic, which now has his face, makeup and all, permanently imprinted on it. Yet again Life’s writers have devised a creative and very visual death scene.

Naturally, Charlie and Reese first suspect the other band members, one of which is a dentist who keeps a tally on the wall of his office detailing how many groupies he has bedded…what an upstanding citizen. It’s logicalthey would suspect the other band members. After all, how many bands—cover or not—get along famously all of the time? Alas, all members seem to have alibis.

Charlie and Reese then go after Tyler, who used to fill Mitch’s spot in the band until he tried to sing one of his own songs on stage and the fans revolted and the band kicked him out. Kind of like Ringo I guess. Tyler spent a few months in the slammer for assaulting Mitch previously, but was released and is nowhere to be found.

So how do you find an M.I.A. rock star impersonator? Simple: you hire every single one in the city to come to your house and play for you. At least that’s what Charlie does, and it’s a perfect excuse to have a classic Life absurdist montage. Fake after fake come to the Casa de Charlie, and while Tyler doesn’t show up, Emma does. Emma tried out for the band years ago but was laughed down because she is a girl. And she works at the club where Mitch was killed. And she has a pet rabbit. And she has a fetish for plastic wrap. She sounds like not all her dogs are barking, but it couldn’t be her. And it couldn’t be Tyler either, because life and Life are rarely that simple.

All I will say is that when the whodunit guy is revealed, it’s stranger than ever. And that’s a good thing. It’s a great murder mystery, and the episode has other plusses too: Charlie has another run-in with his dad, whom he “accidentally” shot in the leg a few episodes back, and hopes for Ted stealing Olivia away from Charlie’s dad improve. Woo hoo! We also get another glimpse at the conspiracy wall and a sweet moment between Reese and Tidwell. And the episode will make you never see Sharpie markers in the same way again. If you need any more reasons to watch an episode of television then you’re s.o.l.

Season 2, Episode 14: Mirror Ball (oriringally aired February 11, 2009)

For another take on this episode, read I Love Rock N’ Roll by Elma Rahman.

For more on Life, click here.

Wednesdays at 9/8c, NBC
Photographs courtesy of www.nbc.com

Hopefully someone besides me still watches the show. If they do, then they know that the last episode of 2008 ended with the socko cliffhanger of Charlie getting shot in his front doorway by a mystery man. This episode begins with Charlie bathed in white light, and for a second, because this show is so offbeat and inventive, I actually thought he might be dead, and the show would continue with Charlie from beyond the grave. But it turns out Charlie survived, much to the relief of his partner Dani Reese, not that she would ever show it. The downside is, Charlie claims he can’t remember who shot him.

After eight weeks, Charlie gets out of the hospital and makes sure he gets to hold on to the bullet that nearly killed him. The doctor says it’s an odd request, but Charlie is an odd guy. Actually, as he explains it, keeping the bullet makes a lot of sense: “Well, someone gave it to me. It would be rude just to throw it away.” Oh yes, Charlie clearly has plans for this bullet (side note: in every other glowing review I wrote of this show, I referred to Charlie Crews by his last name, but I have now decided to forsake continuity and call him by his first name, because I feel closer to him than ever…deal with it).

Charlie’s plans have to wait though, because he returns to active duty and is presented with another impossible murder case: a retired Space Shuttle pilot named William Ellis is found shot to death after managing to land his private plane. Was it suicide or murder? No one else was in the plane when it landed, and no gun was found. But if it was suicide, why didn’t he just crash his plane? Turns out Ellis was rich too, as he started a rocket fuel company that went big after he retired. He was even planning to go into space again. Didn’t sound like suicide to me, and Charlie felt the same way.

Ellis’s son works at his father’s company…as the garbage man. He seems like a good suspect at first, but he turns out to be a nerd who spends all his time with other nerds flying model airplanes, being afraid of heights himself. Charlie and Reese have to look elsewhere. They start with Ellis’s right hand man at the company, who tells him that about a year ago, Ellis returned from climbing K-2 with his partner but didn’t seem the same. They keep investigating and find out that an incident just like the one in Touching The Void (2003) occurred between Ellis and his climbing partner. Did the climbing partner do it? Well as viewer(s) know, life in Life is never that simple.

I don’t want to ruin the episode for anyone, but let met just say that Charlie keeps fighting to get wrongfully imprisoned Ted out of prison and puts his souvenir bullet to immensely satisfying use. We also learn a new dimension to love-to-hate Agent Bodner. As usual, there are more than a few lines of very funny, memorable dialogue, and the plotting is incredibly creative and artful, written at the caliber of a dynamite movie script. Damian Lewis, Sarah Shahi, Adam Arkin, and Donal Logue remain in peak form. There is no better group of actors working on a better show on network tv. Please watch the show and keep it on the air. Please. That’s it until next week, when hopefully we’ll get an update on Rachel, Rayborn and Roman…there’s some alliteration even Charlie would be proud of.

Season 2, Episode 13: Re-Entry (originally aired February 4, 2009)

For more on Life, click here.

Wednesdays at 9/8c on NBC
Photographs courtesy of NBC

The major trend with scripted tv now is the age of antiheroes.  Shows like The Shield and Damages (every show on FX), and Mad Men and Breaking Bad and The Sopranos and on and on.  These are shows where not only are the protagonists flawed, but they may be without any redeeming quality.  These shows make you question whether or not you should feel anything at all for the characters.  I’m a big fan of a lot of those shows, and I’m in awe of the complexity and layers of the writing.  I understand the trend and I’m all for it.  But you know what?  Sometimes it’s nice to watch stories where the protagonists are good guys, they’re heroes who band together with their loyal friends to right wrongs and restore justice.  Creator Matt Nix and star Jeffrey Donovan get that and they take it to heart.

Michael Westen is a complex character with a fascinatingly layered past, and his relationships are nuanced and evolving…but everyone who watches the show knows that he is the good guy, and that’s fun damn it!  Look at the age we’re living in people, we need heroes to believe in, bona fide heroes who aren’t secretly corrupt or child molesters.  If people don’t respect that and don’t like the idea of having Michael helping a new client every week as the A story and trying to figure out who burned him as the B story (though in this case, the B story is the emotional hook of the show, very similar to the way NBC’s Life is set up), then stop watching the show.  There are plenty of other shows to watch.  But don’t criticize a show for unabashedly being what it is.  I mean I don’t want to watch Desperate Housewives because of the show that it is…so I  made the radical decision not to watch Desperate Housewives. It was a complex, wrenching decision, but I sure hope I can get over it through counseling.

Okay, enough of that.  Let’s talk about the new episode, which begins with Michael and Fiona teaming up to find out who planted the bomb that nearly killed Michael.  Logically, they check the security cameras of the business along the river near his loft.  In a typically funny scene, Michael obtains the footage by posing as a security systems technician from the firm that installed the cameras, complete with hillbilly accent.  After looking at the tape, he spots a guy who he thinks could be The Guy.

Meanwhile, Sam comes along and offers Michael free tickets to a Dolphins game.  Michael has known his friend long enough to know that there is a catch, and there is.  Sam needs Michael to help him do a favor for Shawn Martin, who played for the team in the 90s and is now a local high school football coach.  It seems that Corey, one of Michael’s players, got into an altercation with Felix, a local gangster who now wants him dead.  Felix took Corey’s little sister Tanya for a ride and attacked her.  She escaped, and Corey went after him with a baseball bat.

Before Michael can get to work, Carla shanghais him to an “informal” meeting (informal meaning she doesn’t tie him to a chair and threaten to harm his family).  She asks him how his investigation of the bomber is coming and says that the bomb meant for Michael was made with the same material as the bombs that killed the other targets.  Michael asks who those targets are but she won’t tell him.

Michael remains ambivalent about helping Corey, thinking the police are better suited.  But he is persuaded by Fiona, who is bubbling over with rage about the whole incident.  Their plan is to put Felix out of the car theft business and force him out of Miami.  They do this by dressing in uniform with Sam and pretending to be representatives of a big, nefarious agency (of course they also cause some mayhem including pepper grenades and thermite, a good combo).  These antics-which include Michael demonstrating how to bullet proof your car with phonebooks-are a lot of fun to watch, but the real highlight of the episode comes on the Michael/Fiona relationship front.

They talk about when they first met, when Michael was undercover in Dublin pretending to be an operative named Michael McBride.  Fiona wonders aloud whether or not she fell in love with Michael or his cover, and Michael replies that he wouldn’t be surprised if it was the cover.  Speaking in the Irish brogue, he says matter-of-factly, “You become who you need to be.”  There’s a sadness in that line, and we get a wonderfully piercing window into the loneliness that must be inherent in doing that kind of work, and why Michael can’t fully commit to his feelings for Fiona.

There’s an even better scene which involves Michael finding out Fiona is alive after thinking she was dead.  Donovan and Gabrielle Anwar are phenomenal in that scene, and I will leave the pleasure of it for people to discover by themselves.  Until next week…

Season 2, Episode 11: Hot Spot (originally aired January 29, 2009)

For another take on this episode, check out Possible Side Effects by Paul Secrest.

For more on Burn Notice, click here.

Thursdays at 10/9c on USA

Photographs courtesy of USA

But solving the case isn’t easy when you have difficulty identifying victims whose fingerprints have been removed, one sleazy Russian mobster suspect no one wants to mess with, and an FBI agent doing everything in his power to keep Crews and Reese off Nevikov’s back.  Eventually, they are able to get a partial fingerprint on one of the suspects and identify the third guy as Paul, an engineer.

On the personal front, Crews accidentally shoots a man running through his house.  Turns out it’s his father there to get Crews to come to his wedding—considering his track record of being around when people get murdered, it really doesn’t look very good for him.  Dani falls off the wagon at Tidwell’s when she sneaks some vodka he has stashed in the fridge, as Tidwell yells from the shower that he can’t believe Crews shot his own father.    And poor Ted is still stuck in the slammer courtesy of Agent Bodner, but on the bright side, Crews is able to keep some prisoners in his pocket who act as Ted’s personal bodyguards.

Despite her return to drinking and Crews sniffing alcohol on her breath, Dani and Crews are able to crack their case when they figure out the Russian password Paul left on the electronic toy Nevikov always seems to keep by his side.  They are able to discover the details of the murder, including the location under Nevikov’s club where he’s keeping several people and policemen hostage.  As usual, while I found the murders and the subplot of Nevikov holding all those people hostage extremely confusing, I was still pretty stunned when Crews goes to answer his front door thinking it’s Olivia but instead gets a shot to the shoulder from an unidentified person.  Looks like Life viewers—like Crews—will have to wait until the show’s return in February for the answer to the dangerous twelve-year-old question that just put a bullet in Charlie Crews.

Season 2, Episode 12: Trapdoor (originally aired December 17, 2008)

For another take on this episode, read Take that, Lost by Cameron Cubbison.

For more on Life, click here.

Wednesdays at 9/8c on NBC
Photographs courtesy of NBC

As for Life, the episode—which is one of the season’s best and most offbeat—begins with Crews and Reese being called to a crime scene where three Russian guys (an engineer and two construction workers) lie executed. Life has taught Crews that there are no coincidences, so he immediately thinks there is a connection to Roman Nevikov, and consequently, a connection to FBI special agent Bodner, Mickey Rayborn, Jack Reese, and all the evil men who slaughtered his friends and framed him for the crime twelve years ago.

But there appears to be no obvious connection between Roman and these guys, except Crews finds a “Pardon Our Dust” sign in Roman’s club. So Roman was doing some kind of construction in his club, and three Russian construction guys are dead. That seems solid, except that the LAPD can’t find any evidence of any construction work at the club.

Crews and Reese identify the dead engineer as a guy named Pavlo, who had an American girlfriend. According to the girlfriend, Pavlo was a sweetie who helped her with her math homework and who would never be involved in anything nefarious. The girlfriend also reveals that often on their dates, they would go to a particular coffee shop and “people watch” (remind me to try that one next time I’m out and about, it sounds like a blast). The catch is that this coffee shop looks out on a federal building that is soon to be finished. Crews and Reese think that this supposed people-watching was really some kind of recon. Clearly there was something going on between Roman and Pavlo, but Roman isn’t talking, plus he’s still protected by Bodner, who may or may not be actually working for Roman. Things get worse when Pavlo’s girlfriend—and the two LAPD officers who were watching her—go missing.

Crews and Reese more or less solve the case but get only a glimpse at what Pavlo was building for Roman. Is Roman a terrorist in addition to being a mobster? The episode doesn’t give us an easy answer, so we still have a very hazy idea of what Rayborn, Roman, and Bodner are about, how they are connected, and how all that connects to Crews. The writers keep building the conspiracy layer by layer, but I’m confident they will parcel out valuable bits of information to reward viewers when the show returns.

There’s a lot more going on in this episode. Ted is in prison on the bogus parole violation that Bodner cooked up last week. He’s about to be clobbered behind bars when a hulking beast of a man steps in to protect him. That’s right, Crews got his best friend and world-class bodyguard to protect him until Crews can get him out of there. There’s a hilarious scene where Ted uses his enforcer to make the guy that was going to beat him up give him his extra pie at lunch. Only on Life do you get wonderful little moments like these that exist outside the procedural framework.

Also, Crews sends Rachel to an undisclosed location after Roman threatens her, but not before he shoots his father in the leg after mistaking him for a burglar in his house. And Reese falls off the wagon. I haven’t even mentioned the out-of-nowhere cliffhanger the episode concludes with that left me wide-eyed and pounding the table with my fists. If you haven’t seen it already, you really need to. And if you haven’t watched Life at all (why would you do such a thing?), now is the perfect time to get caught up (the first season is eleven episodes and is available on DVD, and all of the second season can be found online). The show needs strong ratings when it returns in a couple of months if it is going to survive, and it deserves to survive. Watch the show, and if you get nothing out of it, I will give you my first-born son. Just give me your contact information and we’ll work out the details.

Season 2, Episode 12: Trapdoor (originally aired December 17, 2008)

For another review, read Who framed Charlie Crews? by Elma Rahman.

For more on Life, click here.

Wednesdays at 9/8c on NBC
Photographs courtesy of NBC

Tidwell tells Crews and Reese to keep a tight lid on the case so that it keeps from becoming a media frenzy, but when the two eccentric curators of the Museum of Murder and Mayhem, Squeaky and Tex, get involved, the press end up having a field day with the possibility that Hazlit is, indeed, very much alive.  Squeaky and Tex are just as obsessed with Crews whom Squeaky tells was two murders away from her “mass murderum” list.  Crews corrects Squeaky, telling her he was actually five murders away from making her list.  Crews, Reese, and Tidwell try to narrow in on the many suspects who could have murdered Dunlap, including the serial killer who was thought to be dead for the last thirty years, his illegitimate children, and two serial murder-obsessed museum curators.

Murderer or not, Crews’ recent conversation with an aging Rayborn has set off Agent Bodner’s radar.  Bodner threatens Crews that he’ll throw him in jail for his continued communication with Rayborn, but after realizing this has little effect on Crews, he has Ted pulled over while he is driving and thrown in jail for possession of a gun and cocaine.  Although Crews is worried, he is not giving up that easily.

Season 2, Episode 11: Canyon Flowers (originally aired December 10, 2008)

For another take on this episode, read Because the Museum of Killing and Chaos was closed by Cameron Cubbison.

For more on Life, click here.

Wednesdays at 9/8c on NBC
Photographs courtesy of NBC

Take this week’s episode of Life, “Evil… and His Brother, Ziggy,” for example.  I couldn’t wait to watch it after seeing the commercial in which Crews and partner, Dani Reese, are forced to solve a crime on a Native American reservation out in the middle of the desert.  And the crime-death of Sheriff Hawes-seemed gripping enough.  A local sheriff, hated and considered basically futile by the people living on the reservation, as they have their own tribal police and resent Hawes’ constant presence.  Because he was so disliked, everyone on the reservation is basically a suspect.  Add to it a brother and sister pair in which the brother’s name is Eval and sister’s name is Ziggy brought in to help build a new casino for the reservation, and you have a recipe for one complicated and hard to follow murder.  In fact, there were so many suspects and so many ways in which they could all be traced back to the murder victim that by the time the murderer was discovered, I really could have cared less who the murderer was or that deep down inside Sheriff Hawes had really always wanted to be an “Indian.”

To top it all off, there were the usual antics of Crews sucking in all the wonderful energy of the quiet desert while eating spoonfuls of Sheriff Hawes’ deer stew and Tidwell’s jealousy when he discovers that Reese and Crews have to share one of the available casino hotel rooms.  Mix in a couple of more scenes in which Rachel ends up spending the night at some musician guy’s apartment because she’s mad that she never knows where Crews is-even though she is always going on about him not being her uncle-and Crews paying a visit at a party on Rayborn’s penthouse rooftop deck with a pool and an amazing view overlooking L.A.  As Rayborn puts it, he and Crews are in a very small, elite group, Cops with Money.  The episode ends with Rayborn cryptically telling Crews he has a secret, and me hating the writers of the show for wasting time in the desert when we could have been learning secrets.

Season 2, Episode 10: Evil…and His Brother Ziggy (originally aired December 3, 2008)

For another take on this episode, read Eval is as Evil Does by Cameron Cubbison.

For more on Life, click here.

Wednesdays at 9/8c on NBC
Photographs courtesy of NBC

Turns out the victim, Frank, was a food bank deliveryman whom everyone loved, so Crews and Reese begin by checking out his deliveries. This brings them to an incredibly odd home just a stone’s throw from the crime scene. The tenants are a middle-aged man and woman named Flint and Maude who insist they’re only roommates and seem quite put out that neither the late Frank or the detectives have brought them food. When questioned about the murder, they claim that they stayed in all night watching tv, since it was the woman’s turn with the remote, and the man never leaves the house anyway because he fears people will steal his “stuff.” There’s clearly more to these folks than meets the eye.

Captain Tidwell orders Crews and Reese to check out the LAPD archives to find out more about Johnny Hazlit, but Crews has a better idea. Instead of wading through cold storage, they go on a field trip to a museum. The L.A. Museum of Murder and Mayhem that is, a joint that focuses on, surprisingly, murder and mayhem. They have rooms set up recreating famous crime scenes and have an entire section on Hazlit. Another odd pair own this place, Tex and Squeaky (still better than Apple and Moses). Crews and Reese look around and discover that Hazlit had eight wives and, get this, 43 kids. No wonder the guy was nuts. Each kid took their mother’s maiden name for protection, and two of them live close by: Maude and Flint.

Crews and Reese return to their home and take them in for questioning. Their alibi remains a little flimsy, but they just don’t seem like killers, not to mention why would they have killed their meal ticket? Actually, Flint had quite a connection with Frank, as Frank was the only person he told about being a Hazlit descendant.

The case takes a turn for the worse when the media somehow gets deeply involved, even though the LAPD hasn’t released any info about the Hazlit connection. At a press conference, Tidwell tries to tell the press that it’s just a routine investigation, but guess who comes strolling up squealing about how Frank was killed and who Maude and Flint are? Yep, Tex and Squeaky. They also out Flint’s son Clifton. Crews and Reese immediately take them in and treat them as suspects, out of which Tex and Squeaky get a perverse satisfaction. They claim they were at an auction for murder memorabilia and that they got their information from the LAPD, which “leaks like a sieve.” The detectives leave them alone for the time being, but they don’t get far.

Soon the detectives respond to shots fired at the museum. Tex is dead and Squeaky lies grazed and crying in the corner. When Crews asks her if she saw anything, she says that Johnny Hazlit did it. Yeah, right…the dead guy. Except his gun is lying next to the body and was used as the murder weapon. Naturally, Crews and Reese interrogate Clifton, who had motive and may have had access to the gun. But Clifton has an ironclad alibi: the media, who have been swarming him nonstop for days (hey at least they’re finally good for something). Crews and Reese have to go back to the drawing board to find out who did it. The reveal of the culprit isn’t exactly surprising, but the murderer’s motive is truly disturbing because it is all too logical.

On the conspiracy front, Crews continues to feel out Mickey Rayborn, trying to figure out what he’s all about. All he gets from Rayborn is that FBI agent Bodner, the guy who threatened to put Crews back in prison if he went after Rayborn a few episodes back, actually works for Roman, a memorable criminal from last season who the FBI took from Crews after he got him on a murder rap, claiming he works as an informant.

Bodner hasn’t harmed Crews yet, but he’s going after Ted. Everybody that watches Life loves Ted, and seeing what happens to him in this episode made me want to go hide in a corner and cry. I have no doubts though that Crews will rescue him and lay the smackdown on these rotten scumbags. Until then, that’s all folks.

Season 2, Episode 11: Canyon Flowers (originally aired December 10, 2008)

For another take on this episode, read Elma Rahman‘s review here.

For more on Life, click here.

Wednesdays at 9/8c on NBC
Photographs courtesy of NBC

This is not an easy case. For one, Crews and Reese are outsiders in a very insular community that is suspicious of strangers. Also, the suspect pool is vast; a tribal policewoman explains that no one on the reservation liked Hawes. Well no one except Anna, a young woman who brought him deer stew and had a mysterious, surrogate father/daughter relationship with him. She’s also engaged to the prime suspect Tomas, the man behind the casino. Hawes was against the casino and Tomas has a mean edge to him. But alas, he also has an alibi for the night in question.

Crews and Reese have nothing until they discover that Hawes left a message right before he died warning about evil. Had he become superstitious? Eaten too much deer stew? No, because he wasn’t actually talking about evil but Eval, a non-native who was living off the reservation and building the casino with Tomas. The detective duo go to track him down only to discover that their car has been stolen. Lucky for them though, the reservation has taxis.

Turns out Eval has a whole garage full of old muskets. He claims they’re props for the casino, but he secretly plans to make them functional and sell them. There’s more involving ghosts and birth certificates, but the investigation didn’t really hold my attention this time around. It was a good setup, but it just wasn’t fleshed out in a particularly interesting way. Still, a lesser episode of Life is still better than most things on tv.

And again with the romance crap…too much with Reese and Tidwell. It was amusing and well-played for awhile, but the writers have gone overboard with it now. There is however a very funny scene when Crews hears unquestionable evidence that they are an item. Ted pops up for a while to tell Crews that Rachel didn’t come home last night (she was with some guitar twit) and to lament that he’s in love with Olivia…Crews’ soon to be stepmom. But he really has nothing to do this time around.

As for Mickey Rayborn, I have no idea what’s going on there. Last episode’s cliffhanger involving Rayborn ostensibly kidnapping Crews is sidestepped in the beginning of the show. I don’t really understand what went down and I’m not sure I buy it. He reappears at the end of the episode to tease Crews (and us) about what he’s really up to. He’s about to explain his agenda when…the episode fades to black and the credits roll. Damn it! But that’s the job of any tv show if it’s going to be successful: make you tune in next week to see what happens. Which I will definitely do, and I hope others will join me because too many good shows are biting the dust due to people not checking them out, and this is certainly one that is worth saving.

Season 2, Episode 10: Evil…and His Brother Ziggy (originally aired December 3, 2008)

For another take on this episode, read Cowboys, Indians, and Cops with Money by Elma Rahman.

For more on Life, click here.

Wednesdays at 9/8c on NBC
Photographs courtesy of NBC

After going through the contents of Shay’s purse, the detectives come across a series of cop badge numbers with grades next to them.  At Shay’s wake, held at a local cop bar called the Lucky 7, Crews and Reese discover that Shay was actually a badge bunny, or cop groupie, who had been with several cops, including Sean Graham, a cop who was separated from his wife.   When Crews and Reese go to question Graham, they find him lying on a couch with his head on a consoling Heidi’s lap.  Graham confirms he had been seeing Shay for a while, and although the two had argued just before her death about him still wearing his wedding ring, Graham denies killing Shay.

At the bar, things heat up for Crews who is approached by a group of badge bunnies that later come over and end up skinny dipping in his up to now unused pool.  Things also heat up for Tidwell when he tries to confront Reese about whether or not she fell of the wagon at the Lucky 7.  Reese, probably trying to blow off the steam at the shooting range, asks to use Tidwell’s large gun, then ends up kissing him after the high of target practice.

After trying to arrest Bana’s drug dealer boss who later gets framed for Shay’s murder and re-tracing the night of the shooting back to a shady cop bar, Crews and Reese narrow in on a murderer that even badge bunnies and boys in blue are shocked to discover.  While it was disturbing to realize that even cops have groupies, it was nice to see Tidwell, the constant sleazy underdog, finally get a shot with Reese.

Season 2, Episode 2.9: Badge Bunny (originally aired November 19, 2008)

For another take on this episode, read “Life as a Bunny” by Cameron Cubbison here.

For more on Life, click here.

Wednesdays at 9/8c on NBC
Photographs courtesy of NBC

But yeah, Life kicks into gear this week when Crews and Reese are called to the scene of a drug dealer found dead under an overpass. The detective duo is initially confused because the drug dealer was shot only once, but they find several more shell casings. Quickly they discover there is another body, that of an elementary school teacher…with cocaine pouring out of her nose. I think the notion of schoolteachers snorting coke is generally frowned upon, though I’d bet vital parts of my anatomy that at least fifty percent of the teachers I had growing up were snorting something.

The plot thickens when Crews and Reese discover the victim was not only a teacher but also serially dated cops-a member of the prestigious L.A. Badge Bunnies. Gee, sure wish I could join. In the victim’s address book, Crews finds a series of numbers and realizes, along with Reese and Captain Tidwell, that these aren’t just addresses…they’re badge numbers. Which means that the cops those badge numbers belong to are all suspects. Tidwell urges them to tread lightly; it’s always potentially lethal when cops go after one of their own. As if that weren’t enough, Crews’ old partner Bobby tells him that he didn’t know the victim, but in asking around, his name might come up. What does that mean? Bobby asks him to let him know when that happens (luckily it turns out Bobby isn’t involved or dirty in a way you’d think, which is good, because I like Bobby).

The detectives decide to look for their suspects at the victim’s wake that is being attended by a crapload of cops. Apparently, cops aren’t afraid of badge bunnies like they should be. Rather, they treat them as family. Crews and Reese gain access to the six cops whose badge numbers were in the victim’s address book, but no one candidate sticks out as the culprit. They also have to look at fellow badge bunnies, who may have killed the victim off out of competition.

The crime isn’t quite as interesting or innovative as it usually is, but it’s at least mildly provocative and absorbing to see Crews having to wade through his own world. After all, here’s a guy who was wrongfully accused of being a bad cop now charged with finding an actual baddie. One of the show’s consistent strengths is how it weaves subtexts underneath the crimes that affect Crews on psychological levels.

There’s no Jennifer or Rachel this episode, but the lovely Christina Hendricks returns as Olivia, Crew’s soon-to-be stepmother whom Ted is in love with. She shows up at his class (which now consists of a single student), and in a satisfying turn, mild-mannered, loveable Ted asserts himself and tells her off for not returning his nine phone calls. But as usual, there’s more to the story. Why can’t these damn romance things ever work out? Why is Olivia marrying some boob instead of Ted? He’s such a sweet guy, he almost makes me want to rethink my orientation for crying out loud.

Also on the romance front, more sparks fly between Reese and Tidwell, who, in a fun scene somewhat reminiscent of the original Lethal Weapon, give whole new meaning to target practice. The episode ends with a cliffhanger involving Mickey Rayborn that I won’t reveal for anyone who hasn’t seen it (I still like to nurture the hope/delusion that someone else watches this show besides me). Suffice it to say that it made me cry out at the screen, and if there isn’t another episode next week, I may very well have my first psychotic breakdown of the holiday season.

Season 2, Episode 2.9: Badge Bunny (originally aired November 19, 2008)

For another review of this episode, check out “Even Cops Have Groupies” by Elma Rahman.

For more on Life, click here.

Wednesdays at 9/8c on NBC
Photographs courtesy of NBC

In fact, I was surprised that the show has managed to hold on for so long-especially at a time when television has its fair share of detective shows.  I mean, did we really need another L.A. crime show about two mismatched detectives-even with the slightly different but not different enough twist about one that was wrongly imprisoned, finally set free, and is now loaded?  And the gimmicky conspiracy theory plot?  And while I find it surprising that the writers not only come up with such offbeat murders every week, I find it hard to believe that even L.A. murders could always be so exciting.

Nonetheless, the show’s redemption probably lies with well-written dialogue and a strong supporting cast.  I can’t help but find the greasy, unkempt Captain Tidwell (Donal Logue), ex-con Ted Earley (Adam Arkin), and Crews’ Spartan and savvy partner, Dani Reese (Sarah Shahi), addictive to watch.  And yes, even the odd, Buddha-like Crews has grown on me as well.

Crews, Reese, and Tidwell do not manage to fall short on entertainment as they usher in the holiday season a little early in this week’s episode, Black Friday.  Crews and Reese are called in to one of the world’s largest malls to investigate the death of “the first jumper of the year,” Mitchell Clark.  But as the two question Head of Mall Security, Dave, they fail to stop the opening of mall doors to thousands of eager shoppers waiting outside, salivating for Black Friday bargains.  They run back to the tainted crime scene from their botched attempt to stop the entry of a herd of ferocious shoppers only to find that the body has disappeared.

After an in-depth discussion on the futility of fruit cake, some questioning here and there, and a holiday shopping spree covered by the Charlie Crews wrongful imprisonment funds, the detectives discover an Xbox scam in the gift wrapping department and that Clark was the mastermind behind it with the aid of his ring of underage runaways.  They manage to find the body, the killer, and a guardian for a pair of brother and sister runaways, Zack and Karen, working for Clark.  Tidwell, however, yet again falls out of Reese’s good graces.  He finally gets Reese to meet him for a first date, but even after helping track down Zack and Karen’s aunt, Reese walks out on him for being pissed that he broke up the two kids and had them sent to Child Protective Services earlier.

Crews’ luck, however, takes a turn when he rekindles his relationship with ex-wife, Jennifer, in the old motel they used to go to when they were younger.  Just when I thought I had the gawky, red-headed man of little words all pegged, he manages to stop thieves dead in their tracks by throwing a 200-pound fruitcake like the lightest Nerf ball you’ve ever seen and win back the woman who had just slapped him a couple of episodes ago for asking her husband to sleep with her.  Well, wins her back for one night, anyway.  Charlie Crews, Daniel Craig has nothing on you.

Season 2, Episode 8: Black Friday (originally aired November 12, 2008)

For another take on this episode, read Cameron Cubbison’s review here.

For more on Life, click here.

Wednesdays at 9/8c on NBC
Photographs courtesy of NBC

Crews and Reese are charged with determining whether a man with a broken neck “fell-slipped, fell-pushed, or fell-jumped” (as only Crews could put it).  The catch is that the crime scene is a gigantic shopping mall mere minutes before it opens for Black Friday…the biggest shopping day of the year, when malls become hellish combat zones and wars are waged between hordes of psychotic shoppers and their purses.

Crews and Reese try to get mall security to lock the joint down before the masses push through all over the crime scene but are too late.  In the confusion, as the detective duo try to suppress the throngs of people, the body of the dead mall employee disappears.  Crews suggests that maybe it’s a Christmas miracle, but Reese can’t be swayed into thinking that a dead body could pick up and go on its own.  That leaves one other solution: somebody stole it.  Maybe thieves will steal anything these days.

The mall is such an absurd freak show on any normal day, but it’s a whole other realm of madness during the holidays.  As such, it is the perfect setting for a Life investigation.  Crews thrives on absurdity and oddity, so watching him interview mall employees is like watching a fish take to water.  Hilariously, and much to Reese’s chagrin, he even finds time to go shopping as he investigates.  After all, it is the biggest sale day of the year.  The plot thickens when they find a 17-year-old kid living with his kid sister in the mall’s basement.  Their parents are dead and they are hiding from child services, who would have split them up.  But are they actually involved in the murder?

On the conspiracy front, Crews has now fully resurrected the conspiracy wall from last season (which is such an awesome visual) and is pursuing new leads.  Jack Reese is still MIA, but Crews decides to learn more about Mickey Rayborn, an ex-cop who was in the photo with Reese that Crews received earlier in the season.  Like Crews, Rayborn is loaded, but something tells me he didn’t earn that money fair and square like Crews did.

Ted does some digging and learns that he owns land all over the city, three hotels, a fighting franchise, and is essentially being given the keys to the city by the mayor.  This guy looks to be a formidable new foe for Crews.  And as an added bonus, the actor that plays him is William Atherton, the guy that played the arrogant sleazeball reporter Dick Thornburg in the first two Die Hard movies!  You just know he’s going to be another sinister slimeball on Life, and I can’t wait to see Crews lay the smackdown on.  Of course that will be easier said than done, as Crews learns that Rayborn is being investigated and/or protected by an FBI agent who also seems more than a little shady.  He warns Crews that if he goes after Rayborn, he’ll find himself back in prison.  On the bright side though, he does offer Crews a stick of tropical fruit gum, which Crews happily accepts.  The showdown is on.

The episode finally brings a sort of closure to the old feelings between Crews and his ex-wife Jennifer.  I so want to hate Jennifer for having abandoned and divorced Crews when he was in prison and marrying some tool and having his litter, but the writers and Jennifer Siebel make her come off as vulnerable and sympathetic.  Tidwell and Reese have a lover’s tiff, although since they’re not quite lovers yet, I don’t quite know what to call it.  They probably don’t either.  The bottom line is that Life is going strong as ever, and at least it’s safe for the rest of the season.  Guess I can’t ask for much more.

Season 2, Episode 8: Black Friday (originally aired November 12, 2008)

For another take on this episode, read Elma Rahman’s review here.

For more on Life, click here.

Wednesdays at 9/8c on NBC
Photographs courtesy of NBC

The plot this week is typically offbeat: Crews and Reese are called in to investigate the murder of a woman living in an expensive penthouse. They find a keychain with the initials “LWA” on them, but the victim’s driver’s license lists her name as Hannah. Reese, however, draws on her experience attending Alcoholics Anonymous and realizes that the “A” stands for anonymous. But what about the first two letters? Get this: the group is Lotto Winners Anonymous. That’s right. Apparently more than 80% of people who win the lotto wish they never had. Sure, I can understand that…winning enough money to go swimming in sure sounds like a traumatic experience.

The other members of the group become suspects when Crews and Reese discover that the victim was involved with several of them. They all knew she loved them for who they were, not for their money, since she had money. Except she didn’t, because she was a con artist pulling a job with a mystery man. Crews and Reese figure if they find him, they find the killer.

The lotto angle is a fun setup, since Crews also more or less won the lottery by winning a multimillion-dollar wrongful imprisonment suit. Damian Lewis has fun playing Crews as he shows off his wealth to work his way into the lotto group, and Sarah Shahi reacts off him perfectly, as always.

The B storyline is especially involving, with Rachel Seybolt coming to stay with Crews in his empty house. We’ve been waiting (wait, wrong pronoun, “we” implies multiple people are watching the show) for this moment all season, waiting for Rachel to open up to Crews and for them to reconnect. The scenes they share in this episode are carefully developed and feel completely genuine and never manufactured, and that’s not an easy thing to pull off. Hats off to the writers, once again.

We’re also treated to a couple of fun scenes between Reese and Captain Tidwell as they try to deal with the aftermath of the romantic moment they shared in “Did You Feel That.” My only complaint isn’t really a complaint as much as a wish regarding Constance Griffiths, Charlie’s former lawyer now turned Assistant District Attorney. Maybe it’s my imagination, but earlier in the season I felt that she was hiding something from Crews and had maybe turned against him somehow. The show doesn’t need her to function, but it’s even further testament to the power of the writing (I know I sound like a broken record here, but clearly no one’s listening so I’m not too worried about it) that all of the female characters are so memorably written and performed-Reese, Jennifer, Constance, Olivia, Rachel, etc.

I know you won’t be here for long Life, but please don’t leave me yet. Give me more time to get used to the idea. Four or five years tops, I promise.

Season 2, Episode 7:  Jackpot  (originally aired November 5, 2008)

For another take on this episode, read Elma Rahman’s review here.

For more on Life, click here.

Wednesdays at 9/8c on NBC
Photographs courtesy of NBC

The investigation grows more complicated as Crews and Reese get an intimate glimpse into the lottery winners’ world of isolation, excess, and disposable friends. Soon, they also learn that Hannah was simply a con artist who had been trying to scam the LWA members.  Not only had she been in prison for various acts of fraud, but she continued to “grift” with a couple that lived downstairs as part of a bank fraud ring.  After questioning the couple, Crews and Reese return to find their stabbed bodies and try to hunt down a possible suspect, Hannah’s mean con artist boyfriend, Lenny.  Meanwhile, Hannah’s LWA lovers, Ben, Dale, and Tom struggle with their own demons after Hannah’s murder.

Amidst the investigation, Tidwell tries to talk to a very evasive Reese about their recent kiss and Rachel moves in with Crews and Ted.  Rachel also struggles with demons, including the theory of whether or not Crews actually killed her family.  And in between it all, she convinces Crews to get a kitchen table.  Reese, upset after finding out her father just left her mother after their long marriage, accidentally confides in Tidwell who tries to convince her he’s not such a bad guy.

I’ll be the first to admit, I had doubts about this show.  And even now, I’m still on the fence about whether it can actually survive another season.  That being said, I don’t know whether it’s the less than perfect characters, the better than average dialogue, or the really bizarre murder cases that finally got to me, but it did get to me.  Maybe it’s just like Crews admitted in this episode, sometimes all you can do is tell a stranger the absolute truth.  And sometimes, it’s great to watch a show that strives to do the same thing.

Season 2, Episode 7:  Jackpot  (originally aired November 5, 2008)

For another take on this episode, read Cameron Cubbison’s review here.

For more on Life, click here.

Wednesdays at 9/8c on NBC
Photographs courtesy of NBC

Monday

Dancing With The Stars.  It seems that the day before Election Day has turned into the equivalent of New Year’s Eve with its television coverage.  To avoid the overdose, sit back and watch team dancing on DWTS.    ABC, 8pm EST.

Tuesday

Election Night. Well, it is finally here and hopefully it will be over the same day.  No matter who wins, Poptimal will miss the steely eyes, kid-like excitement, and rudimentary dry erase board of Tim Russert.  Tim, it just won’t be the same without you.

Indecision ’08:  With that said, we suggest that you tune in to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s election night special.  There is nothing like laughing at ourselves to make the pain of loss go away and to keep us humble in victory.  Comedy Central, 10pm EST.

Wednesday

Law & Order (Season Premiere). In its 19th Season L&O makes what could be its last hurrah.  The players are the same, but their roles are different.  This is a solid pick.  We also recommend that you watch Life (NBC, 9pm EST), which has been resurrected from TV’s graveyard time slot.  NBC, 10pm EST.

Thursday

30 Rock.  One word: Oprah.  If it was good enough for Obama, it’s good enough for us.  NBC, 9:30pm EST.

Friday

The Starter Wife. This show is on our radar.  Good writing and tragically good acting.  USA original series are truly all about the characters and this is no exception.  USA, 10pm EST.

Saturday

Doctor Who. Watch Season 4 from the beginning.  Best show on the BBC, next to Torchwood.  BBC America, 9pm EST.

Sunday

Brotherhood. Set in an Irish neighborhood in Providence, the series revolves around two brothers on opposite sides of the law: one a gangster and the other a politician (a.k.a. an elected gangsta).  This is a gritty show so be prepared for the ride.  Showtime, 8pm EST.

At first, both Eli Stone and Wethersby’s daughter Taylor (who is also Eli’s tempestuous ex-fiancée) insist on representing him with different strategies, fighting like only ex-lovers can.  But after Eli has a vision showing that Wethersby loses the case (and consequently, the firm he staked his life on) directly because of his involvement, he recuses himself from the case and risks alienating his boss and mentor.

As if that wasn’t enough to handle, Eli is also approached by his brother Nate to represent a family with a six-year-old daughter suffering from a slew of medical problems due to the toxic lead paint that covers the home they live in.  At first Eli resists because he sees no way to win the case but changes his mind when Nate shows Eli their father’s journal.  The journal contains all of their departed father’s visions of the future, including one where Eli takes this lead paint case all the way up to the United States Supreme Court.

The episode is strong and simply-constructed, cutting back and forth between these two cases and the repercussions they have on Eli and those around him.  There is also a slightly darker edge to this episode that comes about when Eli convinces his acupuncturist/confidant/spiritual advisor Dr. Chen to perform some mysterious new kind of needle voodoo that is significantly more dangerous and painful than their usual routine.

Eli Stone stands out from the majority of scripted television as a brave and vulnerable show because it is so nakedly emotional and uncynical.  It doesn’t rely on dead bodies or procedures or sarcastic jokes, but rather, dares viewers to passionately embrace the struggles of a man seeking redemption and struggling to live up to the role of supreme prophet he was conscripted into by a higher power.

Lawyers and the justice system have always proved appealing and viable fodder for film and television because they offer the chance to examine morality in a very direct and human way.  We’ve seen the story of the smug and confident lawyer figure who has a crisis of conscience a myriad of times over the years, most notably in films like …And Justice For All, The Verdict, A Civil Action, Jerry Maguire, and Michael Clayton (the film that should unquestionably have won the Best Picture Oscar last season), but it’s always really appealing to me.  Eli Stone builds on this tradition and also revitalizes it by adding the spiritual element to the proceedings, which allows the show runners to stage elaborate musical numbers (musicals make me want to castrate myself with a fork in any other instance but are fun in the context of this show) and liven things up.

The ending of the episode is immensely satisfying (I actually cheered) and unexpected, and the performances continue to electrify, particularly Garber and of course, Jonny Lee Miller as Eli Stone.  Miller manages in making Eli seem real, and that is invaluable in selling the spiritual core of the show.  Eli never seems like a golden boy, holier-than-though prophet.  Miller exposes his flaws and shows him constantly struggling with the burden of being a prophet with responsibilities that have world-wide consequences and implications.  The other thing that really impresses me about the show is that even though it’s about a prophet being guided by a higher power in the name of good, it never feels didactic or like it’s pushing a religious agenda.  I’m a die-hard atheist and I love this show, and that’s a testament to the high-caliber, gutsy writing and emotionally involving performances.  Like Life, Eli Stone is a refreshing and satisfying show that revitalizes a well-tread genre, and it deserves to last.

Season 2, Episode 3: Unwritten (originally aired October 28, 2008)

For another take on this episode, see Eli Stone and the Unabomber Prophecy Manifesto by Kaitlyn Edsall.

For more on Eli Stone, click here.

Tuesdays at 10/9C on ABC

Photographs courtesy of ABC

In all of the chaos, a man escapes from prison.  But this isn’t just any man; this is Arthur Tins, the lowlife that killed the son of convict Mark Rawls.  Crews and Reese caught Tins in the series pilot last year.  They couldn’t get him to fully confess at first, so they booked him on a minor parole violation charge.  They took him to the prison where Rawls was also incarcerated and pointed him out to Rawls.  Terrified, Tins immediately confessed, but in a satisfying bit of dark justice, Crews and Reese left him there, the implication being that Rawls was going to kill him on the inside. (Later on in the first season, Rawls helped Crews track down Kyle Reese as thanks).

But we learn early on in this episode that Rawls didn’t finish off Tins in prison.  The catch is that Rawls is out on parole now, so Crews and Reese rush to track him down and stop him from killing fugitive Tins.  Crews knows it is his duty as a cop to prevent the crime, but he sympathizes with Rawls.  The duo track down Rawls and prepare to bring him in before he can kill Tins, but in a jaw-dropping twist, they realize too late that Tins set a trap, using Crews and Reese to track down Rawls so Tins could kill him first.

In the pilot, Tins was a pathetic little weasel who was all but guaranteed to be crushed by the burly Rawls, but his time in prison changed him from being the hunted to being the hunter.  The rest of the episode concerns Crews and Reese trying out outwit, outlast and outplay (a life-or-death game of Survivor) Tins, who has a lot more planned besides taking out Rawls.  I don’t want to reveal any more of the plot and ruin the intricacies, but the proceedings are electrifying to watch, and Tins-who was a forgotten character until now-easily emerges as one of the most memorable villains in the show’s history.

And just to make sure the show hasn’t lost it’s wonderfully absurd since of humor, the other narrative strand this week involves Ted Earley waking up from falling down the stairs (that damn earthquake) and discovering that his hand has been fully impaled by a pencil.  Adam Arkin’s reaction is priceless, and this little odd event facilitates the return of Crews’ stepmother-to-be Olivia (played by the wonderful Christina Hendricks), who Ted developed a huge crush on last season.

Their scenes together are wonderfully funny and poignant, as are the scenes between Reese and Captain Tidwell, who see their romantic tension come to fruition.  There is no time devoted to uncovering the Crews conspiracy this week, which I actually really liked.  It proves that the show is not formulaic.  Every episode is not equally devoted to the crime-of-the-week A storyline and the conspiracy backbone/B storyline.  A major natural disaster caused chaos, so why should Crews have any personal time for his own life?  A lesser show would rigidly stick to the overall formula, but Life doesn’t, and that’s further testament to the brilliant writing.  Life isn’t formulaic, and rightfully so, neither is Life.

On a final note, I hear that NBC is moving the show from Friday nights to Wednesday nights, but I’m sure that the waves and waves and waves of loyal fans already know that.

Season 2, Episode 6: Did You Feel That? (originally aired October 24, 2008)

For more on Life, click here.

Fridays at 10/9c, NBC
Photographs courtesy of NBC

The conspiracy theory plot thickens when Mrs. Dunn fails to recognize any of the men in the photograph, but does admit that the death of her husband was reported as an accident while he was cleaning his gun so that she could keep the pension benefits.  In an effort to track down Bethany, Crews, Reese, and Tidwell are able to take clues from past email conversations to track down the potential suspect who turns out to be the rich, blonde, tennis-playing daughter of a music industry mogul.  Crews and Dani realize Bethany is one messed up suspect after questioning Bethany’s indifferent mother and possessive father, as well as a slew of former sorority sisters who confirmed Bethany not only had an affair with their college professor but that she also had a disturbing relationship with her father.

Ted ends up with a very small class after most of his students drop out upon realizing the class is graded, not pass/fail.  After one of the remaining students learns of his past in jail while looking him up on the internet, Ted finds himself having to explain that while he did go to prison for a crime he did commit, he nonetheless knows the business world very well.

Crews and his ex-wife, Jennifer, take a walk down memory lane when they go through all their old stuff that his ex-wife kept in storage.  After he tells her about his current case and rummages for an old album, Jennifer tells him she feels like she did when they were married.  The album turns out to be Bethany’s mother’s album, which leads back to a song that was sung online to Mike.  Bethany takes Crews for a wild car ride when he questions her about other possible suspects who may have wanted to impersonate her online.

Crews goes to visit Rachel, only to find Jack Reese there with her.  Jack tells Crews he was always protecting Rachel.  Mrs. Dunn comes by the station and tells Crews her husband didn’t die accidentally or commit suicide.  She also admits recognizing one of the men in the picture, Mickey Raybourne.  As we hit mid-season, this week’s episode, Crushed, gave everyone a sudden sense of nostalgia, as Crews and Jennifer remembered their marriage, Ted remembered the mistakes of his past, and Brody’s murderer longed for the days of being a young, blonde heartbreaker like Bethany.

Season 2, Episode 5: Crushed (originally aired October 17, 2008)

For another take on this episode, read Cameron Cubbison’s review here.

For more on Life, click here.

Wednesdays at 9/8c, NBC
Photographs courtesy of www.nbc.com

Naturally, Crews and Reese suspect “Bethany” and figure the key to solving the case is finding out who this person is. (The hilarious Donal Logue as Captain Tidwell says it best: “Let me tell  you something: there is no her, there is no Bethany. There’s a thirteen-year-old member of the marching band with an online account and a social disorder.”) Nevertheless, Crews and Reese try to track her down by comparing what “Bethany” said about herself to both truck drivers and seeing what overlaps under the theory that anything she said more than once is likely to be true and not an Internet fabrication.

The crime-of-the-week is perhaps not quite as strong as it has been in previous episodes, but there are plenty of assets that more than make up for it. There’s a subplot involving Crews’ ex-wife Jennifer showing him around the storage unit containing all of the stuff they owned together when they were married and before Crews went to prison. It makes for a scene that is tender, nostalgic, and funny. There’s some great dialogue and the sexual tension between the two keeps building.

Another fun subplot involves Ted, who miraculously got the teaching position he was interviewing for the other week even though Crews, acting as his character reference, showed up to the interview high on lab chemicals he had accidentally ingested. It’s fun to see Ted nervous on the first day of school, trying to make a good impression on the kids. (There’s even a little bit of all-too-true social commentary involving students so frantically typing everything Ted says on their laptops that they have no idea what he’s really saying). Adam Arkin consistently manages to bring a perfect blend of sympathy and humor to Ted and makes the character a key fixture of the show.

The combative relationship between Dani and Captain Tidwell continues to play well, and they share a couple of scenes in this episode that feel genuine and come off as very funny. Crews continues to explore the conspiracy against him and identifies another potential member, but the real surprise involves Jack Reese. Crews gets the call that Rachel Seybolt has finally started talking, and when he gets over to the hospital he is shocked to discover that she is talking and laughing with Jack Reese. I don’t want to ruin it in case there actually is another person on planet earth besides me that watches this fantastic show, but suffice it to say that Jack-who has been the villain you’ve (okay, I’ve) been dying to see Crews take down since last season-may not be a stone-cold villain after all. That even the question is posed, that the character is still evolving-is further testament to the strength and creativity of the show’s writing.
Life is all that television should be: enjoyable, fresh, exciting, affecting, evolving, and fundamentally character-driven. I just wish I weren’t the only person acknowledging it.

Season 2, Episode 5: Crushed (originally aired October 17, 2008)

For another take on this episode, read The Way We Were by Elma Rahman.

For more on Life, click here.

Wednesdays at 9/8c, NBC
Photographs courtesy of www.nbc.com

After the detectives come across a room containing hours of surveillance footage rigged by Dr. Halladay, Ted is recruited to try and find evidence of the murder on the tapes.  He and Crews cringe while viewing the life-like prison recreated on the campus which reminds Crews of his jailbird days.  The tapes don’t manage to reveal much about the murder, but do provide insight into all the cruel experiments conducted by Halladay to heighten tensions between prisoners and guards.  After Crews traces a recent phone call from the phantom reporter to his ex wife back to Halladay, he threatens Halladay into giving him more information about the murder.  Halladay finds footage of the murdered guard who not only had a reputation for mistreating prisoners but who attacked Halladay as well.  The detectives have him arrested for gross bodily harm anyway.  While they solve the problem of Halladay, they still find themselves with no murderer.  After Crews sniffs out burning plastic, we get a brief lesson in prison lingo, as the smell leads him to a shank, or “melted plastic burned to a point,” which turns out to be the murder weapon hidden inside an Exit sign.

While this week’s murder was a revealing glimpse into how quickly people can fall into self-created traps with the power of suggestion, what was more important was the missing piece to the Conspiracy Theory puzzle in the form of an old photograph of Jack Reese and four other police officers attending the funeral of a slain, fellow police officer.  Apparently the officers were the six that are now five that could be four. . .and the picture of a young and perhaps less disillusioned Reese leads Crews to solve his riddle and get one step closer to catching his cat.

Season 2, Episode 4: Not For Nothing (originally aired 10/10/08)

For another take on this episode, check out Cameron Cubbison’s review here.

To read all of Poptimal’s reviews of Life, click here.

Wednesdays at 9/8c on NBC
Photographs courtesy of www.nbc.com

Ted Earley reports this to Charlie Crews at the beginning of the latest episode of Life, thus summoning Charlie to work. Yes, for Charlie Crews, work must always intrude on leisure time-though Charlie’s idea of leisure time is listening to the covert wiretap he placed on Jack Reese’s car last week and trying to identify the other members of the conspiracy that framed him for murder and sent him to prison for twelve years.

And yes, I’m aware of the fact that I just cited the protagonist’s name four times in the above paragraph. I’m hoping that if I repeat the name enough, the character will become ingrained in peoples’ minds and they will watch the show. Of course that would only work if people are reading my rave reviews of Life, and clearly no one is because no one is watching the show except me and it’s about to be cancelled. It’s probably futile for me to even bother writing about the show anymore, since it won’t be here much longer and will soon be forgotten. But Charlie Crews wouldn’t give up, so neither will I. (Did I mention the name Charlie Crews? Because that’s the name of the wonderfully complex and entertaining cop played masterfully by Damian Lewis in the wonderfully complex and entertaining Life. And you have no life if you don’t watch Life).

We get to see the intense, edgy and slightly warped side of Charlie in this episode because Charlie and his partner Dani Reese are called in to investigate the murder of a prison guard. Except he wasn’t really a prison guard, just one of a large group of college students participating in a sociological experiment that is the brainchild of a creepy professor. Basically the guy convinced a slew of students to role-play as guards and prisoners in a real prison setting for five days. Yikes, and I thought my professors were bad.

The catch is that when Charlie and Dani arrive at the crime scene, all of the “guards” and “prisoners” are accounted for, which means that the murderer is still there. They have to figure out who the culprit is and find the MIA murder weapon within two hours, before legal council arrives and sets everyone free. It’s an economical and ingenious setup, just like the start of every other episode of Life. People: watch the freakin’ show, is that really too much to ask?

The inner tension that Charlie feels being forced to spend time in a prison-like setting is palpable, and Damian Lewis is never short of riveting to watch. This whole investigation is in the hands of Charlie, Dani, and Charlie’s old partner Bobby (Brent Sexton), because the rest of the LAPD has their hands tied with other crises. Captain Tidwell (the increasingly-impressive Donal Logue) himself has to deal with a suicidal cop who discharged his weapon in a bar after finding out his wife is leaving him. And here’s where a pleasant surprise comes in: the partner of this suicidal cop is Karen Davis (Deadwood’s Robin Weigert), who was the precinct captain last season who may or may not have been involved in the conspiracy against Charlie.

It was revealed in the second season premier that Davis had been demoted, presumably by the evil higher-ups, because she failed to get Charlie kicked off the force after he returned post-prison. I assumed the character was a closed book, so it was great to see her return for this episode, especially because Weigert brings such presence to the role. She has a couple of great, funny scenes with Logue, and it’s still unclear if she was involved in the conspiracy or not. At the very least, this episode reveals that she is close to one of the conspiracy members.

Everyone plays a significant role in the proceedings, including Ted, who helps Charlie’s investigation by going through the security footage of the prison. It’s another skillfully constructed and engrossing episode that I wish people would check out.

Season 2, Episode 4: Not For Nothing  (originally aired 10/10/08)

For another take on this episode, read Elma Rahman’s review here.

You can read all Poptimal reviews of Life here.

Wednesdays at 9/8c, NBC
Photographs courtesy of www.nbc.com

After discovering Dr. Auerbach’s frozen body, along with “Animal Testing is Murder” spray painted in his lab, Detective Crews and Reese’s first suspect is animal rights activist, Betsy Warren.  Oh wow, didn’t see that coming, an animal rights activist, but there really has to be more to it than that.  And there is, when the detectives discover old love / hate letters that get traced back to Betsy who was not only having a dysfunctional love affair with Auerbach, but had also once been his lab assistant as well.  Case closed, right?  Wrong, because Detective Crews is way too perceptive about love and life to believe it’s that easy.  Sadly, Crews isn’t as perceptive when it comes to his own love life after being punched in the face by his ex-wife’s husband for asking his permission to sleep with her again.  You have to admire the tenacity, although it drives an even larger wedge between him and his ex-wife who shows up at his house and slaps him across the face during Ted’s very important interview with the Dean of a business school.  Well, his wisdom doesn’t get him back his wife, but it does help him figure out another possible suspect, Billy, another activist who was also in love with Betsy.  But animals weren’t the only ones being mistreated by Auerbach, as Crews and Reese learn that Auerbach threw a lab book at the janitor for accidentally breaking a beaker and mistreated his current assistant as well.

Crews’ past continues to haunt everyone, as Dani finally gets up the nerve to ask her father if he sent the wrong man to prison in the middle of an otherwise delightful family dinner.  Detective Reese kicks Dani out of the house.  She drives back to work where she runs into Captain Tidwell who rescues her hair which had been caught in the car door and continues to awkwardly flirt with her.  Crews is also able to record Jack Reese’s conversations in the car, breaking new ground and closing in on his thoughts.  The phantom reporter continues his interviews, including one with Jack Reese.

Believe it or not, I want this show to make it, I really do.  It’s an underdog that actually made its way back to a second season.  And it has great actors like Adam Arkin who played Adam in Northern Exposure—Adam in Northern Exposure!  But looking back on shows I loved more that couldn’t even get past a season or two, I just don’t have that same warm and fuzzy feeling about yet another show about quirky, not-so-perfect detectives and the-trying-too-hard-to-be-different-but-aren’t murders they come across every week.  Still, I have hope for the misunderstood, bright-eyed red head, Crews, and his offbeat sidekicks.  Maybe the show will make me regret my words this season and prove it wasn’t just a miracle that saved this show.

Season 2, Episode 3: The Business of Miracles (originally aired 10/06/08)

For another take on this episode of Life, read Cameron Cubbison’s review here.

For more on Life, click here.

Wednesdays at 9/8c, NBC
Photographs courtesy of www.nbc.com

So the show gets the ball rolling fast with an unusual and very visual murder and crime scene, a strength I have previously cited. But who would want to kill a cancer researcher? Well as it turns out, a lot of people, because this guy also routinely tested on and killed rats-an action that doesn’t usually endear one to animal rights activists. The victim received a slew of death threats over the years, so Crews and Reese start there.

They focus on an animal rights activist named Betty who used to work for the victim (and, as Crews and Reese learn later on, was sleeping with him even after she became an activist). Betty and her assistant currently take care of a chimp named Bamba and wear shoes made from the remains of a deceased activist who donated his body in that way so that he could help horrify people who wear leather boots…um, yeah.

Besides the main crime storyline, we also get some significant developments on the Crews conspiracy front. First, Assistant D.A. Constance “Connie” Griffiths tells Crews to stop trying to identify the remaining figures who set him up and denies that she heard Kyle Hollis confess that he killed the Seybolt family (except for Rachel whom he abducted and psychologically scarred by becoming her guardian) on behalf of Jack Reese, even though both she and Crews know that she did. Connie worked with Crews for years to get him out of prison, believed in him, fell in love with him and helped him bring in Hollis at the end of last season, but now she’s doing something fishy and it really worries me.

But on a more positive front, Crews learns that Jack Reese is on dangerous ground with the other members of the conspiracy now that Crews found Rachel Seybolt – Jack’s insurance policy – and took her away from him. Thanks to a listening device he planted on Jack’s car in the last episode, Crews overhears a conversation between Jack and an unidentified new conspiracy member (onscreen we only see the back of his head, not his face) that confirms that Jack Reese is in trouble and is afraid of the other conspiracy members. Crews is gaining ground.

Other highlights of the episode include: Crews talking to rats and getting assaulted by Bamba the chimp and Jennifer’s new husband, as well as getting exposed to a hallucinogenic substance and seeing images of Jennifer everywhere (as well as blowing Ted’s new job interview for a teaching position in which Crews is his reference-serves you right Ted for even thinking about selling Crews out last episode).

Donal Logue continues to make his presence an asset to the show as the new precinct captain, and he and Dani have some really funny, well-written and well-acted scenes between them that ratchet up the sparks. The chemistry between all of the principals on the show remains absolutely infectious and perfect, the crimes are creative and interesting and the conspiracy backbone has never been more compelling. It is truly a good Life.

Season 2, Episode 3: The Business of Miracles (originally aired 10/06/08)

For another take on this episode of Life, read Elma Rahman’s review here.

For more on Life, click here.

Wednesdays at 9/8c, NBC
Photographs courtesy of www.nbc.com

With that out of the way, now I’ll try to do some honest to goodness reviewing. The catalyst for this week’s perfect episode is the discovery of a family man who is found brutally murdered and bound to a chair at the bottom of an empty pool. (One of the great things about Life is that each crime of the week is very visual and economically sets up the conflict without relying on over-the-top visual effects like CSI.) It appears to be a gang hit, but Crews and Reese visit the dead man’s family and learn from the youngest daughter that the father went to go pick up the oldest daughter from a party-that’s where he was killed. To find out more, Crews goes undercover in a place he knows all too well: prison. He overhears two inmates talking about the steroid monster who murdered the man.

Crews and Reese track the steroids to a posh (and shady) gym in Beverly Hills and quickly finger the perps: a group of rich punks who think they are above the law. They think they own the world, and that they can have everything they want…all the time. Crews and Reese’ job is to show them they’re wrong, but their task isn’t easy. The evil trio is aided by their money and by the unethical and immoral therapist who sees them all and gives them alibis. In an awesome scene, Crews goads the steroid freak of the group into assaulting him so they can arrest him and start squeezing the slimy shrink and the rest of the group.

As always, it’s a true delight to see how the villains test Crews and Reese and how the unlikely partners work together to solve the case-Crews with his unconventional tactics and quirks and Reese with her toughness, self-sufficiency and unbendable force of will.

But there’s way more to the episode than just all that. Crews tries to break through to Rachel Seybolt-the psychologically damaged young girl who was the sole witness to the crime for which Crews was wrongfully convicted-whom Jack Reese hid until Crews found her at the end of last week’s episode. Toward this end, he enlists the reluctant help of his ex-wife Jennifer (who also knew Rachel twelve years ago before her family was killed). Jennifer divorced Crews while he was still in prison but he still loves her, and finally they reconnect in this episode in a wonderful scene that is incredibly poignant without feeling unbelievable or conveniently staged.

And in the most disturbing scene, Jack Reese tries to turn Crews’ loveable friend/roommate/money manager/conspiracy-investigative helper Ted against Crews by threatening to get him sent back to prison. This is a twist I never ever saw coming and is even further testament to the show’s brilliant brilliant brilliant writing. We know that Ted owes Crews his life and cares deeply for him, so when we see him thinking about selling out Crews to Jack Reese to save himself, we feel for both Crews and Ted. That being said Ted (hey that rhymes), if you turn on Crews I will find a way to metaphysically jump into the TV and I will happily kill you. Don’t do it.

This show is as good as anything that has ever been on the air, and if you’re not watching it, you’re committing a crime and should be locked up. You’re harming humanity, you’re being evil. To paraphrase Edmund Burke, the only thing necessary for evil to prevail is if good people do nothing. So watch the show and don’t let NBC kill it. Please.

Season 2, Episode 2: Everything…All The Time (originally aired 10/3/08)

For more on Life, click here.

Wednesdays at 9/8c, NBC
Photographs courtesy of www.nbc.com

Normally I would try and write something semi-formal and organized, but I’m just going to get to the point, because we don’t have a lot of time. Here it is: This show freakin’ rocks. Life—created by Rand Ravich and starring the superb Damian Lewis, the wonderful Sara Shahi, and the enchanting Adam Arkin—is one of the most consistently enjoyable, electrifying, clever, creative, original, and just plain amazing television shows I’ve ever seen. Ever. And I watch a lot of TV.

And because it is all those things I just said, it is predestined to be cancelled by the genius suits at NBC, who are afraid of the show and don’t know what to do with it. They will murder it, and I can’t let that happen. We can’t let that happen. I’m asking someone…anyone…everyone: help me save it.

For those who have never seen the show—and there are far, far too many of you—Life revolves around protagonist Charlie Crews, a cop who has returned to the force after serving twelve years in maximum security prison for a crime he didn’t commit: the murder of a fellow cop friend and his family. Advances in DNA evidence cleared Crews of the charges, and, with the invaluable guidance of his loyal (and beautiful) attorney Constance Griffiths (Brooke Langton), Crews secured a multimillion-dollar wrongful imprisonment settlement.

Crews—richer than God and obsessed with fresh fruit after a twelve-year prison sludge diet—rejoins the LAPD to track down and take down the people who killed his friends and set him up for it. Also, as Crews says at one point, when he was locked up and getting beaten to within an inch of his life, thinking that he was still a cop was the only thing that kept him going. Crews turned to Zen in prison to try to stay (barely) sane, and now constantly spouts confounding, philosophical Zeni-sms, much to the irritation of his new partner Dani Reese (Shahi), who was assigned to work with Crews because she was at the bottom of the department’s barrel after getting hooked on drugs while she was undercover and botching up her operation. If you want to make the Lethal Weapon comparison, Crews is to Reese what Riggs was to Murtaugh.

The third principal character is Ted Earley (Arkin), a former CEO who was imprisoned for insider trading. Charlie took Ted under his wing while they were in prison and kept him alive, and as gratitude, Ted now lives in a room above Charlie’s garage and manages his money for him. Life is character-driven to an amazing degree, and the performances are all stellar. Damian Lewis especially is a revelation as Charlie Crews. This show should be on HBO, not a major network. The quality is that strong.

It manages to do what CSI and all of its spin-offs, and the myriad of other procedural shows on the networks cannot: it transcends the procedural formula with the strength and uniqueness of its characters (even more so than House). You’re never aware that you’re watching a cop show when viewing Life, although the weekly crimes are always offbeat and entertaining. The real hook of the show is watching Crews use his Zen mindset to solve the cases and try to decipher the complex conspiracy behind the dirty cops who set him up. There is the A storyline (the crime of the week) and the B storyline (Charlie’s conspiracy), and unlike most shows that involve a complex mythology or serial storyline, with every episode you see Charlie get closer and closer (last season’s finale saw him make a huge leap forward). As a viewer you are rewarded promptly, and that is a tremendously rare and satisfying experience.

If you’ve never watched the show, you will feel a little lost during the second season premiere, which finds Crews and Reese trying to find a killer who is locking people up in numbered boxes all over L.A. until they suffocate and still dealing with the aftermath of last season’s finale. You can definitely still enjoy it, but to really get the character dynamics and complex backstories and interrelationships you owe it to yourself to watch the 11-episode first season (all available for free on hulu.com). I haven’t addressed the show’s style (e.g. showing Charlie always standing in bright light, trying to make up for the darkness of the last dozen years and incorporating Errol Morris-like documentary segments interviewing acquaintances of Charlie into the narrative proceedings) or plot specifics from the season premiere or recapped last season, because I want others to have the chance to feel the surge of excitement I have gotten to feel with every episode of Life. That surge comes from knowing you are discovering a work of art that is fresh, exciting, fun, and original.

Life is endangered. Give it a chance, and let’s band together as lovers of brilliant TV and save it.

Season 2, Episode 1: Find Your Happy Place (original aired 9/27/08)

For another take on Life, see Elma Rahman’s review here.

For more on Life, click here.

Wednesdays 9/8c, NBC
Photographs courtesy of www.nbc.com

For those of you-like me-who may not be familiar with the show that managed to teeter its way back from a rocky start last season with high critical acclaim but low ratings,  Life is about ex-cop Charlie Crews who was imprisoned for 12 years for a murder he did not commit.  After finally being released and coming into a hefty settlement for his unjust imprisonment, Crews is able discover all the changes that have taken place in the world since he was last a free man.  Detective Dani Reese, his pragmatic and much younger partner, finds herself also adjusting to the often analytical and enigmatic Crews.  The fact that Reese’s father is the officer responsible for Crews’ arrest only makes matters more complicated for this oil-and-water duo.  In addition to the dysfunctional dynamics of Crews and Reese, the show is peppered with conspiracy theories, such as those of the unidentified reporter who has been interviewing people involved in the Crews’ case to discover the true murderer.

As Crews and Reese learn the identities of the bodies found in the trunk- Glenn, investment banker,  Lisa Robards, owner of a greeting card company called Unending Notes, and Brandy, exotic dancer-they are baffled to find the three victims seemingly have nothing in common, other than being suffocated to death and stuffed in the trunks in which their bodies were found.  In an attempt to gain more information, as well as scope out possible suspects, Crews and Reese visit Unending Notes employee John Armstrong, Glenn’s wife and business partner, and the club in which Brandy danced.  They come up with very little leads, but are later visited by a luggage store owner who confirms ten of his trunks were recently purchased and paid for with cash.  Crews and Reese are able to zero in on the fact that Glenn and Robards had recently purchased GPS navigation systems.  After narrowing in on the one place Glenn and Robards had recently visited, they are able to locate a nearby park where all three victims had been.

At the park, Crews and Reese digress from their investigation when they are forced to apprehend two crack dealers in an ice cream truck.  After the dealers are hauled off, one having been shot in the arm by Crews, Crews discovers the motion activated sink and towel dispensers in the park bathroom that hadn’t been around prior to his arrest.  Later, a concerned mother who frequents the park admits to having seen Robards and Glenn together, and that Robards was taking pictures of Glenn.  Reese concludes the wife murdered them after discovering their affair, which also probably involved Brandy.  Crews has doubts about the theory, which are confirmed when they discover Glenn’s wife and her girlfriend dominatrix back at her office.  The wife admits the two had not been in love for some time and Glenn’s upcoming career move to London was a fresh start for him.  After discovering the fourth body, 18 year old Kurt Ruiz, and the possibility of a fifth victim who could still be alive, Crews and Reese struggle to catch the killer after pinpointing the only other thing all four victims had in common.  Amidst the mysterious trunk murders, Crews must also pay a visit to Bible preaching ex-cellmate, Kyle, for clues to the whereabouts of missing girl, Rachel.

I’m not completely sold on yet another detective show about partners who just can’t see eye to eye.  However, Crews’ mysterious ways including the unsolved murder case for which he was accused 12 years ago and his existential crime-solving abilities gives the show an eccentric edge that appeals to me.  I hope in time Reese begins to soften the rock solid chip on her shoulder in order to reveal her more human side.  The show’s utilization of abrupt hand held camera shots of interviews conducted by the phantom reporter and his ongoing investigation of Crews also adds a stark grittiness.  Powerful music and an impressive cast, including Adam Arkin who plays Ted Earley and Donal Logue (who you may remember for his roles in Blade, The Tao of Steve, and Grounded for Life) as Captain Tidwell may help Life survive another season.

Season 2, Episode 1: Find Your Happy Place (original aired 9/27/08)

For another take on this episode, see Cameron’s review here.

For more on Life, click here.

Wednesdays 9/8c, NBC
Photographs courtesy of www.nbc.com