Monday Night TV

I might give The Black Donnellys a second shot, but for now just these two from the primetime lineup, plus some online stuff. Highlight for spoilers:

• Prison Break: Hey cool, the tape reveal wasn't entirely disappointing. The Prez was nailing her brother, in a kinda nifty but out of left field plot twist. Their conversation was pretty creepy. And she very quickly caves to Schofield, which is better than dragging it out for three episodes, but still kinda odd. Anyway, there's some big reveal of a folder marked "SONA," and I don't know if I'm supposed to know what that means. But after a little pressure from Kim, the President quits rather than pardoning anyone, and the whole plan goes to shit.
  
  Elsewhere, C-note ends up not dying, in what seemed like a non-dramatic turn of events. Mahone pulls a rather slick move letting Sarah steal his gun (sans ammo) so she can be followed to Schofield. And T-bag's attempt to get his cash that he checked like a moron went horribly awry, while Belick and Sucre might join together to get that cash back. The secondary character stuff was pretty lame, but the Schofield-centric stuff was as good as Prison Break's been all season.



• Heroes: Hiro's labeled a cheat so he's having trouble getting in to see Linderman. But conveniently, Nathan Petrelli, who's been working with the Feds all along, is also looking for Linderman, so they go in together. Hiro heads in to steal the sword, which goes awesomely bad until Ando shows up to save the day. They grab the sword and teleport the hell out, but accidentally end up in New York after the bomb. Whoops. Jessica shows up to take out Nate and the feds, but only takes out the unimportant actors before Nikki takes over and tells Nathan whats going on. With Nathan getting ready to shoot him, Linderman gives a nice long speech about the nature of good men or whatever. As I think we all suspected, Linderman knows just about everything about all the powered people, and saves his life with information and what sounds like promises of the Vice Presidency in two years.
  
  Claire and the Hatian are on the run. She doesn't appreciate the magnitude of what her father did for her, but what else would you expect from a teenage girl? It sounded like the Hatian said "Marseille" on the phone, but my French is a little rusty (in the sense that I've never spoken a word of it). But Claire ditches the Hatian in the airport, apparently unhappy at the idea of fleeing the country and not being involved in the storyline at all. So she goes to find Peter, but instead finds her no-longer-evil-seeming grandmother.
  
  Bennett remembers nothing, and Eric Roberts is seeming especially evil, while his new lackey Missy Peregrym is looking especially hot, especially in her little skirt when she shows up at Bennett's place, and being all the bad girl and whatnot. Isaac's understandably pissed at just having shot the woman he loves, Missy Peregrym's shape shifting powers save him from the cops, but ends up painting what looks like his own death. So kicking the junk hasn't given Isaac much happiness, I'm thinking he's probably headed back to it. Back at Casa de Bennett, he's told his wife, and is happy to come home to be able to confess to her, but it turns out to be Missy Peregrym (I still don't know her character's name) doing the shape shifting bit again. So Bennett is quite scrwewed, and they'll probably kill his wife.
  
  Sylar continues to telegraph his creepiness to Mohinder, who catches on and drugs him. Mohinder's looking to do a little experimenting first, then shoot him, but Sylar's way too powerful. The episode ends with a confrontation between Peter and Sylar, something my friends and I have been discussing for a while. Will Peter absorb all of Sylar's powers at once? Will the super hearing be crippling to him the way it was to Sylar at first? Will Peter's invisibility and super healing, which Sylar can't get without eating his brain, be the deciding factor? It should be exciting. But I don't watch the promos, so I really don't know what to expect. Speaking of promos...
  
  NBC completely sucks with their promos. Great, Spider-man 3 footage coming up, we get it. But there is no god damn reason to show clips from later in the episode in the last frame of the commercial break right before the show starts back up, meaning its impossible to avoid. They first show a clip of Simone standing up and saying "are you gonna shoot me again?" Given that Missy Peregrym is on her way there, I assumed it was her as a shape shifter, and hey, thanks for ruining that. Then the show the back of Linderman's head, which looked eerily like Malcolm McDowell, who doesn't appear until the absolute end of the episode. The second one wasn't so bad of a reveal, but still... some of us want to be surprised by the surprises!



• Andy Barker, PI: Episodes available online here. Minor spoilers for the first two episodes: So as the promos suggest, Andy Barker, incredibly boring accountant, shows up at his new office to find that it used to belong to a private eye, and a client shows up looking for an investigator. The plots, at least in the first two episodes, are straight out of cheesy 70s cop/detective shows. And they're surprisingly engaging. Joining Andy are the owner of a video store (Tony Hale - Arrested Development's Buster) who provides a lot of jokes with his movie snobbery, an Afghani restauranteur who became fircely pro-American after 9/11 to keep business, and the geriatric former occupant of Andy's office, who is easily the funniest character. He uses all the classic noir detective slang and basically seems stuck in the 40s, to amusing effect.
  
  Overall the show isn't great. Andy Richter Controls the Universe is one of my favorite shows ever, and this isn't nearly as good. But it's fairly funny and the stories so far are decent. The weak support NBC's giving it means it's doomed to failure, though. But good for them for putting the series up online for fans to enjoy. I'd say it's worth checking out if you're an Andy Richter fan, or if you liked those old cop shows.

On the Tivo: Black Donnellys, not sure I'm watching it.

I'm still upset at the NBC promos. Oh well. The first of many Veronica Mars-less Tuesdays tomorrow.