Thursday Night TV

As much as I love all the other NBC comedies, it's nice to have a couple things on reruns on Thursday night, so that there's stuff to watch but not quite as many conflicts as there can be.

• Smallville: Paraphrasing Seinfeld, to the superficial man, that's a hell of a way to open a show. Fortunately, I'm above all that stuff. Yeah, that's the ticket. Of course, the superficial man might've been disappointed when they showed the face of the actress who was putting on the schoolgirl outfit. Great body, but she sorta looks like one of those wrestling women who are usually have slightly mannish faces. Or... at least that's what I would say if I were the type to judge women by that sort of thing.
  
  A lot of shows after the opening go with a "24 hours earlier," or "36 hours earlier," or "48 hours earlier," but Smallville goes for 46 hours. This is the kind of attention to detail that makes this among the two or three hundred best written shows on television right now. Except that in the opening, the guy referred to the girl as "security guard by day, schoolgirl by night," which made me think it was night. 46 hours earlier would make it 2 hours later at night two days earlier, but it was daylight at the Kent farm. But it's Smallville, so I should remember to turn my brain off, especially for pointless stuff like this.
  
  So Clark is onto Titan, a Phantom Zone baddie who's part of some sort of underground fight club. No Tyler Durden, though, this one's hosted by a bad Sam Rockwell knockoff, and features mostly meteor freaks.
  
  Lex and Lana are half-celebrating their marriage, and they throw the sinister music over just about every scene Lex does (including another Corto Maltese namedropping), but they never really show him doing anything evil, just imply it. I'm pretty sure if they showed him get up in the middle of the night to get a glass of water, they'd play the spooky music over it at this point. Anyway, Lana ends up passing out, and may have had a miscarriage... or Lex may have drugged her so that the evil alien baby he implanted in her could be harvested without her knowledge while she slept.
  
  Lois is desperate for a story, and snoops on Chloe's notes on the fight club, inexplicably puts on Britney Spears' red cat suit from one of her videos, and goes undercover. After a brief scene of lesbian sexual tension with our schoolgirl from the opening, Lois shows off her ninja moves, kicking the ass of a woman who seems to be a trained fighter/security guard. They like to point out that her father is an Army guy, but I don't see how she can always take down other people with training who are bigger than her.
  
  Naturally, Clark gets his way into the fight club to take on Titan, but first has to prove himself against Lois. I don't get how that'd really prove his skills, or how any of their supposedly rich clients would really want to see some dude kill a 20-ish-year-old girl... or at least I assume the "fight to the death" audience would want to see a close fight rather than something closer to a snuff film.
  
  But it could've been an interesting situation. He can't use his powers because it's Lois, he can't not win cause he needs to get Titan, and he can't kill her, even though she's often really annoying. And because they haven't exploited Erica Durance's body in a couple episodes, the fight club folks bring her out in an even skimpier version of the tight red leather suit. But rather than force him to come up with a clever solution, he waits until Lois' head is turned to zap all the broadcast equipment with the heat vision.
  
  Par for the course on Smallville a series of convenient events brings the plot to a close. Clark doesn't have to look for the guy because Titan just appears on his own, and Clark doesn't have to hide his powers because Lana gets knocked unconscious 5 seconds into the fight and sees nothing.


• Scrubs: Speaking of openings for the superficial man, Scrubs starts off with an Elliot's-shirt-gets-torn-off gag, and cuts straight to a super hot new nanny, played by Mircea Monroe (not porn, but a fairly racy link - follow at your own risk), who I didn't recognize at first, but she was in that Nobody's Watching show from some Scrubs writers that became quite popular on the ol' internets.
  
  The hot nanny's causing stress between Turk and Carla, Jordan's on bed rest after her surgery and is driving Dr. Cox nuts, Elliott breaks the rules because patient wants to see her dog which furthers the conflict between her and Kelso, and Laverne and Perry argue over whether things happen for a reason. That seems like a couple plots too many. But as usual when the jokes are working the show works, and there were some really good ones this week.
  
  "Gotta go, booby horn." Every Dr. Cox's continuing hatred for Hugh Jackman cracks me up every time. The group guy lie was awesome. As was the nice nod to the fact that everyone has hated Dr. Cox's hair this season (except for the obviously out of order episode where his head was shaved), using the delivery guy as the fake father of the stabbed girl was great, and the fantasy ending to J.D.'s date with smoking hot racist thief Heather was one of the better jokes in the past couple seasons.
  
  Ah but the episode ends with Laverne in a coma. She's not my favorite character or anything, but it'd be a little sad to see her die. And I can only assume she will, just because it'd seem cheap to put her in the coma for a while and bring her back, given the "bad things happen for a reason" storyline.
  
  A decent episode, but as a two parter, the payoff will obviously determine the overall quality.


• Andy Barker, P.I.: Sure, I'd technically already watched this episode online, but this was actually my favorite of the series, and it'll probably disappear forever shortly. A fat client of Andy's (his doctors are a bunch of "gloomy Gusses, they like to think that I'm 66% not body fat") dies on the golf course from a heart attack, but it shockingly not due natural causes. And the motive is jealousy over the fact that he was even more shockingly popular with the ladies (and one dude).
  
  The jokes in this episode really work, plus they let the talented cast play to their strengths. Andy Richter really sells the sequence where the wife shows up to put forward the foul play/he'd never have a heart attack/it was his mistress sequence. He manages to look like he's sorry for the widow, like he thinks she's completely off her rocker saying all this about a really fat guy, and like he's desperately trying to be polite all at once.
  
  And Tony Hale in the scene where he first meets Nicole was great. "And who might you be... hello." He bounces around between false bravado, total lack of confidence, and just regular old infatuation effortlessly. And then he comes back for the "Me and Mrs. Jones"/black and white cookie scene which just killed me.
  
  But even more than the jokes, it was a solid story. Nicely paced, classic cop show misdirection. If you were to ignore the silliness, it'd almost be a halfway decent episode of Law & Order or something... that might be a stretch, but the episode was very well-written.

Still to come: I recorded Raines but I'm still debating whether I'll watch it. Otherwise, I think I'm all caught up.