Tuesday Night TV/Catching Up

• Law & Order: Criminal Intent: This very special Criminal Intent is brought to us with limited commercial interruptions. I'm not sure what's special about it. Other than a scene being set in a Moe's burrito place, which might've earned them enough money that they didn't have to air as many commercials to turn a profit.
  
  
  We don't really know a thing about Wheeler, which isn't that surprising for a Law & Order show, but I'm surprised they gave her sort of a feature part this early on. I've had some questions about her character (mostly, thanks to her non-feminine hairstyle and the lesbian mechanic that hit on her early in the season, about her sexuality), but none of them revolved around her father. But it turns out Pop Wheeler was a lawyer who helped people get liquor licenses in exchange for piles of money.
  
  The actual case involved the murder of a judge's son. The investigation, as usual, went in all different direction, but whenever they show punk rich kids I'm immediately suspicious of them. The father of the kid who did it was overacting pretty badly there at the end. A lethal combination of the "look away to process information before dramatically turning your head to face someone in anger" and the long, almost Shatneresque, pause.


• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit: Law & Order did an episode on February 10th about a preacher and a gay hooker, played by Anson Mount. L&O: CI followed suit on February 21st, with Tom Arnold as the gay preacher. SVU's way behind the times, with Tim Daly as the religious leader.
  
  
  But they're at least slightly clever and don't make the religious leader exactly like Ted Haggard. They tried to be tricky about it, with all sorts of circumstantial evidence pointing toward Daly's character, but SVU has gone with the same DNA test twist way too many times. They get a partial match to the main suspect, and run with that until - surprise! - it's a close relative of the suspect. The oldest son was the obvious choice, since he thought their little haunted house AIDS joke was so hilarious, but I wasn't 100% sure until the mom from Picket Fences said he'd changed his tune from preaching against homosexuality to promoting tolerance.
  
  I was expecting the son to be the murderer, but when he confessed to having the gay relationship but not the murderer, they were running out of characters to pin it on. Tim Daly's oldest daughter knew her brother was gay, but they made it clear that the killer had overpowered the victim, and she looked to be about 4'10", so that left the smug church assistant guy.
  
  NBC promoted this with "One thing's for certain, you'll have no idea who did it," which worked, because it made me really try to figure out who did it, but it wasn't that much of a challenge. Otherwise, it was nice to see Finn and Munch get a little screen time after being absent for most of the year.


• The Riches: Eddie Izzard finally dons the priest getup that we kept seeing in the promos. It's part of a scam to get fake documents for the rest of the family in order to get the kids enrolled in school. That doesn't go over well, and I have to assume the kids will have a ton of trouble both academically and socially. During the debate, we get a little insight that Wayne is a "half-breed" and through 7th grade lived as a "buffer," the traveller term for a normal person. Which opened up the possibility at least that there's an explanation for his weird accent (which seemed much more American last week, but goes right back to whatever it was in the first episode).
  
  
  Wayne's first day at work starts with a hilarious speech. It resembled his interview last week, and was hilarious. "Peter Piper picked a peck of Panco peppers." Everyone buying into the "we are rocks" bit was a bit of a stretch, but Eddie Izzard is so damn charismatic that I can see people buying his bullshit. From that point on, the story at Panco was the plot to the Newsradio pilot, in which Dave Nelson gets hired as the new news director, has to fire Ed, the old news director. Still, if you're going to rip someone off, you might as well rip off one of my favorite shows ever.
  
  I'm really starting to like Ginny next door. Her speech about the fancy private school being a waste and then admitting their hypocrisy was great. And I really liked Dahlia's outrage when the private school wouldn't let them in, but with how thick she laid it on with her after the bird con thing, I'm surprised she fell for it in the end..
  
  Tammy, Cael's special lady friend, is still calling him (and Di Di finds out about it). Dale, the traveler leader guy, beats Tammy into leading him to the Malloys. And Cael naturally falls for it completely. We leave off with Dale clandestinely observing the meeting between Cael and Tammy, so I figure that's going to be the basis for next week.
  
  Not as good as last week's episode, but still pretty solid. I feel like they can get a ton of mileage out of this premise, and the cast seems able to take the material as far as it will go, the only question is whether the writing will hold up. But I'm along for the ride either way.

Still to watch: House, which I kinda forgot was new until just now, and I'm headed to bed.