Gone Surfin'

I've had some thoughts about different things I've watched on TV in the past few days...

* I love the new show Sons & Daughters. Best way to describe it is to say it's like The Office, except it's about a family. By that, I mean it's funny in that painful way The Office excels at, and it's not sitcomy (i.e.: no laugh track). My favorite character on the show is Carrie, the sarcastic daughter (or niece, I suppose, if you base everything around the lead character, Cameron). She always gets the best lines and has a perfect sardonic delivery. But, like, here's an example of the humor on the show: On this week's episode, the grandmother is taken to the hospital because she apparently had a heart attack. It turns out to just be angina. So the whole family gathers in her room, and the high school age grandson, who is a smart-ass but dumb as a brick, says to her, "How's your vagina, Grandma?" Cracked me up. Sons & Daughters airs Tuesday nights at 9 p.m. on ABC. They show two episodes every week.

* The reason Lost appears to have dropped in quality this year is because of episodes like last night, which was another above-average Locke episode. His episodes are always better than the others (no pun intended). Cool stuff going on in the hatch. And it's these kinds of episodes that make the "average" episodes (like last week's, about Jin and Sun) seem not as good. And in other news, sucks to be Harold Perrineau, doesn't it? His character went off in search of his son months ago, and hasn't been seen since. And there's no acknowledgement of his whereabouts, either, like no one cares. Are we to assume he died, or will he be back by season's end?

* What About Brian?, that new show starting in April on ABC looks like it's right up my alley, if not a little too true to life. Can't wait to watch it and wallow.

* Bar none, the best news show out there is Keith Olbermann's nightly Countdown on MSNBC. The guy's got a sharp wit, and a great tone. And I love the way he beats up on Bill O'Reilly most every night.

* Felicity is the new 90210. Time was, I'd wake up on Saturdays and Sundays and plop myself on the couch until noon, watching the 90210 reruns on FX. Then they went off the air and I got a life. Well, now that Felicity reruns are on Saturday mornings on the WE channel from 10am to 12, I'm back where I was, lifeless. But I'll tell you, when that show was good, it was really good. And Ian Gomez (Javier) was one of the more underappreciated actors when it was on.

* It's funny how there are just some movies you can sit and watch all the way through on cable, and if you go out and buy them on DVD, you never have the patience to watch them. Like Pleasantville (which I own, and is still in the plastic) or The American President. Sunday night I found myself watching My Best Friend's Wedding. All of it. And yet, if it was in my DVD collection, I'd never watch it.

* I'd mention American Idol, but really, what for? It was pretty bad this week, and Lisa Tucker getting voted off was no big surprise. And actually, now that Kevin Covais is gone and Chris Daughtry shows signs of vulnerability, and all the finalists seem so uniformly average, I'm losing interest.