Hubby’s worked the three to midnight shift for years, so he’s missed most of the treasures we call prime time TV.
But he called in sick this Tuesday and we got to watch Blue together (after I hid the remote so he couldn’t search for an episode of “The Man Show”).
When the episode was over, I tells him, “Ya know what? Andy don’t always say da right ting, but lately, you can depend on him to do da right ting.” He says “Why are you talking like that?”
I love this show – especially the dialogue. It’s like a whole other language – not just the accent and the cop slang, but the rhythm. And the body language, eye contact, little side glances, shoulder shrugging – all that stuff that just communicates.
I love the skells too. Where do they find these people? I swear Riker’s must have drama classes.
I like the show, but it’s iffy right now. There are two cliched trends that are getting very annoying.
The phony inarticulateness of the characters. People hem and haw in a very unconvincing way.
More seriously, David Milch’s inability to create drama without murdering someone. There wasn’t a second’s doubt in my mind that Bobby was going to die when I heard he was leaving the series. And Milch constantly introduces characters (and I don’t mean the victims whose murders they’re solving) whose only role is to die so that everyone else can feel sorry. It’s getting to be too damn predictable.
The strengths of the show are its dialog, which can be fascinating. The crimes aren’t particularly surprising, but the investigation usually is.
“What we have here is failure to communicate.” – Strother Martin, anticipating the Internet.
I found nothing hackneyed about the death of Bobby. To have a cop on a cop show die of an illness, rather than violently, was different, and I found the episode in which he died to be one of the most moving things I’ve ever seen on TV. That it was “predictable” is neither here nor there, in my view; the point is, did they do it well? And they did.
I’ll grant that it got too Andy-centric last year, as much as I adore Dennis Franz. But this year Simmons (Baldwin) seems like quite an addition, it was great to see Fancy get a plotline for a change (now can they give John something to do other than reaction shots?) and Sorenson may turn out to be quite interesting, though they haven’t really gone anywhere yet. After a weak second half of last season, things are looking up.
Although I’m a huge NYPD Blue fan, for rhythmic, communicative dialog, interesting, complicated and flawed characters, and dense and fascinating plot lines, I have to nominate SportsNight as the best show right now on TV.