The Crazy Ones 1x11: The Intern

What I Liked
-Zach and Lauren are "Young, hot pandas."

Only way more likely to have sex.

-Simon thought Andrew was Jewish and doesn't have time to change his plan when he finds out he's not. Curly hair + big nose doesn't necessarily equal Jewish.
-The first bad idea was Simon saying there are no bad ideas. There are a lot of bad ideas.
-Andrew drops his ice cream. It's so sad.

What I Hated
-Kelsi decides she wants the small room. Abrupt changes of heart that ruin plans have been done to death on sitcoms. TO DEATH!

Final Thoughts
I still don't know who Ashley Tisdale is. Mostly because I'm a little too old to have seen most of the things she's been in. At the end of the episode, in one of the outtakes, they show Sarah Michelle Gellar telling her to got back to the Disney hell she came from. That's cold. That's like Kendall on All My Children cold.

Although it's also been done to death, the horrible rich girl princess character in this episode didn't bother me. Whether that's more a function of the writing, acting, or directing, I may never know.

The Crazy Ones 1x10: Models Love Magic

What I Liked
-Simon wears the fantasy bra on his head. That's a problem.
-"Everybody likes pie except for terrorists and Canadians." Here, we like tarts.
-Bottom cleavage.

The third best kind.

-Zack can't pick up the models. It's so sad.
-There's a model book club. They're not illiterate, they're just models.

What I Hated
-Sydney mentions that Simon is literally distracted by shiny objects. It's not as funny if you spell it out.

Final Thoughts
Directed by Fred Savage. It's nice that he's keeping busy.

Bra security guy kinda sucks. He has one job: Watch the bra. And he doesn't even seem to really try to do it.

Do models really love magic?

Not the show's best effort. A lot of the episode seemed to revolve around having the models stand around in their underwear, and that's not all that interesting to me.

The Crazy Ones 1x09: 16 Inch Softball

What I Liked
-Andrew had to tell his girlfriend the truth, even though it was a lie. That's the best way to do it.
-Flizz.

Andrew's right, it's time for Rice Krispies to get a new mascot. Maybe tone down the outfit a bit first, though.

-Lauren's baseball outfit.

Time for a remake of A League of Their Own.

What I Hated
-Weird softball training semi-montage thing. Nothing about it was good.

Final Thoughts
Their first recurring villain (such as he is) has finally recurred, and it's TV's Brad Garrett.

Behold, the face of evil.

The cavalier attitude with which they approached the loss of someone's livelihood was a little distressing. I realize that it's just a TV show, but it sort of makes me wonder if the writers are living in that show business bubble where they don't understand how bad the economy is. Sure, it's fun to play softball and to joust on pocket motorcycles, but afterwards, someone's getting fired.

Sydney's just as appalled about it as I am.

This episode wasn't as funny as the previous one. I suppose there's not that much comedy left to be mined from softball.

The Crazy Ones 1x08: The Stan Wood Account

What I Liked
-The finger doesn't lie!

It sure doesn't.

-We finally meet the Lewis in LewisRoberts+Roberts. I was wondering when they'd get around to that.
-No one remembers Ike Turner for his song-writing skills. They shouldn't.
-Ed Asner plays the feeble old woman. Even at his advanced age, he can still act.
-There's a 'never mind horn' at the used car lot. You've gotta have some way to take it back when someone prematurely rings the bell.
-Brad Garrett driving a tiny car.

Ha-ha!

What I Hated
-They didn't show the new Mr. Finger commercial. That's all we really wanted to see.

Final Thoughts
Dang, Ed Asner is looking old and decrepit. I really hope he's still acting because he enjoys it and not because he can't pay his mortgage or something.

It's good to see TV's Brad Garrett back on TV.

This was the funniest episode so far of this series. I really enjoy it, which probably means it'll be cancelled at the end of the season.

The Crazy Ones 1x07: Sydney, Australia

Josh Groban, everyone.

What I Liked
-During the Priscilla, Queen of the Desert segment, they put Robin Williams in a body-covering unitard. They didn't have to do that, but I certainly appreciated it.

What I Hated
-Simon's somewhat irrational hatred for Australia may have actually been based on an experience he had in New Zealand. Notwithstanding the large distance between the countries, they're really not all that much alike.

Final Thoughts
Josh Groban's one of those guys who's been around forever and sold millions of CDs, but I couldn't name a single one of his songs if my life depended on it. I suppose I'm not really in his key demo.

The Crazy Ones 1x06: Hugging the Now

This week, they're using a choir to market boner pills.

Simon gets nominated for Creative of the Year and he wants to win to prove that he's still relevant.

Lauren pitches an idea for an ad campaign to help him win over the judges.

One of the other nominees is a guy named Josh who Sydney went to high school with and had a crush on. So the firm throws a party for the nominees and she gets all dolled up.

It turns out he had a crush on her, too, and they wind up going out a couple times and then binge-watching Bones.

Unfortunately, Sydney spills the beans during some pillow talk, and Josh steals the idea for her dad's campaign.

She heads over to his firm to confront him. He actually thought she might be impressed, since as ad people, they're all basically thieves. But she's an honest woman, and she doesn't play those games.

Josh wins the award, but Simon decides it's okay because his has his daughter and his team, and that's all he really needs. Which is loser talk.

What I Liked
-The boner pill executive is hard as a rock after the team's presentation.

Good for her.

-Just because Zach and Andrew high-five at the end, it doesn't make a pitch any good. That's an important lesson to learn.
-Simon needs to prove to the guys that he doesn't need a pill to get an erection, and they think he's going to pull out his dick. If it were still the 1970s, a coked-up Robin Williams probably would've done at least one take where he actually did whip it out.
-In his fake acceptance speech, Simon thanks his ex-wives, without whom he would've been able to retire years ago. Hee-hee.
-It's totally all right with Simon if Sydney accidentally gets pregnant because his grandfather clock is ticking. That's very true to life. Once you hit about 27, your parents start wondering where the hell their grandchildren are.
-Sydney can't dodge around the receptionist at Josh's firm because he used to be a ballroom dancer. Ha!

What I Hated
-Simon walks in on Sydney while she's just hammering on her keyboard... but nothing's happening on the screen. I really hate when they do that (hence its inclusion in this section). It's not like the screen was even in focus, they could've at least had her banging something out in Word.
-Robin busts out his Jack Nicholson impression. It's not bad, but it's a bit dated at this point.

Final Thoughts
Directed by Fred Savage. So many actors from shows I used to watch are directing these days.

Apparently, they've decided that Lauren is a literal crazy one since two weeks ago she was reciting poetry about murdering her ex-girlfriend, and this week she's reminiscing about how she poisoned a girl in order to win a beauty pageant and talking about her plan to murder Simon and take over the company. I like that. It's good to have someone mentally unbalanced on a David E. Kelley show. That's what made Shatner such a delight on Boston Legal. Although it's a bit weird that on a Robin Williams show, the mentally unbalanced one isn't Robin Williams. Not that he isn't crazy, but they've really toned his character down since the first couple episodes.

Zach still seems to be a bit underdeveloped, but after six episodes, the rest of the characters seem to be relatively well fleshed out.

I wonder if Josh is going to wind up being a recurring guest star. Every story need a villain, and he'd probably make a good one. He's someone Sydney can have a love-hate relationship with, and his firm would be a good rival for the LewisRoberts+Roberts team.

The show's been running a bit short for my tastes. They try to pad it out by adding some bloopers over the end credits, but even with that, there's still less than 20 minutes of actual show per half hour. That may be why they managed to keep things to a single plot this week, though. It's a conundrum: Is it better to have multiple plots and a longer show or one plot and a shorter show? The world may never know.

In any case, even though the episodes are short, they're still pretty entertaining. Unfortunately, the audience continues to slowly erode, so it may not be long for the world. Which is a shame, since Williams is still relatively funny, and the show's given Sarah Michelle Gellar an opportunity to flex her comedic muscle, which she hasn't gotten to do very often since she left All My Children.

Marvel's Agents of SHIELD 1x05: Girl In the Flower Dress.

A dude in Hong Kong has fire powers that he uses to impress a girl... who then has guys in fire-resistant suits kidnap him.

SHIELD suspects the Rising Tide, so everyone suspects Skye had something to do with it. She starts trying to track whoever hacked into their data stream so she can clear her name.

Meanwhile, the fire guy is being seduced with offers of power and fame... and a new name: Scorch.

The hacker is a guy named Miles Lydon, who makes Ward right away, then bolts in his product placement Jetta. He uses some hacker trickery to cause gridlock and gets away. As it turns out, Skye used to date him, and warned him so he could escape.

They meet up, and she castigates him for hacking SHIELD while she's on the inside. Then they need an excuse for Chloe Bennet to take her clothes off, so they have sex. But Coulson had May follow her, and they get busted before Skye even gets her clothes back on.

Miles was paid $1 million by what he thought was an eco-research company to hack a Chinese SHIELD data stream. That got them Scorch, who they juice up with the super serum from the pilot. Then they start sucking him dry. His blood platelets are fire-resistant, so they'll help stop the soldiers from exploding in the future.

SHIELD agents manage to save him before he dies, but he's not happy to see them, since they were his former oppressors. He doses himself with super soldier serum and starts tossing fireballs.

May tries to reason with him, but he's not interested, and eventually they have to just dose him with more serum until he explodes.

Miles gets kicked out of the plane in Hong Kong with a magic bracelet that does whatever SHIELD wants on his wrist. Skye tells Coulson that she hacked into SHIELD to find out what happened to her parents. She gets a bracelet, too. Then the titular girl goes to see some guy in prison. She needs him to get in touch with "The clairvoyant" whoever that is.

What I Liked
-Giving the guy a nickname makes him more dangerous. That's true in real life, too.

What I Hated
-Fitzsimmons spouts more trolltastic technobabble. This is a show for nerds. We know what things like TCP, hyper-text and mob mean, assholes.
-As Miles is escaping, he hits something on his phone called Gridlock.mp4, which is contained in Act 1 Video Playlist.

It's a damned smart phone. It can do anything they want, and their fancy hacker thing is a goddamn video playlist. And they didn't even bother to change the name to something inconspicuous. How lazy can you get? Did the graphics department not have twenty free minutes to whip something up?

-Coulson has a flying car, and yet he goes after Miles in a regular SUV. I know the plot required it, but the plot is dumb, so that's no excuse.
-They knock Scorch out with some gas so they can restrain him, then leave him awake while they suck out his blood platelets. That seems needlessly cruel. Sure, they're an evil organization bent on world domination or something, but they don't have to be dicks about it.
-SHIELD kidnaps a guy, dumps him in Hong Kong, and robs him. I realize that he was a bad guy, and if he hadn't haxored SHIELD's Gibson, things would've been better, but it wasn't exactly his fault that Scorch went nuts. It wasn't his fault that the guy died, either: May killed him. Not even in self-defense, either. She and Coulson decided he needed to die, so they extra-judicially murdered him. SHIELD's full of assholes.
-Skye is storing the data on her parents on a mini-SIM card. That makes very little sense. An SD card is about the same size and holds far more data.

Final Thoughts
So Skye's an orphan, and the only info she has on her parents was redacted by SHIELD. I still don't care. She's a bland character with a hackneyed backstory, who seems like she was designed by committee. All the new characters on the show seem that way, in fact. They got together in a room, chose some standard character types, and then decided they didn't need to do any more character development: Super nerds, master of waif-fu, Agent Hardchin, and the oddly attractive hacker who grew up in an orphanage. That's what we got from this show, and we're not getting anything else. The really big problem is that I'm not even sure it's possible to care about most of them. Fitzsimmons are disposable scientists and Ward is a disposable agent. Based on what they've done so far, you could kill them all and replace them with with similar characters, and almost no one would give a damn. They're completely generic and have no personalities. It's like they brought three bottles of store brand cola to life and dressed them up as humans.

Which would be forgiveable if the plots were interesting. They're not, though. Some guy we've never seen before had super flame powers. He used them for fives seconds and then exploded. The end. Not exactly compelling stuff. Sure, there's a long-running plot about the CENTIPEDE people, but they've only shown up twice so far, and they seem to be comically inept. Twice now, they've had their plans messed with by a ragtag group of misfits. If the Bad News Bears were a spy agency, they'd give SHIELD a run for its money.

Still, this was better than the previous episode, which admittedly is not saying much. They fought a lower-tier super-powered guy, which is at least sort of comic booky. Of course, most of the episode was focused on the too-pretty hacker and her personal issues, but at this point I'll take what I can get.

Marvel's Agents of SHIELD 1x04: Eye Spy

A bunch of guys in red masks with briefcases chained to their arms ride the subway in Stockholm. A girl knocks out the lights, kicks all their asses and steals one briefcase. Inside are a bunch of diamonds.

They search the interbutts and find a picture of the thief. Her name is Akela Amador, and she was a SHIELD agent who Coulson trained, and who everyone thought was dead. Also she has mind-powers. She sells the diamonds to a guy in Belarus, who gives her a key card.

The team tracks her down, but while Coulson and Ward go searching, she finds the van with Fitzsimmons and Skye and rams them over a ledge. They discover a video feed coming from an implant in her head. They also discover that someone's controlling her. May wants to call in and get a tac team, but Coulson won't let her.

May finds Amador via the video feed, and after the two of them fight, Coulson arrives and knocks her out with a tranquilizer dart. Then they use some Mission Impossible glasses to mimic the signal and send in Ward to finish Amador's mission.

Meanwhile, despite the fact that neither one is a surgeon, Fitzsimmons remove Amador's implant so the failsafe inside can't kill her.

Things go awry for Ward when Amador's orders come in.

Instead of seducing him, Ward knocks out the guard, then completes the mission, which was to look at something. On his way out of the building, an alarm goes off, but he handles the guards pretty easily. Coulson tracks down Amador's handler, but when he tries to stop him, the guy's eye explodes. He was a redundant safety, and the real bad guy is still out there.

The implant is safely removed, Amador is arrested by SHIELD agents, and Coulson promises she'll get a fair trial. For the first time in years, she goes to sleep without anyone watching her.

What I Liked
-Amador hides the diamonds in phony golf balls that dissolve when she pours water on them. That's kinda neat.
-Skye calls Coulson AC because it's cooler. Slater agrees.

What I Hated
-Some people took pictures with their phones, but mainly, everyone ignores the guys in the red masks. In this case, they were transporting diamonds, but in general, they would've been terrorists or bank robbers. If I see a bunch of guys in similar outfits get on a subway and they're not a sports team, I'm getting off and waiting for the next train. But maybe that's just me.
-There are aliens from other dimensions, super soldiers of various types, and a giant green rage monster, but everyone thinks ESP is ridiculous. I'm guessing mutants don't exist in this chunk of the Marvel universe because Fox still has the rights to the X-Men. It still makes no sense that no one would even consider it, though.
-Fitzsimmons are still ridiculous nerds. No real nerd, no matter how nerdy would care about visiting a town near the birthplace of a Nobel prize-winning physicist. That's just stupid.
-Amador and Coulson share a very touching, emotional conversation. Except we just met her, and the dialogue was terrible, so I don't care.
-More crap about Coulson being a zombie or a robot or something. It's really not all that interesting a mystery.
-Someone paid $30 million to get access to a room filled with strange, possibly alien writing, and SHIELD isn't sending in 100 guys to subdue and interrogate everyone? Why the hell not?
-They don't have a medic onboard. They've needed minor medical attention before, but this is the first time where it's been really obvious that they need a surgeon on the team. Ron Glass played a doctor in the pilot; they should bring him back.

Final Thoughts
Directed by Roxann Dawson. I wondered what she'd been up to lately. Not very hard, but I wondered.

This was not a good episode. After the previous one where they did some minor fancy science stuff and created a supervillain, I was hopeful. Then this week they just became bad NCIS again. Or actually, I suppose it's kind of a cross between NCIS and Fringe or maybe The X-Files. Of course, it's not as good as any of those shows. Regardless, why even bother having the Marvel licence if they're not going to use it?

This episode also really showed off how bad some of the acting is. They should probably kill off half the characters and find better actors to replace them.

The show in general hasn't really given me any reason to watch it thus far. The plots are dull, the action is poor, and the characters aren't very compelling. It's still early, but they're mainly ridiculous caricatures. I also don't care about the long-running plots. Skye isn't an interesting character, so I don't care what shadowy business she's up to, and the frequent allusions to the fact that Coulson's a clone or whatever are more annoying than mysterious. Yes, he's somehow different after Loki stabbed him. BFD.

I'm still going to watch a few more episodes, but after the next one, I'm not sure I'll review any more unless the show gets a lot better.