Welcome back to Falling Skies!

Creepy damn aliens (at least two varieties), giant spacecraft and wicked weapons, gritty bad-ass rebellious humans, and absolutely no socio-political commentary to be found anywhere!

Awesomeness abounds.

Go ahead, bicker among yourselves.  Excessive paranoia and a healthy dose of self-doubt?  No problem.  Threaten each other with violence … everybody is equally well armed (all praise the NRA!).

Just remember which way to point those guns with the aliens rain hell down on your heads and I’ll go to bed happy.

It’s clear from the start that our alien invaders in Falling Skies have the firepower to lay waste to the entire planet.  Therefor, the big mystery here, is why they have yet to do so.  Theories range from classic Twilight Zone (To Serve Man) to Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  I favor the latter, or something like it, meaning these aliens need our bits for some purpose other than stocking the larder.  Regardless, this is the central mystery that provides the backdrop to Falling Skies … not that I care.  I’m from the XBox generation, afterall.  Just nuke some more aliens, dammit!

Alien death is often slowed up by interpersonal conflict between the principals, including Noah Wylie and his family of emo-boys, but I supposeTNT doesn’t have the budget for wall-to-wall alien-busting effects.  I imagine, should I put my mind to it and use some of those brain-cells not yet burned out by various video games, I could probably find some kind of allegorical parallels to the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, but I just as soon not.  I can’t even spell Afghanistan without help.

The aliens are bug-eyed bastards that deserve to die.  That’s all I need.  As long as Noah and the boys can set aside the pseudo-drama long enough to take care of bidness, count me in.

The aliens are coming, boys!  Lock and load!

Wait … don’t shoot!  That’s just Larry Hagman …

What am I saying?  Fire at will!!

Falling Skies airs Sundays on TNT at 9/8 Central.

I was going to skip over the various cable network cancellations, until I noticed that several rather good programs are no longer going to be with us.  Still, I will just stick to the highlights here.  And no, I don’t care about any show on Bravo or E! that got pulled.

• In Plain Sight (USA) – I LOVE Mary McCormack, but it was probably time for this one to go.  Good show, just time.
• The Closer (TNT) – Another good show with a great cast that leaves on its own terms and probably right on time.
• HawthoRNe (TNT) - I only got a glimpse of this after watching something else I actually cared about.
• Memphis Beat (TNT) - Gone too soon.  This simple little cop show had a lot of charm and should have been given more of a chance to really catch on.
• Men of a Certain Age (TNT) - Another show I feel slightly guilty for rarely watching.  It was pretty good really, just not my sort of thing.
• Eureka (SyFy) – This is a good one, but not better than anything else that SpiFy has cancelled over the last several seasons in favor of more reality show crap.
• United States of Tara (SHO) – Didn’t care for it.  Showtime has much better stuff to watch.
• Skins (MTV) – Almost nothing on Music?WhatMusic? TeleVision ever gets my attention anymore.  But this one made some waves once upon a time.
• The Protector (Lifetime) – I might have even watched this if I had any clue that it was on.  Ally Walker has a certain appeal.  Sorry Ally …
• Roseanne’s Nuts (Lifetime) – And then we’ve got this, your polar opposite of anything resembling a show with any appeal whatever.  Combining Roseanne Barr and a reality show actually was greenlit by someone … it boggles the mind.  No wonder I never tune in to Lifetime.  It would make more sense to give another talk show to Rosie O’Donell …
• The Rosie Show (OWN) – This was actually on TV? No way!
• Bored to Death (HBO) – I tried watching this.  Just not that hard.
• Eastbound & Down (HBO) –  Hit and miss at best.  When it missed … wow, did it miss.
• Entourage (HBO) – Should have been cancelled about two season ago.
• Luck (HBO) – Ran out of luck when too many horses kept dying.
• How to Make It in America, Hung, & The Life & Times of Tim (HBO) – HBO, it seems, is cleaning house.
• Rescue Me (FX) – This is one of those shows I should have watched more often.  Definitely worth catching up on DVD or Netflix.
• Make It or Break It, The Nine Lives of Chloe King, & State of Georgia (ABC Family) – Were all of these as completely interchangeable as they sound?  Never watched a single minute of any of them.  Maybe that isn’t completely fair to say.  I may have starting watching Chloe if it had lasted more than a season.  As for the other two … I’m being completely fair.
• Glen Beck (Fox News) – Buh-bye.

Dark Blue: Wanted meets The Handler

Undercover cops have been done and redone by television for decades.  Some successfully, others much less so.  The only thing “new” that Dark Blue really brings to the table is the idea that this undercover squad doesn’t officially exist.  But that is also a fairly common gimmick for such shows and in almost every movie about the subject from The Departed to Raw Deal.  TNT has never really been about originality.  Look at the junior net’s schedule for any given day … originality doesn’t exactly jump out at you.  But, occasionally, they still manage to deliver something with just the right combination of formula, concept, and casting.  The Closer, for example, is not much more than Columbo in a skirt.  But it works, thanks to casting and some very solid performances.

The things is, I’m not entirely sure that Dark Blue has that winning combination.  Back in 2004, TNT brought us Wanted, a show about a cross-section of specialists from a variety of law enforcement organizations forming a unit that “didn’t really exist” and “operated just outside the rulebook”.  That show I liked and I can’t help but see Dark Blue as a paler shade of Wanted.  Dylan McDermott leads the cast as Carter Shaw, your brooding, sexy with a touch of angst hero type.  Joe Pantoliano did it better in CBS’s The Handler, another short-lived cop drama from 2004.  McDermott is no Joey Pants, but then, he isn’t David Caruso either.  He is the leading man type, which is maybe enough to lead the rest of the lesser known cast beyond one season.

The best thing Dark Blue has going for it is the name Jerry Bruckheimer in the credits.  The plot and acting are both a cut above certain other Bruckheimer productions (ref: David Caruso mentioned above).  Even when Bruckheimer projects are lacking in depth, they often make up for it in production value.  As astonishingly shallow and silly as CSI: Miami might be, it looks good.  Dark Blue is not nearly as glossy, but maybe that means they can throw some of that Bruckheimer money at better writers.  Unfortunately, there is little to be seen in the first episode to support that theory.  One can hope this series will get stronger with age.  If it doesn’t, not even the Bruckheimer name will save it for a second season.

Leverage: The Equalizer meets The A-Team

This time, TNT isn’t even pretending to be original.  Anyone remember the A-Team?  How about The Equalizer?  Leverage has all the character humor of the A-Team (including their own version of the conman archetypes) with a healthy dose of The Equalizer’s ideology.  Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it also can pay off in certain circumstances … such as network TV.  This must be one of those circumstances since Leverage is into its second season.  Of course, TNT managed to leverage an audience share from a strong lead-in last summer with The Closer, landing Leverage some pretty nice numbers for cable.  This time, the show is paired with Dark Blue and now it is the lead-off hitter, neither of which suggests much of a chance for a repeat ratings performance.

Timothy Hutton (long removed from his Oscar) is the mastermind of  a team of con artists and reformed crooks.  This team doesn’t have Mr. T, but they do have their own Hitter (Christian Kane).  They also have a Grifter, a Thief, and a Hacker to round out the team … it says so right in the opening credits.  The con jobs are all pretty straightforward fare, with the standard plot point these shows always fall back on: the original con will almost certainly go wrong, but our team is too good to fail and there is always another con right around the corner.

So it’s been done.  But think back to the A-Team.  You didn’t get any more shallow or derivative than that.  Every episode was unfailingly just like every other episode.  Yet we watched five seasons worth of it back in the 80′s.  And, coming soon to a theater near you, we get a theatrical version.  We didn’t watch this stupid show for the plots.  We watched for the characters … and how those same characters played off each other.  This is where Leverage might actually succeed.  Here we have just the right balance of tom-foolery and tongue-in-cheek to make these characters humorous without being cartoonish.  The whole ‘Robin Hood’ shtick only works if you can put together the right band of merry men.  I kind of think they have.

Leverage airs on TNT Wednesdays at 9/8c followed by Dark Blue at 10/9c

I’m not real sure about this whole “split season” thing that the cable networks like to pull.  Sci-Fi did it with Galactica and we’re still waiting … and waiting … for the final season to play out.  Monday night, The Closer came to a close but it was only a “mid-season” finale.  Mid-season or not, that was one hell of a finale.

Brenda (Kira Sedgewick) was her usual half-crazed yet brilliant self, managing to get shot at after getting almost blown up at least once.  The case was a particularly nasty one (specially if you happen to live in Utah anywhere near Trolly Square).  As per usual, the crime gets solved by a combination of solid investigative work and stumbling upon that final piece of the puzzle.  Monk does this too, as does House and many others.  They solve the mystery with what I like to call the “incidental moment of insight” or IMI if you will.  Someone says something completely unrelated to the issue at hand which gives the main character that IMI moment.  This time it was not something said, but rather a map Brenda just happens to notice at just the right moment.

But that’s the real brilliance of The Closer.  You don’t care how the mystery is solved because you know it always will be.  It’s all the rest of it that makes us want to watch.  Like the entire team throwing Brenda over their collective shoulders to hustle her out of the vicinity of possible bombing.  Sarah Palin would call that moment sexist … I call it hilarious.

What really makes this series a joy to watch isn’t the mostly no-brainer cases; it’s the rest of the cast.  Their funny moments and their painful ones.  Their individual quirks and their often inapropriate responses to the most awful of situations.  Their unflinching loyalty to their slightly off-center but always beloved Deputy Chief Brenda Lee Johnson.

The Closer went out with a bang … several of them in fact.  At least one of the cast might not make it out the other side.  And while it was one of those mostly annoying mid-season finales, at least we only have to wait until January to see how it all shakes out.