Episode 1233: Surprisingly, Today Work Trumped Play

Today's been a surprisingly disappoint day in terms of TV. Alcatraz has fallen prey, for me anyway, to the Lost curse of promising a compelling mystery that it can't ultimately deliver on. It's not good that I'm making that pronouncement after just five episodes. How I Met Your Mother aired an episode that was conceptually clever, but that also seemed to lack real heart in terms of the storytelling. 2 Broke Girls continued to trade in easy punchlines, even as the overall plot of the season seems to be quickly going nowhere. The Lying Game just needs to put me out of my misery by connecting all the dots of its mysteries before I lose interest entirely, although I'm very appreciate of Allie Gonino's singing on the show. (She's in a band called The Good Mad, which is a brilliant name.) Gossip Girl lamely revealed that Georgina was not in fact the real Gossip Girl, said reveal being so lame that I don't even care if it might be a huge spoiler to people because technically, it's no longer the case now, is it? The quarrel between Dan and Blair in this episode has been a long time coming, but it seems to have had no lasting consequences, so boo to lazy writing. Wasn't bowled over by this week's Pretty Little Liars either, oddly enough, not even with the game-changing reveal for Spencer.

So weirdly enough, the highlight of today's shows was actually the latest episode of House, a show that I am happy to concede is past its prime, but which I selfishly want more of because it could basically be retitled The Hugh Laurie Show. (It would've been the pilot of Smash, which officially premiered on TV yesterday, but which I'd already seen a few weeks ago because it aired online in advance of the TV premiere.) Nice to see Chase being given an interesting story arc, as lately it feels like he's just there to provide continuity with the show's early days and to call House out on his bullshit because the other team members are still too green to have worked out what makes House tick. Work-wise, I'm more than 50% done for the story, but now the real challenge begins, since previously, a lot of what I've done has been to write short snippets to sew together the bits of the story I workshopped last term. I reckon I'll be fine though, since what I've now got to write is the first encounter between Pandora and Adam, which Leila Rasheed specifically pointed out at the end of last term as something that really needed to be written out if I were to go any further with the stuff I'd workshopped.