"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: The Awesomes, "MadeMan"

Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

The Sopranos is back in the limelight again, not because another one of its stars died, but because of a Vox writer's misguided attempt to create click-bait for the crazy "Tony got whacked in that diner, and we've got proof!" conspiracy theorists. So "MadeMan," a mob genre-influenced Awesomes episode where The Sopranos happens to get mocked, has wound up becoming kind of timely, and what I like about "MadeMan," which was written by Ben Warheit, is that it parodies the elements of The Sopranos and The Godfather that other animated comedies usually don't pay attention to whenever they riff on either of them.

Instead of spoofing Tony, Big Pussy or the HBO show's frequently parodied final scene, "MadeMan" spoofs Dr. Melfi. (Is that Kate McKinnon or Cecily Strong voicing Dr. Romano, Impresario's therapist? Whoever she is, she's come up with the best impression of Lorraine Bracco as Dr. Melfi since Debra Wilson's uncanny impression of her during MADtv's classic "The Sopranos on PAX TV" sketch.) And instead of doing tired gags about Don Vito Corleone's wheezy voice (although "I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse" and "No Sicilian can refuse a request on his daughter's wedding day" get referenced), the horse's head scene or any other violent moment from the two Godfather movies (The Godfather Part III never happened), the episode focuses its attention on a minor section of the first Godfather, Michael's romance with Apollonia while hiding out in Sicily.

Another thing that's enjoyable about "MadeMan" is its visual sense. The episode displays a confidence in both its visuals and storytelling that The Awesomes didn't quite have when it started out ("MadeMan" juggles three different plots--Impresario's mama issues, the love life of Josh Meyers' Perfect Man character and Gadget Gal's mentorship of Tim into a skilled gambler--and intertwines them more smoothly than most animated comedies that attempt to juggle the same amount of plots). The show has come a long way since its cheap-looking, straight-out-of-a-2002-webtoon sewage monster in the first episode. Bento Box shows like The Awesomes and Bob's Burgers have a tendency to start out looking unremarkable, but then as their seasons unfold, their animation quality and visual sense both improve (to the point where the rough animation quality of an early Bob's Burgers episode like "Art Crawl" becomes really jarring upon rewatch, much like the animation quality on many first-season Simpsons reruns).

The whole section of Perfect Man the fugitive laying low in Sicily and falling for a local businessman's daughter who's not unlike Apollonia is done mostly without dialogue and was handsomely realized by the Bento Box animators (it's letterboxed too, which enhances the Sicily section's '90s Miramax chick flick vibe as the section becomes more than just a Godfather riff). The images of the city being flooded with Impresario's infinite clones of himself are also quite impressive for an animated show produced exclusively for a streaming service (although the lack of bystanders while the Awesomes attempt to clear the streets of Impresario clones is kind of distracting).

The flood of Impresarios is a result of a fed-up Impresario finally getting rid of his smothering mama Annabelle's presence from the magic jewel she gave him, which supplies him with his Green Lantern-style power of conjuring up purple energy constructs that all previously carried the visage and voice of Annabelle. Now that Annabelle is dating one of Gadget Gal's poker buddies and old Awesomes teammates, the gangland-themed retired superhero MadeMan (Bobby Moynihan), and focusing all her attentions on this other man in her life, her new relationship gives Austin an excuse to free himself of his ubiquitous mama and turn into the kind of independent grown man he's always wanted to be. An especially observant and amusing touch in Warheit's script is that Austin is so stunted as a mama's boy that one of his first acts of freedom is to fill his home at Awesome Mountain with arcade games, pinball machines and oversized toys, much like what 12-year-old Tom Hanks did when he got his first apartment in Big (the scenes of Impresario being ecstatic over all the new belongings he's conjured up, including the "Walking Piano" from Big, are particularly amusing for me because I happened to catch for the first time the expanded cut of Big on DVD right before I watched "MadeMan"). It's such a mama's boy's idea of parentless freedom.

Without the jewel version of his mama, Impresario becomes irresponsible and reckless and creates countless clones of himself to pamper both himself and his teammates. But he loses control of his duplicates and isn't able to make them disappear, so he turns to Prock for help, and Jeremy reveals to his teammates that, much like Batman does with his Justice League teammates, he keeps secret files on them that list how to defeat them if any of them ever becomes dangerous and needs to be stopped (example: trick Frantic into running into flypaper and then light his dick on fire). Prock may be far better as a leader and strategist than as an actual superhero, but apparently he dozed off on the day the lecturer at Sky High (or wherever superheroes in the Awesomes universe go for superhero school) told aspiring leaders to never divulge to their teammates that they keep secret instructions on how to take them down because revealing to them that they keep such secrets about them would just creep them the hell out.

Impresario's A-story in "MadeMan" is a good example of how, on screen, the superhero genre is really at its best when it's handled as a satire or comedy that embraces the inherent absurdity of the genre and makes the characters' battles with their own neuroses more engrossing than any of their battles against crime, like The Incredibles, The Venture Bros. or The Tick (which, by the way, made news last week when Amazon expressed interest in reuniting the live-action Tick's cast). When the genre becomes a completely humorless glorification of superheroes--like any Zack Snyder-directed comic book movie where, as Birdman director Alejandro González Iñárritu once put it while elaborating on his hatred of superhero movies, "the human quality" becomes so de-emphasized that the heroes wind up being unrelatable as characters--the genre's interminable as hell. As we saw in his lead-footed take on Watchmen, Snyder's one of those neo-con directors who's too dumb to handle satire. I'm now convinced that all the witty moments in Snyder's first and best movie, the Dawn of the Dead remake, were James Gunn's doing, not Snyder's.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Space Dandy, "A World with No Sadness, Baby"

Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

Vox posted an intriguing and controversial profile this week about Sopranos creator David Chase that's key to understanding "A World with No Sadness, Baby," the occasionally confusing but visually sumptuous Space Dandy episode that takes place on a mysterious planet of the dead and is one of the few Space Dandy episodes written by general director Shinichiro Watanabe. The part of the lengthy Chase profile that everyone on the Internet is most interested in--other than for click-baity, traffic-generating reasons--is Chase's latest reply to "Is Tony dead?," the question that's nagged Sopranos fans since "Made in America," The Sopranos' divisive, open-ended final episode, wrapped up the mob drama's run seven years ago, to the tune of Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'."

Chase's laconic answer was "No, he isn't." But after the publication of the article, he immediately retracted his answer. "To continue to search for this answer is fruitless. The final scene of The Sopranos raises a spiritual question that has no right or wrong answer," wrote Chase's publicist in a statement to the press. Whether or not Tony got whacked in the diner always mattered to Chase the least (I never gave a shit about whether or not Tony got whacked either, just like how I don't give a shit about the overly giddy, "look, Tony died in that restaurant because look at all the clues in the restaurant and look at that line about how you don't see it coming when you're whacked!" camp). Chase blurted out "No" to the Vox interviewer, not to reassure the Sopranos fans who cared only about the most lurid moments of The Sopranos, like who got killed this week or who Tony is banging this season, but simply because he's tired of being asked that question (they're the kind of fans who want everything to be spoon-fed to them--I wouldn't be surprised if they moved on from The Sopranos to more subtle fare like Jersey Shore and Keeping Up with the Kardashians--and they've failed to grasp the ambiguity that Chase emulated from European cinema, which is why Chase has contempt for them).

What clearly matters more to Chase than "Which characters will live and which ones will die?" are the fallacy of the American dream that Chase's hardware store owner father bought into, the emptiness of post-WWII prosperity and the search for enlightenment (Chase is an agnostic who became alienated by the Catholicism of so many Italian families like his own; he believes that enlightenment is found not in God but in art, whether it's an Antonioni movie or Parisian ruins). They're themes that permeated not just The Sopranos but also Chase's lukewarmly received debut as a film director, 2012's Not Fade Away, and even--and this isn't mentioned in the Vox profile--the episodes Chase wrote earlier in his career for The Rockford Files, particularly "Quickie Nirvana," the 1977 Rockford episode where Chase expressed skeptical opinions about both cults and organized religion that make you say, "Wow, how the fuck did NBC allow much of this to air?" As The Sopranos' run wore on, Chase became more interested in those profound themes of artifice and enlightenment and much less interested in the mob soap opera stuff (this is why all the Sopranos clones that emerged on network TV due to The Sopranos' popularity sucked so much: they only cared about who lived and who died, and those shows' creators and their network bosses didn't understand that the scenes of Tony or Carmela in therapy and the conflict between Tony and his cantankerous mother Livia were what made The Sopranos unique and popular, not the violence).

Where this Vox piece on Chase ties in to Space Dandy--and this is the moment that fascinates me way more than "Is Tony dead?"--is Chase's statement that "I'm not a religious person at all, but I'm very convinced that this is not it. That there's something else. What it is, I don't know. Other universes. Other alternate realities." Chase's fascination with alternate realities explains not just the unusual 2006 Sopranos episode "Join the Club" (where a comatose Tony dreams of an alternate life as a salesman with no ties to the Mafia and no Jersey accent, so "Join the Club" offers glimpses of how the late James Gandolfini sounded in real life, without that accent), but Watanabe's similar fascination with alternate realities in Space Dandy episodes like "A World with No Sadness, Baby" as well.

Like Chase, who's a fan of the ambiguity of Antonioni movies like Blow-Up, Watanabe traffics in ambiguity, and it's part of why Watanabe's work fascinates me more than the work of other Japanese animators. Cowboy Bebop opened and closed with a badly wounded Spike Spiegel at the brink of death, and Watanabe said he left it up to the viewer to decide if Spike really did die when he collapsed to the ground at the end of the Bebop finale. "A World with No Sadness, Baby" is more conclusive about Dandy than either Spike's collapse or Tony's last scene in the Sopranos finale: Dandy's clearly dead from the first moment we see him marooned on Planet Limbo after a dangerous encounter with a "dark nebula" (by the way, the visuals of the planet of the dead that were crafted by BONES Inc. and guest director Yasuhiro Nakura are extraordinary; we're talking feature film-quality visuals here, and they're given pitch-perfect musical accompaniment by guest composers Ogre You Asshole, a Japanese rock band that counts Johnny Marr as one of its fans).

We also learn from Poe (Kaori Nazuka), the entity who's fallen in love with Dandy and is the physical manifestation of both Limbo the planet and Limbo the plane of existence, that Dandy is a much more powerful being than he realizes, and that power of his has something to do with his parallel selves. The absent-from-this-episode Dr. Gel and the Gogol Empire's relentless pursuit of this unlikely "chosen one"--a vain idiot who's a dick to his shipmates on the Aloha Oe and cares only about "food and boobs" (he's basically an overgrown teen)--makes more sense now.

Where "A World with No Sadness, Baby" gets ambiguous and open-ended is the final scene of Dandy back on Limbo, the reason for a bunch of "What happened to Dandy after his time on Limbo ended?" comments and theories on Reddit and other forums. Here's how I interpreted the moment: what we're seeing is a flash-forward to the very last scene of the entire series, at a point in time after Dandy's actual final death, as well as long after Dandy--or one of his parallel selves--was accidentally whisked off to the distant future at the end of "A Race in Space Is Dangerous, Baby." Dandy's returned to Limbo, but at a point in time before the planet used up all its energy and ended up destroying itself to send Dandy back (but as a comatose Dandy) to the Aloha Oe to save Meow and QT from the dark nebula. He's there to reunite with Poe and the rest of the friends he made on Limbo and then take them along with him to heaven. So it's basically the second-to-last scene of the Lost series finale, but without the hugginess and hokey, New Agey sentimentality.

I might be wrong about the final scene--and we have a few more episodes to go before I'm probably proven wrong--but it implies that Space Dandy will be headed towards a more profound direction for the remainder of its run. It's a good thing I read the Vox piece on Chase after watching "A World with No Sadness, Baby" because Chase's alternate realities discussion helped clear up the confusion I initially had about both the final scene and Dandy's reappearance on a planet that ceased to exist. The scene seems to be hinting that the show's closing arc will be the redemption of Dandy the asshole, as Space Dandy starts to delve more into Dandy's parallel counterparts and perhaps will show how Dandy's inevitable reunion with his other selves mirrors his growth as a person, like how the Sopranos characters' discussions about "What's the purpose?" echoed Chase's preoccupation with "this is not it."

The "redemption of an asshole" arc is kind of a tired one. But I like how Watanabe handles the arc in "A World with No Sadness, Baby" in his typically open-ended way, by fracturing the time frame and leaving all the moments of Dandy's maturation from vain idiot to selfless person (who, if I'm not mistaken, will end up saving the universe from the Gogol Empire) off-screen. Watanabe's basically done a series finale before the final episode has even aired. It's a ballsy move. (The odd placement of that final scene on Limbo has also made me realize that Tony's subconscious yearning for an uncomplicated alternate life in "Join the Club" is more of a conclusion to The Sopranos than the actual final episode itself. Tony's scenes as Kevin Finnerty of Kingman, Arizona could be interpreted as a visit to the future heaven of his choosing, that is if he ever stops being an evil bastard after the events of "Made in America.")

"A World with No Sadness, Baby" is an interesting turning point in Space Dandy's run--and at such a late point in the run too. Thanks to the questions of life and death pondered by Dandy and the Limbo inhabitants in "A World with No Sadness, Baby," this slapstick animated sitcom about an alien-hunting idiot who hops from planet to planet and dimension to dimension without ever really experiencing any growth as a person has proven naysayers like the Gray Lady wrong (care to take back those words about the show being nothing but cringe-making fan service, Gray Lady?) and suddenly turned into something more meaningful. It's like when The Sopranos quickly proved to be more than just the "Look, it's Analyze This on a weekly basis!" gimmick that was emphasized in HBO's misleadingly lighthearted, Get Shorty-inspired first-season promos and emerged as something richer and more complicated: a darkly comic and often brutal exploration of seeking enlightenment and realizing the fallacy of the American dream.

I was prepared to hate "A World with No Sadness, Baby"--the episode preview's images of an unkempt Dandy in longer hair that's more fitting for Emo Dandy from "I Can't Be the Only One, Baby" had me worried that the episode was going to be an overly dour one--but for an installment centered on the heavy subject matter of mortality, "A World with No Sadness, Baby" is surprisingly not-so-dour. The show's sense of humor remains intact, like when a pack of what I assume to be grief counselors confers with a depressed bar patron ("Keeping death at a distance and not thinking about it--that is like averting your eyes from death")--but they do so completely in song--or when Dandy responds to Poe's admission of love for him with "Well, I'm so handsome you probably couldn't help it." "A World with No Sadness, Baby" is more entertaining and satisfying than any episode about a sentient planet/plane of existence that falls in love with a lead character who's just died (and wants to be alive again) has any right to be. Space Dandy never fails to surprise. "Don't stop believing," indeed.

Stray observations:
* I'm fond of the '50s War of the Worlds ship-style creature design for the Limbo inhabitants who ended up destroying most of their homeworld through warfare.

* I'm also fond of how the magazine Dandy and Meow are ogling during the preview for next week's episode, "We're All Fools, So Let's All Dance, Baby," is a mag full of spreads featuring '70s and '80s Japanese swimsuit model Agnes Lum.

Why I, a latecomer to The Rockford Files, became a fan of the classic P.I. show and the late James Garner

The legendary James Garner died yesterday at the age of 86. The following is a repost of "Watch The Rockford Files and call to see if Paul can score some weed," from January 16, 2009. In the '09 piece, I mentioned my goal to watch every episode of Garner's classic show, which I became a fan of several decades after it was cancelled.

I still haven't completed that goal, and I should really get my ass to Netflix Instant and marathon the hell out of Rockford again because Netflix has every single episode of Rockford (including the ones where Garner's knees were clearly wrecked, yet he didn't lose a beat and remained a trooper through it all). And also because Garner was truly one of the greatest.

(Photo source: Soref.TV)

Your friends do it and you've probably done it too: catch up on a show your lazy ass has put off watching by setting aside an entire weekend to view the DVD box set in one marathon sitting. Back when 24 first hit the DVD market, various writers who missed the first season chose to catch up with the show on DVD and recapped in real time what it was like to watch the first-season discs in one sitting, while a writer I used to work with picked the '80s version of The Twilight Zone for his weekend DVD marathon. A couple of years ago, those writers inspired me to do a similar marathon thing with the box sets of another cult show: The Rockford Files, Stephen J. Cannell's clever reinvention of the private eye genre, which starred James Garner in his signature role as rugged everyman gumshoe Jim Rockford.

Alright, so it's not quite a marathon. I haven't even viewed all 123 episodes yet, but my goal is to eventually see them all on DVD or via Netflix's media player for PC users. As of this writing, I haven't reached season five yet.

I picked Rockford because I was a fan of Veronica Mars (which starred Forgetting Sarah Marshall's Kristen Bell, a Star Wars geek who should have Jedi mind-tricked the CW assclowns into bringing back her show). Before I started renting the Rockford DVDs from Netflix, I had only caught Veronica's spiritual granddaddy once or twice on cable, so I wanted to better acquaint myself with Rockford on DVD, where it's uncut and commercial-free (on Hulu, it's not commercial-free). The older the series, the more it gets chopped up by syndicators to accommodate commercial breaks, which grow annoyingly longer with each passing year. So that must mean Adventures of Superman reruns will eventually be edited down to 10 minutes, and George Reeves' flying sequences will be sped up so badly it'll look like the Metropolis underworld slipped some crank into the Daily Planet watercooler.

Rockford still draws a cult that's pretty rabid, though not quite as huge as Veronica's online fanbase. Slackers like the main character's pal in Ben Folds Five's "Battle of Who Could Care Less" dig Rockford reruns because Jim is one of them. They identify with a hero who'd rather go fishing with his father Rocky (Noah Beery) than do his job. The fans who still visit the alt.tv.rockford-files newsgroup continue to exchange favorite Garner wisecracks, and a couple of fan sites list every wacky message Jim received on his answering machine during the opening credits.





On disc, Rockford has aged better than most '70s shows, thanks to quirky, sharp and timeless scripts penned by staff writers like Cannell, future Sopranos creator David Chase and Juanita Bartlett. Seventies TV comes in three modes: schlocky (the Krofft variety shows, anything with Glen A. Larson's name on it), sanctimonious (M*A*S*H, Norman Lear's shrill shoutcoms) or a hideous mash-up of both (Hawaii Five-0, the "Fonzie gets a library card" era of Happy Days). Rockford is one of the few '70s shows I've seen that's neither of the above, and whenever the series did address a serious issue--like the flaws of the grand jury system in its most celebrated ep, the Bartlett-scripted "So Help Me God"--it did it with class and zero preachiness.

Almost Griggity-Grown had a theme tune that basically told other '80s TV theme tunes to sit their asses down

(Photo source: Jeff Baron)

Most people visit YouTube for cat videos, while I go there for either hip-hop music videos, instrumental versions of hip-hop tracks, music I can't find on Spotify (or don't want to go to Spotify for because it always crashes), blooper footage or old TV show opening title sequences. The other night, I was zipping through some YouTuber's compilation of network TV opening titles from my childhood (peep Bryan Cranston in an uproarious mullet at 4:25!), and one particular title sequence--from a show I've never seen before--stood out amongst the rancid-sounding, sub-smooth-jazz pack.

Okay, maybe that original Todd Rundgren theme for TV 101 isn't so rancid (Stacey Dash drinks the blood of young Republican virgins to keep looking like she does in the TV 101 opening credits [6:41]). But from 2:01 to 3:01, Almost Grown, a drama that starred Tim Daly (at a point in his career between his breakout role in Diner and the era of Wings, the Timmverse Superman and my personal favorite animated Daly character, Bizarro), blows away all the other '80s shows with a Pablo Ferro-esque font and a swaggering James Brown banger that fortunately isn't the overplayed "I Feel Good," a Brown tune I grew to despise (thanks a lot, movie trailers, wedding DJs and Republicans!).



I know this groove best as Das EFX's "Mic Checka" ("I miggity-make the Wonder Twins deactivate!"), but heads who didn't grow up in the '90s might know it as "Think '73."

It's funny how "Think" was used to open the whitest show on network TV. Almost Grown was part of an annoying late '80s network TV trend of white and affluent baby-boomer showrunners subjecting viewers to their nostalgia for '60s music (even though a lot of that music was top-notch Motown). However, this really white show is an interesting-sounding one I'm dying to watch for the first time on disc (I don't think it'll ever make it to disc because I doubt Universal Studios Home Entertainment would want to go through the trouble of clearing all those existing songs on Almost Grown's soundtrack), mainly because Almost Grown was made by a pre-Sopranos David Chase. Judging from the descriptions of how Chase ambitiously structured the time frame of Almost Grown's episodes, this was a show ahead of its time. Chase made a precursor to the flashback-heavy structure of Lost, Person of Interest and Arrow.

Almost Grown was chock-full of subjects Chase would later revisit in both the equally existing-song-heavy Sopranos ("The family and the annoying mother. Almost Grown was the lab for The Sopranos," said Chase in a 2007 WGA chat where another TV writing genius, Tom Fontana, complimented him on his work on Almost Grown) and Chase's final collabo with the late James Gandolfini, the unsurprisingly existing-song-heavy Not Fade Away. Chase's 2012 movie revolves around a struggling '60s rock band, while Almost Grown's late '60s flashbacks involved the Daly character's phase as a college radio DJ caught up in the counterculture of the period.

"Music has always been part of my creative process. I put on headphones, listen to music and try to get ideas or moods for stories," said Chase to the Chicago Tribune during the brief run of Almost Grown, which had Chase taking a vintage pop tune that a character would hear ($5,000 per tune!--according to Chase in the 1988 ChiTrib piece) and using it as "a mnemonic device to send you back to that period in their life and you'd play out a story back there and then come back to the present."

Oh, so it's like Cold Case without the heavy-handedness.

"Rock Box" Track of the Day: Classic & 86, "Ridin'"

Song: "Ridin'" by Classic & 86
Released: 2004
Why's it part of the "Rock Box" playlist?: It's featured in the Jersey-set Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle and may be the best song to bump in your ride while driving through Jersey since "Woke Up This Morning."
Which moment in White Castle does it appear?: Both the opening and closing credits.

White Castle fans who enjoyed "Ridin'" might have wondered, "Who the hell are Classic & 86? Did they skip the planet?" I didn't know who they were either. At first, I thought that after releasing "Ridin'," Classic ended up as a UPS driver like Thugnificent on The Boondocks, while 86 is toiling away in the same kind of office from hell where Harold would spend his workdays being a walking doormat. I did some digging around the Web and landed on an Urban Dictionary entry that actually listed some useful information about them instead of feeding me info that Classic & 86 is a new expression for getting a tug and chug.

After following a paper trail that started from Urban Dictionary, I found out that the two rappers, who have separate careers and teamed up on "Ridin'," each have recorded more than just that one song and are still making music. Classic is Chris Classic, a protege of the late Jam Master Jay who's frequently contributed hip-pop tracks to prime-time soaps like Gossip Girl and a bunch of movies I want nothing to do with (Harold & Kumar star Kal Penn's 2007 masterpiece Epic Movie, Disaster Movie, the Alvin and the Chipmunks movies and most recently, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps), while 86 is Miss Eighty 6, who also received some airplay on Gossip Girl. Before "Ridin'," Miss Eighty 6 recorded under her real name Sarai. A commenter under Sarai's 2003 "Ladies" video on YouTube wrote: "bring Sarai back - will trade for Ke$ha."

"Ridin'" is good, solid hip-pop with lyrics that are actually more than four words long--it's not the same kind of hip-pop Eminem astutely criticizes and ridicules in his just-leaked track "Syllables" when he says "nowadays these kids jus'/Don't give a shit about lyrics/All they wanna hear is a beat and that's it." The 2004 tune also showed up in the Usher rom-com In the Mix, The Air I Breathe and the Melrose Place revival, but it will forever be identified with a cult flick that's one of my favorite comedies of the '00s.

TV Critic Grimlock is the new definitive voice of TV criticism, so move over, Tom Shales--that is if you can move that hefty ass of yours

In just 50 or so tweets, Grimlock the Dinobot has emerged as a new insightful voice in the often stuffy and annoyingly middlebrow field of TV criticism. Nobody--not even the witty recappers over at the Onion-owned A.V. Club or the refreshingly not-so-stuffy, comic book-loving Alan Sepinwall--has enlivened coverage of the new fall TV season quite like the belligerent tyrannosaur has:

"me grimlock liked when grace park in bikini punched out surfer on five-0. hottest entrance since julie warner skinny-dip in doc hollywood!" (Tuesday, October 05, 2010 8:06 PM)

"me grimlock not miss rick sanchez. sesame street newsflash reporter kermit frog: he more credible journalist than rick sanchez." (Tuesday, October 05, 2010 8:00 PM)

"me grimlock not into unfunny nbc sitcom outsourced. me wish that call center get torched by mumbai gangsters in final episode." (Wednesday, October 06, 2010 11:45 AM)

"me grimlock not masturbate to fox news ladies because they sound so hateful and whiny like starscream." (Wednesday, October 06, 2010 11:41 AM)

I haven't been this riveted by the thoughts of a writer who's discussing TV since the time Armond White implied he wanted to spoon with Keller from Oz.

So what if TV Critic Grimlock, who launched his Twitter page with my help last Sunday (@TVCritGrimlock), has only one follower? Some talented writers are at their most interesting when they're a best-kept secret--or before they jump the shark, to borrow a TV-related phrase that, now that I've finally thought about it, is kind of as tiresome a term as "BFF" or "bromance."

From the Autobot homebase known as the Ark, Grimlock took some time out of his busy TV-watching schedule to discuss the fall season and the animosity towards Optimus Prime (and Dinobot teammate Slag and anyone who's a Decepticon) that occasionally seeps into his tweets, which always look e.e. cummings-esque because Grimlock doesn't quite understand the purpose of the Caps Lock key. To make this Q&A less irritating to read, all of Grimlock's words have been properly cased.

DirecTV's 101 Network reopens Eyes

I was surprised to find out DirecTV's 101 Network has started airing this week all 12 episodes of Eyes, one of my favorite TV shows that were cancelled too soon. I thought the 101 was going to premiere Eyes back in July, but apparently there was some sort of delay.

John McNamara TV shows just never get any respect, do they?

McNamara is a former Brisco County, Jr. and Lois & Clark writer whose most entertaining creations have been shows built around antiheroes with no qualms about being unethical. Years before audiences were willing to embrace The Sopranos, The Shield, House, Rescue Me, Dexter, Mad Men, Breaking Bad and Nurse Jackie, all dramas with not-so-virtuous lead characters, McNamara gave us a shady corporate climber who sleeps in a cardboard box (1996's Profit) and a private detective who enjoys mind-tricking the criminals who wronged his clients a little too much (1998's Vengeance Unlimited).

But while Tony Soprano, Vic Mackey, Dr. House, Tommy Gavin, Dexter Morgan, the players at Sterling Cooper, Walt White and Nurse Jackie are amoral--somewhere in their bastardly selves lurks a conscience or whatever's left of it--Jim Profit was unabashedly immoral. Whether or not dark and detached central characters like Profit are the reason why McNamara's shows don't last more than one season, McNamara just can't catch a break, even when he crafts antiheroes who are still as shady as Profit and Vengeance Unlimited's Mr. Chapel but less insane and a little more likable, like he did with the gumshoes on Eyes.

McNamara's 2005 series centers on Judd Risk Management, an upscale private investigation firm made up of detectives who don't mind skirting the law to protect their clients. The P.I.'s include sexy master of disguise Nora Gage (Garcelle Beauvais-Nilon); buttoned-up, military-trained newbie Meg Bardo (A.J. Langer); Chris Didion (Rick Worthy, so underutilized as "the black Cylon" on Battlestar Galactica), a gay associate who returned to the firm after a leave of absence caused by a nervous breakdown; and Jeff McCann (Eric Mabius), who conspires with Trish Agermeyer (Natalie Zea), the firm's hot equivalent of Q from the 007 flicks, to hide their affair from another co-worker, Trish's dweeby husband Danny (Reg Rogers).

"Every character has a different back story, a different moral compass. I don't think in terms of 'he's bad' or 'she's good' or vice versa. The fun of this world is in exploring the duality of these characters," said McNamara to Zap2it.com interviewer John Crook in a 2005 article about Eyes. "This world that these characters are in has an effect on them, just as they have an effect on it. They are not machines moving through the investigation, chewing up facts and spitting them out. It takes a toll on their psyches."

Their leader--and perhaps corrupting influence--is smug smart-ass Harlan Judd, Tim Daly's most enjoyable role to date. After playing so many uncomplicated characters (the straitlaced older brother on Wings, the animated version of Superman, Dr. Richard Kimble on McNamara's 2000 remake of The Fugitive), Daly clearly relished embodying more complicated guys like drug-addicted screenwriter J.T. Dolan on The Sopranos and Harlan on Eyes.

"Harlan's way of keeping people off balance is something I totally identify with. My default setting is to make people not know whether I'm giving them shit or not. I think that I get that about him," said Daly to TV Guide interviewer Craig Tomashoff. "He sort of teases people, [and] I love teasing people. Most of the time, I'm not mean about it. I haven't been punched in a bar yet."

Daly may have been a lucky bastard inside bars and taverns, but he wasn't so lucky with the ax that was wielded by ABC, which cancelled his serialized show after five eps that weren't able to retain the audience that tuned in to Lost, its lead-in on the network schedule. Warner Bros. Television made the unaired Eyes eps available to stream on In2TV, their clunky precursor to Hulu, but I hated watching Eyes on In2TV, and the site didn't even contain the complete series, which still hasn't received an official DVD release. The 101's Tuesday night broadcasts of Eyes will mark the first time the complete series will be shown in America, which is why I'm firing up my DVR. Eyes ranks with The Rockford Files, Smoldering Lust/Black Tie Affair, Veronica Mars and Burn Notice as one of the best private eye shows ever made.

Watch The Rockford Files and call to see if Paul can score some weed

Your friends do it and you've probably done it too: catch up on a show your lazy ass has put off watching by setting aside an entire weekend to view the DVD box set in one marathon sitting. Back when 24 first hit the DVD market, various writers who missed the first season chose to catch up with the show on DVD and recapped in real time what it was like to watch the first-season discs in one sitting, while a writer I used to work with picked the '80s version of The Twilight Zone for his weekend DVD marathon. A couple of years ago, those writers inspired me to do a similar marathon thing with the box sets of another cult show: The Rockford Files, Stephen J. Cannell's clever reinvention of the private eye genre, which starred James Garner in his signature role as rugged everyman gumshoe Jim Rockford.

Alright, so it's not quite a marathon. I haven't even viewed all 123 episodes yet, but my goal is to eventually see them all on DVD or via Netflix's media player for PC users. As of this writing, I haven't reached season five yet. On Inauguration Day Tuesday, Universal Studios Home Entertainment will release Rockford's sixth and final season.

I picked Rockford because I was a fan of Veronica Mars (which starred Forgetting Sarah Marshall's Kristen Bell, a Star Wars geek who should have Jedi mind-tricked the CW assclowns into bringing back her show). Before I started renting the Rockford DVDs from Netflix, I had only caught Veronica's spiritual granddaddy once or twice on cable, so I wanted to better acquaint myself with Rockford on DVD, where it's uncut and commercial-free (on Hulu, it's not commercial-free). The older the series, the more it gets chopped up by syndicators to accommodate commercial breaks, which grow annoyingly longer with each passing year. So that must mean Adventures of Superman reruns will eventually be edited down to 10 minutes, and George Reeves' flying sequences will be sped up so badly it'll look like the Metropolis underworld slipped some crank into the Daily Planet watercooler.

Rockford still draws a cult that's pretty rabid, though not quite as huge as Veronica's online fanbase. Slackers like the main character's pal in Ben Folds Five's "Battle of Who Could Care Less" (the source of the title of this post) dig Rockford reruns because Jim is one of them. They identify with a hero who'd rather go fishing with his father Rocky (Noah Beery) than do his job. The fans who still visit the alt.tv.rockford-files newsgroup continue to exchange favorite Garner wisecracks, and a couple of fan sites list every wacky message Jim received on his answering machine during the opening credits.

On disc, Rockford has aged better than most '70s shows, thanks to quirky, sharp and timeless scripts penned by staff writers like Cannell, future Sopranos creator David Chase and Juanita Bartlett. Seventies TV comes in three modes: schlocky (the Krofft variety shows, anything with Glen A. Larson's name on it), sanctimonious (M*A*S*H, Norman Lear's shrill shoutcoms) or a hideous mash-up of both (Hawaii Five-0, the "Fonzie gets a library card" era of Happy Days). Rockford is one of the few '70s shows I've seen that's neither of the above, and whenever the series did address a serious issue--like the flaws of the grand jury system in its most celebrated ep, the Bartlett-scripted "So Help Me God"--it did it with class and zero preachiness.