Worst Prison Break Ever
Good Christ, is PRISON BREAK hurting for ways to stretch its gimmicky premise over a full 22-episode season? So desperate that it has to rip off LOST by showing us flashbacks to the characters' lives before they went to prison? Does anybody really care about the armed robbery that sent Sucre to the joint (he was doing it to buy his fickle girlfriend an engagement ring)? Does anyone really believe that the sexy young doctor used to be a morphine addict or that the evil prison guard once hit on her at an AA meeting? More shades of LOST in the scene that had a fleeing Lincoln bump into Sucre on the street. This series is implausible enough without making my disbelief stretch that far.

Of course, 24, as always, kicked ass. I can't say that the final shot surprised me very much--the Vice President seemed too much of an obvious red herring--although Logan's actions at first glance don't appear in retrospect to jibe with his role as the terrorists' orchestrator. We'll see how the 24 writers paint themselves out of this corner.

THE WEST WING's cliffhanger packed a helluva punch, even though we all knew it was coming. It's Election Day, and as the polls start to close, the Santos campaign staff discovers (off camera) the dead body of Vice Presidential candidate Leo McGarry. We've been waiting with dread for this moment ever since the death of actor John Spencer earlier this year, and next week's episode dealing with the late McGarry/Spencer should be an extraordinarily strong one. I think the series has only four or five more episodes to go.

REAL TIME WITH BILL MAHER, a consistently interesting HBO series, was stronger than usual this week, despite the presence of actor Seth Green on the panel. Green was unfunny and useless, adding nothing of substance to the discussion. The show did feature one of the series' strongest off-the-cuff moments, where Maher served California Representative Dana Rohrabacher. I was glad to see Maher press the issue with a member of Congress, since no professional journalist is doing it. You can see a bit of it here at Crooks and Liars. It runs less than a minute, but it completely demonstrates the rampant hypocrisy of so many sycophantic Washington Republicans. You know damn well that Rohrabacher doesn't believe a single word he's trying to stammer, but reciting the party line is more important to him than standing up for his true beliefs.

Oh, yeah. And fuck you, Tom DeLay.