(no subject)
House and the Office have begun their run, and they have made their entrances golden.
By golden, I mostly mean stylish. Do I really care about House's personal development so much? I'd much rather watch him weed out job applicants. Maybe this means I don't take House seriously.
What I really loved about the first episode was the "top this!" of the introduction. Hillary, you wrote a long time ago about twisting the audience's expectations, and the opener's introduction was a case of exactly that. Normal woman undergoing some strange sickness? No, freaking building imploding. From that moment I loved the episode; it built the usual "Oh God I'm getting sick!" tension until the very last possible moment, at which point: boom. Brilliance.
The Office was rather similar, actually. Nothing like completely derailing the scene by hitting someone with a car to start the season.
And I think they're handling the Jim-Pam relationship quite well. So far nothing dramatic; it's more about everyone else reacting to that relationship, which respects the relationship as a plot element; compare this to introducing instability in their relationship to make it "more interesting," which I feared for. We'll see.