sometimes I talk about television (really!)

[pellucid]

The problem, I think, is that most of the television I've been watching lately isn't worth talking about. For a good part of the last year or so, that's exactly what I've needed--the more brainless, the better! I'm starting to miss good, thinky TV, though, and I suspect that soon enough I'll be tapping my fingers impatiently: where is my shiny, new

Comments

[pellucid]

I've still been enjoying the hell out of it, so my interest has been maintained. (It probably also helps that I've only gotten into the show this summer and have watched all three seasons in the past three months or so--I only caught up to real time viewing for the most recent 3-4 eps.) But I definitely think they're being lazier about it than they could be: it's like the writers have found a pattern that works, and they're afraid to deviate from it, even though when forced to deviate (because of Gina Bellman's pregnancy in s2) they rose to the task really admirably.

This season they seem to have substituted "episode that focuses on character X and in which we learn more stuff about him/her" for any actual development. How is Nate feeling about his control issues and his criminal activities these days? How is Sophie feeling about her identity issues? What are Elliot and Hardison's issues? They've done better with Parker, I think--the backstory we got for her actually told us something meaningful about her, and, well, I'm not sure how much you've seen, but there was another ep in which there was at least some real Parker growth, I thought. But some growth for one character out of five isn't particularly great. (Though admittedly, the first two seasons heavily focused the character growth stuff on Nate and Sophie; it was better writing, and they are the characters I tend to like best, but numbers-wise it still wasn't great.)

Anyway, the perfect balance seems not to have been achieved, and it's been worse in season 3, but fortunately what they are doing continues to be loads of fun, I think. And I suspect they may step it up a notch for the finale in December--or so I hope!