I mentioned awhile ago that my roommate and I have been working our way through Battlestar Galactica via Netflix. I loved the first season, and liked the second only a little less. Drama generally doesn’t appeal to me, but the series started with such a good story, such interesting characters, and such cool sci-fi action that I was happy to make an exception.

As I mentioned in my previous BSG post, season 2 ended on what I felt was shaky ground. Well, now I’ve watched season 3 and enough of season 4 to make a simple recommendation: if you haven’t seen Battlestar Galactica, watch the first two seasons and then stop. Season 3 had its ups and downs, with the balance leaning pretty heavily towards the latter. Season 4…

I gave the show the benefit of a doubt and watched “Razor,” the two-hour special that opens season 4. Razor is a flashback that contains a flashback within a flashback. Yes, tertiary flashbacks. No more need be said about the first disc of season four. I gave the show the benefit of another doubt – and then two episodes into the season I dropped all the remaining discs from my Netflix queue.

Think of every thing sci-fi writers could do to ruin a show, and these guys did it. There are ruthless, vengeful robots that look like humans? Obviously when the plot starts running thin half your favorite characters will be revealed to have been robots all along, while the robots who started as frightening villains devolve into emo windbags. Mysterious, supernatural forces at work? Of course it’s better to keep introducing weirder and weirder nonsense than to ever explain anything. Part of me would like to see how BSG ended, but most of me just doesn’t care.

Community is everything I hoped it’d be: a little cheesy, a little quirky, really funny. Chevy Chase is bearable! Joel McHale is great at being a lovable SOB. It’s sure to be on Hulu tomorrow if you missed tonight’s pilot.

And now, a decision: Leno, or Always Sunny? Haha – just kidding.

(If you haven’t watched Leno, let me save you some time: it’s a lame pop-culture snoozefest. Boring interviews with vapid people, plus boring skits that go much longer than they should. Five nights a week!)

It’s football season, with highs in the mid-70s – what’s not to love?

It doesn’t hurt that Joel McHale’s new series Community starts next Thursday night, and Dollhouse will be back the week after. You’ve watched the additional episode of Dollhouse from the Season 1 DVDs, right? And, have you heard that some of Joss Whedon’s favorite ladies and roughly half the cast of Battlestar Galactica are joining the show in season 2?

Don't let her fool you - that's a yawn, not a roar

I’ll be rooting for Michigan today because Notre Dame is annoying and the Big Ten needs to get its act together. I’d like to hear the phrase “a resurgent Big Ten Conference” peppered in sometimes among all the (entirely valid) comments about the Big Ten being a joke.

I really hope the Bucks can… er, buck this trend of flailing helplessly against ranked out-of-conference opponents. USC is going to be tough – but then, when aren’t they? If you’re going to the game by any route that crosses under 315 within 5 miles of campus, you might want to leave home around, oh, 4:00.

Go Bucks!

As the first season of Dollhouse came to a close and we became fully convinced of Tahmoh Penikett‘s awesomeness, my roommate pointed out that Agent Ballard was also part of the Battlestar Galactica cast. Since I didn’t get Sci-Fi (er, “SyFy,” since somehow they haven’t realized that name sucks) when Battlestar Galactica premiered, I knew the series only as the go-to reference when you wanted to call someone a nerd. Given the plethora of nerdy things I already watched, there wasn’t a compelling reason for me to add it to the list.

Having now seen the first two seasons via Netflix, it is so good. Really, the best way to describe my enthusiasm for the first half of Battlestar Galactica is “Schrute-like.” After watching the pilot – basically a feature film unto itself – I expected the entertainment value to drop. It did not. Through the first season and nearly all of the second, the characters (even the sleazy ones) are convincing and their relationships are interesting. The action is great, the bits of over-the-top science fiction goofiness are few and far between, and the drama is… dramatic.

Then you get to the last 20 minutes of the season two finale. I’ve read mixed things about seasons three and four, and the way season two ended inspires no confidence. Let’s say you have a believable love triangle – involving several major characters – that’s picking up steam, sparks of romance between two other characters, and a huge shift in the roles of warring political leaders. Would you fade to black and begin the next scene with “One year later?” Me neither. It almost felt like the writers had gotten tired of the whole wandering through space routine, and wanted to move on to something lamer.

So, like a Schrute (or a lady), season two of Battlestar Galactica left me feeling as though I’d missed a whole lot of important events in the lives of the characters, left me much less excited for the Season 3 disc that arrived today, and made me glad I resisted buying the crazy-go-nuts series box set when DeepDiscount.com had it on sale.

[Update: Typo. First paragraph. Corrected.]

After tonight’s finale of Reaper I remembered to check whether the show had been renewed for a third season. Season two of Reaper was a pleasant surprise – I figured things would get boring, but great new cast members and continued hilarity from the writers and actors learned me for figurin’.

I was bummed to see that CW is dropping Reaper to focus on their skank-targeted programming. In that vein, let’s play “90210 Mad Libs” – because 90210 commercials during Reaper were so inane that I considered buying a DVR. Write your own episode of 90210!

“Omigosh, did you, like, hear? Roxanne got __________!”

Suggested words/phrases: Pregnant; Hit by a Mercedes; Soooo wasted; Seven kinds of herpes.

“I’d love to get naked – I don’t care that you’re my __________”

Suggested words/phrases: Mother’s boyfriend; High school principal; Probation officer; Mother’s boyfriend and my high school principal.

“I’m feeling naughty. We should __________.”

There is only one way this sentence ends. You can jumble the words around, but the result is always dirty, random sex. Other 90210 lines that end this way include, “I’ve wanted you for, like, days. Let’s __________,” “You’re looking hot – we’re going to __________,” and “It’s Tuesday. __________.”

90210 makes me want to kick someone in the brain. Judging by the commercials, it could do little harm.

Good news all of you Whedonites, Dollhouse has been renewed for a second season!  I, for one, could not be more excited.  The show was really hitting a great stride towards the second half of the first season, and everyone I talked to was enjoying it.  Joss reacts to the news of his show being renewed over at The Live Feed.

In other news, Chuck has also been renewed for another season.  I do not watch this show, but I know that my counterpart does so I shall post the news here as well.  I watched the first season on DVD, and enjoyed some episodes very much, but they were too few and far between for me to really get into the show.

Coffing has mentioned Dollhouse a couple of times before – once before the series started, and again when it started getting good. The late upswing continued through tonight’s season (and series?) finale. If you never gave the show a chance, put the season 1 DVD on your list! If you watched at the beginning of the season and got bored… refer to the second half of the preceding sentence.

At first it seemed like Fox was going to pull another Firefly on Joss. The first several episodes had some promising characters, but nothing all that intriguing going on. Then came the rumors that Alan Tudyk would be making an appearance. And about halfway through the season, the awesomeness ensued.

I’m not sure Joss Whedon and Alan Tudyk can work on something together without it being spectacular. Alan Tudyk is so good at what he does. Do you need someone hilarious? Done. Someone crazy? Sure. Someone hilarious AND crazy? Look no further:

We’re not bluffing! –I’m bluffing –But the rest of us mean business!

I hope Dollhouse gets the second season that Fox screwed Firefly out of. The crew at TV by the Numbers do not seem optimistic. If you’d like to lose some faith in humanity, and watching the evening news doesn’t cut it, take a look at this graph on James Hibbard’s site. Note how Dollhouse’s ratings drop in inverse proportion to the show’s level of face-rocking goodness.

It makes me want to murder someone.

To this point, the season 2 finale of Chuck is great. Googling for answers about season 3 I found a Chicago Tribune interview with Captain Awesome. And apparently there were rumors on Twitter over the weekend that season 3 had been confirmed: not so, says GiveMeMyRemote.

While the medium is hardly to blame, let me take this opportunity to say Twitter is retarded.

So what are they going to do with the final few minutes? No terrible cliffhangers yet. I won’t lie, if the episode ends with ambiguity I will assume:

1. Sarah and Chuck live happily ever after.
2. Whoever may or may not have died in tragic fashion will pull through.
3. John Casey spends the rest of his days gleefully assassinating terrorists of various shapes and sizes.

[Update: Such a good finale!! Producer Josh Schwartz was clearly bluffing when he said this would make for an unsatisfying end to the series. They avoided both things I was afraid of - this season ended well, and the twists could easily be developed into 13 great season 3 episodes!]

That’s my review of tonight’s episode of Chuck.

To use several more words: Yvonne Strahovski. Yikes. Adam Baldwin sets a high bar of badassery, and then hurls himself right over it. The past several episodes the story has been interesting, the writing has leaned towards action while bringing well-timed laughs, and the stars continue to be great at what they do. If you’ve missed it – Hulu has not.

Then you get to the preview for the next episode (and season finale). Are we headed for a cliffhanger? It looks cliffhanger-ish, but let’s face it… most of the commercials feature some combination of Chuck with a gun to his head and Sarah in her underoos. Again I thought, “Have they renewed Chuck? Because it’s been great and they better not ruin it.”

I turned to The Internets. And wouldn’t you know it, the New York Times Arts Beat posted an interview with Josh Schwartz, one of Chuck‘s creators, this morning. The gist of the interview is that renewal or cancellation have still not been announced, which understandably sucks for everyone involved in making the show. They asked Schwartz about the season two finale, and his response was as far from what I was hoping for as a response could be:

If, in two weeks, that is the last episode of the show to ever air, it will be one of the least satisfying finales of all time.

Times like these I’m glad I have no power or influence! Should Chuck end in a miserable cliffhanger? Or should the show get another 20-some episodes, more than half of which are likely to be tired rehashes of old episodes mixed with on-again-off-again nonsense?

Every noise you hear during a new episode of The Office is the sound of a great show being run into the ground. It started when they brought Toby back. Why, after his great departure? Because they had an idea for one semi-funny episode and wanted the occasional easy joke from a familiar character?

The Office‘s magic has always been in how believable the cast and writers made the nonsense: Michael Scott remains to inflict insanity because he’s been around forever and nobody has the heart to fire him. Jim Halpert slacks at his job, but is awesome in every other conceivable way. Pam, likewise. The rest of the characters are quirky weirdos who, like actual people, sometimes say and do utterly ridiculous things.

And now? Charles has been around for a month and has had a single good line (“I am aware of the effect I have on women.”). Watching Jim flail is zero fun. A Pam who quits her job to follow Michael is a dumb, depressing Pam. The Michael Scott Paper Company is a decent joke, but a comletely uninteresting storyline. I’ll keep watching for the funny moments (tonight’s first episode had quite a few), but will no longer expect anything great. Question: if the show’s boring and tired now, what’s next season going to look like?