Series Premieres

For dinner I gave Johnny Rockets a try. It's a 50s-style hamburger joint. The hamburgers are actually pretty tasty, although the fries are just average, and the malts are disappointing. It's priced basically the same as the Peninsula Creamery, whose burgers are so-so, but whose fries and malts are terrific. On the other hand, it is much closer to me than the Creamery is.

Hmm. So I also finished reading Have His Carcase, a Dorothy Sayers Peter Wimsey mystery. It's the second of the really long Wimsey novels, two of which I've read previously. I enjoyed this one; it's a good counterpoint to The Five Red Herrings in some ways. But it does seem considerably longer than it needed to be. I am also largely neutral towards love interest Harriet Vane; overall I guess I'd say I find her a negative if only because she detracts from Peter's stage time.

I'm now re-reading Murder Must Advertise, which I first read about two years ago at Tracy's suggestion. I'm enjoying the early bits more since I've read previous novels.

I've also been watching a lot of television.

I've seen three episodes of Grosse Pointe, the satire of the nighttime teen drama genre (Beverly Hills 90210 and all that), and that's about enough for me. It's just not very tightly written, and the characters themselves are a bit two-dimension for me. The satire might work better for someone who's more a fan of the genre.

I saw the two-hour premiere of Dark Angel, James Cameron's baby. I can see why many people find it derivative: Post-apocalyptic future, low-tech environment, heroine is a genetically-altered superhuman on the run from her creators, do-gooder in a wheelchair hacking into the television net. Jessica Alba is fine at times, but her acting seems stiff at other times, and she looks a little too obviously chosen for her vampish good looks. And yet, there is potential here, assuming the writers have a plan and aren't just going to go through a series of random stories without taking the story anywhere. This being network TV, I don't have high hopes, but this was enjoyable enough for me to keep watching for a while. Well, unless the second episode is lousy.

The premiere of Freakylinks was much better than I'd expected. The setting is lame: A web site devoted to tracking down occult artifacts, with a cast of peculiar characters. But the dramatic hook is fairly compelling: Webmaster Derek Barnes' brother died three years earlier, but he seems to be alive again, and is mixed up in the mystery of the disappearance of the Roanoke colony centuries earlier. Derek and his brother's fiancee Chloe investigate. Although it over-works the "mysterious character disappearing suddenly" trick for cheap thrills, it does a decent job of being an X-Files wannabe (even The X-Files has been an X-Files wannabe for the last four years). Again, though, if the writers don't have a plan, if they're just making it up as they go along, then it isn't going to work.

Finally, Deadline is the new series from Dick Wolf, creator of Law & Order. Oliver Platt plays reporter Wallace Benton, a basically unlikeable sort who tries to do the right thing. It's your basic investigative journalism, and is a character drama, so it doesn't need a particular "direction". I think the pilot plays slightly fast-and-loose with reality (I have a hard time seeing the cops allowing Benton to interview suspects alone), but it's entertaining. I found Law & Order got rather thin after several episodes, so I wonder if this one will, too, though.

Back to work today. Seemed like I spent my whole day working out, or in meetings, and only started getting things done at the end of the day. Aargh, very frustrating. I'm plumbing territory right now which I haven't been in before, so I'm feeling a bit like a fish out of water. I had a good talk with Tom about some ways to approach this particular slice of my project, though.