TV is the New Reading

USA’s winter off to an OK start, but I’m going to miss FOX’s ‘Fringe’

Not, mind you, that anyone is watching anything this weekend except the Colts’ showdown with the Saints in Miami starting around 5 or so, but in a programming move that makes a perverse kind of sense, ABC Sunday is airing four episodes of “Modern Family” interspersed with “The Middle” and “Cougar Town,” so that’s a ... demographic or two ... Courteney Cox is impossibly funny but I probably won’t be tuning in one way or t’other, although I may try to pick it up afterwards with the vaguely unnerving “Undercover Boss,” where bosses take entry-level positions in their own blue-collar companies and experience the business end of the work.

In the past I’ve talked about my favorite show on television being “Psych.” Thanks to USA its fifth season resumed, it’s back and it’s just as enjoyable as ever. They’re keeping the Shawn and Juliet question tantalizingly up in the air. Shawn’s Abigail is out of the picture, doing service work in Uganda, but Juliet’s somewhat irritated with Shawn after he accused her brother of a crime it then turned out he was guilty of. Even that should be at least somewhat balanced by Gus pointing out that the Santa Barbara Police Department accused his folks of murder and arrested them over Christmas, but these balancing things take some time to work themselves out.

What’s really been so cute is how the Santa Barbara Police Department still thinks Shawn’s psychic. If I were Det. Lassiter, I would strew a bunch of fake clues around a fake crime scene, wait for Shawn to show up with Gus like he always does (they’ve gotta have a scanner but you never see one -- it’s always Shawn and Gus just wandering into shot in the middle of an amusing conversation -- incidentally, does Gus even still have a day job?), let him do his thing and then deconstruct the process.

This isn’t likely to occur to anyone any time soon, and for now, it’s fun to just go with the flow. Shawn is a seemingly endless font of ’80s references, wacky observations and occasional digs at CBS that bounce glancingly off Simon Baker’s perfect, perfect hair.

We did get a tiny window on Shawn’s process in a recent episode where he brought a gift of mukluks to the morgue attendant for a peek at a body, although he didn’t discover much the detectives wouldn’t have been able to pick up on their own. However, we did see Gus meet the perfect woman, only to lose her by being too ... well, actually, this part wasn’t terribly clear. Gus saved her life in a heroic gesture and she rewarded him by breaking up with him. I get that he uncovered the means by which all of her extreme sports friends were killing each other and betraying her trust, but that’s gotta balance up against saving her from them. Sigh. Poor Gus.

‘Burn Notice’

If “Psych” is consistently bringing its A-game, USA’s “Burn Notice” is having some trouble getting off the mark since its third-season resume. It started with Fiona reluctantly staying in Miami, then resuming her physical relationship with Michael in a hotel room, then some bizarre behavioral anomaly I can only describe as a social conscience (with no reference whatever to last week’s off-camera interlude), and now apparently she and Sam and Michael are all going to be at each other’s throats.

It’s the kind of storyline development that belies USA’s motto of “Characters Welcome.” Character development suggests a stable set of priorities and behaviors that shape how an individual responds to changing circumstances. These people aren’t characters. They’re actors with lines to read, wacky disguises to wear and crazy stuff to do. Michael’s mom insisting that he accompany her to an award presentation, for instance. This woman would’ve built up vast reserves of self-reliance by now. She wouldn’t have asked and certainly wouldn’t have gotten her hopes up.

I enjoyed Michael creating a distraction with olive oil and motor fuel, and I enjoyed the distraction Fiona created by a bomb going off under a trashbin. But I didn’t like how the bad guys were trapped in a garage because the garage door opener lost power. They could still open the door or make a run for it on foot. Michael’s a better spy than that, but never mind. The larger problem is that the personal story doesn’t seem to progress from one week to the next.

This season the burn notice Michael’s trying to undo so he can be a spy again has him obligated in some way to a smarmy British rogue and I’m at a loss to understand how this ne’er-do-well is connected to the last ne’er-do-well, how he was connected to Carla, how either of them relate to Richard Schiff and who, in fact, is ultimately behind Michael Westin’s inactive status. They need to develop a good narrative for that and soon, because he’s been down the rabbit hole for a good long while, now, but he’s still stuck in that little room with the “Drink Me” bottle.

Seriously, if I were him, I’d hop a train to Langely. It’s not like he has a lojack on his ankle or anything. Gather the evidence you’ve uncovered in two years and demand some answers.

‘Fringe’

Finally this week I wanted to talk about the winter finale of “Fringe,” which I think came right out and said something in a way that it’s only been implying for a couple seasons now. That mad scientist Walter Bishop’s son Peter is in fact the version of Peter from the alternate universe his partner Billy Bell is stuck in, rather than a clone from a storage of clones we got a glimpse of in the pilot episode.

Somehow a building arrived from the other side and fused with a building from our reality, along with the inhabitants, in some cases pretty directly, fusing people together on a cellular level. In order to maintain balance, a different building was going to be removed from our reality, probably within 36 hours.

Given the public safety concerns, the priority was to identify the building and evacuate it. But the only person capable of identifying the building was Agent Olivia Dunham. Because she was the most successful test subject in Walter’s cortexiphan studies 25 years ago. Once she reconnects with her childhood abilities, she can see objects “glimmer” when they’re from an alternate reality. And as of the winter finale, she can see Peter glimmer, too.

Olivia Dunham, played by Anna Torv, is easily the bravest, most ridiculous person ever. She dives nekkid into a hyperbaric chamber with wires attached to her to communicate with her dead lover, she turns off a series of lights with her mind, she gets herself kidnapped by criminally insane teleporters, she leaps into alternate realities and comes crashing back through windshields and now she’s reliving experiments that once allowed her to make fire with her brain.

She gets really upset with Walter when she encounters a zombie version of herself as a child in an alternate reality, but more to the point, she seems so instantly compliant to these outrageous schemes I think Walter must’ve given her a post-hypnotic suggestion while she was a child that whatever he needs her to do to conduct any kind of thought experiment, she agrees without hesitation.

Mind you, it’s a huge part of the fun of the show. Agent Dunham puts herself in insane situations and saves the very nature of reality again and again. I’m completely in love with both Olivia Dunham and Anna Torv and cannot wait for both of them to come back when "Fringe" returns from hiatus.

“Psych” airs new episodes at 10/9c Wednesdays, and “Burn Notice” airs new episodes at 10/9c Thursdays, both with multiple encores throughout the week, all on USA.

P.S. – This episode marked a milestone for me with my 100th podcast. So .. here’s to 100 more!

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