Shots, shorts and showers

After staying up late last night to file the Super Bowl ads column, I'm a little beat, so some quick thoughts on non-pigskin weekend TV:

A guy at work came up to me this morning and said, re: the "Grey's Anatomy" episode, "Boy, they sure went after that football audience with the shower scene, huh?" Though it felt more like an "ER" episode than I think Shonda may have intended, I liked it, particularly Christina Ricci as the increasingly freaked-out paramedic. Marian had one complaint about Kyle Chandler as the bomb squad guy: "Shouldn't he have already known about this yesterday?" I had only two real problems: 1)The bit where Meredith and Cristina are doing their girl talk thing and shushing Chandler as he talked about the danger of explosion felt too cutesy even for this show, and 2)Would it have killed them to put on a "To Be Continued" card? I know the house style at ABC is to end every drama with a logo card, but with the irregular start time and my fatigue, I was waiting for the next act to start until I saw the opening credits of the late news.

Another heavily pre-recorded "SNL," which you already know I think is a good thing. We had the Steve Martin/Alec Baldwin gag in the beginning, which couldn't have been pulled off (at least not well) live, a filmed commercial parody (plus a live one) and two different digital shorts. None of them were extraordinary, but none were horrendous, either. In fact, most of the episode felt that way: not as good as anything in the Jack Black show, but nothing like the usual 40-60% of godawful we usually get. Definitely a step in the right direction. On the other hand, why no Prince in "The Prince Show"?

Finally, after an episode that even the creator felt the need to badmouth in public, "Battlestar Galactica" was back on its game on Friday. Starbuck is my favorite character (Ronald Moore's, too, conveniently), and I like episodes that don't shy away from the harsh emotional reality of what life on the run after genocide would be like. I loved that Kara just lets Kat get away with calling herself the new Top Gun, yet still finds a way to piss on Kat's big moment with her toast to all the dead pilots. This show almost never does the predictable, and for that I'm very grateful.