Biker boy

Today is my first non-review column in a while, as I look at some notable ratings performances from premiere week (plus Monday night, where "Heroes" opened big, "Studio 60" continued to do meh and "Runaway" ceased to exist).

Since there's already a thread for "Gilmore Girls," and since "House" is quickly becoming a show whose goodness is consistently specific, I don't have much to say about it, save that House was funnier than usual (especially answering Cutty's phone, quoting "Casablanca" to an oblivious Thong Girl, and in the "You can't stop our love!" bit from the previews).

So that leaves "Smith," which I'll discuss in more detail just as soon as I finish calling all of my spouse's known associates...

The good:

• Virginia Madsen got more of the focus, even if her story was inherently repetitive.
• More Shohreh Aghdashloo, too.
  
• The show is following up on Annie's screw-up with the tasered woman (there were better ways to brush her off in the first place, and once put in that position in the alley, she probably shouldn't have let her live).
• The placeholder robbery story involved the three most interesting members of the crew.
  

The bad:

• The motorcycle chase was beyond cheesey, and it kept gooooooooing. I'm not inherently opposed to chase scenes, but they either need to be shot with a hell of a lot more flair than we got here, or the emotional stakes need to be a lot higher. This was just a bad time-filler.
  
• There was a witness to Jeff killing the bad surfer dudes? Huh? Wha? The whole point of the way that sequence was shot was how beautiful and isolated the spot was; if there was anyone within a distance to actually witness the killing, they wouldn't have gotten a good enough look for a police sketch. (And what homicide cop lets a drug dealer keep the sketch of a murder suspect he has the motive and the means to track down and kill on his own?)
• The use of the temple from "The Usual Suspects" as the meeting place. I get that it's a beautiful location, but one of the best, most famous crime movies of the past decade used it prominently in almost exactly the same circumstance. Not as lame as that time Wells tried to steal The Board from David Simon's "Homicide" book for an early '90s cop show he was doing, but still something that invites unflattering comparisons.

The meh:

• I don't mind seeing an occasional smaller robbery in between the crew's bigger scores, but even that's not going to be realistic every week. I wonder what an episode without any kind of heist will look like.
  

The ugly:

• Ray Liotta's face scares me. It just does.

What did everybody else think?