jennifer love hewitt skinny

First Look: This Never Gets Old

The Boston Cellbitch deserved to lose Sunday's game. Not for the reasons you might think -- the Cellbitch are inferior on a talent level, the have no balls, etc. No, the Cellbitch pretty much sold their soul for a new building a few years ago, and it might have cost them.

Could you imagine the Lakers getting a call like the one they got against Paul Pierce -- pushing off Ron Artest -- in the old Boston Garden? This is what happens when you move into these plush new arenas. Your mystique fades away.

The Cellbitch are lucky to have snuck in that one recent championship, because that team is old and likely to fade away in the Eastern Conference.

And no matter how down-trodden the Cellbitch becomes, there is nothing sweeter than watching the Lakers win in Boston.

No matter how crappy their building is.

Big Love, "The Mighty and the Strong": The candidate

A few quick thoughts on tonight's "Big Love" coming up just as soon as I stay at a Holiday Inn Express...

There are shows with insufferable main characters where the creative teams clearly don't recognize how insufferable those characters have become. (See, for example, Jack in "Lost" seasons 2 and 3.) The "Big Love" writers, fortunately, don't have any myopia when it comes to Bill, made abundantly clear by an episode like "The Mighty and the Strong," in which Bill bullies and/or manipulates everyone around him to get what he wants (in this case, his idiotic, obviously doomed plan to run for office so he can come out of the polygamist closet) while his friends and family struggle to keep up with his megalomania. Bill chose politics over trying to succeed Roman as the next prophet of Juniper Creek, but in a moment like the show's closing scene - where he agrees that Ben is wise to leave home for a while, in the same way the old men of the Creek always chased away the young boys when they threatened their access to the young women - is there really any difference? Hell, he even sends Nicki undercover to get dirt on his opponent, just like Roman did last season.

What was interesting about this episode was in seeing how, despite Bill's increasingly selfish, destructive behavior, the people around him have often turned out to be good. Ben is stand-up from beginning to end in this one (aside from his Benjamin Braddock moment in the family swimming pool), Sarah takes care of the baby (and we see that her marriage to Scott is everything that Barb once thought her marriage to Bill was), and even poor Don is such a good friend to Bill that he lets himself take the public fall, putting his freedom and his family at risk to enable Bill's run for office.

Even Alby has become, if not sympathetic - you can't use that adjective to describe someone who sells his mother into slavery with his sister's hated ex-husband - then recognizably human. Alby still has too much of Roman in him, but his father's death is letting him question things about himself and his upbringing (at the same time Nicki's doing it, interestingly enough).

Still not interested in JJ, or the usual antics with Bill's mom and dad, or the casino, but at the moment the good stuff's outweighing the bad - even if a lot of the good involves depicting how bad Bill has become.

What did everybody else think?

christina applegate slip

Seventeen years ago tonight... 'Homicide' was born

A friend reminded me that on this night 17 years ago, after the first Cowboys-Bill Super Bowl, a little show called "Homicide: Life on the Street" debuted. Inspired by David Simon's great book about the year he spent embedded with a real Baltimore PD Homicide unit, "Homicide" has since been overshadowed by Simon's work on "The Wire," but the original show was pretty incredible in its own right.

Though my heart ultimately gravitated towards "NYPD Blue," "Homicide" at its peak was the better of the two classic '90s cop dramas, and it gave the world the majestic splendor that was Andre Braugher as Frank Pembleton, which you can enjoy in this scene from that very first episode, "Gone for Goode."

(I don't want to give short-shrift to the many other wonderful "Homicide" characters and actors, like Clark Johnson as Meldrick Lewis or Yaphet Kotto as Lt. Giardella, but Braugher's star always burned hottest and brightest on that show.)

And, for good measure, a few other bits of classic "Homicide" I could find on YouTube:

• Pembleton gets a confession from a man he knows is innocent, just to prove a point to his boss. (This is a very long clip, but every second is worth it.)

• Bolander and Munch employ a new kind of lie detector (in a gag Simon would re-use on "The Wire").

• Kay Howard's perfect streak continues (also from the pilot).

• Howard and Tim Bayliss quit smoking and drive their partners crazy in the process.

• Meldrick is a Luddite (and a smooth operator).

God, I miss that show. It was never the same after the third season, as they began to introduce younger, more attractive, duller cops and eeeevil drug lords in futile attempts to goose the ratings, but good lord, when it was good, it was incredible.

hanson robotic