Good formula

Today's column looks back at this season of "The Kill Point" and previews the finale (no real spoilers):

Two men. One in the bank, one outside it. One armed with a gun, the other with a phone.

As formula goes, it doesn't get more basic than that. (I hear tell of an Aristophanes-penned hostage negotiation story set in an Athenian money-lending house, and I suspect that if anyone ever turns up Shakespeare's missing "Love's Labours Won" script, bank robbery will be involved.) But over the last five weeks, the creators of Spike TV's "The Kill Point" have been proving that old formulas get recycled because they work.

Scheduling conflicts kept me from reviewing the miniseries when it began in late July, but I've been enjoying it so much that I wanted to weigh in before Sunday night's finale (9 p.m., Spike TV, with the entire season to date airing in a marathon beginning at 3 p.m.).

Producers James DeMonaco and Steve Shill haven't tried to reinvent the wheel here; they just want to use it to go very fast and maybe smash into a few things along the way.

To read the full thing, click here.

Super Bowl Buzz Kill: Giants

Your team isn't going to the Super Bowl, so why have any optimism? The Hater Nation brings you back to reality with the Super Bowl Buzz Kill. Why your team won't win the Super Bowl:

The New York Giants

The Giants, to nobody�s surprise, managed to stay in the spotlight during the offseason thanks in no small part to a couple of fabricated controversies. For starters, the Michael Strahan saga is one of the most overblown stories out there. Honestly, some journeyman defensive end is holding out for more money. How is this news? The only thing Strahan likes more than Brett Favre taking a dive is any sort of media attention. Now that his wife has left him and he�s become about as interesting as a red balloon in front of Terry Schiavo, he decided to hold out. That is the kind of move traditionally reserved for the media whores who appear on Big Brother or The Real World. Next thing you know, Strahan is going to parade around the Giants practice facility in a red leotard. But here�s the scoop Mike, nobody cares. You could retire tomorrow and nobody would notice.

Then you have the alleged feud between Tiki Barber and Eli Messiah. And even Gomer got into the mix, making it the world�s lamest three-way since Charles Nelson Riley and Lyle Waggoner double-teamed Brett Somers. But please tell me that you didn�t believe, for a second, that the Barber Messiah exchange was legitimate. This was obviously a WWF-style work, and please, don�t be duped into it.

Hell, the fake feud between Elisabeth Filarski and Rosie was far more believable, and a lot more entertaining that showed that Barber and Messiah can�t play, nor fight better than girls. Sorry, the only way a Giant is going to the Super Bowl is if the Oxygen Network hires Tiki to do remotes from Arizona in February, because the team certainly isn�t going anywhere.

Mad Men: Jews cruise

Slightly early spoilers for the sixth episode of "Mad Men" coming up just as soon as I watch a dog play the piano...

After the last few episodes focused on Don and Pete, episode six is another look at the women of "Mad Men": the compromises made, the four very narrow and yet very different routes that Joan, Peggy, Rachel and Midge have chosen to navigate this world they never made.

Joan had been our mystery woman until now, the queen bee vamp who buzzed around the typing pool, handing out advice on matters both personal and professional without revealing anything about herself -- like, for instance, why a woman of her relatively advanced age (Christina Hendricks is 29, which would have made her an old maid in an office like that) still hasn't landed her own husband and got a house up in Westchester. Now we know the answer: Joan doesn't have the house because she doesn't want it. Like Midge, she enjoys being an independent woman, having her pick of multiple men -- notably Sterling/Cooper co-founder Roger Sterling, who, like Don, is both turned on troubled by his mistress's free spirit -- and not being tied down to any one of them. (She can brazenly wiggle her fanny in front of the two-way mirror because any or all of the men on the other side could be hers if she wanted them.) She has her roommate Carol, she has adventures and she doesn't want to be kept in a gilded cage like that stupid canary Roger buys her at episode's end. And yet where Midge lives her entire life outside the system, by day Joan is a keeper of that system, herding the secretaries around like cattle and trying to jump in between Peggy and Fred (the "creative" guy played by Joel Murray) as if she were a Secret Service agent trying to take a bullet for the president. As liberated as Joan is in some areas, she can't wrap her head around the notion of a fellow secretary having something useful to offer the ad guys; I'm sure she had the same dog/piano reaction that Fred had.

And speaking of Peggy, this is an interesting, if not totally unexpected route they're taking the character. The second episode, where Paul gave her a tour of the offices, established that female copywriters do exist, in very small numbers and only for accounts related to lady products, but this has some real potential. (If nothing else, I look forward to the first time she has to work for Don in this capacity instead of as his gal Friday.) And unlike David Duchovny's stupid, cliche-riddled blogging on "Californication," the phrases Peggy came up with ("basket of kisses," "I don't think anyone wants to be one of a hundred colors in a box") actually sounded good. If I was an ad guy in 1960 and I heard someone use those in casual conversation, I'd be intrigued, too.

Rachel Menken comes back into the picture as Don's token Jewish acquaintance, called in to help Don understand how to market a line of cruise ships bound for Israel. And after dismissing him out of hand in episode three because she had no interest in being someone's mistress, it now seems not a horrible idea to her. Being a female chief executive has to be rough on the love life today; in 1960, I imagine what suitors Rachel actually had tended to be guys after her money. The phone call with her sister suggests she's not the first member of her family on a path to old maidhood, and that has to be a scary proposition. The question is, is she prepared to compromise her values in the hopes that Don will leave his wife and marry her, or is she just that starved for companionship that she'll be The Other Woman? And how mad is she going to get when she realizes that she would, in fact, be The Other Other Woman?

Finally, Don visits Midge and gets another reminder of how poorly he fits into her world. Taking him to that coffee house might as well have been a trip to Mars for poor, conservative Don, and try as he did to mock Midge's other "friend" Roy, he's never going to be comfortable in bohemia. So will he attempt to swap Rachel in for Midge, or will he try to have all three women? And how will Midge respond to either scenario?

A few other thoughts:

• Any scene where John Hamm's hair isn't drowning in pomade is a bad idea. The opening scene where his hair was flopping around made him look far too much a modern man.
• Anyone care to analyze Don's dream of Adam's birth for clues about Dick Whitman's deep, dark secret?
• Anvil time: "Some men like eyebrows, and all men like Joan Crawford. Salvatore couldn't stop talking about her." Also, Salvatore's bitchy put-downs of the women on the other side of the mirror. I just can't believe nobody doesn't get it. The prime of Paul Lynde's career wasn't that far away, was it?
  
• Could have been anvillicious but wasn't: Rachel offering the alternative definition of "Utopia" as "the place that cannot be." Sounds not unlike the romantic space she wishes she could occupy with Don.

What did everybody else think?