Thursday Nights = Good TV

Last night was another one of those TV heavy nights for us, but with so many good shows on there's only so much you can do. My Name is Earl, The Office, Scrubs, and Grey's Anatomy all reached or are nearing the end of their seasons so the payoffs for some long developing plotlines are finally starting to arrive.

The 3 NBC shows were all "super-sized" again last night which generally means that they were all padded with extended sequences that would have likely been cut out of a normal length episode. It seems that TV comedy writers often have a difficult time coming up with more than 22 minutes of solid material a week.

That being said, I think My Name is Earl came through with the best show despite it typically being my least favorite of the three. The humor of Earl is often in the little things, so if there's enough of them in an episode I'll enjoy it even if the focus of the particular episode isn't as good. Best scene honors probably go to the fantastic "Robbing the Deaf!" flashback sequence when Earl realizes that Joy's deaf lawyer (Marlee Matlin) is on his list.

Joy finally had her trial for the truck she stole way back in the first episode of the season, and in true absurdist fashion she was represented by a deaf lawyer, a Chinese sign-language interpreter, and an African Mandarin interpreter. For the first time ever, I come away thinking about this show's soundtrack. The trial was highlighted by a montage scored with The Who's "Baba O'Riley" and Earl's long walk to his jail cell after confessing was accompanied by The Animals' fantastic rendition of "House of the Rising Sun". Thumbs up to the surprise reappearance of the always great Giovanni Ribisi (pictured) as Earl's new cellmate. It'll be interesting to see where they go with the show next year now that our main character is serving a two-year sentence.

The Office was good, but not as great as it's been in recent memory. I think the show always tends to suffer a bit when they leave the workplace environment, and the Survivor concept just wasn't funny enough to carry the whole episode. Jam backers (Jim + Pam) probably had a good time, though. I know Meaghan did. After walking across fire, Pam finally talked to Jim about the events from the end of last season. We've re-entered solid will they/won't they territory here, so hopefully it doesn't derail the show too much. Although as long as Dwight continues to be hilarious you won't see me complaining. He's always at his best when being put in his place by Michael. In this case, his place was curled up in the fetal position on a bed of hot coals.

Scrubs continues to stagnate a bit. Meaghan and I have been watching the first two seasons on DVD recently, and it's surprising how fresh and funny they are in comparison to the current episodes. At this point, it feels like the writers are largely servicing the characters that they've created. This tends to happen with most long-running comedies that I've watched (see Friends for a good example), but the good ones don't abandon their core elements in the process. Scrubs is all about over-the-top physical comedy, good music, lectures by Dr. Cox, and stories centered around the patients of Sacred Heart.

This week pretty much boiled down to J.D.'s current bout of woman trouble. Does he go back to Kim (the doctor he knocked up at the end of last season) or does he try to break up Elliot's engagement in an effort to rekindle their on-again/off-again relationship? Blah. J.D. has primarily been a good guy throughout the show, so the thought that he would even consider the second choice is a bit strange. Meaghan vows to be done with the show if he gets back together with Elliot. It seems that they've managed to overplay the classic will they/won't they aspect of the show.

Still to come: Grey's Anatomy

Feel free to chat about these or other shows from last night in the comments. I'm particularly interested in knowing if anyone watched the premiere of "Traveler". It was on after Grey's Anatomy, but we forgot to tape it. It stars Pyro from X-Men 2 and 3, and looked pretty interesting from the commercials. Apparently I'll get a second chance to catch this. They're going to re-air the pilot in it's regular timeslot Wednesday, May 30th at 9:00 Central on ABC.