The Season So Far: Tuesday

How great is Friday Night Lights? Oh my gosh, I love this show. It's really not like anything else on television. Mostly it looks totally different -- from the way people to dress, to the cars they drive, to the lighting, which looks like actual daylight. For those of you who have not been watching, you can watch all nine episodes here.

Last night's episode was so good, it was almost excruciating to watch -- especially the Julie and Matt story line, from Matt's Members Only jacket, to Julie's hoochie dress, to Matt's singing "Mr. Sandman" to his grandmother.

I'm not a big fan of the Smash-using-steroids storyline. It's a little too afterschool-special for this show. So, I was glad to see Smash's character being more developed last night.

I've been a little disappointed in Veronica Mars this season. I think it's partly the realization that it's never going to be as good as the first season, but then how could it be? It's not really possible to have another mystery that's as integral to the emotional heart of the show as Lily's murder and Veronica's rape. You can't kill off Veronica's best friend every season.

But also Veronica's not as likeable. The hostility and sarcasm that made sense when she was in high school -- after all these people turned on her and her dad -- is overkill in college. She really needs to give people a chance. In the same vein, some of the new characters are a little cartoonish, especially the feminists and the greeks. I don't think any of the high school cliques were so crudely drawn.

That being said, I still like the show. As sad as it was, I'm glad that Veronica and Logan broke up. More evil Logan please. And more Wallace and Mac.

I've also been watching House, about which I have very mixed feelings. On the one hand, I love Hugh Laurie. But I think the show is caught in a bit of a bind. If they stick to one-off episodes, it gets formulaic: patient gets sick with mysterious illness, someone suggests lupus, they run all sort of tests, they settle on a diagnosis, that turns out to be wrong, House has an epiphany. But when they do the multiple-episode story arcs, they don't really work, I think because we know that in the end nothing is really going to change.