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TV is the New Reading

POSTED:Sun, November 1, 2009 @ 2:50AM

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The shows so far

I wanted to go on and on about the upcoming remake of “V” this weekend, how I loved the original, how I can’t remember much about it beyond their eating bugs and my enjoyment of Robert Englund, especially since I was such a Freddy Krueger fan at the time (happy Halloween, everyone!) But I’m going to hold off until I see Tuesday’s premiere since, after all, my whole schtick is that I look at media and then I talk about it.

So apart from the time change, we have new developments in the third and final season of “Robin Hood” on BBC America.

'Robin Hood'

What’s been ticking me off about this show is that we’re barely a month or so removed from the death of Maid Marian yet Robin’s eye has been caught and his judgment swayed by at least two damsels, one plucky lass of Locksley and the other, sister to Marian’s murderer Guy of Gisbourne, Isabella, the smoldering refugee of an arranged marriage. Changeable as the weather, she throws in with Guy, Robin and Prince John by turn as the winds shift, and wherever her prospects seem most promising.

Oh yes, Prince John has been a fabulous presence throughout, and it’s impossible not to be reminded in his feckless insousciance, intellectual indifference and spasms of heedless destruction whatever the cost, of other ill-considered pretenders to the crown, easily distracted from their responsibility to their citizenry, treasury and good governance. Particularly this week’s installment where the prince, Prince John, commissioned a waxwork to be made of his brother, King Richard, and trotted it through town as the lifeless body of the fallen crusader, hoping to be coronated in all the confusion, dancing through the streets demanding to know of his countrymen “Do you love me?” amid cheers and praise.

These cheers and celebration were redoubled when the coronation was disrupted by Robin and his men. Isabella saved the prince’s life by taking a bolt from Guy’s crossbow, setting herself up as sheriff (the fourth since the prince’s arrival in Nottingham), the crown was returned to the archbishop of Canterbury and the Prince is left to live on in his disgrace, an interim leader during his brother’s absence but forever barred from ascension.

There’s about half a dozen episodes remaining and I’ll continue watching them out of a sense of completion, but the show is nowhere near as fun as it has been in the past, and there’s not a lot of hope for a satisfactory conclusion.

'Nip/Tuck'

Speaking of hopeless, the final season of Nip/Tuck is grinding right along. While we all knew he was gay, does show creator Ryan Murphy actually just hate women?

This Teddy Rowe character now married to Dr. Sean McNamara is a gold-digging murderous Jezebel with a murky past. The patient she murdered was terribly vain and a plastic surgery addict who died from misapplication of leeches. Liz I believe is continuing her fiscal castration of Christian -- incidentally, if he put everything in her name and all he’s got is a boat and the practice, California being a community property state, isn’t he also entitled to half of everything she owns? Or is it all just the one direction? That doesn’t seem fair somehow.

Anyway, he tried to humiliate Dr. Hamoi by claiming his ex-fiancee village bicycle Kimber is turned on when her men dress as ladies -- and in the case of Mario Lopez, one imagines he could wear anything he likes and still get the girl. Sean’s daughter Annie has been tearing her hair out since the divorce and eating it, so there we’ve got neurotic. Throw in the fact that Jessalyn Gilsig, Murph’s go-to for evil females, is playing a out-of-favor high school sweetheart faking a pregnancy to maintain her loveless sham of a marriage in his new production, “Glee” -- she did much the same thing when she played Gina on “Nip/Tuck” -- and the question’s gotta be asked, is there a woman alive you can leave alone in a room with a man, a professional ethic or a piece of property it won’t be somehow ruined, betrayed or filched? Seriously Murph, who was she and what did she do to you?

'FlashForward'

Finally, I want to share a thought or two about a show that’s really been stepping up lately. This past week’s production of “FlashForward” introduced us to a couple of people at Ground Zero for the world’s two minute and 37 second nap.

Dominic Monaghan plays Simon, a quantum physicist who is involved in some way with Lloyd Simcoe, played by Jack Davenport, who may have engineered the FlashForward to jumpstart his love life. He’s attended the bedside of his otherwise estranged autistic son in, what a tiny little world, the hospital of Dr. Olivia Benford -- a married woman he’s apparently involved with as of April of next year. And all he’s been doing for the past six weeks is making naked, boundary-free advances using his charm, his looks, his ailing son to maneuver his way into her life one way or another, all the while pretending to be this hapless helpless innocent swept along by circumstance and coincidence.

Both he and Simon are creepy beyond belief, but the other half of that marriage, Joseph Fiennes as FBI investigator Mark Benford is flashing on a trio of Halloween masks. In his vision of the future, Mark had been working late when a gang of masked figures attacked him in his office. He saw men in the same masks while trick-or-treating with his daughter, so he gave chase, but to no avail. The one he caught was a dupe.

Meanwhile, his colleague John Cho as Demetri Noh is catching people blue-handed. After two failed assassination attempts against himself and a colleague, Noh is drawn by “blue hand,” a clue from Benford’s Mosaic flash forward to the scene of a third crime bodies in an abandoned house with their hands painted blue. Spooky, huh?

It was all quite scary -- including Simon’s flashforward of himself committing murder -- but in that the “why” and the “how” is still out there, I’m going to keep watching this. It’s so weird, and some of the finest science fiction on the box.

“Robin Hood” airs at 9/8c Saturdays on BBC America, “Nip/Tuck” airs 9/8c Wednesdays on FX and “FlashForward” airs at 8/7c Thursdays on ABC.

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