Haven't missed much on 'Criminal Minds'

It’s taken a while to catch up with all the season finales there have been of shows I even mostly still pay attention too – heck, even the “Community” rerun from this past week was one I hadn’t seen in its first go-round. I’m being told I really need to check in with the second season of “Vampire Diaries” on the CW, although it’s gonna coincide with the new season coming up of “True Blood” on HBO and I do not know that any comparison will be favorable. I guess I’ll find out.

Anyway, I’ve mostly been focusing on the new premieres and things, and when I saw I had three episodes of “Criminal Minds” just sitting there on my DVR waiting for me to watch them last week I determined that I didn’t want to. I’m in rehearsals for a community theater production in September and it’s taking part of my weekend and I so didn’t care about tracking fake made-up gory gross serial killers. So I put it off.

It was a good call. When I finally steeled myself to check them out this week we had a guy who was obsessed with photos of someone else’s serial prey – a guy who was kidnapping, holding and then killing surrogates for his stepdaughter so he could etch them into stained glass and ultimately die with them.

There was a guy reliving his abusive past through father-and-son teams – oh, and I watched that one just in time for Father’s Day, how sweet. And then there was the team of serial killers arranging snuff sport for creepy weirdos in rural Virginia.

This one brought in the Missing Persons team with the super-intense redhead. She had an operative trying to get caught so as to infiltrate the group, and when she did get caught they treated it like it was an oh-my-god tragedy. Pardon me, but that’s what she’d been trained for, right? And it’s why she was dangling out there wearing the shirt that says “bait,” yes?

In the end, the big news is that Kirsten Vangness as Penelope Garcia seems to be making leaving noises with onscreen love interest Nicholas Brendon – good to see Xander again, however briefly – and it looks like J.J., played by A.J. Cook, is returning, so POWER to the complain-y blog-type people.

But my main irritation with the show isn’t the cast or even the crimes, which are ridiculous. It’s the audience they’re clearly aiming the show at, shut-in grandparents. Nearly any line of dialogue can be parsed to trace parallels to the homebound Jessica Fletcher in a snuggie.

"You say she was picked up at a club?" My granddaughter goes to clubs! "You say she was texting on her cellphone?" My granddaughter has a cellphone! "You say the killer was targeting women 18 to 24 years of age?" My granddaughter is 18 to 24 years of age! I get so sick of that voice and she’s the only dialogue I can hear anymore when I’m watching this show.

The Daily Show

Now I was busy this past week and really couldn’t keep up with what was going on on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" and "The Colbert Report." Which normally I love these shows. The Atlantic Wire earlier this month reported May ratings for "The Daily Show" (2.3 million viewers) beat all of FOX News (1.85 million viewers) with the exception of Bill O’Reilly’s show (for which I couldn’t source firm numbers, but the partisan NewsCorpse blog site suggests Stewart actually delivered twice the young viewers that O’Reilly did so in terms of demographics it’s probably a wash).

Ratings are not the metric I tend to use in assessing quality television, of course, because that would imply that our celebrity dancing and national talent shows, reality programming and wall-to-wall crime serials on CBS qualified as quality programming and we know this is not the case. And obviously there are better sources for information than either FOX News or "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart." More to the point, however, as depressing as the news of the world is these days, I prefer to consume my broadcast news through a filter of comedy.

I guess my objection to this is that between the actively repellent Jeanne Moos on CNN and all of the Anthony Weiner jokes – and it would be impossible to ignore the sheer persistence of that coverage from his inability to "say with certitude" up to his resignation a week later – I swear, if they’d lent that level of investigative interest to the president’s health proposal everyone would know everything there was to know about it, or would at least feel they did. I haven’t heard this much about my congressman since he took office six months ago, and he at least stood out as the richest of the freshman GOP House members. You’d think that would’ve garnered him more coverage, or at least some.

But now I and everyone else has seen a twitpic on a scale that no Central Park flasher in the 1960s could’ve dreamed possible. Rep. Weiner possibly has the worst possible judgment regarding his social networking activities, but I seem to recall one House GOP member flashing his abs on TMZ, and New York GOP Rep. Christopher Lee did resign over that shirtless post on Craigslist, and there was that Mark Foley thing with the pages. Of course Rep. David Vitter of Louisiana is still serving away.

But more to the point, the news judgment at the cable news stations this past week have seemed more driven by comedy these days which has made Jon Stewart’s program less necessary, somehow, except that it’s the only place I heard anywhere on television that we’d opened airstrikes in Yemen. I guess if they’d posted their junk on twitter we might have heard about it on CNN. Seriously, guys, there’s actual news news we should be aware of, too.

South Park

Sticking with Comedy Central for a moment, Jon Stewart interviewed Matt Stone and Trey Parker about their Tony sweep for “The Book of Mormon.” Stone and Parker are the creators of “South Park” and the final episode before the show went on break featured Stan turning 10 years old and becoming super cynical about everything, and his parents breaking up and, if I understood the montage correctly, either moving to different parts of town or moving out of South Park, Colorado, altogether.

I guess I’ll see when the show returns, but that was a significant move for a central character and I guess we’ll see what happens next. Some bloggers have read into that episode that Stone and Parker are wrapping things up but they assured Jon Stewart this past week that they love the show and they love South Park and will keep doing it as long as they’re invited to do so. That could be public relations, but in any event, they certainly shook things up with that installment.

Outcasts

Over on BBC America a sci-fi show premiered called “Outcasts.” This was set 30 years in the future on the planet Carpathia and since it takes five years to get there and it looks like they’ve gotten a pretty good installation set up to live in already, I guess we should really get cracking on this.

Um, I don’t 100 percent understand why it is that only British people have made the trip from a now apparently uninhabitable Earth, and I don’t know what we’ve learned about faster-than-light propulsion between now and then. I don’t know about the white-out storms caused apparently by their lunar system and I do not know why they elected to bring mentally unstable clones to help explore the planet, but they did.

Apparently there’s this super smug, somehow dominant pacifist movement that seems a little unclear on the fact that they are on a hostile world and need to be prepared for things, but they’re also super itchy on the trigger finger when they do have firearms. A patrol was working outside the fort and they’d camped for the night when someone opened their tent, dragged them out by their feet and then ran. They fired multiple rounds as their “attackers” made a run for it, and that’s the kind of really irresponsible firearm handling most British people would attribute to Americans.

In fact, there are characters who are already disappointed by how many creature comforts have been installed in the fortress and feel people need to embrace the primitive conditions and they’re planning some sort of coup over it.

I didn’t notice any alien life on this “Goldilocks” planet they’ve found for themselves. I did enjoy the sheer number of children that were in evidence. I’m not clear on what everyone’s priorities are in this little microcosm of the last remnants of humanity following some sort of nuclear apocalypse (which the women apparently blame the men for), but it’s more than a little dull, although it was picking up with the arrival of another clone (the original?) of a criminal who may or may not have beaten his wife to death following a white-out.

New episodes of “Outcasts” premiere Saturdays at 10/9c on BBC America.

Coming up

Coming up, “The Nine Lives of Chloe King” premiered this past week on ABC Family and I’ll have more to say about this down the road but for right now I was getting a really satisfying sort of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” type vibe off of it. New episodes air at 9/8c Tuesdays on ABC Family.

Also, premiering Sunday on TNT we had the sci fi alien invasion series “Falling Skies,” and I’m sure I’ll have more to say about this down the road as well. Also Sunday, AMC aired the first season finale of “The Killing,” which they have apparently picked up for a second season, which is fine although it seems like it would’ve been a perfectly good, self-contained little story for one season. It’s generally good but some installments were simply unwatchable and if they’re going to kill “Rubicon” after one season I’m not sure how “The Killing” gets to continue, but oh well.

The fourth season of “Hoarders” opens Monday on A&E in the home of a doll-collector, so for those of us who track that bow across the E-string between fascination and exploitation, here we go again. That’s Monday at 9/8c on A&E.

ABC seems bent on actually snuffing a contestant in “101 Ways to Leave a Game Show.” Contestants who answer questions incorrectly get strapped to airplanes, dropped from semitrailers, flipped over in exploding cars and all manner of truly exploitative nonsense which I would never recommend watching but oh my G-d this sounds outrageous. For any claims attorneys in the audience that’s Tuesday at 9/8c on ABC.

It’s followed by what may or may not be this generation’s “MASH” in “Combat Hospital.” Shell shocked medics failed to carry the day in NBC’s “Mercy,” so ABC has kept them in the war zone for this medical drama, set in the NATO Role 3 Medical Unit at the Kandahar Airfield. The only difference being that while “MASH” was set in the three-year Korean conflict and lasted 11 seasons … well, I for one am excited to see how they attempt to Section 8 their way out of this. Heck, post-“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” Jamie Farr couldn’t even get out as a transvestite, so that’s “Combat Hospital” at 10/9c Tuesday on ABC.

“Rookie Blue” is back for some reason Thursday at 10/9c on ABC. “Wilfred” and “Louie” premiere starting at 10/9c Thursday on FX, that’s the one where the guy is a dog, no not Louie, the other one, but they seem well paired. Also, the legal dramedy farce “Suits” premieres at 10/9c on USA, following the fifth season premiere of “Burn Notice.” Then Friday on IFC a pair of hucksters celebrate local commercials in “Rhett & Link, Commercial Kings,” that’s at 10/9c Friday on IFC.

Next Sunday we’ve got the premieres of “Leverage” on TNT, we’ve got new episodes starting of “The Marriage Ref” on NBC, we’ve got a new season starting of “Drop Dead Diva” and we’ve got the first post-bombshell episode of USA’s “In Plain Sight” where I assume Mary’s going to decide what to do about her pregnancy. Enjoy!