But he's not wearing pajamas

I've been watching the three alien invasion shows, Threshold, Surface and Invasion. So far, Threshold is the best. Each show is pretty much self-contained, although knowing the past story arc helps. The other two are installments and they have about as much plot development as a daytime soap opera. They try to build interest and suspense like a fan dancer, but the stories are getting too complicated to keep track of. Tonight, Invasion introduces the fact that the goofy brother-in-law UFOlogist is also a blogger! So much for the credibility of the writers. Of course, there must be some bloggers as goofy as this out there, but the stereotype of bloggers hardly resembles Instapundit or Roger L. Simon. He's more like Art Bell without a radio show.

Surface has a redneck character with an anger management problem and extremely poor impulse control, along with a kid whose devotion to his dangerous pet leads him into car theft. Yeah, they're your typical Americans, if you live in a Hollywood trailer court.

Invasion is one of those shows where everybody is too beautiful to be real, living in Homestead Florida. They've had one scene of a married couple taking a shower together outdoors. Tonight we had a scene that came within about a minute from coitus interruptus.

Invasion and Threshold are full of pod people, despite the denial by Kari Matchett's character tonight. Surface is more like an aliens-invading-Earth and endangering-all-life-as-we-know-it horror flick. I'm losing patience with Invasion and Surface. They feel like a long tease, with nothing worth waiting for at the end, except some cheesy cgi or special effects. They're beginning to resemble the endless maze that was The X-Files.

I also have been watching Criminal Minds, about a team of FBI profilers, starring Mandy Patinkin. He's very good. I've been fascinated with this stuff since my days as a public defender. One of my favorite shows used to be Millennium which started out as a kind of study of evil and how it can affect the lives of people who investigate it, but went downhill fast after Chris Carter handed it off to some other producers who turned it into a thin conspiracy fantasy resembling Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco.

I watched Numb3rs and liked it very much when it began, but this season something hasn't seemed quite right. It's starting to get back into its original family feel now, so maybe it was just too long between seasons. I really like Rob Morrow as a tough FBI agent and his math prodigy brother, played by David Krumholz, and the interplay between them and their widowed father, Judd Hirsch.

That about accounts for my broadcast viewing, except football. Otherwise, I leave the TV on Discovery, Science Channel or History Channel, and read blogs with the TV as background noise.