and here they are:

1.  Damages is awesome.  We are one episode away from the finale (Tuesday, October 23rd 10pm on FX).  If you have not been watching (what are you thinking?) then you have one last chance to catch the whole brilliant arc before the finale, FX is playing a Damages marathon this weekend – Saturday October 20th from 8am to 8pm.  That’s a full day for sure, but you’d be hard pressed to see a better show this year.   I urge you to jump on the train now if you have a craving for a veggie day on the couch with a great show.

2.  Pam & Jim.  I am sick of the critics complaining about Pam & Jim being together on The Office.  The writers are managing to keep it light and fun and lovely to watch.  What is so wrong with seeing two great people finally getting to be in love.  I think it’s infectious.  So long as they keep it funny as it has been then I’m in.  Think how many more adventures they can have now that we are not relegated to in-office jokes and secret looks?  Plus, Pam has never looked better, whoever is in charge of hair on that show has finally put a bullet in her character’s bad wavy over brushed out look for softer more natural curls.  She looks fantastic.  Who’s complaining?!

3.  Heroes.  My disappointment in this show is so vast that it is difficult to measure.  They have made every single mistake with this season that they could…at every turn they have made the exact wrong decision.  Which I didn’t even know was possible.  We have a couple interesting plotlines hanging out there (Sylar/Gabriel/Cockroach boy; whatever is up with Nathan’s “mirror face”), but nothing mind blowing. 

More importantly they have somehow managed to make every storyline and character (even the once fascinating ones) whiney, overblown, and as badly written as the Nicki scenes we all so hated last year. I suppose part of the reason this is so upsetting to me is because there was such opportunity to do something amazing this year and they have just totally dropped the ball.  Have you listened to the promos?…I’m paraphrasing here but it’s something like “Now the Heroes are being hunted down one by one by a mysterious…blah blah blah”  Wait…um…wasn’t that EXACTLY what happened last year?  Here’s the problem I think.  These creators/writers DIDN’T study their model enough (which Kring has admitted…”oh we didn’t take anything from comics…we didn’t study them” – not a direct quote so don’t yell at me – but it’s the jist of it) and so they don’t know what to do with the characters. 

I’m sure they don’t have the budget to go all out effects wise, but they also don’t know how to write themselves out of the the position they left themselves in at the end of the year.  So they’re just chickening out.  Introducing new characters, which they can take time exploring and growing, but which are so far all really really lame, so that they don’t have to focus on existing characters that they don’t know what to do with and then slowing all the existing character’s stories down to a snail’s pace. 

I guess I should cut them a little slack since I wouldn’t be so disappointed if it wasn’t for such a great first season…but it’s just so sad.  I’m going to go and cry about it a little bit now…