TV round up (part one)

My last "TV round up" entry was way back on April 20, 2009. In all honesty, my television show based entries may the fewest and farthest between as I don't always feel like doing them at the time that I've watched the stuff, and as time goes on I'm even less likely to sit down to type something up.

Picking up from last entry, though (warning: spoilers below):

Heroes (NBC): "I Am Sylar" (Monday, April 20) and "An Invisible Thread" (Monday, April 27) finished off the show's third season. At this point, I don't recall enough about the episodes to really do into any long discussion about them, aside from certain memories of the season finale. I have to say that I'm rather ambivalent about how the writers left things. In general, I have enjoyed this third season of the series. It's had it's up and downs, of course, but still, as a whole, it's been enjoyable and definitely better than the previous, strike shortened, second season. My gut reaction is that I don't really like what they did with Nathan Petrelli. At times they haven't really know what to do with his character, it seems, leading to some pretty widely varying characterizations. However, I still find the Nathan-Peter-Angela Petrelli (plus sometimes Claire Bennett) family dynamic to be one of the most interesting aspects of the show and now an important "cog" in that has been lost. Plus, I have to wonder just how long they can really keep Sylar looking like Nathan (it's not like they are going to get rid of actor Zachary Quinto, so, now that Nathan's dead, I guess that means that Adrian Pasdar is the one to eventually go). And I couldn't help but feel a bit disappointed at just how Nathan met his end. But, then, again, just how much chance would Nathan really have against Sylar by himself? He probably did well to keep fighting as long as he did (albeitly, most of the fighting was off screen). And the fact that Peter flew into the room and took off with Claire just seconds before Nathan and Sylar did strain credibility a bit, I have to admit. Anyway, I am looking foward to the show's fourth (and probably final) season. It's going to be a slighly shortened season, just eighteen to twenty episodes. But's that's okay. I just hope that if it is the final season that they will write it as such, leaving no significant plot threads or cliffhangers unresolved.

Smallville (CW): Last episode I talked about was "Eternal" (Thursday, April 2). There were four more episodes of the then current eighth season ("Stiletto", April 23; "Beast", April 30; "Injustice", May 7; and "Doomsday", May 14). Too much time has passed for me to discuss these episodes individually, either. But I did, for the most part, enjoy this season of Smallville. They took the series in some interesting new directions. I do have to say that I found the season finale to be a bit of a mixed experience. A lot of build up for only a few seconds of confrontation between Clark and Doomsday. And Clark's declaration that "Clark Kent is dead" or whatever, well, I'm sure that that will be resolved quite quickly. I do, however, have to admit that I in no way saw Jimmy Olsen's death coming, nor their revelation that the character we've been seeing has not been the Jimmy Olsen ("Superman's Pal", etc., etc.) but rather his older brother. The "real" Jimmy Olsen is seen briefly at his older brother's funeral near the end of the episode. Apparently the actor playing the part of elder Jimmy was quite surprised to discover this, too, from what I read, finding out quite late that his character was being written out of the series. It does, however, help explain how Jimmy could be so much older in the Smallville continuity as, obviously, he's supposed to be so much younger in traditional Superman lore. I'll also be interested to see how they'll pick up the Lois situation, what with her accidentally putting on the time travel ring that the Legion gave Clark. Will we see Lois (and perhaps Clark, too) in the Legion's future time period next season? That'd be cool.

American Idol (Fox): Well, too much time has passed for me to really say much about the remainder of the American Idol season, other than that (as everyone knows) Kris Allen won. I was for most of the season a big Danny Gokey fan. Once Gokey was eliminated, I started rooting for Kris. Nothing against Adam Lambert. Truthfully speaking, Adam is probably the better singer (he definitey has a much wider range than Kris does). But Kris is just more my personal style, both musically and personality wise. Plus, Kris was the underdog up until the very end. So I'm happy that Kris won.

(I'm going to have to split this entry into two separate ones due to Blogger's maximum number of 200 characters in the "labels" per blog entry. I'll talk about animated series I've been following in part two.)