Quick hits

Culled from tvguide.com and scifi.com:

Prison Break's Amaury Nolasco ("Sucre") said we'll be seeing a darker Sucre in the beginning of the season. He also mentioned that someone else dies-- and they're working on episode 8 as he was being interviewed. Ep 5 just aired tonight, so doing the math... Someone bites it in the next three weeks (presumably).

Cobie Smulders of How I Met Your Mother (one of the best written comedies of last year-- and has one of the best supporting goofballs on TV [Neil Patrick Harris' "Barney"]) said Robin and Ted's relationship is worthwhile to explore-- even though we know they won't stay together. She also said Alyson Hannigan's "Lily" returns. Oh, and we get to meet Barney's brother, who's just like him-- except gay.

I only saw the first twenty minutes of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, but I can already see that we've got a great show (as expected). Judd Hirsch's speech in the first ten minutes is one of the best I've seen on a network show. Ballsy of NBC to air this tirade against network television (especially since many of the criticisms were leveled at NBC shows). I hope it doesn't let up. We're in a second Golden Age of Television, but there's still a lot of garbage and very little cutting edge programming on the networks. It's nice to see someone "calling out" the networks...

NBC's Heroes is sounding better and better. Comic book great Jeph Loeb is one of the writers and his frequent collaborator, Tim Sale, is painting the pictures for the pre-cog artist (Isaac, I believe, is the name). There will also be an online comic found at nbc.com that will run concurrently with the show. And not everyone with powers is a hero. The first season deals with a super-powered serial killer that forces the characters together. I was over at nbc.com and checked out the trailers and profiles for this show. It looks good.

Just make sure to watch at the least the first two hours, as the original 2 hour pilot was re-edited into two hour-long episodes.

I also watched The Class premiere tonight. It has potential to be a great fit with How I Met Your Mother, but it's not there yet (keep in kind: Mother took a few episodes to get rolling). I'm not liking the comparisons to Friends I've been reading; let this show be its own show.

I watched HBO's Inside the NFL, and as I mentioned in a previous post, that network does the best sports shows, hands down. I care about football only as much as it helps me in my Fantasy leagues, but this show gave me a very human perspective on the Pat Tillman story.

I just didn't like the attention this guy got because he was a "name" and he was killed in Afghanistan after leaving the NFL and joining the Army. I thought "why is this dude more important than the other thousands who have died so far"? Peter King's interview with Tillman's friend Jake Plummer on Inside the NFL opened up my eyes.

Tillman was a person who was a great man in every sense of the word, and the largest tragedy concerning his death is that the Pentagon has given his friends and family four lines of bullsh** so far (the fifth investigation is pending) about his death. It's unconscionable that any family has to go through that.

As usual with an HBO sports show, I'm glad as heck to have seen it.

Lewis Black's tirade at the end of the show was pretty good, too. He went on a rant that the show shouldn't be celebrating being 30 years old because things go downhill after 30. Best, trademark, Lewis Black line: "Sorry to piss on your candles."