TVSquad

So, last year I mentioned that Snoop Dogg got into a bit of trouble for allowing both a feature film and a reality series to be made about his youth football league.

It would seem whatever problems hindered the possibility of a Snoop reality series have been taken care of, because later this year Snoopy Snoop will be the center of a new series for E! that will follow the rapper, actor and producer as he tries to balance his family life and his work.

Assy McGee, Adult Swim's new series about a tough cop who also happens to be a talking ass, debuted Sunday evening.

Given Adult Swim's track record of shows that are often much smarter than they seem and sometimes take several viewings to truly appreciate, I didn't go into this "talking ass" show with any preconceived notions that it would be impossible to create a worthwhile show centered around an ill-mannered butt. Also, comedians Jon Benjamin and Jon Glaser were involved with the show, so I knew there had to be some dry, ironic twist to the whole mess, some way they would make a show called "Assy McGee" much smarter and funnier than a show with that title should be.

(S03E07) Well, are those of you who predicted that Edie was going to get shot tonight disappointed? She is still alive and kicking. In fact, all of the housewives are. But a lot of mysteries about Orson are dead now with poor, demented Caroline Bigsby. Her gun and her lunacy certainly suggest that she could be the one responsible for Alma's and Monique's deaths.

Does anybody actually buy Orson's explanation of how Alma got her bruises? Actually, his last crack about his recommendation to put salt on a wine stain being the reason why Alma decked him does kind of ring true... I still haven't seen any creepy behavior by Orson to Bree since they got married. Creepy behavior? Yes. Just not toward his wife.

(S01E06) I've never been a big fan of gritty crime drama, which is why "The Fifth Quarter" has never been my favorite short story of Stephen King's. It's a very bare bones tale of a man whose friend is killed over a buried stash of millions of dollars and his subsequent quest to retrieve four pieces of a map, each belonging to a different "bad guy." It's not really typically "King" and even he acknowledgers in the Notes of Nightmares and Dreamscapes that the story is more like something that would have come from Richard Bachman (his occasional nom de plume) or even Richard Stark, the malevolent writer from his novel The Dark Half.

Of course, I can't really blame King for wanting to try something a little different once in awhile, but in a lot of ways the story works much better in a visual medium. The problem is, one hour isn't enough for a story that is this involved. Screenwriter Alan Sharp fleshes the story out by giving the protagonist (Jeremy Sisto) a wife and kid, and everyone in this episode plays their parts well, trying to convey a lot of backstory in a short time so we can get to the blood and guns. If anything, the episode suffers from trying to cram way too much drama into a short amount of time. I think this would have worked much better as a feature film, following Wilie (Sisto) as he hunts down the men who killed his friend and begins to piece together the map that will lead he and his family to a better life. That could still happen, I suppose, it's not like they haven't done multiple adaptations of King's work before.

(S01E03) Writers are the most shameless, self-centered bastards in the world. We lie, we seduce, we'll steal your soul. Anything to look good on the page. -Sam Landry

I thought I had read every story from Nightmares and Dreamscapes, and I might have, but nothing about "Umney's Last Case" was familiar when I read it just recently. Nevertheless, it's not a bad story, and it's also very "meta" as the college kids like to say.

In the story, as in the TV adaptation, we begin in the 1930s where a grizzled private eye named Clyde Umney is leading a storybook life that he'll soon learn is more "storybook" than he realizes. He wields snappy dialogue with the precision of a trapeze artist, and always knows just what to say to get what he wants, at one point managing to turn two women to jelly in his office one after the other.