TVSquad

Hey, Brigitte here with TV Squad Daily. I'll be covering the TV stories I find interesting each day, Monday through Friday, in this video blog.

Today on TV Squad Daily:

• Haley Scarnato is talking about life after American Idol, and wearing other people's hair.
  
• Carson Daly is a Fanjaya! (And it's because of the hair?!)
  
• A scene from The Office causes Wikipedia major problems with their entry on "negotiation."
  

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First Stephen Colbert, now The Office.

On a recent episode of the NBC comedy, boss Michael Scott (Steve Carell) went to Wikipedia for tips on how to fire one of his employees. So fans of the show have, naturally, gone to the site and started to edit the entry on negotiations like crazy. Because, as Michael put it (I'm paraphrasing here, don't remember the exact quote), "having a bunch of people edit a web site is best way to get accurate information."

(S01E05) This show is just too formulaic. It's not that the plots aren't a tad innovative - not just hostages at a bank but hostages in a airport control tower, a diner, and in this episode, a hospital operating room - it's just that the structure is just so formulaic and tedious. Guy with a gun takes over a place, the only two hostage negotiators in L.A. are called in, one of them calls the guy with the gun, things seem to be about to go well, then someone screws it up and this pisses off the guy with the gun and it makes everything harder for the FBI team. So they have to work harder to figure out what is motivating the guy, by going into his past (with the help of the cute girl with the Apple laptop back at HQ). That's pretty much what happens.

(S01E04) I hate it when TV shows or movies are really "predictable" in how "unpredictable" they are. Case in point, tonight's Standoff. Have I just been watching too much television the past 40 years or were the two "twists" at the start of this episode pretty easy to guess? Yeah, it was kinda obvious that the first team assault on the house was just a training exercise, and it was equally obvious that the girl was in on the bank thefts with the serial bank robber, just wearing different wigs.

That's not to say that there are worse ways to kill an hour than watching Standoff. This was actually the best episode so far.

This week, watching Commander in Chief, I felt as if I was in the middle of a lovable Steve Martin movie, one where the children were full of hi-jinks, the sexual escapades were many, the adults were in charge of Very Important Things and, at the end, everyone met over the breakfast table to giggle and eat homemade pancakes. In other words: schmaltz. In other words: saccharine. Gah! And just when we thought Nathan Templeton was going to be evil again.

Speaking of Donald Sutherland's evilness, I was happy to see just a glimpse of it, but it was prefaced by such a terrifically (I almost wrote, monumentally) obvious and overplayed line from Jim. I'll get to that in a minute. But first:

Isn't this show supposed to be award-winning? Oh, right, it was Geena Davis. Well, congratulations sweetie, I think you deserve it. But with dialogue like this, you may not keep the honor for long.