TVSquad

On July 26 at 11:00 p.m., Bravo's new docu-series Welcome to the Parker will debut. It will then fall into its regular timeslot of Thursdays at 10:00 p.m. starting August 2.

The new series takes a look inside the five-star Parker Palms Springs hotel, run by Samir Chraibi. Some episodes will include a suite being trashed by Hollywood types, someone demanding a full-time pillow fluffer and similar problems and encounters average folks like you and I will never experience.

Like almost all of it's other programming, Bravo is also utilizing its Web presences to get people revved up about the show. The staff of the Parker will keep blogs on BravoTV.com. The site will also feature preview videos and extended scenes from previous episodes.

(S01E01) The Knights of Prosperity is a show with all the right ingredients, and yet, the result feels more than a little half-baked.

Donal Logue plays Eugene Gurkin, a janitor who decides he wants a change when a co-worker falls over dead on the job. Gurkin doesn't want to die never having made something of himself, so after a failed attempt at securing a loan to open his own bar, he decides to rob Mick Jagger. All of this happens in about the first ten minutes of the episode, so you either buy into the concept right away or you don't. This is a sitcom after all, and not a feature film, so they have to get into it right away. Still, a little more set up would have been nice.

I like a show that doesn't BS around with dull scenes in its season finale. Right off the bat we're given the scenario: Miles and his family are packing up to escape town before the tsunami hits, Caitlin's Vespa is stolen when she arrives too late to find Miles, and she's knocked out when the crook pushes her, and Laura steals a rental car from the airport and blows by a road block to find Rich, who has been locked in a room at the mysterious lab. (And what is Jackson's name and pic doing on the lab's computers? Section Chief?!?)

Here we go!

You know how sometimes they'll advertise an episode of a TV show as the "episode you must see" or "the episode that changes everything?" Usually it's just hype or wishful thinking. They didn't advertise episode 14 of Surface as an episode that changes everything or a must see. But they could have. Because, well, this is the episode that changes everything.

One of the things that I like about Surface (one of many things) is that I really don't know where it's going with its story. I had assumptions I made about where these creatures came from, and they turned out to be wrong. I made an assumption on how the story was going to play out between Laura, Rich, and Miles, and I was wrong on that too. So I'm not going to try to predict what's going to happen anymore. I'm just going to sit back and enjoy the remaining episodes for this season.