"Great New Show, mini CSI:Miami rant"

Last night, I'd planned to do my normal Monday night dance--flicking back and forth between football and CSI Miami. But I got sidetracked with the new Matthew Perry show, Studio 60, on NBC.

It's a Tommy Schlamme (rhymes with "salami") show (what kind of parents name their son "Tommy Schlammy"? To quote my 16-year-old daughter, "Who does that?), so it's very well written. Brad Whitford is great, and Perry is a very solid actor, very underrated. (I always thought he was the best actor on Friends, back in the mid-1990's when I watched that show.) And Amanda Peet is a revelation--very solid, very real.

Of course, every show has to have an oddball. Here, it's a former girlfriend of Matthew Perry's character who's a born-again Christian. I always cringe when TV shows have born-again characters, they're INEVITABLY charicatures. It's like Hollywood people are never around real Christians, so they don't know how to depict them. "Three eyes, green skin, family from the far side of Mars, and they pray? Like, to God? Sounds realistic to us!"

Anyway. Good show. Check it out.

Besides, the football game was a snorer.

And speaking of CSI: Miami: I'm kind of tired of David Caruso.

Do you remember when it became public that Samuel Jackson had ordered the writers of Shaft to come up with more catch phrases for the script: "It's my duty to protect that booty," etc.?

Well, every line that David Caruso's character speaks . . .

(actually, he doesn't speak lines, he intones them, he orates them. There ain't no normal speaking going on here.)

. . . sounds like a failed Samuel L. Jackson catch phrase. Real people don't talk like that, EVER.