itsallovernow | State of Me

I continue to have a very minor plague (seriously, more rain of frogs than boils!) and the cat's teeth continue to plague him, poor munchkin. However, he must be feeling better as he actively ran from the syringe of amoxicillin this morning instead of staring thoughtfully at it and then swaying his mouth around like Stevie Wonder on acid while I try to squirt it down his gullet. The result was that I was too slow, and my kitchen floor now looks like some poor pink-blooded alien was massacred there.

In an effort to get rid of the rain of frogs in my chest and throat, I spent the bulk of the weekend in bed with the cat watching "Criminal Minds" on DVD. So, in addition to not being able to sleep because of the plague, I am having serial killer dreams. (My cureall for plague is TV on DVD, soup and kombucha gingerade. Also, since it was Friday night, gin and tonic, but that's a different story. Someone brought me a bottle of Hendricks gin and it's almost a crime to mix it with tonic, but I didn't want to make myself a martini and take to my bed because I'm not a 60 year old too thin former debutante.)

I make fun of the show (for good reason. It is formulaic. It drops plot threads mid-way through. It is overly… dramatic. The team is overly… competent. Plus, it's kind of goofy), but they are nailing certain dramatic elements that surprised me when watching it through in order. It is, in many ways, the anti-CSI and I find I'm enjoying it (and DESPERATELY wish SMRT-TV were still going because I would LOVE to write about this evolution/devolution in the serial killer/procedural genre and what it says about our current state of government and viewership). There is almost NO discussion of material evidence. It is not a show about science (even CSI super science). It's about being able to box up evil, box and profile our fears, categorize them, beat them, and still, still, not quite escape them.

(It's also a show happy to embrace, or perhaps showcase, the way in which the government is using the looming threat of terrorism to bypass law. There's always a justification in the show for it, but it makes me squirm nonetheless because mostly my feeling is that these are NOT the reasons most government officials invoke the Patriot Act. It's definitely a post 9-11 show, all of the evil out there waiting for us, knocking at our door, invading our homes, but at least for me, I prefer the face of that evil to be ordinary. It's far more frightening that way.)

I love me a profiler (ludicrous as they can be), so watching this in order, watching as the show develops the lives and minds of it's absurdly attractive team is definitely winning me over, even with the RIDICULOUS voice-overs at the beginning. Plus, there's actual story-arc work going on, subtly, and I kind of appreciate that because individual eps are pretty heavy-handed for the most part.

Plus, I really do love Mandy Patinkin, and I love that he went from Dead Like Me, a much better, much more complex show about the inanities of death, to this and while he's still a curmudgeon, he's an entirely different type of curmudgeon here. His body language is different, tight and antsy and pained and I just kind of adore him.