After tonight’s finale of Reaper I remembered to check whether the show had been renewed for a third season. Season two of Reaper was a pleasant surprise - I figured things would get boring, but great new cast members and continued hilarity from the writers and actors learned me for figurin’.

I was bummed to see that CW is dropping Reaper to focus on their skank-targeted programming. In that vein, let’s play “90210 Mad Libs” - because 90210 commercials during Reaper were so inane that I considered buying a DVR. Write your own episode of 90210!

“Omigosh, did you, like, hear? Roxanne got __________!”

Suggested words/phrases: Pregnant; Hit by a Mercedes; Soooo wasted; Seven kinds of herpes.

“I’d love to get naked - I don’t care that you’re my __________”

Suggested words/phrases: Mother’s boyfriend; High school principal; Probation officer; Mother’s boyfriend and my high school principal.

“I’m feeling naughty. We should __________.”

There is only one way this sentence ends. You can jumble the words around, but the result is always dirty, random sex. Other 90210 lines that end this way include, “I’ve wanted you for, like, days. Let’s __________,” “You’re looking hot - we’re going to __________,” and “It’s Tuesday. __________.”

90210 makes me want to kick someone in the brain. Judging by the commercials, it could do little harm.

Good news all of you Whedonites, Dollhouse has been renewed for a second season!  I, for one, could not be more excited.  The show was really hitting a great stride towards the second half of the first season, and everyone I talked to was enjoying it.  Joss reacts to the news of his show being renewed over at The Live Feed.

In other news, Chuck has also been renewed for another season.  I do not watch this show, but I know that my counterpart does so I shall post the news here as well.  I watched the first season on DVD, and enjoyed some episodes very much, but they were too few and far between for me to really get into the show.

Coffing has mentioned Dollhouse a couple of times before - once before the series started, and again when it started getting good. The late upswing continued through tonight’s season (and series?) finale. If you never gave the show a chance, put the season 1 DVD on your list! If you watched at the beginning of the season and got bored… refer to the second half of the preceding sentence.

At first it seemed like Fox was going to pull another Firefly on Joss. The first several episodes had some promising characters, but nothing all that intriguing going on. Then came the rumors that Alan Tudyk would be making an appearance. And about halfway through the season, the awesomeness ensued.

I’m not sure Joss Whedon and Alan Tudyk can work on something together without it being spectacular. Alan Tudyk is so good at what he does. Do you need someone hilarious? Done. Someone crazy? Sure. Someone hilarious AND crazy? Look no further:

We’re not bluffing! –I’m bluffing –But the rest of us mean business!

I hope Dollhouse gets the second season that Fox screwed Firefly out of. The crew at TV by the Numbers do not seem optimistic. If you’d like to lose some faith in humanity, and watching the evening news doesn’t cut it, take a look at this graph on James Hibbard’s site. Note how Dollhouse’s ratings drop in inverse proportion to the show’s level of face-rocking goodness.

It makes me want to murder someone.

To this point, the season 2 finale of Chuck is great. Googling for answers about season 3 I found a Chicago Tribune interview with Captain Awesome. And apparently there were rumors on Twitter over the weekend that season 3 had been confirmed: not so, says GiveMeMyRemote.

While the medium is hardly to blame, let me take this opportunity to say Twitter is retarded.

So what are they going to do with the final few minutes? No terrible cliffhangers yet. I won’t lie, if the episode ends with ambiguity I will assume:

1. Sarah and Chuck live happily ever after.
2. Whoever may or may not have died in tragic fashion will pull through.
3. John Casey spends the rest of his days gleefully assassinating terrorists of various shapes and sizes.

[Update: Such a good finale!! Producer Josh Schwartz was clearly bluffing when he said this would make for an unsatisfying end to the series. They avoided both things I was afraid of - this season ended well, and the twists could easily be developed into 13 great season 3 episodes!]

I contributed my first review to Amazon over the weekend when I noticed none had been posted for Mark Steyn’s recently published Lights Out: Islam, Free Speech, and the Twilight of The West. Maybe that’s because, unless you order from the Steyn Store, the book is not shipping yet… but I’ve been a fan of Steyn’s work for several years so I wanted to take the time to write a review. Though I’m a nerd of many hobbies and a short attention span, I cracked open Lights Out as soon as it arrived in the mail. Despite the fact I noted with my order that no dedication was necessary, Steyn took the time to add a funny comment with his autograph. For a frothing xenophobic hatemonger, he seems like a nice enough guy.

My Amazon review:

In “Lights Out: Islam, Free Speech And The Twilight Of The West,” Mark Steyn details his recent misadventures with Canada’s laughable “Human Rights” Commissions. After Maclean’s, a Canadian news weekly, printed an excerpt from Steyn’s America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It, the Canadian Islamic Congress sued Maclean’s for their “flagrant Islamophobia,” demanding space in the privately owned magazine to print a response. Two of three Commissions agreed to hear the case, despite the plaintiff’s arguments being written by five of Canada’s least literate law school students.

Lights Out is primarily a compilation of Steyn articles from the past several years, with a fair amount of new commentary related to the “human rights” trials. The Maclean’s articles cited as justification for legal action by the plaintiff are reprinted in full, followed by the plaintiff’s complaints, followed by Steyn’s concise destruction of said complaints. Far from the obnoxious partisan your average multiculti-cultist dismisses him as, Steyn relates international headlines and demographic stats in a way that’s thoughtful, worrying, and humorous. There are Muslim populations in Western countries that are hostile to Western culture and laws. These populations are growing rapidly, while native birth rates hover at unsustainable levels. Are these issues we’re allowed to discuss?

Steyn’s stated purpose is repeal of the Canadian law that created the freedom-suppressing Human Rights Commissions. An ambitious goal, to be sure, but one that will gain momentum after a few hundred thousand Canadians have read Lights Out. If you care about free speech, order this book.

So far I’m batting a thousand: 1 of 1 people found the review helpful. Ahh, the sweet taste of a stranger’s acceptance.

If you’re a regular Steyn reader, you may have already read many of the articles featured in Lights Out. If you’re a regular Steyn reader, I don’t have to tell you the book’s worth your time anyway!

That’s my review of tonight’s episode of Chuck.

To use several more words: Yvonne Strahovski. Yikes. Adam Baldwin sets a high bar of badassery, and then hurls himself right over it. The past several episodes the story has been interesting, the writing has leaned towards action while bringing well-timed laughs, and the stars continue to be great at what they do. If you’ve missed it - Hulu has not.

Then you get to the preview for the next episode (and season finale). Are we headed for a cliffhanger? It looks cliffhanger-ish, but let’s face it… most of the commercials feature some combination of Chuck with a gun to his head and Sarah in her underoos. Again I thought, “Have they renewed Chuck? Because it’s been great and they better not ruin it.”

I turned to The Internets. And wouldn’t you know it, the New York Times Arts Beat posted an interview with Josh Schwartz, one of Chuck’s creators, this morning. The gist of the interview is that renewal or cancellation have still not been announced, which understandably sucks for everyone involved in making the show. They asked Schwartz about the season two finale, and his response was as far from what I was hoping for as a response could be:

If, in two weeks, that is the last episode of the show to ever air, it will be one of the least satisfying finales of all time.

Times like these I’m glad I have no power or influence! Should Chuck end in a miserable cliffhanger? Or should the show get another 20-some episodes, more than half of which are likely to be tired rehashes of old episodes mixed with on-again-off-again nonsense?

Every noise you hear during a new episode of The Office is the sound of a great show being run into the ground. It started when they brought Toby back. Why, after his great departure? Because they had an idea for one semi-funny episode and wanted the occasional easy joke from a familiar character?

The Office’s magic has always been in how believable the cast and writers made the nonsense: Michael Scott remains to inflict insanity because he’s been around forever and nobody has the heart to fire him. Jim Halpert slacks at his job, but is awesome in every other conceivable way. Pam, likewise. The rest of the characters are quirky weirdos who, like actual people, sometimes say and do utterly ridiculous things.

And now? Charles has been around for a month and has had a single good line (”I am aware of the effect I have on women.”). Watching Jim flail is zero fun. A Pam who quits her job to follow Michael is a dumb, depressing Pam. The Michael Scott Paper Company is a decent joke, but a comletely uninteresting storyline. I’ll keep watching for the funny moments (tonight’s first episode had quite a few), but will no longer expect anything great. Question: if the show’s boring and tired now, what’s next season going to look like?