COWBOY PETER’S TV ROUND-UP

Okay, folks: You’ve been asking me what I thought of various debuts. Below (with spoilers) find my thoughts on the season debuts of “Alias,” “Smallville,” “Angel” and “West Wing.”

ALIAS: A masterstroke. The problem with a series like “Alias” that depends on shocking turns of events is that by the third season, the twists seem to be there purely to be twists without adding any actual drama. Not on “Alias.” By jumping the series ahead two years and leaving its protagonist (and by extension the audience) playing catch-up, “Alias” maintains it’s at-least-one-gasp-per-fifteen-minutes pace. The maneuver through which she got her dad out of jail was a bit pat for my taste (they sign a letter kicking him loose? Great. They then say they wrote it under duress and rip it up) but the end sequence with Syd watching the videotape of herself was breathtaking. Was it really her? Or was it a duplicate, since we know that capability exists (just ask her dead friend.) And has Sloane really joined the side of the angels? Did two years of chasing after the pieces of the Rimbaldi machine really only result in the punchline from the song “One Tin Soldier?” See? Even the lame stuff is open to second-guessing.

SMALLVILLE: Gotta tell ya, the story’s not making tons of sense to me, and events in the series take us even further from the concept that this could possibly be the story of young Clark Kent who goes on to become Superman (not only would Lex Luthor recognize him, but now major crime players in Metropolis would be able to say, “Oh, yeah, Superman…used to work for me.”) We’re moving from the notion of guilty teen to the concept that Clark’s either under the control of the voice of Zod–I’m sorry, Jor-El–or maybe the ring, or maybe he’s just gone bonkers. On the other hand, Tom Welling is thriving on evil Clark, it was a kick to see Lex Luthor go completely Fight Club, and I’m still waiting for Chloe to start writing articles under the name “Lois Lane.” And Rutger Hauer! My God, how can you not love a TV series that could give us *weekly* (or at least recurring) doses of Rutger Hauer?

ANGEL: Joss Whedon’s season-opening episodes are generally among his weakest, but this was a happy exception. Eminently quotable dialogue and fascinating gray-area scenarios that’s like taking “The Practice” and running it through the horror genre grinder. My personal jury is still out on Gunn’s transformation into a lawyer. On the other hand, it was fun to see the old Cordelia reincarnated as Harmony: Much of her dialogue and all of her attitude could have been first season Cordy, right down to the turn-on-a-dime, “Oh, my poor friend, woe is me…oh well. Where were we?” And we’re going to have to wait a week to see which leaked rumor is true: That Spike is now a human and the first male slayer to boot, or that Spike is non-corporeal, i.e., a ghost. Plot hole that bothered me: How did Wesley know Spike? They’ve never met. Plot hole that stopped bothering me: How the hëll did they get the amulet from the bottom of the Sunnydale pit so they could mail it back to Angel? I realized that Willow could probably just wave her hand in some retrieval spell and the amulet would be in her hand. And thank God Angel got rid of that personal SWAT team: Any tactical group conducting a gunfight with a vampire during broad daylight that doesn’t think to shoot out the windows so sunlight would come cascading in, severely handicapping Angel, deserves what they get.

WEST WING: The Republicans-Aren’t-Automatically-Evil angle continues as the more politically-savvy Leo knows the GOP won’t do anything stupid while the less-experienced staffers keep cooking up worst case scenarios garnered from Democratic paranoia (which doesn’t mean the GOP *isn’t* out to get them…) The rescue of Zoe Bartlett was almost anti-climactic. I mean, I didn’t expect Bartlett to come swinging down on a rope from a helicopter, or Abby to stomp into a terrorist hideout armored in a power loader announcing, “Get away from her, you BÍTÇH!” Instead it’s an off-camera rescue by the FBI having something to do with a domestic dispute and dialing 911. I couldn’t quite figure it out. Still, the show remains watchable, I’ll be interested to see where they go from here, and the final sequence with Abby pointedly standing with her back to her husband on the TV rendered a powerful mute statement that the state of their matrimonial union has taken a serious hit.

Whew.

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