The past few weeks have offered up a whirl of openings and closing and endings and beginnings.  The shows I watch are not really plentiful and some are not even all that popular, but they have served up a fairly decent and satisfying buffet of goodies on which to chew, so without further ruminating, let's wade in on what I've watched and how I felt it played out.

THAT 70'S SHOW - I loved this show when it first came on the air and followed it faithfully until just before Eric went off to Africa.  Around that time, my attention started to drift and by the time he left, Fonzi was metaphorically up on the ramp ready to jump that shark.  Still, I never stopped caring about the characters, especially Red and Kitty who, along with Stephen Hyde, were my very favorites, and when I heard that the series was ending, I had to step in for the wrap up.  I was grateful I did not have to deal with any of the fairly lame characters that were introduced to take the place of Kelso and Eric when they left.  I caught a glimpse of them here and there and was not impressed.  Sadly, by the time the series finale was half over, I was not impressed with the rest of the show either.  Overall, although it was great to see everyone again, I found to to be lacking any kind of substance that one would think the culmination of eight seasons would provide.  Definitely a whimper and not a bang.

RESCUE ME - I watched the final episodes of the second season on DVD and I was extremely impressed by the nonstop action.  It was heart-breaking that absolutely every character was put through the ringer in the most personally devastating ways possible and by the time last Tuesday rolled around and the third season was ready to debut, I was eager to see if the momentum would be maintained.  I was blessed in having only recently discovered the show, so I watched the end of the second season only a couple of days before the new season debuted.  Still, I was breathless.  The new season has yet to disappoint me.  The acting and writing is still razor sharp, although I am not excited about the direction some of the characters are heading.  Kenny Shea especially is a disappointment.  I really wanted more from him than to fall this far into the dark side because of what he experienced with the hooker (who, along with Sheila's abusive girlfriend, seem to have gotten the best ends of the deal from last season).  Eric, my husband, claims to not get into the show, yet he watches almost every episode with me.  He was thrilled by Tommy's beat down of Johnny at the end of the second episode of this season.  My heart breaks for Jerry and his lovely wife, Jeanie.  I only recently learned that Tommy's psycho sister is actually played by Tatum O'Neal.  My favorite moment?  So far, it has been the implied duct taping of Alexis Havins' pretty little mouth.  After a fairly benign third episode of the season, we were left with a riveting final 5 seconds or so when our probie nestled comfortably onto the couch to watch the game with a beer in his hand and his head cuddled up to ... another guy.  This show never, ever fails to keep me riveted.  That almost assures its cancellation along with jewels like "Dead Like Me" and "Firefly."

ER - Just... wow.  I lost several seasons of the show.  I never really watched it in prime time, having gotten my ER education through TNT airings during the day.  I watched up from the first episode through Mark Green's death probably 4-5 times.  I never fail to cry when Mark dies or when Nurse Carol Hathaway left the hospital and went to meet Dr Doug Ross, surprising him at his home.  They way he looked up, saw her, then came to her and swept her up in an embrace melts my heart every time.  At one point, TNT aired all the way through to the current season, so I mostly got caught up, but then seldom watched it in prime time.  Honestly, the Africa stuff makes my eyes glaze over and my interest wane.  The season finale included Michael Gallant's death in a military accident.  Luka was strapped to a gurney and injected with a medication to arrest breathing while a main line is inserted, only without a main line.  Sam managed, while under gun point, to insert a mainline before being abducted by her ex-husband and his prison-mates, along with her son.  Luke regained consciousness in time to look out the window of the treatment room in which he was still restrained to the gurney and see Abby, many months pregnant with his child, collapse with her hands covered with her own blood.  Jerry was critically injured in the hospital shoot out instigated by Sam's ex and his convict buddies and was on his way to surgery.  To close out a season in which John Liguizamo goes crazy and Kerry loses her crutch and is able to walk normally, it was quite fitting.  I approve.

WIFESWAP - True to Jerry Springer tradition, they left the crazy people for last.  Bringing together two fairly volatile families (in different ways), the "sit down" ended up being a knockdown drag out as the two dads started beating on each other after one of the wives told the other one she dressed like a whore... or was it a slut?  The season finale of this one was a while back, so my memory is a little fuzzy.  Hell, I could even be talking about Trading Spouses for all I know.  What I have learned from these two shows is A) There are only about 6 different archetypal families in the whole USA  and B) The men will never, ever, ever follow the rules the new wife sets up, ever, even if she followed the family's rules when it was her turn to do so.  Why these guys even bother to play the game, I can't imagine.

MY NAME IS EARL - This is another show that has earned my undying affection.  It's original, it's cute and it's tremendously funny.  The acting is superb and as with the show, "Firefly," you get the impression that the ensemble cast really does enjoy being together.  It stays fresh and entertaining with every episode.  The season finale centered around Earl learning that the man who checked out before him at the convenience store where he purchased his winning lottery ticket ($100,000) also intended to buy a lottery ticket, but could not do so because Earl had, a few moments before, lifted his last $10 from his pocket.  This told Earl that the winning lottery ticket belonged not to him, but to the man from whom he'd stolen the $10.  With the help of security camera videos from the convenience store, Earl is able to locate the man and gives the remainder of his winnings to him, promising to repay the rest.  Through a series of explanations and flashbacks, it turns out that fate really did mean for the money to go to Earl and all is well again, but in the meantime, the usual hilarity ensues.  It was a fitting ending to the season and I eagerly look forward to the next episodes of Earl.

THE SOPRANOS - This is a long one - I am such a sucker.  I wait with baited breath for each new episode.  We were all told this was the last season, but now it has come out that this is good-bye... for now... until the final episodes, which will air starting in March.  Hell, I don't care if it never ends.  I love my wise guys, warts and all.  This season, oddly enough, has been very invested in character development, which is strange considering that this is now pretty much a veteran show.  We know the characters that are being developed, yet David Chase is showing us aspects of each character that we may not have noticed before.  Story has also been very important and Chase has done a fine job of interweaving character evolution with good story telling.  There have been some dud episodes (sadly, the finale was one of them), but even as we were getting through those kind of blah episodes, it was obvious that the story was being furthered with information we would need later on. 

About halfway through the season, I was fairly certain that the story was moving toward a strong revelation about Tony.  I considered that the series opened with Tony, a hard core mob boss by anyone's standards, was not only getting therapy, but also going on Prozac.  Throughout the series, we learned about his panic attacks and how they had affected his life over the years.  This season began with Uncle Junior, through his dementia (or not?) shooting Tony in the chest.  Over the next couple of episodes before Tony regained consciousness from his coma, he hallucinated that he was Tony Soprano, but was being constantly mistaken by a man named Kevin Finnerty, whose briefcase he accidentally picked up instead of his own.  His only contact with his "real" life was with phone calls to and from Carmella.  Throughout his couple of episodes of coma-dream, he met and interacted with other people, all of which led up to a critical health moment for Tony in real life.  In his dreams, his cousin Little Tony, who Tony Soprano killed in a previous season, is his guide to an opulent building which could have been a hotel, a banquet hall or country club.  It was lit up from within and looked inviting.  Little Tony, who our Tony did not seem to recognize, encouraged Tony to go inside, saying, "They're waiting for you."  Tony looked eager to go, but became hesitant when Little Tony told him he could not take his briefcase (Kevin Finnerty's briefcase) inside.  As they were starting to argue over the disposition of the briefcase, with Little Tony intersplicing the encouragement of "They're waiting for you... go on...," Tony heard a child calling him from the nearby bushes.  In actuality, it was Meadow begging Tony not to die as the doctors worked on him. 

Tony goes back, lives and has a longish recovery time.  During which, we see several examples of Tony not being Tony.  In one instance, he is making out hot and heavy with a gorgeous real estate broker, then (very out of character) puts a stop to it and leaves.  In another, Tony senses that the guys in his crew are not taking him seriously since his shooting, so he brutally beats a studly young man who has been hired as his driver for no particular reason.  He then goes into the bathroom and vomits profusely.  When Vito, one of Tony's captains, is revealed to be a closet gay, Tony hesitates in putting a hit out on him, despite pressure from the family to do so.  When Tony's son, AJ, tries to kill Uncle Junior with a hunting knife (and doesn't even get close to him with it), Tony holds his so desperately and sobs, begging AJ not to go that direction, saying, "You're a good boy.  You're a good boy."  The impression is that Tony is saying that to his younger self.

What  I am getting at here is that it seems evidence is piling up that just like in his coma dream, Tony is not who he seems to be.  I felt they were heading toward a reveal, tying in all of the therapy from the previous seasons, that Tony realizes he's just not cut out to be a mob boss and for the final episode, flips and turns everyone in.  My impression was that the place Little Tony was encouraging him to enter was his own hell, populated by all of the people he'd ever killed or whose death he'd caused.  That's why he did not recognize his own cousin, who he'd shot in the head.  The briefcase, which he could not take with him, represented the last chance he had of being someone other than Tony Soprano. 

In the last 2-3 episode, everything turned around and to all appearances, the old Tony is back as though nothing happened and all of that lead up was for nothing at all and ended with the entire family having Christmas after Tony gave Janice poor Jeanie Sack's mansion.  It was as though we were building all of this momentum and then the train just stopped.

There were a lot of isolated stories that were very interesting.  One was Vito's foray into living the homosexual lifestyle with his very attractive and rugged johnnycake making lover.  Another was Christopher's pursuit of backing for his movie, which involved a fervent stalking of actor, Ben Kingsley (who turned in a wonderful performance as a very gracious, but increasingly frustrated version of himself) and a mugging of Lauren Bacall for her bag of loot from a swag room, complete with punching her in the face.  Still another was Paulie learning that the woman who raised him from infancy and who he adored is not his mother, but his aunt and that the woman who he thought was his aunt (a nun) is actually his mother.  Not long after this, Paulie is diagnosed with prostate cancer.

Where are the Sopranos characters headed next?  David Chase has 8 episodes, beginning in March of 2007, to let us know.