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Only Connect and University Challenge, my two British quiz show addictions, are rolling into second round action, when the shows really get going for me. I like just watching them as trivia challenges, but what makes them addictive is the continuity, which fosters rooting interests as you get to know the personalities of the teams. I'm not quite sure who my favorites are in either show, yet, but I know that pretty soon I'll have some, as we start to get more and more repeat competitors. Unfortunately, the most idiosyncratic teams are often the earliest to lose, especially on University Challenge, so my natural tendency to enjoy watching them doesn't really get time to take hold.

My enjoyment of those two shows is always tempered by the frustration of lacking context. I'm far better at American history trivia than most of the students on UC, but UC rarely asks American history questions. I'm far worse at British history, but UC is constantly asking to identify prime ministers from two centuries ago. And I'm at a complete loss when it comes to questions of British television that are staples of both UC and OC. The thing is that I don't mind knowing the answers, which is my problem. It is often the case that I see a question on Jeopardy I don't know, and the question intrigues me and leads me to doing some reading and learning. But when I miss a British pop culture question, I shrug and say "Of course I don't know that," and stop thinking about it. Which means that there is some significant fraction of the clues that I don't care about, which is the source of the aforementioned frustration: why am I watching a show where I don't care about so much of the content?

I'm still dispassionately watching Agents of SHIELD and mostly not enjoying it. I was puzzled by the inexplicable appearance of fake Ancient Hebrew scrolls written in a fairly modern Hebrew script and carrying a deep, orientalist sense of impending mystical doom. Puzzled because I don't think the concept was substantial enough to be offensive. I think the show's grasp of the nuances of bureaucracy remains shockingly and damagingly poor and it wrecks both the realism and drama of the show's intrigue storylines. But every once in a while they string together a five minute sequence that is properly tense and exciting and morally ambiguous. Though it's worth noting that the last of these ended with yet another black secondary character fridged out of nowhere.

I will say that the All-Simmons episode was pretty excellent, because it was uncluttered by all the nonsense that makes normal Agents of SHIELD episodes impossible to enjoy. In general, AoS would be much better if it had much more Simmons and much less of everyone else, is my general feeling. Though I would have liked the All-Simmons episode more if her companion on the portal world were female and the storyline less insistently heteronormative. I did kind of love Fitz's response to Simmons at the end; I think the writers' consistency in the Fitz will Always Save Simmons character beat is kind of nice because it does come without strings, but I feel like they've been more inconsistent on Simmons will Always Save Fitz than I find believable. On the other hand, I suppose that in the case of the one major betrayal of Simmons Will Always Save Fitz, her undercover HYDRA mission during Fitz's recovery, there's a good argument that Simmons somehow 'saving' Fitz would have been far more problematic.

I'm watching the Grinder, but I'm uncertain if I like it. Certainly I love Ben Savage and Rob Lowe and Mary Elizabeth Ellis and Natalie Morales playing off each other, they're wonderful comic actors. And sometimes the writing hits this really wry meta tone that I enjoy, where they are consciously undermining their own jokes as they're making them... it makes the show less funny but more amusing, if that makes sense. The Grinder's basic joke- that Rob Lowe thinks that playing a lawyer on TV prepares him to be a lawyer in real life- is not one with infinite legs, but I'm curious to see how the show evolves because it has so many good, slightly awkwardly fitting, pieces. And even that joke has lasted them longer than I expected because of a weird truth about life: It is possible, if awkward and deceptive, to impose a narrative on real life. And even though the elevator pitch version of the show is about the difference between TV lawyer and real lawyer, what heft the show has comes from the struggle of Rob Lowe's character to reconcile the narrative he believes life follows and the reality he encounters as he tries to live the narrative. And Ben Savage coming to terms with the fact that sometimes the world does obey Rob Lowe's ridiculous narrative.

This is a dangerous path for the show to tread, because as I said it involves deconstructing the jokes as you make them, and this tends to make the jokes less laugh out loud funny. When Rob Lowe hits on Natalie Morales's character in the office, it is, unmistakably, sexual harassment. But he's not doing it because he's a lecher, precisely. He's doing it because as a TV lawyer he's supposed to be a lecher, and he is following the script. This isn't quite funny, it isn't quite exploitative, I'm not sure quite what it is. It's somewhat clever, but that cleverness has limits. If the sexual harassment crosses some nebulous line I'm not sure I can define, it will make it impossible to like Rob Lowe's character, because it's one thing to cause minor harm to people because you're clueless and another thing to do things that cause serious harm to others because of that cluelessness. At some point that cluelessness stops being excusable, and the exploration of that line is where we'll find out how The Grinder's writers see the world.

I also watched the first few episodes of Grandfathered, which I am liking way more than I expected I would. Part of that is just John Stamos's pure charisma, turning bits that would just be about moving the plot forward into jokes. But it's also how un-tired the jokes feel compared to how you'd expect them to feel. Stamos's Jimmy is the vivid, fully featured character you'd expect, but his son Gerald- proudly feminist, proudly paternal, and profoundly incompetent- is just as evocative a creation. He foils Jimmy in surprisingly sharp ways that make him feel like a living person instead of a walking punchline. When Jimmy offers crude pickup artist mantras and Gerald rotely rebuffs them as disrespectful to women, the dialogue skillfully steers them to the realization of a middle ground where both of them have something to learn from the other about honesty and emotional communication. And that has had me thinking more than I expect a gimmick sitcom to make me think.

I also kind of love how they've designed characters to circumvent one of my biggest problems with smart modern sitcoms: the backslide joke. On shows like Parks and Rec, with smart but flawed characters, as the shows develop arcs of the characters confronting their flaws and dealing with them in progressively stronger ways, it's hard for the writers to resist returning for an episode to a joke that delivers reliable laughs but is dependent on the more sharply flawed version of the character from earlier in the show. The result is funny episodes that undermine the overall strength of the storytelling and make ensuing arc development feel less meaningful. In Jimmy and Gerald you have a pair of characters who you know will continually learn and get better but also reliably backslide... they're still getting mileage out of jokes about Jimmy not liking to be called grandfather despite the Aesop of several episodes being that he doesn't mind being a grandfather, because Jimmy is set is in his ways and will keep backsliding.


And then there is Brooklyn 9-9, which I do not love quite as much as I loved Parks, but it is my favorite currently airing sitcom. Halloween III went exactly where I expected it to go, but it was nonetheless incredibly satisfying. I find myself saving B-99 watching for moments when I need something that I know will make me happy, because B-99 is pretty guaranteed to make me happy.