This week was kind of light as far as good quotes were concerned, since a lot of our favorite shows were on hiatus. The plus side is that what we lack in quantity, we make up for in interesting shows — like the World Skeleton Championships, for instance (I don’t even know what that means!). So these are our favorite quotes of the week from all over. As always, feel free to post your own favorite quotes in the comments.

Life on Mars

“He’s one Brady short of a bunch.”– Ray Carling

“He’s as confused as a baby at a topless bar.”– Ray Carling

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(12/7 – 12/13)

I work with a guy that has the barest of the bare bones cable packages. Thirteen channels. It amounts to the networks, Discovery, PBS, and shopping. It was a tough week of television for him. There were a lot of repeats. The CW only managed 3½ hours of original programming for the week, for example. Add in a host of Christmas specials and the pickings were a little thin. Taking advantage of all of that, CBS had great numbers for the introduction of Laurence Fishburne on CSI. Some of the other shows that did manage to air originals were not so lucky.

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(Season 5, Episodes 12/13 – “Made in China/Last Call” – Series Finale)

A day late maybe, but not a dollar short if Denny Crane has anything to say about it. We could just get married. The gang pulled out almost all the stops on this final run through Crane, Poole & Schmidt. With two episodes back-to-back we got not one, not two, but three balcony scenes (though the third one was a bit of a special occasion).

We did get resolution on the financial problems at the firm, the Sack-Schmidt union and the return visit to the Supreme Court. On a character front, I’m pretty well satisfied with how things are left, but I can’t say the same for the firm. I understand that David E. Kelley likes to get his pot-shots in and he likes to shoot big with his targets, and I don’t fault him the target at all. Still, I can’t say as I enjoyed how things turned out for the firm. And poor Shirley.

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Today’s guest clacker is Aryeh S. who, with his wife and infant son, are transplanted New Yorkers, temporarily living in the quaint village of Philadelphia. He and his wife look forward to the day when their son sleeps past 5am … it will also make it easier for them to clean up the 75 hour backlog on their DVR.

Every fall (these days its all year round) we cozy up to a new lineup of shows, knowing full well that many of them won’t be seeing us through the winter. But over the past four years (okay, that’s as far as I can reference back), a plethora of gold (and pewter) has been ripped from the airwaves faster than our DVR guides can update. Here is my “Ode to Shows Past (or, My Secret Shame).”

DISCLAIMER: If your favorite show is missing, it was edited out after I submitted this. I loved (insert show name) too!

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(Season 5, Episode 11 – “Juiced”)

It’s all coming to an end so quickly. Why couldn’t ABC have just given us a full season of Boston Legal this season instead of this truncated half-season? Did I really just use the word “season” three times in one sentence? I want a season six! There, said it again.

In one respect, it looks like David E. Kelley is looking to have some fun as he goes out, with Carl enabling Catherine Piper’s craziness by taking a case against the television networks to court for … wait for it … not programming for people over 50. Why, the only show on television brave enough to have stars over 50 is Bo– Well, that would break the fourth wall, wouldn’t it Carl?

Fun stuff indeed, as well as raising a lot of valid points. Why isn’t television that skews older allowed to thrive on television? They do have more money than those of us under 50. They certainly have more money than I do (he said while scraping remnants from the bottom of a can of potato soup). Kelley balanced his direct attack against ABC with the somber revelation that Denny’s Alzheimer’s is no longer something that is coming, but is in fact here. Now.

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(Season 5, Episode 10 – “Thanksgiving”)

You know what? Going into this holiday themed episode, I was pretty worried. I wasn’t thrilled with how the episode that took Denny and Alan to Utah turned out, and so when I saw that again we were going to be staying out of the courtroom, I got worried. Can David E. Kelley do what he does so well on this show completely outside of the courtroom?

And then Shirley got mugged by a nine year old black kid in a parking lot, only to find out that this is the new foster child of Edwin Poole. From there things were more fun than they had any right to be, minus a few bizarre outbursts from Shirley, and Kelley still finding a way to have Alan wax poetic about some hot political issue, this one being racism in this post-Obama America. But then halfway through, something remarkable happened and this became one of the most powerful and moving episodes I’d seen in a long time.

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(Season 5, Episode 9 – “Kill, Baby, Kill!”)

Boston Legal loves touching on hot political issues, and we’ve gotten some of our best material from them. That didn’t happen tonight. The ensemble reshuffled the pairings for tonight because, as Denny explained, this is their last season. It’s time to mix things up. So he took off with Carl to Virginia to tackle a murder case with a Boston Legal twist. The defendant shot a man who was in the middle of being executed by the state to end his suffering.

The other storyline put Alan and Shirley together, and even had them sharing a cigar on Denny’s balcony. Cheri Oteri guested in that role as a woman who said she got fired because she voted McCain. The counter argument? She was fired because she was dumb. It was great seeing Oteri on television again; if she’s appeared elsewhere lately it’s not been on shows I watch. She’s still just as manic and spunky as many of her Saturday Night Live characters and is a lot of fun to watch.

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