Omar G. was my hero on a winter's night

I am not on the cutting edge. I didn't have a TV, and then, when I did, I forgot to watch it. So I missed everything.

A couple years ago my son rigged up a dvd player at our exercise machine and now, thanks to Netflix, I'm catching up on the last decade's rotten tv shows as I work up a sweat.

At first I mined out one vein at a time. However, after watching a couple seasons straight of Buffy the Vampire Slayer I was at the edge of insanity and decided alternation would be better over the long haul.

On my series' rotation: Smallville. It's too bad there's nobody else learning for the first time, as I am, that the most handsome kid on earth, also with super powers, can't get a date and is such a wuusss. And moons endlessly over the detestable Lana. Blech! Blech!

Having a low tolerance for suspense - it's way too much when people in movies go through other peoples' drawers! Let alone crab monsters and things! - I like to read ahead in books and now, thanks to the internet, I can also peek ahead in tv series. I found the recaps (but for me they are precaps) written by Omar L. Gallaga, Smallville Guru, at Television Without Pity.

I recommend to you, as an example, his recap of Tornado, which made me laugh out loud even though I was miserably lonely in an empty dark house listening to crinkly ice falling and expecting the power poles to come crashing down any minute. What I love best is that Omar seems to DETEST this show, yet comments on it minutely and with never-flagging relish. Random excerpts from the FOURTEEN PAGE recap of the 42-minute show!!!!:

Opening credits. Isn't it enough that we have to hear Remy Zero again later in the episode? Can't we skip the song this week? Oh, wait. I can! I hit the fast-forward button. ... Chloe walks up, looking all serious. "They're closing the LuthorCorp plant," she tells Clark. Clark looks shocked. He looks to the right. No, Clark. The plant isn't down the hall.

Bo [Clark's father was a Duke of Hazzard] gets fightin' mad. He says that, as much as he would like Lex out of their lives, he wouldn't wish the plant closing on anyone. "I know, Dad," Clark says gently. Next door, Michael Moore is interviewing a woman who sells rabbits as pets or meat. Clark is sad. He says that Lex loved the town and had big plans. A production of Angels in America! A St. Patrick's Day parade! A sushi bar with little boats that float around the restaurant! "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions," Bo says. It is the most deadly and forbidden of platitudes Bo has just uttered. Yoda warned him not to use it unless it's an emergency and it looks like Bo just broke the glass and set off the alarm. Clark looks stricken. "Damn. That's some good platituding right there," he thinks, reluctantly.

The dialogue isn't exactly Gilmore Girls, is it? That show's dialogue crackles. This one's dialogue sits at the bottom of a bowl of soggy cereal turning the milk the muddy brown of Cocoa Puffs. Jocko asks if he's usually boring. Well, shit, yeah. Why do you think they're writing you out of the show?

OK, now about this awful Lana. I know I'm years too late, but couldn't they have reverse-engineered her out of the show with green kryptonite or something, so nobody ever even remembered she had ever been there? (Otherwise they all would have spent a whole season mega-mooning over her and that would have been just as bad.) Two other possibilities come to mind. On Univision's telenovela "Mujer de Madera" the main actress must have asked for a raise in the middle of the season. So they fired her and - wow - her character was suddenly in a terrible accident and spent weeks in the hospital wrapped in bandages and had to have massive plastic surgery. And when the bandages came off - wow - she was like, another person! (Still blonde, though.) Or, there was the classic "Bewitched" solution - just switch to a new actor, keep calling him Darrin, and hope nobody notices.

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