smacky and bucky

Don't drink and drive kids, but do enjoy Aldo antics from the safety of your home. Three awesome things to note:

(1) Aldo makes no effort to hide the bottle, no paper bag or wedging the bottle between his legs for him. Nope, Aldo holds it like he's doing a commercial for Johnnie Walker.

(2) Aldo takes long swigs with his eyes shut. His motto is "Hey, if you're gonna drink, drink." Like his stalking, Aldo never does anything half-assed.

(3) You have to smile when Aldo says (out loud), "This is more like it!" Who among us hasn't experienced that first soft glow of false confidence that comes from angry binge drinking?

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Giving New Shows a Chance, Part II

Last night my wife went to a "stitch-n-bitch" party (women knit, drink, and gossip), so I decided to give another new original drama a shot at earning a place in my heart. I chose Jericho on CBS. Skeet Ulrich drives into his old hometown (Jericho, Kansas) over an emo soundtrack. Turns out he's been gone five years and no one seems to know where. And he tells a different story to everyone he meets ("I was in the army." "I was in the navy." "I played minor league baseball."). I suppose there's a minor mystery there, as he shows a little medical training later in the show, which only rules out ballplayer. Gerald McRaney (Major Dad, Simon & Simon, Mr. Delta Burke) is Skeet's dad, and the mayor of the town.

Blah, blah, blah... a few more characters are introduced, and there's a mushroom cloud on the horizon at dusk. All phones, radios, TVs, etc. stop working. A school bus full of kids crashes in the middle of nowhere (of course it does) and Skeet, walking along bloody after a car wreck of his own (I assume. I left the room for a while and missed that part), arrives and gives medical attention to the injured and drives the bus back to town as a hero. The small-town cops, looking for the school bus, instead find a prison bus. The bus has a few dead guards in it, and so now we've got a group of armed escaped cons heading toward town, along with a cloud of radiation. Because just the radiation would have been boring.

Oh, and an answering machine message heard during the show confirms another bomb went off in Atlanta (The woman happened to call her child five seconds before the bomb hit: "Hi Bobby, how is everythi-- Oh my God, what's that?!? BOOOOOOM!")

So future episodes will deal with maintaining law and order (getting those cons back in prison), Hiding underground until the radiation cloud passes (I suppose in TV land it will only take about two days to pass by), getting power and water restored, and learning about the outside world (Did this happen everywhere? Are all major cities destroyed? Was it terrorism, war, or human error?)

It's not a bad show. I'd watch it if I saw it was starting, but I wouldn't hunt it down in the schedule. And if it stays where it is in the schedule, it will eventually come up against American Idol or some crap, which will likely kill it. I predict it won't last a season. Sorry.