Lily has just posted about her ongoing devotion to AMC’s “Mad Men,” and believe me, I can vouch for it that she is in fact devoted.  Reaaalllly devoted.  I have to admit, though, I like “Mad Men” but I have only seen a few episodes of the first season on DVD.  I feel like I ought to be catching up, but I don’t have any idea what day of the week it’s on, and somehow the DVDs have not quite made it into my Netflix queue yet.  Let me take a minute to tell you about one of my favorite shows, a show in which, incidentally, Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks has been a recurring guest star. I’m talking about NBC’s “Life”.  (Watchable shows on broadcast television still exist?  That’s right!)

Here’s my thing about “Life”: I absolutely freaking LOVE Damian Lewis.  LOVE him.  Before last season, I was vaguely aware that he existed and had an equally vague awareness that he was talented.  After watching “Life”?  Consider me a convert. He is so enormously quirky and weird and completely hilarious as the intermittently zen Detective Crews that the show hardly needs to have a plot to be thoroughly enjoyable.  I’d watch it just for him.

The beauty of the show, though, is that it does have a plot, and a pretty serious one at that.  I have admittedly seen only parts of the show, now in its second season. Frankly, the bizarre things that the writer’s strike did to the TV schedule last year resulted in my seeing only bits and pieces of virtually everything that was on that season. Normally having missed a whole bunch of episodes is enough to stop me from watching a through-plotted series until I’ve caught up (this being why I’ve never watched “24″), but Lewis is so much fun to watch that I am still watching season two even though I only have a vague idea of what happened at the end of season one.

The basic premise is that Charlie Crews is a police detective who was wrongfully sent to jail for the multiple murder of a family he was friends with and spent twelve years there before his lawyer finally managed to prove that he was wrongfully imprisoned — and managed to get a massive settlement with the police department that included him getting his job back as long as he promised not to investigate the crime that sent him to jail in the first place.  Does he leave it alone?  Well, would you?  Most of the time it’s a police procedural, but every couple of episodes, Charlie gets another piece of information for the “conspiracy wall” in his bedroom closet (and frequently gets himself into deeper trouble for it).    By the end of the first season, he’s managed to catch the person who really committed that murder but still hasn’t figured out why he was framed for it and by whom.

So, yeah, I’ll be picking up the Mad Men DVDs at some point.  But I’m picking up the first season of Life first.  And if you’ve never seen it?  I recommend checking it out.  It’s a treat!

Tags: Damian Lewis, Life, NBC, Sarah Shahi, television

This entry was posted on Monday, April 6th, 2009 at 10:16 am and is filed under Jersey. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.