HBO Sunday Roundup

John from Cincinnati. You'll notice there is no spoiler warning on this post. There's a reason for that. The chief significant development--John announcing (again) that "Sean will soon be gone"--was in last week's preview. Other than that, while there were a few nice moments in Palaka's motel-tub treatment session and Dickstein's going all Close Encounters by scrawling John's circle-and-line symbol in wet cement, this episode seemed like a lot of fill and not a lot of build. Also, any theories as to why I should care about anything that happens to Linc and his business are welcomed.

Incidentally, a new comparison for this show came to mind during one of the promos for HBO's theatrical-repeat movies. Mystical intervention, the arrival of a supernatural being, a group of eccentrics congregating together in a motel: is this David Milch's Lady in the Water? (OK, that was an apartment building, but I still find myself looking out for scrunts.)

Entourage. For the second time this season, my increasingly tempermental HD Tivo (more on that later) crapped out on me, freezing at the end of JFC and failing to record Entourage. Which means either that my Tivo is an erratic piece of high-end hardware or that it's a highly intuitive device, and it is trying to protect me from the current season of Entourage. Is it a bug, or is it a feature?

Flight of the Conchords. Once again, it's not what this show does but how it does it: Not simply that the band would take a meeting with a greeting card company but that there would be a demo card playing Greensleeves. Not simply that it would find an excuse to work in Jemaine's priceless David Bowie imitation (and "Bowie Song") but that he would specifically choose to impersonate Bowie from the Ashes to Ashes video and Labyrinth. In fact, I may be overreading it, but it even seemed like his Bowie impersonations were each in a voice appropriate to the Bowie period. Like freak-you-out-isms of the 1972 Bowie: "Oh, the media monkeys and the junket junkies will invite you to the plastic pantomime." Memo to self: change job title on business cards.