don't forget to take your pills, old man.

Seasonal Affective Disdorder seems to have moved right on in, with friends putting blogs on hiatus and other portentous signs of the apocalypse. I watched the entire week's worth of Daily Shows last night, and you know what? Meh, that's what. You know you're getting depressed when Jon Stewart isn't making you laugh, when Letterman's Carson tribute show comes off as just okay under the circumstances.

Stewart did good solid material on the Iraqi elections, and several times I saw the jokes coming from miles away. The Baghdad Bobblehead theatre company was a nice touch, though. The remote pieces, while once great, have become stale for me recently, like a holdover from another type of show. The interviews are still the best on television, and Stewart remains the gold standard for mixing the light and the dark, allowing visitors to impart real information while still entertaining the crowd.

Dave spent some time with Peter Lasally, third in command at Johnny's Tonight Show (after Carson & Freddy De Cordova), and he provided some good insights into the man. The power he wielded was near absolute, and nobody's coming along that's even close. But the monologue, comprised entirely of jokes Carson had sent in to the staff, felt stale and obligatory, and because it only used Carson's smattering of one off material there was no rhythm to it at all. The one insight I thought fresh was Dave commenting that after Johnny, all late night entertainment has in some way aped his concepts. The desk, guest chairs, onstage band and proscenium mainstage are all still in evidence, and only the Daily show has innovated even slightly by foregoing the band. "We all just want to be Johnny, whether we know it or not."

This week's House was the best one yet, although I didn't cry like I did a few weeks ago. In any case, to paraphrase Twain, reports of the death of the procedural seem to be greatly exaggerated. All of my new favorite shows, House, Medium and Numbers are all procedurals. All, not by coincidence, break through the morass of E/RCSIL&O:SVU crap by giving us something a little more compelling than just forensic evidence to sift through. Wounded, human character at the center of each one, coupled with stylistic progress that delights in telling us their stories in unexpected ways. It may be junk science, for instance (and I'm certainly too dumb to tell you for sure) but Numbers use of onscreen graphics and frame division as formal story devices seems nothing short of brilliant. Medium's conceit that no two psychic events present in the same way forces the writers to get out of traps before those traps are even built. And House's formulaic structure is still great because it may be a formula, but goddamn is it the right one. Also if House and Scrubs both exist in the same universe, Dr. Cox might want to cross over for a consult with the folks at Princeton Medical. Just a thought.