TV time with Bob: A look into this season’s favorites

Robert Taylor

“Desperate Housewives”: Falling for the first time

ABC, Sundays at 9 p.m.

The season premiere of “Desperate Housewives'” second season has me intrigued, but I’m not sold on it yet. The mysteries it sets up are interesting enough, but like last season, I have doubts that the producers will be able to use them for the entire season without them making it seem forced and predictable.

I didn’t like the token reason producers gave for splitting up Teri Hatcher and James Denton. Yes, Zach is a psycho-boy, but he’s out of the picture at this point, so why shouldn’t the dynamic duo make the best of their time together and support each other as well as they can given the circumstances? I think we saw that exact same scene about five times last season, and it’s getting really old.

Meanwhile, Rex is dead.

Really dead.

We saw the corpse and everything, so there went the cliffhanger that made us think he was just faking his death.

Just when I thought Bree ordering the funeral to stop, hunting through attendees to find the right tie, and then putting that tie on her dead husband was becoming a bit much, Marcia Cross reminded me why she is one of the best actresses alive by subtly selling the line “you look – magnificent,” and making the scene work.

Lynette’s stuff was less than amusing, and not just because I know her husband was totally faking his back injury to see how much pull he had over his wife. Her scene changing diapers in the job interview was alarmingly unfunny.

Finally, I miss Mary Alice already. She only had two monologues last night, and didn’t get to ironically critique any of the characters the way she did so well last season. Just because the mystery is over doesn’t mean you have to separate yourself from the show’s mythology, people!

“The O.C.”: Rewarmed leftovers

Fox, Thursdays at 8 p.m.

There was plenty of buildup in last week’s “The O.C.,” but no payoff. Yes, Ryan and Marissa did the dirty, but I just figured they had been doing it since they took a ride on the ferris wheel in season one.

Though when Ryan said that they had done a lot before, but never sex, my dirty mind began to wonder just what they did in that ferris wheel after the camera panned up.

Jimmy was in trouble because of his finances again, just like in season one. Only this time he got beat up.

Kirsten almost took a drink again, but didn’t after she got a note from her dead father she was afraid to read, even though every viewer in America knew it would be a sweet letter so that it could give her some closure. Boring.

Summer and Seth’s storyline was just as contrived, and not just because it was almost an exact copy of last week’s plot.

The actors have such wonderful chemistry together that it is unfair to have them just walking onscreen for two minutes before yanking them off and only having them appear separately in every other scene in the episode.

I just hope something improves, because the promise of the first two episodes this season is quickly falling apart.

Contact ALL correspondent Robert Taylor at [email protected].