Shows switch up routines, starting with HBO's 'The Last of Us'

The last week of January and first week of February saw intriguing variations in the formulae of some weekly TV shows I've recommended in this space before, so I thought I'd touch upon each of them briefly.

'The Last of Us,' Sundays on HBO

Season 1, Episode 3, "Long, Long Time" on Jan. 29 began with Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) making their way west from Boston, before it detoured into a 20-year-long, nearly episode-length flashback, fully encompassing the relationship of paranoid bunker survivalist Bill (Nick Offerman) and the man who becomes the love of his life, artistic people-person Frank (Murray Bartlett).

Doomsday prepper Bill will seem amusingly familiar to anyone who was a fan of Offerman's libertarian manly-man Ron Swanson on NBC's "Parks and Recreation," as he transforms an entire abandoned town into a self-sustaining, formidably fortified village of one, until one of his traps catches affable wanderer Frank, whose face lights up with delight at Bill's gourmet cooking and elegant piano.

Frank's affinity for the small joys in life, from sprucing up the place where he lives to hosting garden parties of fellow survivors of the fungal zombie apocalypse, proves too infectious for even Bill's guarded heart to resist, and even as they fend off would-be raiders and succumb to their own infirmities of health and age, our bearded couple finds time to giggle like kids over a crop of strawberries.

For a single episode to span two decades is almost as audacious as the "One Year Later" flash-forward of the 21st-century "Battlestar Galactica," and while I've heard some mild complaints about its pacing, it's the sort of experimental storytelling that should be far more common in shows that are totally unmoored from the current events of the real world.

And for as Swanson-esque as Bill is - at one point, he and Frank get into a hilarious yelling match over Bill's pre-apocalyptic conspiracy theories about how "The government are all Nazis," to which Frank is forced to concede, "Well, yeah, now! But not then," in the wake of FEDRA - Offerman portrays Bill with a vulnerability that should earn him all the TV acting awards.

'Quantum Leap,' Mondays on NBC

Season 1, Episode 11, "Leap. Die. Repeat." on Jan. 30 debuted a twist on the leaps of Dr. Ben Song (Raymond Lee) that I don't recall being experienced even by Dr. Sam Beckett (Scott Bakula) on the original series, as Ben spends an episode re-leaping into the same moment of time, just before the explosion of a nuclear facility in the 1960s, each time as one of the five victims of the blast in the control room.

Ben name-checks "Groundhog Day" and "Rashomon," as he uses the repeating time loop to try and learn as much as he can, during each leap, from the perspectives of an Army colonel, two nuclear scientists, a civilian news reporter and a janitor for the facility, turning it into a murder-mystery with a limited number of resets, after Ben learns the blast was caused by an explosive device, planted and set off by one of the five people he's leaping into.

Ben's attempts to winnow the list of suspects is complicated by inadvertently setting off the bomb during one of those leaps, without realizing it, making him the "murderer" during that leap.

Ben's initial "death," in the first of those leaps, also shows his fiancée, Addison Augustine (Caitlin Bassett), finally, fully losing her composure, in stark contrast to the stressed-out but relatively unruffled military veteran we've seen up to this point.

And the nuclear facility bomber's initial self-assuredness over the moral righteousness of his catastrophic actions gives Ben pause, when combined with the cryptic warnings from his team's adversary-in-residence, Al's daughter Janis Calavicci (Georgina Reilly), about whether his team's good intentions might nonetheless lead to disastrous outcomes, especially with Addison's fate somehow hanging in the balance in the future.

'Night Court,' Tuesdays on NBC

Season 1, Episode 4, "Dan v. Dating" on Jan. 31 inverted one of the most reliable traits of sarcastic attorney Dan Fielding (John Larroquette) from the original "Night Court" series, as the previously unrepentant serial womanizer of the 1980s and '90s has found himself fending off the amorous advances of older women throughout the courthouse, as a "silver fox" of a widower.

As many idiot adolescent guys grew up admiring suckup scumbag horndog Dan Fielding for all the wrong reasons - I'm talking about myself here - I've been pleasantly surprised to see that not even critics of the new "Night Court" object to Dan's evolution, almost assuredly because Larroquette managed to give Dan a sense of depth even at his most stereotypical.

Larroquette made Dan a man who actually aspired to be a shallow, self-serving jerk, but was often brought down by the bummer of a realization that he did indeed possess a conscience, no matter how well-hidden he usually kept it from his coworkers.

If the unseen fiancé of Abby Stone (Melissa Rauch) turns out to be not such a nice guy, Dan's background makes him uniquely suited to seek dirty-pool retribution against anyone who might hurt Harry's daughter.

In the meantime, it was welcome to see Larroquette playing off the under-used talents of guest-starring romantic interest Wendie Malick, who's managed to enliven sitcoms ranging from HBO's "Dream On" to NBC's "Just Shoot Me!"

The B-plot of prosecutor Olivia (India de Beaufort) and bailiff Gurgs (Lacretta) sharing an office builds on the fun rapport they developed in the previous episode, leaving left-out court clerk Neil (Kapil Talwalkar) the most likely to be sacrificed to the second-season retooling gods, since the new "Night Court" has already been confirmed to receive a Season 2.

'Poker Face,' Thursdays on Peacock

Season 1, Episode 5, "Time of the Monkey" on Feb. 2 finally gave aimless amateur sleuth Charlie Cale (Natasha Lyonne) an opportunity to pass the Bechdel test, when a stint as a retirement home attendant introduces her to bohemian best friends Irene and Joyce (played by "Law & Order" stalwarts Judith Light and S. Epatha Merkerson), who spin entertaining tales of their political activism during the 1970s.

While the trio of women's interactions ultimately involve a man, about whom the two older women harbor conflicted feelings - "like a fire hydrant" is a notable compliment both older gals pay him, because streaming services like Peacock don't have to play by primetime network TV rules - I have to admit, I could have watched fellow Gen-Xer Charlie bond with Boomer hippie chicks Irene and Joyce for an entire episode, simply because of the great vibe they had going.

Of course, because "Poker Face" is a murder-mystery, it turns out Irene and Joyce's political activism was less sympathetic than they made it out to be, but the fact that a human lie detector like Charlie could be taken in by their half-truths points to a blindspot in her ability to spot intentional falsehoods, because Irene and Joyce sincerely believed their own self-serving justifications for even their most extreme "political" acts.

My only complaint is that Charlie needs to start expecting some pushback when she goes after murderers, but on the plus side, the show appears to have gained a recurring character in FBI agent Luca Clark (Simon Helberg), so that should complicate Charlie's flight from her pursuers.

Author Bio

Kirk Boxleitner, Reporter

Shelton-Mason County Journal & Belfair Herald
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