This Week in Television - Jan. 4-8, 2010

Heroes
Sometimes watching Heroes is like watching someone play a turn-based RPG: whenever someone attacks someone, their target just stands there and lets it happen, and if they're able to retaliate they wait until the enemy's attack is over to do it. I don't mind that in video games but it's a problem on TV. Hiro speaking only in pop culture references reminded me of a patient on House who had a problem that made him say weird word combinations but he thought he was speaking normally. Maybe Hiro should teleport into Dr. House's office for help on that one. Kind of glad that Nathan's finally dead. Really his only contribution to the show was constantly putting his hand on Peter's shoulder and calling him Pete all the time.

Kenny vs. Spenny
Who do black guys like more (Part One)? For the first time we have a two part episode. I don't know why the competition needs to be that long, but whatever. This episode was basically all Spenny's day with the black guys. At first I thought he was blowing it, because he spent the whole time talking about race, and even though he was saying positive things I think bringing it up at all still kind of makes it an issue. My strategy would just be to hang out with them like normal guys and not even talk about race, but they seemed to respond to him very well so I guess it worked. In the preview for next week it looks like Kenny is purposely offending them, but I think I have figured out his plan: he's going to use footage from this episode and edit together footage of Spenny yelling at Kenny-as-black-maid cleaning the toilet with footage of the actual black cleaning lady that Kenny got to clean the toilet, and he will show it to the black guys to make Spenny look like a racist monster. I think he's hoping that the black guys will be more offended by Spenny's supposed deceit than his own upfront douchebaggery. I think Spenny will win though, just because he's due by now. Let's check back next week to see if I'm right!

Overall rating for this week's shows: B