This Week in Television - Nov. 6-11, 2011

Once Upon a Time
Interesting parallels in the Snow White/Charming stories. I like how they reversed it and had Charming in the coma in the present day. I didn't like how the bridge trolls looked, though. Too humanoid, not trolly enough.

Glee
Where did that girl even come from when the Warblers were singing "Uptown Girl"? Dalton is an all boys school, and I doubt she was a teacher. The romance between Coach Beiste and the recruiter felt rushed and forced just because they wanted to shoehorn it into this episode so it would fit with the other romance plots going on. And for someone so lonely, I don't see how Beiste would be so clueless about him and not jump into his arms after all the attention he was giving her. It felt like this episode was written before last week's, because it made almost no references to anything that happened previously except for the school musical and the Irish kid making a very brief appearance in it.

New Girl
Cece has been a fairly pointless character up to this episode, showing up only when Jess needs someone other than the guys to talk to, but like last week's naked incident, she fueled the humour by provoking reactions from everyone. What happened to the douchebag jar? Schmidt was at his douchiest here, and while maybe there is no merit in running the jar joke into the ground, I don't see how the guys would realistically discontinue it with Schmidt's behaviour failing to dwindle. I think New Girl has hit its stride, though, as the roommates are finally becoming as funny as Jess. People don't seem to be liking Winston and/or the actor playing him, but I find he has funny comedic delivery, such as when he started wearing the paper towels to protest Schmidt's kimono.

Survivor: South Pacific
I don't know if Ozzy's entire tribe was condescending toward Cochran, but most of them were, so they shouldn't be whining. I hate to say it, but Coach has become likable this season, and his tribe seems more positive and friendly.

Up All Night
It was a nice surprise seeing Jason Lee show up, though his character wasn't really funny and it was predictable that he and Ava would hook up after her comment at the beginning about wanting to find a "normal guy". But I was surprised to hear an Oprah mention in that beginning scene; I thought that, in the world of the show, Ava was the Oprah being worshipped by women all over the country. Chris and Reagan's night out was cute, and it's actually nice to see a married couple on a comedy show who are still in love and still want to sleep together, because for a long time it seemed like the trend was to make everything dysfunctional for humour's sake.

Community
This season seems to be working on a theme that isolates Jeff from the rest of the group. From the premiere we had him kicked out of Biology and going crazy because of it, then voted least desirable lab partner by everyone else, then stuck getting the pizza at Troy and Abed's place, and even his Halloween story differed slightly from everyone else's because rather than reflect his true personality, he drew from a fake persona, one that contradicts what this season has been telling us and insists that Jeff holds the group together. This week he plays hooky and everyone seems to get on fine without him while Dean Pelton tortures him with "Kiss From a Rose" (which surely was one of the Dean's many weird Jeff fantasies). Britta may be seen as the buzzkill because she doesn't really know what is cool; I think Jeff is also a buzzkill, but because he does know what's cool, and prevents others from doing things that are not cool but still fun, like singing and dancing to "Roxanne", which only happened while he was away getting the pizza. I think in the first two seasons Jeff did hold the group together, but as they've been saying more recently, the friendships have evolved, and at this point they probably don't need Jeff to hold them together anymore, which means he needs to find a new function within the group to avoid becoming obsolete. Also the shadow puppet show was fun.

Parks and Recreation
Oh man, a lot of really funny stuff in this one, from Ron's remark about sanding his toenails, to Andy stockpiling all the lions in the model UN, to April insisting on representing the moon. It made it more fun that we got to see Leslie and Ben's post break-up aggression play out over the model UN scenario, rather than just a plain old argument episode like we see all the time elsewhere. The stuff with Ron and Tom was something different too, because they don't have stories together very often - possibly not since they played internet Scrabble in season one - and it merged Tom back into the government office, where we knew he was headed. Chris was probably, again, the weakest part because Jerry's daughter hasn't been doing much for him comedy-wise since the relationship started, but it provided him with some good moments of self-reflection and a couple of decent jokes about his relationship with Ann.

The Office
Two things I found predictable in this episode: The cold opening with Andy trying to hold off a fake phonecall, because when has Erin not misunderstood something?; and when Robert brought in his band friends I knew they were just going to replace Andy, Darryl, and Kevin and they wouldn't get to jam with the boss - and additionally, that was a joke that really didn't need to last the entire episode. But Pam and Dwight is a fun combination, possibly moreso than Jim and Dwight, so I liked the storyline with them teaming up to catch Jim in a lie, though Dwight's crotch grab was like three or four times too many.

Fringe
That was a really cool episode. I don't always feel for the weekly guest stars involved in the cases because there's too little screen time to empathize with them, but I can understand Raymond's motives. I'm a big fan of time travel stuff (which is why the Peter Weller episode always stood out to me, that and it was beautifully shot in some parts), so I just loved seeing all the weird time loops happening. I'm wondering what it means that Peter was unaware he was appearing to Walter and Olivia when Walter heard him saying "Walter, help me." Just something from residual subconscious memories, or a different Peter? FUN FACT: the actors playing Raymond and Kate (Stephen Root and Romy Rosemont) in this episode are married in real life.

Hero of the Week: Troy and Abed from Community, for their shadow puppet show and "dreamatorium" (which I'll admit I thought they were going to refer to as a "holodeck" when I saw the gridlines on all the surfaces.)

Douchebag of the Week: Schmidt from New Girl. No. Just no.