This Week in Television - Oct. 30-Nov. 4, 2011

Once Upon a Time
I'm enjoying the war between Emma and the evil queen. I think I actually find it more interesting than the fantasy flashback segments, though Robert Carlyle is fun as Rumplestiltskin. Glad that Henry did show Emma the book pages this week, though he should have done it last week. I'm not sure how I feel about them showing that the evil queen does care about something, because fairy tale characters are usually black and white, but then I don't think you can get that far with a TV show featuring such two-dimensional characters, so they had to make her more complex.

Glee
I'm not really a fan of pregnancy/baby storylines, and the reason for that is because they sometimes lead to soap opera crap like Quinn trying to get back her baby that she gave up for adoption by sabotaging the foster mom. And I don't know if we were supposed to find the new Irish kid charming, but to me he was just devious in taking advantage of Brittany, and knowing Brittany she probably would have given him an actual pot of gold and not sex like he was hoping. I would like to root for Sue in her quest to take down the arts, but Kurt's dad is also cool. Dammit. Although it seems like they've been using the "Sue cut our budget!" storyline way too often.

New Girl
This episode might have worked as the pilot, because I feel it was the best so far at character development, and one of the funniest. Well, the cold opening and ending tag weren't so great, but the middle was. The "accidentally seeing a friend naked" thing is an old sitcom staple used on almost every show out there, but how it affected everyone was what created the funny moments, like Jess attempting to say "penis" and Schmidt attempting to look at one. And Lake Bell was a funny guest star with her hard to read half-sarcasm-but-possibly-not-joking shtick.

Survivor: South Pacific
I've watched every season of Survivor, and I like it, but I can't say that it has a lot of great episodes. This week's was a great episode. For one it actually surprised me in providing moments where I respected, of all people, Coach and Brandon. Coach for accurately assessing the other tribe's scheme and telling the whole thing to Cochran's face, and Brandon for finally saying something sensible, when Jim called Cochran a coward and Brandon told him "Don't talk to him like that. That's what you get for talking to people like that in the first place." Cochran's been making some good moves, but Probst will completely ignore that and push for Ozzy to win just because he loves the challenge dominators and has no respect for strategic players. It's unfortunate that Christine had to be a casualty of Ozzy's plan. She had a nice winning streak going and I was looking forward to seeing her back.

Up All Night
The "my parents are visiting but they make me uncomfortable!" storyline is another sitcom staple, and I don't think Reagan's parents were funny enough characters to warrant using it, though it worked for the sake of Reagan's back story. The big laugh I got out of this episode was actually the payoff to the Ava story about the dead sound man, when they aired the video tribute featuring one repeated photo of him and the form clearly displaying his home address and social security number.

Suburgatory
What's starting to bother me about this show is that when the suburban townsfolk aren't funny, they're annoying. I found the school charity thing to be predictable, and everyone's superficiality and ignorance just bothered me rather than make me laugh. However, this show becomes more interesting if you think of Suburbia as an allegory for the United States of America, and George and Tessa as Canadians. Ponder that, non-existent people who aren't reading this!

Community
This week's episode had a weirdness to it with the combination of Pierce's eccentric father and the air conditioning annex, though it wasn't a bad weird and was still funny. I liked the use of the astronaut making paninis and "Black Hitler" in order to make the truth unbelievable should anyone try to spoil the secret. This episode was good at making use of past episodes, with references to Troy's plumbing abilities, Hawthorne wipes, both Jeff and Pierce's daddy issues, and newer things from this season like Britta's Psych class, Inspector Space-Time, and of course the Vice Dean. More of a return to form after the last two episodes, but a solid one in terms of humour.

Parks and Recreation
It was interesting seeing how the characters reacted to a possible apocalypse, even though none of them really thought it was coming. It felt appropriate that Ron would take advantage of the Zorpies, Chris would take an interest in reincarnation, Tom and Jean-Ralphio would throw a big party, and April and Andy would work on Andy's bucket list just in case (but mostly for fun, which clearly is what Andy values most given the nature of the items on said list). The Ben and Leslie stuff was kind of heartbreaking, but made sense. Neither of them dislike their jobs enough to quit. A nice surprise seeing Lucy stop by Tom's party. Totally unexpected, and while I doubt we'll see her back as soon as the next episode, I think it was a reminder to us from the writers that she'll still be relevant in the future.

The Office
I liked the callback to Stanley's new "Shove it up your butt" catchphrase (which people on the internet thought was out of character for him and believed we'd never hear again), because they gave it a few episodes so that I forgot about it and was able to laugh when it came up this week. I don't think it is out of character for him, though. Yes, he is generally grumpy and dislikes having fun at work, but we've also seen that he enjoys insult humour. Anyway, I'm not really sure why Andy couldn't just order Dwight to stop the "doomsday device", as he is still the manager no matter how much power goes to Dwight's head. Maybe they just both knew it wouldn't work because Dwight isn't intimidated by Andy.

Fringe
Wasn't too into the "monster of the week" B story, as this is probably at least the fourth time we've had an episode about shape-shifters, but the scenes with Peter were interesting. When he told Broyles about how the new shape-shifters are almost indistinguishable from humans and could be anyone, I almost expected Broyles to accuse him of being one, but then I realized that wouldn't make sense because, not knowing Peter at the moment, they don't entirely trust him and that would be crappy camouflage for the shape-shifter. Interesting tidbit that Nina was Olivia's foster mom in this timeline. It makes that scene with Peter and Olivia meeting as children more relevant.

Hero of the Week: Andy from Parks and Recreation. His bucket list, while simple, was fun to watch. "Looks like this Siberian husky is going to be Russian...OFF TO JAIL."

Douchebag of the Week: The entire school on Suburgatory. Face brushes? Really?