Smallville, Burn Notice

I was going to review Smallville's season premiere last night, but had to completely engross myself in Supernatural before I could do that. Either because Supernatural was so good or because Smallville just wasn't that impressive, I never got back to it.

Just to get it out of the way, let's call season 7 what it was: filler. Almost nothing happened all last season that actually meant anything. All in all, Smallville has become a series of one-offs, with nearly every episode just another self-contained story that could easily be overlooked in sequence. Smallville has a knack for doing these, though; I have said before that it is one of the few shows on TV that has a good formula for one-offs: the first 45 minutes are that episode's story, and the closing 15 minutes or so forwards the overall serial. However, it has gotten to the point that this is almost all Smallville does anymore.

Season 8 should be fresh and different because the creators have left the show. Gough and Millar had a bunch of "nevers" with which we viewers had to contend; with their departure, Smallville could feasibly let down the floodgates and embrace its comic book origins. And last night's season opener did just that, with a fantastic appearance by the JLA, but by the half, you realized everything was going to be reset back to zero before the show was over.

It's just getting a little too pat, a bit too predictable. Make no mistake about it, there were at least a dozen great episodes last year and last night's was no sloucher - and yes, it is the eighth season - but I expected a little more bang for the advertisers' buck.

And all of the above basically sums-up Burn Notice's mid-season finale, as well.

If you recall, last season, they had a freaking awesome, two-hour finale that blew the roof off the entire season up to that point! And while I was heartened to hear Mikey Weston, Fi, Sam, and the gang were returning in only half the time this go-round, I still wanted a bit more of a blast-out. Last night's "finale" was just another episode - a good one, though it stuck a little too closely to the established formula (they all have this season) - but just another one, all the same.

Smallville is going to pick-up. It isn't just a "feeling" I have; this could very well be their final season and with Gough and Millar out of the picture, once that is determined, I expect them to pull-out all the stops and go for broke.

Burn Notice should return in January and pick back up where last night left off, so it will be a somewhat seamless run-on (it was out for like 4-5 weeks due to the Olympics, then tennis, anyway, so we can handle the wait), but it really needs a new injection of... something. It's way too early for things to seem so "been there, done that."

© C Harris Lynn, 2008