Great shows know their own work. They pepper in the little references and running gags and call-backs that reward loyal viewers, not just from episode to episode, but spanning entire seasons. And I’m not just talking catchphrases or a returning guest star here: I’m talking about all the little things that make you feel you are watching characters, not just talking props acting out a premise.

Friends and Seinfeld do a pretty good job of this. Arrested Development and The Venture Brothers are two of the best examples of this. The more you watch, the more you get it. And that’s part of the reason these were all great shows.

The Big Bang Theory is not a great show. Sometimes it’s a good show. But more often it’s just an okay show, and I say that because the writers don’t seem to know their own work.

For example:

The Season 2 finale included all of the boys going to help Sheldon on a research expedition at the North Pole, where they were locked away together in close quarters for months.

Season 3 kicked off with some jokes about the rest of the crew dreaming up ways of instigating mutiny or murder against Sheldon during said expedition.

Then, three episodes later–three!–the premise is that Koothrappali must go work for Sheldon or risk being deported to India because his work visa will run out. So do we get some more riffing on the “body warmth” incident? Do we get Sheldon warning Koothrappali not to bring any electric can-openers anywhere near the lab?

No.

Not a single mention is made of their time in the arctic or the fact that Koothrappali has already worked for Sheldon.

No excuses. That’s just lazy.

THE GOOD WIFE (Tuesdays on CBS) is a promising drama about Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) a woman returning to practice law in order to support her family, which includes her Eliot Spitzer-esque husband Peter (Chris Noth), an incarcerated state attorney embroiled in a corruption scandal.

The family dynamics are authentic, the ripped-from-the-headlines scandal aspects are timely, and the procedural elements are on par with other established criminal investigation shows. Overall, it’s the tightest pilot I’ve seen in a while.

The one hiccup for me was the character of Kalinda, the investigator for Alicia’s law firm. She was played as the glib veteran to Alicia’s overwhelmed neophyte, who is quickly won over by Alicia’s skill and determination.

The dynamics of their relationship played to give the audience information (flirting with people works better than subpoenas, for example) that Alicia would probably already know, given she had already been a practicing attorney. Kalinda displays a no-nonsense attitude when she warns Alicia not to get too close to her clients, and later when she asks her point blank how she could stand by her husband after what he did.

Alicia already has an ally at the firm (an ex-law school buddy), a potential rival (another candidate vying for the associate position), and a female mentor who might get jealous if Alicia does too well (one of the partners). Kalinda’s an outsider, immune from the office politics by nature of her position.

She should be the foil for Alicia, the young, hard-working woman-in-a-man’s-world that Alicia once was, except without any drop of homemaker in her.  She’s aloof, a bit of a manipulator, and could have been less snarky and even more acidic, in my opinion. But  any hints at her resenting Alicia for giving up her career to raise a family are soon glossed over.

And that’s where I think she’s a near-miss… maybe a twenty instead of a bullseye.

Reserving her judgment on Alicia, waiting to see more than one case–heck, even watching Alicia interact with her kids–before Kalinda grants her approval would have made this a much stronger, more complicated relationship. Kalinda has the power to severely help or hinder Alicia’s chances at getting the associate position. By Alicia winning her over so soon, it takes away that tension. Now she just has to win over the muckety-mucks, which is the situation anyway.

Plus, it’s always more fun to see the icy armor of the cynic melt over time. It feels like Alicia got a bit of a free pass. She was less a small, shining candle of sympathy and more like a blowtorch. We’ll see how their relationship develops.

Taken succeeds as a simple revenge movie. You kidnap my daughter, I come kill you. It was fun, it moved quickly, and who doesn’t like watching Liam Neeson punish bad guys with throat chops? You don’t want to mess with that successful formula by mucking things up with complicated character issues. It was a good movie, but it wasn’t quite great. A few minor things that stuck in my head as I was watching:

1. Bryan Mills’ former squad-mates. If there’s a defining quality to these kinds of ex-military ops, it’s their fierce loyalty to each other. They would sacrifice anything for one of their brothers. The movie makes a big deal about them showing up, all working together, obviously still yearning for action. They are concerned for their friend and show genuine interest in the welfare of his daughter, Kim. Naturally, they are going to help Mills rescue his daughter, right? Wrong. And there’s no reason given. The people he’s been closest to for all the years he was away from his daughter–the people who probably know him better than his ex-wife Lenore–figure in no way, shape, or form to his story except to flesh out his background.

This needed to be addressed. We want the story to be Mills’ mission, a lone man out to rescue his father, no one else helping him. Of course we do. But it doesn’t make sense for him to go it alone if he doesn’t have to. Have his resources stripped away from him (which was decently done with his old French contact now stuck behind a desk and turning a blind eye), instead of him ignoring them.

You could do it a few different ways: Less satisfying would be for the squad mates to have a security detail that they can’t give up. But again, these are the kinds of guys who would drop anything for a brother in need, regardless of the personal cost.

How about this: They to go to France with him, lay a little smack in the beginning–say they help him in the sting of Peter, the spotter at the airport–and then take the fall in some sort of diversion when the French police are after him. They get captured (and presumably quietly deported) so that Mills can escape to continue fighting. This way the squad serves a purpose, we see their skills, we see that Mills is superior, and they get to sacrifice themselves for him, and then we now have a reason why he has to go it alone.

2. Stuart’s money. This one didn’t bother me as much, but more could have been done with Stuart and Lenore. Aside from the pony-as-competition birthday present and the private jet, Stuart’s outrageous wealth doesn’t factor in the story at all. There’s no way Lenore wouldn’t marshall every dollar he had to get her daughter back. Just have them do something well-meaning, like hire a detective or notify the police. It’s what any well-intentioned parent would do. Then Mills shows up to find that the French are already “on the case” and have a suspect in custody. Mills uses his tape recorder to determine that this is just a patsy, someone taking the fall for the real criminals. The French think they have their man, and have to go through due process. This tips off the bad guys and makes it that much harder for Mills to complete his mission.

3. Expectations and Dramatic Tension. There were missed opportunities for some great tension in Taken, and they stemmed from some clunky set-up of expectations. I already mentioned the implicit expectation that his squad mates would help him.

Another one comes when Mills is in the “House with the Red Door” on Rue Paradis faking it as the extortionist. There’s a great little exchange of glances with the sleepy-faced big man sitting at the table. When the gofer leaves, Mills must wait for uncomfortable moment in the presence of a thug sizing him up–a classic set-up for a hand-to-hand fight. But it never came. Instead, the big one-on-one fight comes at the end with a skinny little guy dressed in Armani we’ve never seen before.

But the biggest one was Marko. That’s your trailer moment, when Mills says “I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you,” and Marko says “Good luck.” Then Mills gets the best of him the first time they encounter each other. I love what he did to him afterward in the interrogation scene, but if Marko had been just a little more wily, he would have made a better opponent for Mills and it would have been more satisfying when Mills finally kills him.

But who am I to argue with $145,000,000 in domestic gross?

You pull out a light bulb that doesn’t work. You shake it. You hear the tell-tale jingly-jangly sound. You’ve got yourself a broken filament.

You also have the metaphorical inspiration for a new feature on here called Breaking The Filament (BTF for short). Small things that happen in movies to draw you out of the experience and make you scratch your head. Painful expository dialogue, unclear motivation, lapses in internal logic, etc.

An example from The Dark Crystal:

So she abandons her people to the Garthim, sees the Landstriders who helped her brutally murdered, and seconds later is dishing out flip comments?

That’s Breaking the Filament.

I enjoyed Kung Fu Panda (I enjoy anything that references Circle of Iron) but the ending could have been better. Once we know that Po is the “Chosen One” his battle with Tai Lung is a foregone conclusion. There’s no dramatic tension, since we know that Po can defeat Tai Lung because Po knows it. That’s one problem I have with prophecy movies in general. But I think you could get around that with a few minor tweaks.

Here’s how I might have ended things:

The Furious Five return to warn Shifu that Tai Lung is coming. Shifu decides that it’s time to give Po the Dragon Scroll. Po takes the Dragon Scroll, examines it, freaks out, then runs away–abandoning a heart-broken Shifu (who had just started to believe in him) and the Furious Five (confirming their suspicions that he wasn’t their savior). At this point, they haven’t seen what’s on the scroll. But it’s too late for one of them to try taking it back from Po: Tai Lung is at the temple.

Shifu fights Tai Lung while the Furious Five sound the evacuation, which is now much more frantic. We see a slightly modified conversation between Po and his father about the “secret ingredient” which triggers Po’s realization about what the Dragon Scroll means. He goes back, but now you have all the tension surrounding his ability to make it in time, and will he truly be able to defeat Tai Lung? Is he the “Chosen One” or a big fat panda running to his doom?

You have a big battle with Furious Five joining in the fighting (so they don’t just disappear for the climax) and falling to Tai Lung. But with each exchange, Po gets better and better, doing more and more amazing things. He tells Tai Lung to forget about the scroll, but this just feeds his rage. Through sheer anger and force of will, Tai Lung finally “bests” Po.

Po gives up. He admits that Tai Lung’s kung fu is too powerful. It’s obvious that there was “nothing on the Dragon Scroll” that could make Po any match for him.

But it’s a trick.

Po hands over the Dragon Scroll. Tai Lung raises his arm in triumph, proclaiming how great he is and all the evil he is going to perpetrate on the world. Then he realizes that Po is still holding on to him. By his little finger.

It’s the “Wuxi Finger Hold”.

Po gives his little speech about how it’s what inside that counts and what the Dragon Scroll really means.

Continue as before.

I liked the naturalistic feel of The Foot Fist Way. I’m glad it didn’t follow the Rocky/Karate Kid/Bloodsport formula. It’s probably the most realistic martial arts movie ever made.

But the ending of this movie surprised me a little. I wasn’t upset, I was just expecting the movie to end with Fred Simmons (Danny R. McBride) being awarded his 5th-degree Black Belt instead of coming up with a new Code of Conduct for all students to recite.

There wasn’t a clear goal explicitly stated for Fred to achieve (which I liked), but in the absence of such, I naturally tried to find my own.

The promotion idea was set up in my mind by Mike McAlister (Jody Hill) giving the speech about only 5% of students making it to black belt, and only 1% making it to 4th degree, then announcing himself to be a 5th-degree black belt. This implied the next goal in Fred’s career. Then later Fred squares off against Chuck “The Truck” Wallace (Ben Best) at the testing. Since there are other judges present, it’s conceivable that they could come together and decide to award it to Fred, even though he wasn’t officially testing. Aside from doing tournaments (which Fred no longer does), rank promotion is the only other way to advance in his career.

Fred coming up with the new Code of Conduct as the last bit in the movie wasn’t set up by anything in the film. Total non-sequiter. No characters ever talked about having one or needing one. It wasn’t something that Fred was working on as a pet project–a way for him to still be involved in the national Tae Kwon Do picture now that his days as a champion fighter are behind him. He could have pitched the idea at the convention. He could have pitched it to Chuck “The Truck” Wallace and Chuck could have shot him down–another slap in the face from his idol.

It wasn’t a bad thing to end on… Fred is more important to people now as a teacher than a champion, and he has seen what can happen when people abuse their knowledge of Tae Kwon Do. It’s a nice little moral to the story. It fits in with the title card device they used. But I didn’t think it was set up by the events in the story.