Keep “The Unusuals”

Note to ABC: Keep “The Unusuals“. This mid-season TV NYPD dramedy is fast-pased, entertaining, and competitive with such shows as “Rescue Me” on FX and so much better than the too-usual “Law and Order’s” and “CSI’s”.

Check it out on Wednesday nights or free online episodes at ABC. Be sure to watch the pilot to catch all the unusual cop behaviors as well as cases from the beginning. It won’t take you long since the 4th episode is tonight.

Then tell ABC to keep making TV shows like “The Unusuals”.

Sunshine Cleaning the movie

Sunshine Cleaning is a comedy with heart, starring Academy Award nominee Amy Adams and Golden Globe winner Emily Blunt as two sisters and Academy Award winner Alan Arkin as their father. It’s been called this year’s Juno, but I think it’s better because we end up actually understanding all the characters by the end of the movie. I never quite understood Juno’s playing with sex when she seemed more intelligent than that.

The women of Sunshine Cleaning, however, slowly let us into their world and we get it. And because we get it, we really care about them and want things to work out. By the time the credits roll, we know one sister’s future but not the other, yet we’re hopeful. So we feel good even though we’ve cried as well as laughed. And it’s believable to boot.

So I, Dianne, give it a High Five, which means it was worth driving a few miles to see as well as forking over the money for a ticket and popcorn

Goodbye ER

It was just another 24 hours in the ER of Chicago’s County Hospital. I had expected the roof to cave-in, the ER to close because of the financial crisis (or the opening of the Carter Center), or at least for John Carter and his wife to get back together. The one thing I really liked was the pan-out at the end showing the hospital (complete with its neon sign and the EL going around it) and the staff responding to yet another large catastrophe.

It was an okay sendoff, but I wish everybody had come back for the finale. At least we got to see them in the retrospective hour before the finale and in some of the episodes this last year. I will definitely miss ER, but as one of the cast members said about the soundstage/set: “It is not the Berlin Wall, it is only a TV show.” Even so, it touched my life along with thousands, maybe millions of other viewers. It was something to look forward to. It took me out of my own problems. ER will be missed.

Tell me what you thought of the finale or why no show can really replace ER. (Of course, that’s what I thought about St. Elsewhere when it ended after only five seasons in the 1980s!)

P.S. Thank goodness for reruns and Tivo!!