NOT NOW WHEN?

As a longtime ER fanatic, I come to praise its latest themes: Maura Tierney is getting BETTER, and their abortion episode last week, replete with "fundamentalists" (which they slyly equated with Catholicism), pushed a lot of over-familiar buttons in ingenious ways. John Leguizamo's so good he plays reckless cowboy bigus dickus for genwine comedy. That music, though, at the end of "If Not Now, When?" last week was symptomatic of the reigning confusion between singer-songwriter and mental illness. I predict Antony will commit himself onstage. And if you think that's not nice, that's how I feel when I hear him sing. Won't anyone else stand with me and call his style mannered and annoying? It's the OPPOSITE of authentic posing as unfiltered emotion.

Even so, the abortion ethic as played out between a 15-year-old, who everybody sympathizes with and nobody thinks should carry her unplanned pregnancy to term, and Abby, who everybody sympathizes with and wants to see become the mother she never had, was a decent barometer of where we are on this prickly issue. Until Abby can go through with an abortion which nobody wants her to have WITHOUT BEING A CRIMINAL we haven't come very far since Roe V. Wade. Reasonable, civilized people can disagree about choice, even disagree about parental notification, right? We'd still love Abby even if she terminated her pregnancy, right? Even if we disagreed?

Turns out there's a greater sin than dismissing Alex Kingston, however, and that's flushing Dr. Susan Lewis (Sherry Stringfield) without so much as a plot point. What happens when the offstage values clash directly when the script's ethics? Oh, yeah. [PS: official web site sucks, no link.]

WEST WING

We rented WAR OF THE WORLDS, which works as an overt 9/11 allegory (lost family flyers, ashen aftermath, literal ground shifting under our feet) until you start to think it through. The very stupid ending is a quasi-argument for... germ warfare. It's the epitomy of how elaborately Hollywood orchestrates empty ideas. I kept waiting for the script to follow through on Tim Robbins as George W., but it didn't have the nerve.

Meanwhile, watching John Spencer's swan song was excrutiating, if enjoyable.