January 20: The Telly Comes Through

It's about 8:55 pm last evening, "American Idol" is wrapping up and I'm stretching my brain trying to think of something new to experience so I can keep the streak going and, more importantly, have something to write here to all of you who are faithfully following this blog (as small as that audience may be). Up to this point, I'm going with doing all of the dinner dishes by hand for the first time since owning a dishwasher, but only because our lousy Maytag Whisper Quiet 300 is currently out of commission; second broken latch/handle in the past 5 years. "Hello, Maytag? Please remove us from your future customer's list. Thank you!" As you can tell, I wasn't real excited about the defective dishwasher, nor giddy about the idea of using manual dish washing as the focus for January 20. But, as the clock sang the start of a new hour through the house, I was saved by the television - specifically, the Fox network. For at 9:00 on this evening, a new show called "Human Target" was getting ready to begin. The pilot episode I believe. And, sure enough, I took full advantage. So, the premise of this delightful, yet predictable, new show is that Christopher Chance, the main character played by actor Mark Valley, is a former security expert who is now hired out to protect clients by becoming the target of whoever is trying to kill them. The regular cast also includes Chi McBride, as Chance's boss, and Jackie Earle Haley, who most of us probably remember best as Kelly Leak from the original "Bad News Bears" movies. Although, he looks quite different in this role (probably because he's no longer 12 years old). During this particular episode, Chance is challenged to protect a hacker on an airline flight, of whom he doesn't know the identity, while at the same time try to identify the assassin, who wants to knock-off the hacker, among the passengers. Interesting plot, huh? I thought so, even though much of the show leaves you thinking "been there, done that" in terms of the storyline, one-liners and fight scenes (but, then again, how much more can you do with fight scenes on a plane?) For those reasons, I'm not confident that "Human Target" can be saved from falling off the Fox prime-time schedule at some point, but on this night, it sure did save me from failing to try something new.