Whack-a-Mole

Okay, first off, I've never actually watched The Mole, or Celebrity Mole, or really any reality TV program. I'm still of a mind that if I want reality, I'll go outside. But I had another epiphany about my viewing choices, namely when it comes to drama. With few exceptions, the shows I watch have someone working against everyone else, usually in secret. A mole. I think about typical cop shows, and hospital shows, and everybody is really after the same thing. Catch the bad guy. Save the baby. The drama tends to come from someone's relative inability to execute toward that goal.

Sure, there's a bad guy involved, as there has to be a criminal to catch, or an evil hospital administrator trying to cut costs in the pediatric ward, but it's the evil you can't see that's infinitely more interesting. To me, anyway. It explains some of my previous fascination with The X-Files. The conspiracy angle was just too cool. Here you had people who were nominally in the same government, working at cross purposes.

Now, we've got an evil that routinely impersonates dead people close to the good guys on Buffy, an exiled higher being-gone-bad on Angel, and all hell breaking loose in every which way on The Shield. The FX original series kind of rammed the point home this week, as Detective Wimms is trying to take down anti-hero Vic Mackie, and while she initially rebuffed the City Council watchdog when she offered to help (because, even if they were at odds, Wimms still saw her and Mackie as being on the same side), it now looks like she'll turn on a fellow detective in earnest. And I don't need to go into the intrigue of who's on who's side of 24. That's pretty much the core of the show.

Sweeps saw some delineation and choosing of sides, but the ride looks to be far from over. And now it looks like there's a traitor on board Moya as Farscape hits the home stretch as well. It's a good time to be a bad guy.