My streak for picking winners continues

I'm always surprised more than validated when popular tastes happen to coincide with my own. This is not to say that my tastes are better than you common folk, merely different. I was always kind of amazed that so many people were watching The West Wing at its height, when I thought they were making it just for me.

Liking something like Veronica Mars in its first season, when they really were making it just for me (for all intents and purposes), is much more my speed. So I suppose I'm not surprised that all the new shows I like this season seem to be weak in the ratings.

Friday Night Lights, a show about high school football that even I liked, loses to Dancing With The Flippin' Stars. Studio 60's ratings are slipping in reverse proportion to its quality, it keeps getting better and they keep getting worse.

And last night, The Nine. The premise is that in the first few minutes of the premiere, we see a group of people, all mostly strangers to one another, gathered in a bank moments before closing. Suddenly, two gunmen begin a robbery. Cut to first commercial.

When we come back it's 52 hours later. What happens to the survivors afterwards, interspersed with flashbacks of just what the hell happened in there, is the subject of the series. It's a setup ripe for drama, and the direction, acting and writing rises to meet the bar. "The Nine" are now bonded, and the different forms that bond takes (has taken...will take...) has many imaginative possibilities.

This show, as many of the critics have been saying, is one of the best of the season (USA Today has a good review). Unfortunately the ratings, while reportedly strong on their own, did not hold as much of Lost's audience as Invasion last year.

For reasons I don't know if I fully understand, how much audience you hold of the show before you is still a big deal in television. I think it has something to do with the idea that the networks have never really recovered from the invention of the remote control.

They would still like you to tune in one channel at 8:00 and leave it there till 11:00. The fact that no one's watched TV that was in at least 25 years doesn't seem to enter into it. But, like it or not, it does seem to be the way the game is played.

To get back to The Nine, I'm pleased to note this is yet another example of some of my favorite things being connected-producer and director of the pilot Alex Graves was also a director and producer on West Wing.

My only concerns were these: For some reason that I can't quite put my finger on, the last act of the pilot fell a little bit flat for me compared to the rest. This was made up for by an effective, if unlikely, cliffhanger.

One of the hostages is the teenage daughter of the bank manager-who comes out realizing that she remembers nothing of the past two days, and her father will not speak of it even to his wife. The episode ended with her visiting one of the gunmen in prison.

All we hear her saying is "Hi..." Fade to black.

Unlikely that a teenage girl would be allowed to visit a convict without, evidently, her parent's knowledge? Absolutely. But like I said, it was very effective (and maybe there's an explaination coming).

I do wonder, can the show sustain the heightened emotion of the pilot for a whole season, and if it can and it's succesful enough to be renewed, what about next year? I don't know, but I'm hoping to.