The New York Times takes on the single biggest problem in television today, the simpleminded refusal to just plan things out in advance. This is a huge problem on Lost, as I mentioned last week, and it's probably the second-biggest problem on 24, after the creeping fascism. From the second link:

Today our bipolar attitude toward the show has swung to contemptuous and disgusted from yesterday's condescending and amused. I just can't get away from thinking that the show is habituating viewers to the idea that ordering a subordinate to taser the living shit out of another subordinate on the basis of a half-hour investigation is a perfectly normal thing for an American government official to do. Any harm that accrues to the subordinate being deliberately and repeatedly electrocuted is entirely the responsibility of the scheming black chick who set her up, not the woman who orders the torment or the man who inflicts it. Repulsive.

(More on that from earlier in the season here and here, with a dissenting voice from Kevin Drum here and here.)

Of course, on the other side of things, tonight's afterschool special about non-terrorist Muslims was pretty terribly insulting in its own right. Bad, bad episode. And bad, bad writers.

(Via Jeremy Isaac and the Television Without Pity Forums)