What to Watch this Spring

By Bert Ehrmann
March 5, 2010

As the TV season races towards its summer break and the multiplexes take a quick breath before the crush of the upcoming summer movie season, there are some interesting things to catch on TV and watch in theaters during this transitional time of year.

I look forward to the end of the series Lost with equal parts excitement and trepidation. What started out as one of the best series on TV slowly turned to a mediocre show, but in the last few years Lost has become somewhat good again. Still, I can't help but feeling that this last season of Lost will be a disappointment for the fans in that it probably won't answer answer all, or even most, of the mysteries the series has raised over the course of the show. Still, I've stuck around with the show this long and I'm actually interested in seeing how it all ends. Lost airs Tuesday nights at 9 p.m. on ABC.

I've been a fan of the series Damages Monday nights at 10 p.m. on FX since the series started airing a few years ago and the current third season of the show hasn't disappointed. The focus of Damages is on lawyer Patty Hewes (Glenn Close) who's willing to do whatever it takes to win a series of gigantic lawsuits that consumes her firm. She's not afraid to blackmail, destroy lives or even kill in order to win these cases. What's interesting with Hewes, though, is that she sometimes does these terrible things for a greater good as much as for bad.

I won't spend much time talking about Modern Family or Underbelly since I've already written so much about these two shows, but these two are a few of the best comedies and dramas on TV right now.

If Modern Family is the best comedy on TV then a close second would be Community on NBC Thursday nights at 8 p.m. I'm not sure if it's the wonderful cast of characters or that the series takes place in a completely believable yet a bit surreal universe that draws me to this series, but each new episode of Community strikes me as more brilliant and better than the last.

I've been looking forward to the mini-series The Pacific for what seems like years now. This series, a sort of sequel to Band of Brothers (2001), is set to debut on HBO Sunday, March 14. Whereas Brothers followed troops fighting the Germans in Europe during WWII, the ten episode The Pacific follows a group of Marines fighting the Japanese during the Pacific campaign of the war.

The third season of the best drama on TV Mad Men is set to be released on DVD and Blu-ray March 23. Also out on DVD is the made-for-TV movie Elvis (1979) March 2. Call me crazy, but I've been looking forward to this movie that until now has never been available on DVD for quite some time. Get this, Elvis director John Carpenter followed up his hit Halloween (1978) with this film. Elvis was also the first time that Carpenter would work with actor Kurt Russell who stars as the title role. Carpenter and Russell would go onto such films as Escape From New York (1981) and The Thing (1982) and I've always been interested in seeing their first collaboration.

Out in theaters February 26 is the remake The Crazies based on the George Romero film of the same name from 1973. In both films, the populous of a small town turns "crazy" after the accidental exposure of some military bio toxin. The differences are that the original film asked some tough questions about what happens when the government doesn't have its citizens best interest in mind while the remake looks like any subtext is being discarded in favor of a shoot'em'up action zombie flick.

Green Zone, out March 12, reteams Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass after their hit films The Bourne Supremacy (2004) and The Bourne Ultimatum (2007). This film follows soldier Roy Miller (Damon) who goes rogue in Iraq in order to destroy some weapons of mass destruction. Oddly enough, Green Zone is based on the book Imperial Life in the Emerald City which is more about the utter failure of the US government in the months after end of the war in Iraq and has nothing to do with rogue soldiers. I guess the producers of this film figured no one would go see a movie about Jason Bourne making a bunch of bad bureaucratic decisions in Iraq.