I have been a bit depressed lately. The loud voices of non-sense that come from the people who would derail nec­es­sary reforms to this country’s health insur­ance system, as well as our president’s poten­tial for suc­cess, con­tinue to be loud. As friends – and Bill Maher – would argue, just because the voices are louder doesn’t mean that a majority of people (or even 50% of the people) believe or agree with the non­sense. Our modern news media just makes it seem that way. But I can only listen to the bull for so long before becoming so angry and dis­ap­pointed in people that I need to just shut off the noise and ignore every­thing. I realize this is not the cor­rect response, but it is a nec­es­sary one. I can only endure so much psy­cho­log­ical assault.

As a remedy to all of this, I have Bill Maher. His most recent “Real Time” show was per­haps one of the best I have ever enjoyed. Of par­tic­ular plea­sure was the appear­ance of guest Kathy Griffin who took over the show for sev­eral min­utes. You can listen to audio of the show as an iTunes pod­cast. It’s really worth the time. In addi­tion to Ms. Griffin, Bill had a number of other excel­lent guests as part of his 9/11 anniver­sary observance.

Another remedy this past week as been the season pre­mier of some of my favorite shows. There were also some new shows. Here are my impres­sions of what I saw:

NCIS
Over the last season, I had been dis­ap­pointed that my favorite char­acter, Agent DiNozzo, had become less of a serious char­acter and more comic relief (much like what hap­pened to Gimli in the LOTR movies). So it was very nice to see an episode that fea­tured Tony and show­cased so much of what I enjoy about his char­acter. I also thought the episode was great for folks who may have not seen the show before. Great start to the season. Now that the drama of Ziva’s depar­ture from NCIS has been resolved, I look for­ward to the team tack­ling more mysteries.

NCIS:Los Angeles
Last season on NCIS, we were intro­duced to an entirely new team on the left coast. Now this team has it’s own show. I’m sorry to say that I think this show is going to flop. It looks like all style and no sub­stance. LL Cool J is ridicu­lous as a former Navy Seal. The set­tings have non­sen­sical designs – as if they were simply made to look sexy instead of appro­priate and prac­tical. The inter­ac­tions between the char­ac­ters were not nat­ural. Per­haps this is just the growing pains of a new show, but the update of Knight Rider that was on NBC had the same prob­lems and we all know how that turned out.

CSI:NY
Another spin-off show that, to me, never lived up to the suc­cess of the orig­inal enters its sixth season? Wow. I actu­ally didn’t expect much from this season opener. The show has dropped off over the last couple of sea­sons by trying too hard and fea­turing overly com­pli­cated sto­ries and unbe­liev­able res­o­lu­tions. I’ve mostly stopped watching. Per­haps because of the low expec­ta­tions, the season opener was actu­ally pretty good. They stuck to the core story, didn’t get too crazy, and the result felt nat­ural. They intro­duced some awk­ward char­acter sto­ries that will develop throughout the season, but they did a good overall job.

Bones
I’m a little wor­ried that the show might have run out of ideas. The season opener suf­fered from an extremely clumsy finish, and the focus appears to have shifted from solving mys­teries to solving the rela­tion­ships between the char­ac­ters. The excel­lent work of the show’s first few sea­sons made this my single favorite tele­vi­sion show. But nothing lasts for­ever. The season’s second show was an improve­ment, but we’ll see how it goes.

CSI
After a clunker closed last season, I hoped to see the new season start on a high note. They deliv­ered. The new season opens with the CSI team in a bit of dis­array, but it looks like the return of Sara Sidle and the emerging lead­er­ship of Dr. Langston will start to bring things together. A few of the team dis­agree­ments seemed forced, but a well exe­cuted story and some “holy cow” moments really gave the episode some pop. Looking for­ward to the rest of the season.

The Men­talist
I’ve quickly become a fan of this show and this season’s first episode was a per­fect example of why. I won’t say much about the episode because it’s worth watching and (like Patrick Jane) I don’t want to spoil the surprise.

Grey’s Anatomy
I’ll say it again: I’m very dis­ap­pointed that T.R. Knight has left the show. He was the soul of this show and I’m not sure the show can get by on heart alone. The very long season pre­miere wasn’t bad, but it felt a bit uneven. The new season finds things falling apart. Just as T.R. Knight was the soul of the show, Dr. O’Malley was the soul of Seattle Grace. Without him, it looks like there will be quite a few changes. I guess this is a good thing. But I can’t help feeling that this show peaked a little while ago and is slowly on the way down.