Pan Am pilot and The Good Wife season 3 premiere

Did we really go to bed last night without mentioning Pan Am and The Good Wife? We know you are devastated (sarcasm, since this isn’t Glee or The Vampire Diaries), but both shows deserved a mention.

Pan Am’s premiere was pretty good. We liked it. We didn’t really like it or love it, but we liked it. We like the female characters so far (all of them), and that’s a huge thing for a show like this. We aren’t really sure where the show is going. There’s a romance angle, a friendship angle, a slight feminist angle, and an espionage/Cold War angle. It works alright, and we were entertained by the pilot. But there are few pilots that have given us less of a sense of what we are going to like or hate about this show in the future. It’s too soon to tell with this one, so it’s going to stay on the list until we figure it out. People are saying, "Oh, it's no Mad Men." But it's not even comparable to Mad Men in terms of subject and tone; just era. It's not trying for what Mad Men is trying for. It's more lighthearted. It's really nothing like Mad Men, except for the clothes.

The Good Wife premiere had a case we didn’t really care about, but it had a lot of Eli Gold, which is always a plus. Alicia has a new attitude: rule breaker. We aren’t sure if we like it. She implicitly advised a client to lie, and that went as lies usually do (badly). We liked Grace’s new tutor even before Grace did. But after the thing that made Grace like her, we loved her. “You know that has as many calories as three bags of buttered popcorn?” “But I don’t want three bags of popcorn.” Ha. As always, this show remains watchable and entertaining, but the premiere didn’t wow us.

Pan Am grade: B-
The Good Wife grade: B