The Yin Blog

I guess you can cross "HIMYM" off the list of possible best series finales....

I'm not one for sit-coms, so I didn't watch "How I Met Your Mother" during its 9-year-run, but being the avid Entertainment Weekly reader that I am, I know something about the show. So I was mildly curious about how it would end, though not enough to tune in. And what's fascinating is how many fans (based on critics' reviews and comments added) hated it. When I saw "hated," I'm not exaggerated. I've seen a lot of comments to the effect that it ruined the entire series for them. TV critic Alan Sepinwall does a great job dissecting all the problems with it.

A common theme among the criticisms has been that the showrunners knew what ending they wanted, but it was no longer suitable given how characters had developed over the course of the show. However, they had already shot the footage of the kids' reaction to the story way back at the end of season 2 to lock in the age of the actors; there would be no way to film a scene now with 27-year-old Lyndsy Fonseca trying to look 16 (which she could pull off at age 20).

Of course, they could have just abandoned that footage and adapted the ending without the kids' reactions, so this seemed to be an instance where the producers wanted a particular ending.

Now, a number of long-running serialized shows that I've watched have, to varying degrees, fallen apart by the finale when it became clear that the producers/writers had been making everything up as they went along and thus couldn't possibly tie everything together without contradicting the past or retconning. So in that sense, one has to admire the HIMYM producers for knowing how they wanted to end their series and getting there. On the other hand, as the criticisms persuasively argue, that ending no longer made sense given what had transpired over the past few years.

Well, I guess that means we can cross HIMYM off the list of possible best series finales. I think I'm going with "The Shield" if I have to choose.

"Hawaii 5-0" has an epic fail on federal versus state courts and more

I really like watching CBS's "Hawaii 5-0," and I don't even think of it as a guilty pleasure. It's got the gorgeous backdrop of Oahu, good chemistry among the cast, and three Asian-American actors in co-starring roles, which is about three more than other shows that I watch put together. Of course, it's a comic book show, so any expectations about verisimilitude are at the viewer's own risk.

Still, last week's episode, Na hala a ka makua, was chock full of legal errors worthy of comment. The basic premise of the episode was that a two-time felon played by Michael Madsen has just been convicted of first-degree murder but escapes from custody and ends up taking our heroes, Steve McGarrett and Danny Williams, hostage.

First problem: the verdict of first-degree murder is announced in "United States District Court" in a case stylized as State of Hawaii v. Roy Parrish.

U.S. District Court is a federal court, for the trial of federal crimes. There is a federal crime of first-degree murder, but it is not a general murder statute; rather, it is first-degree murder in circumstances giving rise to federal jurisdiction, such as murdering federal employees or foreign officials. And it certainly wouldn't be the State of Hawaii against the defendant in such a case; it would be United States v. the defendant.

(There is a situation in which a criminal prosecution under state law could end up in federal court, but that is where the defendant is a federal officer who is being prosecuted for violating a state law while acting within the scope of federal employment. In such a situation, the federal officer can "remove" the case from state court to federal court in order to ensure a fair trial, on the assumption that the federal court will be less subject to local bias and the like. Thus, when the State of Idaho prosecuted FBI sharpshooter Lon Horiuchi for killing Randy Weaver's wife and baby son during the Ruby Ridge siege, Horiuchi was able to remove the case to federal court, even though the case remained one under state law.)

Now, if this were a federal courtroom matter, the security would be provided by court security officers and U.S. Marshals. Yet, after being pronounced guilty, the Madsen character was escorted out by local police and SWAT team officers. . . .

Fast forward to the end. The Madsen character has been killed, but not before the emergence of apparently incontrovertible evidence of his having been set-up for the most recent crime. His daughter is present in U.S. District Court (again), where the judge apologizes on behalf of the United States for the grievous wrong that was done to her father and announces that he has been posthumously pardoned.

Pardoned? That's an Article II (i.e., Presidential) power, and only as to federal crimes, not state crimes. So it wouldn't be a federal judge announcing a pardon; it would be the President, unless we're talking about a pardon of state crimes, in which case it would be the governor.

I'm being utterly nitpicky here, but at the same time, all of this would have been avoided by simply designating the courtroom a state court, not a federal court; and having the end scene be one with the governor's office rather than a court.

Harry Bosch is coming to TV (well, video)

I've been a big fan of Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch series since I first discovered them in the late 1990s. The Concrete Blonde (1993) is quite possibly my favorite crime & courtroom novel.

Now comes news that Amazon is producing a pilot episode of "Bosch"; if it does well, it's expected to go to a full series for streaming via Amazon Instant Video. Titus Welliver is playing Bosch. I wouldn't have thought of him, but now that I know he's playing the role, I see him as fitting perfectly.

h/t Alafair Burke

CBS's "Intelligence": The ACLU's worst nightmare?

CBS's much-hyped mid-season drama "Intelligence" debuted earlier this week to so-so ratings. It stars Josh Holloway (Sawyer on "Lost") as Gabriel Vaughn, an ex-Special Forces operative who has been implanted with a chip that allows him to connect directly to the Internet and access all kinds of information, as well as to "render" 3-D depictions of locations based on such information (with a bit of help from his subconscious). Meghan Ory (Ruby/Red Riding Hood on "Once Upon a Time") stars as Riley Neal, a Secret Service agent reassigned to protect/mind Vaughn. Marg Helgenberger (from "CSI") rounds out the cast as the director of the U.S. Cyber Command agency to which Vaughn is attached.

It sounds a lot like NBC's "Chuck" -- guy with super-information access; woman protector. I didn't watch "Chuck," but I get the sense that was almost a straight comedy/parody, whereas "Intelligence" takes itself seriously. There are attempts to lay the groundwork for longer arcs/serialized mysteries, primarily that Vaughn's wife, another government operative, was believed to have been killed during the Mumbai terrorist attacks, which she apparently aided. Vaughn has been trying to disprove her traitorous turn. . . .

This guy Vaughn has got to be the ACLU's worst nightmare. He can effortless summon all kinds of information on virtually anyone, including driver's licenses, court records, and so on. On top of it, unlike Chuck, Vaughn is quite capable of taking care of himself physically or with a gun, so he's kind of like Jack Bauer and Chloe O'Brien (with computer connection) rolled into one!

Anyway, I thought it was okay. Since I did quite a bit of pruning of my watch list in the fall, I'm sticking with the season pass for now, but I will say that it's coasting much more on the goodwill built up by the main actors from their previous shows.

Did ABC's "Once Upon a Time" just use up the perfect series finale?

Warning: Spoilers for the winter finale of ABC's "Once Upon a Time" (air date 12/16/2013)....

 

It's no secret that "Once Upon a Time" is my favorite show on air right now. I love the "Lost"-like storytelling with flashbacks interspersed with ongoing arc, the modern twist on age-old fairy tales, and most recently the deliciously malevolent Peter Pan as antagonist. All of that came to a surprisingly moving winter finale on Sunday.

To recap, the series is about 28-year-old Emma Swan, who is approached by Henry, a 10-year-old boy claiming to be the son that she gave up at birth. She doubts him but takes him back to his hometown of Storybrooke, which he says is inhabited by fairy-tale characters such as Snow White, Rumplestiltskin, and so on, who've been "cursed" by the Evil Queen to forget who they were. Oh, and the Evil Queen is now the Mayor, and she's Henry's adopted mom. Over the first season, Emma gradually came to believe Henry while working to undo the Evil Queen's curse. She succeeds at the end of the first season, so that Storybrooke's residents remember who they were and regain their magical powers. The second season was a bit uneven and started new ongoing arcs that introduced Captain Hook, among others.

Anyway, leading up to the winter finale, our characters -- including the now-not-so-Evil Queen -- were working to stop the evil Peter Pan from unleashing a new curse that would kill them all. First, to get rid of Pan (who would otherwise thwart their efforts), Rumplestiltskin sacrificed himself, with his next to last line being "I'm a Villain, and villains don't get happy endings." With Pan out of the picture, the Queen can stop the curse, but only at the expense of what she loves most: which is to say, Henry. (Throughout the series, she's been the consistent antagonist, but it's a credit to the writers and to actress Lana Parilla that the Evil Queen is something of a sympathetic character at times.) It's not that Henry will die so that the curse can be stopped. Rather, stopping the curse will undo her original curse, so that all of Fairy Tale Land's residents will go back to the Enchanted Forest. Henry, however, was born in our world, so he can't go with them. Emma, who was born in the Enchated Forest, can go back or she can stay in our world, only because of her special power of being the one who broke the curse. She elects to stay with Henry, of course, but at the price of being split again from her parents (Snow White and Prince Charming).... So it's a bittersweet ending in that Emma, who'd felt abandoned all those years going through foster homes and who finally found her birth parents, was going to be separated from them again, but she's also reunited with the son she gave up 10 years ago. As a final touch, everyone's memories of the past two and a half seasons are going to be wiped out, but the Queen can give her a new set of memories in which Emma never gave Henry up.

It would have been THE perfect ending for the show, as in the end, Emma and Henry shouldn't be part of the fantasy world, but the fairy tale characters shouldn't be in ours. If this is how "Once Upon a Time" ended, I would've ranked it way up there on the list of best TV series finales ever.

However . . . it's just the winter finale, and the last two minutes set up the reboot for the spring episodes. I'm happy that the series is not ending, of course, but I sort of wish the writers had saved this ending for the actual end of the series.

* * *

On the subject of the best TV finales ever (that I've seen), I guess I'd consider as contenders [SPOILERS!!!!]:

 

Perfect

M*A*S*H -- though I'm not sure how well it holds up now

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine -- another bittersweet ending in a way that felt perfect for the show

24 -- no happy ending for Jack Bauer but no death either

[The Shield -- haven't seen the ending but I know what happens, and it's appropriate]

 

Good but flawed

Lost -- it felt warm from the perspective of saying good bye to the characters but the whole "sideways world" of the last season made no sense

Battlestar Galactica -- loved parts of the finale, including the really touching scene where Adama takes Laura Roslin on her last flight across Earth as she dies, but other parts made no sense either

Alias -- glad that Sydney got her happy ending and it was fitting/ironic that Sloane became immortal and then got trapped in an underground cave but the last year and a half were so unwatchable that the finale couldn't undo the bad taste

Prison Break -- I actually liked the final twist where Sara says to her son "let's go see Daddy" but where it turns out seeing Daddy isn't quite what you might have thought . . . there was enough time to put together the foreshadowing, but it was still effective; unfortunately, the resolution of the main characters' dilemma was too deus ex machina

La Femme Nikita (USA Network version) -- the last episode of the fourth season would've been a better ending; those who want happy endings would've preferred the second to last episode, when Michael and Nikita "got away"; but as you can see, I don't really believe in truly happy endings, and the fourth season finale where Nikita gets dragged back in and turns out to have been a mole for the mysterious "Mr. Jones" as a kind of inspector general was a great twist. The "revive LFN" campaign succeeded partly, but only an eight episode short order in which the writers proceeded to kill off most of the characters. Nikita and Michael survived but were split apart at the end. I guess it was appropriately somber but it lacked the punch of the previous season's ending.

Boston Legal -- too many last minute story lines (Crane Poole & Schmidt was bankrupt???) wrapped up too quickly

Burn Notice -- I stopped watching the last two seasons, but did tune in for the finale. Michael's mom's sacrifice was touching, and it was clever how when Michael wondered how he would explain everything to his nephew (whom he and Fiona absconded with, seeing as how his brother had been killed earlier in the series), Fiona quoted the voiceover that Michael uses in the opening sequence ("My name is Michael Weston . . . I used to be a spy. . . .") Otherwise, too much reliance on overused tropes -- outrunning an explosion, fake funeral, disappearance and immediate establishment of a home/life in some foreign country.

Frivolity: John Reese v. Captain Picard

Continuing my "who would win in a fight" series, today's match up pits John Reese (Jim Caviziel) from CBS's "Person of Interest" against Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) from "Star Trek: The Next Generation." (Last week, Xena defeated Sydney Bristow.)

First of all, the stats: Caviziel is 6'2", while Stewart is 5'10". Caviziel would've made a really good Jack Reacher, while Stewart is a . . . Shakespearean actor.

Now, I will easily concede that if I were a taxpaying* Federation citizen, Picard would be the clear choice for who I'd want to be in charge of the flagship of the fleet. He's calm, rational, and skilled at diplomacy. But that doesn't mean he would do well in the fight to the death.

* I am not at sure whether the Federation of the Star Trek Next Gen era imposes taxes; after all, as Picard so haughtily told Alfre Woodward in First Contact, "The economics of the future is somewhat different. You see, money doesn't exist in the 24th century... The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of Humanity." Still, I'm guessing that, whatever their stake, Federation citizens do have some interest in how captains command their fancy starships.

Well, let's take a look at Captain Picard's prowess. Here, he is forced to rescue Lwaxana Troi (Betazoid ambassador and mother of Enterprise officer Deanna Troi), who is being held hostage by a Ferengi pirate.

 

 Oh wait . . . wrong clip. That one isn't very impressive, is it? Here, let's try this one, from the episode "Starship Mine" (aka Die Hard on the Enterprise). Picard is alone on the Enterprise with a bunch of terrorists who are planning on stealing something from the ship. (Yes, that's the actor who will go on to play Tuvok in Star Trek Voyager). 

I guess that's not bad for a dude in his 50s. Presumably, Picard is adept at 24th century martial arts, and has somehow mastered the Vulcan neck pinch, which is kind of impressive.

Let's take a look at his opponent, Reese, seen here fighting a deadly Russian mafia assassin:

Reese does take his licks in this fight, but notice that he starts off at a disadvantage, being held at gunpoint. And then he gets hit while still being held at gunpoint, and he has to begin his attack by neutralizing the gun.

I just can't see Picard beating Picard. First of all, he would probably try to negotiate his way out of fighting Reese, which would simply give Reese the first strike. Second, Picard is captain during a time when the Federation is clearly more intelligent, having issued regulations advising against having captains being part of away teams. The downside of this approach is that, from a Darwinian standpoint, Picard has not been tested against the various forms of lethality that may exist on different planets.

Reese would leave Picard fatally wounded with whatever stabbing or smashing implement happened to be most handy. Reese joins Xena in moving on to the second round.

Frivolity: Sydney Bristow vs. Xena

Okay, let's get going on the "who would win in a fight?" competition! For an explanation of the ground rules, check out this post.

The first match-up is between Sydney Bristow (ABC's Alias, 2001-06), played by Jennifer Garner, and Xena (syndicated, 1995-2001), played by Lucy Lawless. In case you are wondering, Garner is 5'8", while Lawless is just a shade under 5'10".

In Alias, Bristow is a UCLA graduate student who secretly works undercover for what she thinks is the CIA, going on aglobetrotting covert missions; except at the end of the pilot episode, she learns that she's actually been working for a terrorist organization known as SD-6. Bristow is quite skilled at armed and unarmed combat. Here's an example:

 Xena, also known as Warrior Princess, was once a supreme baddie who slaughtered masses of innocents as an evil warlord. Unfortunately -- and I say this because she was always more interesting in the flashbacks as an evil character -- a run-in with goody-two-shoes Hercules caused her to seek redemption and try to atone for her past. Fortunately, she retained her fighting skills: 

As appealing of a match-up as this might have seemed, I just don't see how Sydney Bristow would be able to last against Xena. While Bristow quite competently dispatched her foe in the clip (kicking his head through the car window was a nice touch), she seemed more convincing in the running scene than in the fighting scene. Xena, on the other hand, dominates multiple foes, and while most of those are dispatched by sword, under the ground rules of the competition (basically, the asteroid from the Star Trek episode "Arena"), I don't think she would have much trouble finding sword or staff-like weapons.

I think Xena would win pretty easily, probably within half a minute, and move on to face the winner of John Reese (Person of Interest) versus Captain Picard (Star Trek: The Next Generation).

My TV rankings, week of December 2

All rightie, November sweeps are over and many shows on the broadcast networks are going into midseason finales or have already.

1. Once Upon a Time (ABC Sundays) [last week: 1]

Did you catch the reveal of Peter Pan's true identity a couple of weeks ago? Wow, that was pretty awesome -- very well done in terms of the build-up and the actual reveal itself. This past episode, which appeared to resolve the Pan storyline, was quite effective as well, with the backstory providing even more depth to the Evil Queen's character. Lana Parilla really does a great job of imbuing Regina with such malevolence yet vulnerability in terms of her need to be a mother.

2. Scandal (ABC Thursdays) [last week: 2]

"Scandal" is totally insane in terms of its pacing and plotting, but it doesn't pretend to be anything that it isn't. In some ways, it's kind of like a successor to "24" in that it just throws so many ridiculous mini-arcs out there to see what sticks. The most recent episode, which showed how Mellie stuck with Fitzgerald during his initial campaigning for the California governorship, including an awful rape, was incredibly powerful.

3. Survivor: Blood vs. Water (CBS Wednesdays) [last week: 3]

The water is bloody! This has been a pretty good season, much better than I had initially thought it would be from the seemingly lackluster cast. It's not "Heroes vs. Villains," of course, but then, no season of "Survivor" has matched that one.

4. Hawaii 5-O (CBS Fridays) [last week: 4]

The Thanksgiving episode was pretty fun, especially with the guest turn by Carol Burnett. It looks like Kono (Grace Park) is getting back to Hawaii soon. I'm guessing that Grace Park had a baby over the summer, which would explain her sparse screen time coupled with strategically placed above the midsection camera shots of her.

5. Person of Interest (CBS Tuesdays) [last week: 6]

Wow, they killed Detective Joss Carter! When CBS kept teasing viewers with the someone will die promo, I figured it would be Detective Fusco, because he seemed the most expendable (and also wouldn't decrease the gender/racial diversity of the cast as much). Jim Caviezel sure managed to look deranged in the following episode! The only negative is that Amy Acker's uber-hacker Root has become ridiculously powerful in ways that don't even make sense. I mean, sure, the Machine is feeding her useful information, not just social security numbers, but how can it turn her into an elite killing machine? You could tell me where to shoot, but it doesn't mean I'm going to be super-proficient with a handgun.

6. Grimm (NBC Fridays) [last week: 5]

The last episode reminded me of "The X-Files" episode with El Chupcabra. That's not such a good thing, since even "The X-Files" realized how subpar that episode was, when it made fun of it in the episode "Bad Blood."

7. Marvel's Agents of SHIELD (ABC Tuesdays) [last week: 7]

It's still okay but my mind often wanders while watching. Not a good sign.

8. White Collar (USA Tuesdays) [last week: 8]

The formula appears to be wearing old at this point. Con artist Neal Caffrey appears to have rubbed off in a bad way on his FBI handlers, as a number of them are concealing things from one another or otherwise breaking rules/laws. Except for the upright secondary character, the inaptly named Clinton Jones.

9. The Blacklist (NBC Mondays) [last week: 9]

Kind of an interesting/stupid cliffhanger episode from last week, where the FBI demonstrates CTU-like (from "24") ineptness in letting its office be captured by terrorists. James Spader is still playing Red as an older Alan Shore, but is still entertaining. I'm not convinced about how Megan Boone's new agent/profiler has all of a sudden become Xena.

10. Almost Human (Fox Mondays) [last week: NR]

Karl Urban (who plays Dr. McCoy in the new "Star Trek" movies) is a gruff cop in the near future paired with an android named Dorian in something that looks like a cross between "Blade Runner" and the William Shatner Tekwar novels. It's really just another mismatched cop buddy show mashed with semi-dystopian sci-fi, and not must see TV, but it's handled competently.

(missing the cut), Once Upon a Time in Wonderland (ABC Thursdays), Shark Tank (ABC Fridays), The Voice (NBC Mondays/Tuesdays), Covert Affairs (USA).

"Once Upon a Time in Wonderland" drops off the rankings. I'm still watching it, sort of, but that's because I'm stubborn about these things. "Shark Tank" and "The Voice" are fine but I guess I strongly prefer scripted dramas. (Hmm, why is "Survivor" ranked so high, then, you ask? I'm sure there's a lot of scripting going on there....) "Covert Affairs" ended its season so I guess I should drop it altogether.

Cut: Sleepy Hollow (Fox Mondays), Revolution (NBC Wednesdays), Hostages (CBS Mondays), Castle (ABC Mondays).

On the horizon: Intelligence (CBS Tuesdays starting in January), Justified (FX starting back in January).

"Intelligence" sounds a lot like "Chuck" (a show that I never got into), where a guy gets some kind of super cyber-intelligence and has a tough female agent assigned as a protector. With Josh Holloway (Sawyer on "Lost") and Meghan Ory (Ruby on "Once Upon a Time"), it's earned a chance from me. "Justified" is starting its fourth season, but I just discovered it via Amazon Prime, and I really like Timothy Olyphant's portrayal of Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens. (He looks kind of like Holloway, now that I think about it.) It's weird that I read the Elmore Leonard novel "Pronto," in which Givens is introduced, but I remember nothing about it.

Frivolity: introducing the "who would win in a fight" bracket

The other night, I was watching CBS's "Person of Interest" where Jim Caviezel's soft-spoken ex-Special Forces operative Reese beats up a bunch of bad guys single-handedly. This followed CBS's "Hawaii 5-0," in which Alex O'Loughlin's not-so-soft-spoken Navy SEAL/H50 task force leader Steve McGarrett beats up a bunch of bad guys single-handedly.

I got to wondering, who would win in a fight, Reese or McGarrett?

And thus was born the "who would win in a fight" bracket. Further refinement of the idea led me to decide that four brackets would be necessary: TV versus movie characters, and human versus non-human (or enhanced humans -- thus obviating the "where does Khan belong" question).

Ground rules:

1. Although I'm thinking of characters rather than actors, I decided that there would be only one character per actor. Thus, no matter how badass you might have thought T.J. Hooker was, especially when it came to jumping on to the hoods of moving cars, William Shatner gets one entry, and it's obviously as Captain Kirk.

2. In a normal bracket, such as the NCAA basketball tournament or professional tennis, there are seedings to reduce the likelihood that heavyweight contenders meet in the early rounds. In this case, however, every single character has a claim to being the #1 badass, and hence seeding doesn't make any sense. Instead, I would randomly draw the matchups.

3. What kind of fight to the death is involved? Some characters are quite deadly with weapons but less so in hand-to-hand combat. I decided that this would be something like the classic "Star Trek" episode "Arena," where Captain Kirk is stuck on a deserted asteroid (one with an atmosphere!) with no advanced weapons but the capability to improvise.

Okay, so here's my first bracket for TV humans:

Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner), Alias v. Xena (Lucy Lawless), Xena: Warrior Princess

John Reese (Jim Caviezel), Person of Interest v. Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart), Star Trek: Next Generation

Steve McGarrett (Alex O'Loughlin), Hawaii 5-0 v. Kara "Starbuck" Thrace (Katee Sackhoff), Battlestar Galactica

Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner), Star Trek v. Theodore "T-Bag" Bagwell (Robert Knepper), Prison Break

Miles Matheson (Billy Burke), Revolution v. Michael Weston (Jeffrey Donovan), Burn Notice

Captain Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine v. Angus MacGyver (Richard Dean Anderson), MacGyver

Nikita (Peta Wilson), La Femme Nikita v. Nikita (Maggie Q), Nikita [Yes, this really worked out without any manipulation on my part.]

Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland), 24 v. Christopher Chance (Mark Valley), Human Target

* Note: In past debates with me about female action actors, Professor Bainbridge has consistently pushed for recognition of Yvonne Strahovski's Sarah Walker from "Chuck." As I never watched any episodes of it, I'm simply not in a position to assess a hypothetical fight to the death between her and any of the above characters. Sorry!

Look for semi-regular entries in this series of frivolous posts, but in the meantime, comment away about my choices, your thoughts about the first round battles, or anything else related to "who would win in a fight"!

Fortune's list of 25 most powerful female TV characters

Fortune Magazine put together a list of the 25 most powerful female characters on TV but it's at best incomplete. It's bad enough that the #1 woman is the insufferably insipid and vapid Daenerys Targaryen from "Game of Thrones," whose sections in the book series made me want to put the book down and do something else, anything else. (In fairness, I haven't watched the TV series, so I suppose the producers may have done something to improve her, but then again, this is HBO, so "improvement" in their eyes is probably just having her show even more skin than is suggested in the novels.)

#2 is Olivia Pope from ABC's "Scandal," which I do watch and I can understand her appearance on the list. Fortune is no doubt going by her "I'm in charge of fixing things" mode, as opposed to her simpering, weak-kneed submission to President Grant's puppy-dog eyeing of her.

As for the rest, well, as much TV as I watch, I don't watch any of the remaining shows. Now, at first glance, that might suggest that maybe I get too much testosterone from TV, but I don't think that's it. For example, just consider my favorite current TV show, Once Upon a Time (not to be confused with its vastly inferior spin-off, Once Upon a Time in Wonderland), which has not one, not two, but THREE powerful female characters who drive the show for all intents and purposes: (1) the Evil Queen/Regina Mills; (2) Snow White/Mary-Margaret Blanchard; and (3) Emma Swan.

How the Evil Queen fails to make Fortune's list is hard to fathom. I mean, she's the Evil Queen! She wields dark magic and is powerful enough to have cursed nearly all of the fairy tale characters we grew up reading about. (The article made clear it's not about realism; it's about the power that the women have in their fictional domains.) Daenerys may have her dragons and her Unsullied warriors, but I'm pretty sure the Evil Queen could defeat them all with magic.

I'll admit that the Snow White of the childhood fairy tale is somewhat of a passive figure, but in Once Upon a Time, she's more like a saner version of Xena: Warrior Princess. How powerful is she? Well, in Fairy Tale Land, she spearheaded the revolt to overthrow the Evil Queen's rule....

Finally, Emma Swan, though born from fairy tale royalty, grew up in our world and has no apparent magic of her own (though some latent magic has been coming out). But she's resourceful, independent, and a loving mom on a mission. In fact, her love for her son was so strong that it broke the Evil Queen's curse at the end of the first season. How powerful is that?

I could go on . . . okay, I will go on a little more. Let's take Person of Interest, which has been getting better and better with the introduction of longer arcs. Detective -- now Patrol Officer Carter, following her demotion for tangling with the secret, bad organization known as HR, has proven her worth to the good samaritan team. And as for recent joinee Samantha Shaw . . . sheesh! She's basically like a female version of Jim Cavaziel's Reese, deadly with guns, deadly with martial arts, and ice-cold under pressure. (Amy Adam's severely disturbed hacker Root, who's just a recurring character, is pretty interesting too.)

Piper Perabo's Annie Walker on the USA Network's Covert Affairs makes a lot of mistakes in the field that should get her fired or killed, but she somehow manages to keep her job and stay alive, so she must have some kind of special mojo. Plus, her boss, Joan Campbell, does happen to be head of the fictional Domestic Protection Division of the CIA, which sounds like a pretty powerful position.

Anyway, I guess my TV tastes are more conventional than Fortune Magazine's.