CSI. When did it get so tiresome? I don’t think it’s because William Petersen left, but the timing does line up.

The real reason, I suspect, isn’t exactly that one, but it’s related. Between the downward curlicue (tm the regulars on the Dawson’s board back in the day) and death of Warrick and Gil’s departure, the show hit a consistently high emotional pitch for several months, so when it returned to more garden-variety episodes, they seemed blah. It’s not the recasting; I like Fishburne fine, and he brings a new tone, which is good (I don’t get Lauren Lee Smith or the Riley Adams character, though; she’s like a placeholder, and while she doesn’t actively irritate me, I don’t care at all either). The air has leaked out of it.

Another problem: the tendency of the writing to make experienced CSIs and lab techs explain to each other how a given procedure works, what it tells the investigators, et cetera. Having Langston join the team got around that for a few episodes, but the writers sometimes forgot, when it was convenient, that he’d never done this before…until it was convenient to emphasize that he’d never done this before.

Generally, though, it’s Nick who has to narrate for the audience (much of which has watched the show or one of its spinoffs before and doesn’t need the help) and a co-worker (who…works in forensic science, hello) what fuming with glue does. George Eads does as well as he can with it — in fact, Eads isn’t often given credit for his acting, but he’s carried heavy loads without grunting a lot of times — but it’s not believable. I don’t know how else they’d get around it, but now that I notice it, I can’t not notice it.

Might be time to end my love affair with Marg Helgenberger’s hair and punt this bad boy off the season-pass list…

Making the Band 4. So many questions. I’ll start with a fluffy one: was Donnie wearing eye makeup last night, in the van with Brian? And can he…keep doing that? It works for him. (And while we’re on fluffy, I’ll just add that, after Brian’s All-Night Walk Of Sadness, the next establishing shot showed my old building. I am a rube!)

Tougher questions follow. Can someone explain why Will got so bent and weepy at Brian after the scuffle? Can someone explain Que, period? It goes back to what I said last week, and after last season’s finale: I get the distinct feeling that a large percentage of the pertinent background information is not happening on camera or not making it out of the editing bay, and I don’t get it. I am probably the one viewer besides Diddy’s mom who likes the “DIDDY BLOG DIDDY BLOG” nonsense, because I have this weird…I don’t know what you’d call it. “Branding crush” is the best term, I think. I have one on Diddy, big-time. “The emperor has no clothes? Want to buy some of the emperor’s clothes, now available at Macy’s? He’s not even the emperor! Hey, perfume!” I mean, somewhere Dale Carnegie is like, “Well, that took a turn.”

But. The constant Diddy breaks to talk about his diet or his new show or whatever all take time away from footage we should be seeing instead, and I really am not one of those people who thinks that reality shows are all out to hoodwink us, or who puts too much stock in “the producers manipulated the” blah blah — I’m sure it happens, it doesn’t bother me, it’s not a court proceeding so who cares, but either Dawn is up to some Yoko shit and we’re not seeing it (and should), or someone else is in Que’s ear all “you’re better than this.”

I will say this, though. That kind of argument? Is reality. That endless, circular, nobody giving an inch, let’s define our terms until someone starts crying merry-go-round that you look back on college and do not miss? Totally on display last night. Not that guys in their twenties can’t take care of their business, but this is exactly what happens to young men and women who do not have quite enough to do with their days. They will get into it and amp the drama over little shit, because when you do not have quite enough to do, it allll seems like big shit over cereal at two in the damn morning. This is why everyone at my school had come to dread reading period by the time we were juniors, because we had a really long reading period, and every SINGLE year, it was a series of interpersonal explosions going off, occasionally interrupted by some studying. And then 15 years later you don’t even know half the people anymore. Painful at the time, though.

Still, I don’t get why Diddy isn’t stepping in until next week. I am following him on Twitter (shut up, it’s for work) (okay, not really), and he was as scandalized as I was, according to his tweets. So where was he?Screwface didn’t call him up and tell him to scare some sense into Que? Because I don’t know about you, but even if I wanted to act that kind of fool, I’m not doing it if I know Sean Combs is going to see the playback and see me costing him studio time and money. Dude is intimidating; any time he sees me on camera, I am doing a dish or rocking some sit-ups or something.

I still like the show; I just wish we were seeing everything, because if we were, The Hills who, and someone at MTV should realize that, I’m thinking.

The West Wing. Stockard Channing did a great job with the character, but I can’t be the only one who enjoyed it whenever the other characters had to gather up their pecans and be like, “All due respect, but enough with that attitude maybe.”

I also cannot be the only one — and it pains me to say this, because I like the actor and also because it may lead to my death — that found Josh Lyman utterly unappealing from the get-go. So: am I? Anyone care to join me on the scaffold here? Because it’s not so much that the character is obnoxious; it’s that we’re clearly supposed to find it cute, and then to pair him for a while with Mary Louise Parker, an actress I usually don’t like at all (she’s good; I just don’t dig her except in Angels in America, where she was perfection), and make me pick between those two equally unattractive sides?

And then you get him together with Donna, after years of him treating her the same way he treats everyone else — imperious, condescending, as though they don’t exist once they leave his sightline — but to the third power? Her character evolves, his does not, but yet she still wants to Do It with him? Bradley Whitford is one thing; Josh Lyman, no thank you.

I just rewatched the post-SotU polling episode, where he’s snarking at the pollsters about gum and whether they have accents, and is just rude and self-important, and it’s played as “important work to do here” intensity with a humorous twist, and I don’t doubt the White House is in reality full of officious twonks like Josh, but that, even when it blows up in his face, we’re asked to view that as something other than an overdue and correct result from which he should learn some manners?

The Real World: Brooklyn. Weird season; I won’t be back. I only watched this one because it was in Brooklyn, and the housemates seldom seemed to spend much time there; only in the finale did I finally recognize a place. Brooklynites heard so much about the show during filming, and talked so much trash about it, that the season felt anticlimactic once it did air.

But did you feel like it just never caught fire? There’s fighting, there’s pranking, JD abuses rage-ohol, Ryan gets called up again…end? It seemed short, and fundamentally pointless to put them in Brooklyn, and I didn’t really like anyone, and once again someone named Sarah is a dink and makes me want to change my name (see also: Palin).

But I will be watching the Challenge again, because…there is no “because.” I could try to blame Joe R, but that wouldn’t be fair. Or accurate.

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