Little Bit of This & That

You may already have gone out and bought your copy of the new "Mad Men" DVD today.

Wise move, although you may run out of energy before you get through all the extras. In any case, here's my thoughts about it in my Sunday DVD column.

Caught tonight's second minisode of "Rescue Me." I'm not opposed to the idea of minisodes; I've seen four new Web vignettes from "The Office" (they go online on July 10) and they're very funny. But tonight's "RM" bit — a series of Tommy dreams involving sex — was too fragmentary. The sequence felt as if it had been hacked out of a full episode where we would have known in what context Tommy was thinking this way.

I gave a couple of shows another chance recently: "Swingtown" and "In Plain Sight." The "Swingtown" was last week's episode, with the cabin in the woods. Clearly an attempt to make several characters more likable and sympathetic, but not in a way that struck me as either plausible or particularly entertaining. The thing's a drag, although it does appear to be offering some special marketing opportunities; did you see the ad for oldies CDs?

I am more impressed by "In Plain Sight." All right, I am more impressed by Mary McCormack, although the way she was shot in Sunday's episode — "Who Shot Jay Arnstein," a painfully punned title — seemed unflattering in a way that had less to do with her character than with some so-so cinematography. And that was especially jarring in an episode that dealt partly with whether McCormack is hot. (She is, but that's not the point.)

Anyway, the show has a lot of good characters, and some snap to the dialogue, but the plot was just enh. Nor am I taken by the serialized elements involving the characters' personal lives. So how much I watch still depends largely on how much I am willing to forgive to enjoy the people rambling through their lives.