Couch Tomato: 'How I Met Your Mother''s Day

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Express' Arion Berger hits the high and low notes of the week (so far) in television.

NOTE: The shows described below have already been aired. If you've Tivo'd or DVR'd any of these shows, you will be spoiled.

UP:

"How I Met Your Mother" (Mondays, CBS)
The third season of this underappreciated comedy picks up steam and scalds the living heck out of its ostensible competition ("Two and a Half Men," I'm looking at you) with an episode of brilliance to rival that of season one's "The Slutty Pumpkin" and the immortal season two "Slap Bet."

"How I Met Everyone Else" not only fills in the backstories of how Ted met Marshall, Marshall met Lily, Lily met Ted, Ted met Barney and Barney met Marshall — oh, and how Barney met Lily, how Ted met Robin ... am I leaving anyone out? But also manages to introduce the not-entirely-demented idea of Barney's Hot/Crazy Scale, get Ted hitched and unhitched to a hot/crazy girl, show us how the cast will look in 20 years (tres distingue, for the most part, but does Barney die tragically in a sex-swing accident or something?) and invent a prime-time metaphor for pot-smoking masterful in its simplicity. All in half an hour. Eat it, the new hourlong "Office."

"Heroes" (Wednesdays, NBC)
In "Fight or Flight," Matt Parkman and Nathan Petrelli go to Philadelphia to meet Papa Parkman, who was the bogeyman of little-human-GPS-unit Molly Parker's nightmares. This brings on an awesome confrontation which reveals that Freddy Kreuger Parkman has the power to plunge his victims into a very real-seeming dreamstate, and as Matt, in an eerie prison cell, faces the accusations of his wife and new baby (which may not be his, because she was a cheating cheater, so ... no loss?), Nathan is up on the roof, in the snow, overlooking the bombed-out ruins of the city and wrestling with his burned-and-bubbled alter ego.

Kristen Bell finally shows up, after much fan grousing/anticipation, not as Veronica Mars but as the lying little tramp with her "own f------ knife" she played on "Deadwood." The knife, in this case, is the power to burn folks to a crisp with her electrical beams of zap, which she unleashes on the annoying brother of the annoying Irish cutie with whom the not-dead Peter Petrelli is currently bunking. The fewer Irish people on this show, the better. (Don't e-mail me.)

Meanwhile, the Monica-and-Micah plotline is picking up, and if the writers know what's good for them, they'll turn Miss Hopes and Dreams into a raging, power-copycatting monster just to offset the sweetness of adorable little angel Micah, whose dimpled smile is wearing on my nerves.

The best news? No Alejandro and Maya!

"Friday Night Lights" (Fridays, NBC)
There might be a tiny chance that the lame soap-opera subplot in which sweet geek Landry beats the stalker of tramp-with-a-heart Tyra to death with a pipe might maybe perhaps become something worthy of the blinding brilliance that surround it. It's only fair to give this idea the benefit of the doubt, especially after Landry made the ur-high school move by discussing the murder in terms of his debilitating crush on Tyra, which not only opened her eyes but put her in her place.

As for the blinding brilliance, it's all there, with Buddy Garrity scheming to get Coach Taylor back to Dillon; Tim Riggins pretending to feel God's love in order to get Lila to feel his own love; Smash very close to once again getting a major storyline and Connie Britton as Tami Taylor tearing it up, Emmy-style, as she does week after week. Except it's not every week she hauls rebellious Julie out of The Swede's grubby white van and smacks her acros the face. So, a good week.

DOWN:

"House" (Tuesdays, FOX)
What a mess the episode "Guardian Angels" was. The series came back this season after faltering badly in the last one, a situation either exacerbated or ameliorated, depending on your point of view, by having all of House's minions leave Princeton Plainsboro Killing Hospital. When a juicy new group of potential minions, we'll call them PMs, came on the scene, it breathed some life into the series and, for half a second there, forced Dr. House out of his intellectual torpor — he could anticipate the reactions of his old crew (note to Foreman: It's never going to be vasculitis) to the degree that it made his own brain lazy. So of course the show undermines this interesting development by having House fire the only interesting PM — the old dude with no medical degree, giving the other only interesting PM nothing to do (is Kal Penn even on the show anymore?), bringing back all the old minions we missed so much except we didn't at all and sending his PMs grave-robbing in order to confirm a diagnosis. Which turned out to be wrong. Are there no legal channels for a diagnostician to get hold of a two-week gone brain in order to save another life? No? Well, then; grab your shovels, kids.

"The Office" (Thursdays, NBC)
I love you, show. Stop being one hour long and we can talk about moving in together.

NEXT WEEK:
"Beauty and the Geek," "Ugly Betty," "Dirty Sexy Money" and "The Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror XVIII"