Star Wars: The Clone Wars - Season 2

I have to admit this show's come a long way since the execrable movie that kicked it off. It's still not great, and rarely even better than decent, but at least it's not plain bad anymore. They've found some sort of groove and realized what sorts of stories will work for both kids who like shiny lightsabers and grown up dorks like me. There's less goofy crap and more simple yet respectable stories and homages to classic movies from all sorts of genres and periods in cinema. The main characters aren't as annoying, they've been introducing villains that pose an actual threat, and in some cases, like the stellar second half of the season finale, they actually pull off something pretty darn cool.

Not that I didn't have things to complain about. Because the show is kid friendly, not every plot handles some of the dumbed down elements as well as the others. Just things like the sort of logical holes in alien cultures that would never allow them to survive long enough for the Jedi to meet them, and isn't justified as well as other similar science fiction shows because the main audience doesn't care enough to think about it. And when some leaders make bad decisions and miss obvious information, it's easy to wonder how the republic lasted this long before Palpatine took it over. Not that he's immune from some terrible ideas of his own. Also, it's hard to root for the good guys when they spend so much time protecting him. Just screw up and let him die, idiots! You'll save the whole Jedi order! For now I'm going to keep watching though, to see if the upward trend in quality continues, especially since there's a very sad dearth of competent genre television right now.