His mother had been feeling “not so red hot,” in her mom parlance, and he surmised that they were half asleep in front of the upstairs digital video recorder as the final fifteen minutes of last week’s episode droned before them: the verdict of the judges and the expulsion of the latest scapegoat; the obscure precedents cited by the maverick district attorney; the reenactors of real crimes in their shabby thespianship.
