Category: Television

It’s television season premiere time!  I haven’t spent all that much time choosing new shows to watch this year, mainly because I’m already carrying over some from last season that conflict with each other as it is.

Last week my husband and I watched the series premiere of "Bones."  We wanted to like it.  We like David Boreanaz.  We like cop shows (well, I do).  We sat passively as one absurd thing after another took place onscreen.  I mean, since when do law enforcement agencies have 3D holographic image projectors?  Then there was the interminable scene at a firing range where the main characters were standing WAY! TOO! CLOSE! for no reason that I could determine.  Eventually my husband looked over at me and said, "This is not holding my interest in any way."

I couldn’t argue.  It’s off our list.

I’ve also given up on "Rome" already.  Sure, it’s typically well done HBO fare, but I can’t keep track of who everyone is and I don’t think I care enough to try harder.  Of course, there’s a chance I may be hooked already and in denial.  That happened with "Carnivale" – I tried to stop watching and couldn’t.

I’ve heard that "Supernatural" is good, but I haven’t had a chance to check it out.  I’ll also give "My Name is Earl" and "Everybody Hates Chris" a shot, thanks to early critical acclaim.  I just set up the TiVo to get David Spade’s new show.  Is there anything on the new schedule I’m missing out on?  Or should I just peel myself off the couch and spend some time outside?

Yesterday I saw a television commercial for a chain of suite hotels that featured a man standing by the refrigerator in the kitchenette of his suite, audibly gulping milk from the carton.  I wanted to leap through the screen and slap the milk carton out of his hand.

Of all the annoying things that can happen in commercials, eating and drinking noises cross a line for me.  A few years ago some orange juice brand was running a commercial where a kid gulped orange juice noisily through a straw, and I lunged for the "mute" button on the TV remove every single time it came on.

Is it just me?  Do eating and drinking noises amplified on TV bother anyone else?  Is there some other TV commercial sin that bugs you as much as this bugs me?

My limited budget and abundance of free time this weekend opened up the perfect opportunity for me to prepare for the September 30th opening of Serenity by watching the entire Firefly series on DVD.  Cagey joined me for the first half and when she left, I just kept watching one more episode…well, maybe just one more…until I made it through all 14 and one of the documentaries.

In case that sounds like a completely wasted day, I’ll have you know that I also cleaned my kitchen, weeded my front flower beds and managed to take out the trash before I went to bed. 

Have you seen the trailers for Serenity?  It looks like it’s going to be awesome, even for someone who isn’t familiar with the show.  Apparently, the movie was greenlighted solely based on the DVD sales of the show.  It will be interesting to see if the movie continues as a Long Tail phenomenon or manages to attract a broader audience and become fully mainstream.

A friend of mine just got the first season of "Veronica Mars" on DVD, so this weekend we’re planning on getting together to watch as many episodes as possible while drinking martinis and eating baked ziti.

Not familiar with the show?  Here’s what Joss Whedon, creator of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," "Angel" and "Firefly" said about it on his blog last week:

My peeps and I just finished a crazed Veronica Marsathon, and I can no longer restrain myself. Best. Show. Ever. Seriously, I’ve never gotten more wrapped up in a show I wasn’t making, and maybe even more than those. Crazy crisp dialogue. Incredibly tight plotting. Big emotion, I mean BIG, and charismatic actors and I was just DYING from the mystery and the relationships and PAIN, this show knows from pain and no, I don’t care, laugh all you want, I had to share this. These guys know what they’re doing on a level that intimidates me. It’s the Harry Potter of shows. There. I said it. People should do whatever they can to check out this first season so the second won’t be a spoiler fest.

That’s one heck of an endorsement, don’t you think?  (Found on Y-Pulse, which led to TV Squad, which led to TV Tattle.  Man, it can be complicated to attribute things sometimes!)

When I was a kid, I loved watching Saturday morning cartoons.  My favorites were the Looney Tunes and other Warner Brothers cartoons, but I was a big fan of "Scooby Doo" (until they brought in Scrappy Doo, natch), "Jonny Quest," and to a lesser extent "The Jetsons" and "The Flintstones."  I never particularly cared for Mickey Mouse and his crew, nor for Tom and Jerry.  (Clearly I gave it a lot of thought at the time!)

I’m just old enough that the shows I liked weren’t heavily tied to product marketing (although I did have a "Scooby Doo" lunch box).  "Strawberry Shortcake" and "The Smurfs" came a little later.

Just because I’ve grown up doesn’t mean I don’t still enjoy animated shows.  Of course the most prominent animated show these days is still "The Simpsons," which I don’t watch all that regularly anymore.  It’s become such a fixture that I take for granted that I can catch it anytime I want.

Over the years I’ve enjoyed a lot of the "not for the kiddies" animation that’s come along, beginning with the early "Ren and Stimpy" and "Beavis and Butthead."  At the time, we thought both shows were pretty outrageous, but they’re tame in comparison to any given episode of "South Park."  I watched "South Park" pretty regularly for the first few seasons and I still watch it when I run across it while channel surfing although its "can you believe we’re doing this?" shtick is beginning to pall.

I’m very fond of many of the "Adult Swim" shows on Cartoon Network just because they’re so odd and filled with non sequiturs.  I find twisted brilliance in "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" in particular.

My latest delight is that the Toon Disney channel is running episodes of "The Tick" animated show right now.  It’s been off the air for several years and hasn’t been available on DVD, so I’ve been eagerly watching the old episodes all week.

One of the advertising blogs I read mentioned in passing yesterday that it seemed odd that Sharper Image advertises its Ionic Breeze air cleaner on Cartoon Network.  I’m guessing it’s because Sharper Image is well aware that plenty of adults watch cartoons and may well be in the market for fresher indoor air.

Do you still watch "cartoons"?  What are your favorites?

Last night’s television schedule was the most grueling night of supposed entertainment I’ve ever put myself through. 

It began with Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, a show I’ve gotten hooked on even though I strenuously object to their taking an hour of footage and making it into three, one-hour shows every week.  If you don’t watch the show, it’s a Queen for a Day update that finds a family dealing with some kind of awful situation and tries to make things better by building them a new house full of fabulous furniture, appliances and custom-decorated rooms.

If the show’s ultimate goal is to show that money can’t buy happiness, yesterday’s episode was the perfect example.  The "lucky" family was a father raising three very young children alone.  His wife had recently died of leukemia at the age of 28.  The show went through all the usual paces:  raising scholarship and bill money, rebuilding the house with personal touches from the old house, etc.

The kids enjoyed all the goodies, but the dad and all of his in-laws cried throughout the entire tour of the new house.  That’s the problem with Extreme Makeover: Home Edition:  no one viewing the show would want to be on it, even to get a beautiful new house, because his or her life would have to be going very badly to even qualify.

After that massive wave of televised sorrow, I watched Deadwood.  This week’s episode centered around the funeral of a child who had been trampled to death by a runaway horse.  So much for the "good old days"!

I think I’m going to have to limit my video entertainment to light comedies for a while, just to balance things out.  They still have shows like that, don’t they?

Last week I allowed myself to be inundated by the "I Love the 90s – Part Deux" series on VH1.  Turns out, I didn’t love the 90s all that wholeheartedly.

One show featured the movie "Natural Born Killers," the existence of which I had heretofore successfully blocked from my memory.  It was one of those movies that taught me not to believe the hype.  Everyone we knew kept saying, "It’s awesome, you’ve gotta see it," but I had serious reservations about the gore and violence.

We went to see it anyway and it was everything I hate in a movie.  I was appalled by the violence and left with a pounding headache.  My husband and I both agreed that we should have gotten up and left long before the end.

To top off the experience, we returned home to the condo where we lived then and discovered that our outdoor cat had slaughtered a nest of baby bunnies on our back deck, right outside our bedroom door.  Still suffering from the heebie-jeebies that the film had produced, I found myself scooping grisly body parts into a trash bag.  Even Oliver Stone would have appreciated the irony.

Thanks to the five-day weekend and my L-tryptophan-induced lethargy, I had the opportunity to watch hour upon hour of pop culture commentary shows on basic cable this week.  Now I’m feeling extremely bitter that my high school and college guidance counselors did not give me a heads-up about the fastest-growing new job in the entertainment business:  professional smart-ass.

My mother always used to say, "Nobody likes a smart-ass," but now we all know better.  It turns out everyone likes a smart-ass, as long as that smart-ass is available to go on TV, watch video clips and make snarky comments. 

Now I’m unsatisfied with my current smart-ass credentials.  It’s not enough anymore that I’m known around my office as having told the dirtiest joke in a staff meeting (and to be fair, it was only the punchline). 

Thus, this is an official advertisement of my availability as a professional smart-ass (or PS-A, if you like) for any occasion.  I’m happy to make fun of your ad campaign, the way you dress (despite having no fashion sense of my own – hypocrisy is no deterrent for a licensed PS-A), the silliness of outdated entertainment trends…you name it, I’ll mock it for you. 

Be assured that I’ll hold myself to the highest standards of the profession.  It’s clear that some PS-As are starting to cross the boundaries of acceptable pop culture mockery.  As a lifelong pop culture trivia sponge, I’ll know when a song was intended as a joke and adjust my comments accordingly.  Also, I will not turn my back on something I really like (or used to like), just because my fellow PS-As consider it "awesomely bad."

I may not be the most telegenic person in the world, but the makeup and hair people will take care of that, as will the personal trainer I hire when my workday is limited to watching DVD boxed sets of old TV shows and reading every gossip mag the instant it hits the newsstand.

It’s my destiny, I tell you.  Call me!

Actually, I didn’t watch that much TV last night, but I checked out the premiere of a new show:  House.  So far, so good.  It stars Hugh Laurie (a big fave of mine ever since he played Bertie Wooster in the Wooster and Jeeves series on BBC) as a brilliant but cranky and misanthropic doctor who constantly resists hospital protocol.  He’s surrounded by a team of incredibly attractive younger doctors, so…bonus.

Tuesday is jam-packed with shows I’d like to watch, if only the TiVo weren’t limited to one show at a time.  Last week I watched the second half of Veronica Mars in the bedroom while the TiVo recorded Scrubs.  Today it was the second half of House under the same circumstances.  If only Scrubs weren’t so darned entertaining!

I wanted to like Veronica Mars, but the episode I saw didn’t impress me all that much.  I’ll probably give it another chance sometime, just for Enrico Colantoni.  How can you not like him?

If this keeps up, we’re going to need another Tivo, and maybe a really, really cheap VCR for good measure.  Oh, Entertainment Weekly, how you’ve corrupted me!

By popular demand, let’s talk TV. First of all, TiVo or no TiVo, my daily television time is dwindling rapidly. Many of my longtime favorite shows and the new shows I was getting to like are being axed right and left, so I’m beginning to give up. Still, a few shows remain on my list, even if not for long.

• Last night I watched the final episode of Friends. Yawn. Seriously, I had to fight the urge to grab the laptop next to me and surf before the show ended. The trouble is, I lost interest in Friends a long time ago. As Chris Suellentrop astutely pointed out on Slate earlier this week, Friends is really a soap opera masquerading as a situation comedy. Thus, once someone loses track of the ongoing storylines (or no longer cares), the incentive to watch disappears.
• That leads me to Angel, a show I freely admit is a soap opera but will miss desperately when it ends after the next two episodes. This Wednesday’s episode was a little uneven, but contained a couple of the creepiest scenes I’ve ever seen on any show. Without getting too geekily boring for the non-watchers, they involved a beloved character who was killed and “inhabited” by an ancient, amoral being some weeks back. When the character’s parents unexpectedly drop by, the usually cold and contemptuous creature impersonates her perky and bubbly late host, fooling the parents and horrifying the one person who knows what’s going on. It made me think of stories I’d heard about friendly, handsome men who turn out to be serial killers. Very chilling.
• Speaking of moral ambiguity, I’m still very much enjoying Deadwood. Now that I’m aware of just how many characters are based on figures from history, I find myself doing Google searches to get an idea of what might happen next. The show does a great job of holding an atmosphere of looming threat over every interaction between characters. I’ll bet the real town of Deadwood’s tourism business experiences an upturn this summer.
• Then we get to The Sopranos, speaking of looming threats. By now, regular viewers know that no character is exempt from sudden, violent death, so watching a show becomes an exercise in sharing each character’s dread. I’m not sure where things are headed this season, but I can guarantee they’ll just keep getting worse.
• Finally there’s Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. I almost forgot about it because they don’t make all that many new episodes per season, but I’m a sucker for makeovers, especially when they involve men. The majority of women, whether they act on it or not, know about manicures and pedicures, judicious waxing, etc. We probably have at least one friend who would be willing to go shopping with us and help us become more fashionable. Men – maybe not. I don’t know, though. My husband was a metrosexual before there was a word for it, and his haircare products fill a whole cupboard, so maybe I’m just making unwarranted assumptions. I just can’t resist “before and after” stuff, though.
• That’s about it for the shows I never miss. It leaves a handful of shows that I usually watch but can live without: Two and a Half Men, Scrubs, Unwrapped and Will and Grace to name the majority.
• There’s one show left that we’ve been TiVoing and enjoying a great deal, that little gem of silliness from the late 90s, Weird Science. Don’t laugh! For a fairly low-budget show based on a movie, it’s remarkably well done. We’re enjoying the game of “identify the guest star,” as we watch. A week or so ago one of the episodes featured comedian Jake Johannsen. It took me almost the entire episode to figure out who he was because I’d never seen him do anything but standup. But I digress…

My TV watching has declined for the same reason that I’m less and less willing to spend $8 at the movie theater: too many disappointments. These days I find it more interesting to spend an evening finding and reading new blogs than taking a chance on the latest steaming pile of entertainment-by-committee. Maybe I’ve spotted a new trend; maybe I’m just out of touch. Either way, mega-entertainment is gradually losing a customer.