Tevelision
TV shows, commercials, that sort of thing
Now relegated to Blogblivion...Saturday, February 12, 2005
Sympathy for the Weaver?
Apparently I should have stuck around and watched the end of ER the other night, as the thing went precisely where I expected it to go, and I think I’d have liked to blog about the thing.
Via Joe Gandelman at Dean’s World.
Friday, February 11, 2005
Received In E-Mail
How to Cook an Alien. No relation to To Serve Man.
Tuesday, February 08, 2005
Another shameful confession.
I’m hooked on Dr. Phil. 
Hey, it’s not only fun to watch him politely inform people that they’re behaving like complete idiots, it gives me somewhere to be at five o’clock, which is probably healthy. I need some structure in my day. /rationalizing. Heh.
Sunday, February 06, 2005
Yay For The Patriots!
Very cool that they won, if only just. I thought they might be jinxed by all the “dynasty” talk by the local media beforehand. We watched bits of it, including the last couple minutes. Mostly I washed dishes and the crockpot, since we flew out of here and just left it earlier. Speaking of which, I tried some of the soup, which I hadn’t really had a good, finished taste of yet. Wow! I have never had such good turkey soup, and I didn’t even know what I was doing. It’s a bit greasy, but it’s super thick, plenty of meat in every bite, almost thick enough to use a fork instead of a spoon, and non-bland, without being overpowered or tasting strange. Sort of turkey enhanced, rather than something drowning out the turkey. I can’t wait to see what other people think when they’ve tried it.
The turkey quesedillas were good, but nothing to write home about. A reasonable and different use of leftover turkey, but better with seasoned, grilled chicken or steak intended for the purpose, or for a similar enough purpose to have that taste. It didn’t help that my frying skills seemed to be off tonight.
There were only two commercials I saw notable enough to mention. One was the Mustang, which was amusing and different, if maybe a risk of sending the wrong message. the other was the returning troops commercial from Anheuser Busch. That made us both get all emotional! It also raised my estimation of the company dramatically, and left me remembering that they spent Superbowl ad money for such a thing.
Saturday, February 05, 2005
F^(#ing TV People!!!!!!
Argh!!
We always watch Enterprise at 11 PM on Saturday night on UPN 38. After all, it’s on opposite Joan of Arcadia on Fridays for its “official” slot, where they sent it to die the way Fox always does with good shows that have a modest yet dedicated following. Ironically, we noticed it was on last night when we didn’t get to the TV until partway through the hour, and we explicitly decided to wait and see the whole thing tonight. I had finished the previous post just in time, when Deb started making negative noises, including things that sounded a lot like “assholes.”
She had noticed partway into the 10:00 hour that an episode of Enterprise was on 38, but it looked like it must be the same one all over again (Same guys trapped on same ship kind of deja vu been there done that effect). So why watch it?
Well, when she turned to 38 for tonight’s episode, she saw the exciting ending of tonight’s episode, followed by the beginning of some totally lame different show airing at 11:00 instead, catching us completely unawares.
Damn TV people! WTF are they thinking when they pull this shit? “Hey, it’s being canceled anyway so who cares if we piss off the fans” maybe? Assholes.
She’s had the episode more or less ruined by seeing the surprise ending and not the rest, but at least she got that much of it. All we can hope for is maybe to find someplace like channel 28 still broadcasting it one last time.
I know, Tivo rocks, yada yada. Shush.
Thursday, February 03, 2005
And in the shameful confessions category today, we have this:
Last night I finally broke down and watched American Idol.
And I liked it.
Wednesday, February 02, 2005
It’s Dead Jim. Oh No, They Killed Archer… Those Bastards!
It is ironic that Enterprise’s demise has come after Berman and Braga stepped out of the way enough to let some real writers make this season the best of the series, and more than distinguished in overall Trek history.
It’s sad that the killers themselves will be writing the series finale. May they never be allowed to lay hands on any Trek project - if there are any - after that.
Frankly, the Enterprise setup lends itself to feature films, as it gets into the founding and early days of the Federation. After loosing audience so avidly with the series before allowing it to be good, I suppose the Trek killers have precluded such films from ever happening. What a shame.
UPDATE: Aded to today’s Beltway Traffic Jam.
Saturday, January 29, 2005
Joan of Arcadia
I saw most of Joan of Arcadia last night, after having missed the previous couple of episodes. Trouble was, at about quarter of nine Sadie needed changing. When I got back, I came in on the end of the encounter in Lucy’s office.
I gather that he got enough of a handle on her corruption, which I have assumed to exist in some form since she was introduced, to confront her. Either that, or she knew what he was doing and confronted him. Made it kind of a cliffhanger, since it sounded like he was fired to me. Anyway, I knew she was bad news. Too smarmy, too obviously manipulative, and too unlikely as the person to have suddenly been thrust into the position of police chief after the last bit of police wrongdoing was uncovered.
Apparently I missed how he started to be suspicious of her. It seems to be related to his investigation of Judith’s murder, and the impression I got is that she was involved in protecting the killer, if not more directly still. Usually I find the Dad and cop parts less interesting than the Joan parts, but I’m intrigued to see what happens.
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
House
Is it just me, or is House running the risk of becoming too formulaic? That was my thinking as I watched last night’s episode, enjoying it less than I would have were I not seeing the pattern.
Mystery ailment strikes. Patient admitted to the “we solve mystery ailments” department headed by House, with the possibility of foot-dragging or not. During the show one of the junior doctors gets especially picked on or focused on, though we might learn more about others as well. House makes accurate, seemingly snap judgments about his staff or others. Parents or other family of the mystery ailment victim are assumed to be misguided or in the way, and usually are. A series of good yet wrong guesses are made based on increasingly focused research, usually including entering the patient’s home and rifling through the contents, and always including amazingly detailed yet fast lab work performed primarily by the junior doctors. The solution has some “twist.” The mystery ailment patient goes from being all but dead and having major damage to this and that organ, to being perfectly healthy and living happily ever after. There may or may not be one or more additional patients with the same mystery ailment, providing data points and narrowing toward the correct diagnosis. As needed, someone will know someone with an experimental treatment, which can be at the facility in no time.
While all this is going on, House sees one or more clinic patients, one of whom provides the comic relief subplot. There are jabs back and forth between that other doctor who seems to be amused by House, and jabs or discussions about legal issues or patient/relative complaints with the female boss who not only knows House is the best doctor there, but also seems to lurve him even though nothing will come of that tension until the final season, if ever. We see House watching a soap opera sometime during the episode. We see House finally meet the mystery ailment patient and/or relative sometime during the episode, when things are dire or the other docs can’t get through anymore.
Something like that. It’s not very structured, but it would probably be possible to write a generic script template or two that could be used by most anyone who wants to try their hand at writing an episode.
All of which doesn’t make it less enjoyable, but I think they risk getting in exactly that kind of rut.
Monday, January 24, 2005
And in other news…
Johnny Carson is still dead.
Yes, he was a much beloved celebrity, but the coverage is at the point where every time I ran through the channels this morning, I wound up giggling. There are only so many times one can see this sort of story before the coverage itself is laughter-inducing, even if the reason for it isn’t.
Sigh.
Monday, January 17, 2005
Sitcoms and Memories
Jeff is talking about old TV today. As I noted in his comments, what you saw when it was first on is a great indicator of relative ages. Sometimes I’ll be talking away about something I saw, or did or otherwise remember for that matter, and then I’ll remember Deb wasn’t around or was too young, which is amusingly disconcerting. By the same token, Jeff is just that much older than me (though you’d never know it to look at him guys) that things I only just remember, or didn’t quite see when they were first on, he remembers fondly. To me The Honeymooners is an ancient show that people remember fondly if they’re old enough, but that I have never seen a single episode of start to finish. But I remember Jackie Gleason, and he was cool.
Another discontinuity among the age ranges is who remembers not having a color TV because color TV was unavailable or new and expensive, and who remembers there being no remote control.
Friday, January 14, 2005
OMG! It’s not just me!
I was confuzzled in the extreme by the “Is it because I’m lesbian?” incident on Law & Order last week. Jay and I talked about it, but neither of us could figure any point to the thing, and figured that maybe we missed a vital episode that made sense of that statement.
But maybe not. Susanna is also puzzled. I’m glad to see that it wasn’t just us.
Tuesday, January 11, 2005
Committed But Hardly Blind
When Crossing Jordan first aired, I watched regularly, then fell out of the habit. In the past year, Deb discovered it and I returned to watching a fair number of episodes.
Somewhere along the line, this too cute to be real character joined the cast. I was always a bit confused about her presence, how and why she showed up on the show, when, how and why she left. It seemed a tad discontinuous, but maybe I missed a key episode involving her departure.
I never did get around to figuring out who the actress was.
Then this new show comes along, which Deb saw most of an episode of during a House rerun, and I saw part of as well. It nagged at me, how the female lead seemed so familiar. I promptly forgot about it, until tonight when I happened to see an ad for Committed. I got the same “who is that girl” reaction, only this time I remembered the name of the show long enough to get to IMDB. Well, I looked up the show first, then clicked her and light dawned. Then I Googled.
I think it’s fair to say that Jennifer Finnigan is to me as Rachel is to Karl Urban (Eomer).
So… yay! “Cute blonde chick from Crossing Jordan” now has a name and everything. And she’s on TV again! Opposite House, naturally. Oopsie for her. And apparently also on Thursdays at 8:30. So there’s some reason besides maybe ER to turn on a TV on “mustn’t see TV” night. If NBC is trying it on Thursday at 8:30, they must have serious hopes for it to rescue them that night.
Finally, who names a kid Marni anyway? That’s kind of a strange name. Unusual, at least.
She may not have that red cross thing going on, but I think Jennifer is actually cuter than Kirsten. What do you think?
Oh goodness. Now that I’ve mentioned Kirsten Dunst and Jennifer Finnigan, I’ll probably start getting search hits for them naked, nude, in pictures with or without clothes, and other odd things, just as I do for Erica Durance, Kristin or Kristen Kreuk, and Allison Mack. Sorry folks, no nudity here. Darn false results.
Thursday, January 06, 2005
More blogs in prime time…
I was going to write something about the casual use of the word “blogosphere” in tonight’s episode of The West Wing, but it turns out that John Cole already has (and far be it from me to be redundant on such a lovely evening...).
And yes, I watch the thing. Religiously. I’d like to blame Jay for getting me hooked, but I suppose I’d best just take responsibility for doing nothing to end my addiction. 
Wednesday, December 29, 2004
Rest In Peace Jerry Orbach
Sad news via Jen. Jerry Orbach has left us. Acidman’s prostate cancer list will need an update of the worst kind.
I never warmed to him in Dirty Dancing, but perhaps that was the nature of the character. At the same time, it took many episodes of Law and Order before I saw him as smartass Lennie, rather than the father in Dirty Dancing. I thought he did a fantastic job as Lumiere in Beauty and the Beast, which is arguably my favorite Disney animated film.
Thursday, December 23, 2004
Dead Like Good TV
I sometimes feel the same way about shows. With no cable, I’ve never seen Dead Like Me, but since Wonderfalls we joke about new shows we like not making it past four episodes. Especially on Fox.
Wednesday, December 15, 2004
NOT everybody loves Raymond, thankyouverymuch.
As a matter of fact, I agree in general, though I’ll take Pokemon if that’s what’s on, and I’d kill at this point for the extra channels of dreck. You see, I’m bravely living cable-free.
Shocking, isn’t it?
And since I’m back to needing both hands to nurse (don’t ask), I watch a lot of TV. I’m just not zen enough to sit and stare or worse, try to force some weird bonding thing on a baby fully occupied with eating and pooping. She takes her meals very seriously, this one does. In any case, I’ve repeatedly inisisted to Jay that I’m not nursing another baby until we’ve got cable. Heh.