September Part Deux

Welcome back to my rundown of TV to watch this season.

We had Monday last time, so we'll leap straight into Tuesday!


TUESDAY

There's only one TV show worth watching on a Tuesday night, and that's HOUSE M.D. starring the ever-awesome Hugh Laurie. Its probably one of my all-time favourite TV shows. A great blend of humour, interesting stories, and attractive female doctors. What's not to like?!

Season 4 ended with a brilliant double-parter involving House, his best friend Wilson, and Wilson's girlfriend Amber. Season 5 opens up with the repurcussions of these events, and how life has changed for all because of them. As far as I'm concerned, it is essential weekly viewing. If I could only watch 1 programme a week, it would be an awkward toss-up between House and Chuck.


WEDNESDAY

As I've explained in previous blogs, I am a big fan of crap TV, and also of the "Bad is Good" phenomenon, where something is so unbelievably bad it actually holds your interest to see if it can ever actually get any worse. One of Wednesday's programmes holds my interest because of this. If someone had asked me last year, which one 80s-90s classic TV show would I remake and update for a modern audience, I'd have probably gone into some kind of spasm and said "None of them! Don't you dare do it! Don't you dare spoil my childhood memories!" I mean, can you imagine what a modern day TV exec would do to something like the A-Team?! Update it for the war in Iraq or something? No! Just NO!

But sadly I'm not the boss of TV, and thus this year we've seen a remake of Knight Rider hitting the screens. Now, everyone knows which two things made the orginal Knight Rider a success: a super-cool car with lots of gadgets and special effects; and of course the Hoff!

Now I watched the pilot for the remake, and I was kinda intrigued. I mean, it was poorly paced,but the special fx were kinda cool, and it at least had a cameo from the Hoff in it. It ventured dangerously close to the absurd a lot of the time though, and since my general weekly line up doesn't really have any shows that fit the Bad is Good category, I figured I'd make it my mission to watch Knight Rider and see how long it takes before they cancel it for being pap.

Only good thing about it so far is that the female lead is very pretty. Not sure how long she will be able to distract me from the actual content of the episodes, but since they got her in her undies in episode 1, and in a bikini in episode 2, they're doing well so far!

The other show to hit the screens on wednesday night is the Tim Burton-esque "Pushing Daisies".

Its funny, it has cool dialogue, an interesting premise, and soooo many bright colours and interesting characters you feel that some of them could easily hog the show if it wasn't so well-balanced. Its a difficult show to explain, but the basic premise is that Ned, the main character, can touch dead things and bring them back to life for sixty seconds. If he does not touch them again within that time, something else has to die to balance everything out. If he touches them again, they go back to being dead. Of course, his childhood sweetheart dies and he brings her back to life, but while they are in love with each other, they can never actually touch. This provides all manner of awkwardness and hilarity.


THURSDAY

I constantly argue with people about "Smallville". I'm still unsure if it should go into the "Bad is Good" box. Certainly there have been a lot of bad episodes, but I still watch it, and this is one of the Bad is Good criteria. The latest season has seen 2 of the main cast leave (Lex Luthor and Lana Lang) but as I think I mentioned in a previous blog, I thought that might not be too bad a thing. Seems I was right. Season 8 has started strong, with interesting pace, some cool, well-rounded characters, and a fair bit of action. The last episode which was essentially an origin episode for the Green Arrow was a bit weak, but hopefully the season won't slide down into rubbish now that they've shaken the dynamic up so well by having Clark Kent finally move to Metropolis and become a reporter!


FRIDAY

Disappointingly, there's nothing on Fridays that I could see. Gives me a day to catch up anyways :P


SATURDAY

Nothing on American TV on Saturdays either, so I've had to scrape the barrel a bit and watch BBC1's latest attempt to fill the Doctor Who-shaped hole, "Merlin". Now, I studied myths and legends as part of my degree. I also studied them as a hobby before that. I like Arthurian myth a lot. But I'm not above people changing classical myth and legend to create an entertaining TV show. It kinda worked with the BBC's "Robin Hood" and its kinda working with "Merlin" too.

Sure the 'established' timeline of the legend is all out of kilter, the characters are kinda different, etc etc, but over all: its reasonably entertaining, it has Anthony "Giles from Buffy" Head in it, and the girl that plays Morgana is really quite fit. Obviously for a more discerning television viewer, this might not be enough, but for me this does quite amicably.


So that's my TV week. Hopefully there won't be any other cool programmes coming out soon, as I don't really have any more time to watch stuff now ><

~Jon