It's Thursday and premiere week for me has been largely a blank TV set due to my Time Warner cable box going out just an hour and a half before GLEE started up Tuesday night. You can imagine the shrieks that went on in Casa Altenburg. Had I been on the ball I would have realized that the attendent I was speaking to was halfway around the world and had no idea that there was a Time Warner store six blocks from me and that all I had to do was dash the defective box down there before they closed. But this is what you get when you hand someone a script that says CLIENT where the name should be - I know because the guy called me 'CLIENT' several times during our interaction which basically consisted of him telling me to unplug and plug back in the box. Anyway, by Wednesday morning I had exchanged the box although the damage was done - I lost the premiere ep of HAWAII FIVE O with a shirtless Scott Caan. I realize that doesn't mean anything to the straight guys.. but I also lost a bathing suit clad Grace Park. Now you understand the depths of my loss. Thankfully, they'll be nearly nude next week.
On Fox, there's HOUSE, which I loved when it started out but when I tried to hear Hugh Laurie's English accent I realized I'd grown tired of the show. I caught a few episodes on a Saturday afternoon marathon recently and enjoyed it, but not enough to put it on the DVR. Same goes with FRINGE. I admit I'm all about the parallel universe idea, but the show doesn't feel up to the task either in the writing or in the acting or even in the special effects. It tries very hard and it gets points but not enough for me to invest in it.
On the CW THE VAMPIRE DIARIES is great if you want to see a show that seems to have multiple timelines going on but the biggest reason to watch is merely to see pretty people in their 20s pretend as though they've been alive for a couple hundred years. They always play 'bigger' and more pretentious than I think someone who had actually been alive that long would act. Not that I know people who have been alive that long, I'm just saying in theory. :) And then there's NIKITA which seems to me to be genius in companion television - from the previews it seems like that Pam Anderson show from a few years back where she'd walk into a building wearing one hot, sexy outfit, and enter in another. There wasn't much logic and it was all about the soft porn. I feel that this is true for NIKITA as well (not that there's anything wrong with that, mind you).
The true turd of the season (and my apologies for being so graphic) seems to me to be MY GENERATION. Whomever thought this up should either never be allowed to work in television again or should be made head of a network because they are just that stupid. The idea here is that the show follows a bunch of 28 year olds who haven't seen each other in 10 years, since their senior prom in 2000. In one memorable bus stop ad, a girl is calls her ex boyfriend telling him "remember our prom? we have a son". and if that's any indication of all at what ABC wants us to have in our head going into the show, I fear that the actual show is going to be much worse. The promos are overly pretentious going on about how no one's life turned out the way they thought it would but good God, it was only ten years ago, they make it sound as though this was the class of 1942 rather than the class of 2000.. If it's still on at Christmas I will be shocked (and disappointed in the American public's taste).
The rest of ABC's Thursday night is rounded out by GREY'S ANATOMY and PRIVATE PRACTICE. These are two shows I occasionally watch when home and doing something else. They don't require a lot of investment or brain power and both shows spoon feed you plot and if you haven't figured out what the show meant that night on your own, a voice over will tell you. And best of all, no Katherine Heigl on GREY'S this year (although I unfortunately can't say the same thing about a Heigl-free cineplex.. I think we'll have to suffer through a few more 27 DRESSES thematic knock offs before she crawls back to television David Caruso style).
Thursdays on CBS isn't much more challenging - Simon Baker in THE MENTALIST makes detective work look very pretty (and easy) and while I never caught CSI fever, it can be a distracting enough show when you really have better things that you ought to be doing (like paying bills, washing your hair, etc).
Then there's SHIT MY DAD SAYS. I can say 'shit' because I'm on the internet and no one other than company spam filters care as much. I am torn about this show. William Shatner is a kind of favorite of mine so I want the show to do well. But as the premise was born from a Twitter feed, I want it to fail hard like QUARTERLIFE did if only to delay the merging of web and television for a little while longer. We're getting FACEBOOK-THE MOVIE and I want to wait awhile before I get a soap opera based upon Foursquare (oh God, I just gave someone in LA an idea).
Finally, also on CBS, it's THE BIG BANG THEORY. I can admit when I'm wrong and I was wrong about this show when it debuted. I hated it. Passionately. But although not a DVRable show for me, Jim Parsons routinely gives a stunning performance as the mentally brilliant but socially challenged Sheldon. The show itself is smart about it's use of geek tropes and references in a way that no one can fake.. which makes me really like the show quite a bit. I started to get sold on the show the episode when Sheldon and Wil Wheaton (playing himself at a Trek fan convention) squared off in a geek grudge match. Johnny Galecki mugs a little too much in the co-starring role but the episode when he begged his downstairs neighbor, played by ROSEANNE alum Sara Gilbert, for sex, it was the day that I surrended helplessly to him and this show. It took a long time but these things do happen. I could eventually even fall for OUTSOURCED. Nah.