TV

If you’re not watching HBO’s The Life & Times of Tim, you are missing the funniest show on TV right now. It’s a combination of Family Guy and Seinfeld, with a bit of The Office added to make it uncomfortable. And like The Royal Tenenbaums you need to pay attention to all the details that aren’t the primary focus: Make sure to read the signs hanging on the cubicle walls in Tim’s office and watch for stray animals on the streets of Manhattan. Tim’s “friend” Debbie — a hooker with a penchant for assless pants and mid-morning martinis — is jaw-dropping hysterical.

PS: If you don’t have HBO, you can watch several mini-episodes on the website.

With the demise of the Sopranos, West Wing, and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and with the interminably long hiatus of Friday Night Lights, the best show on television right now is Rescue Me. It has been months since the last episode aired and I had been anxiously awaiting the season premiere last night. Black billboards featuring only a Pink-Floyd-esque, stretched-neck-and-screaming Denis Leary profile started appearing in LA a few weeks ago, captioned with a very simple “rescue me” and “06-13-07″. All day yesterday I was excited to see what was going to happen. (Last season, of course, ended with a dramatic cliff-hanger.)

Now understand this: I have three televisions, two TiVo boxes, and a DirecTV HD DVR. These three machines have yet to fail me in 3+ years. Any time a show was missed, it was always entirely my fault for not double-checking the priorities. I knew that “Rescue Me” was set to ultra-high priority on the two TiVos and I — incorrectly — thought that I had told the DirecTV DVR to record it as well. But it was not to be. I forgot that the (absolutely horrible) software on the DirecTV DVR wouldn’t let me schedule a season pass for the show when I tried a few weeks ago. There wasn’t a new episode set to air in the near future so I couldn’t program it. So that system recorded Mythbusters and Modern Marvels instead. The two TiVo boxes were set to record Rescue Me on the FXP (the Pacific feed of the FXNetwork) channel at 10pm Pacific time. Unfortunately DirecTV dropped FXP and replaced it with the regular, East-coast feed of FX, so not only was the show airing at 7pm Pacific instead of 10pm, but it was now on channel 248 instead of channel 78. So one TiVo recorded Girls Next Door and the other one recorded what was probably its 3000th episode of Law & Order.

So now I have to wait for FX to replay the premiere on Friday night. All three DVRs are set to record it. Damn.

Are you wondering what media I consumed this weekend? I knew you were. And so I shall tell you.

• Heat ****
• Sopranos *****
• Oh the Glory of It All, by Sean Wilsey ****½
• Oceans 13 ***½
• John from Cincinnati ***½
• A Prairie Home Companion, featuring Martin Sheen, Randy Newman, and Paula Poundstone (live at The Greek) ******
• Saturday Night Live (rerun) ***½
• SNL Tribute: Chris Farley ****

Warning: Post Contains Spoilers

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Vote Nathan Petrelli for Congress

All three of the televisions in my house are connected to either a TiVo box or a DirecTV box. Both of these systems give me the option of displaying a “guide” in a grid right on the screen. If I want to see what else I can watch, I click to the guide and browse until I find something I like. That way I can search all I want without changing channels and stopping whatever is currently being shown from being recorded. I love this feature.

My girlfriend fiancée hates it. When she is watching TV she never uses the guide. She just punches the code for E! or VH1 and goes right to the channel. This bothers me both because she sometimes stops recording something by changing channels and also because it just feels inefficient. Why not just use the guide?

I can’t really get upset about it, though, because her method is the same one I use to read my blogs. I just can’t seem to get into feeds. RSS is certainly cool and I dig the ability to subscribe to the feeds of the sites I like. But I never do. I have a bookmark folder in FireFox called “Blogs” and that’s where I save the links of my favorite online reads. About once a day I scroll to the (incredibly cool) “Open All in Tabs” link in that bookmark folder and pop open all my blogs at once. This is definitely less efficient than using an RSS reader — or the system included with Firefox — and only checking the blogs which have been updated recently. Why in the world do I do it this way?

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The blog for inquisitive Gators, Saurian Sagacity, has done an interesting analysis of the effect of the 2006 NCAA football game clock rule changes. I was annoyed all year by the new changes because I felt that it was making the games shorter. I like college football. I don’t want shorter games. I want longer games! It seemed all year that the games were shorter, but the time I spent sitting in front of the TV didn’t change. And now I realize why.

Yes, the games were shorter by about eight minutes. But it’s not like the networks gave me that time. They took away six or eight plays per game, but we got to see around seventeen more commercials. That sucks. There are already plenty of commercials. It’s not like that cash is going to the schools to pay player salaries. Broadcasting college football is a license to print money. That’s why games are being carried by TBS and TNT now. It’s so lucrative as it is there’s no need to screw me out of those six plays.

The only real issue I have with this analysis is that I think it misses the point. What I’d really like to know is the difference between the number of plays run by quarter. The big change this year, I felt, was that the 4th quarter always seemed to be where the time disappeared. There were definitely some thrilling come-from-behind victories this season, but was it just me that thought there were more of them before the clock rule changes?

I was in football nirvana this weekend. I watched no less than a dozen games — college and pro — since I left the office Friday night. The best by far was last night’s Boise State / Oklahoma Fiesta Bowl, one of the top ten football games I’ve ever seen. While watching Saturday night’s Giants / Redskins contest on the NFLN I kept wondering about all the commercials they kept airing for themselves. “Why in the world,” I asked, “do they keep showing me commercials for something they know I already have?”

The only people who could have possibly seen all the ads for the NFLN were the people that currently have the NFLN. And it wasn’t just the 30-second commercials spots, either. During the game they were constantly bombarding me with teasers and float-overs talking about how wonderful they are. Aside from the fact that it was mildly annoying, it was also pointless!

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One of my favorite sites is Metafilter (aka “mefi”). I found it way back in ‘99 and became a member in March of ‘00. For years it has consistently been wonderful. The users are infinitely more mature and intelligent than the ones at digg. It’s really quite incredible how mefi has managed to stay so respectable while digg seemed to get overcome by what are apparently mostly invective teenagers.

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Where does the year go? This one is almost over so it’s time to start doing some wrap-ups. Thanks to TiVo I have gotten to watch a ton of the tube this year, and there has been some excellent stuff to see. Here’s my picks for the top ten shows of 2006. Feel free to argue, but remember that I’m always right.

Wife Swap / Desperate Housewives (ABC)

Don’t vomit just yet. If you haven’t given either of these shows a chance, I’m telling you that you’re missing some of the best “scream at the television” action there is. Both shows are essentially hour-long exercises in watching women act like complete and total retards. There has not been a Wife Swap yet that didn’t have me at some point shaking my head and wondering seriously about the viability of our species. Are there really moms this stupid on our planet? And I am completely done with any Terry Hatcher plotline they can throw at me, but otherwise Desperate Housewives is seriously embarrassing, addictive fun. It’s a bummer that they killed the slutty-hot ex-lover in the supermarket fiasco.

Grey’s Anatomy (ABC)

Now that E.R. has finally gone off the … what? It’s still on? When will that show die? Good Lord! It jumped the shark ten years ago! Grey’s Anatomy may never achieve the excellence of the first two seasons of E.R., but McDreamy and McSteamy and the gang are way more fun than even the Clooney days of NBC’s doctor show were. The writers got us to care about Meredith’s slutty little existence and — with the exception of one exploding-man episode — have been able to avoid the repeated helicopter-train-earthquake-stuck-in-Africa “must see” hijinks of E.R. We all feel bad about Denny, but Alex is a good guy at heart, right?

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You’d have to look far and wide to find an actor involved in more projects lately than Alec Baldwin. He’s currently starring in 30 Rock on NBC and this weekend I saw him in two major motion pictures: The Departed and Running with Scissors. I like Alec Baldwin. I really do. His choices baffle me, though. Sometimes he picks pure winners and sometimes he picks dogs.

30 Rock is a perfectly mediocre television show. Tina Fey is a comic genius and the show’s concept is interesting. I’ve only seen one episode, but I don’t think I’m jumping the gun to say that this isn’t exactly a comedy on the same level as Seinfeld or even Everybody Loves Raymond. It’s a decent television show, though, and Baldwin’s character is wonderfully strange and stupid. He’s brought to the show by NBC executives to hawk the G.E. Trivection Oven, an experiment in product-placement which cannot possibly be real, but apparently is. On a five-star scale, this show gets exactly two and a half stars. I doubt it will last two seasons, but it’s not a bad show.

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“Mr. Snuffleupagus is a full-bodied Muppet character who lives with his family in a cave, just off of Sesame Street. He is a snuffleupagus.
– from the Muppet wiki

Obviously I knew that. Though I didn’t know he had a first name. I just always referred to him as Snuffleupagus. I loved Sesame Street when I was a kid. Who didn’t? I only very rarely ever think about Snuffleupagus these days. To be honest with you, I can’t remember the last time I thought about Snuffleupagus. It’s been a while.

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Anybody out there notice a trend? It seems like the quality of shows has suddenly gotten much better in the last two or three years. My TiVo runneth over. That’s how I can tell. I can’t remember a time since the early 90s when there were so many really, really good shows on the tube. I’m glad that I have DirecTV now — getting the major networks affiliates from different regions means I can catch the East coast feeds for some, so I can TiVo shows that are supposed to be airing in the same time slot. Here’s a quick list of some of the shows that have me hooked right now.

• Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip
• Friday Night Lights
• Entourage
• Rescue Me
• Law & Order
• Dexter
• Six Degrees
• Scrubs
• Boston Legal
• The Office
• Grey’s Anatomy

I have to admit that I was a huge fan of the West Wing. I thought it was “the most intelligent show on television“. The last season (or was it two?) though — after Aaron Sorkin stopped writing — it really jumped the shark. I was still pretty sad to see it go. I have the first three seasons on DVD and I’ll likely get the rest. It was brilliant; the writing, the acting, the direction were all better than any other television show in years.

I have been anxiously waiting for the premiere of Studio 60. There was a big chunk of me that was doubtful, even a little scared, that it wouldn’t be very good. I felt the same way about the new Batman and the new Superman. How could Sorkin and Thomas Schlamme possibly create another show as good as the West Wing? Sure they had Bradley Whitford again, but would he be able to be anyone other than Josh Lyman? And Chandler as his co-star? And why in the name of all that is good and holy would they possibly want to go up against Monday Night Football?!

And yet, incredibly, the pilot was awesome. The second episode was awesome. One of the very, very few good things about football in Los Angeles is that it tends to not conflict with anything else. MNF is usually put to bed by 9 out here, so only 95% of NFL fans in the country are going to get screwed out of watching the new best show on television. Yeah, I said that. It’s the best show on television. I can say that. Rescue Me is on hiatus and the Sopranos went on permanent hiatus a few seasons ago.

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