Summer plans
It is Memorial Day! Which means it’s summer!
Which means, from a TV programming standpoint, things are looking pretty slow for the next several months. This is the season of Wipeout, of five consecutive hours of Cake Boss, of Arnold Schwarzenegger movie marathons, and of course, of reruns. Tonight, for instance, the only real new programming on the networks is a two-hour episode of The Bachelorette, while a trip into cable land gives you the opportunity to choose between some Bones reruns, two new episodes of Cake Boss (the second of which is called – I kid you not – Cake Boss: Ultimate Cake Boss), and WWE Monday Night RAW.
Thankfully, summer television has changed enough that it is now also the season of Mad Men, True Blood, goofy USA shows like Burn Notice and Psych, my favorite SyFy show Eureka (subject of the very first post on this blog), and several cautious new network offerings. I’ll talk about as many of these as I can when they premiere, and there will of course be weekly Mad Men posts when the show returns on July 25th. Much as I dislike a lot of the reality programming and cheesy summertime comedy that gets released from June-August, there’s no point in denying that it’s also fun to rip apart on occasion (see: Secret Life of the American Teenager), so I’m sure there’ll be a little of that.
Still, new and interesting television has nothing even approaching a satisfying density during the summer months, so it’s also an opportunity to catch up with things that have been ignored or abandoned. I’m currently flying through the remaining episodes of Breaking Bad and will likely be caught up by next week’s episode, just in time to write about the last two episodes of season three. My docket this summer also includes The Shield, which is one of those shows I try not to admit having never seen, Party Down, In Treatment, and almost certainly some older stuff that I never watched when it first came out (because I was in second grade, and I wasn’t allowed to watch TV on weeknights). My current list includes Homicide: Life on the Streets, Hill Street Blues, and probably Dallas, but these are all subject to change depending on time, availability, and you know. Whim.
One thing I certainly am open to is suggestions, particularly about things I should be watching that I’ve never seen, or things I should be writing about that I’ve been ignoring. Please let me know if you’re absolutely dying for a post on Glee, or if the fact that I’ve never seen Married… With Children is going to seriously hamper my ability to appreciate the sitcom as a form. But I also need to reiterate something I mentioned a few weeks ago, which is that I will do my best to post whenever possible, but travel, weddings, and Comic-Con may get in the way.
Happy summer, and I hope someone tunes in to Cake Boss: Ultimate Cake Boss tonight and tells me what it was like.
I don’t think you have watched Spaced yet, and that is something you should really do. Because it’s amazing.