Dirty Sexy Money: Is there any other kind?

I missed most of the Wednesday night premiere smorgasbord because hump day is margarita day in my book. This turned out to be a good thing, because I caught the last ten minutes of the Grey's Anatomy spinoff Private Practice when I got home, and I had to thank god I was drunk. That show should remain as private as possible. Like, maybe so private they don't make any recording of it.

Being drunk was also advantageous for a viewing of Dirty Sexy Money (far and away my favorite new-television-program-name). First of all, everyone on the show is drunk all the time, and there is nothing sadder than being the most sober person in a room. I was also drunk enough that I didn't care that no one on the show makes any sense, ever. I mean, that is just how drunk people are. Try to be tolerant people. Finally, the hot angry priest with the illegitimate kid was like a character I would make up if I were telling a story while completely blitzed. So I was watching the show, but it's like I was making it happen, you know?

Ok, confession. Sunday afternoon is also margarita day in my book. My book, by the way, is called Who Ordered These Frozen? Do I Look Like a Sorority Girl to You?

House: The Cheese Stands Alone

House was about the importance of community this week. Or rather, the importance of having a small cadre of sycophantic underlings around to keep you from killing people. Whatever, same difference. Dr. House learned that it's hard to treat patients without his team, particularly given his aversion to talking to patients or doing any actual medical work. It occurs to me watching this show that House is less a doctor than a medical consultant. Which is to say, House is better at thinking about the practice of medicine than actually practicing medicine. Like all consultants, this makes him useless in virtually any setting. I assume it also makes it hard for him to describe his job to strangers. All the consultants I know make their job sound like a cross between study hall and being a restaurant hostess. I know what you're thinking -- House would make a terrible restaurant hostess. Well, I want you to think about the last nice restaurant you went to. How friendly and helpful was the hostess? Exactly.

Next week House selects his new team, Survivor-style. I hope there's mud wrestling.

Vengeance Restored! Heroes Saves the Day

Which is not to say I enjoyed watching Heroes last night. I'm just proud to have posted four times in one day.

Listen, Heroes is probably a totally worthwhile show. I'm sure if I'd seen Season One, I'd have been thrilled with all the revelations from last night's episode. But I had never seen the show before, and I found myself unable to manufacture much of an interest in any of the 47 plots. Except maybe the cheerleader. She seems sort of cool and interesting. But really, this might as well be Journeyman -- I have no idea what is going on.

This is not a new television conundrum. All serialized dramas struggle with finding ways to reel in new viewers without having to constantly waste precious airtime with exposition. The issue becomes even trickier when the show has an elaborately layered mythology that even regular viewers have trouble tracking. The X-Files attempted to address this issue by sprinkling "stand alone" episodes throughout the season. These were episodes that followed the format of a Law & Order-style procedural. The idea was that stand-alones would allow new viewers to get to know the characters without all those confusing alien conspiracy theories. I don't know how well it worked, but I do know that the stand-alone episodes are among some of my favorites of the series (remember when Scully and Mulder went to Texas to investigate the vampire pizza guy, and the town sheriff was Luke Wilson? That was awesome.). It is at least a more artistic approach than the one adopted by Lost, which is to preface seasons with explanatory "episodes" that summarize the show's previous seasons.

I'm not making suggestions for Heroes. Like I said, it's probably a very good show. But I think I'm going to have to wait until the DVDs to find out.

Going Nowhere: Journeyman Cancellation Watch

Journeyman is about a guy who suddenly starts travelling back in time (but inexplicably, only in decade-long increments). After some brief confusion, he starts helping random people by averting their suicides and stuff. He becomes entangled with his former (but supposedly now dead) fiance. Then his (now magically not dead?) former fiance appears, as though she had never died, but exists in the present day and is also travelling through time. Oh, and our journey man also happens to be married in the present day, making his interactions with the many incarnations of his dead-but-not-dead-former-fiance rife with moral gray area.

If you made it through that paragraph and you still care about Journeyman, then I suggest you start crafting a strategy to save the show from cancellation now. I have no idea what the hell is going on here. And I'm not terribly motivated to find out. The stakes are low. This guy will probably have to deal with the whole not-dead-fiance thing eventually, and I'm sure his wife won't be terribly excited to hear that her husband may have found a cosmic loophole in his vows. But as far as I can tell, no one is worried about a rip in the space time continuum and there are no last minute escapes in Doc's Delorian. Also, the protagonist looks just enough like Daniel Craig to remind me of how much I like Daniel Craig, but not enough to make me watch this show. I just need to locate my copy of Casino Royale by next Monday.

Cancellation Watch: I give it six episodes. It's this year's Vanished.

Gossip Girl Overplucks Eyebrows

Have you ever wondered what would happen if Seth Cohen from The O.C. fucked Carrie Bradshaw of Sex and the City, and she proved to be remarkably fertile for a woman of her advanced age, and wound up giving birth to a love child that wasn't a baby at all, but rather a television show featuring pretty teenagers in great clothes frequenting trendy Manhattan bars and lamenting the fact that Peter Gallagher's eyebrows haven't made an appearance?

Well, except for the eyebrows (which I deem a serious oversight, Josh Schwartz), Gossip Girl is the answer to your mild curiosity. It's pretty, as is its cast. The girls all look like beautiful twenty-eight-year-olds, though none of them look quite as ancient and tired as Mischa Barton. The boys are mostly privileged assholes, except for "The Seth Cohen Character", who is apparently "The Josh Schwartz Character". None of the parents are interesting, mainly because, as I've already mentioned, none of them are Peter Gallagher's eyebrows. There is a love triangle or two, and something that passes for class conflict in a UES private school

GG is exactly what it sets out to be -- expensive television candy. It doesn't feed your soul, or even your stomach, but it tastes good and comes in a prettily wrapped package.

Vengeance... diminished: K-ville Cancellation Watch

I was all set to dive into the new TV season with a bunch of new posts on everything and anything happening between the hours of 8pm and 11pm EST. Then I watched the K-ville premiere last Tuesday, fell asleep, and subsequently could not think of anything interesting to say about it. It's about cops and robbers, I think. I honestly don't remember anything about the bad guys. A woman got shot, and the shooting was politically motivated maybe? Oh, who cares.

It's about race because it takes place in New Orleans post-Katrina and the two leads are a black guy and a white guy. And it's scored with heavy rap music. Except the show has nothing interesting to say about race, or poverty, or crime, or New Orleans... Basically, everything The Wire does well, K-ville does with merely mediocre competence. The highlight of the premiere was some ridiculous and climactic helicopter sequence. And that's only because at this point I realized this show had no point, and I could safely pass out.

Cancellation Watch: I'm going to give it until mid-season, even though it doesn't deserve it. But it's on Monday, and FOX won't have anything to replace it with. It's up against Heroes, but I actually think that might help it. Heroes is confusing for people who don't watch it regularly (see my upcoming post on watching Heroes for the first time). For those people, a conventional cop show masquerading as an cop show with a twist will be sufficiently distracting. This is why Law & Order lives on (albeit in a limping, sad little way) and NCIS is a top rated show.

The Turn On Returns... With a Vengance

Yeah, yeah, yeah.... I'm a bad blogger. I haven't written a post in so long it's not even worth discussing. But I'm back, and this time I mean it. To prove it, tonight's going to be a posting bonanza. We have the Emmys to cover (even though I didn't watch -- sorry, but that's just not very good TV), the first notable premiere of the season (K-ville, which starts in five minutes -- you'll be getting the rawest of first impressions), and finally, my general impressions of the season to come -- what I'll be turning on, what I'll be turning off. So stay tuned in.