I know that some of you have lives. Jobs, families, drug habits -- they take up a lot of your precious time. Fortunately, I am unburdened by such prosaic matters, and can spend hour upon hour watching television. I have to admit, much of that television is bad. There was an unfortunate
Dancing With the Stars incident a few weeks ago that I am too scarred to recount for you now. However, I have dug up a few gems that you might want to throw onto your Tivo. They are, in no particular order:
The Riches (Mondays on fX)
This is a show about a family of gypsy con artists who steal the identity of a wealthy family (named the Riches) in order to live in a big house and send their kids to private school and join a country club and invest in alpacas and all that jazz. On one level, this is a smart, incisive look at class in America. Our protagonists appreciate the many benefits of being Rich, but remain proud of their roots. They resent having to pretend to be something they're not. They are perpetually fearful of being found out. It's surprising how universal these themes are. Like
The Sopranos,
The Riches uses a very unusual family to tell very familiar stories.
And if that doesn't sell you, on top of all the heavy stuff floats a pretty amusing caper comedy. Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver are perfectly cast as the kind of people who can sell even the most outrageous story. That's right. I called Eddie capable.
Just the kind of guy you want to bring home to your parents.
How I Met Your Mother (Mondays on CBS)
It's about a group of friends living in New York during their late twenties. They have a local watering hole, live in preposterously large apartments, several of them are dating one other, and there's a snarky fellow who can always be counted on for a good one liner. It sounds like a retread, but this show falls into that small group of current sitcoms that is consistently funny and original. The humor is kookier and sharper than what you saw on
Friends, but the show shares with its forerunner the same warmth and likability. Oh, and
Doogie Howser is hilarious.
Friday Night Lights (uh, maybe never again on NBC)
Technically, the first and possibly only season of this show ended a few weeks ago. Despite the fact that everyone who watched
FNL loves it, not very many people watched. But it is gooooood. It is not about football. Sure, there is football in it. Get over it. This show is actually about family, and not of the
7th Heaven variety. It's about good families making hard decisions, and bad families making bad decisions, and the families people make when their own families fail them. It's about high school, and all the potential that exists for people right on the brink of adulthood. But it's also about limitations, and how sometimes being smart or talented or hard-working isn't enough to lift people out of tough circumstances. It's about love struggling under the burden of reality. It's honest and heartbreaking and invigoration and challenging. Sometimes it's so real it takes my breath away. NBC will announce
FNL's fate in a couple weeks. In the meantime,
the entire first season is available free online. That way, you can watch it, love it, and be devastated when NBC doesn't renew it.
Jericho (Wednesdays on CBS)
When I first saw
Jericho, I was astounded at the brownness of it all. It's about a small Kansas town dealing with the aftermath of a nuclear war. Kansas is brown. People in Kansas wear a lot of brown. They drive brown cars and live in brown houses. Nuclear winter -- also brown. But once my eyes adjusted to the monochrome color palette, there's a lot to like. There's Skeet Ulrich, looking vaguely like the Unabomber, but in a super hot way. There's
Major Dad! More importantly, there's the whole interesting issue of what happens when people are suddenly cut off from the entire world except the part immediately surrounding them. According to
Jericho, they engage in dramatic power struggles and apocalyptic sex. Which is pretty much what you would expect. At least, that's what I'm planning on doing
when all the bees disappear.
Oh, and there's also this very cool character named Robert Hawkins who is either CIA or a terrorist, but a badass either way. So if the brownness of it all starts getting you down, just wait a few minutes and Hawkins will threaten to cut off some guy's balls and you'll be hooked again.
