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TV Shows to Watch
Well, the Wire is done (I started the first Wire thread on DiS, by the way. 0 replies. But I'm okay with not receiving the credit and adulation I so richly deserve.) and so too is Battlestar and the Shield. Heroes has gone tits up - what else is there out there to get mildly distracted by?
1) Burn Notice. I considered this well dodgy (annoying soundtrack, set in Miami - which is like the Bournemouth with Cuban gangsters) until about halfway through the 2nd episode when it became clear that this was nothing less than the new MacGyver. It has lots of entertaining spy action, gadgets, gratuitous bikini shots, the cast have great chemistry, and it has Ash from Evil Dead in it. So far - Win.
2) Dollhouse. The premise doesn't work - am I supposed to tune in for the adventures of a character who changes from week to week? The writers haven't grasped that the one type of character that you can't fit kooky Whedon-speak into the mouth of is a genius scientist - you need tedious technojargon for that. I don't know what the fuck is going on with the title sequence - the music sounds like Red Shoe Diaries or something. And it will blatantly be canceled soon. Despite this, I actually did kinda like Firefly after a year of being pestered to watch it, so it gets a chance based purely on that.
3) Eureka. About a small town populated by super genius scientists. Lots of tedious technojargon, but also quite funny also - I get the feeling this was originally going to be a kids cartoon; it comes off like a live action Dexter's lab mixed with the X Files. I've only seen a few eps, but so far - Win.
4) Law and Order UK. When you hear 'dun-dun' and the next scene is a game-show host chatting to a colleague about murder in front of Euston station, it feels good. I'm giving this a chance at least until they run out of the American scripts and it turns shit.
5) Mistresses. This should really be called 'Women Crying For An Hour'. Nothing about this show makes sense. It rips off Sex and the City by having four women hook up every once in awhile to talk about men, but makes an interesting deviation from that setup by being entirely lazy and stupid. For one thing, in SatC the cast had great chemistry and it was easy to imagine that the characters were all great friends. In Mistresses, it's hard to imagine how any of the women even met. They're all different ages. They have different backgrounds. None of them have any kind of explicable relationship to each other besides all having similar personality traits. And unlike the SatC ladies, each of the Mistresses is utter scum. In my book, you don't have a decent show unless you can empathise with at least one character. Here is a show where the characters are merely empty actions without rational explanation. And those actions are mostly weeping, carrying on with some empty-headed City cocksucker, and then weeping again about men. Fail.
Anything else?