Category Archives: TV and TiVo

My Case for Why You Should Watch Downton Abbey

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I am a television enthusiast. The format has always been big in our family life. I remember watching (but not understanding) the finale of M*A*S*H. Jeopardy! used to come on during the dinner hour, and we’d test our knowledge between bites. I enjoyed Cheers and Northern Exposure with my parents while the adult meanings of each completely sailed over my head. My brother works in TV. It’s a thing.

After I graduated from college, I had time to get into TV again. I bought my first TiVo at 231 , and I’ve not looked back. I never watched LOST, but that’s only because I was too busy catching up on Gilmore Girls re-runs to make time for this new show. 2 I didn’t watch The Sopranos because I was too cheap to pay for HBO, but I picked up The Wire when Sean and Kat gave me a gift card that covered the first season’s price. I quickly bought the other fivefour seasons.

It’s not that I’ve always watched good TV. I also watched all the Law & Order series, which I found did not hold up well upon a second viewing. 3 I also followed several seasons of Big Brother until I got tired of the self-loathing. The Amazing Race isn’t good television, but I have watched every season since Season 4.4 I also watch terrible shows like Archer and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and I stuck with Rescue Me through its dreadfulness and have maintained interest in How I Met Your Mother despite all its dithering. Suffice it to say that I don’t claim to have The Greatest Taste in TV, Ever.

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  1. I’ve owned four. [↩]
  2. By the time I got caught up on Lorelai and Rory, J.J. Abrams was in his third season of torturing people without remorse. I guess I could go back and watch, but with how poorly the finale was regarded… [↩]
  3. This did not, however, stop me from developing a checklist of episodes and ticking them off as I saw the re-runs. [↩]
  4. Ignoring the shitty family season, which I stopped watching as soon as they passed Huntsville. [↩]

Rescue Me Minisodes This Summer

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In case you haven’t heard, there won’t be a fifth season of Rescue Me this summer—that’ll have to wait for next summer, although we’ll be getting 22 episodes then, which is pretty great. [Why we're not getting in the fall is beyond me, other than as part of an FX strategy to air the show in the summer when most other shows are in re-runs. Personally, I don't want to wait until 2009 for more Rescue Me.]

That said, we’ll see five-minute mini-episodes of the show starting in June. The eps are to air at 10pm EDT on Tuesday nights. Can I just hope that one is a hockey fight between Cam “Mungo” Neely and Denis? Wouldn’t that be awesome?

FX hopes that this project will keep the show on viewers’ minds during the unusually long hiatus. Denis Leary and executive producer Peter Tolan are co-writing the minisodes’ content, which was described as “comedic hijinks” by FX.

Hmmm … I wonder if the writers for It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia might get involved. They write some zany sketches … but hey, Denis’s comedy routines are funny.

Life Imitating Art

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In the sixth episode of the tenth season of Cheers, “Unplanned Pregnancy”, Bebe Neuwirth’s Lilith character refers to the normal babysitter the Doctors Crane use as “a 16-year-old bundled of breasts Frasier considers God’s gift to babysitting”. Given the affair Kelsey Grammer was found of participating in just five years later, Frasier’s expression in response—a turn of the head that leads to a leering smirk—is priceless.

[Sorry, we needed better Cheers fodder in the blogosphere today than TV Squad's "Five biggest Cheers mysteries". :yawn: Reference episode aired on TV Land this morning, and because I needed to decompress, I'm watching it tonight ...]