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.

[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 ...]

I love TiVo’s Suggestions. They do me a great service. But TiVo … please give me a setting that says, “I love $Show_X but don’t want you to record re-runs for me.” Because honestly … as much as I love Gilmore Girls, I really don’t need to see all the re-runs again. But I want to know what other shows that GG fans watch.

[Okay, maybe that's a bad example.]

Maybe I’m weird as a TiVo user who doesn’t really like to re-watch re-runs. I’d just rather find new TV to watch.

[As expected, I'm seeing requests for this info on the Season 4 entry, so I'm posting this separately...]

Well, I’m only partially there. I’ve got to:

1. Get Multi-Room Viewing going on the new box and get it to recognize the other two TiVos.
2. Relocate my old TV and the TiVo that used to be upstairs to the downstairs.
3. Transfer all the old SD content onto the new HD.
4. Figure out what all Season Passes I need to get moved to the new box, and then shut them off of my old ones.

I’m going to push to do as much of this as I can tonight, but I’ve been doing the 0700 thing this week, and I’ve gotten maybe nine hours’ sleep the last two nights combined. [Has it been crazy? Yes. Has it been tough? Yes. Has it been trying? Yes. Is it worth it? Absolutely. Am I going to stay vague? Bet your fucking ass.] I’m winding down…

A discussion of this ended up leading to Derek and I talking about Gilmore Girls after the show I attended last night. There we are on a sidewalk outside The Rutledge, talking about Lorelai borrowing Luke’s truck to help Rory move to Yale. I got to tell them that Season Four? IS MY FAVORITE. That was a fun time, because hey … I love talking about GG with people.

Oh, and … Writers’ Night at The Rutledge is hosted by Nathan Lee. Oh my gosh, y’all … that blew my damn doors off. I’ve already bought Down at The Rutledge off of CDBaby this morning, and now it’s my goal to bring him to Huntsville for a show. Wow. That kicked my ass. I just hate that I had recording problems last night [largely to do with it being an SRO crowd and me getting so hot that I almost passed out, but hey]. FUN TIMES.

[Who has two thumbs and got home at 2:00 a.m. this morning? Geof Morris.]

A discussion of this ended up leading to Derek and I talking about Gilmore Girls after the show I attended last night. There we are on a sidewalk outside The Rutledge, talking about Lorelai borrowing Luke’s truck to help Rory move to Yale. I got to tell them that Season Four? IS MY FAVORITE. That was a fun time, because hey … I love talking about GG with people.

Oh, and … Writers’ Night at The Rutledge is hosted by Nathan Lee. Oh my gosh, y’all … that blew my damn doors off. I’ve already bought Down at The Rutledge off of CDBaby this morning, and now it’s my goal to bring him to Huntsville for a show. Wow. That kicked my ass. I just hate that I had recording problems last night [largely to do with it being an SRO crowd and me getting so hot that I almost passed out, but hey]. FUN TIMES.

[Who has two thumbs and got home at 2:00 a.m. this morning? Geof Morris.]

I called Alan Davis at Knology [phone number available upon request; leave a comment and I'll send you his number], and the differential pricing from where I was with Expanded Basic is +$9.99/mo to go to digital, +$9.99/mo to go HD, and then +$12.99/ea/mo for the two CableCARDs. “It’s expensive,” he warned me. [Yeah, a cable salesman who's worried about charging the customer too much money. I really do like this guy.] So, when I look at the fact that I’m not going to be paying TiVo $20/mo. for the service, I’m essentially paying for the CableCARDs. I could do without it, but then I’d not have the dual-tuner goodness.

The lead time on the order right now will be a couple weeks. I should have this thing hooked up before the Super Bowl, then.

[Anyone need an old 19" analog TV? I'll move it for next to nothing.]

Yeah, well, I caved. Work took care of the capital for me with an unexpected bonus, from which I’ve bought a TiVo HD [with their offer to current subscribers of a lifetime subscription] that’s due to hit my doorstep tomorrow and a 32″ Vizio HDTV [okay, I haven't bought it yet, but I've decided on it and will get it at Sam's Club], amongst other things. [Thanks, Marty!] With my TiVo subscription costs going away [two TiVos at a multi-service discount runs me about $20/mo with taxes], I can justify it to myself.

I still haven’t decided if my non-over-the-air source of HD content is going to be DirecTV or Knology, the local cable company into which I’m locked in my neighborhood. I am leaning towards DirecTV mainly for their sports programming [sure, it's a monopoly, but it's a monopoly I want to tap], but I haven’t decided for sure. I will use over-the-air HD from the local providers and standard-definition from Knology [which I get for free, thanks to my HOA] in the meantime. Complicating factors will involve pairing up the TiVo HD with whatever receiver I have to use from either provider.

What kicked me over the edge? Well, it was the infusion of capital combined with the knowledge that 17 Feb 2009 is looming. Unless the WGA strike breaks the networks in the meantime, there’s too much network content that I enjoy in HD that I know that I won’t enjoy down-converted into 4:3, standard definition shots.

The other minor upshot is that I can slave my old [presently ailing, although hopefully back up to par] Mac mini to the new TV and offload the old Sony LCD I’ve been using on it since I got the new mini a few weeks ago. Between that and Screen Sharing in Leopard, I’ll be find to not have a traditional monitor slaved to that mini.

Oh my holy heck, the laugh track. Whoever decided that this show needed one was an idiot. The people who watch this show are either going to be smart enough to get the brainy humor [whether or not they really understand it] or not. Putting a laugh track in there tells that part of the audience, “See! We were funny there!” STFU.

In many ways, being stuck behind How I Met Your Mother—a startlingly well-written sitcom about relationships written more with men in mind than, say, Friends ever was—is a detriment to this show. I might not have minded the heavy-handed sitcommy stuff if I hadn’t had the third season premiere of HIMYM as a lead-in.

Best moment of the whole show: the extended conversation as the depantsed main characters, Leonard and Shelden, go up the stairs. Most shows would have avoided that awkward moment [multiple shots of a nerdy guy's butt in his not-so-tighty-whities], but this one embraced it. That leads me to think that maybe the writers and producers don’t completely suck on this show. In fact, that they were willing to do that scene is the only reason that I’ve set my TiVo to record it again. After all, many pilots try way too hard.

You might think I’m crazy. I’m just a drop in the bucket. But in kowtowing more to the bottom line—the short-term point of view—than the quality of the shows on the channel—the long-term point of view—the CW convinced me that they’re not worth my time.

If nothing else, it makes me feel better, which is typically 90% of the point of protests anyway. Besides, everyone needs something to be visibly and viscerally angry about, if for no other reason than to vent pent-up aggressions that otherwise eat at the body. Certainly none of the underlying problems are solved, but sometimes, you gotta whomp on something to get over it.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to find Clarence Weidman’s number to have him do a little “business” for me.

Plus, FX has suddenly changed its mind about Rescue Me’s placement on the schedule. This weekend, I told you that the premiere date was set for Tuesday, June 12th. Well, as of today that premiere has been bumped back to Wednesday, June 13th and Rescue Me will air on Wednesdays at 10 pm through the summer.

Now, my TiVo will pick it up on either date, but for those of you who make time to watch shows in real time, you’ll want to make a note of this. [Understand that the "10 pm" is the ET/PT timeslot and adjust accordingly.]

Because all questions coming in to my old Season Three entry relate to this topic, I’m closing comments there.

Update, 9 Mar 2007: Amazon.com has a page up for Rescue Me: The Complete Third Season. There’s a place there to sign up for info as it’s known. Worth doing, I’d say.

Update, 26 Mar 2007: It’ll be out June 5, 2007, a week before Season 4 starts on FX.

Why the long wait? I think the fine folks at Apostle understand that we’ll slavishly buy the DVDs and watch each of the old episodes a couple of times before the next season re-airs, building all the anticipation that you need for a summertime-release show. If they put the DVDs out in time for, say, Christmas … well, you might not anticipate the summer show so much. While TiVo and time-shifting-via-DVR in general have made it far easier to stay current with shows—and kudos must go out to FX for re-airing each week’s episode multiple times before the next week hits—it’s just harder for a show that airs new episodes only in the summertime to get an audience, because of all the other things you could be doing on a summer evening besides planting your ass on the couch to watch Tommy, Garrity, Lou, and Franco, y’know?

Update, 6 Feb 2007: It’s my understanding that the show goes into production on Thu 8 Feb 2007.

Update, 9 May 2007: The premiere has moved back one day, as noted elsewhere on this site. And if you were looking for the season three DVD release date, it’s 5 Jun 2007. As TV-on-DVD releases typically happen on Tuesdays, it won’t move concomitantly with the timeslot change.

Of course, I lost the IP address I’d had since moving here in the process, but … no loss there, really. Now I must go downstairs and pick up my roommate’s network cable and bring it up here, as something tells me that he’d like to continue to have access.

I don’t expect it before March 2007, given when the first and second seasons have come out on DVD.

When I find out, I will edit this post to reflect that. If you have verifiable information, post it in the comments.

Update 30 Dec 2006: Given a mid-June premiere for Season Four, don’t expect the DVDs out before mid-May or so.

Heh. I emailed Jessica to remind them, and … for some reason, I had them as watchers when they aren’t. Oooops.

• Monday: How I Met Your Mother [my favorite new half-hour show from last season]
• Tuesday: Gilmore Girls, Veronica Mars [my favorite new hour-long show from last season], and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Also, I will finish watching this season of EUR^eKA, which ends Oct. 3, after Stephen hooked me on it during the Blogathon.
• Wednedsay: Nothing. Fine by me, as Wednesday nights are men’s ensemble and chancel choir practice at church, and that tends to run about three hours. I go straight from work, get out of there around 2100 or so, and am usually just dog tired. I will probably watch something from the night before [likely SVU] then.
• Thursday: My Name Is Earl [which I expect to have a sophomore slump] and Six Degrees, because I always try one new show every season for no real reason. [Read: this thing will either suck dead bunnies through a bent straw or fail to find an audience and be gone before 2007 dawns.]
• Friday: Law & Order and NUMB3RS are my only dueling-TiVos conflict resolution clash of the season, but I’m okay with that. I’m curious to see what will come of both shows: L&O seemed to struggle a whole lot last year, but they’re bringing the talented [and HOT] Milena Govich in as the junior detective under Jesse L. Martin’s Ed Green, which should be interested; and NUMB3RS needs to decide if they’re going to accept themselves as a mostly-episodic procedural for math nerds or try to become something more. As much as I like Dr. Joel Fleisch—er, Rob Morrow—I think that the rest of the cast is fairly blah. Peter MacNicol’s Dr. Larry Fleinhardt is very good, and there are times when I wish that Heuton and Falacci didn’t make this be about brothers and family so Fleinhardt could be Morrow’s foil. [Seriously, Rob Morrow plays the straight guy very, very well. Having David Krumholtz play another very straight guy ... whoa, too much seriousness.] Also, can we either write Navi Rawat’s Dr. Amita Ramanujan better or find a better actress to fill the geeky-love-interest-for-Charlie role? I haven’t decided if it’s the actress or the writing yet, but after more screen time last year, I’m thinking the former…
• Saturday: Nothing.
• Sunday: My beloved The Amazing Race. TAR, how I have longed for you all summer long.

What are you watching?

1. This is a 75-minute show. They went 15 minutes before showing the first highlight. WTF?! The only explanation that I have for it is to avoid showing highlights against the 4:00 p.m. ET starts that sometimes go past three hours. That said, if this is your intention, I as a viewer want to know that. 12 minutes in, I was wondering, “Is this just going to be another damn Bob Costas Olympic-style broadcast?” Then, on the teaser heading to the break, they discussed that they’d go to highlights next. Almost too late for me: however, I’d TiVo’d the thing, so I was ready to bail.
2. The one good thing about the first segment: they did an around-the-league with their on-site reporters bringing you the top news. It had just enough football to keep you mildly interested.
3. The group seemed relaxed and together, but almost too much so for a first show. Any show like this—especially one where the cast sits on leather chairs out from behind desks and essentially is inviting you into their living room—needs to develop its camraderie slowly. This felt like walking into a locker room full of veteran players: intimidating, awkward, and a little off-putting. I’m not asking for stilted, but I am asking for slow development.
4. Sterling Sharpe’s honed repartee didn’t fit in so well with Cris Collinsworth and Jerome Bettis as it did with Steve Young, Tom Jackson, and Michael Irvin. In fact, I felt at times like Sharpe was expecting Costas to pull a Chris Berman on him, which … say what you will about Costas, but he doesn’t have the big man bombast that Berman has. [That's mostly a good thing.] Costas, the professional TV guy, is purely there to guide the broadcast and keep things going.
5. That said, do we really even need Costas? Collinsworth is such a polished TV guy that you could probably get him to play the gig pretty straight and have him lead the coverage. Now, I’m not one of these guys that says that I want only players doing commentary—I think outsiders can pick up on things that players don’t—but … when I think Costas, I think baseball and Olympics.

If you’ve read all that and feel that I’m disappointed in the offering, you’d be right. Even the highlights were just … mediocre. I preferred what NFL Primetime brought to the game: the fast-paced music, the feeling of drama, etc. ESPN had all the cues in the broadcast—done on the fly by people who were just that good—that let you know to start paying attention again if you’d been distracted by something else going on in the room. I never got that feeling with Football Night in America; it never really drew me back in.

I’m going to sample ESPN’s Monday night offering and see which I like; I’m fine with waiting a day for a pre-packaged highlight show. Frankly, I’m curious to see how stunning ESPN can make theirs with a day to do film work and cutdowns on timing.

But enough about Season Three: so that everyone who comes here for Rescue Me news knows, our beloved show will indeed get a fourth season.

Some fires burn too brightly. And some never really get past the embers stage. TWoP readers didn’t really take to the tale of a firefighter who was often drunk, irresponsible, sexist, racist, and homophobic, and therefore, it’s time to turn the hose on Rescue Me.

– TWoP Show Status page

I personally think that Rescue Me is as up-front and visceral as it is in order to present some social commentary in there. Evidently they disagree.

The only issue with doing this is that I either have to watch the episode twice or watch it once and pause every so often to write a few sentences. But I hope that my contributions to TV IV add value. [Stephen is either looking at the screen and wishing that he had the time do to this or wondering what he has to do to snap me out of this.]

Denis Leary’s effdup firefighters series Rescue Me, the best drama on television according to True TV, returns for Season 3 on FX May 30; the Season 2 DVD comes out May 9 for you tube-phobes who watch only discs so you can trick yourself into thinking you’re watching a film. When it comes to adult shows made for adults, not prissy parental-watchdog groups (yeah, alert the Parents Television Council), Rescue Me can’t be beat.

I concur. In honor of the release of the DVD, I have a surprise that I’ll announce here at a later date.

Thanks again, Janell!

Either way, it looks like the goodness that is Rescue Me will be out for all to see on DVD soon!