An immediate benefit of my decision to time-shift much of the TV that I watch to the weekend is that I took time I’d have otherwise spent watching TV to re-wire my home network, moving the cable modem upstairs and finally re-connecting my wireless router [rather than the wired router I've used for the past month or two] to the network. It took a little doing—I had to call in to Knology to register a new MAC address, because even cloning what was on the old router wasn’t working, and I started a second call and had just gotten the tech support rep on the line when VOILA! it came online—but now I’m back up and running.

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.

No, I don’t know when it will come out.

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.

Some might find it a bit silly to be giddy about some TV show starting up, but man … The Amazing Race has consistently been one of the most enjoyable shows I’ve watched over the last few years. [I'm sorry, did you say something about a family season? What do I think of that? I'm convinced that it never existed.] Not only is it enjoyable, but it provides discussion fodder for me with my brother and his wife, the Kings, and Kari and Mike. Sadly, the Kings and I have not been able to make any other local converts.
Heh. I emailed Jessica to remind them, and … for some reason, I had them as watchers when they aren’t. Oooops.

Thanks to the beauty of TVIV’s Fall 2006 (USA) grid [and to Mark for pointing it out to me], I have my TiVos queued up for my fall TV viewing:

• 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?

Here are random thoughts that I had while watching NBC’s new Football Night in America, their Sunday-night highlights-and-commentary show that precedes their Sunday night game:

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.

So yes, my little entry on Season Three of Rescue Me made it a whole season without spoilers being posted in the comments, even after the finale on Tuesday. [My feelings on that? They largely mirror Jonathan Toomey's [warning: there be spoilers!]: not enough resolution, other than the obvious ones you’d expect. They hit the three main A-lines and sorta left the B-lines askew. Unlike Toomey, however, I want Tommy and Janet together. Yes, that might make the show jump the shark, but honestly … this show probably doesn’t have 100 episodes in it without major cast overhauls.]

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.

I’m sad to read that the wonderful Television Without Pity has dropped their coverage of Rescue Me:

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.

As the summer has arrived, the only new shows I’ll be watching on TV are Rescue Me and Big Brother 7. As I’m almost done with my quest to watch every Law & Order episode ever—I’ve got only four left that I can’t confirm I’ve watched, and I’m 90% sure I’ve seen three of them—I’m turning my attention to Cheers, a staple of my childhood. Mind you, I was far too young to pick up on any of the sexual innuendo at the time, but I have an appreciation for it now. Because I’m a nerd, I’m tracking it, but I’m also taking a little time to write up a brief recap and review each episode on the TV IV. My first attempt is for Season Two’s “Personal Business”.

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.]

Janell left a comment letting me know that she’d spotted a start date of Season Three of Rescue Me of 30 May 2006. I have confirmed it, thanks to, of all sources, the Salt Lake City Weekly:

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!

Lots of folks have been asking in the comments section of my Rescue Me Season Three News entry when the second season of Rescue Me would be coming out on DVD. Prompted by a comment from Mike, I went and did some looking: Rescue Me - The Complete Second Season shows up on Amazon with a release date of 9 May 2006. Mike says he hears it’s coming out a week earlier; I’ve emailed him with a request to let me know his source.

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

PVRBlog has links to the buzz surrounding the HD-capable Series3 TiVo floating around at the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show.

The biggest features are that Series 3 will have dual tuners and be CableCARD and HDTV ready! The dual tuner thing should be qualified though, because it will actually have 6(!) tuners. It will have 2 cable tuners, 2 ATSC tuners (for high def over the air) and 2 regular old NTSC tuners. But it will only be able to record two programs at once, according to a sign at the booth (warning 900k picture).

Six tuners. Holy crap, I just peed myself.

Me, I’m going to get one, for sure. All my friends still trudging along with Series 1 boxes, take note …

I watch my server logs: I know that a lot of Googlers get here wondering about FX’s Rescue Me, a show that I really, really happen to love. Lately, folks seem to wonder: “When is the new season of Rescue Me going to start?” Best as I can tell, we can expect that sometime in the second quarter of 2006—I’d bet on May.

FX recently picked up Rescue Me for a third season, ordering 13 episodes. Production of season three begins early next year and will debut in the second quarter of 2006.

– Futon Critic

The pickup comes despite the fact that ratings for the show, which stars Denis Leary as a damaged New York firefighter, have been flat this season. Production on the new batch of 13 episodes is scheduled to begin early next year, with a premiere date targeted for spring or early summer.

“Once again, Denis and [co-creator Peter Tolan] have delivered a brilliant season,” says John Landgraf, president and general manager of FX. “They continue to create wholly original storylines which pull off the difficult task of blending riveting drama with raucous comedy. We’re extremely proud of this show, which is one of the very best television has to offer.”

– Zap2It

As for the odds of [Gavin sister] Maggie coming back next season, [Tatum] O’Neal says, “I think they’re pretty good. They’ve already told me they’ve written me in. Leary told me, ‘You want to work a day a week for six months, Tate?’ ‘Sure! It’s in New York. My kids are in school. No problem.’ So that’s great.”

– Zap2It

I think having Tatum O’Neal as a part of the cast next year would be great. I personally can’t wait for Season Three—I’m expecting that it’ll show up sometime in May or June.

Stephen called me earlier today, having forgotten to set TiVo to record the Duke game. “If you can get the game, I’ll just come over and we can watch it together.” Worked for me. He came over around eight tonight, and we watched the game. Afterwards, I was curious to see what TiVo was recording, and I saw it … Extreme Dodgeball.

“I have to see how bad this is.”

“Sure, why not?”

We proceeded to watch it, and it was so bad, it was good, in that train wreck kind of way that has me watching really awful shows like The Real World and Elimidate. [Ain't gon' lie.] It got to the point that we were actually semi-interested. The only problem was the fact that the announcers didn’t take it seriously enough for the mockery quotient to be really high. [Think of the seriousness of the Celebrity Death Match announcers, and you've got it---mock seriousness is what this needs.]

We definitely have some viewing material for the next guys’ gathering—come on, this is so bad that it’s good—and we’re now wondering if Phoenix has a team that Sean could attempt to join.

Viva la Breadtruck!

HOW-TO on getting DVD content onto your Series2 TiVo.

[HT to Lifehacker.]

I wandered downstairs this morning for a few things, one of which was a necessary cleanout of stuff I’d pulled off the downstairs TiVo. I was happy to find that it is now running TiVo OS 7.2. I just forced a call home with the one here in the loft, but … no dice. I figure it’ll be running 7.2 soon enough.