Because I want to write for television, but do not yet actually have a job doing so, I watch an inordinate amount of it. I try to catch every new pilot and with most series that is where it ends. There are usually several series a year that I watch/study. The following is a fairly complete listing with some attempts at justification.
With the exception of The Contender last year I don’t watch ANY of the reality shows. They all seem to be about showcasing the ugliest aspects of humanity… or they are really big karaoke contests. Either way I can’t be bothered.
The Shows I Watch/Study:
Arrested Development
- A funny sitcom? I genuinely can’t remember the last time.
My Name is Earl
- A second funny sitcom? With an interesting premise? Unprecedented.
Prison Break
-An interesting concept and it will be a trick to keep it interesting once they break out. Now if it turns out that they are chasing a one armed man…
House
-The writing team delivers the pain and the funny damn near as well as the Joss teams did. Hugh Laurie is the best actor on television right now and was robbed of the Emmy.
Surface
-I am a genre guy so I watch this show… it is also interesting to see how it differs from Threshold and Invasion.
Threshold
-I’m a genre guy and so this is a show I watch… I also enjoy seeing how similar it is to Surface and Invasion.
Invasion
-I watch this series because I enjoy genre… it also intrigues me how they almost seem to carry themes across from Threshold and Surface.
Bones
-It isn’t bad but I may drop it. The only procedural that really caught my attention was ‘The Inside’ and so of course they cancelled it. Most bore me to tears.
The Night Stalker
-The production values are higher than Supernatural and the acting is good… but it just isn’t as engaging. It doesn’t help that Kolchak comes across as a very passive protagonist and barely seems there. If I had been handed this, I would have made him a radio talk show host who is constantly warning people about the things he finds and is dismissed by everyone as a crank. He’d still be investigating the occult but then he would be trying his best to get the word out. As it is, he investigates the supernatural and then chats to himself about it.
Supernatural
-I like it. There are slips and stumbles in the logic and the production values aren’t up there with The Night Stalker… but I want to write for this show. I’d like to try and fix The Night Stalker but I would just like to join the writing room for this show.
Smallville
-The closest thing to a Joss Whedon show right now and I would love to write for Millar and Gough. The mythic arc right along with the personal is good stuff. I figure the time is getting right for bringing in some suits and the Green Lantern is just the man to do it. Admittedly the acting left something to be desired in the first couple of years but Tom Welling, Kristen Kreuk, and Allison Mack have all grown in skill and Erica Durance is a better Lois Lane than Brian Singer’s Kate Bosworth… but then Tom Welling is far more Superman than the slightly slimy soap stud Brandon Routh. Right from the start, Michael Rosenbaum and John Glover where incredible as the Luthors. They do occasionally put out an episode that… well lets just say that the latest (Oct. 27 – Thirst) could have been lifted from the Charmed script pile. I expect more from Steve DeKnight.
Alias
-It is more momentum than anything else that keeps me watching this show. They tend to stretch the bounds of believability and coincidence far more than I would like. And if one more person comes back from the dead I will stop watching this show. Yeah, I’m talking to you Mr. Vaughn.
Lost
-I still like this show even though it seems to be weighed down by the effort to keep pulling a story out of their butt at the last minute.
The Simpsons
-Heading towards 400 episodes and still makes me chuckle. Not so fresh but still worth watching.
Family Guy
-There is some rudeness here and I like that the humour can be crude and subtle at the same time.
American Dad
-A lot of crude and not so much the subtle… the pilot was horrible but I caught a later episode and it was hilarious and so I’ve gone back to watching it.
Veronica Mars
-Nancy Drew with a stun gun… and every bit as fun as that sounds.
Rome
-The best new series so far this year and shows how a period piece should be done. They didn’t try and transplant this weeks social patterns on a very different era, they took the times that were and found the people who could have been there. This is a show where the protagonists have just returned from helping the republic of Rome subjugate a foreign land. One of them comes back with a collection of slaves to sell to get a business started while the other is traveling with a slave girl he stole from the men who enslaved her. The times were different and the show rolls with that… these are the good guys despite doing things that today would brand them as the unmitigated villains. This makes it a far more interesting show than ABC’s very tepid Empire.
Guilty Pleasures:
Las Vegas
-It’s light, it’s fun and the ladies are pretty… hey, I don’t have to justify myself!.
The O.C.
-More guilt than pleasure this year and I may drop it. The Cohen banter made this geek sit up and notice but I haven’t been missing it while Fox strangles it with baseball preemptions.
The good (or at least watchable) shows that I don’t watch:
24
-The first season was fresh and interesting… the second season felt like a rerun of the first and so I haven’t gone back to it. It might be interesting to get the DVD set and do a marathon session.
Gilmore Girls
-The writing on this show is top notch but the premise and execution doesn’t appeal to me. This is not a negative evaluation, a damn fine show… just not for me.
Criminal Minds
-I’ve watched a few episodes and they have a good cast and writers… but procedurals just aren’t my thing.
Looking Forward to:
The Unit
- David Mamet as the creator and executive producer? The Untouchables was a few years back but I’m hoping he rises above the procedural quagmire. Shawn Ryan is collaborating with him on this and The Shield was hard hitting work so I will definitely give this a try.
The “Watch this or get bamboo slivers under the fingernails? Let me think about it for a minute.” award goes to -
Commander in Chief
-I honestly tried to watch this. I sat through the pilots for Joey, Young Blades and Stacked… you learn from the bad as well as the good. But I couldn’t sit through this show. Every character dripped with smug self righteous arrogance and I just couldn’t keep watching it.

Fifteen plus hours is a lot of television but it is job preparation as well as entertainment. At least it’s dropping down from the twenty-five plus hours per week that it is for the start of pilot season. Try doing that while also working ninety to a hundred hours a week.
The only way that I can keep up on all the new shows is with two satellite receivers saving them to the hard drives. The networks may hate me skipping the commercials but if that means I can save five hours out of the typical week then I am going to skip the damn commercials. I buy everything right down to my shampoo based on reviews and testing anyway so the advertising dollar is completely wasted on me.

Steve DeKnight is usually a fine writer but I don’t know what he was thinking with this one… maybe they were getting behind and he had to recycle that spec script he did for ‘Charmed’ a few years back? A fair bit of this actually made me wince and I’m thinking that it might just be Steve working through some Buffy/Lana fantasy he’s been holding onto. That said, Ms. Kreuk certainly does look… uhm… okay… in leather. But come on, how many times can they have Lana go bad – be "cured" – and then forget everything she did and learned while bad? Now let us imagine, gentle reader, how would it play out if she remembers every single moment and just doesn’t know how to deal with it? She is tempted by the dark side but knows that Clark would never follow her there? Work with me people, Clark ain’t the only one who can be keeping secrets.
Millar and Gough have shown that they are not slaves to the comic canon so let’s see Lana Lang go bad and stay bad. This would give Superman an interesting dynamic if his worst enemies turn out to be a man he once considered his best friend and the woman who was his first love? And if Lex still misses the only friend he ever had and Lana still loves him… that there is drama gold.
I’m thinking about a spec for Smallville that brings in Hal Gordon with an origin of the Green Lantern episode and would like to integrate the start of Lana letting the bad girl out. I probably shouldn’t since it is bad form to mess with the main characters in a spec script and it has a tendency to shove it over into the fan fic slushpile. Besides, even with its ratings going up, I fear that this might be the last year for Smallville. We can only hope that the ratings stay up and the network will see that, other than Supernatural, the rest of their lineup is getting smacked around by the ratings. If it does get canceled, any Smallville spec would only be good for another year at most so it would be silly for me to spec this show.