Firstly, I’m still alive, and this blog does exist.
Secondly, I haven’t paid enough attention to TV in recent… months? Years? Whatever. New season means time to pick a few shows and see how they do.
Firstly, House. I’ve been out of the House loop for a few seasons now, but apparently House and Cuddy are now official. Or, trying to be at least. This, of course, means that the series is doomed. If Jump The Shark was still an active site (and not a property sold off to tvguide.com and made into a blog), I’d tell you that “They Did It” is one of those primary shark jumping moments. But instead, I’ll just have to ask you to take my word for it since the Wayback Machine didn’t index jumptheshark.com, which is a grave injustice. BUT I’M GETTING OFF TRACK HERE. House and Cuddy are now doing it, and Olivia Wilde and Peter Jacobsen are now officially part of the main cast (maybe they were last season, but I wouldn’t know.) It was getting kinda weird seeing these 2 in every episode (back when I watched regularly) and still not see their names in the credits (but see them as “guest starring.”)
The season premiere was a nice ease-in to what I can expect this season; it basically looks like Huddy relationship drama in addition to standard House medical drama. I guess I can live with this. As long as it stays mostly about the medicine and the patients and House, I’m ok with it. As soon as the relationship starts dominating the plot, the show moves into Grey’s Anatomy territory, and since I have absolutely no interest in Grey’s Anatomy, I certainly hope House doesn’t become it. (Full disclosure: I did watch the first 2 seasons of Grey’s Anatomy way-back-when, but that was only because of a girl I knew in college. We shall not speak of this again.) I’ll be watching next week.
At 10, I flipped to NBC to see what The Event was going to be like. Based on its advertising, I made the guess that they were going for a Lost-like show. “Oooo, there’s this EVENT! But it’s not this, this or this… WHAT IS THE EVENT????!!!” So the show starts, and it looks like shit is going down. People are freaking the fuck out because a passenger aircraft is on a collision course for the President’s press conference in Miami, Florida. (He’s on retreat of course. He’s the president after all.) Then we get a flashback. Then we flash FURTHER back. Then we get back to the action in present time. Then a commercial. Then we see the action from another perspective. Then ANOTHER FLASHBACK, THEN I TOOK A NAP. By the time 9:55 rolled around, I was like “ok, I’ve sat through enough exposition and title cards, can the damn plane just crash?”
And then it didn’t. The plane just disappeared in a flash of light. For those that remember The 4400 (all 3 of you), if you recall the flash of light that The 4400 came back in? Yeah, it looked exactly like that. Except this made a plane (and all its passengers) disappear into what I can only imagine is another dimension, or a sound stage in Burbank. Definitely one of the two. The previews then try to hint as to what just happened, who has what answers, etc, but to be perfectly honest, there was 10 minutes of good television, 12 minutes of commercials, and the rest was very boring backstory. See, Lost did it right. Their first episode was almost all present-day action. There was some flashbacks in episode 1, but it directly related to what was going on at the time. If Lost tried to fit in everyone’s backstory as soon as it could, I would’ve gotten bored really quick. The backstory in The Event seemed to take priority over the action in the present, which is unfortunate because the backstory was really, really boring.
For instance: the Sean Walker story: dude wants to propose to his girlfriend, and through a series of unfortunate events, doesn’t get to, and then his girlfriend disappears and he’s stranded on a cruise ship… that summary took about 20 minutes of time, most of it me saying to myself “this is incredibly boring. Also, I’m talking to myself about how a TV show sucks. I’m pretty sure this is why I’m single. Do I have any ice cream in the freezer?” The president’s story was interesting, if only because presidential and government secrecy usually works for dramas (whereas “oh, he didn’t get to pop the question! awwwwww…” does not work.)
I may watch this next week, but I’ll probably flip to the Hawaii Five-O remake. We shall see.
P.S. This is the most amount of words I’ve written about anything in a long time. If this is terribly uninteresting… well… then I guess nothing’s changed then… eh? EH? :’(