Let's see, in no particular order:

Heroes -- getting dumber every day. Damn near "midichlorians" levels of dumb.

Dollhouse -- just the moment after it was canceled, it has become beyond awesome. Damn you Fox!

BSG spin-off Caprica -- oy vey! I bought the direct-to-DVD pilot and was sorely disappointed in ways that would require serious spoilers. Suffice to say that the whole plot revolved around the most ridiculous series of MacGuffin-like ideas. Well, now it seems that SyFy has picked it up as a series. Ron Moore started off BSG so well, then it descended deep into the bowels of WTF and Caprica is just more WTF piled on top.

Chuck -- so far, it's still working for me. They went to great story-writing lengths to bring everybody back to the Buy More, but it works. The B-story elements are as compelling as ever. I'm glad that Chuck didn't just become a super-badass, despite his new abilities.

FlashForward -- coming back soon. I'll keep watching. Not deeply enthusiastic, but maybe they actually know where they're going, unlike, say...

V -- also coming back soon. I'll let the TiVo keep grabbing it but I won't watch it for a while. Somebody please wake me up if it gets interesting.

Burn Notice -- new season starting soon. I kinda like this one, but I'm not really sure why.

Top Gear -- at least something is still brilliant. (I also downloaded some TG:Australia, and haven't been impressed at all.)


Is there some genius TV that I'm missing?

Fringe can be very good but you can't be picky about the "science" it tries to pretend is real.

Bones it has a few bad episodes but the overall story has been very good.

Supernatural seems like it is just a monster of the week show but it has one of the best story arcs on TV.

Friday Night Lights a really excellent drama about a small Texas football town.

Castle is about a writer who decides to shadow a homicide detective as inspiration for his next book.

White Collar has been amazing and the second half of season one starts tonight.

Dude, way to break the naming convention of these TV threads Just joking :p


Um...because it's super awesome? Burn Notice is probably in my top 5 shows on TV.

Dollhouse: I disagree with you. Dollhouse has been fantastic since around episode 7. The first six eps were garbage, nearly everything afterwards has been brilliant.

Chuck: I agree, I find it interesting how they're limiting his abilities. I'm sure, though, that they'll make the key to unlocking them be something like Chuck's innate goodness or something like that. It's getting a little ridiculous, however, to see how long they can stretch the will they won't they thing, though.

Heroes: ready for something hilarious? It seems like everyone who once loved this show and defended it to me is now joining me in thinking it sucks. The funny part? I think this is the strongest season by far. It still has a ton of the same issues it always had, but at least this season there's some freaking continuity to the story. But thing has remained the same: I still don't find Hayden Panettiere attractive.

As for the other stuff I watch, wow, just too much to name. But I'm happy the season has started up again. The only reason I don't like it is that over the winter my wife was suddenly interested in watching all of Buffy and Angel, and now there are fewer viewing hours in the week to do that We're up to season 5 of Buffy and season 2 of Angel, though, so she's hooked enough to keep going.


Anyway, back to the topic at hand. Off the top of my head, I will be watching the following shows airing this season:

Chuck
Castle
Dollhouse
Heroes
Big Bang Theory
Two and a Half Men (my wife watches it, and I find it pretty funny)
House
Bones
Fringe
Community
Parks and Recreation
The Office
30 Rock
Supernatural (last season of one of my top 2 currently airing shows)
Lost (last season of the other of my top 2 )
Numb3rs
Psych
Burn Notice
Medium
Ghost Whisperer (the first 3 seasons, I'm shocked to admit, were really good - the last two have been awful)
Smallville

That's all I can remember at the moment. Have I mentioned I watch a lot of TV? And that's just the shows on this winter/spring. And it doesn't include shows like:

This Old House
Dream House
Pardon the Interruption
Mythbusters
Various episodes of cooking shows
Various other stuff like football games and live events like the Oscars.

The above is why I don't think ditching FIOS TV and going with iTunes for TV would work for someone like me

Better Off Ted - one I've got into recently

The IT Crowd - only has short 6 episode seasons though

And a few repeated from above:

Mythbusters - although my interest is waning a little bit.

30 Rock - Still going strong in it's fourth season. Love the GE references

Top Gear UK - As an Australian I only lasted about 2 episodes on the Australian version. Maybe I should have tried for longer, but it seemed to try way too hard to be like the UK version.

House

Flashfoward - waiting for it to restart although wouldn't be surprised if it didn't make it far

It did get better during the first season, the last eps were pretty good. I haven't seen any of the second season though, I will watch them sometime. Nine Network has the rights from now on, the presenters aren't confirmed but I'm sure they will be throwing money at it.

Speaking of which.. CTV aired all six episodes over New Years, and I just finished re-watching episodes II & III late last night.

Man the original three were so much better than the final(?) three!

-ml

I can't agree I'm afraid, it seems to be to have become a confused, jumbled mess. I'm having trouble following the plot.

No doubt partly caused by panicking about the likelihood of being cancelled and rushing to cram stuff in.

Good.. perhaps I'll watch the rest of them someday, then. All of the episodes of seasons one and two are in the Myth box here.

Cheers

I still love Lie to Me. I also watched the premiere of Human Target, it seems like it will be OK but nothing special.

There are a few odd shows that I catch that seem like they could be cool. Things like Ultimate Factories or World's Deadliest Aircraft. Occasionally, Modern Marvels has an interesting topic.

Human Target was watchable but I worry for subsequent episodes in terms of VFX and set construction. The pilot, which may have had a higher budget than future episodes already looked a little cheap and dated in some scenes. Apart from that, this is the first show in a long time that I can link directly to the action shows of the 80's like the A-Team and MacGuyver. It doesn't necessarily have the schtick of those shows, but something about Human Target just makes me feel like I'm watching a blast from the past.

It's watchable, but not high on my list of favorites (which is quite small anyway). I'm not sure it's going to last.

I think Flash forward is going to get cancelled sooner rather than later along with V. Taking them off the air for so long was a huge nail in their coffins since I don't believe they had yet built critical mass in terms of audience/attention. The networks have also not been promoting them at all while they've been off. In contrast, ABC has done quite a bit of promotion for Lost's last season.

Heroes is near terrible. But I still watch it for some inexplicable reason. It's just shit writing on top of more shit writing. Little to no continuity or characterization and definitely absolutely no character development over the course of the whole series. Seems like every week there is just more mundane crap. It just isn't believable that for a huge number of people with these powers to waste so much time just sitting around drinking coffee and talking about the weather (essentially the main plot of every episode).

I just started watching the new season of 24 and it's also watchable but sometimes painful in its obvious plot devices. I wish they would abandon the 24-hour concept and bullshit "real-time" tag. It's clearly not anything remotely close to real-time like the first season was. A good reboot could be had with 24x24 where the season took place over 24 days with one day per episode. There are also way (way!) too many story lines going at the same time. One of the same things that made the Star Wars prequels absolutely crap.

Cable/premium still rules and Dexter, True Blood and Californication were the highlights of the season. Weeds was pretty good and I'm currently watching Men of a Certain Age which is growing on me - Ray Romano's new show, which is as far from his previous as you can imagine (I didn't like his sitcom).

Best comedy on network right now comes from ABC IMO. Cougar Town and Modern Family. I still very much like the Office and Parks and Rec. 30 Rock looks good but I'll have to watch it from the start since I skipped it when it originally premiered.

As predicted, the Jay Leno show is a total and complete failure and NBC is deep in the shit because of it. Seriously, who didn't see this train-wreck coming? Apparently the executive team at NBC. The same tards responsible for killing some good programming and giving the boot to Medium, which is still doing quite well (on CBS), IMO.

Scrubs (also ABC) rebooted this year which I found difficult to get into. I was lamenting the loss of Zack Braff the lead, but the current rebooted format works better without him there. I still prefer the old format however. Another comedy still doing very well is How I Met Your Mother, though I wish they'd lose the laugh track.

House is still one of my favorite shows along with Fringe, which unfortunately has had just a few too many close-calls with X-Files episodes (storylines/format ) for my liking. I can't for the life of me understand how NBC has kept Chuck alive. Even the commercials/previews for it look dull and make me want to change the channel.

I'm waaaaay behind on a lot of stuff, but I've mostly been keeping up with the sitcoms.

So, on that front, I'd say that you should definitely be watching 30 Rock, Community, and Better Off Ted.

I think we're probably all familiar with 30 Rock, so I won't say anything about it beyond the fact that its quality has not fallen off.

Better Off Ted is basically yet another Dilbert/Office Space type thing, but it's really well done and quite funny. It centers on the life of Ted, a project manager at "Veridian Dynamics", a multinational conglomerate that goes from making consumer products to fulfilling defense contracts. The other main characters are two dweebish scientists, a naïve QA person, and a company-obsessed senior manager. It also frequently features fake ads for Veridian Dynamics, that "unintentionally" demonstrate how they treat people like consumable resources. ABC is currently running two episodes every Friday, so smart money is on them canceling it pretty soon.

Community is about a lawyer who has returned to community college after he was disbarred when his law degree from Columbia University was discovered to be a degree from a Colombia university. The rest of the cast is his Spanish class study group, featuring an Asperger-ish savant, an incompetent yet successful entrepreneur of retiree age, a former high-school football star, a middle-aged recent divorcee, a high-school overachiever who failed to graduate with her class after she became addicted to Ritalin, and a (less well defined) stereotypically liberal feminist young woman, plus their megalomaniacal Spanish teacher, Señor Chang, who happens to be Chinese, and the dean of the college, who is delusional about the quality of his school.

On the surface, it sounds like a generic ensemble comedy, but there's a lot of fairly subtle breaking-the-fourth-wall humor, which I tend to enjoy, and they actually are spending a good amount of time exploring all of the characters in the study group. It's a really good show. It won't make a dime.

Oh. My. God.

One of my (soon to be former) friends convinced me to watch that show. I got through about 2.5 episodes before I was pretty sure I was on the verge of killing myself. Not a single laugh in the entire 50 minutes or so. Truly awful.

It's one of the highest rated new comedies, though, so that makes sense. People will watch anything as long as it doesn't make them think.

Wow, I actually find that surprising. Most US audiences like things like that Charlie Sheen show and of course the aforementioned Ray Romano sitcom.



You know you're talking about sitcoms right? I don't know of any sitcom that makes one think. The ones you mentioned previously included.

Better Off Ted is another one I missed the first season of so I won't watch any new episodes until I've had a chance to see the first ones.

TV seems to be even more subjective today than I ever remember it in the past. Not sure if it's the ability to record and place shift or what. But I don't know any 2 people that like mostly the same group of shows. And that includes everyone. Family, friends, neighbors and the lot here on the board. There's a ton of disparity even when a couple of shows do overlap.

You mean divorced middle-aged people with sons making lame sex jokes?

No, I mean a slice so wide of the population that it encompasses all age groups and genders. Damn, what's the name of that show anyway? I honestly can't remember. Something about Two Men. I'd have to look it up.

Oh, speaking of no-laughs however... That's what I got when I watched the pilot for the latest Kelsey Grammer show - I'm assuming it's been cancelled already though since I haven't seen any promotion for it.

Really with the crowd here on Dollhouse, Supernatural and Flashforward

also enjoying Being Human and loved True Blood (SWMBO endued up getting all 10 books for Christmas)

Aside from that, Mythbusters and Ice Road Truckers are good late night drunk watching, and for serious brain dead TV - One Way Out, which purports to be an escape artist show, but degenerates amusingly into a man getting hurt a lot

I no longer watch television.

This is an unusual state of affairs coming from someone who three months ago was watching an average of 30-40 hours a week. (Retired, remember?) And you know what? It is incredibly liberating to have severed the ties that kept me glued to that idiot box.

Why this change of heart?

TiVo does not work in Mexico, other than in Mexico City. And after 10 years of watching TiVo, "television" (defined by having to search out the few grains of wheat among the bushels of chaff in 200+ cable channels, those grains constantly interrupted by commercials) is absolutely and totally unwatchable.

Add to that the fact that only about a half dozen of those channels are in English (it is disquieting to see Mythbusters overdubbed in español) and the only reason that the TV set is even in the house is my DVD player. (At the moment I am just starting season three of Buffy, spending about 45 minutes a day at it.)

I am on a one-month free trial of the local cable company's premium service, and in another 10 days or so I will give their cable box back to them and keep only the basic non-HD service which I need for my internet connection. (I am paying top dollar for the fastest possible internet, and my download speed is less than one-third of what I had in California.) That basic service includes exactly ONE English language channel: CNN News. I've never watched CNN before, is it always so badly programmed? There has been nothing but 24-hour continuous coverage of the Haiti earthquake since it happened, and after the first hour or so all they have done is repeat what they already said. I suspect that there may have been other newsworthy events in the past week, but I have no way of finding out.

So, I will continue to watch this thread, but my interest will be purely academic.

tanstaafl.

These threads are always helpful for me to know what I'll be picking up on DVD a few years down the road. I've been PVR/subscription free for nearly 4 years, and it's nice to be able to watch as much or as little of a show as I want in one sitting. The one exception I made was for Battlestar Galactica, but beyond that, shows like Lost are still on my "waiting for it to end" list before I pick it up.

I'm not paying any recurring fees for TV right now and I'm loving it. The PVR is working overtime as everything network is now recorded in HD (OTA).

I guess I really could do that myself. I watch far fewer cable shows than stuff I could get OTA. But I don't think the Series 3 Tivo can do dual tuner OTA, can it?


Bitt, I totally agree about Community. I think it's hilarious and very clever. I particularly like the episode enders over the credits with Troy and Abed. I just found out that the guy who plays Troy wrote for 30 Rock, so that gives me more respect for him, as I think that show has some of the best comedy writing on TV.

I'm thrilled to see that there are several people on here who like Supernatural. That show has always been FAR better than it ought to be, and never gets any publicity at all (and, sadly, the ratings have been so low I'm stunned it's still on the air). I had zero expectations going into it, based on every single person involved having done stuff I hated: Jensen Ackles was awful on Smallville, Jared Padelecki was on Gilmore Girls and I wasn't a fan, and McG...well...he's friggin' McG need I say more?

But the show surprised me like none other that I can think of. It's the best horror that primetime networks have ever produced, the relationship between the two brothers drives the show, and the entire production and story writing are all top notch. And to top it all off, I'm amazed at how hilarious the show can get. Every season there are 2 or 3 episodes that are flat out hysterical, mostly playing off previous events and characters in the show.

For those of you in this thread who wait until shows have run their course, definitely check this one out soon. All signs point to this being the last season, mostly because they've kicked the story up to the highest notch it can logically go to. From what I've heard, the actors have contracts that go through next season, but they probably won't go past this one.


While I'm at it, if it's finished shows on DVD that you're after, here's my favorites, pretty much in my order of preference:

6- Arrested Development [sitcoms don't make you think, Bruno? you really have to pay attention when you watch this one if you want to get all the phenomenally good jokes and season-old call-backs]
5- Freaks & Geeks [this show is so unbelievably great it pains me to put this so far down the list]
4- Veronica Mars [the third season wasn't great, but the first couple are fantastic - best father-daughter relationship on TV I've ever seen (though sadly you don't see that many)]
3- Buffy/Angel/Firefly [three-way tie]
2- Carnivale [easily the best cinematography of any show I've ever seen on TV (also the best intro) - extremely slow to develop but worth every minute]
1- Avatar: The Last Airbender [the true Avatar - it's a Nick cartoon, but DO NOT let that stop you - try to get at least 6 episodes in]

Seriously though, check out Avatar. It starts out a bit too childish, but after that I think the show creators found their footing and got full control of the show, and it's simply wonderful. I also give them credit for setting out with an episode number limit. They wanted to make a three-season epic story, and succeeded on every level. The heart of the show, though, lies in its character development and warmth of spirit. The show just makes me happy, and I love spending time with those characters. That's what has made me watch it three times through.

Yeah, they're, for some reason, making a live-action movie of Avatar: The Last Airbender, which they now can't call "Avatar", so it's just "The Last Airbender". I have no notion that it will be any good, though.

Huh. I didn't notice until just now that it's "written" and directed by M. Night Shama-lama-ding-dong. Maybe it will be good. (He's already got the story, and he's an excellent director, despite the story flaws in his last several movies.)

I agree on your above list. I would also add The Wire, Babylon 5, Farscape and Rome.

I do, too! They're the perfect 21st-century Odd Couple.

Biblioteca

For sure, they hurried up the big story arc so we could see that there was something more than the whore-du-jour going on. Now, if they'd only dropped season 1 and started the show at season 2, they probably would have gotten much farther down the road.

(In hindsight, it's amazing that Babylon 5 survived its first season to actually get rolling. B5 didn't really hit its stride until the third season, and then there was the hurry-up-and-finish of season 4, followed by the "well, I guess we can keep going" of season 5. Sigh.)

That's definitely a show I will check out. Again, something I didn't catch right from the start, but liked what I saw.

I don't call quickly picking up in-jokes or references "thinking" though. A lot of people will miss them, but for the most part there's not much thinking involved to picking them up and "getting" them. No more than driving straight down the freeway, it's almost all instinct.

Yes, as far as I know, it CAN record dual tuner OTA. It's got four tuners: Two cable and two OTA, so you can record a mix of any two programs (cable or OTA) at once.

https://www3.tivo.com/store/boxes.do?Wt.ac=shophome_whichDvr_boxeslist_img#tab_dvrquestions

That is correct.

Btw.. did you ever configure an auto comm-skip add-on into that SageTV system of yours? Curious.

Cheers

Actually I haven't. I've been avoiding playing with a number of add-ons in fact, even though the machine has enough CPU to handle it all. I'm going to look at it again once Sage release their next update, version 7. At least once I know it's stable.

The default installation offers 10 second and 2:30 skip forward and back commands, so commercials are usually no big deal to pass over. Probably the main reason I haven't done anything with comskip (which needs to transcode the full recording afaik).

Oh, and speaking of free TV... I can't believe it but I just downloaded last night's episode of Bitches Love Money. Err, The Bachelor. Obviously (obviously I said!) for the wife.

For some reason Sage always schedules things to record off the Canadian OTA channels when it can unless I restrict the favorite to specific channels. And last night, my City-TV (51-1) seems to have disappeared. Though instead of "no-signal" sage seems to just tune some other channel instead. So we ended up with one hour of the CTS (Christian Television).

Oh boy you've gotten me started You can imagine, being the fan I am (it's my absolute favorite TV show of all time, if you can believe that), how concerned I am about that adaptation. I believe he is hoping to do a trilogy, but I suppose it depends on how well the first one does. From what I've read about his thoughts on his take on the story, my concerns haven't been eased. And don't get me wrong, I'm a pretty big fan. I LOVE Unbreakable, but I've had issues with his other "twist" films, and The Happening was the worst movie I've seen in theaters in the past five years (barely beating out The Whole Ten Yards).

I'm even only about 50/50 on the teaser trailer that's been out for some time now.

I think I have to prepare myself for something VERY different. There are simply things you can do in animation that you can't do in film, even with CG. I guess I'll just have to get myself ready for the film whenever it comes out.