Surprise! The old boob tube has done it again, and has managed to come up with some actually pretty good shows this year! I'll give you a rundown of some of the best, and as an added bonus, I'll give you some old shows that are worth the DVD rental fee!
1. Burn Notice
Okay, so it's not exactly new, per se - its pilot was last
summer. However, it was sadly overlooked for an unusually good show. It airs on USA and stars - well, probably nobody you know except Bruce Campbell (playing an ex-spy-currently-kept-man named Sam Axe, which is the awesomest name ever) and also a guy named Jeffrey Donovan whose only claim to fame is probably playing the jerkwad in Hitch - but trust me, they make good watchin'.
Donovan plays a Michael Westen, spy who gets fired (i.e. burned. With a burn notice. Hence the title) which for spies means 'utterly and totally screwed' since the government not only does not give you a severance package, it also freezes all your accounts and blacklists you, eliminating the chance of getting a job that pays more than minimum wage. Dumped in Florida, he has to rely on the only people who are willing to be seen with him - namely, his (insanely hot) crazy ex-IRA ex-girlfriend Fiona, good ol' washed-up Sam Axe (who's selling info on him to the Feds) and (God forbid) his more-than-a-little-psychotic family. As he pointedly points out, there's a reason he took a job where he's almost always overseas in places where no one he knows - especially not his mom - can contact him. Anyway, Michael makes a living working jobs where people need someone discrete with very specialized skills, while trying to find out who burned him and annoying the hell out of the FBI. Or CIA. I never remember which is which.
The show is witty and quick-paced, and even gives you cool little tidbits of spy wisdom - I have no idea if they're actual spy stuff or just something a writer though up - such as How to Figure Out If Someone Is Tailing Your Car and Lose Them If They Are, and also has this
AWESOME scene involving some hitmen, Fiona, and a couple of Molotov Cocktails. It's definitely worth the time to check it out.
For your viewing pleasure: Bully Psychology
2. Pushing Daisies
An ACTUAL new show, this is a smart, fantastical little comedy that plays like a happy,
sunshine-and-roses (uh...daisies) Tim Burton film with a little touch of Dead Like Me - which is probably because it's from one of the creators of Dead Like Me. Don't know the show? Don't worry, it's at the bottom of this post.
Lee Pace plays Ned, aka The Piemaker, who is a sweetly shy, adorable, 6'3" teddy bear of a man who can do this amazing thing with his hands - get your mind out of the gutter! I mean, when he touches a dead thing, it comes back to life. There's two catches, though. If they stay alive longer than a minute, somebody near them dies, and once Ned has zapped someone back to life, he can't touch them again or they'll die again. Permanently. While that's a good trick for staying within the one-minute limit, it sort of backfires on him with the few people he brought back to stay - his dog Digby, his mother, and his childhood sweetheart, Chuck. Chuck is a girl, by the way.
His mother was, unfortunately, the way he discovered about the one-touch-only rule, when as a boy he was only able to bring her back to life for a day, only to have her bite the dust again when she kissed him goodnight. Incidentally, because she was alive for more than a minute, Ned's little magic trick took its toll - and killed Chuck's father.
Skip ahead, and Ned is a grown man who has gone into business making pies, in honor of his mother, in a place called The Pie Hole. He uses rotten berries that he has brought back to life, and makes money on the side working with private detective Emerson Cod and bringing dead people back to life long enough to have them expose their murderers. This is how he meets Chuck again, having lost touch after their parents died. She has been murdered, and after he wakes her up to ask who killed her, he can't bear to kill her again. So he brings her back to live with him, and slowly they begin to fall in love, despite the considerable barrier of the no-touch rule. Also starring dimunitive Kristin Chenoweth (she played Glinda from Wicked) as Ned's infatuated employee, Olive Snook.
This show is at once sharp and sweet, whimsical and poignant. Their adventures are always just beyond the line of reason, and while death is never mocked, it is occasionally poked fun at. While I have been a longtime anti-shipper (I'll save my shipping rant for another day. It will include the whole "who will Kate choose????" debacle from Lost (in my opinion, she doesn't deserve Sawyer) and if you watch Avatar, I will probably go into depth about Kataang, Zutara, Tokka, Zukaang and all the stupid portmanteaus associated therein. I will also mention the whole N/C Yaoi "OTP" craze that makes me uncertain whether I should stab my eyes out or go murder someone) or at least am extremely picky about the relationships I support in media (wow, that sounds mighty pretentious) the Chuck and Ned romance is possibly the best romance TV has
seen for ages. The plastic wrap kiss was amazing.
Olive Snook Sings
3. Samantha Who
I have to admit, the first time I saw a promo for this show, I assumed it was just another of those stupid sitcommy average-IQ-of-40 shows where some annoying blonde agonizes over her sex life/age/personal appearance/broken nail episode after episode, surrounded by her circle of insipid friends and going through brainless, prettyboy boyfriends as fast as a chainsmoker goes through cigarettes. Not so with Samantha. Okay, she is blonde. I'll give you that. BUT - this show is surprisingly witty and even has a little wholesome message to go with it!
Christina Applegate plays Samantha, who, in the pilot, has just woken up from an eight-day coma with no memory of who she is. A
clean slate, if you will. And as she begins to go about figuring out who she is, she begins to realize that pre-amnesia Samantha was not a nice person at all. In fact, she was downright evil. Her only friend was Andrea the alcoholic lawyer who is nearly as bad, her boyfriend - whom she had cheated on - had broken up with her, and she had reduced her assistant to a quivering, neurotic mess. She hadn't spoken to her parents in years, and even had had a restraining order taken out against her by an ex. Mortified, New Sam tries to reorder her life and change her ways as she tries to mend relationships she destroyed as Old Sam, including re-befriending her plump school friend, Dina. She slowly regains tidbits of information as she tries to convince everyone that she's changed, although occasionally bits of Old Sam peek through and scare the crap out of her. There's also fun to be had as she rediscovers things like her phobia of elevators, her allergy to oregano and Old Sam's style of dress - such as when she pulls a tiny black minidress out of her closet and cries, horrified, "Oh my God! I have a daughter?"
Christina Applegate is startlingly sweet and likeable as insecure Sam, and the witty writing pops out jokes that actually make me actually laugh out loud, which does not happen often. Definitely a fun show, and you can watch free episodes on abc.com! Oh, and you can do that with Pushing Daisies, too!
Sam discovers more about Old Sam
Old Shows
I'm not going to go into depth with these because - well, it's late, and I'm tired, and I still have two-thirds of a paper to write before tomorrow. So, I'll give you summaries and some clips, and maybe I'll write more later.
1. Firefly!
Possibly my favorite show in existence. I won't explain it too much, because I never manage to do it justice, but in short, it has spaceships and horses and shootouts at corrals and smuggling and heists and heroism and antiheroism and government conspiracies and swearing in Chinese and suspenders and hilarious one-liners and mind-reading and dancing and a preacher with an Afro and horrible cannibalistic crazy men and some of the best damn computer effects I've ever seen on a TV show. If you've seen Serenity, you've gotten a taste, but Firefly is better still. Canceled by the astronomical morons at Fox.
Chain of Command
2. Arrested Development
Basically, one of the funniest, quirkiest shows in existence. About a guy named Michael Bluth who is possibly the only normal member of the family Bluth, a family which brings a whole new dimension to the term disfunctional. In the pilot, Michael's father, George Bluth, is arrested for embezzlement at his retirement party where he was stepping down as the head of his corporation. Michael is then left to try to hold everything together as the family goes bankrupt, while trying to deal with an alcoholic mother, an arrogant magician older brother (named GOB - caps intentional), a childlike adult younger brother, a snobbish, elitist sister who is separating from her downright weird husband Dr. Tobias Funke (notable achievement: attempting to combine the professions of analyst and therapist, thereby creating the world's first professional analrapist), their rebellious daughter Maeby, and his neglected son who has a crush on her (played by Michael Cera, from Superbad and Juno). This masterpiece of a show was canceled, like Firefly, by Fox, which does not know a good thing when it has got it.
The Bluth family has no idea what a chicken looks/sounds/acts like.
3. Dead Like Me
The pilot opens with the main character dying. How often does that happen? Furthermore, she dies from being struck by a meteoric toilet seat from space. This is definitely not your everyday show. The main character's name is Georgia "George" Lass (Bryan Fuller must have a thing about giving girls boy nicknames) and after she dies, she 'gets' to become a reaper. Death's civil servant. She works with a group of four other undead, or re-alive, or whatever people whose jobs are to remove the souls from people when they die, and to guide them to the afterlife. They are assigned to the "external influence" division, which basically means people who die from accidents. She has to harvest an unspecified number of souls before she can become truly dead, but meanwhile, in addition to her reaper duties, she has to get a real job and a real life. For a teenage girl, it kinda sucks. Although she is pretty much indestructable now...that's cool. The show has its own unique style of dark humor which manages to actually be funny without being crude. Amazingly, this show was not canceled by Fox, although they probably would have if they'd had the chance. Jerkwads.
Anyway, it was canceled by Showtime and now is occasionally shown on the SciFi channel.
Georgie laments over her house while her other reaper friends have other things on their minds.
Current Shows to Keep an Eye On:
Lost
Heroes
The Office
Ugly Betty
Eureka
Avatar: The Last Airbender yes I know it's a kid's show. It's still good.
Bones
