Thoughts on the Fall 2009 TV Lineup

I just peeked at TV Guide’s Fall 2009 TV lineup to see what Prairie and I might be interested in using to rot our brains with in the evenings. Most of the week looks doable, with only a few potential conflicts. (Oh, and we are old and crotchety and go to bed at 10pm, so I’m not paying much attention to the 10-11pm block.)

  • Mondays

    While we like both How I Met Your Mother and Big Bang Theory, as CBS has put one show we’re not likely to be interested in (Accidentally on Purpose) and one show we know we dislike (Two and a Half Men) in between the two, we probably won’t bother watching either one until the season DVDs show up on Netflix. This leaves us without anything we’re terribly interested in watching on Mondays until the mid-season switchup when Chuck comes back. Looks like Mondays will be TV-free for us until spring.

  • Tuesdays

    NCIS is a definite, with NCIS: LA a maybe. We’ll probably give NCIS: LA a couple weeks out of curiosity to see if they can pull off a successful spinoff, but we’re reserving judgement, as the NCIS episodes from last season that introduced the new team weren’t our favorites. Plus, once Dancing With the Stars (ugh) ends (hooray!), the Scrubs/Better Off Ted combo will (for us) be a strong contender — NCIS: LA will have to be really strong to pull us away once that switch happens. I am worried about ABC putting V up against NCIS in November — not only does NCIS already have a strong fanbase, but it’ll have had two months to set up any season-running plotlines to hold onto its fans. I really, really want to see this new take on V…but I also really enjoy NCIS. That’s going to be a difficult choice — one of them will have to get pushed to Bittorrent or some other form of online delayed viewing.

  • Wednesdays

    Law and Order: SVU and/or Criminal Minds are the only things that look interesting at all, and they’re both shows that we can watch or not watch depending on our mood. Wednesdays look pretty TV-free for us.

  • Thursdays

    While I’m curious enough about FlashForward to look for it on Bittorrent, Hulu, or some form of online watching, I’m not curious enough for it to win out over Survivor: Samoa (I’ll admit it, it’s one of two “reality” shows that Prairie got me hooked on). After that, it’s Fringe…or CSI (if I choose, it’ll be Fringe, if Prairie chooses, it’ll be CSI — either way, we’ll both enjoy what we watch, and the other will get the Bittorrent/Hulu/whatever treatment later in the week). Ugh. This one worries me. I really enjoyed season one of Fringe, and I’m not happy that FOX is putting it up against CSI. CSI has such an entrenched presence and fanbase, I’m not sure if the sci-fi, alternative reality weirdness of Fringe can pick up enough numbers to compete long-term. While I’m glad that Fringe is at least getting a second season, I worry that in putting it against CSI, FOX is just practicing a form of “delayed cancellation” — this way, FOX can just say Fringe didn’t get the market share it needed when they cancel it, even though if they’d moved it to a less competitive night (or left it where it was, though I can understand them not wanting to try to battle the NCIS juggernaut either), it might have done fine.

  • Fridays

    Prairie’s a fan of Ghost Whisperer, so we’ll keep watching that, even though last season kept annoying us (the ‘ghost of the week’ stories were fun and what kept us watching, the stupid ‘romance’ plotline with her husband in the body of the new guy is annoying, dragging on too long, and has enough WTF moments for a post of its own…but then I’d have to publicly admit that I watch Ghost Whisperer). Nothing else looks interesting.

  • Saturdays

    A wasteland of dreck. TV-free, for sure.

  • Sundays

    The Amazing Race is our favorite “reality” show, so that’s a definite. Nothing else that night is a must-see.

So that’s our lineup. Agree/disagree? Attempts to convince me to try a show I’m ignoring? Lemme know!

CSI Gets Geeky

I don’t often talk much about my TV watching — in some small part because after spending something over a decade as as anti-TV zealot, I’m in some ways still coming to terms with actually finding some TV worth gritting my teeth through the commercials — but one of the shows that Prairie’s managed to get me into is CSI, and last night’s episode, “A Space Oddity,” was so worth it.

I was pretty sure that I’d be getting a few laughs out of the episode from the previews, which made it clear that the murder of the week was going to be at a Star Trek convention. I didn’t expect just how entertained I ended up being, though. The writers obviously knew their stuff (not surprising, as it turns out the episode was written by David Weddle and Bradley Thompson, two former writers for Battlestar Galactica, and directed by fellow BSG alumnus Michael Nankin), and the show was crammed with funny and knowing tributes to fandom — specifically, Star Trek and BSG.

Hodges surrounded by Astro Quest fen

The show opens with Hodges running around Whatifitcon, a Star Trek Astro Quest convention, surrounded by various alien-costumed fen. Soon he runs into fellow CSI labrat Wendy, all dressed up in an AQ uniform. They don’t have long to bond over their shared love of “the greatest science-fiction show ever” before there’s a commotion nearby — a murder (imagine that)! Hodges calls in to CSI headquarters to let them know that, yes…”He’s dead, Jim.”

The victim turns out to be Jonathan Danson, a producer who’d been working on a modern “reimagining” of the classic Astro Quest show. The night before, he’d shown off the first glimpses of Astro Quest: Redux, and the response was…well, it was pretty much what happened when Ron Moore first started showing off his “reimagined” version of the classic Battlestar Galactica. In short, the fans were not impressed.

And here was where an already enjoyably silly episode really took off for me. I’d already been grinning from the various Star Trek gags, then even more when it became obvious that they were riffing off the recent BSG reworking. But then, as the camera pans across the shocked and horrified fans…

BSG's Grace Park isn't a fan of the new Astro Quest

…waitasec, that was Grace Park — Sharon Valerii/Boomer/Athena/and lots of other cylons in BSG! But after just a quick glimpse of her, just long enough for me to register the cameo, another offended fan jumps out of his chair, yelling “You SUCK!” at Danson.

BSG creator Ron Moore _really_ isn't a fan!

And, of course, that’s none other than Ron Moore himself, responsible for “reimagining” BSG. And the cameos don’t stop there, as an academic researching the cultural impact of the Astro Quest television show is played by none other than Kate Vernon, BSG’s Ellen Tigh.

The episode goes on from there, with Hodges and Wendy dancing around their newfound connection, complete with fantasy scenarios giving nods to ST:TOS episodes “The Menagerie” and “The Gamesters of Triskelion”, über-geeks a little too involved in the AQ world living with their mother in a room entirely remodeled to match the AQ set, and so on.

The one criticism I might have with the episode would be that it falls victim to the same trap that so many other shows do when involving the geek community, in that they rely so heavily on comedy at the expense of the fringe members of fandom (the geeks in their remodeled room in mom’s house, for example). However, given that they also spent time letting Vernon’s academic and the bartender espouse some of the less cringeworthy sides of science-fiction shows and fandom, and “outed” two regular cast members as fans (and it wasn’t even the less socially adept character who got all dressed up in costume for the convention), I’m willing to cut them some slack.

Bottom line: great episode, and worth watching (you can even see the whole episode online at CBS’s CSI site) if you’re a fan of CSI, Trek, BSG, or any combination of the above.