Desperate Housewives

Fall ’06 TV Plans

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Shows that Prairie and I (either together or individually) plan on doing our best to keep up with this season (though, admittedly, our schedules will be busy enough that it may occasionally be difficult):

  • Sundays:
    • The Amazing Race 10 (CBS): Prairie’s been a fan of this one for a couple years now, and this is my first time actually watching it. Generally speaking, I’m no big fan of “reality” TV (most of what I’ve heard of and seen of “reality” programming has little or nothing to do with reality), but I’ve actually been enjoying this one so far. I’m a bit bummed that some of the more interesting teams were eliminated so soon (though, as some commenters have pointed out, my geopolitical placement skills leave something to be desired), and we’ve been surprised that so many teams have been eliminated so quickly — apparently there will be a few stretches later in the season where eliminations don’t come quite so fast and furious. At this point, our current favorites are Lyn and Karlyn and David and Mary.

    • Desperate Housewives (ABC): I missed the first year of broadcast (though Prairie often gleefully filled me in on some of the more outrageous moments over IM sessions before she and I moved in together) and had to catch up via DVD before season two started. Season two hooked me, and we thoroughly enjoy watching the weekly over-the-top shenanigans on Wisteria Lane (and I get to tease Prairie about being the perfect [i.e., non-psychotic] mix of Susan and Bree).

  • Mondays:

    • Heroes (NBC): This one’s just me, and I’m not entirely sure I’ll stick it, but I heard just enough to make me curious (a group of ordinary people suddenly discovering not-so-ordinary abilities) and snagged the first three episodes via BitTorrent. So far I’m not entirely hooked, but it’s caught enough of my interest to keep me checking it out for bit, at least. At this point, Hiro is by far my favorite character.
  • Thursdays:
    • Grey’s Anatomy (ABC): Originally, I just tuned into a couple episodes to laugh at the goofy Seattle geography and then shrugged it off. However, it was in a broadcast slot just after Desperate Housewives, and Prairie and I just kept getting sucked in when we didn’t turn the TV off fast enough. A few weeks of that, and we were hooked (it’s Prairie’s “new ER“). Unfortunately, with their move to Thursday nights, when I’m often working and Prairie teaches ’til late, we’re not able to keep up with it at broadcast, so we’ve been using BitTorrent to watch it on Wednesday evenings.
  • Fridays:
    • The Ghost Whisperer (CBS): This one’s all Prairie’s — her “silly ghost show”. I’ve not seen any of it yet, as I tend to be at work when it’s on.

    • Battlestar Galactica (Sci-Fi): I’ve babbled about it often enough that this shouldn’t surprise anyone. Still hands-down the best show around (admittedly, I pull from a very small pool, but it’s really good). Prairie and I are just about done watching Season Two on DVD (I’d already seen it via BitTorrent while it was broadcast, she waited for the DVDs to come out), and now I’m BitTorrenting Season Three as it appears (I know, I could get them legally via iTunes, but…[sigh]…the quality still just isn’t quite there). The season premiere? Oh, so very good.

So that’s the TV plan for the next few months. A lot more than I used to do, and all subject to being preempted by school, work, or other major life events…but it’s nice to have some downtime every so often.

iTunes “An American in Paris” by San Francisco Symphony Orchestra (Seiji Ozawa) from the album Panorama: George Gershwin (1977, 18:01).

Whoops…something slipped.

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And…we’re back. The server my site resides on went down about 3pm yesterday, and didn’t come back until sometime this morning. Sorry ’bout that — these things do happen from time to time, though.

In the meantime…

Yesterday, a customer came wandering into the store. “Hi there,” I greeted him. “Anything we can help you with today?”

“Yeah, I wanted to look at a couple cameras.” Then he paused and took a closer look at me. “Um…are you Michael? Of Eclecticism?”

I laughed. “Yeah, that’s me.”

“I’m Joe — Pop Astronaut.”

And another connection was made between the online world and real life. We chatted for a bit, then got him set up with the camera he’d been considering. Small world!

Small bits related to my recent re-acquaintance with television:

  • Desperate HousewivesLast night, Prairie and I finished our Desperate Housewives Season One marathon, which we’d been working on for the past couple weeks. We’ve both been enjoying watching Season Two on Sunday nights, and have been borrowing Season One so that I could get caught up on all the back story.

  • Battlestar Galactica has started up again also, and I’ve been doing my best to avoid any articles about the first episode of the second half of Season Two until I get a chance to watch it myself. The episode is sitting on my ‘puter…I just need to get a chance to watch it! Maybe tonight…

  • LostFinally, Lost finally starts up again this Wednesday — and because I’m working until 10pm that night, I’m not going to be able to see it until I get a chance to download it! Grrrrr…stupid work. ;)

And I think that pretty much brings us up to date. Plans for tonight are light: work ’til 6pm, do my reading for school tomorrow, have dinner, and watch tonight’s Desperate Housewives. Non-stop excitement, I tell you!

On that whole TV thing…

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Most people who’ve known me for a while are aware that I’m not much of a fan of television — and actually haven’t really watched television in a long, long time. Seeing as how a couple people commented on my watching Lost, I thought it might be worth addressing this. :)

I’m really not sure when exactly I got sick of TV, but my best guess would be sometime around 1992/1993 or so I decided that it just wasn’t worth my time. Most programs didn’t have enough intelligence to keep my interest, and even when I did sit down to watch something, the insipid and insultingly stupid commercials would drive me up the wall. So I quit.

In the intervening years I’ve seen bit and pieces of shows here and there, generally when I’ve been over at friends houses. For the most part, though, I’ve relied mostly on recommendations from friends as to what shows were actually worth watching…and then I’d wait for the DVDs to start coming out. Thanks to DVD, over the last few years I’ve seen (for the first time) all of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, the first four seasons of The X-Files, and the first four seasons of The West Wing.

More recently, adding BitTorrent to my repertoire has allowed me to keep up with more recent shows. I first saw Firefly this way, I’ve been keeping up with Battlestar Galactica, Gray’s Anatomy got a few trial weeks, and I’ll soon be watching the first three episodes of Surface to see if it’s worth keeping an eye on.

So I’m not really entirely against television as a whole — in a very general sort of way, yes, I think that TV is primarily a waste of time, and most people (especially children) would be far better off finding better ways to spend their time — but I’m not entirely opposed to finding specific shows that are better written, more intelligent and/or more entertaining than most.

I’d have been quite happy sticking with BitTorrent and watching things at least a day or two behind most of the rest of the world, too, except for two things: Prairie, and Lost.

Prairie, while sharing many of my views on the majority of the shows on TV these days, has never been quite as militant about her anti-TV views as I have been over the past few years. She’s had a few shows that she’s been enjoying keeping up with, with her top three being ER, Desperate Housewives, and Lost. All during last year, she’d occasionally drop tidbits of what was going on in that week’s episode of Lost to me…and then, after getting me to admit that it sounded interesting, and determined to get me hooked, she picked up the Season 1 DVD set when it came out.

We spent the next week powering our way through all of Season 1 — and she won. I’m hooked. So, Wednesday nights are now “Lost Night” for us. Admittedly, I still grit my teeth during most of the commercials (and even the ones that are cute once or twice get extremely grating the twentieth or fiftieth time they show up), but I’m quite enjoying watching the show itself.

So I’m still primarily anti-TV, and am far happier spending my free hours either fiddling with projects on my computer, wandering around town with my camera, or getting together with friends whenever possible. For one hour each Wednesday night, though, I’ll be joining the majority of America in setting back, grabbing some munchies, and keeping up with this week’s adventures on the boob tube.

(Oh, and while I’m just not interested enough in a hospital soap opera to get sucked into ER, she just might get me hooked on Desperate Housewives if I’m not careful. The last two episodes have been pretty entertaining, I must admit….)