Feb 02 2009
Manic Monday Followed by Terrible Tuesday
So, tonight was so packed with TV I couldn’t watch it all. I’ll be able to catch up with what I missed, thanks to the wonders of technology, but it’s annoying to have to play catch-up. It would be much nicer to have a couple good shows to watch every night of the week, instead of feast or famine. Maybe I’m just too picky.
The only show I’ve been getting excited over on Tuesdays was The Mentalist, and that’s in rerun limbo while they film follow-up episodes. I miss the days when a series ran for a season and then we caught up with reruns in the summer. This two weeks on, three weeks off crap gets annoying, and makes it impossible for on-the-cusp shows to sustain an audience. If you turn the channel on two Tuesdays in a row and don’t find what you’re looking for, you stop looking.
But I digress. Tuesday night has the last season of Scrubs, which should be good for a few laughs. I haven’t been all that inspired as we tapered off of watching it in the preceding seasons. When it got grouped in with sitcoms we didn’t watch, and put against hour-long dramas we did watch, that was kind of the end of that. While Scrubs can be enjoyed on its own, there is a continuing thread with the characters that can be hard to pick up after missing a lot.
We used to watch Without a Trace faithfully, including picking up reruns on TNT. When the show first ran, it didn’t make a good impression, but when I tried again it had hit its stride and became a regular part of my viewing line-up. Anthony LaPaglia has done some amazing work on that show, creating a complex character that has wowed audiences and broken their heart a number of times. It’s an award-worthy performance.
Around the time Rosyln Sanchez hit the beat as Elena Delgado, things went downhill. It was such an obvious ploy to add some eye candy, and diminished the credibility of the show. Without a Trace has always touched on the lives of its main characters, alongside the investigations, but they started getting overly involved in the main players’ stories. Pushing the heavy (melo)drama on us over and over, when it wasn’t what drew us to the show in the first place…we just kind of drifted away. I’m sure I’ll drift back at some point, because I’m hoping there’s still some quality there, but right now I’d rather watch a DVD.
For Law & Order: SVU you can pretty much say the same thing. The main Law & Order formula has always been to focus on the cases, and only delve into the police characters’ lives for how it informed the case they were working on. The characters have humanity, but what keeps the show fresh is the changing cases and mysteries each week. Once SVU started continually breaking that mold, I drifted away on that one as well.
So, after a good night of solid entertainment on Monday with fun episodes of Chuck, The Closer, and Medium (with Heroes, Big Bang Theory, and How I Met Your Mother) waiting in the wings, tomorrow I’ll probably be catching up on my DVD collection.
