TV Update

The book obsession continues, with me not wanting to do much else but work on the book -- I really need milk, and I resent the fact that I'm going to have to make a grocery store trip today (and I think I just talked myself into waiting until tomorrow). But what got really frustrating yesterday was not being able to figure out the scene I was working on. I managed to delete the part I knew was wrong, but then every time I tried brainstorming or thinking about what should happen, I fell asleep. I guess I stayed up too late the night before. I think I have figured out what needs to happen. Maybe the subconscious needed to work and got the conscious brain out of the way.

Now that we're several weeks into the new TV season, my schedule has already changed a bit (though the pull of the book may have something to do with that). I've given up on Heroes and Journeyman on Monday night, and that was actually something of a relief. I read the Heroes recaps, but then I realized I didn't even care to know what happened. I've watched the first couple of episodes of Samantha Who? and while they've been cute and the cast is great, I'm not sure if it can sustain itself as a series. There's such a limited range of things for the chick with amnesia to discover about her past, without going the My Name is Earl route of her discovering individual bad things she has to make up for. I think that premise would make a much better movie because it's tailor-made for the three-act screenplay structure. Act One would establish the amnesia and the fact that she was previously an awful person. The first turning point would be her decision to start over and change her life. Act Two would be about her efforts to change, along with her discoveries about her past, building up to changed relationships with her friends and family and her falling in love with her ex-boyfriend as her new self, while he falls in love with the new her. The second turning point would be her getting her memory back, and Act Three would be about the tug of war between her old self and her new self, with the big question about who would win. The TV series seems like it will be stuck indefinitely in Act Two.

I loved Chuck to start with, but it's growing on me even more. I came for the Adam Baldwin, but the main character is turning out to be someone I also adore.

I've also given up on Bionic Woman. I switched over to a rerun of Mythbusters during a commercial break on the third episode and forgot to switch back. I considered that a bad sign. However, I'm loving Life more and more. It's not quite so much House as a cop as I originally thought, but it does have the main character with an unconventional thought process, which is something I like (as a person with a rather unconventional thought process, myself). I've rhapsodized at great length about Pushing Daisies, and that show is turning out to work as a series. I love the characters, the absurdity, the gorgeous production design and Chuck's fabulous wardrobe. I hadn't realized it before, but it kind of reminds me in places of the book I'm working on (which, I want to remind everyone, I initially wrote in August, before this show came on). One of the main characters in my book was brought up by kooky aunts who didn't get out much (and in the book they're even referred to as "the aunts"), and I also have a character who tends to burst into song as she feels like she's living inside a musical.

I'm still on the fence about Friday Night Lights this season. There are still moments when I remember why I loved it so much last season, but there are also plenty of things that are more typical nighttime soap. I give it a few more weeks before I decide if I really want to watch it going forward. I hate it when the things they do to make a show I love appeal to more people end up making it appeal less to me. I'm also not loving what they're doing on House so far this season. I'm hoping it settles down a bit once they're done with the Survivor routine. Meanwhile, I've gotten hooked on the Spike reruns of Deep Space Nine in the morning, which comes at a good time for doing stuff like reading e-mail and writing blog posts. The downside is that the ads on Spike are highly irritating. They're mostly the TV versions of the kind of messages that land in my spam filter. Still, the show holds up very well, and Captain Sisko totally rules.