It’s August, and that means many things. Back to school season has begun, summer is heating up and winding down simultaneously, the frantic end-of-summer romances are burning and fizzling, and Waldorf Van Buren looks forward to the Fall Television Season.

I’m terribly bitter about television shows being axed and ground off the air by merciless executives with no compassion or TASTE. Every year I shed a tear when Fox allows chum like American Idol to grease the screens but nixes quality shows like Firefly. (Yes, I’m still horribly bitter about the Firefly cancellation). So, I’m not going to get involved too much with anything this season; not going to get hooked by anything that the networks might tempt me with. Instead, I will simply discard everything before I’ve even watched a single episode.

Today, I will deal with the Monday prime time lineup.

ABC gives us an hour-and-a-half of claptrap called Dancing with the Stars. The only way I can describe this show is to be terribly politically incorrect. . .  Dancing with the Tards. I know, I know, I’m horrible. Unfortunately, that’s the best descriptor I can come up with on decaf coffee.

Following that 90-minute self-fellating fecal fest is a little nugget of crap called Samantha Who? It stars Christina Applegate, best known as the vacuous bimbo from Married with Children, which she followed up with two seasons of an unsaveable Jesse (where she plays a vacuous bimbo), followed up by laughing at a dying River Phoenix while drinking like, yup you guessed it, a vacuous bimbo. Right. Career Where?

Finally, in the 10 PM time slot, it’s Boston Legal. I guess that’s okay. I’ve only seen previews. I think it has James Spader dry humping Captain Kirk while making lewd gestures towards a leathery Murphy Brown. They might be discussing Supreme Court decisions, but I think it’s all about sex. And Boston. Though the two might not be able to coexist naturally.

CBS Monday night is where I give some credit.  I love Big Bang Theory (crap I’ve cursed the show), and I like How I Met Your Mother (fantastic ensemble) and Two and a Half Men (despite Charlie Sheen’s robotic acting). Big Bang Theory is very clever, and the amount of geeky pop culture references crammed into twenty three minutes sends me into a spasmodic glee of wet dreaminess. Maybe not so much, but it’s funny. It’s even funnier realizing that Sheldon was raised by wolves in a Quiznos commercial, but I digress.

CBS treats us In the 9:30 slot with Worst Week. What’s it about? if the preview tells me anything, it’s about the villain from the first Robocop movie putting the smack down on a hapless naked guy. What will it be in reality? Another Seinfeld, right? Meh. More like another Men Behaving Badly, without the comedy. The Ten O’Clock hour ends the evening with David Caruso spouting bad dialogue with bad inflection while playing with his sunglasses. But seriously, Chuck Lorre owns the night.

Next on my list are the CW’s Gossip Girl and One Tree Hill. I wouldn’t waste YOUR TiVo space on this garbage. I don’t care if Michele Trachtenberg is on the show or not. I can always watch Buffy reruns if I want to hear her whine. I don’t think the Bush administration would condone THIS exercise in trying to get info from Gitmo detainees. Even they have boundaries. Next.

Fox. I have a soft spot for Fox. I think it’s called a fontanel. I’d like to go back in time and poke the fontanels of the executives who canceled Firefly. They’re probably the same ones who thought Down the Shore or Herman’s Head were good ideas. They didn’t like the Whedon. How can you not like the Whedon? Sure he’s hip and self-loathing and smugly powerful, but Angel and Buffy and Firefly, Oh My!

Fox has had a few golden shows over the years: most seasons of The Simpsons, the earlier X-Files, and the Arsenio Hall Show.  This season might be a must-miss.  Except, maybe, MAYBE, season two of Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles.  I might TiVo Terminator: The Incredibly Long Titled Show if the guy who played two characters on Deadwood (Damn you, HBO!) is still playing the terminator (Garret Dillahunt – he was excellent as Jack McCoy). It might be worth watching another season. The writing wasn’t bad if you ignored the paradoxes. I might watch it and complain about those paradoxes created by time traveling resistance fighters and machines. Or I might just STFU and wait for the fourth Terminator movie, featuring Christian Bale beating on someone other than his mother or Heath Ledger.

Prison Break comes on at 9, and I just don’t give a damn. How long can they string that friggin’ story out? Come on Fox! Stop trying to force another 24.

NBC pissed me off last year with a smack-ass Heroes storyline. Both seasons so far have been smack-ass, but season two was particularly smacky. I don’t mind them lifting stories and powers from an extensive DC/Marvel/Image library of titles and characters. Really, I don’t. But the second season was anemic. The villains were anemic. The heroes were anemic. Take some iron. Sheesh.

I think the worst part was the voiceovers in the teaser ads, and at the beginning of each episode. They irritated me to no end, inflating what little drama there was to mythic proportions. The only thing I really liked was the alt-universe, plague-ridden New York City. They could have really gone with that and explored it more. Instead, they just tacked on a superhero saving the world ending. Ugh.

NBCs other two Monday night shows, Chuck and My Own Worst Enemy, might be worth watching if I were in a persistent vegetative state. In that condition, I might show more signs of life than the new entry with Christian Slater, and although I’ve never seen an episode of Chuck, I can boldly make the claim that it sucks canal water through a camel’s ass. Why? Because the ads and promos are too smug and cutesy. Yes, I am that shallow. If I want smug and cutesy, I’ll read the Suburban Panic! blog.

Next:  Tuesday Night Crap-A-Rama

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Tags: criticism, entertainment, Fall, pop culture, prime time, smug, Television, TV

This entry was posted on Friday, August 8th, 2008 at 7:41 am and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.