I’d Like to Ruin Television for You: Tuesday Night

August 15th, 2008 by Waldorf Van Buren

Television doesn’t return the love I’m giving it. Yes, it’s tough love, but it would still be nice for TV to give in and grant me a little love. It doesn’t look like Tuesday night will be the night d’amour. No, it will be, in my opinion (which you should view as having the strength of supported fact), just another torrent of shit in an otherwise staticky world.

I’ll begin with a second word about Monday night – sucks. Okay, that out of the way, I’d also like to reconsider Samantha Who? Perhaps I was a little harsh, I’ll give it a second chance, if only that I genuinely like Christina Applegate without ever having met her. I’m not even three degrees of Kevin Bacon from her. Four maybe, but not three. And Chuck I’ll get on Netflix and give it a go. But keep in mind, I’m writing this without actually ever having seen the shows in question. It’s all opinion masked as some sort of snarky journalism. Kind of like Fox News.

Tuesday nights on ABC (Always Bland Crap) gives us the craptacular event Opportunity Knocks, which is the mother of the reality show, the game show. It seems to be a hybrid of the game show and the home makeover show. Not the great game shows that were risque and sported seventies collars, but the later shows that extolled the virtue of greed and backbiting. So proud, so PROUD! The game show comes to you! Next up, if you can believe it, is a SECOND night of Dancing with the Tards, Stars, D-listers, whatever. Then it’s Eli Stone cranking away from 10 to 11. I like the actor playing him; he was great as part of the Trainspotting ensemble. But the show doesn’t appeal to me, not even in an eighties/nineties-retro-George Michael-pop-culture way. Maybe it’s because I’m cranky, but that’s because I’m not getting enough fiber.

CBS (Crappily Bad Shows) gives us another season of NCIS which, I must admit, I have watched every once in a while, thanks to my wife’s watching habits. As far as procedural dramas go, it’s not bad. However, CBS seems to think that it needs to completely fill its schedule with either procedurals or Survivor-type shows (as opposed to Survivor Type shows, based on the short story by Stephen “They taste just like ladyfingers” King), so they’ve added The Mentalist at 9 PM. I watched a ten minute clip (it felt like ten minutes) on The YouTube and I was completely…  bored. You can watch it here if you’d like, but a caveat; don’t drive or operate heavy machinery for an hour. If you watch the show, you might as well stay up for Without a Trace, which has become a snorer after so many years. It’s procedural drama night on CBS! Part one, anyway.

The Crap Wok (CW) gives us a bland dish of fecal noodles with a water-based sauce for its Tuesday night schedule. 90210 “returns” at 8, followed by Privilege at 9. 90210 is an update of the old series of thirty-somethings playing teens, revised to show…  what? How the rich and snobby are still rich and snobby? Right, The CW follows this pointless rehash with Privilege. It’s about a (presumably) privileged girl who graduates from Yale, gets fired from her cushy job then gets hired to tutor a richer, more privileged woman’s twins granddaughters in West Palm Beach. I always love to watch people with money to burn complain about their privileged lives. Ugh. Two nights, two strikes, CW.

Fox (I can’t decipher this acronym) gives us House and Fringe. House is getting a little lame (pun intended), but I really like Hugh Laurie. I have a man crush on him, and so does my wife. I really long for the days of Black Adder II, III, Goes Forth and Jeeves & Wooster, but I’ll settle for the curmudgeonly Gregory House any day. Sure, it’s all very improbable, and he makes a mess of the lives of everyone, but it’s a damn fine character study and I’m sure this next season will give us more without giving too much more. Fringe, an entry from Lost and Alias’ JJ Abrams, wants to be an X-Files for the 21st-century. I want to ensconce myself in cashmere and become the King of Kalahui, but that isn’t going to happen either. My verdict – half a night of crap. Catch House and switch the station before Fringe tries to suck you in.

NBC is short for Nothing But Crap on Tuesday evenings. The Biggest Loser: Families is on. I think the true biggest families of losers are the ones who warm their hands by the blue glow of their television sets (damn, okay, LCD or HDTV’s, as well, I’m still stuck in 2003). I can imagine a family of five shoveling bags of overly processed cheese snacks into their gullets, their eyes glued to the images of fatties trying to get fit. While some may consider it inspiration television, watching people try their best to lose weight, I consider it fatsploitation. Law and Order: SVU, the weakest of the Law and Order lineup, rounds out the night with a chung-chung fizzle.

Tuesday night, I’d say your best bet for television (unless you watch “cable,” which we’ll deal with in another entry) is to not watch any at all. Tivo House, go out and get a coffee and listen to some local music or a poetry reading, or just sit quietly and read. TV, network TV anyway, is not worth watching on Tuesday nights at all, unless you’ve been suffering from insomnia. Stay clear of the Tuesday night cesspool.

Wednesday seems to have a lot more potential, but I’ll get to that later.

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This entry was posted on Friday, August 15th, 2008 at 8:05 am and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.


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