Summer Break – I’m Bored Already
It’s official: all of the TV shows I regularly watch have now finished for the season and I won’t get to see any new episodes until fall (if ever). A long and mostly TV-less summer stretches ahead of me. How will I ever cope?
Most of all I will miss Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, mainly because it is almost certain that we won’t get a third season of it. Which sucks because not only do I miss Summer Glau, but the show got really, really great towards the end of season 2 and it ended with a major twist that opens up so many new directions it could have gone into. Alas, we’ll probably never get to see it. Damn. (And no, the movie, however much I am looking forward to it, is no consolation whatsoever in this regard.)
The finale of House, on the other hand, left me completely cold. Which is a surprise, because I used to love that show. But after 5 seasons with no real emotional development in the good doctor I am slowly but surely getting fed up with the show and for most of this season I kept thinking “enough already, we’ve seen that all dozens of times before”. Of course, when it inevitably returns in fall I will keep on watching, because my loyalty to Hugh Laurie will never waver, but secretly I wouldn’t be sad at all if this would have been the last season.
I haven’t even watched the full episode of the Bones finale yet, and I am not sure I will bother at all. I watched the first 5 minutes, figured it was all a hallucination, watched the last 2 minutes and found out I was right and promptly stopped caring. This episode was completely superfluous. They should have ended on last week’s tear-jerker instead.
Criminal Minds and NCIS were equally not-interesting, but both of them have been less-than-stellar for a while for me. I still watch them for the eye-candy, but I really don’t care too much about what happens anymore.
I gave up on 24 after they killed off Bill Buchanan in such a stupid, insulting manner. What a waste of a great character. For all I care they should have killed off Jack Bauer, because Kiefer irritates the hell out of me. And from what I am hearing they made Tony turn into a baddie now, after bringing him back from the dead and then not using him for almost half the season. Talk about jumping the fucking shark. This is definitely a show that will go on without me as a viewer next season.
The only one of my shows I haven’t quite kept up with is LOST. The last episode I saw was 5×10. Which is a good thing, because it gives me at least something to look forward to in the next 2 weeks or so. Unless, of course, the remaining eps are so friggin’ fantastic that I can’t stop watching after one.
One show I can’t wait to see more of is definitely Castle. Out of all the shows I have watched this season this one was the most fun. It’s not deep and twisted, it doesn’t really require all that much concentration (except if you try not to miss all the subtle Firefly-references Nathan throws in), it’s just pure, light-hearted fun. I love it.
The one show that I never really fell in love with, no matter how many chances I gave it, is sadly Dollhouse. I kept watching it faithfully every week, because I am a fan of Joss Whedon’s work. I liked some parts of it from the start (mainly the scenes with a shirtless Tahmoh Penikett), some characters kind of grew on me (mainly Topher), other parts bored the living daylights out of me and the rest was just meh. The show seemed to take forever to find its footing and I stayed patient until after the fabled 6th episode, when all was supposed to finally turn into something awesome. Well, it didn’t. I still don’t know why I should care about any of these characters, I still find Eliza’s acting very hit-and-miss, I’m totally not interested in the whole moral debate about the dolls and I still miss Joss’ trademark humor in this show. Oh, and the finale? Sucked to high heavens. I love Alan Tudyk, but what they did to the Alpha character was so unbelievably lame that I wish I had never watched this episode. It’s still undecided if the show will get renewed, but I for one wouldn’t mind if FOX just let’s it die.
In addition to my regular shows I also found some new ones to watch recently, which is good, because I have some catching up to do with them, so that could maybe tide me over the long and boring summer.
The first one of these is Rescue Me. Five whole seasons to catch up on. I am still only at the first one, but I like all the swearing and the sex and the fact that this is the first show ever to depict men really realistically, what with the cock-measuring-contest and all that hilarious stuff.
Another show I started watching only recently after I re-discovered my liking of Neil Patrick Harris is How I Met Your Mother. Jesus Fucking Christ, why did nobody ever tell me how frikkin’ funny this show is? Well, maybe somebody did and I just wasn’t listening (in which case I deserve to be slapped by Marshall – hard). I really don’t know what took me so long to give the show a chance, but since I watched the first 3 seasons more or less in one go last week, I am officially in love with it. This show is everything Friends tried and failed to be. It’s awesome. And of course, Barney is my favorite character. Legen…wait for it…dary!
Another new favorite of mine is Life. Needless to say, it just got cancelled a couple of weeks after I heard of it and fell in love with it (or, rather, with Damian Lewis). Figures. They always cancel the stuff that I love and keep on crap like ER or the myriad incarnations on Law&Order or CSI long past their due date. Anyways, at least we got 2 seasons of Life – 32 glorious episodes of Charlie Crews, sprouting Zen-nuggets like “you don’t have to understand here to be here”.
My new-found love for Damian Lewis even brought me to watching Band of Brothers, a 10-episode series about a group of soldiers in WWII, which must be about the most depressing stuff I have watched in quite a while. But it reinforced my commitment to watch everything Mr. Lewis ever appeared in, because he is just THAT GOOD. And easy on the eyes, too.
But once I am through with all this it will be reruns for me all summer. Or, worse still, going out and having a so-called “real life”. What a bummer.
I feel left out because most of those I have never seen. I did give House a try, and Lost. They failed to click. And I thought Band of Brothers was drivel. I heard that the hero of 24 is a psychopath, so I never bothered.