Lovely lovely television

[slemslempike]

I watched an episode of Ruby and the Rockits because it keeps being advertised during Make It Or Break It, and they had a father-daughter dance. Is that something that actually happens in America?? It was INCREDIBLY creepy. It wasn't just a school dance where girls brought their fathers, but a dance where the girls took it in turns to dance soppy formal dances ONE AT A TIME with their fathers in a sort of spotlight while everyone else watched. It was not a good show.

Better Off Ted finished, and I am sad - I love Portia di Rossi, and her management through hairstyle and slapping people and being generally awesome. Ted is less dull than he was, and I love the two scientist guys too. Veridian is so very creepy. Make it or Break it is also finished up (though I have not yet seen the final episode PLEASE DON'T SPOIL ME) and it is some of the most awesome television I've ever seen. I like the relationships between all the girls, it would be nice if they stopped trying to make us like the boys, but whatever happens most of the time there is some brilliant gymnastics going on in the background. Someone's concerned about their personal life, and behind them WHOOSH round the bars and FLIP on the beam and shiny glittery leotards everywhere.

I missed Psych resuming over the summer and now I'm catching up on that, and liking it all even more for the break. They should just leave the whole Shaun/Juliet thing, because it has always been dull and now it is irritating. Lassiter's great, and Cary Elwes was in the first episode! Dread Pirate Roberts is a suave art thief. I am also catching up with Nurse Jackie which I missed the final episodes for. Unfortunately I can't find 7 and 8 for download at the moment so I'm had to skip some. I think Zoe is lovely, with her panda earrings and her childish tops.

I am looking forward to the return of 30 Rock, The Big Bang Theory and The New Adventures of Old Christine. I am also really interested in the Seinfeld cast on Curb Your Enthusiasm, though I've not watched the last few series of that. I am less excited about How I Met Your Mother because I think the last two series have had a serious drop in quality, but I'll probably still watch it. A show needs to be very poor indeed before I stop watching it.

I watch Spicks and Specks even though it still infuriates me that they buzz in first and THEN think of the answer. Also The Librarians from Australia, about a weird power-hungry librarian and her long-suffering (and also weird) staff at the library. Jen has been making a list of people from Home and Away and Neighbours who show up in Prisoner [Cell Block H], and Cody showed up in an epsiode of The Librarians! CODY! Mysteriously not dead of an unlikely drive-by drug dealer shooting in a cul-de-sac, but just her same face and voice.

I watched the first episode of The Byrne Ultimatum, a panel quiz show, even though I am not overly enamoured with Jason Byrne. I really liked it! This is despite really rather disliking John Bishop and never having heard of the other panellists, but the silliness of the rounds and the fact that Jason Byrne was in charge and thus not having to desperately interrupt everyone else in order to draw attention to himself more than made up for it. The Panel is coming back too, mysteriously not cancelled after all, though the last series was really not great and suffered from a hignfyish over-reliance on youtube clips.

Peep Show is back. I wasn't overly impressed with the first episode of this series (though it was pleasantly free of jokes about having raped a teenage boy), And In the Thick of It starts again quite soon, so I must watch the specials before that happens. I liked In the Loop an awful lot, and in the next series of ITTOT one of my friends' names will be used on the phone, apparently. I sort of quite like Off the Hook mostly because Jay-from-the-Inbetweeners is not playing the same character which I had imagined he would. I sometimes quite like Rob Brydon on Would I Lie to You and sometimes he is very wearing, but David Mitchell and Lee Mack are good together. Something called Trinity starts tonight and I think it might be just my kind of trash.

What else is going to be coming back? What's new that I don't know about especially in the US? What's oldish that I should find and see?

Comments

[the_antichris.livejournal.com]

I looooove Make it or Break it. So far it's more or less Stick It in long form, which is exactly what I want to watch.

Glee is pretty fun.

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

I know! Only Stick It had great boys, which this doesn't. And Jeff Bridges never called one of his girls a "dog", and I don't care how motivating it turned out to be.

I think I saw an episode of Glee and it didn't really grab me. I'm much more cheerleading/gymnastics than general music/dance, I think.

OH TELEVISION

[nerdcakes.livejournal.com]

I am quite excited about Curb Your Enthusiasm. I am excited despite the fact that I haven't watched it in a few years and despite the fact that pretty much all of the Seinfeld cast are COMPLETELY UNBEARABLE when they're being themselves and I am just embracing the fact that it makes me happy whenever Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld are standing near each other in the preview-y bits I've seen.

I LOVE ZOE SO MUCH. I love it when Thor and Mo-Mo look after her and I love how much she adores Jackie and I love her rabbit scrubs. OH.

MOSTLY I love Portia de Rossi. I love that she stole Linda's hair and I love it when she was stressed and shot the pillow and I love that she fell in love with a magician. I am sad to hear that Psych still hasn't gotten over Shaun/Juliet. I should really catch up with Psych at some point.

I think I should watch the old episodes of HIMYM at some point. I have always avoided it because Willow, but I don't think it's fair to avoid an entire show that people love just because of the presence of Willow. On the other hand, Willow.

Re: OH TELEVISION

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

I think Lily is still quite annoying, though I didn't have as much exposure to Willow as you, so perhaps she is a welcome relief. I really loved the first two or three series of HIMYM, but it's not nearly so funny now. I don't care who the mother is, and I find it bizarre whenever they reintroduce that whole thing in random episodes.

Have you watched The New Adventures of Old Christine?

[orionnebula.livejournal.com]

I don't watch Ruby, so I have no context for the episode, but was it possibly a debutante kind of dance? Where the fathers present their daughters to society? While still weird, at least that's a more familiar concept.

I enjoyed Make It or Break It more than I thought I would. I was always a gymnastics fan as a kid, so it's fun to watch all of the drama.

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

Nope! School dance, where the girls were in short party dresses, aged about 14/15, slow-dancing with their dads while other girls in short party dresses watched. David and Patrick Cassidy are the dad and uncle.

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

How weird. I associate that kind of thing solely with very evangelical people and virginity pledges.

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

I have seen quite a bit of US high school films and TV things, and it seemed very odd to me too. Also, are you allowed to organise events which are only open to girls with dads? What about boys, can they dance with their dads if they want? I mean, surely they can, otherwise it would be suggesting that it was weirdly incestuous for the girls to do it rather than PERFECTLY NORMAL.

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

I know, what are you supposed to do if you live with your mother and a stepfather (or with an aunt and uncle, which seems to happen a lot more on TV than in real life)? Or with your mother and her female partner? Or if you lost your father in a car accident of much drama in the previous series? Are you allowed to draft in a nonresident uncle or older brother? It seems very confusing and divisive.

Not to mention, as you say, weirdly incestuous. Is it the sort of fandom that is likely to take the incestuous wrongness and run with it?

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

Actually, Ruby does live with her aunt and uncle, and her uncle was worried about whether her dad would show up at all (she had organised the event as a way of trying to get close to him), and was prepared to step into the breech. Her dad did let her down - at first it seemed like he wasn't going to show at all, and then he arrived with two scantily-clad showgirls in tow to dance for her not with her.

I don't imagine there being much of a fandom - abc family show that is RUBBISH, and already cancelled. Though I shall have a look.

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

WTF @ the showgirls. Because the event was already so wholesome before they arrived?

[sollersuk.livejournal.com]

Er... very evangelical and virginity pledges goes with an undercurrent of paedophile incest?

(I think I'd find the term "evangelical" more acceptable if they paid more attention to the Gospels)

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

I think you are putting things together from two different comments there: it was slemslempike, who has seen the show (I haven't, and I don't know whether you have) who mentioned the incestuous undertones.

By 'that sort of thing' I meant father-daughter dances.

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

OK, to be clearer: virginity pledges and father-daughter balls remind me of the American evangelical Christian community in particular. I'm basing this on Daniel Radosh's Rapture Ready and on Kathryn Joyce's Quiverfull, which mention them as part of that particular end of Christian culture. If I've picked up the wrong impression from these books, I'm willing to be told so.

I do think that purity balls and virginity pledges have some weird though almost certainly unintended overtones: I think that choosing not to be sexually active in one's teens is an entirely valid choice, but I'm a lot iffier about fathers signing pledges on their daughters' behalf, and about peer-pressuring events like The Silver Ring Thing.

I don't have any data whatsoever as to whether actual incest or paedophilia are any more prevalent in Evangelical Christian circles than in the outside world, and I had no intention of implying that they were.

I hope this clears things up.

[orionnebula.livejournal.com]

That kind of father/daughter dance sounds more like something that would have happened in the 50s. I don't know of places that do that now. Though maybe it's tradition... When my mom went to college--in the mid 60s--I know they had a father/daughter weekend.

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

I very much want to see the new series of The Big Bang Theory, though that's partly because I get about 55% of the geek jokes and partly because of an unholy desire to lick the back of Jim Parsons' neck.

Also, I am kind of delighted that somewhere along the way Kaley Cuoco has developed a sense of comedy - she was bloody awful in Charmed but there she is every week on BBT with a nifty sense of timing, doing actual acting and being funny and stuff.

I am on the fence about Lunch Monkeys. Either it'll be the new The IT Crowd or it'll just turn quite vexing and hopeless. I am also quite confused by Home Time, which has lots of actresses in and loops past the Bechdel test approximately every three minutes, but is also quite slow and can't decide whether it's going for surrealism or not.

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

I love Sheldon and Penny together. Sometimes the show verges way too close to creepy for how they treat Penny (I don't mean the bits where they are showing how they have no social skills and it's weird, but when they don't really seem to know what to do with her other than objectify, which is actually quite rare compared to most other shows but still grates), but I like her character a lot. I never watched Charmed, but I'd grown to really like her in 8 Simple Rules.

I'd forgotten that I'd watched Lunch Monkeys and Home Time, which probably isn't a good sign for them. I agree with you about the directions for LM, though I suspect the latter to be more likely, and HT might grow on me if it actually develops rather than sticks with "weren't the 90s funny".

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

I know. I love the awkwardness of their relationship and the way they're both so stubborn in different ways. And that is a great point about the objectification - they seem to teeter between 'one of the boys' and 'Danger! Danger! Not one of the boys!' It'd be nice if there were more non-Penny female characters about the place, though Leslie Winkle makes up for it by being awesome enough for about twelve and I also liked Dr. Stephanie before they gave her a personality transplant and shoved her into the weird 'stealth moving in' plot.

I like the horrible office manager character in Lunch Monkeys but the other characters seem a bit interchangeable, which isn't a good sign. I do wonder how on earth they got Nigel Havers. Maybe he needs his roof mending or something.

I liked the awful Spice Girls dress joke on Home Time, but as you say, the 90s thing is a bit overplayed. And were people still listening to cassettes in 1997? I can't remember when I switched over to CDs, though it must have been some time in the mid to late 90s.

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

Leslie Winkle is GREAT.

Most of my stuff was still on cassette in 1997 (when I was 16) - taping from other people, because I couldn't really afford to buy CDs for myself. Though then I got a discount at HMV so I made up for it in the next two years.

[stellanova.livejournal.com]

I hate Jason Byrne and think he is an annoying little shouter, but the same night on RTE saw the launch of an excellent new comedy show called Maeve Higgins: Fancy Vittles, which is hilarious and also basically the first time I have seen any ladies on Irish TV whose style and manner seem to resemble me and people I know at all. Anyway, it's very funny, and definitely worth checking out if you can access RTE stuff online.

[stellanova.livejournal.com]

It can be seen here...
http://www.rte.ie/tv/programmes/maeve_higgins_fancy_vittles.html

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

It is downloading slowly! I really like Maeve Higgins though, so I am very much looking forward to it. Do you mean that you are not adequately represented by the pretty ladies that the Panel has on instead of female comedians? I am shocked!

I have hated Jason Byrne virtually every time I have seen him (he pops up on Australian TV too much for my liking), but he was surprisingly controlled (for him) in The Byrne Ultimatum. But only in the same way that I watch Good News Week.

[gair.livejournal.com]

I really like Spicks and Specks! I watched it when I was in Australia this summer/southern winter, and it was on on Wednesday nights, where there was just like an hour and a half of telly programmes in a row about how great people are and how much fun they might have if they all hung out being nice to each other, not competing or being bitchy/cruel, and making jokes which were not about rape, race/racism, homophobia, ableism, etc. It made me very happy. And also! A girl team captain just as if it was normal for girls to know things about music! I never saw that on Never Mind the Buzzcocks (not that I watched it after the first couple of seasons, mind, and at that time I was going out with a muso boy who had SPECIAL BOY POWERS OF MUSIC KNOWLEDGE - the second in a row, I was really crap at choosing boy partners, hence my eventual fleeing into the Republic of Lesbitania - so he may have tainted it for me rather.)

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

I find it really weird to watch as a spin-off of Never Mind the Buzzcocks, because they're so NICE to each other all the time. It can get a little dull over the series, because a lot of it is "tell us a story about yourself" and when there's 30 episodes of mildly amusing anecdotes I start to pine for a show where people are nasty and rude. Australian shows seem to have a female captain as a matter of course - Glasshouse did, Good News Week does, Spicks and Specks (okay, all three of the ones I know, but I think the Panel had a regular woman too), which is pretty cool. Have you seen What the Dickens, which has Sandi Toksvig hosting AND Sue Perkins as a team captain? Yay!

[irrtum.livejournal.com]

I was a bit disappointed by the first episode of Peep Show too. I even minimised the window to look at facebook because I was so bored. I must get around to watching the Big Bang Theory.

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

Do! I think you might like it. There's an engineer in it.

Peep Show was a bit dull. Hopefully it will pick up a bit during the series, and it's still watchable for me.

[irrtum.livejournal.com]

I omitted the fact that I was clearly disappointed when there was a link for the second episode that didn't link to an actual episode. And I laughed uproariously at the Hitler bit because of what I was writing. I laughed even more at the new Rammstein song. Have you seen the video?