Television and Sickness

The strange part of being sick and having a dysfunctional net connection ( which makes it sound like my modem needs Cialis ) is that I end up watching a lot of television.

There is a good chance that I watched more television yesterday then I did all last week. A pretty good chance actually given I found the tv remote under the listings for the week before last.

The bits that I am coherent enough to remember:

Krypto the Superdog is awful. Even if you consider it targetted at the kindergarten age crowd, it is awful. I really think they had to have made one hell of an effort to write stories as shallow as they have managed to.

I will admit, I have seen a decent episode in the past involved Bat-Dog and him being sneered at for his lack of 'powers' and then proving he just needed his smarts. But the two stories they had that I saw yesterday... An alien flea bites Krypto and causes Krypto to wreck his owners yard until alien flea powder is applied and the flea runs away, and Lex Corp has a 'growing ray' invented and Luthor's pet iguana uses it on a caterpillar to make it a bigger meal and the caterpillar causes havoc in the city until it goes into a cocoon.

Two stories that easily could have been more then they were, the flea one could have been about needing to remember to take care of Krypto and groom him properly as just because he is the 'Dog of Steel' doesn't mean he doesn't get fleas. The second one could have been an imaginative re-write of the 'Ugly Duckling'. Instead, they were mindless and shallow and really not even all that interestingly animated or voice-acted. Blegh.

Law & Order is something I have watched a lot of over the years. It is still one of those shows, and its spin-offs ( at least CI and SVU ), that I will take the time to watch since they are almost always well-written. I did stop watching it for a while, when they were big on the whole 'Ripped from the Headlines, but with a Law & Order twist ending' bit as that was really tiresome and often their twist endings were just... goofy. They'd be weird, silly, 11th hour stuff that would go against the flow of the rest of the episodes story. But whenever I turn on the tv, I often end up watching a lot of it as re-runs.

I do miss Lenny ( Jerry Orbach? ) in the new episodes. He was a great actor and him having been a part of the series for so long made it seem more real or immersive I suppose. He had certain habits and you would just get used to seeing them and there was the fun anticipation of looking forward to his 'quip' before the first commercial break. That said, I do still remember him best for his bit as a guest villain on Buck Rogers ages ago, where he was an evil band manager who was going to take over the solar system with his hypnotic messages over-laid on the bands live concert broadcast. So delightfully corny.

Medium is a show I have a weird love-hate relationship with. Something about the show, the premise with it or something, just quite simply rubs me the wrong way and makes me not want to like it. The writing and the acting though are exceptional.

It is possibly the only time I've seen a married couple with kids written on a tv program and you can actually believe that they are a married couple with kids. The disappointments about her having to work late, the playful bits of making up, him being angry and sleeping on the couch because he doesn't want to be woken by her when she finally gets in from work, etc. It is just superbly written and acted and if I can just ignore the actual plot of the episodes and just watch the people act out being family members and listen to the banter it is an amazingly fun time.

Daily Show with John Stewart always makes me laugh out loud. Nothing really to say about this except that if you have a sense of humor, and aren't so conservative that you believe that 'stoning' isn't a valid form of punishment, you should enjoy watching it.

Funny bit about the Daily Show, apparently Channel 4 in England just picked it up in syndication to broadcast it on their digital More4 station. Previous to that, to watch the Daily Show over there you apparently just got the cut-togethor weekly form of it that CNN would air. Something about CNN airing a weekly 'highlights' version of a fake news program like the Daily Show just makes me laugh.

Awake enough now to realize I need breakfast. Going to go raid my pantry and fridge for consumables and see if I can find a Law & Order episode on at this time of day.