So it’s officially the start of the new television season. Which means that I am now justified in spending an entire evening on my couch with the extent of my exertion being switching channels to check the score of the football game. But, that doesn’t mean that I don’t have some in depth analysis of some of the new shows.
I caught most of The Class, in the “I listened to all of it but only watched the last five minutes of it” sort of way. (I was having dinner at the time and I’ve reached the point where I eat at my dining room table as opposed to while sitting on the couch. This has been a major development in my life and is another in the long line of events that make me feel very old.) Can’t say that The Class is a very good show, though it has at least a little promise. It’s about an impromptu reunion of a third grade class twenty years later and the usual angst filled questions of what life is like as you turn thirty.
I should like this show but I’m a little fearful of it. This is probably due to the fact that my fifteenth high school reunion is in a month and I am debating whether to attend or not. It’s one of those strange things where it’s not like I didn’t like high school. Parts were good, parts were movie worthy and other parts were so horrible I should probably charge my therapy bills back to the school. Basically, no different than anyone else’s experience. But I’m not in touch with anyone from my class and have no idea who will be there, which makes buying a plane ticket to step into a room filled with the unknown a little frightening. So The Class is about people dealing with people they haven’t seen for years and it is meant to be funny. But they at least try.
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, on the other hand, is a show that I should really enjoy. It’s an Aaron Sorkin dramedy, in the vein of Sports Night and The West Wing. It’s falling a little more in the range of Sports Night but not nearly as much as I would like it to be. The show is one of two on the NBC schedule about Saturday Night Live (and that doesn’t include SNL itself) and it is interesting though not in a laugh out loud sort of way. Plus, there are about a thousand characters who really should wear name tags and those West Wing camera angles are almost nauseating when viewed in high definition. Still, I’ll be watching this one.
That leaves the story of my life in How I Met Your Mother. I still say that this is one of the most realistic shows on television, if only because not only have I missed seeing Barney on television but I’ve also missed the fact that my personal Barney(s) are a couple of states away. This show makes me miss the regular crowd at the bar. Tonight focused on Marshall trying to get over Lilly leaving him and this is where they get it perfectly right. After his fiancée dumps him Marshall spends two months sitting in his apartment drinking and feeling sorry for himself. Which is what every guy does when he is dumped up until the point where he realizes how horrible a frame of mind that is and he pulls himself out of the funk. Two months is about fair, though in some instances it takes a good three to four years.
The weird vibe that I got from this episode is that Robin and Ted don’t work as a couple at all from a television point of view. Now it’s known that they don’t end up together but it’s weird that two characters who have so much chemistry when they are not a couple seem to lose it when they get together. Mainly, a happy Ted isn’t a very good character. You need conflict in your main character and Ted needs to be depressed and miserable in order to be interesting. (Wow, and I wonder why I see myself in him). Of course, it’s good to know that my doppelganger has found the girl of his dreams, if only for the moment.
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