Okay, honestly intended to post more frequently. Part of the problem is the new job. The commute adds an extra 90-120 minutes to my day, and I'm not comfortable enough with the work flow yet to consider blogging by email from there yet. (On my breaks, of course. Because it would be wrong to do something like that on work time.) The other part of the problem is the new job, and the frustrations detailed previously. I feel stressed out, but I don't want that to spill out too much here. (Mainly because a couple of coworkers know about this blog, and while I doubt they check it regularly, there's a compartmentalization issue.)

So, TV since last we spoke:

The premiere of Desperate Housewives was apparently a hit for ABC, which is nice, because I liked it. (Lost is also doing land-office business, which is cool, because it seemed like a dark horse.) I'll admit, at first, I wasn't sure if I'd be back for the second week of Housewives. It's a tongue-in-cheek soap opera about, well, housewives, and I like that it plays with the conventions of the genre. It's sharply written, well-acted, and has just the right edge. (As opposed to, say, The Mountain, which I sampled and turned off inside of twenty minutes because when it literally had two brothers coming to physical blows over something or other, it didn't have any sort of twinkle in its eye.) But I'm a 35-year old single guy, and about half an hour into it, I was questioning what my entry point into these characters' lives would be. By the end of the show, I had found it: there's a mystery storyline that I want to see unfold. (And the difference here between this and Veronica Mars is that it's better produced, and I like the characters. Although now that I know Veronica Mars is rerun on MTV, I'm going to give that a second look. I hate myself.)

I also watched the first episode of Boston Legal, the David E. Kelley lawyer show that replaces his The Practice on the schedule, spinning off several characters from that series including William Shatner, who I guess made guest-appearances towards the end. It was well-done enough, closer in tone to the more whimsical Ally McBeal than The Practice, but I won't be coming back. It's just so much like you'd expect a David E. Kelley lawyer show to be, it holds no real surprises. And I feel like I've seen that, and I don't feel like seeing it again right now. So, moving on.

Oh, this week's Jack & Bobby almost started to win me over a little bit. It was actually about religion, and caught me off guard with the revelation that before Bobby is elected President, he becomes a Reverend. The contemporary part of the episode was about his confronting his mother with the lack of religion in his life. Of course, the mother--one of the most complex characters ever seen on television, according to Science Fiction Weekly--as a liberal college professor, has the groundbreaking attitude that all organized religion is bad, and anyone who follows it is a brainwashed simpleton. However, before the end of the episode--and this is what makes this a truly groundbreaking series--she is confronted with the reality that individuals turn to religion for a variety of reasons, and take a variety of personal responses away from it. So she relents, and allows Bobby to start exploring religion for himself.

Now, I do give credit to the show for tackling an issue that is often ignored or treated with a one-note dismissal by most TV shows. But I still say that being only slightly better than the competition may win races, but it still makes you only slightly better than average.

Got a couple of magazines yesterday, including the new TV Guide, where they review Life as We Know It, the ABC high school drama whose title I couldn't remember the other day. In their review, they say ABC seems to be modeling itself on the WB. "Not the smart, sophisticated WB of Gilmore Girls and Felicity," they write, "but the smarmy, superficially slick WB of One Tree Hill."

Now, as I'm unashamed of admitting, I watch One Tree Hill and enjoy it. I also enjoy Gilmore Girls and Felicity. And lots of other shows the critics love (Nip/Tuck, Rescue Me, The Wire, to name a few) and bunches the critics don't. And comments like these have got me thinking more seriously about why I watch what I watch. The superficial comment would be to say that people who watch shows considered good by whatever nominating body are smart people, and people who watch shows that smart people thing are stupid are stupid people, but I don't believe it's that simple. And I don't feel like going into it all right now (because I have to leave for work in, like, less than half an hour and have stuff do to before I go), but I still maintain that anyone who clings to the belief in simple objective categories like good and bad has a lot of growing up to do.