Okay, so I watched the first episode of the new Lisa Kudrow "comedy" on HBO, Comeback. And I want to say something positive about it, but after about 20 minutes or so, I was starting to think the best thing I could say about it was that it ended after half an hour. But, after a half hour, my DVR recording of the show just ended, and it was still going on! (It was rerun later, like at 1:30 in the morning or something, so I did record the final minutes, possibly, just to see.) Apparently the season finale of Gilmore Girls ran over unnanounced as well. So I downloaded a copy of that episode off the internet, just to get the final bit. And if someone wants to make an issue of my downloading the episode, let me point out that I wouldn't have done it if the WB had fit the whole thing into its assigned time block.

Now, I know that networks are troubled by folks like me recording their TV and watching it later, skipping the commercials. To which I say, "Boo hoo." There's a lot of TV on, and I'm going to be recording quite a bit of it instead of watching it live. If a network wants to somehow force me into watching it live, they're more likely to make me just decide to skip it altogether.

Of course, making a show like Comeback is another way to keep me from watching, because it really isn't very good. The concept is, Kudrow plays an actress who once had a brief moment in the sitcom fame sun. Now, she's the subject of a reality TV series following a former star who ends up in a new series, hoping to recapture her moment of glory, all in front of the cameras. The thing is, it just isn't very funny. At all. So it's just watching this fairly clueless egotist talk about herself for half an hour (or more) with no payoff. It's painful and irritating in a way that the British faux-docu-sitcom The Office wasn't. I mean, I get that, as an actress, the character is always performing in front of the cameras, but there isn't enough of a juxtaposition where we see a sympathetic human side to her, so there's nothing to really grab hold of. And the idea of a documentary-style show about acting was done so much better by HBO in Unscripted, so it's hardly new ground... I don't know, I feel like I should give it a second week to be sure, but we'll see.

Oh, and at the end of this week's Doctor Who Confidential, they showed a commercial for the American version of The Office on BBC Three. This would be the dull American remake of the British show, and it's called The Office: An American Workplace. Their tag line: "The same, only different." Good lord...