TV update

I am finally caught up on Heroes! I am almost caught up on The Office! (By the way, Megan, I wouldn't worry. Joss was just kidding... I think...) Speaking of The Office, even though I haven't seen the new episodes yet, and therefore can't judge, here's a post about whether the one-hour format works for the show (verdict: not so much).

Anyone else who's watching Pushing Daisies - how'd you feel about episode 2? I still like it - I thought the snark balanced the cuteness a bit, but when Kristin Chenowith started singing, I just went, "Oh, dear Lord." Now, we all know how much I love musicals, and Kristin Chenowith does have a wonderful voice, but that's exactly the kind of thing that's going to make normal people turn the show off. The quirk is tolerable only up to a point, and for many people, song-and-dance numbers (which seemed more like filler than anything else) are past that point. For me, personally, if the damn narrator doesn't stop giving people's ages in minutes and seconds, I'm going to reach into the TV and throttle someone.

I'm also (inexplicably) still watching Moonlight. I don't know why, but since I'm not caught up on Friday Night Lights, I don't have an excuse to pull my eyes away from the train wreck. I think I've put my finger on just what I dislike about the show. First of all, it's moving too fast. It's only the third episode, and the reporter not only knows Mick's big secret, but she is completely okay with the fact that vampires exist. Maybe I'm expecting too much, but those are big issues. It'd be nice if the show dwelt on them a little bit, you know, made them have an emotional impact. On the other hand, I feel like it treats the subject matter with too much gravity... as though this is groundbreaking stuff. Do we really need so much of the pretentious voice over? I mean, we've all watched vampire shows before, we don't need our hands held in explaining the mythology, even if it is slightly different (read: crappier) than previous incarnations. In the same vein (ha! get it?), I read somewhere that someone described it as, "This show would be good... if it aired in 1987." But it's ignored 20 years of raising the bar in TV production, and so it seems pretty crappy by today's standards. I have to agree. It makes me wonder if the creators of the show have watched TV in the past 20 years.

On a related note, here's a NYTimes article about how many supernatural shows there are on TV right now.