1. "Miss/Guided"
I almost hate to say it, but ABC's whole new wave of cutesy comedies ("Pushing Daisies," "Samantha Who?" and now this) is kinda becoming my favorite stuff on TV these days. They're all more classic rom-com quirky than annoying Juno indie quirky, and actually have some snappy writing and good acting to fall back on, and I'm rooting for any/all of these shows to make it to the 07/08 season. I've always been kind of ambivalent about Judy Greer, but this is a pretty ideal showcase for her, and also for Chris Parnell, who I'm still bummed about not being on SNL anymore. Ashton Kutcher is an exec producer, which isn't a good sign, but his obligatory guest appearance in one of the first episodes wasn't that bad. At least, until I realized that the co-star his character hooked up with at the end of the episode was played by Brooke Burns, who's Bruce Willis's girlfriend or ex-girlfriend, which makes the whole thing kind of weird and creepy.

2. "Welcome To The Captain"
This show, on the other hand, is the bad kind of quirky, and you know a cast is irritating when Chris Klein is the best thing about it. CBS has had such good luck with semi-traditional sitcoms lately, I don't know why they had to go and ruin it with this shit.

3. "Unhitched"
I kinda like this show, but they really shot themselves in the foot by mounting an ad campaign filled with nothing but "new Seinfeld" comparisons (also one of the reasons I never gave "It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia" a fair shot, to be honest), since inevitably the only similiarity it bears is to the more slapstick moments of season 9 "Seinfeld."

4. "Quarterlife"
I checked this out last year when it was being hyped as "the MySpace TV show" last year just to see how awful it was, and it really exceeded my expectations. And once it made its way onto NBC, it was cancelled so quickly that I almost didn't even get a chance to see how much it sucked on real TV and gloat about its failure, but they dumped all the produced episodes on a Bravo marathon and I got to see a little of it. Reminds me of how I couldn't even bring myself to watch "My So-Called Life" back in the day no matter how hot I thought Claire Danes was.

5. "In Treatment"
Even if the overseas show this is based on preceded it by a few years, HBO rolling this out just a few months after "Tell Me You Love Me" seems like a bad idea -- this is definitely the better show, but the first time I saw it I was like, oh, another show about therapy, this time without all the sex scenes? Still, the soap-opera like schedule of 5 episodes a week is nigh impossible to keep up with, so I just check in here and there and am generally pretty lost, and I kinda doubt I'll feel motivated to watch it on DVD when it comes out.

6. "Canterbury's Law"
I've always kinda liked Julianna Margulies, especially after her smoking hot guest appearance on "Scrubs" a few years ago, but she doesn't look too great on her new show and the show itself is pretty dumb. I did like, though, that in the big scene of the pilot episode, the witness on the stand that she was cross-examining that punched her in the mouth was Marimow from "The Wire."

7. "Smash Lab"
I really can't think of any reason for this show to exist, other than to pander to people who like "MythBusters" but think it needs more explosions. That's a totally valid point of view, though, and probably a significant segment of Discovery's audience, but this, this show is surprisingly kinda boring, mainly because of the unmemorable host people.

8. "MythBusters"
The original article, however, is as good as ever. On most shows, doing a pop culture-themed episode would be a bad thing, but the recent "MacGuyver" and James Bond specials have been awesome, the exact kind of thing I watch this show for. And as much of a geek cliche it is to say this, Kari Byron really is one of the hottest women on television.

9. "American Idol"
I don't even know what to say about this show anymore. I think I might hate all the contestants right now, but I haven't even seen enough of this season to say for sure. I skipped the audition rounds because I usually hate the freak show aspect, and kept saying I'd tune in consistently for the top 24, then the top 12, but just haven't. Maybe next week?

10. "Saturday Night Live"
I've been pretty cool with the show's cast lately, and although I'm bummed about Maya Rudolph's mid-season departure, it's been pretty great on the first few episodes back since the strike. Kristen Wiig in particular is really coming into her own, although, please, no more 'Penelope' sketches, it was funny the first time but those shits are getting more repetitive than the Will Ferrell/Cheri Oteri cheerleaders.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 22, 2008 at 11:52 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.