a) "Brand X with Russell Brand"
How did America get stuck with this fuckin' guy and start pretending he's any good? His character in Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Get Him To The Greek was funny enough with the right writing but when they put him onstage and just let him be himself at an MTV awards show or on something like this it's just torture. It's like he wants to free-associate absurdity like an Eddie Izzard but doesn't have half a brain to even remotely make it work. Can we get send this idiot back to England now?

b) "Anger Management" 
As one of the few people who thought Charlie Sheen-era "Two And A Half Men" was a pretty effective trad sitcom, I would like to definitively state that this show is total garbage even compared to that. And it's pretty much as close to making the same show again as Sheen could get, which is funny since he kept saying that the writing on that show was below his standards when it was really the best thing he'd ever done. The weirdest thing of all here, though, is that there's not even any apparent connection to the movie this show is named after and supposedly based on, other than that a main character is an anger management therapist. I feel bad for Shawnee Smith and Selma Blair that they're in this, even they don't seem to know why.

c) "The Newsroom" 
"Sports Night" and to a lesser extent "West Wing" are all-time classics to me, so I will forever remain something of an Aaron Sorkin apologist, and thought his movie into commissioned screenplays for things like The Social Network was nice in that it let him exercise his talent for dialogue without being caged by his own habits and obsessions in the way that brought down "Studio 60." So here comes HBO with all the horrible horrible freedom they can offer him to repeat himself into self-parody. The things that this show is really getting beaten up on, the recent past timeframe, its Great White Male complex, etc. are really the least of its problems for me. I mainly hate the direction and tone of the show; the cast and the story are decent, but once you put on that pompous opening credits sequence and shoot everything in drab color on handicams it just comes off so much worse than it could. Man I hope they cancel this, because I'm probably going to watch every episode for as long as it's on just like "Studio 60." Which was actually better than this, by the way.

d) "Saving Hope"
This show NBC is running over the summer is a Canadian production that's already been on the air up there for a few months. And it's a combination medical procedural/supernatural high concept show, which is just the definition of what TV doesn't need any more of. But man Erica Durance is one insanely good-looking woman, so I have watched it a few times.

e) "Bunheads" 
I never watched "Gilmore Girls," but that was mainly because I have an irrational dislike of Lauren Graham, so I have no idea how I feel about this lady's shows in general. But the pilot of this was pretty decent, although I was bummed that they basically (spoiler alert) wrote my favorite actor in the show out of being a series regular in that first episode, which has kind of lowered my motivation to keep watching.

f) "The Eric Andre Show"
I have to appreciate that this show is taking the ramshackle anti-comedy Adult Swim aesthetic somewhere darker and much less cutesy and pop culture-driven than most of their other shows. But I dunno, man, I feel like it's just being crazy and unpredictable for unpredictability's sake and is being funny is kind of an accidental secondary concern, which is not really my scene. It's about ten times better than that "Comedy Bang Bang" bullshit, though.

g) "Bunk"
This is in a way as much a deconstruction of game shows as "The Eric Andre Show" is of talk shows, but it's also really really funny, just a minute-by-minute zany thrill ride in the best possible way. 

h) "Veep"
I feel like this show got better as it settled in and the cast really got some chemistry. I still feel like it's kind of going for easy laughs and dressing them up with colorful cursing, though.

i) "Suits"
One of my favorite new shows of last year is back, off to a great start. Not an especially innovative show but also not a boilerplate legal procedural, I like that the plot is still very driven by tension between the characters. And really it's almost as gratuitously about people looking great in expensive suits and dresses as "Mad Men" is, and those women really look amazing.

j) "Episodes"
Another new show I enjoyed last year but wasn't really in any rush to see more of. So far it's actually funnier in the second season, though, had some serious belly laughs in the premiere.

k) "The Big C" 
I took my time getting around to watching the third season of this since I was pretty on the fence about the first two. Then I finally got bored enough to catch up, and by the fourth episode I just realized how much I hate these characters, especially when they tried to adopt a baby and refused to accept that a middle-aged couple with cancer and heart problems shouldn't adopt and I was just yelling "fuck you" at the screen. 

l) "The Sunny Side Up Show"
This is one of my son's favorite shows on Sprout, where a squeaking chicken puppet named Chica and one of four human co-hosts wishes happy birthday to viewers and sings songs. My wife and I had a favorite co-host, a cute redhead named Liz who was by far the best singer on the show. And then recently they replaced her with a "quirky" chick named Carly who plays ukelele and is almost like SNL's Zooey Deschanel parody brought to life, so we're a little annoyed with "The Sunny Side Up Show" at the moment. My son doesn't seem to care, though.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 02, 2012 at 10:58 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.