TV roundup

Hey TV fans. Just a quick recap of stuff I watched this week, stuff I read about today, and one special show I've just fallen in love with.

Notable stuff I watched:
- Gossip Girl. I'll preface this by saying that I feel some sort of six-degrees-of-separation type of thing with this show. First of all, they've been filming this all down 27th street in NYC, and they've done a week or so right by where I work. (Their wardrobe trailers were outside my building... and I accidentally walked through their breakfast tent one day and saw some of the beautiful gentlemen cast members. Hell yeah. One of them even glared at me! Be still my heart.) Secondly, my coworker's friend wrote the books the series is based on. Anyway, I've gotta say, this show was pretty smutty. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. A good way to sum it up is that while I never watched The O.C., I'm not surprised that it's by the same creators. But Kristen Bell (Veronica Mars) is the narrator, and I love her. And I think it really captures the culture of the teenage set these days - with the sidekicks and the texting and the blogs and whatnot. It's interesting to me from a cultural perspective, and I always love a little drama. It's classic CW/WB, so I'll be tuning in again.

- Back to You. It's hard to judge sitcoms by their pilots. I was a little disappointed by this show's premiere. I'd flag it as mediocre so far. But hey, I'm not giving up on it just yet. Who doesn't love Kelsey Grammar?! Plus, it reminds me of Murphy Brown, News Radio and Mary Tyler Moore. So I'll hang in there.


Notable stuff I read:
- Tony Almeda is returning to 24 this season! Maybe the plot lines, character development, and, oh, say, anything interesting at all, will return too. We can only hope.

- Insight on Pushing Daisies from Slate.com: "...anyone who's seen the Pushing Daisies pilot has to wonder: How long can the studio keep up that expensive look? The same question applies to the premise—guy touches dead people, they come back to life; he touches them again, and they die permanently. The girl of his dreams dies. So, guy loses girl, guy touches girl, guy can never touch girl again." We'll have to see how that plays out. I've thought from the beginning that this might be one of those shows that would make out better as a movie. But here's hoping.

- NBC's co-chairman Ben Silverman threw a pre-Emmy party that included girls in underwear and a tiger in a cage. Formal attire only. Assumedly that applies to everyone but the g-string-clad women. And the tiger. So... there's that.

- "How to Sound Like an American." This Slate video article investigates how all these British actors drop their accents to sound so utterly American. (House is the best example. Damn, he's good.)

My new love:

HEROES. Seriously, I missed out last season by not watching this. Now I understand what all the hype was about. It's so much better than I expected!!! It's everything I always wished Lost and 24 could be. And for someone like me, who loves reading novels, the fact that this plays out like a novel is fantastic. The writing is phenomenal, the characters are so complex, and the plot is revealed just enough at a time. And like my sister said, the story arc was planned from the beginning, so nothing that happens is an accident. Plus, I love superhero stories. So this is like my dream show. I am wondering, though, how this got scheduled in a 9pm time slot. It's pretty graphic, racy, dark, and scary. (Especially if you watch it with all the lights off and only candles lit, like I've been doing. Very "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark"-ish.) Anyway, seriously, watch this show. I always knew I'd like it, but I never knew I'd love it to the point of addiction, which is how I feel now. Season 2 starts Monday, but you should DVR it, Netflix the season 1 DVDs right now, and have a marathon over the weekend, like I'm doing, so that you can start watching season 2. (You definitely have to start with season 1.) I'm holding out hope that it won't lose momentum in season 2. This show is extremely powerful. And you know what they say... with great power comes great responsibility. Crossing my fingers that that means season 2 plays out just as fantastically as season 1!