welcome.

nasty fuckin week here in cs. just rainy and dreary, sorta sucks that valentine's and my birthday fall in prolly the ugliest month of the year. i remember as a kid always wanting to have my birthday in the summer so i could have some pool party or something.

scrubs 3x12 was pretty good tonight, for this season at least. overall it was a pretty funny ep, but i've got a couple complaints about it. what's with NBC's stupid bullshit fetish with fuckin with programming times? they do it several nights of the week, and they've already got the DVR community pissed off about it. you can see the problem with it: if a time-shifted NBC show starts at 7:59 instead of 8pm on the dot, any recording you have going from 7-8 is gonna conflict with that 7:59 start time. so it makes you either cancel the previous recording or manually record the NBC show partially, which kinda defeats the entire purpose of a DVR. it may seem like a really small deal to some, but that's the kinda thing that causes people (read: me) to lose loyalties to a network. NBC has started to sink the last couple years anyway, and i'm happy every time they lose a show of theirs where i wanna watch the channel even less. [i'll get back to scrubs in a sec...]

NBC just seems like they're getting more and more similar to fox, which is not a good thing in my book. you might have noticed for the first time in 20+ years, they've put something other than a sitcom on thursday nights, the apprentice. now i've never had any interest in the apprentice, so i can't bash it at all, nor do i really care whether anybody likes it or not. i think them putting it on thursday nights (not to mention wednesday) just shows they're really running low on new comedic scripted material these days. hell, maybe it's better they just rebroadcast the apprentice like they're doing thus far, cuz i wasn't watching anything from 7:30 to 9pm (except if scrubs was on) anyway. sure, tell me i live in the past, put do you remember NBC "must see TV" thursdays of the mid-90's? the lineup was friends-single guy-seinfeld-[several mostly horrible shows like suddenly susan, caroline in the city, veronica's closet, etc]-ER, and you were almost always guaranteed to have an hour and a half of good comedy followed by a good compelling hour of drama. nowadays i really only list ER as still being kinda watchable, although i won't cry when they wrap things up within a couple years (which admittedly, is prolly drawing it out too much anyway).

as painful as it is today (who am i kidding?) i'm ready for friends to end. they've made the right decision to end it after a round-number 10 full seasons on the air. it's been just a notch above horrible for a good 3 seasons now, and any comparisons to seinfeld are largely unfounded since seinfeld bowed out early enough to really go out on top. sure, friends still has phenomenal ratings, but it's definitely had a significant portion of its viewers lose interest over time. i still give the show credit, they've had a little less than 250 episodes, which really is a lot for such a generic subject. i'm not sure if it's really ever completely jumped the shark but i can sorta tell why i don't really like it very much anymore. it's easy to see. with any comedic medium, do the standard litmus test: see if it makes you laugh. friends has a hard time doing that anymore, at least for me. most of the time i realize i'm watching it (almost always with alayna) mostly because we feel obligated to see the show out to its proper end. but all the guest starts, cliffhangers, super-sized episodes, etc... c'mon, just cut the crap already. standard desperate attempts to keep the show going past its prime i say. sure, i'll occasionally miss seeing it in on the primetime schedule, but i can't really say i'll miss it as much as my personal favorite, seinfeld. believe me, you'll still get thoroughly beaten over the head with it in syndication.

quite obviously, i don't agree with NBC's decision to create the friends spin-off, joey. i know, frasier was a spin-off of cheers, and both were great shows, but i don't have a good feeling about this one. i just think it has big potential to be thoroughly shat upon, like the american version of coupling. it'll be on at 7pm thursdays just like friends, so they're pretty much assuming everybody will just transition right into it. i'll give it a shot, but i just cannot see myself wanting any more to do with new content from the friends "world." i'll have all my own copies of all ten seasons of friends, maybe even on dvd, but c'mon, just go away already.

admittedly, i seem to be the kinda guy that if a show has been on for a while and i didn't catch it at first, i'll never watch it. as far as NBC, semi-long-running shows like ed (which is about to end), west wing and third watch, i just never watched 'em, so i don't watch 'em these days. so with mainstays like friends and frasier ending this season, it'll be interesting (at first) to see if NBC just plugs those holes with more reality type crap.

so i guess in my book, as far as next season, the only things NBC seems to have going for it will be scrubs, ER and las vegas. the law & order original series is still pretty rock solid, but c'mon, 14 seasons? believe me, there's a lot of recycling going on there. and don't get me started on all the spin-off series from that show either. but las vegas man. surprisingly, that show has actually been really good. yeah, they do the crazy camera transition shit too often and all, but overall the show's pretty entertaining and seems to have a decent enough following online so far. it's got the all-too-obvious something-for-everyone appeal, josh duhamel for the ladies, and plenty of eye candy like molly sims, nikki cox and vanessa marcil for the guys. it's got enough action and clever enough dialog to be entertaining for the most part. not sure how much longevity it's actually got, but it's nice to see that not every new idea a network comes out with immediately gets canned.

that brings me back to scrubs. i missed scrubs first season, and i've still only seen about 1/3 of the episodes from that season. somehow i caught the first episode of the second season (upon its shift to thursday nights at the time) and was almost immediately hooked. there's been a somewhat noticeable dropoff from the second to the third season, but overall it's still good enough to tivo and mostly enjoy. just like anything else, they're kinda running out of storylines. hell, look at ER in its 10th season, there's only so much you can do with a hospital and a bunch of doctors running around, whether comedy or drama. so they're filling the lack of plots with a slew of guest stars mostly, and it kinda starts to make scrubs look bad. admittedly, tara reid has to try pretty hard to make anything look bad, but the fact that she was one of many guest stars just makes the entire concept lose its luster. since almost the entire production team came over from spin city, with michael j fox on tonight now basically the entire former cast of that show has at one point guested on scrubs.

scrubs' first season should definitely be out on DVD by now. friends has like 6 seasons out now, it's time to start whippin out those fuckin tv dvd's quicker now.

i think lately i'm making a big effort to somehow broaden my tastes, at least in terms of media. i've tried to get away from a bunch of sitcoms or beaten-to-death reality shows and look for other shit to entertain myself. within the last few months i've run across these decent alternatives:

• most of the adult swim shows on cartoon network: i never really realized before that cartoon network bothered showing anything for people other than children, but adult swim is suprisingly cool, and the ratings have been sky-high for it. i tivo cowboy bebop every night, since the entire series is only 26 episodes long and hoang and rick have suggested it's somewhat essential anime viewing. overall it's pretty good, just that i get a little lazy in watching all of them, so i'm slowly making my way through them, bout halfway through now, with 6 episodes sitting on the tivo now. from what i can tell, witch hunter robin will replace bebop when it's through this month, and that looks pretty interesting as well. i'm still sorta feeling my way through the other adult swim shows, like aqua teen hungerforce, sealab 2021, the brak show and space ghost coast to coast. i've only watched a few of each and can't tell yet if they're my cup'o'tea. plus, since i never watched it on fox, i learned that family guy was a surprisingly great show, not to mention the ratings from cartoon network alone have influenced fox to most likely pick it up again for new shows prolly early 2005. but the best on adult swim that i'd never even heard of before has gotta be home movies. about 90% of the episodes so far have gotten me lol'ing, so that's saying a lot. if you need something to watch on sunday nights, turn off mtv and their bullshit road rules / real world challenges or whatever and catch this one.
  
• a limited number of decency on spiketv: don't get me wrong, overall spiketv is a stupid idea. i know women have their lifetime and oxygen channels, but this "first network for men" crap is a bit too much. seems more like they have maybe 6 hours of good programming per week and then a bunch of filler crap on for the other times. so far i've caught onto MXC and the john henson project. i managed to turn lauren and laura onto MXC, so if they like it, why wouldn't anybody?! watch an episode, then send an IM to suckdahornywater and tell him how you love those crazy charlies. hoang and i really missed john henson from when he quit talk soup several years ago and he FINALLY turns up again on his own show on spike. i think we've had like 4 episodes now, and the show is only marginally good, but it's just nice to see skunkboy back on tv so i don't mind tuning in for each episode. basically the parts where he's sitting at the desk commenting on something (just like the old days, eh?) are the really worthwhile parts, with the other segments just being bad ripoffs of the man show. also they show old CSI episodes on friday nights, which is cool, but once a week is a fuckin joke. not to mention the entire seasons of CSI on dvd are way too fuckin expensive so far.
  
• semi-scholarly shows: i'm referring to anything i tivo on the travel channel, the history channel, or TLC now and then. oddly enough sometimes it can be more entertaining to watch 45 minutes worth of semi-educational tv rather than bad sitcoms. if you look through like the next week's worth of schedule for each of those networks, you can usually find a handful of decent shows on each that pique your interest. definitely a nice change from the usual idiotbox entertainment.
  
• sports-related shit: playmakers was actually an awesome series, and let's all send a collective fuck you to the NFL for pressuring ESPN to cancel it. they should have been able to have a 2nd season, but the NFL shit all over it, just like they do everything else lately. i tivo PTI everyday, and most of the time it's great to keep you up to date on current sports news and opinions. even alayna watches it and enjoys it when she can. sportscenter isn't quite as good as it used to be, but still well-produced and entertaining to watch. now and then you can also find a decent "beyond the glory" episode on fox sports, the much-inferior sports network.
  

that's the great thing about tivo, y'know? if i've got enough other good stuff recorded and ready to play, if i feel like watching tv for the night, who says i have to watch primetime major-network shit?

but i guess i shoved enough opinion down your throat for tonight, huh? kudos if you even got this far ;)

cheers,
justin