Rough Draft

TV Shows

Erik recently linked to a couple Fall 2005 TV grids (here and here) and posted a list of the TV shows he plans to watch this fall. I figured I'd also share what my ReplayTV is set up to record.

Sunday
Family Guy (9:00 on Fox)
Curb Your Enthusiasm (10:00 on HBO)

Monday
Arrested Development (8:00 on Fox)

Tuesday
Bones (8:00 on on Fox)

Wednesday
That 70s Show (8:00 on Fox)

Thursday aka Reality TV Night
Survivor (8:00 on CBS)
The Apprentice (9:00 on NBC)

Friday
Numb3rs (10:00 on CBS)

Saturday
Naruto (9:00 on Cartoon Network)

Bones is the only newly added show to my regular lineup and I have no idea if it will actually be good. The important thing I'll need to remember is that David Boreanez is not in fact a kick ass vampire in this show.

There are a couple shows that don't start up again until 2006 that I'll definitely be watching including Scrubs and The Shield.

The only cancelled show that I'll miss is The Inside which only aired a handful of episodes on Fox this past summer. Bones might fill the FBI show void in my schedule, but I'm not sure if it will be as dark as the The Inside was. The Inside was definitely my favorite dark crime/drama show since The X-Files.

Are there any other shows I ought to be checking out this Fall?

ReplayTV Upgrade

I bought a 200 GB hard drive from CompUSA today for $70 and installed it in my ReplayTV 5040. The Replay was easy to take apart and the instructions here for using RTVPatch helped a lot. I had an empty Firewire drive enclosure so I just used that rather than bothering with putting the drives in my computer to do the patching. I also didn't bother attempting to back up my mpeg partition with RTVPatch. I just copied a few shows (can you say grocery shopping penguin!) I wanted to keep with DVArchive. I now have 66 hours and 56 minutes of space available at high quality. W00t! Perhaps I'll need to find some new shows to start recording. Any suggestions?

Good TV

Last night's episode of Scrubs was wonderful. First you had Zach Braff dressed as a Kabuki actor to tell a family their loved one has died. So completely random. Though this was especially entertaining to me after learning about Kabuki theater in my Classical Japanese Literature class last spring. Then Tom Cavanaugh was in the episode as Zach's brother, Dan. Though he spent most of the episode drinking beer in JD's bathtub. This is the first season I've watched Scrubs and I've laughed out loud multiple times during every episode. I believe the older seasons are coming out on DVD, so those will definitely be going into my NetFlix queue. And speaking of Tom Cavanaugh hopefully Ed will be out on DVD in the near future, that was such a great show too.

Tonight's episode of Rescue Me was also really good, and as it turns out the season finale. I didn't know beforehand this was the last episode of the season, but by the end of episode with all the shit that was going down, I had a bad feeling it was. So I checked FX's website and sure enough it was. I'm sure they'll be re-airing the season soon, and when they do I definitely recommend checking it out. So I guess I need to find a new show to fill the genre void of drama littered with twisted humor in my tv viewing...at least until season 4 of The Shield starts.

Firefly

I've just started watching Firefly on DVD from NetFlix and have been enjoying it. I have to say the captain, Mal, is a total badass. That's not to say he's heartless, but in both episodes I've watched he has killed someone in a way that says "don't fuck with me".

Firefly has actually reminded me a lot of Cowboy Bebop. Aside from the fact that both series take their name from crew's main spacecraft, they both take place in a future where we've colonized other planets, yet still live a relatively low tech life. Both shows follow the stories of a rouge crew, that will take whatever "job" they can to get by. I'm sure I'll be able to draw a lot more comparisons after I've actually watched the rest of Firefly.