We’re deep into the summer TV season and I thought I’d write a little something, as I like to do every now and again, about the shows I enjoy. Or the shows I just watch. Sometimes I don’t enjoy them as much as they’re okay but not great. First off I miss “Burn Notice”. That was always a fun summer show and this is the first summer it’s been gone. Oh well, nothing lasts forever.
Let’s start with a new show: “Extant”. It stars Halle Berry as an astronaut sometime in the future that returns to Earth after a long solo mission in space and things are not what they seem. It’s one of those conspiracy “What the heck is really going on here?” shows that I often love or hate. Or like or dislike. This one is “Like”. It moves along at a pretty good clip, reveals new thing, and lets us know a little more about what’s going on. That’s all I ask for. Often these post-Lost shows don’t give me enough information about the mystery and I get frustrated and bored. This one has kept me watching though.
I first saw Chris D’Elia on the Whitney Cummings’ show “Whitney” and thought he was good on it. “Whitney”only lasted two seasons but I enjoyed the show and thought I would check out D’Elia’s new show “Undateable”. It’s solidly okay with some potential. It’s a show about a guy (D’Elia) who gets a new roommate and starts hanging out with the new roommate and the roommie’s buddies in the roommate’s bar. D’Elia is also supposed to be trying to teach the guys about women. But is it really D’Elia who is “Undateable” or the goofy guys? That’s the question. It was only a ten episode season and has been renewed for ten more next year so I’ll be back. It has some funny moments and tries hard so maybe soon it will raise it’s batting average.
Watching “Undateable” lead me to another ten episode show from the same producers called “Ground Floor”. It ran last fall but I missed it entirely. It also has ten more episodes coming in its season two. I haven’t watched all of season one but I think I already like it better then “Undateable”. “Ground Floor” is a sitcom about the rich young men who work for a financial company and some of the less rich and powerful building employees who work on the ground floor. Of course one of the upstairs guys starts dating a downstairs gal. Cue the odd couple type comedy. They do a good job with it. The supporting characters are cool and there are some laughs to be found. I’ll take that.
As many comic books as I read I don’t nearly read all of them. There is a new TV show “The Strain” based on a comic book of the same name. It’s a horror story. The lead character works for the Center for Disease Control and has to work out what is happening when a plane full of people land in NYC and are all dead. Turns out it’s vampires. And not the pretty and attractive modern vampires but the old fashioned kind that are monsters through and through. The story has moved along a little slowly so far and there a few characters who, four episodes in, have not been integrated into the main plot. I have no idea how they will fit into the story. That’s a bit strange but overall it has held my interest.
“Rizzoli and Isles” is one of those buddy cop police procedurals that I sometimes like to watch. I kinda only watched it with one eye in the past but this season, its fifth, has kept me more interested than the others. The two buddies, the cop and the coroner, are both women so that makes it unusual for a buddy cop show but they’ve been there since the beginning so I’m not sure why I’ve liked this season more. It’s a solid show. It’s like a lot of other cop shows so I won’t go into detail about its plots and characters. It’s pretty standard stuff but well done.
The other procedural I’ve been watching this summer is “Perception”. This one is in the quirky detective sub-genre. This detective’s quirk is that he is one of the world’s leading brain experts but he has a degenerative brain disease himself. He is a consultant who has an FBI agent as a partner as he teaches in a college and solves crimes in his spare time. Once again this has been a pretty good season for “Perception”. This is the show’s third season and it seems to be hitting its stride. Solid but not spectacular.
A weird show that I’ve been watching is called “Welcome To Sweden”. It’s a story about a successful accountant who quits his job to move to Sweden with his girlfriend. He has no job there yet and not much of a plan. A bit of the show is in Swedish. The show in and of itself isn’t so weird but the idea that the show even exists is strange. Who green-lit a show about moving to Sweden? Why did anyone think that was a funny premise? The show is light, amusing, and I enjoy it but I didn’t think Sweden was in Hollywood’s consciousness. Turns out that it’s a joint US and Sweden production and it’s already been on in Sweden and been renewed for another ten episode season. That and Any Poehler is a producer on it. That woman is hot right now and has some pull.
A returning summer TV show that I’ve been watching is “Under the Dome”. The first season was all right but I’m liking the second season much more. Things are happening as they are killing off more and more characters and pasts are being revealed. We may not know as much about the dome as we want to but it still feels like the plot is moving forward. That’s all I can ask of these post-Lost mystery shows.
One last summer show I’ve been watching is a canceled fall show. It’s “The Michael J.Fox Show”. It ran in the fall and spring but was canceled before all the episodes were even shown. Those unaired episodes have been showing up on the internet though and that gave me a chance to watch them. I’ve heard people say they found the show hard to watch because of Fox’s Parkinson’s Disease but that didn’t bother me. I though the show was okay but also think it became funnier at the end of the season. The unaired episodes were among the best of them. Ain’t that always the way. So what are you watching?
Discussion ¬