Season Premiers, Part 1
It’s season premier time! Here are my thoughts on the shows that I watched last night.
Just finished watching Chuck. It was a pretty good show. Neat premise, decent actors, good action, and funny comedy. The pilot was a good one, and I’ll continue to watch it for at least a few more episodes to make sure that it’s worthwhile. Jayne from Firefly/Serenity is in the series! I totally didn’t recognize him until near the end of the episode. I think it’ll be fun to see what kind of NSA agent he plays. Yes, the hot CIA agent is fun to look at, so that doesn’t hurt things. I just wish I knew why here eye-teeth were so friggin’ huge. Every time she smiles, it scares me a little inside. I can get over that though. The one big gaff was that Chuck left Stanford five years ago, and he was talking about his old friend Bryce. While talking about Bryce he mentioned that he remembered working with Bryce to write Zork on a TRS-80 while at Stanford. Ummm… Guys? Nice flashback to the past for us computer geeks (reference to Zork AND TRS-80 in the same sentence is nice), but your target audience for that reference (computer geeks) all know that Zork was written on the PDP-10 in the late 70′s. Yes, it did run on the TRS-80, but this was over two decades ago… not five years. Anyway, that one minor bit aside, the rest of the show was wonderful. I can’t wait for next week to hit.
After Chuck came The Big Bang Theory. This promised to be a funny show for the geeks in the world. This is why I watched it. Apparently Chuck Lorre thinks that smart people are horribly retarded when it comes to social interaction. I take offense to this stereotype because it is rarely true once they get out of high school. The really large words that were thrown around were really distracting because it is equally as rare for even the most intelligent people to talk like that in a social situation. I know that characters are supposed to be exaggerated to really be interesting in fiction, but it can’t be a constant thing or it really gets annoying. There were some good lines in the show, and the best line of the show was in response to, “What do you guys do for fun around here?” The line was, “Today we tried masturbating for money.” Worst line was about the Sun’s position relative to the stars at the time of birth determining personality. It’s actually the position of the Earth relative to the stars as we perceive them that has spawned astrology…. Duh. If you’re going to make a show about smart people, then smart people are going to want to watch. Don’t make stupid mistakes like that. Overall, I’m thinking that this show is going to be a waste of time and energy, but we’ll see how it goes… I’ll leave it on the DVR for now, but no promises that it’ll last more than a week or two.
After that was Two and a Half Men. I came into this show with high hopes as it was a tried and true veteran of comedy. The hilarious lines came one after another. Each performer lived up to even the harshest critic’s expectations. If anyone says anything bad about the season opener of Two and a Half Men, then I have a few theories about them:
- They are horribly stupid.
- They are part of Al Qaeda.
- They are part of Focus on the Family.
- Chuck Lorre did something horrible to them as a child.
- #2 and #3.
- They are Denise Richards, and they still hate Charlie Sheen.
- They hate to laugh because they feel that enjoyment is a mortal sin.
- #1 and #6.
After this, I caught the last half of Journeyman because it was on. I had no intention of watching it, but I had nothing else that I felt motivated to start working on at this late hour. It was pretty good, but I wish I had caught it at the start of the show. I’m not a big fan of time travel shows because of the horrible paradox holes that most writers manage to blow into the plot. I try to ignore them, but most of them jump out and slap you in the face. As I said, I didn’t catch the first half, but the second half was put together reasonably well. I’m not sure I’ll DVR it. I’ll probably just stumble across it when I have time.
The best show of the night (that I watched) was by far Two and a Half Men. I fully expected this. I’m going to continue to give Chuck my time, but Big Bang Theory only has one more shot to get over the “first show jitters” before I remove the timer from my DVR.
Don’t expect updates on these shows the night after they come out. Life is pretty busy for me, and there may be some lag between the time they air, and the time that I watch them.
PS: If I vanish from the face of the Earth within the next week, check the CIA’s secret European prison system. I just mentioned CIA, NSA, astrology, Al Qaeda, Focus on the Family, and Denise Richards all in the same post. I’m pretty sure some high powered government computer somewhere is digging through my blog as you read this flagging me for vaporization in the near future. What? Yeah. I’m reading 1984 right now. Why do you ask?
