Random thoughts - Idol, the future of television, and more

- Sometimes I hate it when I'm right.



Some thoughts on the finale:

Beyonce is AMAZING. And J-Lo could not have been happy to have to go on after her.

Casey Abrams and James Durbin are legitimately funny.

Jack Black? Seriously? And...those girls didn't have fat bottoms.

Haley can have a nice career in the Adele/Amy Winehouse/Duffy genre. She just needs to get there fast while people are still buying it.

I miss Pia.

Speaking of which, Pia doesn't get a solo song, or even a duet, but we get a song from the Spiderman musical? And nobody was even INJURED during it? BOOOOOOOOO.

Carrie Underwood. Good grief. I'm glad I don't live anywhere near her...that girl is a restraining order just waiting to happen.

I am willing to bet that Scotty McReery's high school choral department doesn't have as hard a time getting guys to join as most high schools.

I gave myself a 45 minute fast forward buffer, thinking that would be plenty. It wasn't. Not even close.

Congrats to Scotty...he is now going to sell a whole lot of records, and I will never have to pay attention to him again.

- If you are an HBO subscriber and are NOT taking advantage of HBO Go, do yourself a favor and go to hbogo.com RIGHT NOW. You have access to the ENTIRE library of HBO shows, at no extra charge. You don't even need an iPhone...I have been watching season one of Sopranos and season 3 of Deadwood on my PC. For free, except for the $10 a month for HBO that I would already be paying.

It's just another step towards the future of television. Pretty soon, it will ALL be web-based. After my post the other day, I was thinking about the logistics, and it may actually be easier than I thought...you could just pay your cable company just like you do now, since most of the cable companies are also internet providers, go to comcast.net or whatever, and then pick your channel (web page) and go watch what you want to. The only other thing to figure out is advertising, but Hulu has a pretty good model for that right now, I think. Just imbed the ads in the video, and even better (from the advertiser's perspective), don't allow fast forwarding during the ads.

- Cougar Town fans...it may be too late now, since the season ended last night, but you should really be following @TheLarmy on Twitter. I'm not sure if it's actually Busy Phillips updating it or not, but it is Laurie in character, and it is consistently hilarious.

- Last week's Parks and Rec season finale ended one of the most perfect sitcom seasons of all time.

- Speaking of perfect seasons...I just started watching Survivor two seasons ago. Has any player ever dominated the way that Boston Rob did this season? It was like he was using Jedi mind tricks or something.

- Guess what today is? 100 DAYS UNTIL KICKOFF!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yep...the countdown starts in earnest now.


GO DAWGS!!

My favorite things I watched last week

Hopefully, this is going to be a weekly feature on the blog. In a normal week I would plan on getting this up over the weekend, but some family issues kept me from doing much blogging this past weekend.


These lists will be in no particular order, and will certainly not contain everything I watched or enjoyed during the week...just my very favorite things.

- The return of Parks and Recreation. Probably my favorite comedy currently on television, and it returned in top form. Even if there was nothing else good about the episode (and there was TONS), it would have made the list just for this:
(Click to enlarge...trust me, it's worth it)

- The ratings for Fringe. The first Friday show itself was not one of my favorite Fringe episodes...I thought it was good-not-great, even though every scene with John Noble and Christopher Lloyd was brilliant. But the really good news is that they managed to maintain the same ratings on Friday that they were running on Thursday, which was enough to win the night for Fox in the key demographics. Great news, and if they can keep that up they will have overcome the dreaded "Friday Slot of DOOOOOOOOOOM".

- Phil Dunphy eating breakfast on the floor. My favorite part of the scene was that neither he nor Claire even acknowledged it. It was just like, "Well, I'm hungry....and Claire won't let me go downstairs until we figure out how to deal with this. So I'm gonna try and salvage these eggs".

- Everything Busy Phillips did on Cougar Town. Wuh-BAMM!!

- Surprisingly enough, American Idol. I was pleasantly surprised by the judges panel, though I am still mostly reserving judgment until we get to the live shows and they can no longer edit out the awkward/annoying moments. But what I was most excited about was the noticeable reduction in freak-show/mentally challenged auditions. I liked what Jacob on Television Without Pity said: "What if the big change this year is that we are no longer playing to the Lowest Common Denominator?"

- Breaking Bad and Deadwood. Two shows on almost everybody's "Best of the '00s" lists that I had missed. I'm catching up on Breaking Bad by watching the replays on AMC, and I'm into season 2 of Deadwood on iTunes. Both are living up to their lofty reputations, though Deadwood's language is causing me some problems...I'm no prude when it comes to profanity (in that I understand that if you're going to write realistic dialogue, you have to write how people really talk), but the air around Deadwood is so blue it is actually distracting at times. But the writing and acting on both of these shows are tremendous, and I no longer begrudge Bryan Cranston beating out Jon Hamm for his multiple Emmys.

- Jay Rome's announcement. Got me believing again that the Dawgs may pull off this whole Dream Team thing, especially when it was quickly followed by his teammate Malcolm Mitchell following him to the Classic City. With Drew, Crowell, and Jenkins still on the board (and supposedly all strong UGA leans), I may actually get excited about football again.

How about you, fellow TV watchers? What were your favorite things on TV last week?