Fumarama

So remember how I promised that I would review every new fictional show of the new television season...yeah, I totally did not do that. I made a good faith effort to do so, but believe it or not, I reached my television breaking point. I could not make myself watch Men in Trees. It is wierd cause that is totally my kind of show, woman centered dramedy with a long will they or won't they relationship. So I was home on a Friday night (working theoretically) and i made myself a dinner and turned on the tv in order to finally sit down and watch Men in Trees. And I could not do it. Something about Anne Heche trying to be cute, and the predictable dialogue, and I was bored and annoyed and after five minutes I could not take it anymore and turned off the tv. I believe I read the New York Times with my meal instead.

Reviewing tv after the first episode is really hard. In all those other arts, movies, books, even if you don't give anything away, you get to review reflectively so your impression of the movie is more than the details coming through and that comes through. Television reviewing is prospective. I tried to solve this problem by asking the question "will I watch this show again?" But that turned out to be a harder question than I thought. I was right about Ugly Betty and Friday Night Lights, even though I think for each around episode 3 I thought that maybe I was wrong about them. But I never turned on either Six Degrees or Brothers and Sisters again. And I was totally wrong about Heroes. I randomly watched it a couple of weeks ago. That show is amazing! I still maintain that I might eventually find it really frustrating, right now it is just awesome.

All that being said I watched Shark last week. It is a big time defense attorney that gets a heart and turns into a prosecutor. He represented really rich defendants so i think that is why the audience is expected to believe he was heartless. I can't imagine a public defendant being portrayed as heartless. Anyway, it was a pretty good procedural. I almost never watch law shows and so I found myself trying to figure out if the law was correct. Of-course I have become insanely cautious so my answers tend to be like well, I am like 80% sure that the show is wrong and that evidence would be indeed admissible but really I would have read the statute in the jurisdiction and really feel much more comfortable if I had a California evidence treatise and some applicable case law. But yeah, as I said, reviewing tv is hard. The show is not awful. It is not amazing. If you are sick or bored, totally watch it.