Pop Culture Curmudgeon how i met your mother

Life Is Too Short for Crappy TV

Motherhood has changed me. It has made me value my time, and I don’t want to waste it watching TV shows that are just okay.

During the summer, there are so few scripted options to choose from, and I was home on maternity leave. Thus, I watched darn near everything I could stand, courtesy of my DVR.

Now that the new fall season has started, I am winnowing shows left and right. I am becoming as fickle as Fox execs, dropping a show after only two episodes. So far, I have dumped Nikita, Hellcats, The Event, Undercovers, Better With You, and @#$% My Dad Says.

I still haven’t watched any episodes of No Ordinary Family, and I continue to watch Hawaii Five-O only because Mr. PCC likes to see his home island on our TV. (In all fairness, the show is the Royal Pains of the fall season. Fun and mindless entertainment.)

I’ve dropped 90210 by default because my DVR can only do two shows at once. Chuck and How I Met Your Mother get my viewing attention. I’ll probably catch 90210 in repeats—I do still enjoy it’s ridiculousness.

I am finding some bright spots in this TV season, though. I absolutely adore Raising Hope, and I love the quirky Arrested Development-esque humor of Raising Wilde. I hope the ratings pick up or at least stop their freefall so that it will stay on the air.

ABC’s sitcoms continue to appeal to me. In fact, Cougar Town made me a little misty when Travis went to college—one of these days, PCC Jr. will go off to college, and I will be sad. And, as I mentioned last week, it is nice to see Supernatural return to smaller stories about hunting monsters.

How are you feeling about the fall season so far?

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My Fall TV Viewing Schedule

[digg=http://digg.com/television/My_Fall_TV_Viewing_Schedule]Now that the fall lineups have been announced, my viewing plans are falling into place. Mondays and Thursdays are still full, especially now that NBC has announced that they will not move Chuck to Fridays.

Mondays, I’ll be on CBS, watching How I Met Your Mother at 8 and giving Accidentally on Purpose a Chance at 8:30. I’ll be recording Gossip Girl and most likely watching it at 9. Then to ABC for Castle. I am okay with the thought that I am breaking up with Heroes, but we’ll see if Mr. PCC records it on his DVR.

Tuesdays, it appears that no one has given me a reason to break up with 90210, so I’ll be all CW, all the time, watching 90210 at 8 and Melrose Place at 9.

Wednesdays are free until 9, when I visit Fox for Glee and then move to ABC for Eastwick.

Thursdays are pretty standard. Watch Vampire Diaries on the CW at 8 and DVR Flash Forward. Stick with the CW for Supernatural at 9 (obviously) and record The Office and Community/30 Rock. [Edited to add: Thanks to Rainn Wilson and Twitter, I realized that Joel McHale has a show coming out this fall: Community. I watched the preview at Zap2it, and it looks pretty funny.]

Fridays, I’ll be watching Dollhouse, but that is pretty much it. Thanks, Fox, for picking up this show for a second season.

My weekends look free. When DirecTV announces when it will play Friday Night Lights, I’ll update the spreadsheet I keep so that I won’t miss out on a new show I am interested in. (Yes, I’m that much of a TV geek. I make a spreadsheet each May and use it when the new shows premiere in the fall.)

Most of my favorite shows and ideas are slated for midseason: Chuck (NBC), Lost (ABC), Better Off Ted (ABC), The Body Politic (CW), Happy Town (ABC), V (ABC). I haven’t decided if I will follow Tyler Labine to Sons of Tucson.

Here are links to night-by-night grids to help you do your own fall TV planning, spreadsheet suggested but not required.

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Alyson Hannigan Is a Mommy!

Alyson Hannigan gave birth to her little bundle of joy

Read more about Alyson, her hubby, and their little girl at Zap2it.

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Monday Poll Results

So, my friends and readers are not so much into the reality television.

Chuck was the big winner on our poll, with 24% of the vote.
How I Met Your Mother and Big Bang Theory tied for second, with 18%.
Everything else tied for third place, with 12%: Heroes, House and Gossip Girl.
24 brought up the rear, with 6%.
None of my readers watch Dancing with the Stars. That makes me happy.

So, did you enjoy the poll? Do you want to see more polls in the future?

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I Love TV

This is the most wonderful time of the year.

I love watching all of the season and series premieres. I haven’t really fallen in love with any of the new series–in fact, I broke things off with Privileged last night. It has potential, but it isn’t there yet. But I totally bought the premieres of Supernatural and How I Met Your Mother.

SPN: I loved the reunion scenes. I loved the psychic and the demon. I’m not sure how I feel about the new Ruby (or if she even is Ruby). I think it is just as likely that she is Lilith or one of Lilith’s minions pretending to be Ruby to corrupt Sam. Perhaps I’ve read too many Piers Anthony Incarnations of Immortality books, but I think it is a valid theory. Possibly more clever than SPN usually is, but I’m willing to be wrong.

I’m also totally loving Castiel. I like that his voice and visage are incomprehensible by most mortals. Unfortunately, I forgot that people on the east coast would have already seen the season premiere and visited Television Without Pity before watching the ep last Thursday. So, I knew there was an angel on the show because he already had a character thread on the Boys Will Be Boys section. I don’t know if I would have realized it was an angel right away without that knowledge. (I avoid spoilers like the plague.)

HIMYM: Loved Neil Patrick Harris. He was totally robbed.

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More support for How I Met Your Mother

More and more of us are talking about the goodness and joy that is our weekly half-hour visit with Ted, Barney, Robin, Lilly and Marshall (a really long way of saying How I Met Your Mother). Here are a couple recent pieces arguing for keeping this great show on the air:

Now, I’m not sure I can agree that HIMYM is better than Friends, but I love me some HIMYM. It has made me call Neil Patrick Harris Barney rather than Doogie.

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Saving Two Good Shows

So, two of my favorite shows are on the bubble. If you like TV that is good, feel free to join me in my efforts to save them.

Friday Night Lights: http://www.savefridaynightlights.tv/
Donate to buy mini footballs, ship them to NBC and support some sort of charity, too.

How I Met Your Mother: This doesn’t really have a campaign set up yet, so all we can do is make sure we watch the show when it returns March 17. Get your friends to watch it, too. Host a DVD viewing party at your place March 15 or 16, then send your friends home to watch the new episode. (Bonus points if any of your friends are secretly Nielsen viewers.)

Then, talk about watching the show. Blog about the episode. Go to the CBS site (http://www.cbs.com/primetime/how_i_met_your_mother/) and interact with it somehow. Digg the page, share it on facebook, anything that will show that you are there, you are watching and you care enough to keep watching next year.

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