T. V.

for the first time in 17 months, i have a TV. no cable, mind you, nothing crazy, but i have a few good channels and a remote. so far, not entirely different from life in phoenix (last time i had both TV and my own apartment), but not entirely the same either, which is good.

i would like to make some comments about TV. maybe everybody knows these things, but since it's not about Lost or Battlestar or Bones or House or especially The Wire, my social sphere hasn't been talking about these shows:

(i was going to save the good one for last but realized i might not hold my audience through the 2 negative reviews so i'll start here)
--viva piñata. this is an incomprehensible setting for a show, but here goes. there's a land populated by piñatas that are alive. they eat candy and do all the things that civilized beings do but then some day the highest honor is to be shot out of a cannon to end up at a party in which you are used as a piñata. this seems to make everyone happy but the main character who spends his time avoiding 'the call,' enforced by a small footless frog piñata. it makes no sense at all but is really cleverly written. the main character (fergy fudgehog) gets to say 'fudge' when things go wrong, which while not technically swearing is still amusingly dirty for a kids show. and they are doing some great mockeries of presidential ads. seriously, a great show.

-- the suite life with zach and cody. I was intrigued to watch this show (nerd alert) mostly because of Dan Savage's commentary on it on This American Life. DS finds the show creepy because of its horrific portrayal of heterosexuality vis-a-vis zach (or cody. they're twins.), in which 11-year-old zach (or cody) makes all kinds of advances on the 16-year-old girl who works in a gift shop. while i did manage to see the jumbled up stereotypes mentioned by DS (ditzy asian teen heiress, "meticulous"/flaming black bellman), i couldn't stomach enough to hold out for a storyline involving creepy tween love. thumbs down for being a kids show with apparently no redeeming sociological study value for curious old people like yours truly.

-- hannah montana. it was not until i watched this show that i realized that the entire hannah montana thing happened without me and i have no real idea what it is about. actually some of the schtick was amusing. also it has billy ray cyrus, whose meteoric re-career is a good reminder that miracles do happen and so that's a Good Thing. but i guess the show is so far along that they don't really run with the 'pop star' storyline, so it's just a story about a dad and some kids and their friends. i was at least hoping for an unrelated music video or something, kind of like the monkees. (didn't the monkees also have scooby-doo-like action montages set to monkees music? if not, they should have. and HM should have, too.) the acting was really pretty bad on this show, particularly from this kid who is maybe supposed to be HM's brother? from the commercials i gather he's like a tween phenom who's had a few [i'm guessing dvd-only] movies that exist only to increase his visibility. there was one other strangitude, which i can't categorize i can just explain. in one scene, billy ray is attempting to plunge the sink. the pushing step is clearly getting more muscle than the pulling step. admittedly this is not necessarily common knowledge, but a lot of people do know that this is not the right way to plunge effectively. the pulling step is where the magic happens. pushing is just to set things up for the pulling. OK, that's forgivable. but everybody, Everybody, EVERYBODY knows that when you run the garbage disposal, you run water. this is not a fucking secret. so how is it that the writer, director, actors, stagehands, studio executives found it reasonable to have a garbage-disposing scene in which no water is run?? because kids don't know any better, you don't have to portray normal parts of the real world realistically?

ok, although i will probably have the opportunity for actual adult programming (not that kind, you perv, i told you i don't have internet. actually maybe i didn't tell you. i don't have internet yet.), let's decide right now that i don't need to review TV for everyone. most of you already know its witching ways.