So yes, I’m doing H again, but that’s because I just discovered How To Make It In America. So there it is. There’s the notable exception of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia below. It’s a brilliant show and I’m seasons behind. I’ll eventually catch up, because it’s always worth watching. But I haven’t, and don’t have anything relevant to say about it.

If you read nothing else in this post, please watch the video under Leverage. It’s four minutes that won’t be wasted.

How To Make It In America – HBO

To describe it this sounds like every first-year student TV writing project. Two guys who live on the edge of a criminal lifestyle, yet somehow hanging out on the elite New York partying scene, swearing at each other and attracting all who pass by. Yet the delivery changes a lot. The cast is strong (Luis Guzmán being reliably menacing alongside the younger, prettier crowd), and it’s occasionally aesthetically inspired. The direction is smart, and with a fantastic soundtrack (helpfully documented on the show’s site), its presentation helps cover gaps the perhaps not stunningly original themes may leave. The second scene of the first episode, pulling back to reveal Victor Rasuk standing on the back of a bicycle ridden by a Hasidic Jewish boy, outlines the smart wit. “Stay strong, He-brew.”

It’ll be interesting to see if the guys-struggling-to-keep-up-with-the-scene story is strong enough to sustain. In terms of story theme it feels like it falls halfway between the astonishing Bored To Death and the atrocious Entourage. There’s a tendency for the characters to speak in speeches, which feels a shame in a show that would benefit from a more naturalistic delivery. The heavy script of Bored To Death works so well because it’s so spectacularly refined, but here it seems to be holding things back somewhat. People don’t say, “He who hesitates masturbates!” and then twinkle their eyes. And perhaps they didn’t need the drunk guy shouting to his ex-girlfriend from the street scene immediately. Or someone complaining about being woken up and pulling the pillow over their head… But wow, the soundtrack helps me forgive a lot.

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I’m reposting this piece about Psych written about a year and a half ago as it’s no longer online elsewhere. Giant Realm briefly had me writing about TV (one day, somewhere, I’ll get a regular gig writing about TV for a magazine or website that won’t immediately close down) before they pulled their entire blog. This is the unedited version, because the edited was so comprehensively translated into American that it often didn’t read like me.

And I should add in the interests of balance, this week’s episode of Psych was awful. Fortunately, last week’s was one of the best ever.

At the mention of its name, the reaction people give to Psych tends to be, “That show? Really? I saw maybe one episode – it seemed alright.” I want to put that right. I want to convince you that Psych is the most entertaining show on TV this summer. I will use a collection of silly names, and a pineapple.

The show’s conceit, to put it mildly, is contrived. Shawn Spencer (James Roday, Miss Match) is the son of a retired cop, who spent his childhood having observational skills drummed into him by his forbidding father. As an adult he’s kept his hyper-observant talents, but no job for longer than three months. That’s until his habit for solving crimes by watching the local evening news caused the police to become suspicious. Needing a way out to prevent his being arrested, he invented the story that he was a psychic, convincing the officers and detectives by throwing out a few ‘hot reads’ based on all the stuff his eagle eyes had spotted. Well, convincing all of them but one, the surly Detective Lassiter (Timothy Omundson) remaining heavily sceptical.

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I missed out so many the last time I did this, and with The Amazing Race having started, I feel like I should start from A again. But really this is F-H, with a few extras beforehand. I’ve decided to implement a code. If there’s spoilers in the piece I’ll have * at the start of stuff you shouldn’t read. Assume that it will spoil anything that’s happened in that show up to the current (US) episode. There are also some bad swears in there, delicate-eared readers. Oh, and let me know if I’ve missed anything. I know there’s still stuff from A-E that I’ve forgotten a second time.

The Amazing Race – CBS

Well, what’s to say. Eleven teams of two in a race around the world. It’s such a huge idea, and it’s still working sixteen seasons in. Perhaps what I like best about the global scale racing nonsense is that the best teams tend to win. Stupid people go out first, unpleasant people then follow, and generally it’s the nice lot left to win at the end. And if you don’t love Phil, there’s something wrong with your DNA.

Burn Notice – USA

Season one of this programme was confused. After a horrible pilot it quickly ditched a few ideas, found a groove, but didn’t really know whether to take itself seriously. By season three it really knows what it wants to be. Light-hearted, while dealing with life or death situations. The gimmick – that burned spy Michael Weston narrates giving advice to the audience for how to be a spy in various situations – still works. And it seems to trust Bruce Campbell to be Bruce Campbell a lot more. The most recent episode featured Campbell doing the most fantastic spoof of CSI, openly playing for laughs, as is more frequently the case. The theme now is for Weston to have a long-running nemesis whom he must work for/against in the hope it will get him closer to learning who burned him, while taking on weekly cases for the seemingly infinite number of friends of friends in trouble. This means we get to see him trying juggle both situations, and inevitably his chain smoking mother, while teaching us how to bug a car or break into a guarded office. It’s so silly, and thankfully it now knows it.

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Family Guy enjoys being offensive. It does it with glee. As creator Seth McFarlane likes to say, they’re an “equal opportunity offender”. I’m struggling to think of a subject they haven’t made wildly inappropriate jokes about. Racial stereotypes, paedophilia, infanticide, rape, degenerative disorders, disabilities, the Holocaust… A large part of the point of watching the programme is gasping in shock with your hands clasped to your mouth, unsure if you’re stifling a cry of horror or a laugh.

There have been other programmes that have taken this “no taboos” rule to more effective and more shocking places, such as the astonishing Wonder Showzen, and Drawn Together. But these were on cable. Family Guy is on at primetime on Sunday nights on Fox. Having been cancelled twice by the network, it’s proven itself fairly invincible, and with McFarlane’s new contract breaking all records they know they’re not going anywhere. And to embrace this the most recent episodes having been pushing things further and further, including as many digs at Fox as they can cram in. Last Sunday’s was particularly shocking. At least, I thought so at first.

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I wrote this piece about Yo Gabba Gabba a few months ago as a spec for something else that didn’t happen. So if you are a super-high-powered editor/publisher who wants writing about TV like the below, do get in touch. That would be nice.

The cruellest thing that can happen to any children’s television programme is its ironic adoption by the student classes. Teens and twenty-somethings oh-so-knowingly put up posters of popular pre-school characters, but, wait for it, here they’re smoking a spliff, or taking a dump! How astonishingly clever and, let’s just say it, satirical. The system, the Man, is truly smashed to bits like someone took a bulldozer to a Sylvanian Families collection.

These wretched people misunderstand any magical programme they touch, ruining the gentle, repetitive loveliness of everything from The Magic Roundabout to the Teletubbies, Bagpuss to Bob The Builder. But this isn’t to say that adults shouldn’t be able to sit and enjoy the output of channels like CBeebies or Nick Jr. If capable of watching them without becoming enraged by the numbers of arms a presenter may possess, there’s much to be appreciated on exactly the level the creators intended. But sadly any programme that doesn’t treat its child audience as plankton, bothering to work hard at being thoughtful and involved, seems to be subsumed by the weed-addled idiots.

There is, however, one programme that knows exactly what the ironic pissants will do to it before they let loose their first nasally snort. One that has them beat from the start. Yo Gabba Gabba is the creation of indie hipsters Christian Jacobs and Scott Schultz, and is quite possibly the most perfect under-five’s television programme if you don’t count Sesame Street.

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Because TV so strangely doesn’t understand our Earth years, the US lot beginning in September and ending in May, and the UK and AU lot starting and finishing whenever it feels like it, I couldn’t find a way to do a “Best of 2009″ style thing for it. Because TV from this time last year feels like it’s from the most ancient of pasts. That’s – what – almost three seasons of Survivor ago! Imagine it. So here’s what TV is up to. Alphabetically. Oh good grief, I only got to E. So no, I don’t watch all these shows every day. Lots of them finished their runs already. I watch two or three programmes a day (which I’d say would be about average), banking up lots of shows for a day off maybe, or a way to fill a long train journey. It’s okay. It’s not as weird as it looks. The weird part is how I’ve spent so long writing about them.

Archer – FX

After an enormous post-pilot hiatus, Archer finally starts its series proper. It’s the latest from Adam Reed (Sealab 2021, Space Ghost Coast To Coast), and follows the formula: fast-paced adult cartoon with little interest in coherence or human decency. On FX rather than Cartoon Network, it frees things up to be a little ruder, swearier, and more callous. And it works well. The brilliantly droll Jon Benjamin (Dr. Katz’s Ben) plays Archer, a secret agent of sorts, who isn’t quite incompetent but more simply hateful. His mother is voiced by Jessica Walter (Arrested Development’s Lucille), along with Aisha Tyler (CSI, I guess), the compellingly lovely Judy Greer (I loved her in the very short-lived Miss Guided), and SNL’s Chris Parnell. Two episodes in it’s unsurprisingly great, as you’d expect from Reed, and really quite fantastically wrong too.

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The first series of Being Human (BBC 3) made the same mistake in every episode. The tale of a ghost, vampire and werewolf sharing a house began each episode in the manner of the trite sitcom that brief description suggests. Oh, the wacky adventures they must have! But as each hour-long story progressed, it became darker and darker, finishing with a dramatic cliffhanger that ensured you’d watch the next. And yet somehow by the next week it would have reset back to its kooky sitcom cheeriness, constantly betraying its own potential.

The final episode was different. (Spoilers follow.) Enough threads needed to be brought together that writer/creator Toby Whithouse was forced to begin with drama and stay there, and it was a dramatically better programme. Optimistically, the first episode of the second series managed the same.

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The one thing Russell T Davies can write is sentimentality. And that’s no small compliment. The word is more often used detrimentally, a way to dismiss something: oh, it was too sentimental. But done well, and consistently when he wrote it was, it can carry an episode just above the mire. There’s a reason why just seeing Rose is a big deal – he wrote his heart out on the Rose storyline, and it still carries an impact now. And while Catherine Tate’s success in Doctor Who was to somehow not be hateful (which offered her a surprising amount of grace), it was only in Wilf that RTD managed to repeat the success of Rose as completely. So despite a story that went beyond all known limits of bullshit, Davies’ final episode managed not to be that bad.

And thank goodness there was the sentimentality, because good grief it didn’t have a plot to carry it. While it at least made coherent sense (in the same way a ball rolling down a hill makes coherent sense – it’s going to keep rolling then eventually stop) it didn’t make any narrative sense. So the Master turned the whole world into himself, but then that’s undone with the magic time gauntlet, never mind eh? In fact, the Master’s attack of all humanity wasn’t to make any clever changes to humans, but simply to illustrate that the Deus Ex Machina Gate works. Donna had her memories come back and was immune to the Master so she could, um, stumble about a bit and then forget? The Timelords are back, but oh, no they’re not. And so on.

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Well, I can’t tell you how honoured I am that people ask me to say how unutterably shit each episode of Doctor Who proves to be. So here goes:

Wow, how unutterably shit. Russell T Davies is now only one episode away from his oh-so necessary death, before he gloriously regenerates into Steven Moffat this Spring. It seems he intends to go out in a giant celebration of everything that has made him one of the most tiresome and incapable writers. The End Of Time Part 1 was bad in ways previously unexplored by science.

Interestingly though, this penultimate RTD episode isn’t bad in the ways his smug ghastliness normally manifests. Instead he even seems to be bad at being bad. We can normally rely on Davies for some vile preachy speeches, a sanctimonious scene that comments on the errs of our ways, and of course a loud-speaker-bellowed declaration of quite how relaxed and nonchalant everyone is about someone being gay. But in this episode he manages to be terrible at even these.

It seems like good form to sum up the plot at this point in the piece. I’m not sure that this is possible. It appeared to be the work of a seven-year-old. But here goes: “So the Doctor is being naughty right but he visits the Ood in this giant white castle place and they tell him that the Master is coming back and that Bernard Cribbins is sad and so he flies back to Earth but the Master comes back because his wife hasn’t washed her mouth for three years but then she throws this potion right and then the Master goes mad but he gets magic powers and can shoot electricity from his hands what turns into explosions and he can FLY and everything and then there’s these old people who sexually assault the Doctor and there’s burgers cos I like burgers and then the Doctor tells him off but there’s this cross black man and his girlfriend daughter who has this gate from outer space and there’s these green aliens in disguise as humans and then the Master and the gate do this thing and then everyone in the whole world apart from Catherine Tate and the Doctor and Bernard Cribbins turn into the Master and then it ends.”

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Question Time this evening will be receiving a slight boost in ratings. With the appearance of the leader of the openly racist British National Party, Nick Griffin, it’s clearly going to be the largest audience the political debate programme will have seen in a long time. What’s not known at this point is what the consequences will be.

Many are arguing that giving the BNP a voice on a respected BBC programme legitimises them, and will increase their popularity. Others counter this by saying his views will be exposed and people will become more aware of the party’s racist and fascist nature. Each likes to accuse the other of patronising the population. But the point where everyone gets caught up is in the figure of 900,000 people who democratically voted for them.

One side likes to argue that these 900,000 people are confused about who the BNP really are, and would not vote for them if they really knew their bigoted values and opinions. Another side likes to argue these 900,000 people want a party who’s willing to stand up for Britain against Europe, or bring in real change, and they’re resorting to the BNP in desperation. What almost no one seems to suggest is the possibility that there are 900,000 hateful racist bigots who voted for a hateful racist party.

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