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Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles suffered many setbacks in its lone two seasons, from budget cuts that stripped the essential action from the show, to the insufferable Riley and Jesse diversions, to far too many boring Sarah-centric episodes designed to make us just fall in love with the miscast Lena Headey, but despite all of that, it really was a fantastic show. And as August winds down and I get more and more amped for all my favorite shows to return, I just can't get the disappointment that Cameron, Derek, Ellison and John Henry won't be returning to my viewing schedule out of the back of my mind.
Hulu and ABC have been knocking it out of the park lately with their partnership. After adding Lost, Grey's Anatomy, Desperate Housewives and Castle, they've also begun streaming their catalog with today's epic addition of the entire series of My So-Called Life. Re-watch it, re-live it, and if you're anything like me, re-hate Angela for ignoring Brian Krakow and loving Jordan Catalano, who can't read. They made a whole episode about how he can't read!
The first season of 21 Jump Street popped up on Hulu yesterday, and while I was very familiar with how hilarious the world seems to find that show and everyone's fondness for using it as a punchline, I had never actually seen it. I was four when the show premiered, so it wasn't really on my radar back then, and I never noticed it syndicated in my later years, so it was just something I completely missed out on. But I watched an episode today and realized something: 21 Jump Street is a tragically misjudged show.
Hollywood's so weird. They keep rebooting things, even though they usually don't turn out well. The latest in the trend is The Rockford Files, which House creator David Shore will be rebooting for NBC. Shore is cool, and The Rockford Files was cool, but I really doubt this will be the next Battlestar. It might be a procedural, the second most durable genre on television (next to cheap cheap fun fun reality), but you just know too many chefs in the NBC executives' office kitchen are just going to ruin it and its awesome theme song, I don't care if Ben Silverman is gone. Call it a hunch. That I would bet my life savings on.
Today in the annals of glorious syndicated camp, we remember VIP, the show about a crack security team with Pamela Anderson for a figurehead. The acting was terrible, and the scripts were even worse -- it was heaven! Pammy basically played herself with a gun, and the show was full of frequent self-aware jabs at her celebrity persona, because she actually used to be pretty awesome back in the day. I know, I know, it's hard to remember that far back. But it happened! And it was great television.
Here at TWoP, we bitch a lot about Smallville and Heroes, with their dull characters and their hackneyed and/or convoluted plotlines, but maybe we should stop being so surprised that they're terrible. Because while superhero comedies are usually hysterical (if short-lived -- see The Tick and The Middleman), superhero dramas are often the worst things on television. We looked back on over a decade of terrible super-powered TV, and found that most of the time, we really didn't need a hero.
Every time my job required me to watch Grey's Anatomy last season, I was consoled by only one thing: the presence of Kevin McKidd, whom I loved so much on all 13 of episodes of Journeyman. The show was like Quantum Leap 2.0, with McKidd Desmond-ing around in time, righting wrongs and saving lives with Moon Bloodgood, who was fresh off of the also short-lived Daybreak (or "Groundhog Taye," as we call it in my house.) The show was engrossing and effective light sci fi, but I really loved it because it was just so exquisitely sappy in the most perfect way, just like Leap was.
When I noticed that all 13 episodes of Kitchen Confidential had become available on Hulu, I immediately thought two things: 1) there goes the rest of my work day, and 2) I want to write about about that for Brilliant But Cancelled, but surely someone already has! But apparently no one has? Super weird. Anyway, if you didn't watch the show back in 2005 when Fox did that really great thing they do where they premiere a show, then take it off the air for a ridiculous amount of time, then expect viewers to miraculously find it again, then cancel it when they shockingly don't, I highly recommend falling in love with it now. Because it was truly a fantastic show.
What do today's kids really know about David Hasselhoff? They know him as a leather-jacket-wearing judge on America's Got Talent, as the German dodgeball coach in Dodgeball and as a hamburger-eating drunk on the Internet. But do they know what he did? What he accomplished? I'm not talking about the Baywatch franchise -- no, not even Baywatch Nights. I'm talkin' about Knight Rider. It was just a simple show about a guy and his car, solvin' crimes and jumping through moving trains, but Hasselhoff elevated the material, creating a hit, spawning numerous remakes and forging an American icon. Has he been given a medal yet? He should be. To celebrate the return of the Hoff to America's Got Talent, we thought we'd take a look at the rich history of Knight Rider, from 1982 to today.
This Sunday, the British series Merlin, a re-imagining of the Arthurian legend, premieres on NBC, with a cast of actors mostly unknown on this side of the pond. (The notable exception being Anthony Head from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.) But is America ready for a new medieval television series? Sure, Legend of the Seeker just got renewed, and Robin Hood airs on BBC America, but is period fantasy ready for one of the big networks? We took a look back at previous period fantasy shows to see whether they were hits or misses.
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