More frozen delights

Before things get really crazy with the new TV season, I had better do another ice cream post. I finally made it to my final Turkey Hill flavor, tin roof sundae. It tastes exactly like tin roof sundae should! I don't know what else to say.

I've also tried a couple of Private Selections flavors, both of which I really enjoyed. Carrot cake was apparently something of a find for me, as I nabbed the last box and can't find anything about it online. It's a wonderful flavor that reminds me a lot of pumpkin. (It contains no actual carrots, if you're wondering, just the spices that would go into carrot cake.) It also has tiny little pecan pieces that are wonderful and occasional pockets of cream cheese icing. My one complaint? They thought they couldn't make a flavor with cake in the title without putting in cake pieces. Real carrot cake was apparently too expensive for them, however, so they used pieces of white sponge cake, which just don't go at all! I'd prefer it if they were left out.

The other Private Selection flavor is burgundy cherry. It's very good, with big pieces of chocolate flake and maraschino cherries. I'd certainly buy it again.

Electric blue

The morning of my life

Summer TV report

This is the time of the summer when I traditionally do a post explaining what I've been watching on television all summer, so here goes!

I've been watching surprisingly little on actual live television, actually. Most of the new series just haven't appealed to me. I have been watching The Gates, which hasn't wowed me in any way but has kept me coming back every week. I also made sure to tune in every week for season 4 of Friday Night Lights, which has been as wonderful as I expected. I've also been thrilled beyond belief at the return of Futurama, which I'd never quite given up on but never realistically expected to see new episodes of again.

A new old show I've been watching is Curb Your Enthusiasm, which has been airing two episodes a week on TV Guide Network. (Yes, you heard correctly. TV Guide Network.) I'd never expected to like this show, since the things I'd heard about it online had made me incorrectly surmise that it was a stupid reality show in which cameras followed Larry David around being a jerk to everybody. But when someone whose opinion I respect very much said that it was his favorite show, I decided to give it a chance, and I was laughing hysterically within 5 minutes of starting the first episode. How can I describe it to people who've never seen it? Well, even though Larry David does play himself, it's not a reality show by any means. Everything else about the show is fictional, and it features the same kind of off-the-wall plots that you'd see on Seinfeld, just in a more true-to-life setting. Each episode is plotted and loosely scripted and then the actors improvise their actual dialogue, and since they're all funny people, that means the show is often a riot! We're just getting to the end of season 3, and I'm going to give up watching it to make room for the new fall shows, but I'll try to come back to it next summer.

Netflix Instant Watching made me very happy this summer by adding Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Torchwood. I'd gotten partway through season 3 before they stopped showing Buffy on FX, and now I've finished that season and plowed through seasons 4 and 5 as well. It's well known that a lot of shows lose steam when the characters go off to college, but in Buffy's case I think it made the show much better. It seems like the stakes have been raised; she can find herself in more adult situations now. As far as Torchwood goes, it's been nice to see the full unedited versions of the episodes, which are sometimes over 50 minutes long. Some of them that were very confusing to me when I watched them on TV made a lot more sense now.

On DVD, I've been having a very British summer. I led off with To the Manor Born, which I hadn't seen in years. It was wonderful to see all the episodes in the proper order, and I got a lot more out of it as an adult than I did as a kid. I find Audrey and Richard's relationship to be a very good example of how to do a "will they, won't they" pairing that works. Even when they supposedly hated each other, they always treated each other with respect and good humor, and this makes their eventual marriage seem like a good idea and not something that came out of left field.

Then I moved back into the past with Robin of Sherwood, which was called Robin Hood when it aired here in the U.S. during the summer of 1985. I found this show almost unbearably sexy and mythic when I was nine, but it didn't rekindle the same magic in me as an adult. I think there are two reasons for that. First, I must have a lot less imagination now than I did at that age. I think I was supplying a lot of things to the narrative that occurred offscreen in my mind, like Robin and Marian's romance. I remembered them as impossibly romantic, but in actuality they rarely even kissed. Second, we expect a lot more from our TV shows these days. Just as with Star Trek: The Next Generation, which premiered around the same time, the characterization was hailed as being unusually deep and the plotting quite original, but both aspects seem kind of trite by today's standards. I guess both of these shows were creating new paradigms that we now take for granted.

Even further back into the past for I, Claudius, which of course first aired back in the year of my birth, 1975, but which I saw during the Masterpiece Theater 20th anniversary retrospective season in 1991, when they reaired many classic series from their history. I would have been 15 then, and in this case I saw even more in the show than I did as a youth. I highly recommend this to everyone!

And there you have it. My summer as seen through the lens of television.

A trip to Turkey Hill

I'm not sure why, but our local Kroger has been having a blowout on Turkey Hill ice cream the last couple of weeks, selling it at $1.99 a box! The shelves are getting mighty bare in that area, leading me to believe that they're trying to clear it out entirely. My freezer is now well-fortified with Turkey Hill for the foreseeable future, and I've tried two flavors so far.

Chocolate pretzel is a low-fat variety, and it is phenomenal. There are ample chocolate-covered pretzel pieces, and the ice cream itself is a very light vanilla that allows their flavor to shine through. The only drawback is the fudge swirl; when you hit a large deposit of it, you can tell it has a pretty artificial, almost burnt flavor, but fortunately, there isn't much of the swirl in most of the box.

The other flavor I've sampled is black raspberry. This isn't an ice cream flavor you see very often, but I remembered enjoying it from Schwann's many moons ago. Unfortunately, the Turkey Hill iteration isn't leaving me with much enjoyment. Oh, the first bite is bursting with black raspberryness, but then the flavor just seems to disappear. (Like with other "only the first bite is good" flavors I've encountered, that means I'm going to be nursing this box for a long, long time.) Looking at the ingredients, it's not hard to understand the lack of raspberry flavor; there is less raspberry than corn syrup in the ingredients. Skimp on the fruit and you'll get a skimpy fruit ice cream. It's that simple.

It's raspberry season!

I wanna do right

The realness in reality

I'm not sure that I'm qualified to write on reality shows. In fact, I'm sure I'm one of the least qualified people in America to do so, because I have barely watched them at all. Sure, sometimes while flipping through the channels I've caught 5 or 10 minutes of The Biggest Loser or The Amazing Race, but the last reality show I purposely watched was also the first-- the first season of Survivor, way back in 2001.

In this unassuming little summer show were the seeds of every reality show to come-- the forming of alliances, the double-crossing, the bizarre product placements, the pointless but dangerous challenges, and the endless talk. It was all fresh and new, then, and nobody knew what to expect. Whether they knew it or not, those 12 people cast away on a remote island were setting the rules for a whole new genre, and they were doing it innocently and in good faith. (And even when they acted in bad faith, it was done in good faith, in the sense that they were following their own instincts and not some idea they had of how people were supposed to act on a reality show.)

I remember being blown away by Susan's famous "Rats and Snakes" speech during the last tribal council, and what fascinated me at the time was the amount of emotion she showed, yet when I viewed it again right now, what impressed me instead was her sincerity. She really believed that people's actions on the island reflected their personas in real life, and she was entirely willing to judge her fellow competitors on the morality of their behavior. That seems like such an innocent stance to take now.

The state of reality shows right now is much more confusing. Sometimes we, the viewers, want to believe that everything we see on a reality show is really real, that the couples that find true love will live happily ever after and that the people who get hired to work at a company will have long and fulfilling careers there. Yet at other times, when there is conflict involved, we fall back on the notion that it's only a game, that the things that people say and do to hurt each other aren't real, and that they are all just actors going through the motions and trying to make it seem convincing, in the same way that professional wrestlers do. We want to have our cake and eat it too.

Susan's speech is the reason I've never watched another reality show, because I realized that watching real people hurt each other was not my idea of entertainment. I remain devoted to fictionalized worlds that let us explore conflict in a safer way, without ruining the lives of real people. I hope that in time the rest of the world will join me.

The conflict we barely see

Another good example of how our society's approach to conflict has changed is the difference between the two wars we have fought with Iraq. Although it only lasted a little more than a month, I can still tell you all kinds of things about the Persian Gulf War, because I, along with the rest of the American people, was there. I don't know if my younger readers realize this or not, but that war was televised, not just in quick soundbites on the 6 o'clock news, but with live coverage on all the networks for the first few days and then on CNN. I remember watching it in Mr. Hehr's study hall. We didn't usually get to watch television in school, but he thought it was important that we all should know what was going on, because the boys in my class were almost old enough to be drafted. See this video for an example of the coverage on CNN, and here is an example of the regular television briefings that General Schwarzkopf gave.

Contrast this with either of the wars we are fighting now and have been fighting for most of the last decade. How much information do we get about what is going on and the actual violence that is occurring? "Yes," I can hear you saying, "but there's no way we could take seeing that level of violence day in and day out." Which is my point exactly! If we are going to cause violence elsewhere in the world, we need to know what is happening and agree that it is necessary and we are able to live with the consequences. If we can't take it, we shouldn't turn our heads away and pretend it isn't happening! It is our removal from these conflicts that has allowed them to go on so long. (And did you realize that last month, the war in Afghanistan surpassed the Vietnam War as the longest-ever conflict involving Americans?)

In defense of nose-punching

In the same spirit as my earlier posts "In Defense of Stalkers" and "The Lost Art of the Celebrity Crush," in which I argued that our society has become too repressed on the topics of love and attraction, I now bring you "In Defense of Nose-punching." As with the previous post, my intention is not to argue that all conflict is good, but that we as a society have gone too far in covering up the expression of these feelings in their natural and healthy way.

22 years ago, George Bush Sr. promised to make this a "kinder, gentler nation." At the time, this seemed like just empty political rhetoric, but looked back upon now, his words do mark some kind of a watershed in our society. Although I believe his speech was just a signpost of changes already starting to occur and not the instigator of the change, real changes did start to happen in American society with the dawn of the 90's. This is the time when multiculturalism and political correctness became terms that everybody, not just the intellectual elite, was debating. And while the ideas of the extremists never passed into common use, that doesn't mean that these movements haven't had real effect on our society. Ask almost any college-age person today, and they will agree that all people deserve respect, whatever their beliefs, ethnicity or orientation. Look at how the debate over homosexuality has shifted. Twenty years ago we were arguing over whether they had the right to exist, and now we are arguing over whether or not they have the right to get married. These are all good changes.

I think it's good that people are more tolerant of each other when this reflects their true feelings, but the flip side of this is that I also see people papering over their differences and allowing them to fester instead of confronting them. When political correctness came to the fore, how you said something became more important than what you said, and I think this had a chilling effect and made lots of people just stop talking about important things, at least in public with strangers. Instead of potentially offending someone and risking conflict, it became safer just to hole up with a group of people that you already know agree with you. The problem with this is that both sides become more extreme in their views, more convinced that they must be right, and less able to deal with the other side when they eventually do meet.

I have been watching a lot of television from the 80's recently and reflecting how different this world is from the one that I grew up in. It amazes me how much more violent television was, at least in a personal way. People were always punching each other in the nose and having fistfights! Nowadays, television is much more likely to show impersonal violence, with groups of people hiding behind pillars and shooting at each other without even being able to see each other. I think this is a good metaphor for the changes in our society. Instead of coming out into the open and dealing with each other as individuals, we stay in hiding with our groups and take cheap potshots at each other that are unlikely to do any real damage, but also unlikely to solve anything.

I have only scratched the surface of this topic and probably will come back to revisit it over the next few weeks. I want to think about what it really means to be brave and what it really means to be kind and gentle.

Even more ice cream

Ok, the plot thickens. While at Kroger, I looked at several different flavors of Edy's frozen yogurt, and only the mango kind had propylene glycol. Does this mean I'm going to have to read the label every time with them? Oh, joy!

What Kroger has had on sale the last few weeks is Breyer's, and I've been trying out their new all-natural lowfat line. I've tried both strawberry cheesecake and coffee fudge brownie, and both are excellent. I think I haven't met a flavor of Breyer's all-natural that I haven't liked, and even when I think I don't like a certain flavor of ice cream (for instance, coffee), their flavors are so pure that I can't help but be won over. The coffee tastes like frozen coffee with cream, and the strawberry cheesecake tastes like real strawberries and real cream cheese. (Plus, they've resisted the tempation to put in silly crust pieces, which seem like a good idea but are often the downfall of an otherwise fine cheesecake ice cream.)

Edy is trying to poison me!

The good part about being off your feed for a few days is that when you start eating again, you can taste everything as it really is. Sometimes this is a blessing. (That cream of mushroom soup I had yesterday at Baker Center was divine!) But sometimes it's a rude awakening. When I returned to my vaunted Edy's Mango Yogurt, the first thing I noticed was that it tasted strongly of freezer, but I suppose that's my own fault. But I also noticed a chemical taste underneath everything that I hadn't discerned before. Checking the ingredients, I discovered that one of them is propylene glycol! I'm sorry, but I don't want antifreeze in my ice cream, and so maybe I have to say goodbye to Edy once again.

We got it made

Chalk up one for Pandora! I'd never heard of this song before, but I'm finding it deeply infectious.

Edy's Mango Yogurt

Ok, so I promised you ice cream reviews, and ice cream reviews you shall have! I told you last time how I have given up on Edy's Fun Flavors, because they now use mainly whey instead of milk or cream. But when I most recently went to Kroger to buy something from the freezer case, Edy's was the only brand on sale. What was a poor girl to do? What I did was look beyond their ice cream selection and notice their line of frozen yogurt. Mango caught my eye, and I'm glad it did!

I haven't really had much experience with frozen yogurt. My mother sometimes would buy it when it first caught on in the late 80's, but to be honest, back then "frozen yogurt" was just a code name for "extremely tepid and uninspired lowfat ice cream"; there was never anything of an actual yogurt flavor to it. I'd never guessed that in the past 20 years or so, they actually learned how to make frozen yogurt with living cultures. This stuff is fantastic, and I'm going to have to try some of their other flavors next.

Final ironic point: although their regular ice cream no longer contains much milk or cream, this frozen yogurt actually contains plenty of both!

It could be something special....

...just for me.

All I need is a miracle

Where do you belong?

I have to praise you like I should

We'll go walking through the park

I scream, you scream

I've decided to start a new feature here on the blog, more for my own benefit than for my readers', but if it helps some of you out, all the better! As those who know me in real life can attest, I tend to be experimental in my ice cream purchases, with results that run the gamut from delight to disaster. It's sometimes hard for me to keep track of what I like and don't like, so I thought I'd record some of my findings here. This first post will be a catch-up post, with things I remember particularly liking or not liking in the last year or so. After this I'll try to keep up with it whenever I try a notable new flavor.

On my good list:

Turkey Hill Coconut Cream Pie. Until this spring, my all-time favorite ice cream flavor has always been Edy's Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, but I have found a new champion. This ice cream was loaded with tons of real coconut and really yummy pie crust pieces. Too bad it's a seasonal flavor, but let's hope it comes along again next spring.

Private Selection Banana Cream Pie. While not as good as the Turkey Hill (especially in the flavor of the pie crust pieces), this flavor came in a close second, and I would be glad to buy it again. It was a limited edition, though, so who knows if it will return?

Great Value Blueberry Pomegranate. I almost never buy ice cream at Wal-mart, but last fall I just couldn't resist this enticing variety. I got a lot more blueberry than pomegranate from it, but whatever it was, it was good!

Breyer's Cookies and Cream. Although simple flavors like this don't always catch my eye, for some reason I bought this, and it was fantastic! The simplicity of the ice cream base really brought out the chocolate flavor of the cookies. Note that this was from the all-natural black-label Breyer's range. There's also a Breyer's Oreo Cookie from their not-all-natural range; I haven't tried that, but I imagine it's more artificial tasting and probably not as good.

On my Bad List:

Edy's Fun Flavors. Look carefully at the label, and you'll notice something that isn't there: the phrase "ice cream." Edy's Fun Flavors line has whey listed as the first ingredient, and it just doesn't hold up well either in the taste or texture department. I've gotten burned by them twice, once on Espresso Chip and more recently by Banana Split. I will try to remember to stay away from this whole line in the future.

Kroger Deluxe. I hate to say it, because I don't have anything against generics on principle, but I've never tried a variety of this ice cream that I actually liked, and I've tried plenty! Something is always just a little bit off, and I'm thinking maybe I should just give up on them in the future.

Would you be mine? Could you be mine?

I think I need to buy this album stat.

The thread of Theseus

This morning I pulled out an essay on the labyrinth written by a writer I very much admire almost exactly 10 years ago. I would reprint the whole thing here if I could, but all you really need to know is the ending.

'The door at the end of the room opens up. A woman in a plain dress and Nike running shoes steps through and looks at the cookie gripped in my cracked hand.
"It's you," she says with a sigh and a smile.
I shrug and look at her.
"The blood. On the wall. It is yours."
"Yes," I say, wondering if she wants a cookie, but forgetting to ask.
"I almost gave up when I got in that long cul-de-sac, but I saw the blood at the end, and no body. I figured that someone else was in here. And they weren't dead yet."
I don't know what the Labyrinth is for, not really. Maybe it makes the world a better place. Maybe it is the world. Maybe it ends up complicating the simple distance between two points. I don't know what the Labyrinth has taught me, or if it has taught me anything at all. Sometimes I'm not sure that going through the Labyrinth is anything but a dream, and one that we share with no one. Sometimes, we wander through it with half a heart, knowing that we'll never find an end, knowing that our best efforts may be vain ones. I know that much is true. The one other thing I know is that sometimes, when we get really angry or inspired or exhausted, we do something we can't explain, and maybe then we leave a little blood on the wall for someone else to find.'

Fall 2010 TV preview

So we have had the traditional May upfronts this week, when all the new shows for next fall were unveiled. Maybe it's just that I have a big slate of returning shows again this year, but I don't see much new that intrigues me. Still, I'll go through the week and point out what interests me in each timeslot. And now that I have a DVR, I can pick two things per slot instead of just one if I like!

Monday

8 pm-- Chuck!

9 pm-- Three new shows in this timeslot. The Event is yet another show about a man looking for his missing fiancee who uncovers a big complicated conspiracy. I lost interest in that kind of show a long time ago, and Jason Ritter isn't exactly the kind of actor who's going to draw me in. Mike & Molly is about two plus-sized people who find romance at a Weight Watchers meeting. This one kind of depends on how it's executed. I'm withholding judgment until I see it. The one that I love from the trailer I saw is Lonestar, the story of a bigamist in Texas living a very complicated life. My money is on this one.

10 pm-- Castle! And I'll probably tune in for the first episode of Hawaii Five-O. I've never seen the original, which means I'll be starting out with a clean slate on this one. But with all that gorgeous Hawaiian scenery (not to mention all that gorgeous Alex O'Laughlin scenery!), how can they go wrong?


Tuesday

8 pm-- Glee! And I'm definitely interested in No Ordinary Family, about a family who travels to Brazil and then discovers they all have superpowers.

9 pm-- Life Unexpected! Also in this slot are two new comedies that might be worth a look. Running Wilde, about a man reunited with his childhood love who has just returned from Africa, seems promising. Raising Hope, about a family saddled with an unexpected baby to raise, seems less so.

10 pm-- The Good Wife!

Wednesday

8 pm-- The Middle! I'm also mildly interested in new show The Undercovers, about a husband and wife spy team.

8:30 pm-- Better Together is a new show about an older sister who has decided not to get married and her younger sister who impulsively does. I like some of the people in this one, especially Joanna Garcia, and so will give it a chance.

9 pm-- Modern Family! There is also a new show in this hour, Hellcats, about a college cheerleading squad. I am unconvinced but will probably give it a try.

10 pm-- There are three new shows in this hour, all of them law shows. I'm not interested in the new L.A. version of Law and Order. The Whole Truth, in which we see both sides of a murder case, has been done before a few years ago, and as I remember, it was cancelled after only a few weeks. Why try again? My money is on The Defenders, which at least has Jerry O'Connell, Jim Belushi, and Las Vegas to recommend it, and seems like it will be on the lighter side.

Thursday

8 pm-- The Vampire Diaries! And I'm definitely interested in My Generation, a faux documentary that cuts between the class of 2000 as high school seniors and their lives now as grown-ups.

9 pm-- Fringe!

10 pm-- The Mentalist! And I'm also definitely going to check out Love Bites, the new anthology series that tells several different interconnected love stories each hour. It sounds like it will be the Love Boat without the boat.

Friday

8 pm-- Nothing to report here.

9 pm-- There is a new show called Body of Proof, about a brain surgeon who becomes a medical examiner. It's worth a shot, right?

10 pm-- I'm vaguely interested in Blue Bloods just because it stars Tom Selleck. But to tell the truth, I zoned out halfway through the preview and am not really sure what it's about. That's not a good sign, is it?

P.S. Just in case you're interested, here is the tally of shows I'm interested in by network. I think it shows how each network is doing creatively, at least with my demographic.

ABC- 8 (4 new and 4 returning)
CBS- 6 (4 new and 2 returning)
Fox -4 (2 new and 2 returning)
CW- 3 (1 new and 2 returning)
NBC- 3 (2 new and 1 returning)

Will you meet me in the middle?

Shine, shine

April TV thoughts

It's been a long, long time since I did a post about TV, and since the season is almost over, I think it's a good time to do so. This will probably be majorly long as I try to catch up on a lot of things, but that's what I get for being silent for 6 months! I'm sort of going to do these in random order, so bear with me.

Ugly Betty-- This show really got better this year, and I'm kind of sad it was cancelled, but I'm glad everybody is getting a nice wrap-up. Hilda is finally married, Justin is finally happy, Betty is moving to London, and it looks like she may be heading towards a relationship with Daniel after all. I can't wait to see what the last episode will bring!

Dollhouse-- I really loved this show, but I honestly don't know how much more they could have done with it. In two short seasons they managed to pull out a million plot twists from their bag of tricks. It ended on a kind of strange note, but what did anybody expect?

Eastwick-- I really liked this show at the time, but I haven't lost any sleep over it since it was cancelled. I do wish they'd had a chance to wrap things up better, though. Skipping all the way to the last episode like they did was stupid when it ended on a cliffhanger anyway.

Better Off Ted-- ABC's treatment of this show is breaking my heart! I love it so much, and I can't believe that the network has jerked the fans around as much as they have. I finally just set my DVR to record it any time it's on, because I kept finding out that an episode had been on the next morning when it was too late. Oh well, Hulu got a lot of my business that way! I wonder if they'll ever show the final two episodes, and I wonder if ABC will torture it again next year or let it die a nice dignified death this time. (Although that's definitely not what I want! More Ted, please!)

Chuck-- This show has been a rollercoaster ride this season. It looked for a while like Chuck and Sarah were going to be split apart for a long time, but then unexpectedly, they came back together, for good this time, I hope. It has been a little bit more serious this season and not quite as silly, but as Chuck gets older, I guess it's only right for the show to mature as well. I can't wait to see what they have in store for us for the rest of the season!

Heroes-- I can't mention Chuck without mentioning Heroes in the same breath. I think it ended in a good place, and if it doesn't come back, I'll be ok with that.

Castle-- Now here's a show that I want to come back. (And fortunately, it has already been renewed for next year!) This show is perfection and hearkens back to the great detective shows of the 80's with its blend of humor, seriousness, and romance. I LOVE CASTLE!

Fringe-- This show just keeps getting better as well. I can't help wondering how what Olivia recently learned about Peter will change the show, but somehow I'm sure it'll bring them closer together. They are both different, and we already know they love each other. I loved the conversation they had in the car this week!

Vampire Diaries-- This show has managed to cram about 7 seasons' worth of plot into less than one. I never know what's going to happen, and that's a very good thing, and I'm learning to appreciate Damon much more than I ever thought possible. Another show that I'm very glad to say has already been renewed for next year.

The Good Wife-- I'm not sure what to say about this show. It's always the last thing on my DVR every week, but I always enjoy it while I'm watching it. Is "understated" the right word for that? It's not flashy, but it has surprising depth if you're paying attention.

The Forgotten-- As I've said many times before, I really enjoyed this show. Yet I have to admit that I won't die if it's cancelled, which looks likely at this point.

Modern Family-- I really enjoy this show. The situations are always clever, yet true-to-life.

The Middle-- I also love this show much more than I ever expected to. ABC programmers take note: I always record it and watch it after Modern Family. It flows better that way.

The Mentalist-- This is the opposite of The Good Wife on my DVR. I always watch it quickly and then forget about it. This is a very well-done show, but there isn't really a whole lot of depth to it. (I could be really cynical here and say that's why it's got 16 million viewers!)

Brothers and Sisters-- This show has had so many changes behind the scenes, and I feel like each new person spends most of their tenure trying to undo the changes the previous person made. So now Justin and Rebecca still aren't married, and they lost the baby, and we've forgotten all about his medical school problems, and Holly is everybody's friend somehow, and Kevin and Scotty have forgotten about their surrogate, and Kitty is running for Congress? This is all too confusing for me. Let's hope this show figures out what it wants to be by next season.

Flashforward-- I'm liking this show more than I did at first, but I'm still not exactly sure how it is going to sustain itself. I'm pegging this for a one-season wonder, and I hope they wrap it up well.

V-- I want to like this show, I really do. But I keep thinking about other things while I'm watching it. And that's not a good thing, is it?

Mercy-- I have come to love this show so much. It's one of the few that I always make sure to watch live, because it needs my help with the ratings but also because I need to know what happens right away. The central love story breaks my heart, but it's also very realistically done. I really want them to get together in the end, but I know it'll be a long road, and so this just has to get renewed for next year!

Glee-- It's been so long since this show was on that I've almost forgotten about it, not that I could with the constant articles in the press about it. I hope there's not going to be a big backlash at some point, but to be honest, it seems almost inevitable.

Life Unexpected-- I love this show! The relationship between Baze and Cate is another one that seems inevitable in the far future, so this one must also be renewed.

You forget about everything

Who needs logic?

Still on the line