Shiri Appleby returns

Shiri Appleby may return to primetime if her pilot 1/4 Life gets picked up. Let's hope it does better than 'life as we know it.'

- nyanko

Picasa 2

I've heard that this is a really great product for organizing your photos, and it's free! You should check it out - I just installed it and will be playing around with it too.

- nyanko

'Numb3rs' is getting good ratings

I haven't watched NUMB3RS yet, but I'm hoping I'll have a chance to see an episode or two before I run out of room on the TiVo. The review from the boyfriend is that the premise is interesting (woo, math), but that the execution of the first episode left a bit to be desired. It looks like the show might have some time to develop as it is kicking the butt of Medical Investiation, its time slot competitor. It's vaguely comforting to think that math might be able to win out over yet another medical show.

- nyanko

Downloading TV

The NY Times has an article on downloading television, BitTorrent and video on demand. Apparently, the average viewer only catches about half the episodes of a given show.

- nyanko

Someone at the OC must like A9

Amazon says that it did not ask for the O.C to make a reference to a9.com.

- nyanko

Air date and timeslot for Eyes

The midseason replacement series, Eyes, has had some good buzz. It will be premiering in April, right after Alias.

It's about some people running a high-tech surveillance company or something.

- nyanko

More Scrubs!

Rumor has it that Scrubs has already been renewed for a fifth season! Yay! And the first season will be out on DVD in May - you can already pre-order it on Amazon.

- nyanko

Google searches TV

Google will search for stills and text snippets from TV shows. But it's still in beta so much more is yet to come! Could be more fun than tvtome...

- nyanko

Snowed in

My flight back from my vacation was on jetBlue, so I was going to write about their free DirecTV. However, because I was flying to Boston, which got hit by an enormous snowstorm, travelling wasn't exactly the smoothest process.

After five cancelled flights and two terminal/gate changes (including accompanying trips through security), I had a confirmed seat on a 9:15 pm flight. Logan Airport was closed so the flight got delayed until 3:50 am. We had a "fun" sleepover in the airport, boarded the plane at 5 am, sat in the plane, moved the plane to another gate, were allowed to get off the flight for a while, took off at 9 am, arrived in Boston at 12:30 pm, sat on the tarmac for 2 hours, sat in front of a gate for about half an hour (a blackout had rendered many of the jetways immobile), finally got to get off the plane and then waited for the baggage handlers to hand-deliver the luggage (the power outage also broke the luggage carousels).

Anyhoo, didn't have much time to watch the DirecTV until we were parked on the tarmac, but managed to see parts of two episodes of Buffy, including the one where her mother dies, which of course started the sniffles. Anyway, 40 channels of TV is pretty nice although it's a little weird when you aren't familiar with the daytime tv schedule. They definitely need a TV guide channel on there. It would have been much nicer say, yesterday evening where I could have watched prime time TV or the men could have caught the football games.

- nyanko

It's now safe to watch TAR 6

Totoro, you can now safely watch The Amazing Race - yellow shirt has been eliminated. And the next season of TAR has been scheduled to premiere on
March 1. Not much of a break, so I guess I won't be catching much of Scrubs or Veronica Mars in the interim.

- nyanko

The O.C. and 'N Sync

What do The O.C. and 'N Sync have in common?
Well, until yesterday's episode of The O.C., I probably wouldn't have a real answer to this question. However, my keen *cough* eye recognized that Alex's "ex" last night was played by Emmanuelle Chriqui, the girl in the Lance Bass movie On The Line. Ha.
Initially I thought I might be hallucinating, and it was hard to confirm since she got all of 5 seconds of screen time, but TV Tome confirmed my suspicions.

- totoro

OMG! Do Something!

The wacky, crazy Britney is back, but not the somewhat scary Britney-porn version. World of Britney has posted a link to the Do Something video that Britney co-directed. Hilarious for reasons that are impossible to explain. Although if you don't find Britney's pink H2 in the sky funny, well, I have nothing to say.

- nyanko

What happened to Valentine's Day cutesy movies?

I am a sucker for a cheesy, sub-par quality romantic comedy, and usually Valentine's Day is a great time to find a nice heart-warming movie. This year? Not so much. The only movie that looks promising is Bride and Prejudice, a Bollywood remake of Pride & Prejudice. I remain very skeptical of The Wedding Date, mainly because I find Debra Messing to be somewhat annoying. Other than that, it's pretty slim pickings.

- nyanko

iPod, you betray me

Over the holidays, I went on a bit of a road trip with some of my high school friends. The iPod came too, along with a tape adaptor thingie. And what I discovered is that I have ZERO other-people-friendly music. All of my music is just embarrassing. I'm perfectly happy listening to my own total crap, but I have nothing that other people would like or that is appropriate for a roadtrip with people I don't know as well.

I think the problem is exacerabated by the fact that most people downloaded music indiscriminately during the Napster heyday, and when they got an iPod, they simply dumped all their mp3s onto it without doing any screening. Or the other conclusion is that everyone really likes some completely horribly embarrassing music, no matter how cool or much of a music snob they seem to be.

Maybe I should just buy a couple Now That's What I Call Music! volumes and load it on there to play when the situation requires it.

And for Totoro, another one of the passengers also had an iPod and he had better music than me. But at one point, Kelly Clarkson's Breakaway came on, at which point he cringed and said we could skip the song, and the driver and I admitted that the song was kind of catchy. Sigh.

- nyanko

Cover my eyes!

I've figured out that my level of prudery for televisions is approximately cable-network-level. Meaning, I'm comfortable watching most of what is shown on cable networks, such as FX, USA, or TNT. This seems to be slightly more flexible than network TV, but thankfully more stringent than pay cable, like HBO.

I have been watching Six Feet Under and the last of Sex and the City, and honestly, I think I can do without seeing the sex scenes. Conversations about sex are fine, but ack, put it away! I'm trying to figure out why they are so prevalent (seems like one scene per episode) - although it seems like there is precedent for this in the sense that all romance novels are cutesy and lovey and then somewhere in the book, there is some traumatizingly graphic sex scene. Go figure.

Caveat: The extended soft focus make-out etc. sessions on network TV shows also get the TiVo fast-forward (Amy & Ephram on Everwood, Syd & Vaughn on Alias - I'm talking to you!), but mainly because there's no dialog and well, we all know how it's going to end, so I can just save myself those five minutes and get on with it.

- nyanko

Go on a cruise with the 'Apprentice' cast

Oh good gravy. I guess this is how Trump will continue to milk as much money as possible out of the Apprentice franchise.

- nyanko

Amazing Race on DVD

Sounds like the Amazing Race Season 1 might be out on DVD sometime in the near future. Woo!

- nyanko

Wallace & Grommit movie

AICN has a link to the behind-the-scenes trailer of the full length Wallace & Grommit movie.

- nyanko

24 Recap on TWOP

The Television Without Pity recapper has a moment of pure genius when coming up with nicknames for the character who is the Secretary of Defense. DoD -> DaD. And then gives his daughter the nickname of DoDder. Heh.

- nyanko

Back in my good graces

24 is back in my good graces after an action packed two hour premiere last night. I had prepared myself for disappointment, since I was very excited about seasons 2 and 3 before they premiered, but then lost interest about halfway through the season. Anyway, yay for not sucking! We'll have to see if they can keep it up for the rest of the season.

I think I also inadvertently got one of my roommates hooked on the show since she was hanging out the living room while I was watching...

- nyanko

One review of Johnny Zero

Fox is launching one of its midseason shows, Johnny Zero this week and there is a one paragraph review of the show towards the bottom of this article. Looks like it probably won't make my season pass list unless more positive reviews come out later this week.

Numbers will probably get a provisional season pass, pending reviews later this week. I've also heard some decent things about Eyes, which I think will be on NBC. However, I haven't heard a concrete start date for that show yet.

- nyanko

Queue Sharing Feature on Netflix

Netflix's New Queue Sharing Feature is great for people sharing an account, whether they are spouses, family members, or friends. This would have saved a lot of queue shuffling when I was sharing my account with my roommate.

- nyanko

Ice Princess Trailer

Michelle Trachtenberg's new movie Ice Princess will be coming out in March. Heh. Heh. Heh. Math + Ice skating = priceless trailer moment.

- nyanko

TiVo @ CES

Looks like TiVo is branching out to show TiVo broadband content, in addition to cable and satellite feeds. Iiiinteresting.

- nyanko

My Winter Break

During this recent winter break, I was on a plane for something like 40 hours over the course of about two weeks. This means I watched a lot of movies. Specifically, I made some heavy use out of Singapore Air's personal Video-On-Demand (Economy class!). If I can always take Singapore Air in the future on my way across the Pacific, I would be happy indeed.

So here's the laundry list of what I watched, feel free to laugh or cry over my selections. Keep in mind that there were about 60 movies I could've chosen from, with about 40 of them being Hollywood movies and the others being foreign.

(In chronological order of watching)

1. Anchorman
   
2. Master & Commander
   
3. 90% of Princess Diaries 2
   
4. Elf
   
5. rest of Princess Diaries 2
   
6. Wimbledon
   
7. The Runaway Jury
   
8. Taxi

- totoro

Committed

This is my first post in so long that I think the blog forgot who I was, but here goes.
A new sitcom recently premiered called Committed, and although I was warned away from it by Nyanko (who has read some horrible reviews), a recommendation from another friend (whom we shall call Squishy) prompted me to invest 22 minutes of time late last night in giving this show a shot.

Although this might end up causing much loss in face to me and my family in the near future, I must say that those were 22 well spent minutes. Committed is about a bunch of totally crazy people, and the pilot was specifically about two of these insane people who end up on a blind date with each other (sort of). I have a definite weakness for this kind of wacky humor, as my love for shows such as Scrubs and Coupling might suggest, but I don't think there's even one sane person in Committed. Oh, and if crazy people falling in love with each other doesn't sound good enough, just keep in mind that there is also a dying clown that lives in the closet. That alone should make this show worth watching.

- totoro

Afraid of Lost

So one of my roommates is actually so afraid when watching Lost (I think the music is what really gets her) that she actually waited for me to get home yesterday because she didn't want to watch it alone. Before she just wouldn't watch it right before she went to bed, but now it's sounding like we'll always be watching it together. And this is a girl who will watch CSI and used to watch CSI: Miami, which both have quite gory reenactments and corpse fly-throughs...

Granted, I also watch lots of crime shows, but I cover my eyes when anything with scapels, weapons or cutting implements come out.

- nyanko

An impending TV tragedy for Nyanko

I never thought I'd be regretting having new TV throughout January, but it's triggering an impending TV tragedy for me. I had a bunch of stuff stocked up over the holidays and I was looking forward to slowly working through it at my leisure. Unfortunately, I just planned a vacation starting in mid-January, which means that I need to have the TiVo cleared off in order to store all the stuff that will come up during my vacation. Saturday's MI-5 marathon is pretty much the death blow for me.

Now it's a panic to get through enough of my TV and watch my three Netflix before I take off. Sigh. Damn you, TV.

- nyanko

Good TV in January

For once, we won't have to wait until the last week of January to get new television! Usually, the second week of December until the last week of January is a total wasteland of television, but a number of networks are launching new shows or showing new episodes in January.

Alias and 24 both start this week (Wednesday and Sunday respectively). Midseason replacement series also start this month, including Committed, Medium, Numb3rs, and Point Pleasant. I haven't seen any reviews for those shows yet, but I'll be interested to see if critics/tv columnists think they are worth checking out. And the new trend of playing shows without repeats (Alias, 24, Everwood for the rest of the season) is going to be quite nice!

- nyanko

TiVoToGo Launches

Gizmodo reports that TiVoToGo has launched. I'll have to read up on this and see if this might persuade me to upgrade to a Series2 box. I'm not that used to watching tv on my computer but this could be pretty darn nice for long airplane rides and extended work trips. If the Netflix/TiVo partnership is launched anytime soon, I will be hard pressed to not buy myself a new TiVo.

- nyanko