Shut Up And Listen 157

The Ten (Well, Thirteen) TV Shows You Should Be Watching

I watch a lot of TV. I can't really write in silence, so I'll usually have the TV on while I work and I decided to take the easy way out this week and talk about the ten (well, thirteen in total, I guess) TV shows that you should be watching. Before I get to that though, would anyone mind if I said a little about TV? No? Thank you. Such a polite audience.

I like TV. There's this idea that's been around for a while that TV rots the brain or is for morons. That's bullshit. Yeah, there's a lot of crap on TV, but there's a lot of crap movies, a lot of crap music, a lot of crap books, and so on. Find me a medium that isn't full of shit. Me, I love the TV medium. After the comic form, the television form is my favourite. It has many of the same properties of movies, except it's more convenient and with more possibilities. Maybe I'm just a fan of the serial form. All I know is that I like TV the same way I like comics, books, music, movies, magazines, newspapers, websites, paintings, poetry, and all those other mediums I'm leaving out. And here I'm going to point out some shows that I think demonstrate how well the television medium can be utilized.

Something worth noting though is that you won't find any one-hour drams on my list. I'm not a fan of those, for the most part. At least the ones currently on TV.

Arrested Development/The Bernie Mac Show
What we have here are the two best shows on Fox and the heart of their Sunday night line-up. The Simpsons are still continuing on their descent into crap (any other show with the same quality they have now would be cancelled right away); King Of The Hill is almost there; Malcolm In The Middle has its moments, but is getting to the point where they seem to be losing it; and Oliver Beene is good, but not quite "there" yet. Arrested Development is a damn funny show and really deserves a better timeslot than the 9:30 Sunday night one. It's a show about a wealthy family who is thrown into disarray when the father/grandfather is thrown in prison for corporate crimes and the responsible son has to take charge and try to turn the family company around. Of course, the entire family is totally fucked up. We have Gob, the older brother, who is a struggling magician with a vindictive streak; Lindsay, the twin sister who is a vapid wannabe crusader; Buster, the younger brother who has the social maturity of a five-year old and was dating his mother's best friend/worst enemy, who had the same first name as his mom; Tobias, the husband of Lindsay who had his licence to practise psychiatry taken away, so he decided to go into acting, but won't do nude scenes because of his fear of nudity; George Michael, the son who is in love with his cousin; Lucille, the mother who manipulates her children and treats everyone like crap; George Sr., who was sent to prison and has decided that he loves it there and has converted to Judaism; and Maybe, the niece who makes out with George Michael to piss off her parents, and continues to try and piss them off at every turn. Trust me, the show is funny as hell.

The Bernie Mac Show is in its third season and still going strong. This is a family comedy without the whole pussy attitude that those CBS ones have (although, I'll admit, I watch some of them anyways). Bernie Mac plays himself and is taking care of his sister's three kids with his wife, Wanda. This season has featured episodes where Bernie has to try and not kill his extended family when they all come to LA for a family reunion and then decide to party at his house, where Bernie plays a villain opposite his young niece's favourite TV personality, so Bernie has to get the actor to come over in the suit and make things right, and one where Bernie and his wife Wanda are forced to share the same space during the day when Wanda quits her job. What makes this show is Bernie Mac, and his talking to the audience. He doesn't hold back. He tells it how he sees it, whether it's saying that his nephew is a geeky little guy or that his father-in-law is an asshole. Odds are, you're watching Fox on Sunday night, so make sure to watch these two shows specifically.

Buzz (Canadian)
This show is fucking retarded and I love it. What we have are two guys, Daryn Jones and Mistah Mo, and basically, they're given a camera and a budget and they film whatever the fuck they think of. There's a segment called "German Dinner Theatre" where the two of them, plus recurring "cast member" Big Eric sit out on the sidewalk dressed like that Mike Myers character in that "Sprockets" feature on SNL, and play a keyboard, bass and drums, while Daryn makes up songs on the spot about people walking by. Or there's Country Mo Dee, the greatest rapper of all time with songs about white trash, having sex with blow-up dolls, and why white women like black men. And for like an entire year, they'd always end the show with this interview they did with this Elvis impersonator while he was in the shower and then the shower curtain falls down, which is always good for a laugh. The show is so fucking cheap and retarded, but it's funny. Very, very funny.

Curb Your Enthusiasm
Two words: Larry David. First he did it with Seinfeld and now he's doing it with Curb Your Enthusiasm. I'd go so far as to say this is the best sitcom on TV right now. It recently ended its fourth season, which consisted of two continuing plots: Larry and his wife's tenth anniversary where his present was permission to have sex with another woman before the actual night of their anniversary, and Larry performing in The Producers first with Ben Stiller and then with David Schwimmer. Each episode is so involved that once when I summarized an episode, I ended up writing a huge paragraph to detail what happened. You don't get that with other shows. This show simultaneously uses compression and decompression to simulate life, and does so accurately. If you don't get HBO or the Movie Network, buy the first season, which is now on DVD.

The Daily Show/Rick Mercer's Monday Report (Canadian)
You watch The Daily Show, right? How you can read my column and not watch The Daily Show is beyond me. The same goes for Rick Mercer's Monday Report if you get CBC. That's all.

Fillmore/SpongeBob SquarePants
And now we come to the children shows portion of the column. First up, Fillmore, a Disney show that's about the title character, Cornelius Fillmore, a safety patroller at X Middle School, and his partner, Ingrid Third, as they solve various crimes that plague the school. Basically, it's a cartoon aimed at kids done in the style of a 70s cop show. Every week Fillmore and Third have to solve the case or it's their badges, and there's the requisite three or four chase scenes, and the melodramatic characters. Bloody brilliant.

And then there's SpongeBob SquarePants . . . What can I possibly say about this show to do it justice? I'm sure you've seen an episode or two. It's one of those shows that people either find brilliant or just plain stupid. Me, I think it's brilliant. We have a yellow sponge that lives in a pineapple under the sea with his pet snail, next to a squid. His best friend is a pink starfish and he works at a burger joint for a crab. How is that not great?

The Newsroom (Canadian)
Last week's episode ended with the rehearsal between the producer and writer/director/star for the producer's addressing of the viewing audience about a contest to write a couple pages of script to finish off a subplot of the episode about the main character being charged with stealing thirty-five cherries from a grocery store after being caught with the pits in his pockets. After viewing this ending, I wasn't quite sure if the contest was real or not. This is Canada's answer to Curb Your Enthusiasm, except that it started before Curb Your Enthusiasm. It's about the behind-the-scenes workings of a newsroom. It's insane, it's amoral, it's funny as hell, and it follows The Monday Report, which makes eight to nine on Monday nights on CBC the best hour of TV each week.

Puppets Who Kill (Canadian)
We have a bear that is a sex god, a chain-smoking dog, an asexual comfort doll, a murdering ventriloquist dummy, and a social worker all living under the same roof. In what would normally be a show or movie about the redemption of these criminal puppets, it is instead a show about them running amuck and the descent into immoral activity by their social worker, Dan. My favourite character is Bill, the ventriloquist dummy, just because those things look so damn evil to begin with. In one episode, he's placed in a hospital as a volunteer and people keep dying, and he gets a citation from the city for his efforts in saving them. Of course, it's obvious that he's killing them off, but the humour comes from the fact that no one seems to think that maybe a ventriloquist dummy who has a history of murder is killing all the people he then tries to "save". Think Greg The Bunny except that it's about evil puppets and quite often puppet-sex.

Scrubs
Alright there, Nancy, now if you can pry yourself away from those reality shows where the guys and the gals all act like cavemen, just so you can sit there, box of Kleenex in hand for when that fella you like who is just the sweetest thing gets voted off because that bitch stabbed him right in the back by breaking the alliance between them and that guy who walks around in the nude, but who's ass it really all blurry because people just don't want to see a fifty-year old man's naughty bits, except for course for you there, you might be able to change the channel to a show that is actually of quality. How does that strike you there, Nancy, can you be a man of taste for one moment in your sad little life?

South Park
Now, I know you've seen an episode or two of South Park. I know it. There's no way you could have avoided it for so long. Four foul-mouthed kids where one of them used to die every episode? Yeah, you've seen it. Then you should also know how it is the great popculture satire of the modern era. Oh, you don't think that? You think it's just dick and fart jokes? Well, you're wrong. In two hundred years, if people are as smart as they claim to be, South Park will be studied in schools the same way Jonathan Swift is. South Park is ultimately a moral guide to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It is interested in the truth. It tells the truth, even when it's lying. And this is the point where you can tell that I'm an academic jackass. Watch the fucking show, asshole.

Trailer Park Boys (Canadian)
I honestly didn't think I'd like this show. Look at the name. The name is totally honest about the show. It's about guys from a trailer park. Why the fuck would anyone want to watch a show about a bunch of fucking redneck hicks from a trailer park in eastern Canada? I certainly didn't. It wasn't until after its third season had ended that I even watched an entire episode, and that was because there was nothing else on. And the show was good. There's Julian, who always has a glass of alcohol in his hand, Ricky, who can't say three words without swearing, and Bubbles, the sweet guy who loves cats. Every season ends with someone, usually Julian and Ricky, going to prison. Much like Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Newsroom, it has that documentary kind of feel, which just adds to the charm of the show. For you Americans you are interested, it will soon be airing on BBC America down there. Take a look at it.

And those are the shows I think you should watch. If you can, check a couple out and see if you agree.