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What’s your favorite Tom Hanks movie or character, and why?

That poor guy. His career's been all downhill since he played Kip Wilson.

You know, I was joking when I started this post, but watching the opening credits reminded me just how much I liked that show, and what a great cast they had. And yes, a big part of its consistently-entertaining quality was the guy who would go on to become one of the big stars of the next three decade. His good humor, his improv chemistry with Scolari, and his ability, shared with Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant, to maintain some level of gravitas in the most humbling, embarrassing situations all served him well both in this series and in his later career.

And I never thought of myself as a big Tom Hanks fan. I just enjoy his stuff -- but I enjoy it, I realize, pretty darned consistently, and have since the days when he and Peter Scholari answered every knock on the door with that distinctive falsetto "Who is it?"

Ah, summertime. Warm weather, ice cream, barbecue, and big-screen blockbusters -- and, as the broadcast networks settle firmly into Mid-Season hiatus, cable TV brings us new episodes of shows far better than anything the mainstream offers.

Two of my favorite shows have their season premieres this week: Burn Notice returned on Thursday, and Leverage debuts tomorrow night. Both shows, of course, involve ensembles of quirky characters, experts in a variety of extralegal activities, who band together to help the Victim of the Week get revenge on the bad guys making their lives difficult, while pursuing the not-entirely-benevolent agendas of their nominal leaders.

The big difference is a matter of resources: the Burn Notice team tends to scrounge and improvise, and have to stay off the grid most of the time; they deal with gangs, drug dealers, and the occasional international terrorist. The Leverage crew, on the other claw, scored big on their first outing, and have huge wads of cash to finance bleeding-edge technology; their adversaries are unscrupulous corporations and con men who screw the little people in ways that make them hard to touch in a court of law..

They both fall into my favorite genre: cool, competent people being cool and competent.

When you have two shows that are so similar in so many ways, you just have to ask yourself ...

Who'd Win?

If the team from Burn Notice somehow wound up on opposite sides from the Leverage team, who'd wind up on top when the dust clears? Let's ignore all the logical reasons about why they wouldn't ever get in a head-to-head; maybe it's mistaken identity; maybe David Xanatos arranges it all; maybe Nate Ford and Sam Axe meet in a bar, get drunk, and make a really, really stupid bet ...

... you know, that last sounds the most plausible.

[Poll #1755797]

Please explain your answer in the comments!

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In the tradition of paka and hafoc:

"Jane Austen. Novelist.

"Gentlemen, we can rebuild her. We have the technology."

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quelonzia and I sat down to watch our recording of the premiere of V last night.

Fans of the original series will not be disappointed: it was completely faithful to the original.

The acting was wooden, the scripting was heavy-handed, the motivations were weak, the characters were unlikable, and the glaring Plot Stupidity of the original was wholly intact.

We didn't get past the first half-hour.

Pity. I had high hopes, considering the cast was packed with veterans of some of the best SF shows of the last decade.

Now I'm kind of nostalgic for the first couple of seasons of Earth: Final Conflict.

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Your Obedient Serpent has no idea what he's gonna do to relax in the near future, because all the things he's frittered away his spare-and-not-so-spare time on over the years actively piss him off right now.

This is, in part, because he's frittered away so much of his life on them, and in part because, well, Busman's Holiday. One of his sources of stress is his low-paying retail job, selling all those time-consuming distractions.

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With quelonzia back on a serious reading jag (thanks to her bionic lens replacement from last year), and Your Obedient Serpent working three nights a week, our TV habit is falling by the wayside once again. We drift in and out of it as seasons pass; recent years have been close to an all-time high for us, but now, scheduling, distractions, and the previously-mentioned ebb in SF-related shows have created the Perfect Storm of Turn Off The TV.

Today, we finally trimmed our timer list down to half-a-dozen regular-season shows -- and one of those may get dumped later:

• Supernatural
  
• Castle
  
• The Mentalist
  
• Flash Forward
  
• Heroes
  
• CSI: New York

Note that this is our regular season list; summer shows and half-season shows like Leverage, Burn Notice and Doctor Who are still on the list.

Shows that disappointed us or had become a chore to watch are gone. The survivors grabbed us, pulled us into their stories, made us laugh, or, in general, just made us happy to invite these people into our homes on a weekly basis.

CSI is gone; we've honestly just been watching it through inertia for a long time, and losing William Petersen last season -- while I liked Laurence Fishburne's character more than Quel did, we really watched the show for Grissom.

Criminal Minds is gone, because we just haven't found ourselves in the mood to watch it. We watched the opening, found it hard to follow (possibly because we tried watching it right after the Forgotten fried our brains with sheer tedium), and, after some procrastinating, realized that we just didn't care enough to push through it.

CSI: New York still has Gary Sinise, which is honestly why it made our list in the first place five years ago; at the moment, that's enough to keep us recording it... though we still haven't sat down to watch it this season.

I think that, after nine years, we're just plain burned out on forensics, profilers, getting into the heads of sick, twisted people, or diving into the bodies of just plain dead ones. Castle and The Mentalist are murder mysteries, but they get a pass because they're throwbacks to the Eccentric Detective Shows of the '70s and '80s. Quel and I enjoy watching Smart, Competent People do Smart, Competent Things*; that's why our pet procedurals got us watching in the first place. Over the years, though, they've focused less and less on the Smart People Being Smart, and more and more on the Twisted People Being Twisted.

And we're tired of inviting those people into our home.

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*Yes, we also enjoy Heroes. Shut up. And don't even try to dis Supernatural here.

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After eight seasons, queloniza has finally given up on Smallville, walking out at the 45-minute mark on the Season Premiere. "It finally jumped the shark," she said, though honestly, it's spent more time on the far side of the tank than an RV full of retirees spends in Florida.

I'm going to keep watching it, at least for a while; as someone who works in a comic book store, it's almost a job requirement. I thought Season 8 was a lot better than the previous two or three, despite the loss of Michael Rosenbaum as Lex (which, honestly, was Quel's real shark-jumping moment); Season 9, on the other claw, is starting off a bit rough.

Not many shows stay on the DVR timer long if only one of us is watching; the last one was Ghost Whisperer, which lost me at the Obvious Shark-Jumping Point last November; Quel stubbornly stuck with it, but didn't make it to the season finale.

Scoreboard thus far:

New Shows:
Flash Forward has our attention. Good cast, intriguing premise, lots of mystery.

The Forgotten failed to grab us by the 45-minute mark. It more than failed to grab us, really; much as we wanted to watch Christian Slater after the ignominious cancellation of the smarter, snappier version of Dollhouse, the show dragged, and we just couldn't see watching this band of amateurs bumble around week after week. The premise might have made a good movie, but as a weekly series, it seems contrived and implausible.

That's right, some one who's watched every single season of Smallville just accused a show of being contrived and implausible.

Eastwick may have hit a new record: we didn't make it to the 20-minute mark before deleting the timer.

We made it through the full premiere of The Vampire Diaries, but ultimately, it was just too teenybopper for us.

Returning Shows:
We'll be catching up on the premieres of our Police Procedurals on Sunday. As for the other shows on our current list:

Castle remains fun and fluffy. It's the kind of silly, throwback Cute Detective show that we'd normally roll our eyes and ignore, but, you know. Nathan Fillion.

Heroes looks like it's heading into its best season ever. The writers have finally fond their footing, and have a definite direction.

Finally... Supernatural continues to rock. It has never, ever jumped the shark; Sam and Dean just dove right into the tank and made sushi out of that bad boy.

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The replies to my previous post have pointed out a few shows that have eluded my notice -- or that I simply forgot about. I'm listing this partly so I remember what timers to set!

Defying Gravity is a 13-episode British/Canadian/USian co-production, following 8 astronauts on their six-year mission around the Solar System in the year 2052.

It started 02 August 2009 on ABC, and I didn't hear word one about it until this morning. This suggests that there's some glitch in the Buzz Network. Episodes are on Hulu, but.. gaaaah. Space stuff needs big screen. I won't watch postage stamps.

(Technically, it's a summer show, so it doesn't quite count toward the "dead fall" issue. But it's SF, and, crap, we all MISSED it!)

Flash Forward is one that I had heard about, and forgot: it revolves around an event in which everyone on Earth blacks out for over two minutes, and in the aftermath, it turns out that everyone has had a vision of their future, six months down the road. (It'll be interesting to see what they do after the show's been on for six months, and the visions either have or have not come true.)

It starts 24 September 2009, once again, on ABC.

ABC seems to be the go-to place for network SF this year: on 03 November 2009, they'll be treating us to a remake of the miniseries, V. I was never a fan of the original series, so my initial reaction was "meh" -- but then I remembered how everyone reacted to the news that they were remaking the velour-jumpsuit-and-robot-dog epic of the same era. One of the minds behind this revival also gave us The 4400, so I'm definitely tuning in.

Since I'm now watching everything else on ABC, I'm also going to tune into The Forgotten on 22 September 2009. It's "science fiction" in the same way CSI and Numb3rs are: it's fiction, about science. I'm going to give it a try just because it has Christian Slater, and I still miss My Own Worst Enemy.

(Hey, Quel and I started watching Castle just because it had Nathan Fillion in it.)

This is odd. It's not so much that Geek Chic has run its course -- it's just moved to a network that hasn't had much of anything to show in the SF genre in a long while.

(Of course, that could be evidence in and of itself that a trend is on its way out -- when the lowest-rated network finally jumps on the bandwagon.)

Did I mention that Eastwick is on ABC, too?

Over on NBC, Day One is going to start in the Spring, following good ol' Chuck. I don't know if it'll find any more success than NBC's last post-apocalyptic drama, but we'll give it a shot.

On Cable, BBC America has given us the summer show, Being Human. Quel and I have been enjoying it thoroughly, even though the premise sounds like a bar joke: "a vampire and a werewolf rent an apartment with a ghost..." It's only 6 episodes long, but a marathon's coming up this weekend, and it's also available On Demand for those who have access to such things.

And coming up on AMC:

A six-episode remake of one of my all-time favorite shows, The Prisoner. What this one lacks in pennyfarthing bikes and surreal Welsh architecture, it makes up for with Ian McKellan. I've seen an extensive trailer, and since I'm not particularly vulnerable to knee-jerk aversion to radical changes, it looks like it has potential.

Can't find a specific premiere date on that one, sorry.

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Wow, what a dead TV season. The only new Fall show that has even kind of gotten our interest is Eastwick, an adaptation of Guess What; The Human Target may be worth a peek, but it's not coming up until later in the season. I had to look all this up online, incidentally -- there's been no hype, no buzz, nothin' about the new season in my usual haunts.

The only word that really describes this is "abrupt". The last couple of years have been brimming with new shows that have, for one reason or another, gotten our extended social group and the blogosphere with which it intersects a-humming. This year, suddenly, nothin'.

Oh, there may be some ads that we fast-forward through on the few summer shows we watch, and the "First Look" adumentary reels in the movie theaters have hyped one or two new shows -- but nothing that really grabs us.

And it's not just us. Nobody's saying anything online about... anything. Not on LJ, not on FurryMUCK, not in the entertainment blogs I read.

I'm not sure if the Cater To The Geeks fad has faded; honestly, I didn't recognize many new non-SF shows on the schedule, either.

It's a dead season. Nobody cares. There's nothing to excite the fandom.

Or were there were just too many successful new shows in the last few seasons to make room for more this year?

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Public Service Announcement: Those of you who feel the need to respond to any post about TV schedules with "I don't watch TV" will be soundly mocked before your posts get deleted.

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The Executive Producer of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles shares some reasoned, thoughtful comments about its cancellation.

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It's Day 3 of this cold, and Your Obedient Serpent's brain is rambling through those twisted corridors that squeeze between sinus pressure, DayQuil, and something akin to stir-craziness.

In this mental state, I happened to observe that, while I have achieved the highbrow milestone of hearing "The William Tell Overture" without thinking of The Lone Ranger, and have occasionally even listened to "Also Sprach Zarathustra" without thinking of 2001: a Space Odyssey, it was going to be a long time before I could hear Bob Dylan's classic "All Along The Watchtower" without thinking of both Battlestar Galactica and Watchmen.

Of course, the Watchmen movie and the BSG finale are still very much on my mind. When I'm in the altered states of consciousness that being sick always seems to induce, and my mind is dwelling on two vivid and engrossing works and worlds... I start to see... connections.

Especially when music is involved.

( Cut for BSG *and* Watchmen Spoilers! )

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Appropriately enough, I posted this on Joseph Campbell's birthday.

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