We don't watch a lot of TV at my house (compared to what I hear from other people about what they do at their houses), but we do have routines, and when those routines are (thankfully) broken by something like Summer, the TV watching goes up and weird and habits change. C watches Daily Show and Colbert, and General Hospital. I watch Friends re-runs and the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes movies from the 80s on PBS whenever I can catch them. In all honesty, I also almost always have a huge TiVo backlog, too. Stuff that dates back a couple of months, sometimes, patiently waiting for me to watch again, now that it's gone to all the trouble of watching it through the 1st time for me. It took me nearly a month to watch the G.I. Joe movie, Resolute, written by Warren Ellis, and broadcast during Adult Swim one night at midnight. I thought that was excellent. I think I still have the Mark Twain award ceremony for George Carlin from April, too. Haven't watched it. C records all these great History Channel and Nova shows about stuff, but I don't end up watching anything, and as a consequence, I don't know anything. And here you are, reading my stuff. Ha. I win again.
My kids are the only ones with "regular" shows now. Abby gets a lot of PBS recorded for her, but gravitates toward two shows, the abominable Caillou and the refreshingly entertaining Martha Speaks. No one in my house but Abby likes Caillou. Max, who is at an age where he will still get drawn in by programming beneath his level, hates Caillou because of the narrator ("Does she have to tell us everything? We know that, we can see it, it's right there."), and is troubled by the fact that Caillou, who is four, is bald. I am also troubled by this. It is indeed, troubling, as Caillou never has a chemotherapy appointment on the show, and does not seem to live near power lines, brownfield, or reactors. I am assured by the Wikientry & the main site that this absence of follicular development is because when he was introduced he was a much younger character, and thus had no hair. That is a bullshit answer from lazy creators of children's programming. Grow him up, grow him some hair. I am convinced that Abby really only likes Caillou 'cause he's comforting, as she seems to use it more like background entertainment anodyne and does not much engage with the actual show. Martha's a different story, though.
Martha Speaks is about a talking dog, and is a genuinely funny show. The characters are engaging, warm, idiosyncratic, and cut from different molds, giving them depth and the illusion of sincerity. Abby talks back to Martha Speaks, like patrons of an urban cinema. We like Martha Speaks in our house because it's a vocabulary builder than manages to weave the job it does seamlessly together with being funny and entertaining, and also having a talking dog. It's well written and falls into the category of shows I would watch even if I had no children.
The other one of those presently is Phineas & Ferb, which is just three shades of completely awesome. Phineas and his brother Ferb drive their older sister nuts by doing something cool every day of the summer. They have a pet platypus who is a secret agent, and he fights an evil scientist called Dr. Doofenschmirtz. Phineas & Ferb's stuff includes rockets to space, water slides down Big Ben, giant monster truck arenas, and robot clones of themselves. It's always gone by the end of the day, and while formulaic, it's funny and fresh and comfortingly cool all at the same time. There is often music, and the show has enough street cred - some of the guys used to be on the Simpsons and Family Guy - that you should watch it. The above pic was taken from this show, and features the part of the roller coaster where they dump snakes on you.
What do you watch in the Summer?
