Lest you think I only watch a soap opera...

Short list of other stuff I've been watching. You know...stuff that isn't General Hospital: Castle--Before this time last year, I had seen MAYBE one episode of Castle. Then, there was all this hoopla about them doing a noir episode. It probably also helped that this was about the time last year that I got really, REALLY started watching GH again in 'real time' so I started seeing a lot of commercials for it. Anyway...I fell in LOVE. And I'm so very glad. Last year's season finale was SUPERB. This season has had a couple of fantastic episodes and, I'm sorry to say, a bunch that have been mediocre at best, but they've done a pretty good job of avoiding the "Moonlighting Curse" and on the whole it's still pretty fun to watch. Smash--Dear God. I had this weekend at home alone this summer where I THOUGHT I had plans and then I didn't have those plans and instead I watched the entire first season of Smash. There are plenty of things that I enjoy about it. I think Megan Hilty is a goddess and supremely talented and I can vouch that she's utterly charming in real life and when I met her we were wearing the exact same shirt, so she's obviously got excellent taste. The thing is, I felt the whole time that they were trying to make her character, Ivy, just impossibly vile, because it was the only way they could make me sympathetic towards Katharine McPhee's character, Karen, in comparison. The problem is that it kind of didn't work. I mean, yeah, there was an episode near the beginning where I felt a smidgen of sympathy for Karen, but then...nothing. And most of the time, it was just a contest to be the character that I DIDN'T want to punch in the face. Only one episode has aired so far and it may be that they've compounded the problem by bringing on Jennifer Hudson who's playing a character I like to call, "Another Person Who Can Sing Rings Around McPhee." Seriously...find a clip of Megan Hilty singing "Second-Hand White Baby Grand". I'm telling you...goddess. Bunheads--I am now confess that I am the one person on the planet of my particular demographic who didn't watch and worship every single episode of The Gilmore Girls. I watched it here and there because my mom and sister both LOVE it and sometimes they'd have it on when I was around. So I didn't watch the first episode of Bunheads because I was an Amy Sherman-Palladino disciple. I watched because it managed to hit some theater geek trifecta with Kelly Bishop, Sutton Foster AND a plot that centers around a dance school. It can be silly and way to self-aware of how adorable it is and some of the acting is less than award-winning, but it's super easy and fun. Law & Order: SVU--I have come to accept that I will never, ever be able to quit you. We are Ennis and Jack and we must accept this. The Carrie Diaries--This is where I have to confess that I was really excited about this one because I had already read the books and LOVED them. And boy did it not disappoint. Anna-Sophia Robb as a teenage Carrie Bradshaw is just fantastic and charming as hell to boot. It's got tons of fun 80s fashion and the music is really incredible. And it's really neat (and different) to see an in-depth look at the background of such an iconic character. Two EXTREMELY enthusiastic thumbs up. The Americans--Okay, so I watched the first episode on Hulu the day after it aired. And the reason is because I was reading an article about it and in the comments, someone said, "It's like Jack and Irina from Alias if Jack had been a Soviet deep-cover agent, too." At which point I almost broke my fingers trying to type hulu.com into the address bar because--OMG JACK AND IRINA!!! Also, I was fascinated by Keri Russell playing a spy, because JJ Abrams said that the way he came up with the idea for Alias is that he had this thought of, "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if Felicity was a spy?". I've only seen the first episode--I haven't watched this week's yet--and I'm completely hooked.

My New Love

It is nigh on impossible to get me to start watching a new television show. It took an entire season for my best friend to convince me to watch Alias and it took YEARS for me to finally sit down and watch The West Wing, which is bar none, my favorite show ever, in its entirety and from the beginning. Part of this stems from my prevailing television abandonment issues. I became convinced, at a fairly young age, actually, that if I were to fully invest in a new show from its infancy and then happen to fall in love with it, it would be summarily canceled. Case in point, Rags to Riches, which may, in retrospect, be the most awful thing ever to happen to music and acting, but when I was eleven, represented the pinnacle of television achievement. I loved it. It was canceled. This happened to me several times over the years. I would discover something. It would be AWESOME. Networks would cancel it. When Alias was ending, to much wailing a gnashing of teeth at my abode, I knew that I had to find something new. Hence Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Look, I know that a lot of people thought it was relatively horrible. But I also know a bunch of people who LOVED it. I was one of those people. And I got all caught up and invested in the characters and, of course, it's canceled. Which sucked, but I guess I should at least be thankful that they knew it was happening and wrapped up the ending in a nice little package. I also fell head over heels for Pushing Daisies. Which had TWO WHOLE SEASONS. Okay, not really. There were two seasons. Sort of. It was on sporadically at best. Anyway. These and many other events in my television past have made me extremely wary of anything new. Which is why when daytime shows were being absolutely flooded with promos for a new ABC show three years ago, I studiously ignored it. No matter how adorable it looked. And so, into my world came Castle. I knew it was there. I knew it was starting. But it was a mid-season replacement, which can mean it's gonna go huge and be awesome. It can also mean it's gonna suck and last for twelve episodes as a filler until the fall season starts. It was also fortuitous that three years ago, almost EXACTLY when the show was starting was when I was making my first foray back into community theater in several years. So, it was easy enough for me to dismiss it with, "Well, I probably won't be around to watch it anyway." And I guess to be honest, a lot of the time, I wasn't. And even though the promos still danced adorably through General Hospital commercial breaks, I didn't watch. Which brings me to the end of January. I had just finished my run of Pirates of Penzance and had the first completely free weekend I had had in MONTHS. Which was great. Except for the fact that I had absolutely nothing to do. So on Friday, as I wandered through Target, I saw a display with the Castle Season One DVDs. And they were something like $20. So, I figured it couldn't hurt. When you think about it, twenty dollars is pretty cheap for a weekend of entertainment. Plus, if it turned out to be awesome, there were two more seasons on DVD waiting for me AND the current season. And, for real, y'all. I am in LOVE. It is one of the cutest shows EVER. And also, Nathan Fillion. Which rocks. I've had a thing for him since he was Joey Buchanan on One Life to Live when I was in college. It's a cop/detective show. Which usually, other than Law & Order: SVU, I avoid like the plague. Actually, there are things about it that remind me very much of SVU. It's certainly, as Buffy would say, "dark and twisty" from time to time. But where SVU is, at heart, a procedural and is always heavy and actually kind of dismal, Castle is delightfully funny. There are a couple of scenes that I have saved on my YouTube favorites that I can watch over and over and still laugh out loud. Every. Single. Time. It gets compared with Bones quite a bit, but I'm old-school and it feels like there's much more in common with Moonlighting and Remington Steele. It brings the banter. And the people in it are just ridiculously attractive. And it makes references to the late, much-lamented Firefly all the time. I'm pretty excited about tonight, which is the season finale. And by "pretty excited", I mean REALLY REALLY SUPER EXCITED OMG!!!!!!111!!! I mean, the promo at the end of last week pretty much showed Beckett (awesome lady police detective) DIVING for Castle's face, in particular the mouth part of his face. With the mouth part of her face. Castle being Nathan Fillion's character, who is a best-selling mystery writer who shadows Beckett for research for his books. And also because they are TOTALLY IN LOVE WITH EACH OTHER. Anyway, the point is, this show is awesome. You should be watching it. Tonight. 10/9 Central. ABC. Or get thee to a Target/WalMart/Best Buy and buy those DVDs. Or watch on ABC.com.. And if you hear shrieks of joy or mournful wailing coming from central New Jersey in that hour? It's me. And I'm sorry for disturbing your peaceful evening.