telly 2

And here's the second part.


You Have Been Watching

Clearly, you have to like Charlie Brooker before you even consider watching this. Especially since, although it's presented as a panel show, it's a bit of half-arsed version. I mean, there are normally very few actual questions asked of the guests and more time is spent giving what are more like mini-reviews.

It works, but they appear to have tweaked the format a little from the first series, and I'm not sure I like the tweaks. In the first season the guests watched episodes of the shows being discussed, but I think they've scaled that back a bit this year - perhaps only showing them 1 episode and asking questions about the whole series.

This okay, but Brooker watches them all (he's a TV critic after all) so the balance has shifted more towards him talking, where the guests said more in the first series.

Also, they had something called TV club last year where they told you what to watch and you could put your opinions and stuff. This has basically been dumped, although to be fair, it wasn't a crucial bit of the show.


The Big Bang Theory s3

The Big Bang Theory is consistently the funniest show on TV. I'd say its only real rival is 30Rock, and that's not shown on a channel I can watch easily.

Oh, Channel 4 are always up to their usual scheduling shenanigans of course, but the mighty power of schedule searching that my PVR enables, combined with my already exhaustive scouring of Radio Times each week ensures I don't miss any episodes.

I think one of the things I like most about the show is that for once it actually manages to depict scientists and nerds in an unapologetic and non-fanciful way. I've ranted many times before about Hollywood depictions of scientists and nerds, but Big Bang Theory doesn't do that - it's got a proper understanding geekiness and geekdom.


The Mentalist s2

The mentalist is a bit of an odd beast.

Basically, it's a crime mystery job (I love a good crime mystery) and generally speaking, each episode is self contained. There's a murder or two and the main guy, Jane, solves it, often engaging his mentalist abilities - think Derren Brown.

Anyway, these are all fine and good, but then there's also supposed to be a couple of plot threads that work across the episodes. For Jane, this is basically to do with a serial killer called Red John who killed his wife and child.

Now this is clearly quite a dark thread, but the individual episodes are often jolly and light-hearted. It's like there's an intention for them to be entirely stand alone, but then every so often you get a full Red John episode or a small arc. If this were an anime, I'd probably end up thinking of the normal episodes as filler, because tonally they just don't match with the Red John ones.

But in a way it still works - the reason for Jane being there and how he behaves is actually explained by the Red John stuff.

I dunno, it's difficult to explain in a short space, but basically the show works. The stand-alone episodes work as crime mystery stories and the Red John episodes work as a long-running plot. My only thing is I wish the two were a bit better integrated - it's like they completely forget about Red John while they work on the individual cases.


Doctor Who

The Steven Moffat run Doctor Who continues to be enjoyable.

If I'm totally honest, I have had a few niggles. The biggest one was probably the Rory character. Rory was engaged to Amy, the Doctor's new assistant, indeed, the Doctor actually took her away on the very night before her wedding.

He even went and picked up Rory, who was in a few episodes and was heavily involved in the plots - not just a bystander. And then a few weeks back they killed him off.

Well, actually they didn't just kill him off, he was touched by some sort of time rift thing and completely 'disappeared' from all-time. He not only died, but he ceased to ever have existed.

If they'd simply killed him that would have created paradoxes - there was some stuff of him in the future - but to cause him to cease to exist is the mother of all paradoxes. He was about to marry Amy and has been her friend since childhood - how does that all now work?

Hopefully, the overarching plot to the series will sort it all out. Certainly the overall series plot has been better integrated into the series than back in the RTD days.