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TiVo recorded a Seinfeld episode as one of its suggestions for me. So, I’m watching it, and it seems sort of different. I looked it up, and it turns out it was the pilot. It’s really interesting seeing the characters before they were fully fleshed out. You can see shades of what the show would ultimately become, but everything is just slightly different.

Holy crap, new episodes of Greg the Bunny are airing on IFC! I absolutely loved Greg the Bunny when fox was running it. Unfortunately, this preview clip Greg the Bunny Video does Las Vegas is amazingly unfunny. I hope the rest of the shows are better than this.

I think so, Brain, but how will we get three pink flamingos into one pair of Capri pants?

OK, I thought it was kind of funny when the TV show Arrested Development referenced the Star Wars kid. But, that is nothing compared to the Robot Chicken I just watched. An all out brawl breaks out at a SciFi Convention, and they reference the Lightning Bolt, Lighting Bolt Video. That is one extremely obscure and esoteric reference. I literally fell off my couch I was laughing so hard. I don’t know who wrote that into the thing, but I love that show just a little bit more now.

Some people on the web were raving about how funny Robot Chicken was, so I told TiVo to grab me a few episodes. It really is kind of good in a wring the funny out of the morass of pop culture kind of way. More than any show I think I’ve ever seen it seems to have been written by and for people with attention deficit disorder.

I just got done watching the pilot for the show, NUMB3RS. The always lovely Sabrina Lloyd was in it. I have a Tivo Wishlist set up for shows she’s in, so Tivo was kind enough to record it for me.

OK, first things first, the name is just God awful. Seriously, that alone almost guarantees this thing won’t make it past a half a dozen episodes. And, it is pretty clearly trying really hard to follow the CSI formula for TV. I can almost hear the pitch meetings now — it’s like CSI, but math instead of science. The premise feels pretty thin even for a single two hour movie, so I just can’t see them stretching it out for an entire TV series.

All that said, I did sort of just barely like the pilot episode. There are a lot of known names involved with this thing including Rob Morrow (Northern Exposure), Peter MacNicol (Ally McBeal), Judd Hirsch (Taxi) and Ridley Scott (Blade Runner) to say nothing of the always lovely Sabrina Lloyd.

I doubt it will last very long, but there’s never much good to watch on Fridays anyway, so I’ll watch the next one and see if it gets better or worse. My money’s firmly in the worse camp.

Man, NUMB3RS — what a stupid name.

When Louis is giving the weather, he looks about as awkward and uncomfortable as I’ve ever seen somebody look. I mean, I love me some bad TV, but Wow! This moves past right past laughter and well into tears.

Wow! It looks like a new season of MI-5 has started. It had been so long, I just assumed it was cancelled. I’d almost removed it from my TiVo season pass. I never know when to safely remove things from my season pass. I assume I can get rid of The Agency, Boomtown, Dead Like Me, dr. vegas and The Office, but I haven’t for fear that I might be wrong about them (despite what I’d heard). I’m even less sure about shows like Out of Order which I assume was just a one off kind of little mini-series, but sort of hope will one day come back. I wonder how many season passes TiVo can hold. Is there any problem with just leaving cancelled shows in there forever hopelessly searching for the next new show to record?

So, TiVo recorded Gilmore Girls for me last night. And, that’s good because I feel like Gilmore Girls is one of the few really good shows on right now (although I am sort of getting into Lost).

The thing is, I get it off of satellite, and there was a crazy amount of rain here in Southern California. Rain means rain fade. I lost signal, and I didn’t get like 15 or 20 minutes of the show recorded.

Arghhhhhhh!!!!!!

So annoying! But, fortunately I live in the time of the internet where content is never more than five or six clicks away. OK, actually, it was a little more than that away. I was pretty sure somebody would have posted a torrent for the show, but first I had to find it. I tried a few Google searches with predictably bad results. I knew there was this one site out there that catalogs all that stuff *Cough*SuprNova.org*Cough*, but I couldn’t remember the name of it. That meant even more searches to try to dredge it up.

Finally, I find a seed for the show, and I start downloading it, and it says it’s going to take 100 hours. 100 hours? For 1 hour of TV? WTF internet?! I started, and then I found another seed that was only going to take 8 hours, so I started that one, and then I went to bed. I woke up and still didn’t have the full show. I had to wait another hour+.

Really, we should be able to get these things a lot faster than this shouldn’t we? I mean don’t get me wrong. It’s great that we can get them at all. Mother nature with her silly rain can’t stop me, but I thought the whole idea of torrents was that it made downloading fast (I know the real idea was that it offloads the bandwidth for really popular files, but isn’t it also supposed to make it fast?).

Anyway, I finally got the show, and I come to find out it only ran 43 minutes anyway. I’d only lost the final 2 minutes to rain fade. What the hell is that? Ten hours for two lousy minutes of programming.

Update: I just realized the reason the run time is so low is because they cut the ads. Duh! But, that means I didn’t lose nearly as much of the show as I thought. They must load up a lot of ad breaks at the end of the show or something. I swear TiVo said I was missing a good 15 minutes.

Man, Jon Stewart went on Crossfire and took the whole show to task with both guns blazing.

Samples:

BEGALA: Well, it’s because, see, we’re a debate show.

STEWART: No, no, no, no, that would be great. To do a debate would be great. But that’s like saying pro wrestling is a show about athletic competition.

(LAUGHTER)

CARLSON: Jon, Jon, Jon, I’m sorry. I think you’re a good comedian. I think your lectures are boring.

STEWART: Now, this is theater. It’s obvious. How old are you?

CARLSON: Thirty-five.

STEWART: And you wear a bow tie.

(LAUGHTER)

(APPLAUSE)

CARLSON: Yes, I do. I do.

STEWART: So this is theater.

CARLSON: I do think you’re more fun on your show. Just my opinion.

STEWART: You know what’s interesting, though? You’re as big a dick on your show as you are on any show.