I have been on a “good” television kick lately. If you believe, like I do, that music and movies and television and other forms of entertainment can and should be viewed as fine art, I believe that television is a great vehicle for telling a complete story. This belief, I am sure, has grown from my obsession with The Wire and the work of David Simon. Now, I realize that much of the entertainment we consume is pure drivel, but that does not stop me from finding television programming that does the format justice.

With that said, I have become a big fan of True Blood. On the surface, this would not be a television show that I would even bother checking out. It’s main story point revolves around vampires. Yawn. The only reason I began watching it was because my wife was a big Six Feet Under fan and the two shows have the same creator. It took a few episodes for me to get into it, but I just think it works. I guess it is cliche to say a show is character-driven, but this is the selling point of the show. Yes, it keeps you interested with the vampires and supernatural powers and strange occurrences, but that would all be worthless if the characters were two-dimensional. Second, it makes great use of the one hour television format. Instead of each show having a beginning and ending, the entire season has a beginning and end. So yes, you can not just watch any episdoe and be entertained like you would be able to do with a show like CSI. It requires you to be vested in the entire season. I realize that it will not capture the casual viewer, but I feel like that does a disservice to what really becomes a 12-hour mini-series.

I hope shows like True Blood become the rule instead of the exception, but I’ll take it while I can get it…

Sid & Marty Krofft have be getting some press recently because of the opening of Land of the Lost. After seeing them in a magazine, I was reminded of a favorite show of mine when I was younger, D.C. Follies. Now, I was much too young to understand some of the jokes on the show since it was political statire. Plus, it probably wasn’t all that good since it was taken off the air after only one season. The reason I call it a favorite is because of the puppets. They had live actors mixed in with puppets of famous people like Ronald Reagan, Elvis, Oliver North, and Richard Nixon. I just loved the look of the puppets since they were very accurate three-dimensional caricatures of the actual people. I’m surprised I even remember this show, but if you are interested, you can check all the episodes out on Hulu.

Image courtesy of On the Set

Just something silly I saw on Flickr. I like how these were made as actual television sets and not just the set as we would see on television. It adds another dimension that we do not often think about. Plus, the attention to detail is very nice. They have captured the dirty floor and the pictures on the wall in the above Cheers set.