I just watched the 2009 series finality of Monk, in which the show’s ever arching mystery is solved.  It was a kind of feel good show where Adrian finally comes to terms with the death of his wife.  I wasn’t all that happy with the way things turned out, after all, the writers have had 8 years to work out a perfect ending and yet this seems to be a standard rush job wrap up show.  Oh well, you can’t have everything.

Monk was a USA Network show and I only watched a  few episodes while the show was running.  We have reached a point in TV History where there are too many channels that actually have good shows and there is no way to watch them all.  I don’t much try any more.  Now The Wife tends to wait until there is a season or two on DVD and we watch them when there is nothing on TV but sports or election coverage.

Monk had a great cast, great stories, and great music by Randy Newman.  If your like me you missed it while it was on, you want to get a coupe of DVD and see what you missed.

Monk – Season Six

Get even more obsessed with TV’s funniest and quirkiest detective series, Monk, as every episode from the smash-hit sixth season comes to DVD on 4 discs! Tony Shalhoub reprises his 3-time Primetime Emmy® Award and Golden Globe-winning role as the brilliant but phobia-laden detective Adrian Monk, who never lets his obsessive-compulsive disorder stop him from solving a crime in the most ingenious way imaginable! Dropping the clues this season are a roster of red-hot guest stars including Alfred M

Rating: (out of 53 reviews)

List Price: $ 59.98

Price: $ 18.75

Our good old boy bartender Sam turns out to be more of a cold blooded killer and less of a poor misunderstood shapeshifter.  Sookie takes the time to torture an evil vampire and takes great pleasure in his suffering.  Lafayette seems to be a witch in the making and there is little chance of anything good coming of that.  Tara continues to suffer at the hands of the endless line of supernaturals who have taken an interest in her.

In short, the story has taken a definite turn to the dark side.  Yes, I know they are all monsters, but I have liked the general idea that they are trying to be nice monsters.  There is also something kind of silly about the idea of every manner of supernatural being in the known universe hanging out in the backwaters of Louisiana.

I still liked True Blood season 3.  There are so many characters and so much stuff going on.  The plot runs the gamut from redneck shapeshifters to Mexican witchcraft to Eric’s holding a grudge for a couple of thousand years.  It was fun.

Part of the shows charm is that we get to hear the Conchords sing their latest terrible song. My favorite Conchord song is The Humans Are Dead. It’s a short little ditty about how robots took over the world in the 1990s. You’d never guess this video was shot with no budget and a cell phone.

In Season 1 of The Colony the producers really stacked the deck in favor of the volunteers-image Gillian’s Island with seven Professors and no Gilliagans.   Season 1 had a handy man who could fix anything, a scientist who could whip up a Tesla coil out of old junk, a doctor, an RN, a rocket scientist, and so on and so forth.  In short order they were cleaning water with first charcoal and then an Ozoneator.  They generated electricity by creating Wood Fuel in a Gasifier and then by using Solar Panels.  They made a radio transmitter and receiver without breaking a sweat.  They were as far from a group of random survivors as you could possibly get.

Season 2 of The Colony is a little more real world.  If anything, they have gone too far the other way and put nothing but Gilliagans on the island this time.  The setting is also a lot less conducive to turning a coupe of coconut shells into a nuclear reactor-instead a shop filled with usable materials, the Volunteers are in a crappy neighborhood and have so far found nothing but an old tractor and a truckload of rotting pig carcasses.  If this were the real world, these Volunteers would be toast in short order, whereas the first group would be busy taking over the world.

The Colony is fun to watch, but it does bring home the fact that most of us would not be in any position to keep ourselves alive, let alone rebuild the world.

I like American Pickers and I have to admire the chutzpah of these two saps as they bang on doors and hand out their want list.  I have yet to see them hit a big score from knocking on random doors.  The main action happens when they spot a pile of rusty junk in someone’s yard and ask if they can dig around in it.

Antique pickers Frank Fritz and Mike Wolfe find antique hoarders everywhere they go. There is a kind of Antiques Roadshow feel to their interactions with the owners as they try to one up each other on what the odd items are and what they are worth.  As each show ends we see how the pickers have done with their buys.  I was surprised that they are making so little on their finds, many times the profit is only $20 or $30 dollars, though they do hit bigger profits as well. But then, making small, fast profits is what antique picking is all about.

I’m a bit surprised that anyone still does picking, as its easy enough to go straight to the source and sell directly online.  Pickers have traditionally sold their items for a lot less than retail, so they usually pay next to nothing for them in the first place.  But that is true of most antique dealers, buy low and sell is not just for stocks.

American Pickers is fun and a little informative, though the odds of your finding any of the items these two find on a regular basis are pretty slim.

The normal formula is that Dexter runs across another serial killer and somehow becomes involved with him, as brother, mentor, or student. I think Harrison is a little young to take up the family trade, but who knows? Baby serial killer? Maggie did try to kill Mr Burns, you know.

Dexter is a great show and Season 5 looks to as good as all the rest. Julia Stiles will guest star in 10 episodes as a new woman in Dexter’s life. Shawn Hatosy will appear in a multiple episode arc as a “bad guy”. Maria Doyle Kennedy will also join the cast of Dexter in Season 5 as an Irish nanny. April Lee Hernandez has been called for a recurring role as a police officer. Jonny Lee Miller has been added to the cast, and will have something to do with Julia Stiles’ character. Also Peter Weller will join the cast and he will be playing “a troubled Miami Metro police officer who gets caught up in an internal affairs investigation.”

So Dexter carries on as best as he can. I look forward to seeing how he handles it all.

The new season opens up with a collection of Previously on Eureka clips, the most interesting one being a small clip of Jack and Tess breaking up via hologram-this scene is interesting because it was never aired, never put in webisode, and never shown to the public in any form or fashion.  The general consensus is that the actress who plays Tess got a much better job on Eastwick, but then that show was canceled so she went back to Eureka.  This doesn’t explain why Syfy decided to blindside fans of the show and leave us stumbling along and searching the internet for a missing episode.

As the season opener rolls along it make a little more sense, we are assaulted on every side by new faces, new characters, and an alternate timeline where nothing makes any sense anyway.  The hardest part for me to deal with was Baltar’s tough guy mafioso accent and his constantly calling the Sheriff ‘Sport.’

I’ll admit that the standard formula for Eureka can be a bit predicable, but there’s nothing wrong with that.  Perry Mason was predictable, House is predictable, Three and Half Men is predictable-that doesn’t means it’s bad or unsuccessful.  Nothing annoys me more than great shows changing the entire formula of the show.  There is little danger of the new changes in Eureka being permanent. The great thing about Time Travel is that you can destroy the universe if you want to-so long as you still have the Tardis nearby, it can all be put back together again.  Also, the usual the Sheriff Saves the Town formula was used in the season premier.

I like Eureka and look forward to the new season, but I never liked the autistic kid in the first place and am not crazy about him being the linchpin of the story.  I would also like to see Stark return, since it seems his role in True Blood didn’t pan out very far.

One thing I did truly and completely hate in the season opener was the over use of really bad special effects ala Warehouse 13 and Sanctuary.  Just because you have all those damned green screens laying around doesn’t mean you have to use them on EVERY SHOT! Ok, other than that I’m glad to see the return of Eureka.

First Clown:

Hamlet:
This? [Takes the skull]

First Clown:
E’en that.

Hamlet:
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite
jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a
thousand times, and now how abhorr’d in my imagination it is!
My gorge rises at it.

PBS recently aired the BBC’s Hamlet-another one of those wonderfully anachronistic versions where everyone lives in an alternate reality where they dress much as we dress but talk much as Elizabethans talked.  The works of Shakespeare have been prone to these mashup productions for the past several years.  The fact that the original plays have been staged about a gazillion times means that even fans of The Bard might b tired of the same old thing.  The words remain the same, but the time, place, and costumes can be changed-these are often interesting productions.

David (Dr Who) Tennant and Patrick (Captain Picard) Stewart play Hamlet and Claudius without bringing to mind much of Dr Who or Captain Picard.  Of course, wearing a t-shirt and chewing up he scenery David Tennant doesn’t much bring to mind Hamlet either.  Still, it was an interesting bit of business.  High School was a while ago and I seldom sit and read Shakespeare as I once did.

Watching Hamlet is fun because it seems that every single line from this play has been taken and used elsewhere. It is hard to follow the story at times, as the individual lines all call so much attention to themselves.

This version of Hamlet is very stylized and near perfectly adapted to television.  The lighting and cropping of the shots are all filmic and often at odds with the exaggerated arm flailing and playing to the balcony demanded from a stage production.  It was still Hamlet and it was fun to see David Tennant and Patrick Stewart on the same stage.

So I am left to just watching, which is fine-who really wants to travel the world on someone else’s dime and get paid for it as well? Hmm, I think I could go to haunted houses or look for mythic animals-but then, I never watch those shows.

Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations is my favorite Travel Channel show. He makes it look easy. It seems like your really watching Tony wander around in a daze and listening to his snarky thoughts on everything he sees. It takes a special person to travel the world and bitch and moan about just about everything at the same time. Anthony Bourdain also does many of the things I like to think about, but never get around to doing Like writing books, traveling the world and drinking Absinthe.

The big news on the whole RSA front is that Craig is getting a Robot Skeleton sidekick-which should come little surprise to anyone who saw the anniversary episode that featured an all puppet cast. Gonna love Craig and the whole puppet thing. There is also that wonderful Myth Buster connection, I have always loved Myth Busters-though they have been scraping the bottom of the Myth barrel the past couple of years. But hey, who cares about the Myth as long they blow stuff up and blast Buster to a million little pieces.

The Dyson Vacuum is the one with the proper amount of suction, but being more of a Hoarder type myself, I haven’t owned a vacuum in a very long time. Of course, in Britain they call all vacuums Hoovers, so they would call a Dyson a Dyson Hoover. The mind still tends to wander, what is the proper amount of suction? A question for the ages and any number of Tiger Woods girlfriends.