What I’m Watching Tonight…

Veronica Mars. this season has been a little lacklustre, I reckon it’s because of the removal of the season long mystery in favour of two (or three?) arcs. but tonight we will find out who killed the dean. The program then goes off the air for a while, to be replaced by a reality show to find the next Pussycat Doll. Is there room for one more, did one of them die or something? Anywho, maybe I will watch Dirt, if I can find it anywhere, but there isn’t much else out there in the torrentsphere. I wonder what’s on normal TV…

Oh yes, and Friday Night Lights. Here is the deal. You watch it. you come back here and proclaim me as your TV leader. We never speak of this again.

Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe S03E04

I am a big fan of Screenwipe, have been ever since the first episode. Imagine my surprise when, over the end credits of the fourth episode, the announcer says that it was the last episode in the series, and Screenwipe will return later in the year. What is it with this country and it’s television practices. If it’s comedy, the writer can only write six a year. If it’s drama, the writer can only write two episodes, and they are essentially the same story chopped in two, and they have to air over consecutive nights. However If it is a soap continuing drama, writers can knock up between 250-300 episodes a year, without a break.

Bittorrent Entertainment Network

On Monday, Bittorrent inc attempted to go legit. The company launched the “Bittorrent Entertainment Network” a service with a number of movies and TV shows available for download, at a cost. That’s right, imagine using Bittorrent and paying money for the privilege.

Now anyone that uses Bittorrent is probably a downloader of some sort of illegally copyright material, be it albums, TV shows or movies. I know there are lots of other things to download, but these seem to be the main three that take up all that bandwidth. In fact, I have read (and it is probably speculation) that Bittorrent is now the most used application on the Internet, surpassing both email and surfing of the Worldwide webski. Maybe not in terms of numbers, but I can certainly see it being the case in terms of bandwidth.

The Black Donnellys S01E01 – Pilot

With Scorsese riding high on the critical acclaim of his Irish mob movie, The Departed, NBC were lucky to be able to launch The Black Donnellys a day after The Oscars, a gritty drama about an Irish family who are on their way to becoming the mob. Starting after last night’s episode of Heroes, with many people probably still passed out from the quality of that episode, this show had it’s work cut out to wake people up and make them pay attention.

Heroes S01E17 – Company Man

I started off watching it from way back in my not-so-comfy chair, but by the end I was close enough to the TV to make myself blind in later life. You may know I like making bold statements, but this episode of Heroes was as good an hour of Drama as the last hour of Season 1 of 24, or Locke’s second episode in Season 1 of Lost, Deus Ex Machina.

Virgin v Sky

Over the last 72 hours the war has become very nasty. Late on Friday, Virgin announced that Sky’s basic channels (Sky One, Sky Two, Sky Three, Sky Travel, Sky Sports News) would be removed from their cable platform on Wednesday Night. This, tey say, is due to Sky’s unrealistic demands over what they feel these channels are worth.

Friday Night Lights ratings horror

The premiere of Friday Night Lights fell way below even the lowest of expectations. According to Media Guardian, the show was watched by just 26,000 people on ITV4 Wed night. I know more people than that. The abysmal figure can be attributed to live football (or Soccer as Americans like to call it) on Sky Sports, a great game between Barcelona and Liverpool, taking away what would be the core audience of the show. Which begs the question, why was it scheduled at that time in the first place? ITV know that the Champions League will have people hooked from now until May, why did they schedule a sports drama against sport? Do they like to waste money? Apparently so.

I was thinking that a couple more weeks of those kind of figures, and it would be moved to some graveyard slot to die. But ITV4 is a graveyard channel, how much worse can it get? If you haven’t watched it, do so. I promise you won’t regret it. Do I have shares in NBC Universal? Maybe.