Giving up

There's been barely anything new worth watching in the fall TV season, but there are still a lot of good returning shows, and my viewing schedule has been pretty full. Hence, a few shows have had to fall by the wayside, starting with Heroes, which was consistently dismal all through its second season. I actually have all of this year's episodes of Heroes still sitting on my DVR, but I seem to always have something better to do than watch them. As always, I like the idea of Heroes: a show thoroughly informed by comic-book superhero storytelling, and bringing those conventions to TV with a twist. The problem has been that there isn't much of a twist, that the show just repeats stale superhero-comics tropes with a somber tone and no colorful costumes. Everything I've read about this new season or heard from acquaintances who are still watching indicates to me that it's the same dull repetition and super-seriousness that made last year such a slog, so I'll probably just end up deleting those episodes unseen pretty soon.

I did make an effort to get into The CW's new version of 90210, since I have a weakness for soapy teen dramas, and I did watch the original for many years when I was in middle school and high school. But it's pretty abysmal and just as hokey and cheesy as the old series, and when it became clear that the nostalgia factor wasn't strong enough to keep me around (Shannen Doherty only appeared in a handful of episodes, and Jennie Garth doesn't seem to have anywhere to go with her character), I dropped it. None of the new characters came close to holding my interest, and I get my teen-soap fix much, much more satisfyingly on the still-excellent Gossip Girl.

I've also given up on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which I watched during its first season primarily because the writers' strike meant there wasn't much else on TV to watch. But it was always pretty mediocre, and the longer it went on the more apparent it became that the writers would need to keep throwing in new contrivances just to postpone Judgment Day and keep the Connors on the run. You know they're never going to quite defeat Skynet, nor are they ever going to be captured by the Terminators, so the entire show is like one protracted chase scene, and I got tired of it. Since I stopped watching, there's apparently been a whole episode devoted to the history of Cameron the Terminator, which I would have liked to see, but otherwise I don't get the sense that this is going anywhere interesting. I sort of wish they'd just let the Terminator mythology and legacy alone, but even if this show gets canceled (and its ratings have been steadily dropping), there's still that fourth movie in production.