It’s the most wonderful time of the year… ;)
TV TV TV! The new fall season has begun! Hooray!
September is like Christmas in my house, or actually, maybe it’s more like Hanukkah, where you get a new present each day…or actually, maybe it’s most like getting married, where exciting presents haphazardly show up at your house every now and then — sometimes none for days and then sometimes four at once — and you kind of know what they are before you open them, but it’s not until you get inside the box that you discover whether it actually goes with your new shower curtain. (In the case of our towels: they do! perfectly! yay! In the case of Gossip Girl…the jury’s still out).
Except, of course, I don’t have TIME to watch all the exciting new fall shows, because I have books to finish and a wedding to plan! Seriously, how did I not think about this when I chose my wedding date? I mean, really, what’s more important: fall foliage for the background of the photos, or having to abandon my DVR during the busiest two weeks of its year? It’s going to have such a meltdown while we’re in Thailand. I think instead of a petsitter I might have to get a DVR-sitter. “Just go in and talk to it for a while, give it some affection, maybe make fun of Prison Break or The 4400 so it feels like we’re right there with it.”
But if I did have time to devote to this all-important decision-making process, here are the shows I’d be watching (and hopefully will be watching after we get back, if they haven’t been eaten by the DVR in a fit of self-pitying loneliness):
(1) Pushing Daisies: This piemaker can bring dead people (and fruit?) back to life with one touch — and then send them back to death by touching them again. So, of course, he solves crimes and makes pies, in a whimsical fairy tale funny sort of way. The critics all adore it MADLY; almost all of my favorite critics have picked this as their #1 new favorite show. Plus it’s by the creator of Wonderfalls and Dead Like Me, and it’s got adorable people like Kristen Chenoweth and Lee Pace in it, so I would totally be there no matter what.
(2) Chuck: He’s a geek AND a secret agent! I’m not entirely sure how this is different from Jake 2.0, which was also about an ordinary geek suddenly knowing all kinds of secret agent things, but that show was adorable, and THIS show has Adam Baldwin in it! Yes, Jayne from Firefly! And he gets to be funny again! Hooray! Awesometastic!
(3) Reaper: Yet a third show about an ordinary-seeming guy with odd quasi-supernatural powers and/or a mission; this one’s about a slacker who finds out on his 21st birthday that his parents sold his soul to the devil, and now he has to work as a bounty hunter tracking down escaped souls from hell. MY GOODNESS. So, instant points for originality, plus a few more for great casting.
(4) Gossip Girl: Scandal + teenagers + NYC (for reals! I recognized most of those location shots!) = inherently fabulous. I’d read the first book, so the first episode was a little unsurprising, but hopefully it’ll get more exciting from here on.
(5) Moonlight: OK, I don’t hear wonderful things about this, but I must clearly at least try watching it anyway because (a) vampires, and (b) most importantly, Jason Dohring (aka Logan from Veronica Mars!) is in it WOO HOO! and any show that puts him back on my TV that quickly deserves a chance, methinks.
I’ll also be swinging by Journeyman (is it Quantum Leap? or The Time-Traveler’s Wife?), Bionic Woman (Starbuck! yahoo!), and Kid Nation (because wow, seriously, these kids are hilarious and fascinating and great, and this is the craziest show ever; I have no idea what I think about it yet, except that you cannot make up characters like this – they’re just so individual and amazing and in some cases fascinatingly odd).
Which is not so many new shows, really, considering that I lost Gilmore Girls, Veronica Mars (sob!), Standoff, and Studio 60 after last season, and I’m sure half of these will be cancelled, as usual (6 of the 12 shows I was interested in last year vanished pretty quickly).
But of course many of our beloved old shows are coming back, too, so we also have to keep up with those. Hmmm. I wonder if any of the Thai hotels will be showing Dancing with the Stars…
By the way, I might not be able to do a new blog between now and the wedding (ack less than two weeks ACK!), but I will try to update the front page with the Avatars 2 cover and some other new books, so look for that! And eventually I will be back and much much calmer with pictures to post of all the wedding things I’m most super-excited about, including my beautiful dress, our ridiculously thrilling centerpieces (yay Mom!), our splendiferous chuppah, our splendiferous cake, elephants, tuk-tuks, Cambodian temples, and of course, the most exciting part of all, my dashing tuxedo-clad husband. 
Quote of the Day: Spice Girl Mel B, on meeting her partner Maks for the first time: “Oh, good, you’re hard and in love with yourself and cocky!”
— Dancing with the Stars 