What I'm watching

(I wrote another post yesterday, but it's still travelling the long path between Youtube and Blogger.)

New television season (to the extent television still runs in seasons) + two elections = Ryan spending a lot more time than usual in front of the television.

This begets the question - what is on that television screen when I'm in front of it.

When it comes to regular prime-time TV shows, the only new entry is Billable Hours, a dark comedy set it a Toronto law firm. I discovered it by accident this summer, and am anxiously awaiting the new season. I'll also be watching (when I remember they're on), returning shows The Office, Scrubs, and Corner Gas (which unfortunately seems to run against Billable Hours).

I haven't heard of any new shows that strike my fancy this year, but maybe that'll change.

The rest of my watching (minus Kitchener Ranger games) is somehow related to the news/political sphere. TVO's The Agenda is a great show that I seem to remember I was convinced to watch by a professor last year. Each night from Monday to Friday, Steve Paikin spends a commercial-free hour (it is TVO, after all), talking to a panel of experts about...well, almost anything. Just looking at the most recent and upcoming show topics, we've got shows on fatherhood, left-wing Canadian politics, hip hop and young black culture, and the Arctic. Past subjects have ranged from conspiracy theories to the influence of Bobby Orr on the sport of hockey.

I've also been watching CTV National News (with Lloyd Robertson and a SNAZZY REVAMPED GRAPHICS PACKAGE~!) every night, because I have to for a class assignment. Since I also try to watch The National once in a while, I've found myself watching two national newscasts some nights. It's actually quite startling to see the media bias at work - it's not overt like FOX News in the US, but CBC makes a much bigger deal out of any bad news for the Conservative party, while CTV downplays it as much as possible. (Trying not to pick sides, but it *seems* like CBC does the better job as far as getting the whole story.)

Although I'll be watching the debates (first one tonight), I refuse to watch American coverage of the American election. The true news outlets seem more focused on issues that don't really mean anything, leaving any true analysis to the likes of Jon Stewart and David Letterman.

On a semi-related note, American political hosts and pundits seem to all be cut from the same cloth. Canadians, on the other hand, have people like Mike Duffy (appearance-wise, the exact antithesis of what you'd put on television), Craig Oliver (not quite as bad, but legally blind), and Steve Paikin (a young, eager type who looks like what I imagine Alex Trebek did when he was young, working in Canada, and not a robot). Plus we have a wide array of people like Chantal Hebert and Jean Pelletier, who you would never see on American networks simply because of their accents. Kind of nice that Canadian television can still put things like looks and voices aside when intelligence is present.

--Ryan