August has failed to live up to the hype (so far)

Before you start wondering if I've lost my mind, let me just point out that this particular August was supposed to be action-packed: the Olympics, the DNC, and every tense point in between.

What have we gotten instead? An Olympic games that is like a suburban housewife smiling on the outside waiting for her Percoset to kick in, an almost surreal conflict between Russia & Georgia that is playing out as if it's 1966, and the presidential candidates are sniping at each other like two drag queens giving each other shade--because really there is seemingly little policy difference between the two.*

* That being said, all those "Gore & Bush are the same" people from back in 2000 should eat their words, given what has transpired over the past 8 years.

Times were that even in the slow month of August, there would at least be a new season to look forward to. Fox used to roll out its shows starting in August, but not this year--unless you consider the return of the very suspicious Moment of Truth notable.

The new season--which I'll get into as it gets closer (mid-September! You lazy network bastards had extra time plus a political convention bump--which means people will definitely want non-political programming--and most of you programming execs aren't rolling out shows until mid-September!)--is relatively lacklustre, in my opinion. The only new show that I'm interested in is Kath & Kim (because it will be a car crash, even with extremely talented leads, since NBC has a near perfect record with screwing up adaptations when they should actually just let the writers and performers DO THEIR JOBS) .

Oddly enough, the only new appointment television I've found are the old UPN sitcoms now in reruns. I had studiously avoided All of Us during its original run mostly because I despise Will Smith and suspected that it would be another one of those "moral of the week" shows, and have found that surprisingly it isn't. It's flawed, and I can see why it's cancelled, but it really isn't half bad. As for Half & Half, I didn't even know it was on. (Did anyone know what was on UPN beyond America's Next Top Model & Everybody Hates Chris? And this was UPN's 4th most popular show!) Again, it turned out not to be a "moral of the week" show, and despite some journeys into hack joke land, it showed a lot of potential. Plus there's the added bonus of seeing which old black star from the late 1970s/early 1980s will turn up in any given episode.

Yet to end on a lighter note, it is probably good to have a quiet month to garner up strength before the chaos that is September/October/November/December (four months which seem to fly by in a nanosecond).