It snowed quite a bit today, and now I guess it’s sleeting or something? Who knows. The weather forecast keeps going weird, but altogether I don’t think it’s been as bad as it was made out to be. I took some snow pictures earlier, but they were all pretty lame, so I’m not even bothering to upload them.
I got the one sock finished that I wanted to get done (yay!) and also finished weaving another scarf.
So, I’ll be starting on the hat next and hopefully get the loom warped again tomorrow to do scarf #3.
I do have two pieces of news regarding TV. First off, as you may know, the Writer’s Guild has been on strike for a while now. Scripted shows, including the late night talk shows, have stopped producing new episodes, and the networks are getting set to roll out new winter shows, consisting primarily of competitive reality crap and new shows that weren’t good enough to be picked up during the fall season, but had some shows already filmed and sitting around, ready to be shown. The two good pieces I had heard before today is that there are some episodes of Jericho (yay for apocalyptic cheese!) and 8 episodes of Lost ready to be shown. So, that’s some small thing to look forward to.
As the strike continues, I’ll probably be watching more shows on BBC America, including season 2 of Life on Mars, which just started last week., and Top Gear, which I watched for the first time last week and was pretty damn fun. But the main event is the debut of season 2 of Torchwood, which begins January 26th, I think, on BBC America. The neat thing about this is that season 2 of Torchwood debuts in England only about 10 days earlier, so US audiences will only be a little bit behind the UK audiences, instead of having to wait a year or more to see it.
Torchwood is a Doctor Who spin-off, in case you didn’t know, and features the wonderful Captain Jack Harkness, who is omnisexual and also can’t die. There is a *lot* of Captain Jack love in this house. But too be honest, I actually thought season 1 of Torchwood was pretty much a hot mess, as Tim Gunn might say. I think they were trying too hard to make Torchwood an adult Doctor Who, but it seems like their interpretation of “adult” was all of the main characters having sex with just about everyone, except for Captain Jack. I understand that Jack has to be more hard and bitter than he was in Doctor Who, but did they have to make his character almost entirely joyless? And did he get to shag anyone last season at all? Poor Jack.
What’s encouraging is that the makers of Torchwood seem to have realized that things went horribly wrong during season 1, and apparently have worked to address a lot of the issues. I’ve read a few early reviews of the first new episode, and they’ve all been really positive, which was a bit of a shock. I think one even said that the first episode was one of the best hours of TV ever featured in any series of the Who-verse. So here’s to being able to watch Torchwood that’s actually a good show!
Getting back to the Stateside in TV news, I read something tonight which, if proven to be true, would be awesome regarding the writer’s strike. Apparently David Letterman’s production company, Worldwide Pants, is rumored to have started separate negotiations with the Writer’s Guild. To date, the AMPTP has been negotiating en masse, and the Writer’s Guild is going to try a new tactic of divide and conquer, trying to convince smaller companies to be reasonable instead of dealing with all production companies at once. Letterman’s in a good position because his show is actually owned by himself, instead of being owned by the networks. Also, Letterman happens to be an all around decent guy (and, he’s a graduate of Ball State, just like me! It’s not often that you hear about someone from Ball State being a success!).
Anyway, here’s the post on Deadline Hollywood that goes into what’s going on with the WGA and Worldwide Pants. I really hope that they can work out a working agreement, because it’ll be nice to have something interesting to watch at night, especially since the Daily Show and Colbert are off the air (and man have they been missed in this primary season). What I’m looking forward to most is having Letterman go back on the air and be able to just rip the networks for the crap they’re pulling with the writers. I can almost smell the snark already.
So, two happy pieces of TV news for you – potential Letterman return without screwing the Writers Guild and potentially good Torchwood. It’s more than I could have hoped for!