TV, part two

To continue from yesterday's post on TV -- I watch a lot of late night TV as I get home from work at about 1am. Since I don't have cable, I'm stuck with free-to-air TV, which at that time of the night, are mostly reruns of drama series and reality shows, several seasons behind.

Which is not a bad thing. Because I work nights, I never got to watch them when they were aired "fresh" on prime time. And the great thing is that you don't have to wait a week for the next episode, they broadcast the whole series nightly at the same time slot and and when that runs out, move on to another series.

From 1am to 2am daily on weeknights, I've finally caught up with CSI, CSI Miami and now, am on to Las Vegas (the second season). The 2am to 3am slot was taken up by The Apprentice (the second season, the one that was won by Kelly, the West Pointer) until that recently ended and it's now showing Gray's Anatomy.

I've watched most of the CSI, Las Vegas, The Apprentice and Gray's Anatomy episodes when they were first aired on prime time, this was from when I worked 9am to 5pm for a brief five months two years ago -- so that's how behind these reruns are.

I don't care much for Las Vegas (the series and the town) but I enjoy watching it because it brings to mind the great holiday I had in Vegas when T got married and the Dogtalkers met up. And it's kinda boggling to see that casino hosts apparently never wear the same dress to work more than once.

From 3am to 5am, we get two talk shows: The Ellen Degeneres Show, followed by The Tyra Banks Show. Ellen's funny and witty and a warm and wonderful talk show host, plus her DJ plays some good music, but Tyra should have stuck to modelling and kept her mouth shut because nothing interesting comes out of it. Her function as host seems to be solely reliant on empathy. But that only gets you so far and it makes her eyebrows look very overworked. We used to get Oprah. Bring her back, I say.

Afternoon TV is just as interesting. I catch about an hour before I leave for work and managed to watch a season of Joan of Arcadia, until it ended and now it's on to Remington Steele. It's kinda fun watching a retro series like that. We all know Pierce Brosnan went on to become James Bond but whatever happened to Stephanie Zimbalist? Poor woman, elbowed aside by Mr Steele once again.

Joan of Arcadia caught my attention when it was first screened because it had an interesting premise -- God appearing to a teenager in the form of ordinary people around her. It was first shown on Saturday afternoons and I missed most of it because I was either bathing dogs or grocery shopping at that time. The opening credits flash still pictures of Bob Dylan, Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama to theme song, Joan Osbourne's What If God Was One of Us (I wonder what happened to her, she had that one great hit and then seemingly disappeared) and I guess it's left to you to infer what you will of the association. Interesting that other than the Dalai Lama, there's no other picture of a religious leader. The Pope must be sore that he wasn't considered godlike enough. And no Beatle either, despite being more famous than Jesus.