TV Fatigue

You may recall that back in September I did a fall TV season preview. At the time I talked about a couple of promising new sci-fi shows on ABC, FlashForward and V. FlashForward has been on for about six weeks now, and V premieres tonight. So this is the point I should be telling you how good FlashForward is, and that you should plan to watch V because it's also really good. But I'm not going to do either.

I recorded the first five episodes of FlashForward before I ever watched a minute of it; it was only because the Mrs. was working on a sewing project one night last week that I found myself in front of the TV alone and decided to finally check out the pilot (she'd made it clear she wasn't interested in the show). After watching it, I went back and forth for days about whether or not I wanted to keep going with it, and yesterday I decided to delete the unwatched episodes and cancel the season pass from the TiVo.

Which is not to say it isn't any good. I have heard that some critics, after seeing a few episodes, don't think it's living up to the promise of its pilot, but I really didn't get far enough into it to form an opinion either way. Right now I just don't feel up to the task of keeping up with another show every week, and I figured it was better to cut the cord before getting any deeper into the show's overarching mysteries.

Normally I will give a new show at least four or five episodes before deciding whether or not I consider it a keeper, and that may continue to be the case with future shows, but at this moment I just can't muster the energy to care about FlashForward. If any of you are watching it, I'd love to hear what you think.

The reviews for V that I've read have generally been quite favorable; if anything, it sounds like a better show than FlashForward, but again, I'm not sure that's enough to draw me in. The mitigating factor here is that, if I decide not to watch it and later change my mind, I can catch up online.

The bottom line is that I believe it's only possible to handle regular watching of a certain number of shows at a time. Even someone like me who loves TV has to have a limit, and I find that there is always one show that settles to the bottom of the TiVo queue that we end up having to catch up on later. We are watching two new shows this fall, but both are comedies: Modern Family on ABC and Community on NBC. Sitcoms are much easier to digest, because you can watch one in 20 minutes if you skip the commercials.

Elsewhere in TV land, if you're a fan of the CSI franchise, you probably already know about the three-part crossover coming up next week. If you're like me and only watch the Thursday show (which I like to refer to as "CSI: Original Recipe"), you'll probably want to be home on Monday and Wednesday nights for the Miami and New York editions of the show, or set your recording device, because the case is going to carry across all three shows next week, and Laurence Fishburne's Ray Langston is going to appear in all of them. At least the producers and writers had the decency to structure the story so that it starts on Monday and concludes on Thursday.