TV Watch: Searching for bright spots in this cataclysmically awful TV season

Even though, or perhsps because, the comic-book store has descended into ghostly solitude, Stuart (Kevin Sussman) has amply rewarded the increased attention of The Big Bang Theory's producers -- and the other "supporting" characters are coming up aces too.

by Ken

I haven't been doing much "TV Watch"-ing lately, which might be because I haven't been doing much TV watching, but anyone who knows me knows that that's a laugh. Especially with two shiny new TVs, I've probably never watched more TV in my life. It's just that less and less of it is, you know, TV. At least not current stuff, because the pile-up of DVDs I have been watching has been mostly former TV. And while it's true that once you have the history of the medium to draw on, the odds are better that you'll find something worth watching than if you limit it to, say, the current season, to pick a random example.

I think it was the last time I wrote on the subject that registered my horror at the current season, which strikes me as historically, no epochally ghastly. Completely unaffected are the returning champs: The Good Wife, The Big Bang Theory, and Modern Family -- and I'd have to say that The Middle is having a pretty good season, finding some new interest in the Heck family as the kids get older. I'll be curious to see how Suburgatory looks when it returns this week.

I go back and forth about this final season of How I Met Your Mother, which sometimes this season has seemed to me inspired and at other times has seemed stuck in some of the grooves it's been falling into in the last couple of seasons; but heck, we can nurse it through that one last season, can't we? I've kept watching Two and a Half Men and 2 Broke Girls out of habit, but they're habits that are looking easier to break. I've just about had it with Blue Bloods. When I had to reprogram my DVR for HD telecasts I thought long and hard about these.

I've tried to get myself interested in NBC's Parenthood on the strength of the pedigree of creator-producer Jason Katims, by which I mean Friday Night Lights, as well as an appealing cast, notably Peter Krause -- when I have I not enjoyed a show that he's done? I'm not bowled over, but I'm getting to know the family, and I can actually look forward to each new episode. At some point I guess I'll even go back and catch up on the seasons I've missed.

I can go through the list of new shows I'm watching more quickly. There, want to see me go throught he list again? Almost uniformly my response to the new shows I've watched has been, "They're not serious, are they?"

The cable pickings aren't much better. I've been watching this season of White Collar, and even missed it during the weeks it took off for the holidays -- maybe because that's when I got around to watching a batch of episodes that had accumulated on the DVR. I got through this season of Tremé the same way; in each hour episode there's about 10 minutes' of program that deals with characters and is actually interesting.

Otherwise, to say something positive, I have to go back to one of those class returning shows I mentioned up above. In fact, they've all done a bunch of shows this season worth talking about. But the one that's lodged in my head at the moment is this week's Big Bang Theory, which shows what you can do when you've established a really solid roster of characters, because this episode's most wonderful segements were given over to what are usually thought of as "secondary" characters. Oh, I thought the plot line of Penny gathering the courage to quit her job at the Cheesecake Factory to really once and for all give her all to breaking through in her acting career -- I thought that was fine, with the fine counterpoint of Leonard's constitutional difficulty in supporting such daredevil behavior.

But the real fun was:

* Amy awaking to the discovery that she has a suitor, even if he's considerably less satisfactory boyfriend material than Sheldon. All the same, we got more sense of her own frustration with the situation than we've had before. Come on, simply as a living, breathing human being she deserves better.

* Amy's deft handling of aspersions cast on Sheldon's pathetically obvious, er, limitations as a boyfriend, notably by Raj, by snapping back questions about his love life. Bull's-eye!

* And then there's poor Stuart, who has amply rewarded the producers' upgrading of his status on the show with ever more endearing hopelessness. His comic-book store can be barely be qualified as a "business" anymore if by "business" we understand an enterprise that customers. This week's plot have us a chance to see Stuart accompany Bernadette to a hated rival's store in search of a comic book she needs for Howard -- a store that turns out to be an oasis of happily swarming customers fueled on latte and scones and free popcorn. I don't know how much longer Stuart's desperation can continue to be amusing, but for now he remains a character that this viewer at least can care about and continue to love watching.

Which is more than I can say about virtually the whole of this season's broadcast and cable schedules.

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