It is of course, no surprise to anybody how totally our local Cable Company, Charter Communications, sucks ass. In the past couple of years, we’ve discussed the absolute lameness of their HD-DVR, how their regular DVR drove Kirk & Kassia away from TV completely, as well as the amazing difficulty their customers have getting their technicians to show up for scheduled appointments

So here’s the deal: since last Thursday, nearly all of my digital cable channels are out. No HBO, no BBC America or Sundance, no ESPN HD. For whatever reason, the HD versions of our six local channels, as well as all of the analog channels like Sci-Fi, are still coming in.

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How I Met Your Mother is one of the three funniest shows on TV right now, along with The Office and 30 Rock. However, because it’s on the normally sucky CBS, it gets very little love and very little attention, except when they do things like stuntcast Britney Spears.

Sigh. They don’t need Britney, not when they have great comic actors like Neil Patrick Harris,Cobie Smulders, Josh Radnor, Alyson Hannigan and the absolutely awesome Jason Segel.

For the uninitiated, the framing device of the show is simple: in the year 2030 (still no flying cars, sadly), this guy Ted is telling his kids the story of how he met their Mother. That’s it: nearly every episode starts with a shot of highly uninterested teenage kids staring in the camera while a voiceover starts the week’s episode with a “Kids, let me tell you …), before flashing back to the present with that week’s part of the story of how he met their Mother.

Seems simple enough, but within that framing device lurks misdirections, fast-forwards, flashbacks, Rashomon-like POV changes, and, so far, no concrete idea of who The Mother actually is. And oh yeah, lots and lots and lots of great jokes.

At its best, it is, in a word, awe–

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Bravo, Bravo! You have finally done it! You have taken one of the best websites ever to grace the internet, and in just a little over space of a year, you have turned it into a garishly unusable pile of synergy-laden shit.

Awesome!!

When you took over TWOP last year, I said I wasn’t worried. Well, you showed me. Turns out, I’m a fracking idiot. Who knew that when I professed my love for this site after it had been one of my top destinations for years that it would all end so . . . badly. Well, I guess you did, huh, Bravo?

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Kassia is fond of saying that around ‘Loper HQ, April Fools isn’t a day, it’s a season. However, this year, real life has gotten in the way, so in honor of that, I’ve decided to point out a few actual real things that are far more absurd than most of the jokes you’ll see today.

Let’s begin, shall we.

• Continuing Record Company Cluelessness About the 21st Century
  Last week, there was an article in Entertainment Weekly about the rush-release of the new Gnarls Barkley album. Apparently, the fact that it leaked online a few weeks early caught Atlantic records by surprise.

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Apparently, Lorne Michaels is worried that — because of a couple of cold opens spoofing the media’s kowtowing to Obama, Tina Fey’s funny but heartfelt “bitch is the new black” endorsement, and of course, an actual appearance by Mrs. Clinton her own self — people are perceiving Saturday Night Live as pro-Hillary.

This, naturally, brings up two related questions: 1) who still watches Saturday Night Live? 2) Are pro-Obama SNL viewers up in arms over the pro-Hillary bias?

My answers are: 1) me. 2) Not this one.

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About a year ago, after Bravo purchased Television Without Pity, I wrote a piece entitled Why I’m Not Worried About The TWoP Buyout. I figured that as long as they were able to keep their strong, independent editorial voice, they would do just fine, and remain one of my most favorite websites on the entire interwebs.

And for a year, everything seemed to be fine. Sure, I didn’t like the cosmetic upgrades — I miss the line drawings that accompanied the recaps — but that was more that outweighed by the expansion into sitcoms like The Office & 30 Rock, as well as the catch-up they were able to play with shows like The Wire.

But now I’m worried, because according to a blog posting on their site, the founders of Television Without Pity are leaving. Within the next week, as it turns out. That seems . . . quick.

This. Is. Not. Good.

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quarterlife, the much-hyped new series from the creators of such shows as thirtysomething, Once and Again and the eternal My So-Called Life, debuted a couple of nights ago to what some are calling “the worst ratings in 20 years.”

I don’t think that this was what NBC had in mind when they announced that they had picked it up from, er, MySpace amidst a busload of hype. Given the fact that it had a pretty high profile and was debuted during a time where there is very little serious drama being broadcast, their expectations must have been that it would at least hold its own.

And yet it failed, miserably. Why? The flip answer is that it sucked, but that’s only part of it. The full answer is a bit more complicated.

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ABC, which was hit a couple of weeks ago with a $1.4 million fine by the FCC, has decided to fight back.

The fine was imposed because of a scene in a 2003 episode of NYPD Blue that showed a woman’s buttocks and a bit of what the Celeb gossip sites all call “side boob.”

Just like NYPD Blue had been doing for 10 years. This time, however, it was different. I guess. And five years after the actual episode was broadcast — three years after NYPD Blue went off the air — the FCC came down with their oh-so-timely fine.

And the children, once again, are saved from the gruesome horrors of the naked female human body! Thank God. Or thank Wholly His Official Representatives on Earth, the children-loving, naked-woman hating Parents Television Council, who, as usual, decided to be offended so that the rest of us didn’t have to.

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I first heard about Mystery Science Theater 3000 from friends in ‘91 and thought it sounded interesting, but I didn’t have the wherewithal to track it down. Then one Friday night after closing the Video Zone my friend and coworker Mark and I were flipping through channels, as was the custom in those days. we came across a b&w monster movie with silhouetted chairs and figures along the bottom of the screen. I said: “Is this what I think it is?” The movie was Gamera, and while it was never my favorite episode of MST3K, it will always be the one closest to my heart. You never forget your first. I was immediately a fan, and I taped every episode.

The show was canceled in 1999 after a decade, and I figured that was that. It saddened me, of course, especially because I held the heretical belief that the show hit its stride when it moved to the Sci-Fi channel in 1997. I always preferred Mike Nelson to Joel Hodgson, I liked the new direction Bill Corbett took Crow, I found Pearl and Professor Bobo and Brain Guy a lot funnier than Dr. Forrester and TV’s Frank, and…yeah. As I say, heretical.

Still, there’s a lot to be said for quitting while you’re ahead. Or, as the case may be, being abandoned by your network while you’re ahead. Besides, I still had several hundred hours of MST3K on tape should I ever need a fix, many of which I hadn’t watched since the waning days of Bush 41’s administration, so they wouldn’t feel stale. It’s not like I remember any of the jokes from Crash of the Moons or Tormented, though I do know Manos, The Hands of Fate and Mitchell by heart at this point, and woe to anyone dating me who thinks they won’t be subjected to Hobgoblins.

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The headlines, of course, are breathless: HBO Goes Online,
It’s not TV, it’s HBO — on your computer, It’s Not the Web, It’s HBO, so when I first saw them, I thought, cool.

Actually, here is what I thought: finally, I’m going to be able to re-watch the full run of The Larry Sanders Show! On my own schedule!

But then I read what HBO on Broadband is actually going to be . . .

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