TV Show Meme! Day 3!

Day 03 - Your favorite new show (aired this TV season)

Well, I haven't watched any TV shows that premiered in 2010 so far. Shows I am looking forward to watching, though, are:

Pretty Little Liars -- I am interested in this mostly because it is a show about a group of friends who are all female, and the commercials for it don't have any boys at all except one cop. That is extremely attractive to me in this climate of YA romance, male-focused shows, and how sometimes even shows with more than one female lead don't pass the Bechdel test! (Women's Murder Club, I am looking at you.)

Now, please don't assume I have anything against shows that star men or are about men or have men in them. I enjoy my fair share of Psych, White Collar, Better Off Ted, Supernatural... and, you know, 95% of what's on TV. Sometimes I just want to watch something that has women in it, in which they talk about something that is not a man.

(Recently I have been getting my fix by watching old episodes of Cagney & Lacey streaming from Netflix. Wow, you guys. Wow.)

Back to the show: I want to say that I've never read Pretty Little Liars by Sara Shepard, on which the show is based, but I actually think I have. I just don't remember much of it. That's okay, though, since I am sure the show will end up being very different.

It's already premiered -- the third episode airs tonight -- but I haven't watched it yet. You can stream the first two episodes at the official website or at Hulu, or watch the reruns on the ABC Family channel.

(If you want to know more about the actual show and don't mind spoilers, zvi has done a short write-up about the characters.)


...The other show I am looking forward to watching that's new this season is Rizzoli & Isles. Based on Tess Gerritsen's bestselling books about ME Isles and Det. Rizzoli, it's basically about two women who solve crime and have complicated inner/personal lives. I am hoping that the show sticks pretty closely to the books -- the women in the books are pretty amazing, imperfect, flawed, interesting, and strong in the way normal women are in real life -- not superwomen. The plots of the books are okay (a little predictable, but I don't necessarily mind that), and I'm hoping the show sticks to the type of case Tess Gerritsen writes about -- the complicated ones that are sometimes horrifying in their banality.

I am particularly worried that this is going to end up another Women's Murder Club, to be honest, which was a show that starred women, but was really about the men in their lives. If they talked about something that wasn't a man, it was usually... a dead woman.

I remember watching the first episode of WMC and being so incredibly offended and horrified that in the first, I don't know, ten minutes of the show, the female leads stood around in front of a woman who had been killed in a totally brutal, awful way, and discussed their boring personal lives! And then examined the body and spent a lot of time talking about the dead woman's waxed genitalia. I just. Ugh. Not my style, not what I want.

I guess what I am hoping is that Rizzoli & Isles will be more like Cagney & Lacey. I do like the two actresses playing the leads (Angie Harmon and Sasha Alexander), and Lea Thompson (!) and Lorraine Bracco (!!) play secondary characters, and the writer of the first episode is Janet Tamaro, who wrote one of my favorite episodes of Bones ("The Aliens in the Spaceship" -- about the two boys who are buried alive, and then Brennan and Hodgins are buried alive too!).

Rizzoli & Isles premieres Monday, July 12th, at 10 PM on TNT. Fingers crossed!!



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