Okay, it’s Wednesday, so here we go with the CBS upfronts and fall schedule. As usual, look to Zap2it and TV Squad for more in-depth coverage.

The Amazing Race is of course the news I’m looking at here. The All-Stars season didn’t completely kill the show, but it didn’t do it any favors either. The Amazing Race has been renewed, so it will be coming back for a 12th season, but for the first time in years it’s not on the fall schedule. Instead it’s being held back for the dreaded “midseason”, which could mean that CBS is losing faith in our little Race. Or it could mean that they’re just holding it back until the inevitable happens and one of the new fall shows gets cancelled, then they’re be able to drop TAR right into the waiting slot. Whatever. At least it’s coming back, but not in September.

How I Met Your Mother is back. It was kind of a close call, since that was a bubble show right until the last minute. It’s the best laugh-track sitcom out there, though, so it’s good to see they’re keeping it around.

Jericho and The Class are cancelled. We stopped watching Jericho long ago, but my wife will be sad to hear about The Class.

And of course Survivor is back, this time at a lake in China.

Out of the new shows, only Moonlight stands out. A vampire private investigator? Hmmm, that sounds familiar for some reason. It might be worth a look. But Jimmy Smits as a sugar cane patriarch? Kids forming a new society in a New Mexico ghost town? The swinging 70s? I’m thinking I’ll take a pass.

I’m also thinking The Amazing Race will be back sooner than we think.

I’m back, and I’m trying to catch up on all the shows I missed while I was gone. Some of them I managed to watch from the hotel while I was on vacation. I got to see Sanjaya butchering another song on American Idol, and I also got the see the horrible injustice of Gina being sent home before Haley. That does not compute in my world, but I guess if you sing a boring ballad you go away. Up tempo songs, people! I keep telling you!

On Survivor first it was a very good week, with Lisi getting booted, but then it was a bad week with Michelle going next. I’m sending all my thought waves for Earl and Yau Man to be in the final two, but it’s getting harder to see it happen.

On The Apprentice I got to witness the impossible, Frank making the final four! Over Heidi! You know, Frank is my Sanjaya. Everything about him is repugnant, and he’s a five-year old trapped in an old guy body, but I so desperately want him to win and I don’t even know why. And to watch Arrow triumph over Kinetic? It’s so wrong but it feels so right. These are not the people I should be rooting for, but I find myself doing it week after week. I’m pulling for my boy Frank to win it all.

But on The Amazing Race, quite the opposite has been happening. The two shows while I was away saw the elimination of both the Guidos and Uchenna and Joyce, leaving us with a very grim final four indeed. Danny and Oswald are the only shining lights left, and I’ve wanted them to win from the beginning, so I’m still rooting for them to pull through. But I was hoping that as we got near the end there would be two or three other teams that I could also root for, kind of as a fallback in case the unthinkable happens. But right now I just want all six of the other contestants to be eaten by sharks. Seriously. They cast some dud teams for this All-Stars, and somehow most of them are still around at the end.

Oh, and there’s so much more on my TiVo that’s still crying out to be watched. House. Scrubs. How I Met Your Mother. Ugly Betty. There are only so many hours in the day, people.

Oh, I am so glad to see Rocky gone. It’s not often you get reality show contestants that are just vile through and through. Usually there’s a good side somewhere, even in the most hardcore villains. In fact, what makes a good villain is that they have a human side too, so you can actually see there are two sides to them. Like Jonathan, last year, some saw him as the villain, but I was rooting for him all the way. I actually liked him. Or Shane, from a while back. He wasn’t a villain exactly, he was just batshit crazy. And at first you just wanted him to go away, but as the season progressed you started to get attached to him and it was almost sad to see him go.

But Rocky? None of that. Disgusting through and through, like to his core. Whether it was the way he bullied everyone on his tribe, bitched and yelled all over camp, systematically got rid of all the women just because they were women, or the hour-long gay bashing fest we got last week in his treatment of Anthony. Rocky had no good side. He was rotten, and now he and his little rat face are gone. Unfortunately he’s on the jury, so he’s not really gone from the game, and we’ve got to put up with weeks and weeks of eye-rolling from him during tribal council. Not something I’m looking forward to.

I was actually rooting for Lisi this week, is how bad I wanted Rocky gone. That’s how bad it was. “No, don’t vote for Lisi,” I actually said. Out loud.

In other, more cheery news, the only thing making this season of Survivor watchable is Yau Man. His little happy dance when he found the immunity idol was the best thing that’s been on Survivor in years. I want him and Earl to go all the way to the final two, but I know this show doesn’t work like that. I’ve seen the show too many times to expect anything good like that to happen. Alex and Edgardo are going to steamroll over those two, sooner or later, and the last few weeks of the season are going to suck like they always do. Such is the pain of watching Survivor.

I guess I never wrote anything about last week’s episode of Survivor. I must have just been too bummed out about Cecilia getting booted off. Here you have a girl that doesn’t fit into the normal Survivor mold of a walking skeleton with big eyes and big teeth (I’m looking at you, Eliza. And Janu. And Danielle). A girl who’s actually for real good-looking, and who also seems mature, and intelligent, and… Okay, so I can see why she didn’t fit in on the show. How’d she ever slip through the casting process? We hardly ever saw her on screen anyway. For a while I thought she might be getting the flying-under-the-radar edit, and they’d show more of her as the season went on. But no, they were giving her the this-girl-is-toast-so-let’s-not-waste-our-time-showing-her edit. Too bad.

Anyway, the other big news in last week’s episode was that the Race Wars are over and everyone got “integrated” into two tribes. Wow, they let their big gimmick last all the way until the third episode…they really are slipping. Last year when they underwhelmed us with the “big twist” of young men/old women, they stopped it five minutes into the second episode, just when it was in danger of getting interesting. This year they let the Race Wars get even closer to the point where it would have been compelling TV. Luckily for us, they orchestrated one of the most Rube-Goldbergesque merges ever, and quickly got us back to the same old boring two-tribe game we all know. Thank goodness, we wouldn’t want Survivor to start getting interesting, would we?

Only two hours until the new episode!

Episode Links:
Miss Alli’s recap
Trevor’s review at RFF
TV Guide review
Watch the episode on InnerTube
Download the episode with BitTorrent

It’s always so exciting when Survivor starts up. Especially the first episode of the fall season, when the show’s been off the air for four months and all you’ve been watching is Big Brother. Of course I know that watching the show gets less and less exciting as time goes on, and by the last few weeks the obligation to watch every week is like a noose around your neck, and you stop caring so much about who’s going to win, and start wishing one of them would get eaten by a shark just so you’d have something exciting to talk about. And also because many Survivor contestants do, in fact, deserve to be eaten by a shark. But we’re not at that point yet. We’re still at the first episode, the honeymoon period, so I still have the capacity to enjoy it.

Other links:
Trevor’s review at RFF
Miss Alli’s recap
TV Guide review
Zap2It review
Watch the episode on InnerTube
Download the episode with BitTorrent
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