By the flickering light of a Sony Trinitron
by Matt Worley

The candles are burning off a slick of smoke haze in the air, brought in clinging to hair and clothes from the clubs last night. I stuff Kleenex up my nose in an attempt to stem the tide of early morning sinus flow. I throw on a t-shirt worn sparingly in the last few days, pop the computer on and find a relaxing but spunky CD on the changer (Prince's "Around The World In A Day"). It is time. The stage is set. Yes, another new season of TV. Just in time to keep those who were thinking there really wasn't any good reason to sit in front of the tube every night glued to the cheap furniture of TV room.

I have to admit, a new TV season is a bit like coming back to school from a long, and sometimes maddening, summer season full of hot sun, rain and long days spent looking at the neighborhood from behind our little fence enclosure in the backyard. The familiar electric lines, birds, trees and tree stumps will soon be replaced by our old friends in TV land who have had the good sense to think of new reasons to talk to each other.

The season started early for some of us. Fox trotted out new Melrose Place and 90210 for the faithful last week, along with other new shows I avoided like the plague. Actually I've pretty much avoided MP like the plague since the coolest characters were axed in the first, not-so-confrontational season. I like my soaps light and frothy, not stupid and slutty. And I'm beginning to wonder if I really care about those aging kids in Beverly Hills anymore. In their first show after graduating from college, they have already lost, turned down or just plain ignored more jobs than I actually had in my first year after college (I had four, if anyone is counting). Yeah, I'm feeling a bit under-used.

I really should have no authority over the new TV season at all. Along with my comrades-in-training at Lies Magazine, I wrote a satirical TV pilot and crafted an entire season of fake TV shows for our current issue (http://cent.com/abetting/ or your local magazine stand)--but that's just make believe silliness. In really real land, I'm just a casual viewer, not a reviewer (as in, I don't get advance cassettes of shows--unless the show happens to think I might be able to write for them, in which case I get advance cassettes and a t-shirt), so I really have no knowledge of the new shows except what I read in the magazines. So here's a personal round up of some of the new shows that are getting a bit of press this year.

Dharma & Greg. It's on ABC, I think (Entertainment Weekly screwed up and listed it as a CBS show in one of their breakout boxes), which doesn't matter too much unless you're already watching a show on a competing network. Sexy hippie chick meets and marries button-down yuphead. The love is gooey and addictive. It's only the parents who are the problem. This should be a warning sign: any sit-com that believes opposites attract and are held together just by sex isn't reality, it's put together by wishful writers who hope they'll someday have girlfriends with breasts as large as Dharma's.

Jenny. When one episode is devoted to showing the two hotty stars (one blonde, one brunette for everyone's pleasure) getting tongue piercings and crashing an exclusive party not able to talk correctly because their tongues are swollen, you know to stay away. Far away. I can't wait until they spend a whole episode trying to figure out how to program the VCR, clock radio and coffee machine so the three are sync.

Veronica's Closet. Forget about it. Everyone is going to watch this because it's after Seinfeld and before E.R. Especially those of us who knew from the first minute Kirstie Alley hit the Cheers set that she was much cooler than Shelly Long.

Dellaventura, Michael Hays, Cracker (not the band), and C-16. Cop shows, smop shows. If you wanna see a cop show, take a walk around my neighborhood at 11:30 at night. I gotta line for you, copper!

I'm sure there are more, but I'm just not that interested. I'll get more interested later--maybe. The thing is, my prime time line up is full. I don't need to watch any new stuff. I tried to watch Star Trek: Voyager for the fourth time a few weeks ago when they resolved their Borg problem. It was still 35 minutes of boring crap with 15 minutes of exploding computer consoles. So that's off the list--again. I'll find Buffy when I can (we don't have a WB station proper, but our UPN stations run our crazy Vampire Slayer a few days or a week later). Check out Fox's double decker of Sunday comedy (Simpsons, King of the Hill), watch Must See TV (because we all have to talk about something in common) and maybe get around to seeing Newsradio and its cohorts on NBC Tuesday (Just Shoot Me is pretty funny). Xena will be taped on Saturday nights out, and slavered over on Sunday afternoons when the Chiefs aren't on. And 60 Minutes is always good for bit of pulp news.

So I'm covered, and this new stuff just doesn't make me want to give up any more of my precious time. I mean, I've got to have time to talk to people about all these shows I'm watching, don't I? Otherwise there's no good reason to enter another world.

Matt Worley had just discovered that after nights of long TV watching, his eyeballs actually shrink back into his head.

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