The idiot lantern.

Time for more Thoughts and Things on the new TV season. But first, a complaint. I'm going through painful withdrawal. The forums (discussion boards) on Television Without Pity have been down for about a week, as they're moving them to new servers, or something. They say it'll be faster and less likely to forget which page you want to go to next, but they've also taken a lot longer to get up and running again than they predicted. They now say they'll open on Thursday at noon. And they also said they'd be open by noon on Tuesday. And by Monday. And by last Saturday at the latest. Gotta have my TWOP.

HBO started two new series last Sunday. The jury is still out on both of them, so far as I'm concerned. One is their political semi-reality show, K Street. Executive produced by George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh, and starring the fun couple of James Carville and Mary Matalin (gee, those two deserve each other), Michael Deaver, some real actors, and continuous guest appearances by politicians playing themselves. The best part is that it's timely: they start filming a Sunday night episode on the previous Monday. Can't have "coming next week" promos, as a result. But the shows can address actual issues in a timely manner. The first episode focused on Howard Dean and his performance at the 9-candidate debate in Baltimore. Carville helps Dean with some debate prep and suggests a couple of "spontaneous" lines that he could use, and then does, to great efffect. (Yes, I understand: they watched the debate in real life, found those lines, and then filmed the debate prep scenes. It still came across pretty well.) Haven't yet decided what I think of this show, yet. I'm enough of a poltical junkie to enjoy the behind-the-scenes maneuvering of the political consultants and lobbyists, but they'll need to have a more coherent story line and characters to effectively bring the series to life.

The other new HBO series is Carnivale. Set in the 1930's, a traveling carnival picks up a young man from a Dust Bowl farm - a young man with an amazing power of healing. At the same time, a minister in California discovers that he has mysterious powers. An opening monologue talks about the balance of Good and Evil and there always being one leader of each power on the earth, at least until the first atomic bomb blast. Wonderful production values, good cast, very odd characters (as you'd expect in a traveling carnival). Sort of a strange combination of The Grapes of Wrath for the Dust Bowl and going-to-California settings, Something Wicked This Way Comes for the feeling of evil in a carnival, and Twin Peaks, because it's all just so darn strange. Don't know how the show is going to go. It sort of depends on which year of Twin Peaks it decides to emulate: the first year, which was edgy, spooky, and chilling, or the second year, which was stupid, pointless, and pretentious. I'm hopeful it'll be like the first year, especially since David Lynch isn't connected to this production.