TV Hero

If you ask me if I watch a lot of TV, I tend to say, not really, just a few shows. And true, Lost, The Office, 24 and Heroes are the only shows I don't miss every week. Plus American Idol, and now 30 Rock is really good, and of course I do catch other shows later on dvd like Battlestar Galactica and The Sopranos and Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Shield and...you see what I mean?

I've always been a Food Network fan--I can't say they have anything on there I dislike. I like cooking shows. But as far as stuff I will watch pretty regularly, it's Iron Chef America (even though I acknowledge the original as superior, now that there's an American version with chefs I know, I don't watch the other), and Bobby Flay's Throwdown. There's something interesting about that one, in that Flay is really kind of the villain of the show--you want him to do well, but lose. It's that smugness of his, to think he can whip out a superior version of the food his opponent specializes in. Probably the one flaw of the show is that they pick these random local judges rather than reknowned food critics, so the winner can be anybody.

In an effort to break my kids away from watching the same Spongebob episodes we own and have seen 3 or 4 times, I started DVRing some Discovery Channel shows like How It's Made, Dirty Jobs and Man Vs. Wild, and find I like them a lot. How It's Made lacks personality but makes up for it in quantity of info--there's usually four different things we learn about per episode, from potato chips to batteries to winter coats to, yes, sanitary napkins. I'm going to refrain from joking about that one, but the show is in general a great crash course for parents in being able to answer your kids about how things are made, if they ask. I mean, yeah, I could fake it with potato chips, but it's still cool to be taken through the process.

Dirty Jobs is very good, largely due to the likeable Mike Rowe, a real guy's guy with a good sense of humor. Some episodes are more indoor-based, like one about Bug Breeding at the Audubon Society, but mostly he's out there in dirt and muck with some kind of machinery. Mushroom farming, digging wine cellar caves, tree-trimming...not only is it cool to watch, but as I deal with writing lots of these operations for Workers Compensation insurance, it's actually really helpful to me. I'd never seen Shot-Crete being sprayed, or what a stump grinder looked like.

Man Vs. Wild stars a former British Special Forces agent named Bear Grylls who looks like a regular bloke but has amazing survival skills. He's dropped into an inhospitable place like a mountain range with only the clothes on his back, and he has to make shelter, find food, and get to civilzation, in a matter of days. While he's not really in danger--there's a camera crew there, after all--it's still pretty dramatic to see him stuck in a tree 60 feet off the ground having to use an emergency parachute to lower himself, or eating millipedes and earthworms for energy. The desert island episode was great--making lotion out of coconut oil, poisoning fish in a pool with local roots (the poison doesn't affect humans) and making a great bamboo raft. If I somehow found myself in some similar situations, I now have that little bit more knowledge to help me survive.

Oh, and I ended up watching an episode of Split Ends on Style Channel, where this famous Beverly Hills stylist, Peter Ishkans, trades jobs with one from Texas, this blowsy woman called "Booger Red." It's pretty good reality tv--both places are pretty unwelcoming at first and of course the stylists are encouraged to be themselves rather than fit in, all for conflict and drama. And they each end up winning over their new coworkers. It's not great, but I always like a good fish out of water story, and this show has two of them, in a kind of contest, and without any phony romance thrown in.