I’ve always had a thing for nature shows, but Isabella Rossellini’s kooky low budget skits on animal sex might be my favorite. The first Green Porno series ran on the Sundance Channel ages ago. The construction paper costumes were perfectly paired with her eager, strange, and accurate demonstrations. The series stuck with me. Actually, I’m a little obsessed with it. I’ve even bought her Green Porno book. The whole thing is one part Michel Gondry and one part Radiolab. I mean, she has this ability to make worm sex sound awesome.

Recently Rossellini released Seduce Me, a series of shorts that explain what happens right before animals get laid. She pulls the sheets off bedbug bonding, cuttlefish copulation, and snake sadism. It’s a little more puppet show than past pieces, but still predictably irresistible.

So they have brutal arrests of poor American people with lots of cop yelling and then they blend it with talking head interviews about what just happened etc etc. What makes Police Women Of Broward County stand out among the hundreds of other shows in this formula is that the four main protagonists are actually great characters. Way more interesting than the Jersey Shore cast, for example.

Video quality is impressive, presented in its original 1.33:1 full frame aspect ratio. Audio is similarly exceptional. Perfect for long summer nights.

Tim Roth as Doctor Lightman, scrutinizing YOUR face for signs of lying. In the series Lie To Me, which I’ve been obsessively watching through Netflix, the Lightman Group works on solving murders, mysteries, and crimes through study and detection of lying through body language and facial ticks, expressions, and involuntary movement while asking personal questions, videotaping reactions and studying everyone VERY closely. I like the premise of this show a lot.

The funny thing about watching this show is that it makes you over-aware of others’ expressions, paranoid about what they actually mean, and self-conscious of your own movements and expressions. If you can forget about that, the show is wonderful and enjoyable.

Neighbors from Hell revolves around a family of demons who move from the underworld to Houston, Texas, on a mission to destroy a drill that can dig to the Earth’s core. The family not only faces culture shock trying to fit in with humans, they also realize that the humans can be as bad as the demons, and that Earth is almost no different from Hell. It is entertaining so far and I’ll see if I’ll make it all the way through the season.

I love the MTV Movie Awards. I am not a tween, I have not seen Twilight, I do not wear Uggs or Extreme Couture and I do not own a Miley Cyrus record. But I do believe that the MTV Movie Awards are the greatest awards show on the face of the earth.

Here’s why: Irony.

Hollywood is insufferable in its ability to take itself way too seriously. Are the Oscars a celebration of the best that film has to offer? Sure they are, but they are a po-faced celebration of gratuitous ass kissing in the same breath.

This is where the MTV Movie Awards come in. Although tween oriented, they are unafraid to take themselves ridiculously, to embrace to sublimely silly and to go where not even Much Music will go. Anyone who remembers Howard Stern’s Fartman will simply have to agree with me.

Even the MTV Video Music Awards have been guilty of being a little too afraid to do their own thing. That’s why it’s a pleasure to see awards shows begin to loosen up the collar. Much Music may be too polite for its own good thanks to it being Canadian, but dressing Miley up as an LA gang banger may be the comedic moment of the year. Even the Tony Awards, normally the home and hiding place of the stodgy theatre types let loose embracing its inner campiness and getting brilliant, marvelously fab.

So the question is now, who’s next to follow suit? Who will get naked? Will the Billboard Awards go Goth? Will the Grammy’s develop a sense of humor? Can Will Ferrell keep his pants on? Tune in…

The other night my grandparents were watching the Tony Awards on television. My first thought was “I can’t believe this actually gets aired on TV… Who watches this???”

My second thought, after a number of women got up on stage and had such a difficult time choking back their tears and sobs while giving their thanks, was “no wonder no one goes to see live theater”. But a little bit of over acting can go a long way I realized when I thought about my emotions seeing Kristin Chenoweth on the television. Her appearances on Glee and the Tony Awards only serve as bitter reminders of Pushing Daisies, which was a truly unfortunate victim of the writer’s strike.

Even though my initial reaction to Pushing Daisies was “ew”, it quickly won me over, and reconsidering it a year after it went off the air, and after all the hysterical adulation people threw on the trash heap that is Lost as it drew to an end, it really shows how a little (or maybe a lot) of artifice can transform something as mundane as some crime-sleuthing and pie-baking into something so otherworldly and magical. Through all of that gloss and highly mannered dialogue something really compelling and beautiful appeared, whereas when I think of Lost, for instance, I can only wonder how it’s possible to make a smoke demon and random time travel seem as bland and commonplace as soggy corn flakes.

However, a great new television show has appeared in the form of Adventure Time with Finn and Jake. What is there to say about it really? It is totally ridiculous, adorable, and highly diverting. The episode with Tree Trunks, the self-proclaimed “cutie” senior citizen elephant, was especially amusing.

These days I take my TV in bed, preferably beside my boyfriend. The only action our too big living room flat screen gets these days (from me anyway), is when it offers up a decent movie or Super Mario Galaxy 2. For anything an hour and under, that’s for me, my MacBook, and my boyfriend in our room. The thing is, I don’t really watch that much TV anymore. TiVo made watching the tube tolerable again, but a few years in I realized that just because I could effortlessly access shows, it didn’t mean that I needed to actually watch them. (Clay Shirky and Dan Pink explain why here). Catching all the Hoarders episodes was its own obsession, and thankfully I’ve kicked that habit. Better now to be in my bed with my boyfriend and Ira Glass or Christina Hendricks. It’s not the intimacy I’m after, exactly. It’s just that if I’m going to watch TV in bed, it’s got to be good (which, let’s be honest, severely limits the selection). It seems I’m not the only one that feels this way. I’ve just started watching Mad Men. All my roommates have already seen it; they bought episodes on iTunes and watched it on their MacBooks in their respective rooms. That means we have two copies of most episodes and they are all already spoken for. A lot of TV we watch is TV we end up owning and it makes us more discerning. And finding a show (kinda for free) on Netflix streaming presents its own set of challenges. If I can’t find a 30 minute show I want to watch in 5 minutes, the effort is no longer worth it. There’s, um, something better I could be doing. Our next apartment will not even have a TV. But perhaps the next laptop we buy will have a bigger monitor…

Yes, I’m pretty damn late on this, but why didn’t anyone tell me about the amazing TV show Trailer Park Boys sooner? It’s freaking hilarious! Since becoming obsessed with this show, I’ve had a real epiphany about a fact many Americans might need a moment to process: Canadian comedy shows have been at the core of my love for absurd television since a young age. 

It really all started with me when Comedy Central began to air Kids in the Hall in the early 90s. I never had cable as a child, so this delectable treat was among my favorites when I would visit my indulgent grandmother’s house. Lying in bed eating chocolate chip cookies and watching weird comedy sketches such as the Chicken Lady probably influenced who I am today. That’s scary to admit, but it’s true.

I also have vague memories of heartily consuming the Canadian sketch comedy classic SCTV back in the early 90’s when Comedy Central was still “the Comedy Channel.” Good Lord, look at the number of awesome celebrities littering this show: John Candy! Rick Moranis! Eugene Levy! Martin Short! And last but certainly not least, Christopher Guest’s mockumentary darling Catherine O’Hara. This show is absurdly influential.

Thanks, Canada, for your awkwardly amazing sense of humor.

As if that weren’t enough, they constantly demean one another’s fledgling careers and future dreams. It’s wonderful!

Saving the prom queen!