The Gold Rush

During the weekend the Duchess was gone, and in between watching DVR, getting another beer, and watching old episodes of “Coupling”, I randomly flipped through the channels hoping to strike gold. When I say gold, I don’t mean the episode of “Growing Pains” where Mike thinks about doing cocaine. I mean short lived TV shows that occasionally pop up on random TV channels, like “Wonderfalls” on Logo or “Keen Eddie” on Sleuth. In my search, I hit one nugget of gold and one nugget of fool’s gold.

The gold strike came when I was flipping through the channels I never go to (around the 800’s) and found the Universal HD channel. I wasn’t sure what it was but it was showing the movie “Blue Steel” and if that doesn’t say something, I don’t know what does. So, I decide to check the guide to see what other gems this TV channel might unearth (for you fans, they had “Friday Night Lights” reruns). I was frakking shocked when I saw “Touching Evil”. For those of you who don’t know (and I’ll guess it’s a lot considering it got cancelled), “Touching Evil” was one of the very few really good adaptations of a British show to American TV. The show starts off with Detective David Creegan walking into a room with his gun drawn. He turns around to be faced with a masked gunman pointing his gun at him. The gunman then shoots Creegan in the head and he goes falling out a big plate glass window. Creegan takes years to recover (even being clinically dead for a short time) and returns to work at the Organized and Serial Crime Unit in the FBI. While Creegan is strange and a bit kooky, he also has an amazing ability of understanding the criminal mind and a drive to take the evil off the street. He is teamed up with Detective Susan Branca and together they hunt the sociopaths who break the laws and harm the people. It was a frakking great show (it made Bravo’s “brilliant but cancelled” series). It’s funny and dark and haunting (and not just because of the Nine Inch Nails songs they play) and just plain gripping. The USA Network cancelled it after one season, but I always remembered it and I always liked it. So, of course, I DVR-ed the episode that was on and will watch when I get the chance. Totally sweet ninjas!

The next was a complete strike out. I was checking out the Science Channel to see when re-runs of “Survivorman” was on (because its cool to sit on your couch and watch some dude try and survive in harsh conditions he puts himself in purposely for my entertainment) and I went to the guide to check it out. Low and behold I see that they are showing “The Net”. Remember back in the mid-90’s when USA actually thought it was a real network and put out stuff like “Silk Stalkings”, “Pacific Blue”, “Duckman”, and “Weird Science”? Well, near the end of that run, they put out “The Net”. This was based on the horrible Sandra Bullock movie of the same name. Basically, it picks up with Angela Bennett being hunted by some secret society because she found out they were trying to control the world through computers or something. Yeah, totally lame, but it was a good show. She get’s help along the way from computer hacker master “Sorcerer” (voiced by Tim Curry). It turns out that “Sorcerer” is just some horn-dog teenager, but he knows computers and helps Angela try to unmask the secret society. I know it sounds totally lame, but I liked it and was excited about it actually resurfacing (even if they make it sound like all you need to do to hack a computer is pound on the key board for about 10 seconds and frighten older people into not trusting computers). Anyway, I set the DVR for later viewing. So I go to check out he beginning, and it turns out it wasn’t “The Net”. Every time I DVR-ed over the last few days, it's either been a show about out of control fires or Tom Brokow telling me that I destroyed the world because I used to drive a SUV. It was a complete douche.

I love finding random short-lived shows on TV. Basically, the channels that put them on are basically saying “we don’t have any other programming to show” and they hope that people like me will tune in. Well, if they keep putting them on, I’ll keep watching. Now, if I could only find reruns of “Salute Your Shorts”, all will be right with the world.