Now I'd like to act all erudite and stuff, and say I watch hardly any TV at all... but I try to be more honest with myself in these Cant columns... and the truth is that I watch an alarming amount of TV. So much so that I really do have to work at it to keep it at a manageable amount.

A long time ago I made myself two little promises...

The first was that I'd never have TV watching interrupt my social life. This promise, I'm happy to say, I've kept. I don't have much of a social life, but I haven't ever left a party, or failed to go out drinking, or abandoned playing with friends just because some show is about to come on.

The second promise was that if I couldn't find a way to watch some show live, or record it on my VCR, I would just let the show pass me by. No regrets. Now... I've never really regretted missing a show, but lets just say that I've been known, from time to time, to phone up a friend and ask them to record channel blah at 9 o'clock since I'm going to be watching channel foo and taping channel bar at the same time.

Anyways, back to the new fall season...

I was happy to discover that not all the new shows were going to be reality based game shows. I hate reality based shows. Well, no, that's a lie (see, this being Cant, I admit it). I hate the soap opera inter-personal relationship based ones. It's not like I could stand to listen to any of these people whine and grouse about their completely sub-human lives even if they were my friends; so why the hell would I want to watch a TV show about complete strangers doing the same thing? But I do like the endurance/torture shows... We don't have that many in the US (Ecochallange and Fear Factor being all I can recall), but man should we take a hint from the Japanese, now they have some really exciting "reality" based shows. Shows where an average challenge would be "how fast can you sew a button to your tongue"... not "could you", but "how fast" could you? Or "which team can bring the most pounds of coconuts up these thousand stairs before someone faints"? Now that's interesting.

On the non-reality front... well, we've got non-reality. Given that Buffy, X-Files and the like have been successful, we've got several new supernatural thrillers: Dead Last, Special Unit 2, Wolf Lake, Invisible Man and The Chronicle. And if it wasn't supernatural thrills you were looking for, what about simply super thrills? We've got Smallville (Dawsen's Creek meets Lois & Clark), The Tick and Dark Angel for all you super-hero fans.

But really, the biggest draw has got to be law and law enforcement shows. Someone once told me that the way you could predict an election was whether the public was watching fantasy or crime shows... fantasy meaning Democrats would be elected, crime meaning Republicans would be elected. Well, it looks like a solid Republican front will be moving into politics. Along with the return of some longtime crime/law shows (West Wing, Law & Order (and it's spin off), Spin City, Crossing Jordan, The Practice, Ally McBeal, Family Law, Judging Amy, CSI, and The District) we've got six new ones added to the block: 24, The Agency, Thieves, Alias, UC:Undercover and another Law & Order spin off.

Gah, with all that coming out... maybe I'd just be best to stop watching TV. I could just go out to the movies. And apparently that's not a bad idea, since all the major studios have been so fearful of not getting an oscar nomination that they've all been holding back their major movies for end of the year showings. The backlog of movies is so intense now that there will be more major movies released before the January 2002 than there are days left in the year. That's a movie a night for the rest of the year.

In any case, let me just wash my hands of the whole mess by mentioning that at least one major city gets my congratulations. Chicago is apparently promoting a city-wide book club thing. They've started out with To Kill a Mockingbird, and they've gone to great lengths to encourage every inhabitant to read or re-read the book. The public libraries have even purchased thousands of extra copies of the book... in several languages. It's been a while since I heard of a govenment doing something nice...