In The Snow, Without Shoes, Uphill, Both Ways...

I think, now that I'm 30, I'm officially old enough that I get to start writing posts like this one.

It's been brought to my attention on multiple occasions lately that I think my tastes may actually, tragically, finally be growing up.

A few months ago, I went to dinner at McDonald's after a really rough day at work, under the theory that I really needed some comfort food, and, once upon a time, Mickey D's definitely fit the bill. Hey, what can I say? I was a child of my generation. Anyhow, tragically, sometime between the time I was 15 and now, McDonald's suddenly forgot how to make a hamburger. Or else I have been so busy spoiling myself with buffalo burgers and grass-fed hand-formed patties from my own grill that I just can't appreciate the wonderful magic of the chemically-enhanced artifical flavor concoction that is a Quarter-Pounder anymore.

And now, I can't even enjoy junky TV anymore. I had hopes for the new incarnation of Bionic Woman. Cute chick can punch through walls, do all kinds of wacky kung-fu, and jump hundreds of feet through the air? Plus, the bad guy is also a hot chick, and they totally fight in the rain. Really, how can this not go well?

Well, sadly, it does. I was hoping that they would go for the Lost demographic, putting a normal person in a rather extraordinary circumstance and seeing where it goes. But no. The 24-year old bartender with the cute, vaguely geeky scientist boyfriend? She got into Harvard, but had to drop out to take care of her little sister after mom died. Vaguely geeky scientist boyfriend happens to be the only surgeon in the world capable of saving her after a car accident (an aside: really? A truck? Crazy female super-soldier wants to exact revenge on those people who 'did this to her', and the best she can come up with is plowing into his car with an 18-wheeler? Really?)

And can I just say how tremendously irritating it is that they've made no effort whatsoever to maintain the cool factor in the bad guy by keeping her mysterious for as long as possible? The reason The Others are interesting in Lost is that we don't know what the fuck is going on! If they kept appearing and monologuing all over the place, we'd rapidly lose interest and go back to watching UFC. But, by keeping us wondering what's going on, we stay interested!

Instead, we are treated to tedious monologues, where people talk and talk and talk, but somehow no information is transmitted.

It's a fine line, of course, between simply bad TV and kitschy, entertaining popcorn TV. There are only a few small elements separating Heroes from Bionic Woman. While Heroes has the tedious, uninformative monologues (especially Mohinder's opening and closing 'logues), they are so pretentious and over-the-top that all you can do is laugh, while somehow the statements in Bionic Woman, by taking themselves as seriously but being slightly less absurdly ridiculous, aren't at all entertaining, just painful to watch/listen to. Heroes knows how to keep you in the dark about what's going on; some good action takes place offscreen, and you often don't know who people are as the series goes on.

Which is not to say, in any way, that Heroes is good TV. Not by any stretch. But, unlike Bionic Woman, it's badness is entertaining and fun to watch, and thus I will be watching it for more than 3 weeks this season.

Which means, I guess, I'm not quite that old yet...