"Chopped" is a travesty

• 
• I kind of hate Ted Allen. He has no personality, at least on this show, and I don't have any reason to believe he knows about food in the same way that even a Tom Colicchio would.
  
• It's obvious that this is a Top Chef knock-off. It was bad enough when they had "Next Food Network Star," which sucked, but at least was right for Food Network. The skills it tested were more associated the warm nonsense that Food Network goes for than actual cooking. This show purports to be about actual top-level cooking, which is why is fails. That's simply not what Food Network is about, it's about home cooking.
• The ingredients are mostly things a Food Network viewer might find at home. It might seem cute and appeal to some, but it just seems contrived and weird to restrict real chefs in this way.
• Dessert is the final showdown between the last two contestants. Really? Something real chefs apparently don't really focus on at all is the last task?
• Because there are new chefs on every episode, you don't get to know them, so it ends up being another personality-less affair, like Food Network Challenge. At least on shows like Throwdown, you can learn to love to hate Bobby Flay.
• There's really only room in my life for one food competition show, and even that one spot has been being squeezed recently by the poor quality of Top Chef this season. Sorry Chopped.
  

I Only Watch TV on Sundays

Venture Brothers

The best and most conventional show on Adult Swim these days has animation and jokes so stellar that everyone loves it. But, like all Adult Swim shows, full enjoyment presupposes comprehension of its intricate intertextuality.

Metalocalypse

The "brutal" facade belies the true theme of bourgeois boredom. A bunch of guys sitting around getting everything they want, hating each other and not doing anything about it sounds like internet culture to me. The animation isn't that great, but some of the design was clearly well thought out and visually stunning.

Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job!
I'll admit that though I'm a public access maven, I didn't really get this show for a long, long time. The most recent season might have been substantially better than prior ones, but regardless, it resonated with me. Pure absurdism and hysteria without dissolving meaninglessness.

Robot Chicken
Still viciously hit or miss but often enough worth the ten minute run time. Other shows are tangentially dependent on parody, but God help you if you haven't seen Robot Chicken's source material.

Mad Men

Though Mad Men might be a pure misogyinst fantasy - see Don Draper's perfect housewife, multiple mistresses, drinking habits - there's a clear pathos lying not too many layers underneath. Mad Men is really about the construction and deconstruction of illusions. The impeccable set design and lighting covers up for a few dull episodes here and there.

The Hills
The persistently vacuous and numbing crown jewel of MTV is falling apart into four or five separate storylines. Intentional or not, the show awesomely exhibits the station's blank values in fast-forward, ridden with drama but emotion free.

Feasting on Waves
Alton Brown is great... but I'm unsure what the seaborne sequel to Feasting on Asphalt has to offer over the other two million shows of its type except better production.

Entourage
The ultimate misogynist fantasy (moreso than Mad Men because of its immediacy) has returned for another season. It's hard to justify watching this one except for the fact that it's so entertaining.

I Love Money
VH1 vets getting their PhD in advanced reality strategy studies.

BSG, or why I'm a frakking geek

Yes, despite the fact that I'm posting about anime and sci-fi back to back, I don't consider myself a classic geek in that sense.  I would classify many of my friends as those sorts of geeks, so this claim is not some sort of expression of pride or superiority.  However, I think that being a geek in general just means putting an excessive amount of energy into any one given pursuit or interest, and in that respect, I am certainly a geek in more than a few areas.

I can easily geek out over great television shows.  Evangelion and Battlestar Galactica (quite possibly the geekiest television title this century from a sci-fi perspective) are two such shows.  Though both shows focus greatly on robots (an abbreviated description for the sake of simplicity), they both also employ more nuanced moral themes.  

There are shows with more realistic settings that also employ themes of morality.  A recent show that people have gone crazy about that meets this description is The Wire.  The obvious difference between The Wire on one hand and BSG and Eva on the other is setting.  In a fantasy setting, BSG and Eva are free from reality-based restrictions and can manufacture situations that could never occur on our Earth in 2008.  This is obviously a trade-off; I've frequently extolled the realism of The Wire.  But I think this trade-off is acceptable.  Every show takes place in its own universe and operates according to its own rules.

Any series which takes the effort to set up its own rules and adhere to them has the proper structure to deal with the more universal themes that all good dramas bring into play.  BSG is marked by an extreme attention to detail and a wildly diverse range of characters.  It's what caused me to geek out over it initially and it continues tonight at 10pm.