TV

Ripping off Scott Freeman... My favorite TV shows of 2006 in no particular order: 30 Days (FX) Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip The Thick of It (BBC America) Little Britain (BBC America) God or the Girl (A&E) The Office My Name is Earl The Daily Show The Colbert Report Black. White (FX) Waterloo Road (BBC America) Hustle (AMC) The Street (BBC America) Saved (TNT) Lovespring International (Lifetime) City of Men (Sundance) The Hill (Sundance) Entourage (HBO) Deadwood (HBO) Dog Bites Man (Comedy Central)

Here are some of the TV recommendations for this week from The Week magazine:

• American Experience: RFK (Mon, 9 PM, PBS)
• 10 Items or Less (Mon, 11 PM, TBS)
• Independent Lens: Two Square Miles (Tue, 10 PM, PBS)
• Stage Door (Wed, 10 PM, Turner Classic Movies)
• Afterlife (Thu, 9 PM, BBC America)
• Worst Week of My Life (Fri, 9:40 PM, BBC America)
• Ithuteng (Never Stop Learning) (Sun, 6:30 PM, HBO)
• The Sun (Sun, 9 PM, Science Channel)

Last month there was a bit of controversy about the excision of religious content from episodes of Veggie Tales airing on NBC. From an article of the same title on beliefnet by Chansin Bird of the Religion News Service:

Fans of VeggieTales, those lovable animated singing and talking vegetables, may notice a change in the episodes aired on NBC's Saturday morning cartoon lineup: There's less editing than originally feared. "The last batch of episodes are airing with very little editing," VeggieTales creator Phil Vischer wrote in an e-mail to Religion News Service. "Not none whatsoever, but very nearly none whatsoever. Much less than earlier episodes." Originally, NBC had asked for changes in four of 13 episodes -- mostly editing out references to God and the Bible. Vischer said he was not thrilled with the edits, but was happy to have the cartoons on network television.

Some advice from Slate for the next time you're a guest on The Colbert Report:

Act your age.
Laugh uproariously.
Embrace the theater.
Go on the offensive.

According to an article on Slate.com, the British TV comedy Saxondale is coming to America in Americanized form. Feeling un-hip because the first time you saw the The Office was on NBC? This is your chance to get ahead of the curve by watching the British Saxondale on BBCAmerica before it gets Americanized for the US TV market. This will be the third British show that I enjoyed that later on came to the US in mutated form. The first two were The Office (of course) and Teachers. I didn't even bother to watch the Americanized Teachers (which lasted only 6 episodes) because I thought the British version was kind of marginal itself. I'm still waiting for the Americanized versions of Shameless, The Catherine Tate Show, The Robinsons, Little Britain, The Kumars at No. 42, Waterloo Road, Love Soup, The Thick of It, The Street...or even seasons 2 through 4 of the British Teachers.