What You Should Have Watched #1

And now we come to the television part of our blog.

Bad TV Made Better, Good TV Made Awesome, Awesome TV Made…Awesomer?

How’s THAT for a post title?

As many/most of you might know, I watch TV. A lot of it. Way more than I should. And with the amount of TV I watch, there are going to be a few craptastic shows that I catch each week. But why, if I know they’re craptastic, do I continue to watch them? Two words: eye candy. Guys do it, girls do it…don’t act like you don’t. You’ll make excuses, call it your guilty pleasure, but you’re just watching a craptacular show for the eye candy.

The most craptastic show I tune into each week is probably Smallville. I’m a comic book geek, so I started watching this show when it began, what, nine years ago? because I felt it was my duty as said comic book geek. And in the beginning, the show wasn’t half bad. Sure, it seemed to be more Dawson’s Creek than Heroes, but it worked. It WAS about a high-schooler, after all.

And the eye candy was there from the start. Now, I think the going consensus was the Kristen Kruek (Lana Lang), was the show’s reigning hottie, but I always preferred Allison Mack (Chloe Sullivan). She seemed a little more real, maybe a little more approachable. And she had a cute little crooked smile. But then Erica Durance was cast as Lois Lane, and you could just hear the other women channeling Bill Paxton (Game over, man! Game over!). Now, as the storylines get more and more ridiculous and gimmicks seem to take precedence over good storytelling, the eye candy is pretty much the only reason to stick around.

But I consider most of what I watch to be entertaining. Maybe not week in and week out, but mostly. And it’s the eye candy that helps these mostly entertaining shows stay on the DVR schedule when there are more out weeks than in ones.

Chuck has replaced Las Vegas as my guilty pleasure show. It’s fun, and it’s fast-paced, but the stories aren’t all that good, and the acting could be better. I started watching the show because of Adam Baldwin. I loved him as Jayne on Firefly, Marcus Hamilton on Angel and Taye Digg’s ex-partner on Daybreak. But his character is a little too one-dimensional to keep me coming back each week. Enter Yvonne Strahovski. If you were a fan of Alias and are missing your weekly dose of Jennifer Garner in a skimpy spy outfit, well, here’s your replacement. She’s obviously not the focus of the show, so she doesn’t get the screen time that Garner got as star of her own show, but it’s definitely a welcome presence after staring at Baldwin, Zachary Levi or Joshua Gomez for too long.

Two other shows, Criminal Minds and The Big Bang Theory, fall into this same category for me. They’re both good shows, they’re just not great. Matthew Gray Gubler, who is wonderful as Dr. Spencer Reid, can only carry the show for so long now that Mandy Patinkin is no longer on the show. And yeah, Joe Mantegna is good, but he’s no Patinkin. So it’s nice to have Paget Brewster (Emily Prentiss) and A.J. Cook (J.J.) around. I knew Brewster before this after enjoying her on Andy Richter Controls the Universe and a brief stint on Friends, so seeing her in a serious role was weird. As for TBBT, while I love all the geek-centered jokes (y’know, being a bit of one myself), it’s nice to have those moments punctuated by Kaley Cuoco (Penny).

Then there are the awesome shows. How do I concentrate on the awesome (and possibly extremely involved and multi-episode) stories when there is so much prettiness to look at? Fringe has Anna Torv as Agent Olivia Dunham…but it has excellent writing, crazy-ass episodes, and scenes stolen by John Noble’s Dr. Walter Bishop. And when she’s constantly wearing smart little pant-suits, it’s easy to forget that, yeah, Ms. Torv is pretty hot.

Then there’s Lost, where despite months and months stranded on a weird, deserted island, Evangeline Lily’s Kate Austen remains incredibly sexy. But I can’t focus on her, because I’ve got to stay focused on every OTHER detail of the show to attempt to figure out what the hell is actually going on.

Now, this is by no means a complete list of all the attractive women on all the shows I watch. We’d be here forever. Hell, almost all the female cast of Friday Night Lights would have to be mentioned.

So fess up…what crappy shows do you watch just for the eye candy?

Next week? The guys. I mentioned it before that I only started watching Chuck because of Adam Baldwin. There are a couple of other shows that had me tuning in because of the actor. Any guesses on which ones?