summer television

i've been enjoying keen eddie on fox this summer. it's a fish-out-of-water tale of a new york detective in london, and the show owes a lot of its style to guy ritchie's films. if fox is smart, they'll pick up a second season of the show to use as a midseason replacement for when their fall shows undoubtedly stink up the joint.

another new show is mtv's spider-man, which derives a lot of its characterization from the recent and upcoming movies. the animation is at turns quite good and quite not-good, but overall the show holds together and is fun. i went in knowing that neil patrick doogie harris was voicing peter parker, but ian ziering as harry osborn snuck up on me. the theme song was produced by john digweed and nick muir, which reminded me that i never followed through on picking up any of digweed's albums after watching groove those many months ago. i'll have to rectify that.

and in another television-related note, this is the summer of people i know being on game/reality shows. the score so far: one person i went to college with as a contestant on jeopardy, one of the organizers of the user group i spoke at this past week was the rabbi on the premiere episode of fox's banzai, and someone i used to work with is one of the temptresses on the upcoming temptation island 3.

(banzai is a pretty goofy show. it is basically a take-off of wacky japanese game shows.)