I LOVE television.

I've always liked televesion. Everyone does, right? It passes the time and hopefully gets you thinking about a good story rather than the harsh realities around you.

But, we live in a time where TV is actually great! There are a lot of good shows on now. I think I am recording something like 50 TV series in any given year (53 over 2 HD DVRs, I checked)
Now don't get me wrong, I don't sit at home and only watch TV. Many of these shows are not on during the same season.
I.E. there are several summer series (Kitchen Nightmares, So You Think You Can Dance, Psych, Eureka...)
shows that are sporadic at their series airings (Battlestar Galactica (the last season has taken 2 years to air, isn't that 2 seasons?) The Simpsons, Family Guy, American Dad (between football and NASCar it's amazing these shows get seen)
Shows that don't start until midseason (24, Lost...) that replace shows that were on the first half of the year.

So I record all these shows but it's a rotation of old shows out, new shows in.

But back to my original point. There is a lot of good television. And much of it is getting a chance. FINALLY TV is getting a chance by TV...
For years, executives looked only at next day numbers from Neilsen and made decisions based on that. Those numbers suck, they looked at who was watching live only. There were no check boxes for VCR data collection. If a shows numbers were bad, it got cancelled right away or maybe shifted to another night to "find an audience."

But, unfortunately, for those that found the show the first night, they had to hunt for it if they wanted to see it again. Then the show that needed to find and audience, lost the one it had. And then got cancelled.

For the 2007-08 season, Neilsen and the networks, seeing the deeper penetration of DVRs into the mainstream (28% as of Sept '08) decided to take a chance and look at "live + 3". That's everyone that watched the show air and eveyone that watched it within 3 days of the original airing. The data was so much harder to parse that the networks admitted that it would take at least 4 weeks to gather the informaiton and see what it meant. And so, shows that wouldn't have had a chance the year before, got to find their audience and the audience could find the show the second week.

Now, there is a lot of good TV on. Interesting stories that are getting time to unfold and more genre shows because, duh, geeks into Sci-Fi have DVRs and watch that stuff when they get to it (after a Halo party)

The best part about these stories is that they are making themselves big but finite. Some of these new shows are probably only going to last 3-5 years (if they get to play out) but at the end, they will have told the whole story. Lost is begining it's 5th of 6 seasons and, though more questions are being asked than answered lately, we the viewer know that everything will be answered. Fox's new JJ Abrams show Fringe had it's season premiere and talks about 46 documented events that are being referred to as "The Pattern". Well, let's do the math.
[
46 events
+ 1 current case/event
+ unknown number of new events
- multiple events being part of the same mystery
+ minimum of 5 episodes that deal solely with the conspiracy behind it all
]
divided by 18 episodes (because that's what JJ has to do for Lost due to high production demands)
______________________________
3 seasons

Then boom, it's wrapped up.
It's a great idea to work with. So great that we didn't even invent it. The Brits did, near as I can tell. They do short seasons (6-12 episodes) and run for a couple years only. They don't do things Friends or Seinfeld style, running endlessly until enough cast gets tired they leave or ratings drop so low, the network has an albatross around it's neck.

But these shows are great. They are being written by true storytellers. These people have complete thoughts and ideas and have a way of crafting them to create suspense and anticipation yet not go down season after season only to have one whole season not count because it was a dream or have it prattle on because no one cares about the characters anymore because they have become a self-referential joke of themselves.

I am getting lost in my own ideas now, so just give TV a chance, I think you'll like it.

So far the only new show I can truly vouche for is Fringe but the new season of Heroes is kicking ass already and I am looking forward to Chuck and Lost.