After a break that lasted the better part of a year, the Amazing Race is finally back with its 13th season. And even though this website is more or less dead, there is one section of it that I’ll still be keeping alive. The episode downloads can be found at the usual place, on my Amazing Race BitTorrent page.

Today was NBC’s day to make their announcements. And I’m not going to cover everything, since you can find full coverage in a hundred other places, including TV Squad and Zap2It. But here are some of the things that jump out at me:

Scrubs had been on the bubble over the last few weeks, with news coming out that it was renewed, or it was cancelled, or NBC was cancelling it and it would move to ABC, to a hundred other possibilities. But today it’s official that the show is staying on NBC, Thusday nights, although this will almost surely be the last season. For a show that has ridden under the radar with middling ratings for its entire life, seven seasons is damn good. Glad to see it’s back.

Studio 60 is cancelled. Officially. Which isn’t a huge surprise since it got trememdously low ratings and was jerked all around the schedule this spring. At least it wasn’t cancelled and pulled early in the season, like so many other unlucky shows were, but it certainly wasn’t treated well. It’s coming back on May 24th to finish out the rest of the season, probably another six episodes. And that’s a courtesy many cancelled shows don’t get, so I guess we should be happy.

Also cancelled: a whole raft of midseason shows that just didn’t catch on. This was a really weak midseason, for all the networks but NBC in particular. The Black Donnellys, Andy Barker, P.I., Raines. Didn’t watch ‘em, don’t care.

Heroes is back, of course. It’s one of the biggest hits NBC has right now. And next year they’re making six extra episodes, called “Heroes: Origins”, that will be outside the season’s main story arc and each introduce one new character. Kind of a strange idea, and we’ll have to see how it plays out. There’s nothing wrong with more Heroes.

New shows: All dramas and dramadies this year for NBC. And they’re trying to cash in on the whole sci-fi/superheroes thing a little bit, which might backfire on them. Bionic Woman is an update of the old show from the 70s, Journeyman is about a guy who travels through time changing lives, and Chuck is an ordinary guy who gets a bionic brain implant. Can’t say any of those jump out at me, but I’ll probably give the first episodes a try, at least.

The Apprentice is not on the schedule at all, but that doesn’t mean it’s dead. It just means they still have a Trump headache and don’t want to think about him for a while. Can’t say I blame them.

Tomorrow? ABC’s new shows.

The wannabe brigands dress in period costumes, eat such yummy authentic food as gruel – the officers get better rations – and are ruled over by an elected captain who assigns roles to the crew members and can be overthrown if he doesn’t treat his crew well. Mutiny, anyone? Each week at “Pirate’s Court” – which are, according to Burnett, modeled after actual tribunals – a player is cast off the ship and set adrift on a raft. “If you can’t run with the crew, if you can’t swim or row or navigate, you’re a liability.”

This is either going to be the next Survivor or the next Treasure Hunters. I’m betting on the former. Mark Burnett is a freaking genius.

For the next two weeks I’ll be watching TV from hotel rooms and not writing about it. Should be nice.

See you in mid April!

One interesting thing is the note that Scrubs might switch networks, from NBC to ABC. Switching networks is something only a very few shows have been able to pull off, and most of them weren’t in their seventh season when it happened. But we’re always expecting every season of Scrubs to be its last, just because it never seems to find a big enough audience, so nothing will come as a surprise.

Of course, you also have to wonder when a show is considered “off the bubble” and just plain old cancelled. Like, for example, The Nine is listed as a “long shot”. Which, consdiering they yanked it from the schedule last year and never even hinted they’d ever show any more episodes, I think it can be taken off the list. You know? “Long shot” means there’s actually some kind of chance.

The rest of the list are all shows that I don’t care about one bit. It’s a surprise to see Jericho on there, because I thought it was doing pretty well. Even if I did stop watching it months ago. The rest of them? They were duds right out of the box, and apparently I could tell because I never watched any of them. So they won’t be missed. Bring on the new pilots!

Hat tip: TV Squad.

Like Jane Espenson, who is a working TV screenwriter but who also keeps up a blog giving tips to aspiring writers. Or Ken Levine, a writer/prodcuer/director whose career goes back to MASH.

And the reason I’m writing this piece is Greg Beeman, who is a producer and sometime-director on the show Heroes. Like he isn’t busy enough working on one of the biggest new hits of the season, he also sits down every week to write up his thoughts on each week’s episode. And this is real behind-the-scenes stuff, not just talking about characters and the story, but talking about the actual work of making a TV show and all the things he has to keep straight. Like on the episode that aired earlier this week, he was the director. So he talks for a bit about some of the camera choices he made while filming.

In the first scene with HRG and Isaac, HRG is in control of the scene. So in that one I used cranes and dollys and let the shots sweep and push in. Trying to visually mimic the emotion of the scene – pressure. The pressure HRG is putting on Isaac. After that, there’s a scene on the roof with Claude and Milo, where Claude beats the hell out of Peter with a Bo Stick. In this almost every shot is handheld and the camera trades off from character to character a lot. This technique adds a sense of chaos and unbalance – and whenever I cut wide to show the special relationships (important to do so your audience doesn’t get completely disoriented) I used big sweeping wide shots done from a crane, which are always passing over foreground objects. Moving past close foreground on full figure shots adds both a sense of speed and a sense of pressure.

These are the kind of decisions that directors and cinemtographers have to make every day, but it’s so rare that we, the audience, get to poke inside their heads. But now, because these guys are able to blog (Greg doesn’t even post the blog himself – he admits he has his assistant do it), we can get a small hint.

Of course there were things wrong with the show. There are things wrong with every show. But it’s ridiculous to dissect every single aspect of every single episode of a show. What’s the point? You take it as a whole, realize that there will be good and bad episodes, and continue to watch it and hope the bad things get better and the good things stay the same.

Somewhere along the line, watching television became cultural shorthand for being a stupid. Thus, for wannabe intellectuals, not watching television is the best way to prove to everyone that you’re intelligent. Saying, “I don’t own a TV” implies a life of Shakespeare and smoking jackets.

Except, here’s the thing: Shakespeare was the television of his time (insofar as it was wildly popular and easily accessible by the masses). Seriously. His theater was on the wrong side of town, next to bear baiting pits (a sport that I fully expect Fox to revive before the end of this decade). The intellectuals of the day looked down on it as something vulgar and common. Shakespeare was filled with unnecessary sexual innuendo and broad, bawdy comedy — I mean, it really was Two and a Half Men of Verona.

So, if they can enjoy Shakespeare so much, why is it that “intellectuals” can’t enjoy popular culture? Because they’re being pretentious.

A thousand million “Amen”s to this article. I’ve known people like this, who don’t own a TV, or who only have a small set somewhere in a back bedroom, and who look down on us whenever we talk about TV shows. And I used to get riled up, but now my standard response is to just ignore them and to feel superior to them because of all the stuff I know they’re missing.

Our house has five TVs, four of them with DVD players attached. Our son has been watching TV since he was one, and most of those extra TVs are so he can watch what he wants without us having to switch off our programs. We just bought a van with a DVD player in the back, and we have a portable DVD that we take into restaurants. We’ve been criticized of using the “Plug In Drug” on our child, and one lady we were out to dinner with actually picked up the DVD player and turned it around so the kids couldn’t see it. So, not only pretentious, but rude too.

And the thing is, the kid doesn’t even watch the TV when it’s on. He’ll ask for a movie, or for a TV show that we’ve burned to DVD for him, and five minutes into it he’s wandered off to play with his trains. So it’s not like the TV is taking over his life. We got him his own computer too. But everyone knows that having a computer just leads to writing (god forbid), and writing on the computer leads to him becoming a blogger. I can’t imagine a worse fate for him.

And here’s the funny thing. We’ll be watching TV, and he’ll actually interrupt our show to ask us to read him a book. So I think he’s going to turn out just fine.