TV Musings

1. For some reason on Wednesday night, my DVR stopped recording Lost about 4 minutes before it ended. Now, it normally knows when the show runs long, but for whatever reason, it did not know it this week. Two notes about this: One, am I wrong to frequently refer to my DVR as a TiVo? I find that TiVo has become a generic term like xerox or coke. It certainly is weird to say that I DVRed a show, but TiVo works great as a verb. Second, thank you ABC. Thanks to their making available certain shows for free on line, I was able to watch those final four minutes. Not much happened, but I was glad I could see it.

2. The Office has become my favorite comedy of TV. There are few shows that are laugh out loud funny (on a repeated basis) and then extremely poignant. In some ways, I prefer Michael Scott (Steve Carrell) to David Brent (Ricky Gervais), and I loved the British version of the show. But what I love about Michael Scott is that as obnoxious as he is, we also see both how sad he is (including his childhood in one painful moment) but, at times, why he is the office manager. In the episode where he hooked up with Jan, his ability to work a deal was made apparent (at, of course, Chili's) and he later did extremely well in protecting Jan. She actually brings out the bets in him, and she likes him more than even he realizes as we saw in the season finale. I look forward to season 3.