Best of 2009 — Television

So 2009 was pretty much dominated by what dominated in 2008, and 2007, and 2006…  Reality TV and crime drama were big over the past year, and if anyone tried to put anything else on, it was pretty much ignored.

It doesn’t seem like there’s much good stuff on TV anymore, which is actually a good thing.  If my television schedule was full, there’s no way I could play any video games.  My top three shows of 2009 were:

3) Jeopardy!

What can I say?  It’s a fast-paced show where the entire episode is like a Lightning Round.  Whereas on other shows, you’re given time to think about what your answer is, Jeopardy! doesn’t grant you more than a few seconds to come up with the answer.  With up to 61 trivia questions an episode (122 an hour!), it’s like many rounds of Trivial Pursuit, rolled up into one.

For the 2009/2010 season, Jeopardy! has started a season-long celebrity invitational tournament, which will air one episode a month, and the winner of the tournament will receive a million dollars to donate to the charity of their choice.  Jerry Orbach would’ve so won this if he was still alive.

Note that this show only got third place.  It lost marks because they got rid of this sound effect and replaced it with a rather dumb-sounding one (the new sound effect can be heard about one and a half minutes into the first video, above):

I was very disappointed.

2) Numb3rs

Whoa, how did this show get the #2 spot?  There must be something made of even more awesome in the #1 spot, right?

This show gets the number two spot, not only because it’s my current favourite show on television (mathematics solves crime!), but also because of the sequence of episodes that ended season five.

In “The Fifth Man“, Don Eppes gets stabbed and his brother Charlie doesn’t rest (and I suspect he doesn’t eat and he hands off all his lectures to other professors) until he finds the guy responsible.  Then in “Disturbed”, Charlie shows signs of hyper vigilance, and it’s thought that he’s just dealing with what happened to Don in his own way (considering that in the past, he tried to solve P vs. NP to deal with upsetting situations), until he declares that he’s discovered a serial killer who doesn’t act like a serial killer.  Turns out he’s right.  “Greatest Hits” is an episode featuring Henry Winkler’s character Roger Bloom, so I was largely unimpressed, but the last 30 seconds of the episode seem like they’re leading up to a major step forward in Charlie and Amita’s relationship, until Amita is kidnapped and the kidnappers try to run Charlie over, to be continued.  In “Angels and Devils“, Charlie manages to roll out of the way and call Don, who gets pretty much every law enforcement agency ever on the case, and would’ve called upon God Himself to smite the kidnappers if he had the authority to, because that’s how close the two brothers are.  In no time at all, the kidnappers’ van is being followed, and there’s nowhere for them to go.  So they crash the van on purpose and blow it up, with everyone inside.  The episode gets even better from there, until at the very end, Charlie proposes to a very much alive Amita and the episode fades out before Amita can respond.

Wow, the title of that video displays even more atrocious spelling than Charlie’s.

1) Canada’s Worst Driver 5

I think this is the first season that I felt a lot of sympathy for some of the drivers.  Not only that, but some valuable lessons were learned, sometimes rather poignantly.  This was also the first time that someone was nominated as a bad driver for driving too slow, and it was pointed out on the show that driving too slow is very much a ticketable offense.  Well, in Canada it is.  I don’t know whether it’s the same in the United States, or elsewhere in the world for that matter.

In some cases, bad driving isn’t always the fault of the driver.  One of the nominees was constantly being bullied by her husband, and this caused her self esteem to drop and she would constantly make mistakes.  It was a vicious cycle, and at one point, the host had enough of it and put together a recording of everything that the husband had said to her.  Then he i
nvited the husband along and had him drive around and was talking to him about how he treats his wife.  Then he invited the husband to listen to the recording while he drove.  When he started listening to himself, noticing how he talked to his wife, it shocked and devastated him.  Later on, after the drive, he broke into tears.  The change afterwards was dramatic, and it was in that very same episode that his wife was declared not to be Canada’s worst driver, and was graduated off of the show.

Another driver thought that it was all a game.  She treated all her accidents flippantly, and didn’t seem to care about the carnage she’s caused on the road.  During the taping of an episode, she got the worst phone call in the world.  Her brother-in-law had been out on his motorcycle, and someone drove right into his path and killed him.  A bad driver killed the brother-in-law of a bad driver.  Devastated, she was allowed to go home to grieve with her family, and out of respect for the tragedy, the remainder of the episode (there were only a few minutes left anyway) was left as a tribute to the fallen motorcyclist.  A sad and rather frustrating footnote: the bad driver who killed him got to walk away with a $150 fine for a moving violation.  This is especially infuriating because a similar thing almost happened to me when I was trying to cross a street.  Is my life really worth $150?

And also, in the very last episode, perhaps the best line delivered in any show this year: when one of the bad drivers nearly mowed down an elderly lady in Toronto, the host cried out, “Watch out for grandma!”, and the lady commented to the driver, “No wonder you’re Canada’s worst driver”.

Unfortunately, this is a Canada-only show.  Sorry.

Honourable Mention: Medium

This was a good episode:

Honourable Mention: Burn Notice

Only on SuperChannel… oh, and a little network called USA.  Ha, promo fail.  (All the promos for the originating network that I wanted to use had someone else’s website plastered all over the top.)

I’m still catching up on season two episodes, so I haven’t even started season three.  Since I’ve not seen any episodes broadcast in 2009, I can’t comment on this show.  But I’ve enjoyed it in the past, so it gets the honourable mention.  Now I go back to gaming!