Tuesday, July 21, 2009

The TV MegaSite's Blog Post #71

Hi to everyone! Yahoo 360 went under, I guess, so this is our new blog. I am not too disappointed, though...it was not a very good service. This one is way better.

The old blog posts are now at my Yahoo profile. That's what I get for not updating my blog..LOL.

Usually I talk first about our site, and then I talk about TV. Our site continues to do well in terms of visitors and traffic, and adding content. All that is good.

We just got some new guys to join us in writing AMC and Y&R summaries, so that is great!! So now I just have to find someone to write B&B Tues.-Thurs., and Guiding Light...I try to write them whenever I get a chance, but I have so many other things to do...

So I hope to find some time this week to post for more help!

We did have a financial partner, but he has had to bail out for now, so I am back to financing things on my own again. So please, go to our site right now and click on the ads! That helps us out a lot. Or if you have some extra change, please click on the "donate" box and send us some money via Paypal. I don't keep it - it all goes towards the site's bills.

I hope I can always afford to keep the site going with all the tons of information and other fun stuff we put out...knock on wood!!

We still have many great volunteers who help out every day on the site. You can see all the new stuff that's put up on our What's New page.

We had a volunteer, Laurie, who was a big help for a while, running all the abc soap transcripts and making daily screencaps...but she quit, so now we do our own. Juanita has been a god send in doing the screen caps...

Anyway, the plan when I had a financial partner was to pay someone to re-design the site for us, put it in a Content Management System so it would be easier to update, and then we'd try to sell it. I am still hoping to do that, but now I have to do it all for free (or at least cheap).

I have been working on a new design for our site. Let me know what you think of it! It's a work in work in progress, though...the new logo came from Dennis, who was the winner in our Logotournament contest. That was a pretty cool and fun thing, to see all these people make logos for our site. I am not a designer, so this was very helpful.

I know, there are a lot of ads, but they pay the bills! Without them, we couldn't have such a large site.

I am still looking into getting a Content Management System. Our webhost installed Drupal and Webgui on our site so I could test them out. I am not a programmer, either, so they seemed really hard for me. I might have someone to help me get the site set up in Webgui...waiting for something first. Otherwise, we might just stick with Frontpage since it is very useful to us writers who are not coders :)

Got any questions about our site? Any problems with it? Any complaints? Send them my way!

It's summer, so of course our TV options seem limited. Well, they're really not. There are tons of new shows out there. You just have to look a little bit.

First there's the daytime soaps, which are on year round. You might think, "oh, they are stupid" or "they are for women", but you would be wrong. It's true that soaps do tend to be romantic, but they are now targeting young men as much as everyone else (advertising dollars). They are also not slow like they used to be. I will grant you that some of them are not so good, but it just varies depending on the writers. I'm told that Guiding Light is very good right now (now that it's being canceled!). I know that Young & The Restless is very entertaining.

If you like lots of action or adventure, watch General Hospital. It hasn't been about the hospital much in a few decades; it's kind of like The Sopranos Lite. If you like melodrama and romance, try The Bold & Beautiful or One Life to Live. If you like gay storylines, well - As The World Turns has Luke and Noah; One Life to Live has Fish and Kyle; Young & The Restless has Phillip, Rafe and (sorta) Adam; and Guiding Light has Olivia and Natalia (AKA Otalia). One of these shows should have something for you unless you really just hate dramas. The great thing about soaps, too, is you really don't have to watch every day if you don't want to. They do a good job of catching you up.

Now to Primetime...

I really enjoyed watching "Harper's Island", which just concluded on CBS. It was a great horror miniseries. They didn't call it a miniseries, but that's basically what it was. It was like 14 parts spread out over as many weeks, and it ended in mid-July. It was a whodunnit/horror story. They did a great job with it. I was a bit disappointed in the end by who the killer was, but that's because they did such a great job writing the characters and sucking me in. The writing and acting were excellent. You can catch it over on cbs.com if you missed it. It was not canceled- it was never meant to be more than this short miniseries. I say, write more!! And put them on a night like Saturday so they won't have any competition!

"Burn Notice" is back on USA, and soon "Monk" will be returning as well. These are two of my favorite cable shows. I have also been enjoying "Royal Pains" on USA and "The Cleaner" on A&E. I missed "The Cleaner"'s first season, so I have been watching those in reruns. It is, pardon the expression, an addictive show. I got to talk to star Benjamin Bratt, as well as the man whose life the show is based on (by phone), so that was awesome. Syfy has a good new show, "Warehouse 13", so that has been fun to watch. It's kind of like the X-Files but more light-hearted and fun. The guy who is the hero in that reminds me a lot of the actor who plays Jack on ATWT.

Speaking of "Royal Pains", the guy who plays the brother on that show can be really enjoying. I hope the writers keep toning him down. I know several people who are annoyed by him. It's definitely the way they write him because he was never this annoying when he was on the sitcom "Joey".

I am a real TV addict, so I never run out of anything to watch (that is both good and bad!). I have tons of soaps to catch up on, on my DVR. I download "True Blood" online, so I have that to watch (one of my favorite shows). If you like vampire shows, you gotta check it out. The first season is out now on DVD.

Oh, and speaking of DVD's, I have tons of those to watch, too!! Okay, now I feel pressured....LOL.

There are just so many choices now, and on top of the TV, DVR, DVD's etc. you also have so many online places to watch now. It's unreal, isn't it? Sometimes it seems like, the fall season is just too much. I think that may be why people don't watch as much network tv any more. There are just too many choices. I have two DVR's, so my other one is filled up with a whole season of shows I haven't yet watched, like Life, 30 Rock, Reaper, Samantha Who, and more. Who knows if I'll ever get around to watching them?

I know I don't talk much about reality TV. If you like reality TV and want to talk about it, please feel free to leave comments here. Or if you want to really talk about it all the time, let me know and you can become a guest columnist. I just don't watch reality shows. I don't watch anything that's not fiction. There's just not enough hours in my life.

My husband and MIL both watch a lot of news, which I don't watch, either, so I hear a lot of that. She also watches MASH reruns a lot, and he watches a lot of sports as well. Unless I have my earphones in (and sometimes even then), I have to see and hear it all.

I don't get reality shows. To me it's like watching bad actors in a trashy, boring soap opera or game show. I don't like "real people" (not that these are real people, either). I watch TV and movies to escape from reality. I like to watch drama and comedy and good acting and great writing. Reality shows have none of that. They also seem to celebrate the lowest common denominator - trashy people saying mean things or hurting each other. Ugh. It's just dull.

It's not JUST reality TV, I don't watch any non-fiction. When I was younger and had fewer channels (and more time), I used to watch game shows, variety shows, and talk shows sometimes. Now I have to be more selective.

But all TV is good TV, and I have nothing against non-fiction shows, per se. I think the trend is going away, though, from reality tv. Only the best ones are surviving. I think the networks are realizing that people only watch certain ones now. They are not filling out their schedules with them as much as they used to. Thank goodness! I am sure they will still have them as long as they are profitable and don't cost too much.

Have a good week!

Suzanne