My current favorite TV shows

I was blown away when I watched Sherlock the first time. Since then, I have watched all 6 episodes innumerable times! One of the most brilliant shows I've had the pleasure of seeing.

Some people don't like this show. I understand some of the criticism, as it's a procedural, but I like the cast members. And AJ Buckley is worth watching. ;)

Leverage just ended its 5 season run, but it was a fun ride, and enjoyable. The point is to suspend disbelief and go with the flow. A little cliched, but in the end, it's all a game and the good guys always win.

Rachel is different than many of the other politically themed shows around. Each show has its charms and its inner heart, and while I like Ed Schultz's passion, Lawrence O'Donnell's intellectualism, Chris Matthews's sharp interrogation style, Rachel explains things. If there is some news breaking, she will tell you why it's important, and who the players are. She will name names and show connections to other news breakers. In the end, you come away wiser than when you started. She defers to her guests, and makes certain that her own grasp of an issue is correct before going on. She makes it appear easy to be an intelligent, empathetic, and concerned host, of which, fortunately, she is all three.

I think Patrick Jane is still a scoundrel, and that he uses his position at the CBI to his own advantage. Now that I've admitted that, I just enjoy the show. There is no real gravitas to the show--it's essentially a caper show, with a sliver of a procedural in the very middle. It's more about the people in the show, and less about the cases it investigates.

That doesn't make it any less fun. It certainly doesn't take away the tongue-in-cheek tone of it, nor does it undermine it. The show is charming, and that's good. I work best with a diet of character driven shows, and this one certainly fills that requirement.

I loved the old Hawaii Five-O, and I very much like the new one. They're not the same show, nor would I want them to be--the original show dealt with a lot of relatively complex crime situations, while the current version focuses more on high profile cases and politically related cases.

I like the humor on the current one, mainly that between McGarrett and Williams. I enjoy Kamekona and his "get-rich-quick" schemes, and the complicated relationships and characters in the show. I do enjoy the pace, only because I remember how Hawaii made me feel when I was there--energized. I do think the show needs to grow up a bit--after three years, they shouldn't be arguing about the same stale subjects, but move on and talk about a lot of other things, rather than looking like they're reading clips from a script. Natural looking and sounding would make it feel more normal, and enhance it significantly.