For Better or Werts : TV Worth Watching

CLICK HERE: A TV blog too good to be true (but it is!)

If there's one thing I really hate, it's reading a TV blog entry I wish I'd written.

And if there's one thing I really, really hate, it's reading one of those every day.

Too bad for me I'm hooked on Jaime J. Weinman's TV Guidance blog on Canada's Maclean's magazine site. Weinman writes about "new shows, reruns and forgotten classics" (as his page logo promises), but mostly he writes with aplomb about the first-person experience of watching TV, which has always been one of my passions.

I love quality shows, of course. But I also love absolute dreck and inexplicable obsessions.

I love deconstructing shows that lose their way along the way, or find it.

I love saluting the people who make TV great or aggravating (or both).

I love discovering vintage TV hallucinations.

I love little tube-as-life anecdotes.

And of course, I love just riffing on my favorite medium because it's so gosh-darn wacky!

Weinman not only does all of the above, he does it in one week of TV Guidance. Look back just a tad further, and he's eyeing TV DVD, the re-invention of Jay Leno (watch NBC tonight to see the latest incarnation), "shows you liked better after crass re-tooling," and one of my own personal obsessions, film vs. videotape. (Please tell me you can tell the difference, too.)

He seems to read every other cool TV blog, and to have an encyclopedic TV memory, not to mention a wonderfully intimate yet detached writing style, all of which only make me exceedingly more jealous.

But I love TV Guidance so much, I can't resist sharing its fun. Just promise you'll come back to TV Worth Watching, too.

At least Weinman doesn't make any nightly viewing recommendations.

Thank goodness he's Canadian.

2 Comments

metsfanatic said:

Thanks Diane for recommending this blog. It is great. Not only can I tell the difference between film and videotape, I love it when a filmed show inserts videotape when one of the characters is on some TV news show.

September 14, 2009 2:19 PM

Toby O'B said:

Thanks for bringing this to our attention!

September 15, 2009 4:40 PM

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Diane Werts has been glued to the tube since she can remember, growing up in a household where the TV came on first thing in the morning and stayed on till bedtime and beyond. She worked for the USA Film Festival, then for The Dallas Morning News writing about everything from Shakespeare to macrame art to rock music (and has the hearing loss to prove it). She moved to New York's Newsday to edit their glossy TV magazine, then returned to writing about television, specializing in its stranger permutations. She's a past president of the Television Critics Association.

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