John From Cincinnati: still terrible, but now somewhat easier to spell. It’s remarkable how little interaction the characters engage in. The show is mostly composed of aimless soliloquies. Admittedly, there will sometimes be some yelling about how one person is a disappointing son/mother/father/husband/wife, and the other is a disappointing opposite-of-that. But these fights quickly devolve into the characters speaking past one another, and then it’s back to spouting disconnected profundities as if I was paying $10 a month to watch ponderous student films with strangely high production values.

Still, tonight was an improvement over week one, primarily because last week I missed the intro and so was pleasantly surprised to hear my favorite post-Clash Joe Strummer song being used for the opening music. Good job, HBO. Way to play songs I like when I’m not riding my bike back from U Street. Keep making those kinds of creative tweaks and you just might have another hit on your hands.

Despite this forward progress, John From Cincinnati remains a bad TV show. But I’m quickly developing a sense of apathetic tolerance toward it, like scar tissue forming around a foreign object (in my Sunday TV schedule). The human body, and in particular its desire not to get up from the couch, is an amazing thing.

Flight of the Conchords: highly promising! Back in college I loved Tenacious D, but have been increasingly embarrassed about it ever since their album came out — it turned out that what I thought was a pretty funny joke wasn’t actually the joke being told by the people doing the telling. These days I’m older, more sedate and, let’s face it, quite a bit wussier. I’m glad to see that parodic folk-pop has finally caught up with my slowed-down outlook. Flight of the Conchords : Tenacious D :: VH1 : MTV. Except that makes it sound like I don’t like the show and/or that I enjoy like VH1. I assure you that neither is the case.

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