Watching TV

Here's the skinny on some of the TV shows I've been watching or have watched recently:

• I Rock-Very funny Australian TV show about indy rock and roll bands trying to make the big time.  It's got all the classic rock archetypes, the narcissistic lead singer, the alcoholic doofus drummer, the spunky rock chick, the loyal but clueless girlfriend, and the crapped on band member who gives it his best but still gets shit on by the lead singer.  This one is six episodes long and I caught it on HuluPlus.
• Katy Brand's Big Ass Show- I like Ms. Brand a lot.  I find her sexy and funny.  However I find some of her characters to be one note and annoying.  She makes fun female celebs and in most cases justifiably so.  But she then falls into the same trap that has vexed many a modern comedian, she relies too heavily on repeating the same joke about those characters.  Her Kate Winslet trying desperately to be 'normal' was funny once, amusing twice, but by the third time I wanted to shake Ms. Brand and tell her to move the hell on because she'd mined all the humor out of that vein.  I love her parodies of Amy Winehouse and Lily Allen.  I think her 'Sadie and Stella' sketches are hugely funny and I'm in love with her 'Jolie of the Jungle.'  Some of the other stuff needs work though.
• Grease Monkeys-Holy shit, I'm three episodes into this stereotype smashing show about a dysfunctional Indian family in Manchester who own a car lot and a garage and I fucking love it to death.  It's got my long time pretend Indian girlfriend Archie Panjabi in it, so you know it has to be good.  This show doesn't make saints out of the Indians in it, in fact, it shows them to be troubled, drug addled, and conniving.  As pretty and good as Archie is in this show, the fella playing her bastard brother Dave, real name Ace Bhatti, is a revelation.  He's the first Indian bad boy character I've ever seen on a Brit-com.  He drinks, drugs, cheats, steals, lies, beats off, and tries to get away with murder, and that's all in the first three episodes.  I can't wait to see the rest of this show on HuluPlus.
• Friday Night Lights-I missed this show on purpose when it first aired on NBC.  I didn't want to get into another hour long drama and I didn't want to sit through all those endless promos for NBC's shit shows, so I stayed away.  Now on Netflix I don't have to watch any commercials and I watch it on my schedule.  And the hype about this show as right, it's very good.  I'm not a huge fan of Texas or of football players in general, but I am a casual football fan and I spent my teenage years in a town that was pretty damn small and high school football was a huge thing in it, so I can empathize with a lot of what's going down in this series.  I'm eight episodes in and I'm hooked.  And all the female eye candy doesn't hurt either.   Minka Kelly, hot.  Adrianne Palicki, super hot.  Connie Britton, full grown and super hot.  I'll watch this show at my leisure but I'll make sure I watch it all the way through.
• Sons of Tuscon- Mildly funny show about a goofy man child pretending to be the father to three boys.  
• Foyle's War- This leisurely paced series of World War 2 era mysteries first aired on PBS over here in the USA and they rightfully became a hit.  The plots take their time unfolding and Michael Kitchen as Christopher Foyle, the series lead, is unflappably good.  He's a but laconic at times and at others he's more of a mirror for other characters but all in all it works.  And these being originally produced by the BBC, they feature a raft of actors you've seen in other British productions.  Also, Honeysuckle Weeks, is possibly the cutest thing ever to come out of the British isles.  I've seen the first three and I'll get around to seeing the rest on Netflix, but I'll do it at my leisure.
• Vera- Brenda Blethyn plays a hard bitten northern police detective in this police procedural.  She likes her drink and to do things in an unorthodox manner.  I like this series because I'm a huge fan of Ms. Blethyn, but I find some of the accents unintelligible.  I've seen the first episode and I'll watch the rest eventually.