Summer TV

So, American Idol is over (congratulations, Jordin!!), and so are almost all the other shows for the 2006-2007 season. (I have a season finale recap post ready to go up as soon as House airs…oh, and as soon as I actually watch the Lost finale.) What are we going to do over the summer? Well, now that I’ve been converted into a mindless sheep reality TV viewer, I’ll tell you what I’m going to be watching.

So You Think You Can Dance started up on Thursday to fill the performance show gap left by American Idol. I enjoyed this show last summer at least as much as I enjoyed American Idol, even if my level of obsession didn’t quite reach as high. This will be SYTYCD‘s third season, and after the first audition show, there are already two or three people to watch. Of course, I neglected to take notes so I can’t tell you who they are. Ah well. (And this is a good time to state that I will not be live-blogging SYTYCD like I did AI. I enjoyed doing that, but it ended up taking over the blog a lot more than I intended it to.) Anyway, getting to see all the different types of dancers take on different types of dance from ballroom to contemporary to hip-hop is incredibly fun, and I can’t wait for the competition to start. Although the auditions are also fun and tend to be not quite so mean-spirited as Idol‘s can be. So, yeah. Y’all should watch So You Think You Can Dance on Fox, Wednesdays at 7pm (results show Thursday at 8pm).

On the Lot is a new show seeking to find undiscovered filmmakers. It’s produced by big names Mark Burnett and Steven Spielberg, and the two episodes that have aired so far are very encouraging. They chose some fifty filmmakers via a tape submission process last year, and right now judges Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia in Star Wars, also a fiction writer), Garry Marshall (writer-director of Pretty Woman and others), and Brett Ratner (director of X-Men and others) are narrowing the contestants down to eighteen, who will then make short films every week and be voted on or off the show by the American public. The first round of eliminations was the ability to pitch a film based around a given set-up, while the second one put the filmmakers in groups of three to make a 2 1/2 minute short in 24 hours. Impressively for Fox, they’ve put all the short films up at The Lot.com. (In fact, I just noticed they’ve also put up full episodes. Niiiice.) I haven’t watched all the films yet, but the three or four they showed during the episode were quite impressive. I’m really looking forward to see what these filmmakers do throughout the rest of the series, because it seems like a very talented group of people. This one is on Fox on Mondays and Tuesdays at 7pm.

Hell’s Kitchen…yeah, Becky has gotten me to promise to watch this, in exchange for her watching SYTYCD. ;) I’ve seen a few episodes before, but never gotten into it. Maybe this will be the year? It starts on June 4th, Mondays at 8pm, also on Fox.

Project Runway…whenever it starts. I think several people who read my blog already watch this, but I found myself inexplicably fascinated by the show. I’m not a fashion-type person, so I never thought I would like a reality show about competing wannabe fashion designers, but I happened to catch an episode when I was flipping channels one day last year, and was completely hooked. Addictive, these things are. (But don’t get me started on the use of the word “auf,” which makes no sense on a number of levels.)

So that’s my summer. Like I said, I’m not going to blog these while watching every week like I did American Idol, but I’ll probably throw some comments out there every now and then.