I'm a bit late, but here's your TiVo alerts for this week. The season finales are in major full swing, which leaves me with mixed feelings. On the one hand, this makes for great TV fare. On the other, it just reminds me of the dry months ahead. Plus, the summer months are usually when I end up getting hooked on other shows I didn’t watch before—which is a bad thing as I can’t even keep up with what’s on my TiVo now (those two episodes of ER I alerted you to earlier are still unwatched). Sigh. Anyway, onto this week’s God-talk TiVo alerts:Lost Wednesday, May 17 (ABC 9/8c). This episode continues the story already started (see this blog’s thoughts on last week’s episode here). The writers are promising that whole faith thing will play prominently in the season’s final episodes. (By the way, multiples sources are reporting that J.J. Abrams (Lost’s creator) is producing the next Star Trek film.)
10.5 Apocalypse Sunday and Monday, May 21 and 23 (NBC 9/8c). Another TV disaster flick, this one following up 2004’s 10.5. According to TV Guide, it “wastes no time in laying waste to the Hoover Dam and Mount Rushmore with eruptions and sinkholes while threatening to dive the United States down the middle. On the junk-food scale: a 6.5.” Why is a disaster flick on the God-talk list? See my previous TiVo alert.
Broken Trail June 25 and 26 (AMC). I saw the preview for this Western saga during the previews before Mission Impossible: 3 (a good thrill ride, but I actually expected more out of Abrams). TV Guide reports it will be a “four-hour horse opera set in 1897. Robert Duval, fondly remembered for Lonesom Dove (arguably the best TV Western ever), and Sideways costar Thomas Haden Church star as Print Ritter and his nephew Tom Harte—a couple of hard-bitten cowpokes who plan to drive a large herd of horses 1,000 miles from Oregon to Wyoming. Their arduous trek gets complicated when they come across a passel of young Chinese women who’ve been sold as sex slaves and are being transported to a mining town. Naturally, the gentlemen try to save the ladies . . . . The theme of this story, says [Director Walter] Hill, ‘is that the good deeds we do have an effect. Like all Westerns, it’s elemental.’” (And that, my friends, is one of the reasons Broken Trail makes the God-talk list.) During the MI:3 preview (which you can see here), Duvall calls it the third in a trilogy of films for him, the first being Lonesome Dove and the second being Open Range (which I absolutely loved and does a wonderful job with the redemption theme). He also quipply observed the Western is to America as Shakespeare is to Britain. While my pretentious graduate school education screams against this, I can’t help but whole-heartedly cheer. I love Westerns, and this one will be a must-see for this God-talk blog.
Wants some good Hollywood flicks on TV? Then avoid Open Water (Tuesday, TMC), unless you want to get plain depressed for no reason. Instead, try Norma Rae (Thursday, MAX), X2: X-Men United (Friday, FOX—and find out why comic book movies are so cool and make this blog's must-watch list), Batman (Saturday, MAX—and ditto, but it isn’t as good as Batman Begins, which is on Christianity Today’s 2005 Top Redeeming Films), or War of the Worlds (Saturday MAX).
(Image: Patrick Q at flikr.com)