For the first time in a month, Jason and Joel are on their own, with no guest to use as a crutch. No worries; it’s not like we forgot how to talk. In fact, there was a ton of stuff to talk about this week, as the TV News Fairy blessed us with a bushel of topics right before we turned the microphones on:
- The Office is mercifully coming to an end at the end of the season, and we talk about why this is a good thing for a show that has lost its way (and we’re excited to see episodes about the documentary crew whose been filming Dunder Mifflin for nine years),
- With The Office and 30 Rock dropping out this year, we speculate on what comedies can take their place on NBC’s Thursday lineup. We definitely think the new Michael J. Fox show is a strong candidate,
- Then we talked about the lay-offs at The Tonight Show, and whether this was a case of Jay Leno doing just enough to cover his ass from a PR perspective,
- Which leads us to the big news about late night: Jimmy Kimmel moves to 11:35 PM in January. We talk about the move, what it may mean to the late night landscape, how long Jay and Dave are going to hang around, and why ABC is making this move now,
- Not to neglect Nightline, we talk about what the future of the show might be now that it’s been moved out of the timeslot its occupied for 33 years,
- We then talk a little about the news that Michael Strahan (yes, that Michael Strahan) will get the permanent seat next to Kelly Ripa,
- Then we talk about actual shows, discussing the “summer finale” of Bunheads, and how that would have been a bummer of an ending if it hadn’t gotten picked up, and why men seem to be more OK with this show than they were with Gilmore Girls,
- We talk about MTV’s Inbetweeners, and how it’s a pretty funny and relatively faithful recreation of the British original,
- Finally, we discuss our challenge show, BBC America’s Copper, and why people need to stop comparing post-Civil War shows to Deadwood,
You can listen to the podcast above (if you don’t hear anything, fiddle with the volume slider), download it via this link, subscribe to our RSS feed, or subscribe via iTunes. You can also find us on the Stitcher radio app for smartphones and iPads.
By the way, the bumper music is “Trevor Trailer Trash” from the late, great band Cropduster.
Joel Keller
Joel Keller is one of the co-founders of Antenna Free TV and co-hosts the weekly AFT Podcast. A long time ago, he left a career rebooting servers to write about TV and other fun stuff (though his ulterior motive was to write off his cable on his income taxes). At the time, he was writing for the late, great site TV Squad, where he eventually became editor-in-chief. Since those heady days, he's written about TV and other topics for The New York Times, The A.V. Club, TheAtlantic.com, Fast Company's Co.Create, Vulture, Zap2It and elsewhere.
