TV Mailbag

Here are my answers to some email we've gotten over the summer......


1. What will happen with Glee? --Wes- Philadelphia

Interesting question. They will be faced with a huge problem that has faced high school shows for as long as I can remember......the kids have to graduate at some point. We've seen it with shows like 90210, Dawson's Creek, Saved by the Bell, Friday Night Lights and more. The thing is, if the show is more about the story/plot than the characters, you can graduate kids and introduce new ones. This has worked with Friday Night Lights. FNL has kept around 1 or two graduates who are "townie" now. The show is about football and middle america, not the characters. This is where 90210 failed after high school. The show was about these kids living in Beverly Hills and their lives. Even new character introductions seemed weird on 90210. Hopefully Glee will take the path that has kids graduate and move on. If not the show will just get awkward. The only problem I see is Rachel is clearly the star of the show and replacing her could be tricky. On a side note, will the Asian Guy and the other guy in the glee club get any lines this season?

2. What was on your summer TV? - Galen- Spokane

Big Brother dominated my summer TV. IT was a great season with lost of laughs. House guests like Brittney, Hayden and Lane made me laugh 3 times a week. The Wire also dominated my summer TV. I watched the 1st 3 seasons and came to a realization. I would never want to get stuck in inner city Baltimore. Which led me to this old thought. About 10 years ago I was in Baltimore for a bachelor party. Leaving out names, 2 of the guys brought some girl back from the bar and she wanted drugs. Thinking they were gonna get some action they took her into the inner city to find such drugs. They were gone for a long time. Nervous long. After watching this show I would never let them do this. The show almost makes me scared to go to the good parts of Baltimore, b/c I know the bad parts cant be too far away.

3. What was the best movie of the summer? - Patty, Chicago

You must not know me well at all b/c you know I don't go to the movies.....ever. I take that back. The best movie I saw in the theatre this summer was a kids flick, Cats & Dogs: The Return of Kitty Galore. Why was it the best? Because it was the only one I saw. And I missed a chunk b/c I was chasing Jackson around the theatre and out in the lobby. I do Netflix. Big Fan. I like it so much I would do free advertising. The addition of the ability to watch instantly to your TV with some titles is a great addition.

4. What shows are you excited for this fall? --Kyle, Queens

The Event looks like it could be a cool show. I;ve heard its the new Lost. Big problem there. Nothing will be the new Lost. If you are gonna compare it to Lost you will probably be disappointed. How about we just watch it and see if we like it. Why do things have to be "the next" anything? Can't they just be what they are on their own? I am also curious to see if Modern Family can keep it up. They were the break out show last year. And I feel like the office knocked it out of the park last season. Just funny all the time. There are also like 15 other shows I cant wait to watch, but those are 3 i'm really looking forward too.

5. Will the MTV challenge be awesome as usual? -- Tina, Hoboken

Yes. I saw some sites with cast and there are a lot of people from recent challenges & RW cancun/dc.
This show just gets more and more ridiculous each season. Hopefully there are no gimicks and they just battle it out. I would love to see some Jersey Shore people on it one of these years. Just make it an MTV challenge and people from any mtv show can be on it.

6. When will someone die on a reality show? --Eric, Clark NJ

Quite frankly I'm shocked it has not happened yet. My guess would have to be Biggest Loser. I thought it was gonna happen a few seasons ago when an old man passed out on one of the 1st days. Those people are just not used to that type of activity. Its not a gradual process yet. They work out harder on day 1 than most people who are in decent shape work out. we've seen things happen on Survivor where people are removed and even a guy got thrown off a ledge on Real World D.C. The better question is, will the incident be the end of that TV show?

7. What are your feelings on this season of Jersey Shore? ---Sal-,Pt Pleasant

Pure enjoyment. This season has exceeded my wildest expectations. The episode with Uncle Nino was hysterical. An older man speaking jibberish and laughing....you cannot make that kind of stuff up. I thought this season was gonna flop, i could not have been any more wrong. Now the "Sich" is on DWTS, yes I am taping it just to watch him and the Hasselhoff of course.

8. How bad was the Bachelor Pad? --Ali, San Fancisco

How can a show with such promise turn out so bad. The answer is ABC. All reality shows should be on HBO, Cinemax or Showtime. There had to be so much they could not show. A bunch of single people living in a mansion with booze. It would have been 1000 times more entertaining. This show can be summed up best by my wife. During the finale she stated, "this is the gayest ending to the gayest show this summer"

My diamond shoes are too tight.

I recognize that, Rob and I have not shared our opinions on:

-> The Bachelor Pad- Gia’s strategic mistake is evidence enough of why I should quit my gig and become a professional reality show contestant coach…

-> Jersey Shore- The fact that The Situation makes $5 million a year between the show, appearance fees, and endorsements!

-> The start of the NFL season- I have 100 contradictory opinions about the NFC east.

Or dozens of other blog-worthy topics.

Unfortunately none of those subjects will be addressed today. Instead I’ll complain about a frivolous topic .

I have a cleaning lady, and what once may have been a minor luxury, or expense-able laziness has morphed into an absolute essential. Back in my Richmond days, my roommate Goette and I made the call to Molly Maid and were ecstatic about never having to do the serious clean. “People who say money can’t buy happiness, have never had a maid,” is one of my more favorite Goette quotes. And it’s true. Not having to do boring household chores makes people happy.

Anyhow, flash-forward to my current situation. Lisa and I live busy lives and the onset of her pregnancy and the subsequent birth of our son prompted us to get a cleaning lady.

(And by the way, I do recognize the misogyny of the fact that we only got the cleaning lady once we hit the point where the balance of cleaning would shift more to my side than Lisa’s side. I only bucked up for cleaning lady once my whacko-wife decided that I would have to clean the floors since being with child meant she could not be within a country mile of a chemical. In my defense, it is worth noting that this decision was not made 100% out of my personal desire to avoid housework. It was also driven by the fact that I have no interest in trying to clean to Lisa’s crazy standards. Every one of our wedding vendors openly hated my wife, not cuz she is a bad person, but because she has exceedingly high standards. Hence in order to protect my marriage I chose not to meet Lisa’s standards and simply outsource the problem.)

That said, I can say that after 7 months of not having to once clean a toilet, there is no way I can go back. The very idea of spending part of my free time scrubbing a bathtub is so far from the realm of possibility it is hilarious. To add to that; Lisa is overjoyed, because the woman we have cleaning our house does a great job and seems to put up with Lisa’s craziness.

So the only problem is that I’m pretty sure the cleaning lady is fucking with me.

Yeah that’s right. She is fucking with me. She has decided that there is just something about me that rubs her the wrong way and she is going to use her time in the house to mess around with me. And I know this because she has managed to hone in on only the things that effect me while managing to keep straight Lisa’s 25 itemized lists of whack-job requests. A few pieces of evidence.

Exhibit A: The case of the bathroom floor mats.

We have a two bathroom condo, and for some reason the shower in the master bath is set to low to work for my freakish height. No big deal, I use the other bathroom and it actually makes mornings more convenient. Of course, somehow the cleaning lady deduced that the hallway bathroom was a “Mike-Only” zone and was an ideal target for her hijinks!

So here is the thing, it’s a simple straightforward bathroom. Sink, toilet, tub. There are three corresponding bath mats. I leave the mat for the bath tub hanging over the shower, which really leaves two rugs with two places to go – in front of the sink and in front of the toilet. I’m not sure how it is possible to mix this up, yet every single time she puts them back in some new combination, pattern, or formation. Seriously. Every time she mixes it up, and never does she put it back the way we originally had it. I pointed this out to Lisa , and she can confirm this bizarre unspoken disagreement. I can imagine the cleaning lady looking at my logical arrangement of bathmats and thinking, “I know every time for the past 7 months he has preferred this formation, but I really think I can do better.” Or maybe she is thinking, “Screw that guy, lets see how he likes this.”

What puzzles me most is that it actually takes effort to put the bathmats in a different order. It’s easier to clean underneath them, and put them right back in the same spot. But sure enough, yesterday I came home from work and was greeted by one bathmat stretched diagonal across the room and the other one tucked into a corner.

Now I’m sure you are thinking that I am a bit obsessed and overly concerned about the arrangement of my bathmats. And are equally convinced that this perfectly nice cleaning lady is not even remotely thinking about screwing with me and this whole thing is in my head. And I might think you were correct, if the evidence had not begun to increase.

Exhibit B: The case of the kitchen knives.

I like to cook, and in fact am pretty good at it. So much so, that I do 70 plus percent of the cooking in the house. That of course makes the kitchen and the organization of the countless array of kitchen doodads, tools, and paraphernalia my domain. Of course somehow, our fiendish cleaning lady snuffed this factoid out and decided to hit me where it hurts.

As always it started very innocently. I opened the cabinet with the plates and found them all neatly stacked with one wine glass perched atop the pile. When I asked my wife what was going on, she replied that the cleaning lady had been nice enough to empty the dishwasher. I thought it odd that the same woman who dusted the huge shelf of hanging wine glasses over the bar, couldn’t figure out “hey this is where they keep wine glasses.” But I let it go.

Then came the knives. After a day of not being able to locate our very large and very sharp chef’s knife, I was starting to get annoyed. It wasn’t in the dishwasher, nor was it in the prominently displayed knife block. Lisa mentioned my nemesis had been by recently, and I began to have an inkling of what she might have been up too. Sure enough hidden in the classic kitchen junk drawer was my chef’s knife just waiting for an ill-paced hand to land on its blade. Yup this was getting personal. No longer was the cleaning lady content with annoyance, now she was out for blood.

Exhibit C: The patio furniture.

This is where she got creative. In fact if she wasn’t my sworn enemy, this might be where I would give our cleaning lady a nod of credit. If this were a Hollywood movie this incident would be the scene where our hero (me) looks at the audaciousness of the crime perpetuated by our villain (the cleaning lady) and has that slight grin showing that there is slight admiration at the audacity of the crime.

What happened you ask? Well as always it started out simply. Lisa asked the cleaning lady to spend some extra attention on our patio and give it a quick clean. Of course my nemesis took one look at the Patio and realized it was an ideal area for her greatest caper yet. Having infiltrated my life she must have realized that I live a very urban lifestyle- Live in a city, take mass transport to work, work in a concrete jungle… One of the few areas I have of outdoor space is our little patio. Hence, Lisa and I in some wild decorating plan have the large patio chairs facing away from the building looking out toward the backyard. Our cleaning lady thought this was just plain wrong and went to the effort of re-organizing the furniture and lifting the very heavy patio furniture so that they faced directly into the brick wall of our building. It really had to be seen to be believed. Lisa thought it was so funny that she left it that way so I could see it when I got home from work.

At this point I am prepared for anything she might do to me. Every other week I come home prepared to be shocked by some slight bit of domestic sabotage.

Baby’s bathtub precariously perched in a place it would only fall on me- I saw it coming.

Unplugging the cable TV that is hidden in our bedroom closet- a minor setback but I was able to recover.

That said, let this post stand as a warning. If I ever go missing please place my cleaning lady at the top of the suspect list.