It takes a lot to make me stop watching a show. Evidence: I have watched every single episode of ER since its premiere. IN FUCKING 1994.

But I’m with Alan Sepinwall on this one: Heroes has lost me for good, and not because of anything in particular, but because of the sum total of its stupidity.

I was trying to explain why I still like Lost but am deleting my Heroes season pass to a friend, since both shows are often horrifically confusing and unnecessarily convoluted. It comes down to this: Motivation.

Characters on Lost have either had slowly evolving motivations or still are motivated by many of the same things that they were at the outset of the show. Most of the characters on Heroes seem to be motivated by whatever fits the plot that “chapter”, or even that week.

It becomes impossible to care who’s doing what or why when a character’s motivation can change so frequently and so capriciously, and you find yourself wondering why the hell you’re still watching this show in the first place.

It says a lot about how wrong you’ve gone when an unemployed person with nothing but time to kill decides that watching your show is not worth her time.

Credit to Sars of Tomato Nation for coining the phrase “DVR Break-Up“. Brilliant in its simplification of the process of deleting all recorded episodes of a show, then torpedoing the season pass. Amusing that she inaugurated it with Heroes six months ago, because she does not posess the patience (read: stupidity) that I do.

Spoilers for the last couple episodes of Grey’s Anatomy and The L Word, in the unlikely event that anyone who gives half a shit about either show hasn’t either seen the episodes or heard about them.

There are many shows that, for whatever reason, have their characters do things that are either entirely out of character, wholly implausible, or both. Usually this reason is that the writers have run out of ideas, but sometimes they’re just weird.

The question becomes: How do you address this within the show? Two shows I watch have pulled really odd and implausible plot twists out of their asses, and have gone with entirely different tacks in terms of how the other characters react to the weirdness.

Grey’s Anatomy has had Katherine Heigl’s character, Izzie, fucking the ghost of her dead ex-boyfriend. Like, having actual sex with a ghost. No other characters find out about it for a couple episodes, and when Izzie’s actual living, breathing, boyfriend, Alex, finds out about it, his reaction is roughly, “Whatever.”

The whole fucking-a-ghost thing is weird and implausible enough on its own, but for Alex to not really have a reaction to it made it that much stupider. As a doctor, he should at least be concerned about someone having massive hallucinations. As her boyfriend, he should really be concerned that she’s cheating on him with said hallucinations.

The whole thing’s just been handled atrociously, and what’s worse is that it’s STILL dragging out. There was some resolution in the last episode (apparently, Dead Boyfriend came back to tell Izzie that she’s sick, but he wasn’t an omniscient enough ghost to actually tell her what she has), but there’s still a lot of unraveling that arc has to do.

Meanwhile, The L Word, usually a show I still watch because it’s grown so cartoonishly bad it’s actually funny, actually handled an out-of-character moment for two of its characters really, really well.

Jenny is the resident flake/screenwriter, Shane is the resident seductress/slut. The characters have been good friends for several seasons, but apparently Jenny decided she was in love with Shane, and at the end of the episode two Sundays ago, declared said love.

Shane reacted to this by sleeping with her, eliciting a collective, “What the FUCK?!” from the lesbians and friends of lesbians who still watch this show, because such a pairing really makes no sense for either character. Even in a show infamous for lack of continuity and character inconsistency, this stood out as really bizarre.

But the payoff to the hookup that happens in the first few minutes of the next episode made me completely ignore its irrationality. Alice, a friend of both Jenny and Shane, comes over the morning after the ridiculous hookup, and has an awesome moment of revelation where she realizes Jenny and Shane had sex.

The camera pushes in on her face like in a Hitchcock movie where someone’s just realized they know who the killer is. Due credit to Leisha Hailey, who plays Alice: The way her facial expression morphs into a truly horrified grimace as the camera pushes in is absolutely hysterical.

Alice immediately excuses herself to use the restroom, and sends out a freaked-out mass text to all their mutual friends. The montage of reactions (one person falls off a treadmill, one person busts out laughing in the middle of a meeting, one person even gives an out loud, “What the fuck?”) is truly the best sequence they’ve done in years.

And why was this so funny? Because they took the bomb they just dropped on the audience and showed that even within the show, people were completely flummoxed and thrown by the development, just as much as the audience was. They effectively told the audience, “We know what we’re doing is insane. Stick with us on this one,” by making every other character in the show a proxy for the audience’s reaction.

Now I will grant the Grey’s folks one thing: They have to fill 22 episodes, where as the L Word writers only had to fill 8 episodes for their truncated final season. Part of the reason the L Word writers may have moved to address the issue so quickly was that they really didn’t have time not to.

Whatever the reason, it’s a fascinating contrast in how writers approach plotlines that take both the characters and the audience out of their comfort zones.

Things are still batty at work, but at least I have a whole weekend this weekend. I have taken advantage of it by sleeping an enormous amount and swimming 3km this morning.

So, in the continuing spirit of not really feeling like doing anything of substance, I present some weekend randomness.

First, a video from the Chicago NBC station that is quite possibly the most hilarious “bored interns with animation software run amok” bit I’ve ever seen:

Then there’s this New York Times article about hilariously inappropraite place names in Britain. I really want to purchase a t-shirt of that map they have of numerous places in Britain with such names.

And last but not least, the show I’ve been working on since September premieres tomorrow night after the Closer, so check your local listings for what time that is in your area – note that on the West Coast TNT’s HD feed is still on Eastern time. Please watch, especially if you’re, say, a Nielsen household.

As someone working in scripted TV production…holy shit, this is bad news: NBC is replacing its entire 10pm hour with a nightly prime-time hour of Jay Leno.

If you look purely at the numbers, it absolutely makes sense for fourth-place NBC, whose ratings have completely tanked this year due to the fact that they put on some atrocious, atrocious television shows this fall, and who just completely gutted the ranks of their execs:

Though Mr. Leno will command an enormous salary, probably more than $30 million a year, the cost of his show will be a fraction of what a network pays for dramas at 10 p.m. Those average about $3 million an episode. That adds up to $15 million a week to fill the 10 p.m. hour. Mr. Leno’s show is expected to cost less than $2 million a week.

So let’s run some math here. Leno does about 46 weeks worth of shows, and at $2 mil a week that’s about $92 mil a year. Scripted shows do 22 episodes each, at 5 per week and $3 mil apiece that’s $330 mil a year. This change stands to save NBC Universal $238 million annually.

Let me repeat that: Paying Jay Leno $30 million a year will save NBC Universal almost a quarter billion dollars a year.

And for those of us on the scripted side of things, where network work has already been getting squeezed out by cheaper reality shows, this is a HUGE blow. Work has already been slowing because of the recession and the impending SAG strike.

For NBC to summarily declare they’re going to give up 5 hours a week is a brutal addition to the litany of problems facing everyone who works in scripted television. There are already too many people and not enough work to go around, and this is just going to make it infinitely worse.

I’m hopeful that cable’s going to continue to pick up the slack, but cable shows are, unfortunately, usually quite a bit less stable employment than network. Cable shows do 13-15 episodes in a normal season, or about 5-7 months worth of work. Networks shoot 22-24, or about 9-10 months worth of work.

Being on a good show on a network is almost like having a real job: If you’re in the office, you work almost year-round. If you’re in cable, you tend to bounce more from show to show, and it’s harder to form a team because everyone’s getting rotated into different schedules.

Anyway, we’ll see what happens. The common thread I’m finding in most commentary is that it’s a plan born of desperation on the part of NBC, but it brings to mind one of my favorite quotes from my favorite movie of all time, The Great Escape:

Now why didn’t anyone think of that before? It’s so stupid, it’s positively brilliant!

Courtesy of the Best Week Ever blog and a disturbingly large number of people I know from my days at The Ellen DeGeneres Show who are now working over at at Bonnie Hunt:

Bonnie Hunt and Jimmy Kimmel make imaginary meatloaf.

More updates when I’m not flat-out exhausted, probably sometime around Thanksgiving.

And the winner of this year’s First Show Deleted Off The Season Pass List is…Little Britain USA!

Sorry guys, you’re just not funny enough to overcome that hideous laugh track.

Although I will admit, had I gotten around to watching the two episodes of Fringe sitting on the TiVo, I might have deleted that first.

Prep is always pretty brutal. Trying to formulate a system to get everyone all the information they need, figuring out exactly what information they actually do need, and even simply trying to get a grip on who the fuck everyone is before we start shooting is a time-consuming and exhausting process.

Adding onto that the increasingly Herculean task of dragging myself to the gym an absolute minimum of 4 days a week to try and keep the weight loss going, and time for damn near anything starts to evaporate.

And of course, only in my world is it a problem that this is all happening as almost every show on television starts to premiere. Sure, I have a terabyte of storage space on the big TiVo, but I want to watch everything noooooooow. And by everything, I mean the 30+ hours of crap I plan to record every single week.

All in all, I just need the days to be longer. As much as the prep process sucks, I like my job. And the working out has left me feeling physically better than I have in a long time. But I need more sleep, and I could really use some more time to myself during the week.

Alas, for now, I’ll just keep rolling along, taking the occasional Saturday off the gym and then deciding to make up for it by doing a gym triathlon on Sunday. And sleeping like a hibernating bear on the weekends.

Sorry to stick y’all with another bullet-pointed post, but these things happen when you’re broke and unemployed and not doing much:

• Went sea kayaking with my friend Lisa this morning, which was great fun. We paddled at least 2-3 miles up the coast from the Malibu pier, and it was a really gorgeous day for it, too. However, I forgot how much seawater fucking stings when you get it in your eyes, and I also didn’t realize how much kelp that’s about three feet underwater could look like a shark. It did not help that I recently re-watched Jaws.

• Between the opening and closing ceremonies, are there any fireworks left in China? I know it’s the country that invented them, but man, that was an awful fucking lot of fireworks.

• Man, the Chinese do know how to put on a show. Between the fantastic opening ceremonies and the very nice closing ceremonies, the organizers of London 2012 must have been watching that and going, “…oh, bloody hell.” Particularly since the Jimmy Page and Leona Lewis portion of events was (with the arguable exception of Jackie Chan singing) the most flagrantly goofy part of the closing ceremony that often came across as a cross between Cirque de Soleil and Starlight Express.

• I’m sort of sad to see the Olympics go, since they were a wonderful, wonderful diversion from the fact that there is nothing good on television right now except Mad Men. However, I’m glad they’re going now, since I just did my annual “How the hell am I going to TiVo everything I want to watch?” spreadsheet and have determined that, at least before I start deleting things that suck, I have 26 hours of TV a week on my prime-time schedule. I think the “cancel season pass” key is going to have to be merciless this year, because I am not going to have time to actually watch all that.

• So speaking of television, does anybody have any desire for me to do a few TV reviews like I did last year? I basically talked about new shows as I watched them (making sure to divulge the ever-increasing number of shows I have friends working on), some briefly, some at greater length. Did you guys actually find that shit interesting, or was it like, “Dude…you watch too much TV”?

Finally, I have a job interview tomorrow, so hopefully these bullet pointed posts whining about how I’m bored stiff will soon be replaced with ones whining about how exhausted and overworked I am. Fingers crossed!

Ah, the dulcet tones of the Production Office when there’s a 10am call and a projected exceedingly late wrap – The fridge sadly cranking along, two keyboards clacking away as two sets of hands type bored IMs to friends lucky enough to not be stuck at work at almost 11pm on a Saturday night.

You’ll notice “the drone of the air conditioner” is not included on this list because…well, it’s not on. And the engineer who actually knows how to turn it on has gone home. And the windows don’t open here.

I’m getting a little sleepy. And I can’t leave until they wrap. This is going to be a looooong evening.

At least a) I have gotten every bit of work I possibly can out of the way, b) I did my PT exercises so I don’t have to when I get home, and c) I discovered that Netflix Watch Now has the Dragnet Blue Boy episode on it. This is the most gloriously paranoid half-hour of television ever.

After watching it with the poor PA who’s stuck here with me, he said, “You know, this was only fifteen years before Hill Street Blues. I can’t imagine how they came that far that quickly.” He’s damn right.

If you watched tonight’s episode of How I Met Your Mother, you will be highly, highly amused by the extremely long, hysterically funny song on this site referenced in the episode (warning: audio loads automatically).

They had way, way, way too much fun creating that. It’s almost as long as the goddamn episode, but sweet lord, it’s awesome.