summer TV series

Summer television usually involves massive doses of reality TV stunts (that I invariably give into *cough* Dancing with the Stars *cough*) but now that cable networks have started offering original series that don't follow the regular broadcast television season, there are other things to watch. This summer I've been watching:

Entourage on HBO. I love this show! It's a very light half-hour show about a hot young actor (played by Adrian Grenier who I've always liked since Drive Me Crazy, that movie with Melissa Joan Hart...yeah, I'm weird) and his friends working and living it up in Hollywood. This is part buddy comedy and part inside look at the movie business. There are plenty of real actors guesting as (or spoofing) themselves...this season Mandy Moore, James Cameron, Bob Saget (in a really disturbing appearance), and Amanda Peet have shown up, to name a few, and the situations these guys are in are always hilarious.

The 4400 on USA. This is my current sci-fi fix. Originally conceived as a mini-series last year, it was successful enough to warrant a full-blown series and it's easy to see why. The premise is that 4400 people that have disappeared over the last hundred or so years are suddenly returned together, not having aged at all and some having strange new powers. A handful of these 4400 are regulars in the show, along with the two agents assigned to monitor their cases, who are somewhat Mulder and Scully-esque, which of course I love. This season, various other members of the 4400 pop up as part of the mystery-of-the-week, while the bigger mystery of where the abductees were taken and why they were returned is pursued. I like the writing, I like the cast, and the requisite little blonde girl who knows everything is a lot less scary than Dakota Fanning...