Ken and I have been really enjoying watching True Blood, Alan Ball's new vampire serial on HBO. It's fantastic: ridiculous, over the top, and excitingly garish. Everything a vampire show should be. The premise is that vampires have come out of the coffin and walk among us. Good vampires mainstream and drink synthetic blood, but there's bad evil vampires who hang out in Shreveport nightclubs and feed off of human groupie fangbangers. Our hero is human but telepathic and she makes friends with the misunderstood vampire who comes to their little town. She's a great character, very girly and innocent but also strong and smart.

A big part of the pleasure in the show is the small swamp town Louisiana setting. A town just big enough to have a fascinating ensemble cast but still be seriously backwards kay-zhawn. I particularly like the assortment of accents the voice coaches assembled: young Southern belle, aging Southern belle, New Orleans sophisticate, Atlanta sophisticate, gutter swamp Cajun, proud young black woman, crazy black mama, queeny-but-tough black gay guy, dumb redneck white hick. All living in the same town, and that's not counting the gentleman Civil War vampire, the creepy Boris Karloffs, and whatever weird-ass verbal tic sheriff J.F. Sebastian has. The characters and setting are great for someone like me who grew up with the mythology of the South.

Alan Ball also wrote a lot of Six Feet Under. But where that show was sympathetic and mature and subtle, True Blood is outrageous caricature and silly vampire genre stuff. With some Civil War nostalgia and commentary on civil rights thrown in the mix. All done incredibly well and very fun to watch. Recommended.

For a decade now people have been babbling about "digital convergence". The typical vision involves some proprietary set-top box from your company name here and the grandiose plan to be unify radio, TV, and Internet in one market-dominating service. That hasn't happened, but it turns out digital convergence is already here in our living rooms and no one has quite noticed yet. The driving factor isn't the consumer electronics manufacturers or the cable companies. It's Internet services like Amazon Unbox, Netflix, iTunes, and Youtube. Youtube is now a full-fledged content provider on both Tivo and AppleTV. I can watch Youtube on my TV just like I watch Comcast. There's plenty of random things to browse and search as well as actual edited programming with YouTube's Featured Videos. YouTube on Tivo is great for bored channel surfing, particularly since you can quickly bounce around related videos. The video quality is atrocious, of course, but it starts playing fast and it feels like watching TV, not browsing the web.

YouTube isn't the only Internet service I can watch on my TV. Amazon's Unbox is also on Tivo with online rentals available for download right next to recording off the cable. Netflix is about to stream to the Xbox 360 if you haven't gotten around to spending $100 on a Roku player yet. Of course iTunes delivers TV and movies to AppleTV.

Internet companies are now making the end-run around cable and satellite distribution that's been predicted for years. If you have fast Internet in your home you can get something to watch Internet video for very cheap. The big sticking point is quality; streaming HD is still generally unavailable. The same A/V setups that can stream low-res content from the Internet are mostly being bought by people to play HD content, and watching a crappy 80 kbytes/sec YouTube video blown up to 1920p is a bad experience. Internet HD is doable; decent quality 720p AVI files are about 200kbytes/sec, within reach of home broadband. But it's a significant expense to provide that bandwidth to hundreds of thousands of customers. Also, I imagine content owners are loathe to license HD copies of their video for streaming. So traditional cable and satellite video distribution isn't doomed quite yet.

It's been 24 hours since the Olympics opening ceremony. NBC started the broadcast early and I missed the fancy drums. So I went online to watch the part I missed. You know, go to Youtube and watch a crappy FLV version of the opening ceremony, broken up into easily sharable, easily linkable three minute segments.

Nope! Near as I can tell, there's no legitimate way to share a video experience of the Olympics online. Google's got Youtube locked down quite tightly, even if you fiddle your cookies. The NBC and Olympics sites seem to not have the video, although the sites are so awful I could have just not found it. I even checked Hulu, which apparently thinks Jimmy Carter's boycott in 1980 is the most relevant result for a search on "Olympics".

Of course there are torrents available; 5 gigs for a 720p copy, probably blissfully free of the American announcer stupidly bleating colour commentary. But that's a lot of effort to watch three minutes of video. And it's not really sharable with your friends.

So great job, Olympics copyright holders! You've made your production irrelevant to the Internet.

I wanted to enjoy the new TV season of nerdy shows, I really did. But there's not a lot to love here.

The first season of Heroes was great fun, I even managed to get Ken to watch it despite his aversion to nerd TV. The fresh naive characters and the pleasure of self discovery were great. Sure, there was some scary bad stuff, but mostly it was joy to watch people learn their powers. Particularly Hiro. By contrast the second season is one giant bummer reel, lots of depression and scary crap and no joy. Hiro, the most fun character, is exiled to some stupid feudal Japan adventure that seems entirely irrelevant. The new character Monica is the only breath of pleasure in the new season, but then she's mostly about troubles, too.

But if Heroes is midly dissatisfying, the new Bionic Woman is horrible. There was some hope that Eick could use his Battlestar Galactica magic to retread another cheesy old scifi show. But terrible casting and stupid plots (Islamic terrorists in Paraguay? Really?) make for awful TV. The one clever thing in the game is an undercurrent of feminism and body ownership; if they can ever elevate that theme beyond an occasional throwaway line it might be sorta interesting. But first they need to fire their lead actor.

At least I still have Mad Men. The third season of Prison Break is sort of working, too.

AMC's new TV series Mad Men is completely fantastic. It's a period ensemble drama about a Madison Avenue advertising agency in 1960. It first sounded a bit dumb, but it's beautiful and brilliantly written and terrific television.

The period setting is amazingly well executed. 1960 is just far enough back to be somewhat mythical while still familiar. And because that era has generally been neglected it's fertile ground for a new drama. Incredible costumes, hair styles and furnishings make the show beautiful. And the writers' delicious indulgence in forbidden things like sex and drinking at the office, smoking, and awkward racist jokes is both uncomfortable and slightly wistful.

And the writing is intelligent, not the stupid pandering that passes for most TV. For example, the centerpiece of the third episode is a suburban kid's birthday party. The desparation and discomfort of the parents is just devastating, but it's not thrown in your face so much as exposed through a series of vignettes. Great storytelling.

I'm not much of a sports fan. But I've watched a couple of World Cup games in the past few days and find it makes for compelling television. Why? Because they play uninterrupted. 45 minutes of game, 15 minutes halftime, 45 minutes of game. No delays for substitutions, no TV timeouts, even an injury only delays play for about 60 seconds. So you get a constant flow of sport rather than 3 minutes of play punctuated by 3 minutes of filler and commercials. Much more enjoyable than American football or basketball.

The White House press corp dinner this year had Stephen Colbert speak. It's always an irreverent and casual event, but this year Colbert delivers some real zingers. It's the first time I've ever seen someone be directly critical of the Bush Administration in their faces. And he's funny, so he gets away with it. But despite digs at Bush, Cheney, at al the best remarks are for the press corps itself:

What are you thinking, reporting on N.S.A. wiretapping or secret prisons in Eastern Europe? Those things are secret for a very important reason, they're superdepressing. And if that's your goal, well, misery accomplished. ...

Let's review the rules. Here's how it works. The president makes decisions, he’s the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Put them through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know, fiction.

Video here, 26 megs and 15 minutes. You can stop at 07:30 though, it goes to a stupid canned clip that never gets better.

Showtime's got great shows this year; first Weeds and now Sleeper Cell. On the surface it's a spinning-plates anti-terrorist drama in the vein of 24. Which makes for fun TV. But Sleeper Cell has more depth than that, particularly in the subtlety of the characterizations.

The script borrows from recent history to build a motley crew of terrorists intent on carrying jihad to America. Blake Shields is great as the unfortunate John Walker Lindh type. Alex Nesic is fun as the French Islamic radical who enjoys hookers and strippers. Both good guys and bad are drawn with complexities and imperfections that make the story compelling.

But the real standout is Michael Ealy. Mild spoiler, highlight to read: He does a great job as the conflicted undercover agent. By making our hero himself be a Muslim the show gives a much more nuanced story than the usual "kill the Muslim terrorists" shtick. He's also a fantastic actor, and quite handsome, so it all makes for good entertainment.

The show just finished its 10 hour miniseries run, but Showtime promises a rebroadcast January 10. And it looks like a DVD release is planned, too.

There's a great feeling of accomplishment at the end of May, at the end of the mainstream TV season. All these shows finished! If by "accomplishment" you mean "done sitting on my butt passively starting at mindless entertainment". But I'm done with The Amazing Race, and Survivor, and Desperate Housewives, and Lost, and 24. That was five hours a week, heavy responsibility.