Weekend standouts, good and bad

What better way to usher in the new week than with a roundup of (mostly terrible) weekend television!

We start with High School Reunion (TV2, Friday at 11.30pm). High School Reunion is an American reality show featuring 19 members of a senior high school class (roughly Year 13/Form 7 in Kiwi terms), together for the first time in 20 years. The series airing on TV2 was made in 2009 and deals with the members of a class from 1988. To make things fun, each former classmate has a catchy title  - a classmate named Heather is "The Preachers Daughter", another named Lynette is tagged "The Snob", and in Friday's episode she was trying to ignore the advances of Andrew "The Band Geek" ... you get the point.

You might think it would be a fun watch. In fact, it's horribly, horribly depressing. Take this week's main story (and last week's main story as well, judging from the "Previously on High School Reunion" montage), which deals with Liz "The Wannabe" and Jenny "The Cheerleader" (image on right) being at each other's throat because Jenny called Liz a fat-ass ... back in 1988.

If you know me in 2018 and I'm still mad at people who called me names at high school in 1998, please feel free to give me a wedgie and/or a bog-wash. I'll deserve it. Though, to be honest, High School Reunion might get its own blog post before all is said and done, since the unintentional comedy reaches extremely high levels. Stay tuned.

Moving on to Saturday, I managed to get through a trifecta of afternoon shows on TV2.

Privileged (1pm) is a written-by-numbers drama, telling the story of a woman who is hired as the tutor for two (you guessed it) privileged teenage girls who have no interest in schoolwork. You might not believe this, but actual schoolwork doesn't figure too highly on the list of things in each episode. At least, not in this week's episode. What do figure highly are the exploits of a pair of upper-class drama queens and their overly moralistic tutor. My favourite part was when I flicked over to something else for five minutes.

Next up, Greek (2pm) tells the story of a collection of college fraternities and apparently stars Clark Duke, who you may remember from Hot Tub Time Machine - though you wouldn't know it; despite being top-billed, he didn't show up this week. As you may have guessed, schoolwork doesn't rate too highly here either. (Also, why are there so many school-based shows playing on the weekends?) To be fair, Greek isn't as bad as Privileged, but it suffers from something which might be much worse: it really doesn't make much sense, since fraternities are really only a part of Americana. No one else in the world has weird little clubs with Greek names. Except maybe Greek people.

Last up, and easily the best of the bunch, Reaper (3pm) follows the antics of a hardware store employee (played by Bret Harrison, aka Brad from Grounded for Life) who happens to hunt demons in his spare time. Reaper is actually a show I've come across before and, while it does have its share of sub-par episodes, it is usually pretty entertaining. 

(Jonas, the official TV show of The Jonas Brothers, also played at 4pm, but I had already seen that episode on Disney Channel. Umm, with my daughter. Or something. Let's just move on.)

Shifting over to Comedy Central, this week's episode of Saturday Night Live (9.30pm) was probably the funniest episode I've seen yet. Originally aired in March last year, the show kicked off with a song-and-dance routine from Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson (image on left), before heading into a performance from singer/songwriter Ray LaMontagne, and a skit featuring Jessica Biel dressed as Jessica Rabbit. If you haven't taken a look at Saturday Night Live, I highly recommend that you do - the regular cast are great, and you haven't seen hilarious until you've seen The Rock in a tiny tuxedo singing about wearing girls' makeup.

Finally, Sunday is a pretty solid night of TV. We covered Top Gear last Monday, and I thought this week's episode was even better - the camping trip segment was hilarious (especially Hammond's tiny pool table). That said, the repeats of The Big Bang Theory are easily the highlight of the night for me: I didn't jump on the Big Bang bandwagon until the latest series, so catching up from the start has been fantastic. It would seem I'm not alone, since viewer numbers have hardly dropped between the end of the latest series and the start of repeats.

So: What terrible shows did you watch over the weekend? What shows did you think were great?

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