Mediocre housekeeping

With most of the shows I watch either out of episodes or dormant until sometime in the new year, it's time for a state of the blog address.

I'm going to write about the small handful of shows that have new episodes left this week/year ("Life on Mars," "Journeyman," maybe even "Gossip Girl"). I'll have my Festivus column this Friday, and a couple of Best of '07 columns the following Friday. Beyond that -- and barring some miraculous development with the strike -- things is gonna be slow until '08. Maybe it's time to start linking to funny YouTube videos again?

Also, someone reminded me that the two "Wire" documentaries I mentioned a while back -- "The Wire Odyssey" (about the series as a whole) and "The Wire: The Final Word" (about the state of the media theme of season five) -- are already available via On Demand. (If you don't have that, they're debuting Thursday and Friday night at 10:30. I pop up from time to time in both, though I feel kind of silly with my presence in the latter, where the other talking heads are real reporters and I'm the lone TV critic.

(Note: "The Final Word" mildly gives away some developments in the final season -- I've seen episodes 1-7, and there are scenes in the documentary that were new to me -- so if you want to enter the season unblemished, you may want to stick with "The Wire Odyssey.")