The busy season begins

Lost in my Emmy coverage and my other two columns today was the obvious mention that the 2008-9 TV season officially begins tonight. Obviously, with a bunch of Fox and CW already having debuted, the official start date -- which is reflected by Nielsen and the broadcast networks -- seems more arbitrary than ever, but that's the way the Big 3 still roll, and so get ready for a lot more original TV starting tonight.

Some ramblings about exactly how I intend to cover all of this on the blog coming up just as soon as I find out if I have a long-lost identical twin out there...

If you're relatively new to the blog, some things to keep in mind about the season:

• I watch an awful lot of TV, and do my best to write about everything I watch, but there are only so many hours in my day. This means I may not get to certain shows until several days after they air, or that I simply may skip over some shows on some weeks, either because I have nothing to say or because it took me so long to get around to watching them that it now seems pointless. Dropping into a "House" review post to complain, "Where's the Sarah Connor post?" isn't helpful; either it'll go up at some point or it won't.

• Along similar time-management lines, prepare yourself for a mixture of individual show reviews and multi-show grab-bags. I know the latter aren't as popular, but they're the only way I can realistically cover as many shows as I do, particularly the ones I don't feel as strongly about but can compose two or three sentences on.

• Both of those points being made, there are certain shows I will not miss an episode on, and that I will always review separately from other shows. "Mad Men" is my biggest time-suck of the moment, but I'm going to endeavor to do individual posts for most of my favorites -- "How I Met Your Mother," "The Shield," "Dexter," "The Office," "30 Rock," "Chuck" -- and whenever I get episodes in advance (as I do regularly for "Shield" and "Mad Men"), I'll do my best to have a review ready to go as soon as the episode finishes airing. I can't always be that fast -- and I fear the "Mad Men" reviews in particular may get slowed down for these last few season 2 episodes, now that I have so many other things to write about, in the blog and for The Star-Ledger -- but I'll do what I can.

• I'm going to be covering a much larger number of shows over the next few weeks than I will by late October or November. For the most part, life's too short to waste it on shows I don't like -- though I'll make exceptions for shows where the nature of the badness fascinates me, like "Studio 60" or middle-period "Grey's Anatomy" -- and I'll also eventually be ditching certain shows if the timeslot competition is too rough. (I suspect "Sarah Connor" is in trouble around here once I run out of "Chuck"s I've seen in advance, in fact.)

• So, just as an example, I'll have a "HIMYM" post up tonight at 9 because I've already seen the premiere, I'll hopefully have a "Heroes" premiere review done sometime tomorrow morning, and I'll also have a link tomorrow to my review of "The Mentalist," which you can then use to comment on the pilot after it airs tomorrow night. "House" and "The shield" I've already seen and will hopefully get done for end-of-show time, while I'll hit "Sarah Connor Chronicles" and "Fringe" whenever the time/feeling strikes me. And I realize I still haven't even watched last night's "Skins." Sigh...

(I wanted to put a photo from the actual "What's Alan Watching?" pilot at the top of this post, but I couldn't find one, so I went with Corin Nemec's second-greatest role.)