Our favorite Gilmore Girls creator, Amy Sherman-Palladino, is producing a new series for The CW, potentially for Fall 2010, called the Untitled Wyoming Project, a family drama set out in the midwest.  Entertaiment weekly describes it as “Gilmore Girls meets Little House on the Prairie“.   So yeah, that’s pretty great.  It may not have been realistic for Rory and Lorelei to talk that fast or insert that many pop culture references into their speech, but I miss the wit and cleverness of Gilmore Girls a lot.

I just found out that another of my favorite shows–Ugly Betty–is in its last season.  I’m not a big supporter of shows lasting forever and ever, but it’ll be sad to see this one go.  I would’ve been interested in how they decided to play out Justin’s story, who just started high school where his fashion-loving ways  were less than embraced by high school culture.  Hopefully they’ll devote more to that storyline in the rest of the season.  Hasta la vista, Betty! (I feel like that’s something Marc and Amanda would say . . . )

I decided I should keep up with the shows coming out now, and so I recently watched Life Unexpected, a new CW show about a girl named Lux (played by Brittany Robertson) who has bounced around foster girl for 15 years and is reconnecting with her birth parents.  Now, back when the CW was actually the WB, they produced a lot of  good stuff like Buffy, Gilmore Girls, Felicity, etc., but after the change to the CW, I actually lost of interest in the network and the kind of content they were producing.  (Alan Sepinwall talks about the golden days of The WB in his review of Life Unexpected)  Though shows like Gossip Girl and 90210 can be fun, they don’t quite capture what it is I love about a lot of other teenage dramas.  Those shows present a very specific lifestyle that in my opinion doesn’t really speak well to “real” teenagers and the way teenagers really interact with each other.  (Caveat:  I am a big fan of The OC, though, which had a lot of these elements–rich kids with their fancy homes and crazy lifestyles–but also had a quirkiness and originality that I don’t think you find in GG or 90210.)  For that reason, I think Life Unexpected is a refreshing take on a maybe-not-so-original situation that harkens back, as Sepinwall says, to the old days of teenage drama television.

Though I sometimes tire of storylines revolving around teenage pregnancies, Life Unexpected is less about the angst that surrounds teen pregnancy, and more about the fractured family dynamic between Lux and her parents.  There were some nice/relatively typical teen drama touches, like the psuedo-popular, pseudo-alternative song playing under the dramatic moment when the three family members are first together (in this case the Bright Eyes song, “First Day of My Life.” )  A standard in many televsion shows, Baze’s character (Lux’s father, played by Kristoffer Polaha) is one of those man-child types who lives with two roomates (who are mostly there to provide comic relief) above the bar he owns.  Cate (Lux’s mother, played by Shiri Appleby), on the other hand, is a career-driven commitment-phobic perfectionist type with a perfect seeming boyfriend/fiancee, another standby in the television world.  Also in the mix is Baze’s perky girlfriend who I expected would be overly annoying and grating but I was pleasantly surprised to find out that she was in fact pretty calm about the whole situation.  I  also just want to mention that really I appreciate that Lux actually looks and dresses like she’s 16 and not 25, as most supposed “teenagers” on tv appear (even though according to imdb, she’s actually 19).

There are definitely some elements of the show where you have to suspend your disbelief, like the fact that the judge assigns her to live with her estranged parents instead of just emancipating her or sending her back to foster care, and the fact that it was so easy to find Baze, but overall Life Unexpected is a sweet portrayal of a unconventional family.  Though it may not have quite the same levels of cleverness, wit, and humor that Gilmore Girls had,  it’s a fun show that reflects better the way that teenagers actually sound when they talk, and it in fact reminds me more of the teen shows that I know and love.

For anyone who watched Salute Your Shorts on Nickelodeon back in the day and wants to know what happened to all those campers at Camp Anawanna, Celebuzz has some updates on where they are now.  

Okay, it may seem like I talk about Glee a lot, but the truth is, I like other shows too.  This one just happens to be in the news more often.

So anyway, I was super excited to find out the news that Neil Patrick Harris (love him so much!) is in talks to be in Glee during May sweeps, specifically in the episode being directed by Joss Whedon, someone else I really really like.  Can’t wait until April when it comes back!!

So I was recently studying in Argentina, and I happened upon this hilarious clip from a show called El Casting de la Tele, which is basically seemed just like Argentina’s Got Talent or something.  I recorded my own version and was going to upload that but turns out this one is a lot better!  Not quite related to teenage drama, but awesome nonetheless.  Enjoy!

Congratulations to Glee for winning the Golden Globe for Best Television Series — Comedy or Musical!!

I’m so looking forward to April and the new episodes, which supposedly are going to include: an all-Madonna episode, Jonathan Groff (Lea Michele’s broadway costar in Spring Awakening), Idina Menzel, Joss Whedon directing, J.Lo, and much much more, I’m sure!  Don’t stop believing!

Vampires are all the craze now, with all the frenzy from Twilight, but let’s not forget our favorite chosen one, aka Buffy Summers, part-time high schooler trying to survive the perils of cheerleading trials and boyfriends, part-time hardcore vampire-slaying machine.  Buffy represented girl power to the extreme, but the type of girl power that could include her worries over the right  prom dress and her occasional feelings of vulnerability (though her job as slayer often prevented her from showing it).  In a lot of ways, she was exactly what post-feminists at the time wanted, a female heroine who could have it all–brains, beauty, superhuman strength, and a hot boyfriend,  too!  It was like battling evil vampires and demons every week was really a symbol for fighting patriarchy.  Surprisingly (or maybe not surprisingly), Buffy the Vampire Slayer spawned a lot of scholarship, including a collection of essays in the book Undead TV.   A lot of it is on Google Reader, here, and there’s some fun stuff in there like “At Stake: Angel’s Body, Fantasy Masculinity, and Queer Desire in Teen Television,” or “Buffy and the ‘New Girl Order’: Defining Feminism and Femininity.”  If you’re curious, there’s a whole Joss Whedon Studies Association, which includes Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies, and you should go check it out!

Other reasons I love Buffy: her Buffyisms (like vampirism = a whole big sucking thing, among others), the outfits she wears while doing things like slaying vampires and killing demons, and her non-chalance about the current upcoming apocalypse.  Of course there are lots more things I love, but those are a few!  On a fun note, here’s a great mash-up (that you may have already seen) with Twilight’s very own Edward Cullen and Buffy!  Enjoy!

So one of my favorite new shows probably has to be Glee, even if its just for the splashy numbers.  This article is a little old but it talks about Glee and some of my other top shows, like Ugly Betty and Modern Family, and how representations of gay characters on TV shows have reverted back to some tried and true stereotypes.  Thanks to my sis for pointing it out to me!

During high school, my sister, mom, and I watched a lot of TV, often of the high-school-drama, teenage-angst-driven variety.  You know the ones I’m talking about.   Sobby music (or maybe pseudo-obscure indie music)  plays in the background while Susie and Steve looked longingly into each other’s eyes, trying to deal with the fact that Susie’s long lost triplet sister has just been killed in a freak overdose accident . . . you get the picture.  I might mock these shows mercilessly sometimes, but I really do love them.   Though I admitedly never really watched the show, my older sister and I got attached to the slogan for the ABC Family show Wildfire that aired with one of the original promos.  It goes something like this:  “This isn’t some high school drama, it’s my life!”  Thus the name for the blog.

Though I’m a little young to have watched old standards like Beverly Hills, 90210 or My So Called Life when they aired (The OC, One Tree Hill, and Gilmore Girls were my bread and butter), I absolutely adore the classics.  So for a treat, a great clip from My So Called Life: