This post is completely unrelated to teenage television, but I think this video of my friend’s handbell choir playing Lady Gaga’s Poker Face is great!!

Okay, so now it won’t seem to open (too much internet traffic perhaps–blast you Internal Server Error!), but Aha, it’s working now!   My brother sent me a link to a prety funny review of Glee by a conservative Christian website.  Ooh, it’s working now, yay!  Some choice quotes:

Instead of a real world high school, we have a fantasyland of happy, shirtless teens hanging out in the    showers or dancing on million dollar stages.

If this is what they think of Glee, how do they react to Gossip Girl?

But this show is a drug of false expectations that will inevitably harm our children. It convinces impressionable teens to avoid serious career training in favor of having “fun” in the “arts.” Also, the music numbers just drag down the plot of the show.

Lol, I love that they felt the need to capitalize “fun” and the “arts.”

The link between watching the Girls and increased risks of homosexual behavior was made abundantly meaningful. In a nutshell, the Golden Girls turned a generation away from procreation.

Wow, I’m learning so much!

Look into the eyes of a young Kurt Hummel. Is that not the face our of future’s polymorphously perverse intellectual terrorist? Change the channel my friends. Change the channel and change the world!

Those intellectual terrorists sure are scary.   But here’s the real problem with Glee:

Additionally, the show has far too many musical numbers.

Ooh, exciting new promo for Glee!   April still seems too far away though . . .

Another of my favorite, albeit non teenage-related, shows, is Lost.  Which is why I really appreciated Jimmy Fallon’s parody called Late, about a mysterious elevator accident that strands a group of writers on a deserted floor of the building.  If you’ve seen Lost, then you’ll really like how they’ve recreated elements from the first few episodes of Lost, including the soundtrack and even some dialogue.  And I think Jimmy Fallon actually does a really spot-on Jack (aka Matthew Fox).

I realize that last time I did this I called it my Teenage TV Character of the Week, but then I didn’t do another one for like 3 weeks, which is kind of a fail on my part.  In order to prevent fails like that in the future, I’m just gonna call this my “Favorite Teenage TV Characters” post.

This time: Veronica Mars!  I love Veronica for some of the same reasons that I love Buffy: she’s a really strong female character who’s witty and snarky, but still worries about high school (and college) problems and hasn’t figured everything out yet.   A former shallow popular girl turned quirky private detective after her best friend’s murder and her own rape, Veronica is funny, witty, smart, and, well, pretty too.   Also, like Rory Gilmore or Seth Cohen, she’s got a vast arsenal of pop culture references at her disposal and makes jokes that probably only a small portion of the show’s viewers will actually understand.

And here’s a funny Veronica scene:

You can watch Veronica Mars on theWB.com website, so go do that!

So I’m a big fan of The OC, and I’m also a big fan of another Josh Schwartz show, Chuck.  Which is why I love that he parodied himself in this clip from Chuck which is nearly identical to the scene at the end of The OC episode, “The Countdown.”

(for this one, the specific parts starts at around :10 and ends at about 2:00)

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.