TV is the New Reading

Dog days

There’s not much on now, but

there’s much to look forward to

Is this the dog days of summer or what? My column this week was on “Hell’s Kitchen,” of all things. “Hell’s Kitchen”? OK, yes, I’m watching “Hell’s Kitchen,” at least for now. I remember getting bored with it by the end of the fifth season, and I suspect that will happen this season as well.

Right now, madman Gordon Ramsay has a dozen chefs competing for the opportunity to run his kitchen in British Columbia, and none of them seem qualified. They make huge errors – not just errors blown out of all proportion like toward the end where you’re getting “This Wellie is slightly overdone! Oh my God, are you stupid? DIE! DIE! Throw yourself on a CHEF’S KNIFE, you donkey!” but actual mistakes like leaving the salmon in the freezer and throwing away service after service of perfectly al dente pasta because some other aspect of the appetizer had gone pear-shaped.

Speaking of reality television – or in the case of “Hell’s Kitchen,” insanity television – although I get it. There’s a lot of pressure on an executive chef and if you can’t survive 15 rounds of Chef Ramsay’s perfectionism you can’t possibly expect to ride herd on a kitchen staff. It’s really just televised job training in a pressure cooker environment, and you’re never safe from Chef Ramsay and a houseful of customers screaming at you all demanding perfection in real life, so there’s nowhere to hide in “Hell’s Kitchen,” either.

But yes, speaking of reality television, Heidi Klum and Tim Gunn are back, this year on Lifetime which poached “Project Runway” from Bravo for its sixth through at least 10^th seasons. So now that Bravo’s replacement whatever has more or less ground to a halt, we’re back to “In fashion, one day you’re in, and the next day, you’re out” and “make it work,” starting Aug. 20.

‘Dr. Who’

I want to focus a moment on the installment of “Doctor Who” and “The Planet of the Dead” which aired recently on BBC America. First off, if you missed it, try to track it down. For “Who” fans it is a must see, along with being something of a game-changer.

The Doctor meets a charismatic thief, the Lady Christina de Souza, who makes off with a golden 13^th Century chalice from the London Museum or wherever it was, doesn’t really matter because she hops a double-decker bus along with the Doctor and falls through a wormhole. Like ya do.

They end up on a ravaged planet with fly people and weird flying manta rays that are in fact the things that ravaged the planet, left it for dust and are now recreating that scene from Superman where they fly around the planet faster and faster until they create a wormhole to Earth, their next meal.

Not if the Doctor can help it, of course, David Tennant as the Tenth Doctor, connects with his old friends at UNIT, just like the Third Doctor, and works with the charismatic thief, just like the Fourth Doctor did with Garron in the Ribos Operation. The gold did come in handy, somehow, but ultimately the installment mirrored the Christmas episode in that the Doctor is short one companion. Catherine Tate’s run as his companion, Donna Noble, ended when she absorbed the Doctor’s brainwaves, got overloaded and had to get her memory wiped. He left her in the care of her parents at the end of the last season proper.

He then visited the 19^th Century and worked with a steampunk version of the Doctor in “The Next Doctor,” played by David Morrissey, while that Doctor had a companion called Rosita. Apparently Cybermen fell through time and built a giant cyberman in 1851 London, and together with the Next Doctor and Rosita, The Doctor – playing the part of a companion – defeated it and sent it to the void. He left London singing his praises into the Dickensian night.

The Doctor has been without a human or otherwise alien companion occasionally in the course of the series, and even once or twice since Chris Eccleston burst forth onto the scene as the Ninth Doctor and Billie Piper as Rose Tyler hopped aboard to be the main companion for the series reboot.

The Planet of Death was cool, but troubling, in that it marks a step in the countdown to farewell of David Tennant as one of the most exciting Doctors in the series history – the actor has only signed on for a couple more specials before the 2010 handoff to Matt Smith, the newest and youngest actor to take on the role. On the plus side, he gets a new Companion, Karen Gillan as Amy Pond who is extraordinarily easy to look at, and the show itself is taken over by Steven Moffat one of the most inventive minds in the series history.

So indeed, that’s something to look forward to.

‘Defying Gravity’

In other scifi events I’m looking forward to, “Defying Gravity” premieres actually this weekend on ABC. Eight international astronauts climb aboard a six-year mission to visit seven planets in our own solar system.

My first reaction to this is that it looks beautiful. Indeed, space travel is almost always more glamorous on television than it is in real life, ever since Captain Kirk took an away mission to a paradise planet and got to demonstrate what “kiss” is.

In reality, the physics of space travel put enclosed space at a premium with life support systems paramount, second only to radiation shielding that you need when you don’t have 75 miles of atmosphere and collisions with even tiny bits of debris so potentially devastating that windows are rare, small, thick and heavy.

It looks like there have been a few breakthroughs and game-changers between now and when this series takes place, and as a science and astrophysics enthusiast, I’m looking forward to exploring all of them, beginning with the two-hour pilot episode Sunday, Aug. 2.

“Project Runway” kicks off Aug. 20 with a two-hour Project Runway all-star challenge, leading to the sixth season premiere at 9 p.m. on Lifetime. Syfy is running reboot Season Four episodes of “Doctor Who” very, very early Fridays at 4 a.m. so set those DVRs, and ABC premieres “Defying Gravity” at 8 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 2.

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