Changes are a'coming

Hi neighbors. Is it too early to look for woolly worms, persimmon pits, or spider sacks in trees? Is it just my arthritis, or are the "signs" predicting an early, cold winter? Since it is still technically summer, I'm hoping my premonitions are based only on the fear of having to buy a new furnace.

The new shows and new seasons of old shows will be starting soon. All except Monk who apparently doesn't like his new shows "touching" other new shows. The Monk show seasons start in early summer and then again the next January.

I've noticed from their promos that a lot of the new shows will deal with aliens, mediums, the legal, law enforcement, political and military systems and terrorism.

Do you think all these subjects are connected? If so, maybe we need more conspiracy theory shows.

Remember when we didn't want to know? Shows like "Unsolved Mysteries" when criminals, crimes or disappearances were presented through re-enactments and you were left wondering how it would end.

You could have as many nightmares as you wanted and they'd often not tell how it ended because there were no endings. These stories were supposedly cold cases and "unsolved" mysteries after all.

Many shows have sprung full blown from that one. Cold case stories, forensic evidence shows, X-Files, The 4400, America's Most Wanted, etc. I'm sure you can think of many more.

There aren't many westerns these days. This genre has divided into "factual" shows like Wild West Tech and other historic events or biographies of famous and infamous western frontier adventures.

I think the American Cowboy myth has been, oddly enough, transformed and merged with the super hero myth -- with a little bit of sports hero thrown in via rodeo coverage.

Maybe that's why the western isn't as popular now. Heroes can ride airplanes instead of horse. They can fly to any planet in the universe in an instant instead of taking a full season to travel to a Gold Rush.

The unknown dangers of the wild west are now the technical difficulties of staying alive in a hostile environment while fighting indigenous alien cultures.

Even the "detective" and "lawyer" shows are different these days. Unlike Perry Mason and more recently Matlock who not only cleared their innocent clients but also got a full confession in front of 12 peers from the real guilty party, today's lawyers play as a team.

The focus isn't on how sharp the lawyers are at seeing justice done. More often than not, today's television lawyers are depicted pointing out loopholes in the law and demonstrating how laws can be interpreted and manipulated.

Similar to having embedded journalists on the front lines, one new series "Over There" depicts today's soldiers fighting today's war. Unlike the actual war, this one has a script and a scheduled ending. I haven't seen this show and probably won't. I think Hollywood got on the bandwagon too soon for this premise to fly.

People have a fascination with war stories and maybe want to see what a soldier's life is all about. People may watch fictionalized representations of some daily news event. But not if a loved one is involved in the real thing thus making the viewer see their own family member going through what the fictionalized characters are.

I wonder if they based their bet on the success of West Wing which shows fictional treatments of problems facing our government figures. In that show, the strength of characterization the actors brought to their parts was of more impact than the situations the characters found themselves in. A much different scenario than a war story.

I grew up watching shows about World War II which was over by then. To my memory, there was only one television show that touched on a war from my generation -- M.A.S.H., which was about the Korean Conflict.

Although some movies have been made about Vietnam, no successful television series has been made that I recall. There are just too many painful memories and for some, too many as yet unhealed, scars. If "Over There" thrives, I'll be amazed.

Until the next time friends remember, both weather and television seasons change regularly and sometimes not for the better. The one thing you can count on is they are all only temporary.