The Life & Times Of Tim

When we moved to Cedar Rapids, we rented a house that had free cable including HBO. I was always worried that the cable police would come around and bust us, but a friend who worked for a cable company in Colorado said we were so close to the Mediacom c.o. that they wouldn’t be able to test it unless they did a walk by in the back of our homes. Cable dudes, especially the grunts that don’t get paid shit, don’t like to get out of their vans if they don’t have to.
Thanks to the free cable, I got addicted to HBO. The showed the Floyd Mayweather Jr fights, Deadwood, The Wire, the Sopranos, and a few other new ones that we thought were pretty cool.
When we bought our own house, we had to get our own cable, but since we both hated Mediacom and since they were not going to show Hawkeye games, we went with DirecTV. If you’re ever in the market, you need to know that all television providers…cable or satellite…are pretty much a bunch of cocksuckers that will make as much out of you as possible without any expectation of providing you service. In this case, the lesser of two evils is DirecTV.
We pay out the ass for our shit and in all reality if it wasn’t for the wife and kids I probably wouldn’t feel the need to have all of the shit we do. The two channels I watch are essentially VH1 Classic and HBO. On Sunday nights, you can usually find me ironing my clothes and watching the football game immediately followed by the HBO shows.
They’ve introduced three new shows this season in addition to Entourage, whose story arc this year is actually pretty good. My wife keeps asking what happened to Big Love, the show about a polygamist family that we enjoyed watching.
The three new shows are True Blood (bayou vampire show), Little Britain USA (British comedy) and The Life & Times Of Tim (animation). The first two are ok, but they’re nothing what I thought they would be. True Blood is probably going to be a hit (there’s a chick at work without HBO that has someone recording VHS copies of each episode, usually a good sign that the show will take off) and Little Britain USA is nowhere near as funny as I thought. It seems their main gig is just to try to shock and offend me. And after the first half dozen times, you get numb to a guy dressed up as a little girl going “I love you more than interracial gangbangs.”
But The Life & Times Of Tim is awesome, so good that I’m worried that it will end after this season and not be renewed. It features primitive animation and story lines that are just out of reach of reality, but the dialogue within them are fairly typical of real world reactions.
One of the running gags features Tim’s girlfriend breaking up with him, usually for very good reasons. But Tim’s is well intentioned, which is the only explanation why she would take him back in time for the follow week’s episode.
On one episode, he befriends the priest that’s marrying his girlfriend’s sister. After an exchange with Tim, the priest suddenly decides he doesn’t want to be a priest anymore, renounces the priesthood which nulls the marriage and then becomes a drunk. I forgot to mention that in this episode Tim tries to win back the graces of his girlfriend and her parents as they’re all pretty upset with him. He does this by trying to get on the good side of her grandmother who’s been left alone after all of the excitement and confusion of the wedding. Things go along great until the grandmother convinces Tim to take her out on the balcony and, in a moment of reminiscing, tells Tim to touch her breasts. After obliging (she was very persistent) Tim is caught feeling her up by, you guessed it, the parents and the girlfriend. Grandma has falling asleep as he’s playing with her tits, so his pleas of “She asked me to do it” are met with deaf ears.
Quite simply, the best new show this season, which probably makes it a contender for being cancelled. I say “best new show this season” like I know what I’m talking about. I don’t; I couldn’t even name one new show aside from the HBO ones. But given HBO’s track record that should be enough.
Hell, even John From Cincinnati was better than most of the best shit on regular TV.