word girl ...

With a tivo in the house (well - 3 tivos, actually - his, hers, and kids ... wait, did I just admit that out loud?), we really don't watch a whole lot of unintentional tv. Thanks to the miracle of dvr television, we almost always watch from a menu of collected shows rather than a show being broadcast in 'real time' (football is the one big exception that comes to mind). The manbug of the house has season passes to HBO's Entourage and a few History Channel shows like American Pickers and Pawn Stars, while my tivo gathers episodes of Mad Men, Modern Family, 30 Rock, a sprinkling of HGTV shows, and variety of less intelligent shows that fall way down on the food chain like The Dish and those classy Jersey Housewives.

And since our ladybugs, in turn, have grown up in a tivo household, they never really watch 'real time' tv. I'm so thankful that the only tv shows they ever watch are from a collection of season passes and not mindless channel surfing! When they were younger, their tivo menu was filled with sweet cheerful cartoons like Maisy, Little Miss Spider, Clifford, and Charlie & Lola. These days, it's shows like Cake Boss, Fetch, Wizards of Waverly Place, and AFV that fill the menu. But there is one lone cartoon left among the season passes - it's a PBS-kids gem called Word Girl ... since the title character/superhero is a 10 year old girl, my bugs are on the hook - and since the writing is so intelligent and clever, so am I.

Maybe it's the teacher in me or my nerdy love of vocabulary - but truth be told, Word Girl is as much a favorite of mine as it is theirs. First off, it's the last of their cartoons, so that alone makes me sentimental ... they're growing up! But unlike so much of the junk out there, this one's actually a really smart show (and it teaches too ... woven into each script are two new vocab words like 'impeccable', 'frenzied', or 'flummoxed') and the talented voice artists perfectly deliver the dry subtle humor in the writing, which has a very Tina Fey/30 Rock vibe (Chris Parnell of SNL fame voices the narrator, so maybe I'm not too far off?). The villains are characters like "The Butcher" (who butchers words), "Lady Redundant Woman" (who overcomplicates her sentences with redundant words), and "Seymour Orlando Smooth" (a game show host who schmoozes with is handsome smile) to name a few - completely ridiculous yet hilarious parodies of themselves. The bugs will often play an episode as I'm getting dinner ready and I loosely tune in as they watch ... and I just love how much my kids are starting to 'get' the more subtle humor that makes me giggle just as much ... see what you think ...

One of the downsides of living off of the tivo menu is that there are probably a lot of good shows out there that never pass through our radar ... anyone got any favorites or recommendations out there? Would love to hear of anything you're loving ... either kids shows or grown ups ... and clearly, with RHONJ on my menu, I'm not picky - or judgmental ;-)