which is the best of these 21st-century original programs on premium cable channel showtime?

btw the answer is: MASTERS OF HORROR

also boy was my face 0_o when i realized the chick on secret diary of a call girl was billie "honey to the b" piper.

Have watched at least parts of:

Dexter - lost interest when it became more about Dexter's personal life than killing someone every week, I think it really needs that kind of darkness to work
Shameless - have only seen the first half of the first season, not effecting enough to rise above goofy comedy
Weeds - stuck through the first three seasons but it was never terribly interesting (highlight: brother getting pegged by the hotttt Israeli girl)
Californication - progressively more absurd, but watchable in an embarrassing way
Dead Like Me - peaked midway through the second season, when Daisy's story started getting interesting, then flatlined again.
Jeremiah - so long ago I only vaguely remember how things worked, but I'm a sucker for post-apocalyptic scenarios
The L Word - Sex in the City with lesbians, innit?
Odyssey 5 - cool concept, good actors, would have liked to see it survive longer
The Chris Issak Show - no idea how this stayed on the air for so long

voting for Dead Like Me

haha this poll is gonna die a death

dead like me is super awesome, so that

masters of horror is like 30% great and 70% mindnumbingly terrible

dexter is doomed because its never going to hit the highs that came early, ending in awesome lithgowness

weeds is gonna crush this isnt it, anyway ive not liked any of the ones ive seen which isnt admittedly that many, i watched my first ever episode of dexter the other day and it embarrassed me w/its awfulness, then i watched another, why cause i wanted to know what happens and i was bored

have enjoyed moments of but would never in a million years actually pretend were ever any good and stopped watching awhile back: dexter, weeds
tried to watch for less than noble reasons and couldn't bear: l word, californication (shameless came this close to making this list)
sister(s) watched, tried to convince me it was actually good/watchable at some point: l word, tudors, nurse jackie
show i caught one episode on some showtime free weekend thing and thought 'wasn't bad, has paget brewster in it': huff
show i suspect is most likely best: dead like me

all the showtime shows seem to have the same corny look as far as the lighting and set and color palate, whats up w/that

they all look...really fake. even the ones you suspect they spent some bucks on.

seen very few of these, liked even less of em, voted brotherhood cuz of my soft spot for jason isaacs

shit, i didnt even notice masters of horror

Sleeper Cell dammit

like that borgias show...it looks like they spent a shitload on some stuff and then realized "fuck we still have a dozen sets to build"

yes, i watched the borgias

i dont like weeds at all but thats really all i have to say & havent seen 90% of these

i voted queer as folk because thats an hilarious bewildering name, like what does it even mean idk

i don't have cable anymore and it seems not a coincidence that i've read like four books this week

its some limey thing

my girl said shes gonna make me watch that show idgi

haha every time i travel i read like 1m books

on the other hand now i'm deprived of oversexed rennaisance faire melodramas featuring characters who are supposed to be spanish and italian speaking in fake british accents

lol at first i was like 'i don't think got is set in italy'

EVERYONE SPEAKS MASTERPIECE THEATER ENGLISH IN THE OLDEN DAYS

books are superior to television and movies cuz in my mind, the sets and acting are always amazing

idk sometimes the sets i come up w/ are pretty ramshackle tbh

god i need to stop doing this three letter abbrevs

haha my mental set-building ability always goes to shit when the descriptions start to get too complicated

sometimes i make the actors in my head redo scenes

the l word of my mind is a shitload more to the point than what showtime came up w/ i can tell you that

every character becomes paul lynde when i read a book

heh when I read the Tana French "Dublin Murder Squad" trilogy I got lost due to their different terminology for certain things due to it being an IRish author. for about the first thirty pages I pictured people carrying actual torches until I realized it meant flashlight.

huff is ok. that fat guy is funny.

I'm really into Nurse Jackie even though I don't actually think it's very good. I watched Weeds for the first couple seasons but then lost interest. Haven't seen any of the others so Nurse Jackie it is. At least it'll get one vote.

there was like a wk when i was really into Huff that i had completely blocked out until this moment

have watched and at least mildly enjoyed: Dead Like Me, Shameless, The Big C, Episodes, The Chris Isaak Show

tried watching like one or two episodes and it was just too dumb to even watch as a guilty pleasure: Californication, Weeds, The Borgias, United States of Tara

like Californication is so mindblowingly odious i can't even watch it for the gratuitous hot chicks. and i've watched more episodes of Entourage and Dream On than i care to admit.

Dead Like Me <3

Such a weird show, in a way. In how it came and went, without too much fuss. Cancelled after two seasons, followed by a (straight to video?) film, and the last episode gave you this nagging feeling of "this show ain't done yet, but it ends because it's forced to end". If Six Feet Under could go on for five or six seasons, surely Dead Like Me could've as well.

imo Dead Like Me quickly went off the rails after Bryan Fuller left, much prefer his other shows (Pushing Daisies and especially Wonderfalls)

californication IS odious but the first season featured david duchovny getting punched in the face while fucking, which was pretty satisfying really.

there's no way i can discuss the show's other uh minimal virtues without sounding like a total sleazeball so

Dead Like Me probably the only good show here

I like Californication due to a few ridiculous reasons but have never been able to make it through a single episode of Entourage!

Going to California

Oh geez, I remember this one even if no one else does because of the episode with the vegan protesters at the slaughterhouse that the two main characters were working at over the length of the ep. It was sort of a stupid show and I don't think it lasted past the first season before Showtime replaced it.

I voted on Dead Like Me, btw. We need to do a similar poll for past FX shows.

done - Which of These Original Scripted Programs Produced By The Basic Cable Network FX Do You Most Highly Regard?

slogging through first season of nurse jackie right now. i'm leaning towards considering it mad men-esque (i.e., decent but kinda dull and not as good as some think it is). at least it isn't quite as much carmela soprano-as-gregory house as i thought it would be (dunno whether that's good or bad, leaning towards bad b/c Edie Falco ain't no Hugh Laurie).

californication is an unabashed guilty pleasure and much funnier/better-written than some give it credit for being. it is also kinda odious crap. and i hate entourage so whatever yo.

weeds was pretty funny and good its first three seasons (if a little too smug plus sketchy racial issues). from there it fell totally off the cliff and it's unwatchable now (not even for mary-louise parker hot weed-MILF action or justin kirk's consistent LOLs).

brotherhood had its moments and deserved better. if anything, even grimmer than the sopranos (little to no humor to leaven the grimy nastiness) and sometimes a bit TOO obvious and subtle as a flying mallet (again, unlike the sopranos). still solid overall though and yeah anything with jason isaacs and jason clarke is worth watching for those reasons alone.

will be checking out united states of tara by end of week. but i'm not expecting much.

the tudors = the Court of Henry VIII as Abercrombie & Fitch douchebags. whudda thunk it? chick who played Anne Boleyn was kinda hot.

so it looks like dexter will be the one to get my vote.

these are all soooo bad

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

started renting Huff -- really like it for the most part, although it's kind of unnerving the way Showtime used the same director and background music guy as Dead Like Me so it looks and feels almost exactly the same in a lot of small ways.

was thinking about how i liked The Big C and was looking forward to the new season, but i'm watching this week's episode right now and am already rmde

it seems like the plot of any showtime show that lasts for more than two seasons becomes some kind of exquisite corpse conducted by a room of coked-up screenwriters

^sounds better than it actually is

yeah, true. i'm pretty sure all of us could come up with a better showtime show than any of these on this very thread.

w/ or w/o coke.

i wonder how many of these shows feature characters talking to hallucinations of dead characters. i've watched episodes of Huff and The Big C this week that do that and it feels like a very Showtime device.

the influence of the sopranos rears its gandolfini-shaped head again

though at least chase had the taste to make them interminable dream sequences instead

Dexter vs Weeds for me. Weeds I bailed on in season 2. Dexter I even watched the Julia Stiles staggering awfulness.

haha the julia stiles season was one of those times i unshamefully wished for the surprise twist death of a protagonist

Dexter needs to do what 24 never had the gonads to, go overseas and stay there - break its main character out of the context that's been wrung dry.

i wonder what the internal processes at showtime are that make all these shows so similar

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

united states of tara is much better than i was expecting. obv b/c toni collette is awesome. still glad i voted for dexter, though.

no votes for l word!