Sometimes I eat TV. It tastes like Salisbury steak. Old, chewy Salisbury steak.

I don't know why I get interested in some TV shows. I don't even like watching TV. Commercials make me want to shoot the world in the face. Reality TV shows, Surreal Life and Survivor included, make me horribly, horribly disgusted. It is common knowledge that 90% of television is pure crap, mixed and refined to enhance the quality of crapiness to its maximum potential level. And yet...

Aside from watching Sci Fi's various non-Scare Tactics original series, I also watch a bunch of mainstream network shows, when I get the opportunity. My mother and I used to watch Law & Order religiously, every Wednesday. We would shake our heads in admiration of Jack McCoy. She called me the day she heard that Jerry Orbach died. I still watch reruns, even though I've seen them all, and I'd probably watch the latest season if I could. Instead, lately our new religious viewing has been CSI on Thursdays. Something about Gil Grisom, genius forensic criminologist, is entertaining.

Anyway, what prompted this entry is the show "Without a Trace". It follows CSI on Thursdays, plus TNT appears to have picked up old episodes on Mondays. It's about an FBI missing persons investigative team. It doesn't require nearly the suspension of disbelief that CSI or Crossing Jordan requires. These are FBI agents and I have no trouble believing that they can arrest, question, and shoot suspects while in the pursuit of their investigation. On top of that...Without a Trace is just so much more emotionally satisfying than those other shows. Sometimes they go a little too obviously for the emotional angle, with the soldier returned from Iraq, for instance, a plot failing that Law & Order shares, whereas CSI scripts tend to shoot for the obscure, or at least the shadier kind of urban legend. But I still feel good after watching an episode of Without a Trace. There have been episodes of CSI that left me aching and breathless with tragedy. I don't know how to explain it. I just enjoy Without a Trace more.

Okay, I can't justify the fact that I watch TV. I can't even justify that mumbling, rambling paragraph I just wrote. I have to get up early tomorrow. End.

Also, my dad and I watched the season premier of "24". Dammit. They got me again.