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WITH SUMMER'S PROGRAMMING BLUES COME REVISED VIEWING HABITS AND NEW OBSESSIONS
The rhythms of television watching change during the summer. Your favorite shows are in reruns, so you don't have to bother making a point of being home to watch them. Yet I notice that when I'm around the house on, say, NYPD Blue or Buffy the Vampire Slayer night, I still peruse the TV listings in the vague, heat-induced hope that this'll be an episode I've missed: Hmmm, ''Bobby faces a moral dilemma.'' Hey, maybe I didn't... So I tune in, and, invariably, I have seen it, at which point the electronic search for novelty begins.
Thus far this summer, wayward channel surfing has yielded an unexpected treasure trove from fusty old PBS -- the recent four-part documentary series Cadillac Desert, a history of California as told through its water systems -- and it's far more exciting, daring, and swashbuckling than you can imagine from that description.
I've also developed an unhealthy obsession with MTV veejay Matt Pinfield, he of the perennially sour expression, scratchy voice, and gleaming pate. (Pinfield looks like a deeply troubled older brother of the Smashing Pumpkins' Billy Corgan.) Pinfield seems at once so earnest about and so contemptuous of pop music that as I press a glass of cranberry juice and ginger ale to my forehead, I find it a decadent summer treat to worry about him: Is he unhappy? Are his masters at MTV giving him a hard time? Will he ever crack a smile?
Music video is, of course, the TV format that fits the summer mind frame most agreeably: bits of 3- or 4-minute programming that rise up like heat-wave mirages, then fade into an icy-cold commercial. And it's not just Pinfield who grants me the pleasure of emotionally uncommitted worry; there are also all these women singers to be concerned about. Like Fiona Apple in her ''Criminal'' video, the one in which the hollow-eyed singer-songwriter patootie is filmed in various vulnerable positions in what looks to be a cheap motel. The idea, apparently, is to simulate the dank atmosphere of a porn loop -- a venerable rock-video tradition, to be sure. But Apple's image is predicated on her assiduous appeal to adolescence -- her little-girl mien, her gawky gait. (To the producers of the new Adrian Lyne version of Lolita, which seems unable to find a film distributor, I say: You've been beaten to the punch, guys.)
Just as I wonder with a frown where Apple's mother was when her daughter was shooting this piece of vile artiness, so do I fret over Abra Moore, whose video for the super-catchy ''Four Leaf Clover'' seems to be airing every 10 minutes on any music-video channel you come upon. Moore sings about her good luck in romance, but she's unhappy around the edges: Her eyes bespeak woe; her thin, tense frame backs up her ''My body's on overload'' line. Moore is new to me, and I wish her the best, but as I click past channel after channel, I also wish that all these determinedly paradoxical tough-waif types who've surfaced in the wake of Alanis Morissette would eat a few cheeseburgers and...
Hey, wait a minute, I don't think I have seen this episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer...
