Fridays have become a TV wasteland for us. We can't bear to watch one second of "Ghost Whisperer," and we gave the premiere of "The Book of Daniel" a watch, and were totally insulted by it. Not by its "blasphemous" presentation of Christianity, but by its pathetic attempts at quirkiness and humor. It was forced, obvious, and ultimately, dull.

So a few Fridays ago, we decided to take a gander at some public access shows. We admit we don't take in a lot of public access, even though on the rare occasions when we have, we've actually been entertained--in a "I can't believe this is on TV!" kind of way. The problem is our TiVo doesn't list by name any of the actual shows that run on cable channel 29, and that makes it hard for us to program the shows we'd like to check out. Instead we have to go channel 29's Web site to view a schedule, like some kind of ANIMAL. To add insult the injury, the schedules are all PDF files!

But, we went ahead and downloaded one of the schedules, randomly picked a couple of shows that looked interesting, and programmed the TiVo to record them.

The first was a "burlesque game show" called "This or That!" (site slightly NSFW), which runs late Fridays at 1 a.m. For the life of us, we can't begin to tell you what the rules of the game are--it was late, and we were a little sleepy when we watched it. But it seems to involve two contestants, a man and a woman, who make choices between "this or that," gain points, and lose items of clothing. We think. In between, viewers are treated to several appearances by scantily-clad women. In some cases, full on boobage can be seen. And THAT'S where the true entertainment in public access lies, isn't it? In the ability to see nudity, for free, on your TV screen. As for the rest of the show, we suppose it's a slight step above most public access offerings, in that they seem to have an actual set, and real costumes (as skimpy as some may be). We imagine it would be even more entertaining if one were to watch it after coming home slightly drunk on a Friday night.

Up next was "Reality Check," which labels itself as the "First Reality TV show!" We don't know about that, but it has been on the air in some form or the other since 1991. It's kind of a hodgepodge show, with backstage interviews with punk and heavy metal bands, as well as local musical acts, and some performance videos. You can also expect to see the occasional porn star sit down for an interview as well. We could say more about the show, but feel we should be honest here. We were shocked to see that someone who works on the show is someone we've actually met, and when we met this someone, we had an instant and intense dislike for him. He was...creepy. Really creepy. We shall say no more than that, but will admit that his involvement with the show really clouded our judgment of it. Also, the episode we saw was over a year old and was nothing more than a series of rapid-fire clips from the previous year's shows. We can only hope other episodes are a little more solid.

Thus ended our brief foray into the world of public access. In the future we may take the grab bag approach and just randomly pick some show times for the TiVo to record, and see what we get..and pray that if we know anyone involved with the show that they're great people, or at least people we wouldn't mind seeing naked.