It’s hot, y’all. And we’re cheap. In the dog days of summer, we get our kicks on the couch and in the air-conditioned cool, with a TV, a laptop, a PDA. Here’s a rundown of our most recent pop-culture fixations.
� It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No – it’s an extraordinary dancer! Doled out in short, five- to 15-minute vignettes, the new Web series The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers (www.thelxd.com) – directed by Jon Chu of Step Up 2: The Streets fame – is unapologetically literal. Dance isn’t a metaphor for telling the story, it is the story. And by story, I mean an epic tale in which our heroes – otherwise ordinary people with extraordinary abilities to pop, lock, and pirouette – will dispatch justice against some very dark, trenchcoat-wearing forces of evil … by dancing. I dare you to look away. – Nora Ankrum
� Spike TV may claim it’s the guy channel, but it’s FX that knows who men are. The Tuesday night one-two of Denis Leary’s unrelenting dramedy, Rescue Me, and Louis C.K.’s teeth-grindingly brilliant and hilariously awkward comedy, Louie, runs through to the fall, when Sons of Anarchy and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia will tag in. – Richard Whittaker
� The Good Guys: The West Wing‘s Emmy Award-winning Bradley Whitford performs an acting about-face as he steals the show on this Dallas-based cop series that started on Fox in June. No longer a buttoned-down presidential aide, Whitford now sports a bushy mustache, Southern drawl, and goofy persona as a veteran cop who only retains his job because of a single act of heroism performed long ago. Colin Hanks as his young partner provides a good foil on the best TV show filmed in Texas after Friday Night Lights. – Marjorie Baumgarten
� What am I looking at? Tweets on the hashtag #TCA on Twitter. The Television Critics Association is having its big conference for most of the month. I’m not there, and from the looks of the tweets, that’s not entirely a bad thing. Out of the garble, a couple of good tweets do rise to the surface. I live for those. – Belinda Acosta
� Once you get over the sniggering premise of the BBC drama Being Human – a vampire, a ghost, and an especially weepy werewolf share a flat and their bottled-up feelings in Bristol – it’s hard not to get sucked in by its Buffy-inspired mix of bantering, brooding, and bloody good action. Series two premiered in late July on BBC America, but those of us without a fancy cable package used to be able to purchase a season pass on iTunes – an option which has mysteriously disappeared in the last few days. Bring it back, stat, iTunes, and fang you in advance. – Kimberley Jones
This article appears in August 6 • 2010.