There’s not much good on TV. Likely there are several of you who’d disagree with me on this, but I found the quality in television programming strongly lacking in 2012. Some shows I’ve been a fan of for years simply haven’t appealed to me as much as they had before. How I Met Your Mother. Leverage. Burn Notice. American Horror Story. Castle. Dexter. Supernatural. They may not have had a terrible year, but they certainly didn’t cause me to sing their praises from the rooftops. Likely my disappointment has much to do with my age and the fact I can barely keep my eyes open past 11:30 PM on weeknights these days, so I’m extremely picky with how I spend what little TV watching time I have. This isn’t to say there were some good shows in 2012: Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead, for example. This item relates to the next two items on my list. …

Supernatural could end in 2013 and I’d be OK with that. The past to seasons of this show have been pretty lacking, when comparing to the earlier seasons that caused me to fall in love with the show. There’s still a chance things could pick up gain, now that the Sera Gamble experiment crashed and burned, and Jeremy Carver is now at the helm. The magic it just gone, and there’s nothing new coming to the plate. This is one of those shows that demands a clean and purposeful finale, and should the numbers falter for Supernatural, CW better damned well allow for one hell of a stellar ending to the series, with Kripke back to help to boot.

Comic-Con is still fun, but I’m reaching the end. This is much related to my first item of my not finding a place with many shows currently on television. This past year was the best SDCC for me to date, but it had much more to do with the company I had than the shows I was interested in covering. This year I had the good fortune of attending the press panels and/or rooms for Firefly and Breaking Bad — most every other TV show I just didn’t care much for. This is why I’m thinking this year’s SDCC may be my last, if I actually am able to attend at all. The cost of attending is often difficult to justify, and every year I spend months scrambling to get the various press outlets to put us on their lists to attend press rooms for interviews. If I do attend this year, I won’t fall prey to that hoop jumping again, and I’ll take time to soak in the surroundings more, especially now when CliqueClack’s focus is on anything you’d see there, including animation and comics. I might actually get to sit in a few cartoon panels with Michael this year.

Downton Abbey is a mysterious pleasure to watch. And I have a hard time putting my finger on why. So far we’re halfway through the second season, and we’re eagerly looking forward to zipping through the rest of the season and beyond. The thing is, I’m not exactly sure why it’s so damned appealing … but it is. The best I can come up with is that the characters are extremely well done, and the time period, for me, is fascinating to watch. Some have been telling me that it’s basically a soap opera set in the early 20th century, and sometimes I get what they are saying. But there’s something about how this show is filmed, acted and portrayed that makes me want to see more and more of it. It’s fun to get lost in the time period.

Kickstarter is hit or miss. This goes quite outside the usual TV theme I’d be going off about here, but it’s something very 2012-ish to bring up. I’m a big proponent of Kickstarter, and I’ve actually donated a fair amount to several CliqueClack-ish projects that I’ve felt pretty strongly about, in particular web-based series and animation projects. However, there are cases when there are projects that promise a “reward” of the finished product, only to have that finished product take a very long time to complete or, more drastically, never come to fruition at all. I truly hope more web series, comics and books become a success using Kickstarter, but in turn I hope their funding stays realistic and promisses are kept. I plan to keep giving what I can to these projects, so if you find some related to our site that fit, let us know.

Cable’s overpriced. And a resounding “DUH!” issues from the audience. I’ve got a side resolution for 2013, and that’s to get our house off overpriced cable TV and onto more realistic subscription plans. In the past — when we had to review TV programs the night they aired, for CliqueClack and TV Squad — not having cable wasn’t an option. Now that we’re no longer burning the midnight oil off of two ends of a candle to get sleepy reviews posted, we can deal with recorded programs or legally-downloadable shows days after they air live. We may miss a few shows here and there, but when our viewing has become so picky these days, would we really miss them all that much that it’d be worth paying hundreds of dollars for a subscription to programming where 99% of it we don’t care about?

Wow, now that I look back at that list, I sound pretty damned sour about 2012. I don’t believe a so-so year — or even a bad year — can be followed by yet another one or worse, so I have high hopes for 2013. Here’s to better TV programming, more time to watch it (and more cheaply), and another SDCC that’s so good that I can’t stay away for 2014. And here’s to my 1000th post (minus those I did for CliqueClack Food). Happy New Year everyone!