Anime, of course, is for geeks, guys who live in their parents’ basement and 14-year-old Japanese girls. That’s a bit of its rep, but anyone who thinks that probably doesn’t understand why Up or Iron Gian or Beauty and the Beast are such amazing works of art. There is so much cheap, crappy animation in the world, it’s easy to write off the entire field. There are even more crappy movies and tv than animation, so it’s a stupid thing to say. Yet it gets said, or thought, so it needs to be answered.

Cheap crap is cheap crap, whether it’s food, tv or animation. The medium of expression is irrelevant to the concept of quality; there are 30-second commercials that are excellent expressions of art and skill. Not a lot, of course, but enough to prove the point that quality is possible in any field of human endeavor. And quality is what sets any work apart, not its form or format.

Azumanga Daioh, for an excellent example, is better television than at least 90% of all the sitcoms ever made. A 25-episode story arc following the lives of a group of Japanese girls in their three years of high school. What it is not is an extended After-school Special, exploring the growing pains and so on; it is, instead, hilarious, silly and, now and then, touching. There’s no boy troubles, no teenage rebellion, just a lot of goofy characters, a few sweet moments and art that is wonderful to watch. Yes, it’s anime so there are many scenes of minimal, and often no, animation. Stills, and the mere moving of still elements, are a major aspect of anime that need to be accepted along with the Coyote’s ability to hover in space until he looks down at his feet.

TV is a big deal in the world, in many ways. "Shows" — sitcoms and dramas — are, for good or ill, an important part of people's lives. They entertain, they divert, they even teach at times. There are so many different shows, so many options; there are enough for everyone to have a few favorites, to have shows they watch when something better isn't on. To pass the time. To fill the spaces. But no matter the reason for a show, those who create them have one responsibility (besides making money for the network and the sponsors): do not broadcast crap.

Yet they do. Most tv is crap, and for a simple reason: The writing is crap. That's why the work of those who do not produce crap is so valued, even if it isn't always rewarded with multiple seasons and big audiences. Yet we know when we are watching crap and when we're watching quality — if we choose to pay attention, which, of course, few do.

"Quality television" is not automatically an oxymoron. The foremost exception to that near-universal rule is Joss Whedon. "Buffy" and "Firefly" were, and remain, exemplars of what television can be, and their quality — excellence — stems from a single source: Joss Wheden's writing. Between his way with a twist in the story to a twist in the heart, few have ever accomplished what he's managed to do in a relatively brief tv career.

And now we have "Dollhouse." I managed to avoid almost every teaser — for me, they are all spoilers — but I did catch one warning about the show that I now bear in mind having seen the first episode: This may take a while. If I had watched the first episode cold and then been asked who was behind it, I doubt I would have said Whedon. It was not typical television writing, but it wasn't that far from it. There's little in it that I would call Whedonesque, no head-snapping lines, no punch-to-the-gut plot quirks. What there was was an hour's worth of set-up (ok; forty-some minutes): Who Echo is, what the Dollhouse is, who the players are that will be making the story happen. And we had a number of examples of what the Actives could do. Obviously, the show needed a 2-hour premiere, but frakkin Fox wasn't even able to get it on the air until the middle of February. Viewers will need time to get into the story and what promises to be a multi-layered story arc; I'm not sure we'll get the chance.

Perhaps Whedon is already writing the movie that will show what "Dollhouse" could be if given the chance "Firefly" was not.

Ok, I'm breathing a sigh of relief. Episode 10 of Season 4 is the end of the series. That's a half-season finale; I forgot they do that on BSG. It would have made an interesting conclusion to the series, but now that I realize it's only half-way, I see a few things I was missing.

(Perhaps part of my problem is watching via bittorrent. I don't necessarily follow some of the meta-info that I would get watching SciFi, where they would also announce the second, etc. I'm paying for my pirating sins.)

(spoilers follow the jump)

I don't have a television, but I can still watch tv. I am current on Battlestar Galactica, Doctor Who, the last season of Dexter, Bleach (with subs), Pushing Daisies (as far as they got before the strike) and I'm hoping someone will post Food Network's "Next Celebrity Chef" (my favorite and only reality show). I watch almost all of these via bittorrent, although I've found a legitimate way to watch some shows: Hulu.com.

Hulu is advertisement-based and has an array of tv shows and movies. You can watch "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" and the first season of "Lou Grant." Or, as I just did over the past few weeks, season one of "Bones." Not sure why I started watching it. I'd known about Hulu, but the ads were irritating (the same 10-second McDonald's ad over and over, or awful Chili's ads. Then an adblocker for Safari came along that skipped past Hulu's ads instantly. I tested it on — Bones. I was going to watch an ep of "Buffy" but I've seen them all so many times; I just wanted something new, and there was "Bones" right near "Buffy." Turns out it's a darn good show.

Not perfect. A bit preachy at times, sometimes predictable. But the relationship between Bones and Booth is one of those perfect tv pairings, and they never get close to romance in season 1. That would have been the cheap and easy (and usual) way to play it, but the creator, Hart Hanson (the only other thing I know of his was "Joan of Arcadia," a wonderful and unjustly cancelled show for which he wrote two eps) was smart enough not to play it easy.

The season-ending cliffhanger was great, too, although predictable. But given the storyline of Bones' parents, it was inevitable at some point.

Season 2 and 3 are not going to be Hulu'd, however. I'm heading back to bittorrent for that. It takes longer than Hulu, but I'm not in any rush (just for te new eps of BSG). And I guess when you are involved in a criminal activity, better to be patient. If Emily Deschanel wants to come and scold me for my wickedness, I could handle that.

The idea of salvation seems to be one of the most prevalent in Western society. Here in America, salvation in one form or another dominates creative endeavors: the list of characters in movies who need to find salvation is huge, almost from the beginning of cinema. Chaplin's characters were looking for salvation from the pressure of being at the bottom of society. Bogart, in his first major role, The Petrified Forest, is as bad as they come but still finds a glimmer of hope to maybe end his life a bit better than he lived it. Pulp Fiction, with Butch the runaway boxer and Sugar the petty thief, presented two very different, and very odd, roads to personal salvation.

And on television, no character has been sent in search of saving grace more than the troubled cop. Hence the name of the new Holly Hunter vehicle, "Saving Grace". Anything with Holly Hunter is worth seeing, of course, and a weekly television show is just a promise of delight. The hope is that this tired old formula is given a fresh look by Hunter and creator Nancy Miller.

"Tired old formula" certainly sums up Hunter's Grace at the beginning: smoking, drinking, sleeping around, wild and careless, with her life and the lives of everyone around her. Until she kills a man while driving and drunk. Which is when the angel appears and offers her one last chance. The premise of the series, of course: Grace is given one last chance and fights against it as hard as she can, but the angel appears to be even more stubborn than she. That remains to be seen.

But the formula is old and well-used. We see it over and over again, the lost soul struggling to come to terms with life via God's grace. But it's always pretty much the same god, the Judeo-Christian (and to my mind, Muslim) "Father in Heaven" god, occassionally with a bit of Jesus thrown in (for most writers and directors, however, that seems to take things a bit too far). Given that the vast majority of Americans believe in that god to some extent, that's understandable. It's familiar, a storyline viewers love and watch. It's safe, too; even a tobacco-chewing angel is acceptable, because, after all, he's got a heart of pure gold.