TV Time

So it looks like Tom Scavo, the Desperate Housewives househusband, is out of the at-home father game. He got a job last night, ending what was no doubt the highest-profile at-home dad on primetime. Add that to the coming death of SAHD-containing 7th Heaven, and the TV landscape will suddenly be stripped of happy guys at home. Both shows proved a very important point: audiences will accept as realistic the idea of a perfectly capable guy at home taking care of the kids. That neither character caused much of a ripple is cause to celebrate.

But I may not be without a small-screen dad to monitor for long. There's allegedly work on a pilot called "The Angriest Man in Suburbia," but it doesn't sound like there's much detail yet. I'm not holding my breath. I'm increasingly convinced that it's hard to play the dad-at-home, fish-out-of-water angle for laughs now. If the networks can launch a smart sitcom about domestic life, it'll probably do well. But I don't think dads are an endless well of humor anymore.

Convention stuff: we had about a dozen edits to the Convention 2006 wiki over the weekend, and I'm hugely appreciative of all of the deep thinking going on there. Over the coming week, I'll be cleaning up that page to make it more readable. I've already added a couple of new subpages, including one listing volunteer e-mails and Skype handles and one on program suggestions. I'll be porting over some of the program suggestions now on the main page, so don't be alarmed if your suggestion suddenly disappears -- it'll be pasted on the new page.