News bits: FX expands, CBS renews, Amazon gets original

A fair amount of stuff happened this week while I was busy doing other things. Here's a rundown:

An UNO game show? Skip

Is it April 1 already?

It was reported Tuesday that Mattel is teaming up with The Gurin Co., a production and distribution company specializing in "light entertainment," to make a game show based on UNO, that staple of sleepovers and family road trips. They're dreaming up two possibilities: a half-hour show with a $100,000 jackpot, or an hourlong show with a $1 million prize. The French will get to see it first.

They may be on to something. Think of the possibilities for other edge-of-your-seat card games, like Go Fish, in which the terrible guesser would have to go catch an actual fish, or War, where the contestants could beat on each other gladiator-style in between rounds, the winner getting the bigger deck.

Believe it or not, this is not the first ridiculous idea for a game show to crop up this year. In February, NBC announced "Hollywood Game Night," hosted by Jane Lynch and produced by Sean Hayes and Todd Millner ("Grimm"), which would feature "A-list celebrities hanging out and playing games with fun-loving non-celebrity contestants in a cocktail party atmosphere."

I assume they're talking charades or -- meta alert -- Celebrity, but with NBC you never know. We could be watching someone else just jump checkers all night.

Scattered Thoughts on 'The Sopranos'

It's somewhat fitting that I finished "The Sopranos" the same week as the 10-year anniversary of the Iraq War. When I picked up the show for the first time earlier this year, and realized it had started back in 1999 -- when I was but a sophomore in high school -- one of the things I was most curious about was how a show that straddled 9/11 would handle those events.

Hey, readers

Hello, and welcome to my blog.

Some of you may have come here via my Rabbit Ears column in The Herald. Some of you may have wandered in from who knows where, looking for snacks and a place to prop up your feet for a while. I accept all comers.

So who the heck am I, and what's this thing going to be about, anyway? By night I'm the assistant city editor at The Herald, a transplant from Colorado by way of Oregon. And this thing is going to be about TV: shows and trends and news and anything else that strikes my fancy in between work-work. (Warning: A fair amount early on will be about Game of Thrones.)

I did not set out in life to write about TV. I didn't even watch it all that heavily until I moved here almost eight years ago and fell in with a TV-watching crowd. Then I started shelling out big money for cable and premium channels, and discovered that people write about this stuff for a living and think about it and have interesting things to say. Pretty soon I was knee deep in it. And now here we are.

I enjoy television, mostly for one simple reason: The stories are seemingly endless. When shows have characters that are well drawn, dialog that's sharp and stories that are complex, I want to spend as much time with them as possible.

If you're reading this, hopefully it means you feel the same. So let's talk.

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What am I watching?
The Good Wife, Vikings, Bates Motel, Nashville, Go On (don't ask me why), Modern Family, The Office, Parks and Rec, Community.

What am I looking forward to in the next few months?
GAME OF THRONES, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Arrested Development

What are some of my all-time favorites? (in addition to many mentioned above)
House, In Treatment, early ER, early CSI, The West Wing, Lost, Downton Abbey