The 10 highlights of summer TV 2009 (part II)

This summer marketing moment brought to you by Bing.

The ongoing saga of Worst Episode Ever’s review of the Summer 2009 TV Season. You can read Part I here.

Best Product Placement: The choices here are many, from the GE kitchen products on “Top Chef” to the casual/bizarre mention of a Prius on “The Closer” (”With the car running in battery mode, chief, we can get close to the suspect with him hearing us…”), our summer TV was rife with the sly, but gratuitous, placement of merchandise and services, all the better to make sure we got the marketing message before we TiVOed through the commercials and headed out into the cool night evening.

But, for my money, the best product placement this summer was actually an old idea resurrected from TV’s golden age: instead of trying to get its new Web search site, Bing, mentioned by characters in a show, Microsoft and its ad partners flipped the equation around and had a show’s characters appear in commercials for Bing. No one could mistake or forget that NBC’s summer series “The Philanthropist” was sponsored by Bing after seeing these commercials — starring characters from the show — before and after regular commercial breaks.

Hope the cash was worth it, guys.

Best Show I Should Have Watched More Of: I probably watched only about two and half episodes of TNT’s “Leverage” over the course of the summer — so mesmerized was I by the roadside accident that was “Raising the Bar” that few other TNT shows could pierce my gaze — and that’s a shame. The tale of Timothy Hutton’s band of grifters, conners and thieves who conspire to right the wrongs perpetrated on the downtrodden is, of course, nothing more than a Robin Hood story for the computer age, but it’s a well-told story of endearing rogues and intricate sting operations. I promise you… I will watch more next year. And you should, too.

Fastest Disintegration of a Show: I like to think that I’m a patient TV viewer. Despite this blog’s title, I like to see TV shows succeed — and I’m willing to give even the flimsiest of ideas a chance. I stuck by “According to Jim” for eight years. I make a point of watching “Still Standing” in reruns. My TiVO still has a season pass to “Saturday Night Live” even though I know I’ll end up fast-forwarding through 95 percent of it.

My point is that I always try to be optimistic about a TV show. The premise of Lifetime’s “Drop Dead Diva” may not have been designed for my male demographic — the soul of a thin, beautiful, and vacuous club-going model accidentally ends up in the roly-poly body of a cat-loving, homebody, plus-sized lawyer and everyone learns lessons about society’s depiction of women — but the reviews were surprisingly positive, so I was intrigued when my wife announced she was recording it.

“Drop Dead Diva” went from Season Pass to deleted in two and a half episodes. What had been intriguing became, with blinding speed, a sort of low-budget “Ally McBeal,” where inane courtroom antics mixed with paint-by-numbers cardboard caricatures of women (one’s a dumb model but with a heart of gold, one’s a backstabbing corporate shrew and one’s plus-sized — but with a heart of gold). Snooze.

Saddest Goodbye: Another tie…

First, we have USA’s “Monk.” Yes, episodes are still airing, but this summer marked the start of the final season of “Monk” and it’s a bittersweet goodbye — for us and for USA. Not only did “Monk” set a template for other quirky detective shows, but it fueled the identity that is now driving USA’s success. While I can’t vouch for the medical accuracy of Adrian Monk’s obsessive-compulsive disorder (his mental quirks seemed to drift over the show’s eight seasons to encompass a litany of anxieties to fit the writers’ moods), I can vouch for the show’s comedy expertise. And with all due respect to Bitty Schram, when it comes to Monk’s assistants, I’m a Traylor Howard fan all the way… it’s just how I was raised.

Serious stare, serious hair.

And tied with “Monk” for saddest goodbye this summer is Mark-Paul Gosselaar’s hair on the legal drama “Raising the Bar,” (also known as “Stephen Bochco’s Former Cast Members of ‘Saved by the Bell’ Full Employment Act of 2008″ — it’s got Gosselaar and Natalia Cigliuti, so far. I’m hoping to see Leanna Creel next season as a courtroom stenographer with a mysterious past). Ignoring the show’s many faults (why do all the lawyers on it seem like they’re members of a community college drama club who think turning up the dramatic acting means yelling your lines louder and more emphatically?), it’s always been a strangely compelling show. And part of that draw stemmed from Gosselaar’s greasy, unkempt  and anachronistic hair… he looked like the in-house counsel for the Roman Legion.

The hair was all anyone could talk about when it came to the show, which is probably why they sheared Gosselaar down to a businessman-neat this season (but not before devoting the jokey subplot of the season premiere to his newly shorn locks). But without his He-Man hair, Gosselaar’s show has lost the one news peg that got it gossip column attention. Now it’s just another cable TV legal drama, albeit one populated by 15 year-olds playing dress-up.

Coming Next: The number one highlight of the summer 2009 TV season…