TV Party for Friday, June 17th

Fridays are a slow night on television during Sweeps Month, and things have only gotten slower now that it’s summer. So tonight I’m going to outline a couple choices I think might be interesting…not ground breaking, but interesting.

First up is 2 solid hours of investigative reporting courtesy of Dateline NBC. Running from 8 to 10, tonight’s edition turns the hidden camera’s eye on the world of garment workers in Bangladesh. The Dateline team looks at the hours worked, the wages paid, and the conditions of the garment factories, then brings a foreign garment worker to a U.S. department store to see the garments she made and talk to U.S. consumers. It’s a great topic, and will certainly push you to have all your clothes hand-made by the tailor down the street…at least until you get the bill.

If that’s not your cup of tea head up to A&E for Biography: Shania Twain, a look at the singer who bridges the gap between country and pop better than almost anyone in the industry, and wears a mean pair of leopard-print pants. How the heck Mutt Lange ever got her to marry him is beyond me.

After an hour of Shania you’ll definitely be in the mood for an affordable romantic getaway, so slide down the dial to the Food Network for two episodes of “$40 a day” as host Rachael Ray takes you on culinary tours of Nantucket and Cape Cod, all for $40 a day. Well, for the food, anyway. This is the Food Network, after all, so lodging is off the books. In Nantucket she enjoys Sourdough French Toast with Orange Bourbon Butter and Spiced Pecans, Curried Chicken Salad, Dark Chocolate Chipotle Cookies, Iced Lemon Cookies, Pistachio Lime Cookies, and Grilled Salmon Salad, while the Cape Cod menu features Stuffed French Toast, Captain Parker's Chowder, Linguini Puttanesca, and The Cape Codder. Clearly they don’t have any cookies out on Cape Cod.

After watching all that eating it’s time to watch people exercise. That’s right, exercise. Extreme exercise. At 10 head down to ESPN2 for coverage of the 2004 World’s Strongest Man competition from the Bahamas. Watch as these insanely huge men compete in crazy strength events like the limo pull, the milk jug carry (with milk jugs that weigh something like 200 pounds each…) and my favorite, the Atlas Stones where the competitors have to lift five stones of decreasing weight and set them on increasingly tall platforms. The first stone weighs a hefty 363 pounds and gets lifted a little over 4 and a half feet high. The fifth stone weighs 242 pounds and gets lifted on to a platform that’s just under 6 feet high. And to think I complain when I have to carry my kids around…