THE second longest running off-Broadway musical, I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change, which has been pleasing audiences worldwide for many years, is coming to Helsinki. Boasting the tagline of ‘Everything you have ever secretly thought about dating, romance, marriage, lovers, husbands, wives and in-laws, but were afraid to admit’, it explores themes that we are all familiar with.

“At first glance it’s just a satire about male-female relationships but, at its very core, it is about people trying to connect,” director Nihan Tanışer comments. “I think this is the reason the audience can relate to it so easily.”

YOU may think you’re through with the vampire-genre after the likes of Buffy and Blade, but if you have any love left for the undead you need to try True Blood.

YLE TV2 finally brings HBO’s prize-grabbing hit series to Finnish TV. There has been a lot of hype around True Blood and many think YLE is unforgivably late, since a lot of impatient people have found other ways to watch it. According to Miika Jalonen of TV2, YLE waited because they wanted to air both the first and the second season as a whole package.

Oh look, Frasier’s on. Didn’t I just see the last episode? Yes, I remember, it was very touching and I was quite sad to see the rerun cycle come to an end. Ah, Nelonen is doing what Sub did with Friends. They’re running the entire show again on the same slot. In fact, any day of the week you can catch a number of 90s hit shows that seem be stuck in a scheduling hamster wheel. And as if this was not enough, we’ve seen the emergence of a new phenomenon on Finnish TV: the marathon broadcast.

In Victorian society, upholding a facade of moral purity was important. Behind closed doors any kind of depravity could be indulged in, but all that was kept firmly out of public sight. If they’d had TV back then, they would probably have banned The Moment of Truth, a Colombian format that is sweeping the world, and now Finland!

Each week a contestant walks into the studio and answers a series of embarrassing personal questions to win a cash prize. To call their bluff, a pre-show lie detector test is administered. What comes out is the ignominious true face of humanity. Thus the appeal of the show is easy to understand. Seeing the poor saps spill their guts on their darkest personal secrets makes people feel better about little digressions of their own, which they’d rather keep under the lid.