Anything good on Chinese TV?

Now I thought I had problems with the quality of the UK's 5 TV channels, but here in China, we have something like 30 or 40 terrestrial channels. I understand Chinese TV stations are going on 'buying sprees' looking for soaps overseas to fill up their slots. I guess when you have this many people paying license fees, then you can afford to keep so many TV channels.

A problem for me is that only 12 or 13 of them are 'numbered'. The rest have chinese names or logos, which makes it a little harder for me to figure out what they are.

One I like is the Wen Hua channel, which has a lot of drama and music. And on CCTV9, http://www.cctv.com/english/ the english channel, they have a 15 minute mandarin teaching session twice a week (with daily repeats). You can watch it online too, I think I may have written about it before. And on one of the channels there's a daily shanghainese soap at about 8 in the morning, that woudl be good for anyone wanting to study shanghainese i figureOther than that, I'm a bit lost.

I've got my PC wired up as a TV recorder now. The idea is for me to leave it to record TV, and then I can watch favourite programs at my own (very slow) pace. I can rewind and replay TV to my heart's content this way, which is a great help for making sure I actually understand all or most of the words that are flying past. I use Hauppage's WinTV 2000. It has a handy function when playing back recordings, for replaying the last 10 seconds. VERY handy.

All I need now, is to know when the good progams to watch are. With I think 60 channels, it's too difficult to surf, and I'm a bit stuck when it comes to reading TV schedules.

Does anyone have any good suggestions for interesting progams to watch? Or ones that are good to learn Mandarin from? I'm thinking... people who speak slowly and clearly... interesting regular progammes, or things with beautiful people in them. Honestly speaking, if it helps keep my attention, then that's a good thing. The Chinese equivalent of Friends would be great.... What is it that people in their mid twenties watch here? Haha, I was told to look out for the 'blind date' program that's on on Saturday evenings, apparently that's a lot of fun.