TV Round Up…
Alrighty. Figure I’d put this up for posterity’s sake. These are the shows that currently occupy my viewing time. I rarely turn the TV on unless there’s something I actually want to watch on, and these are it. Them. Thingy.
Must Watch
The shows that I absolutely cannot miss.
Chuck
I’ve already spazzed my pants over how much I like Chuck, so I’ll just leave it at that. I will say that, as it’s on at the same time as The Big Bang Theory, I usually watch BBT and then wait for one of the later showings of Chuck. (This is why having Satellite sometimes doesn’t suck; I get a three hour timeshift on everything.)
Dirty Jobs
I often make the mistake of watching this while eating dinner. Still, I’ve loved this show since I found out they pixellate it when anybody vomits. Now if they’d just scramble the vomit audio, it’d be fantastic.
Flashpoint
Absolutely genius show. The editing, the acting and the writing all make me positively gleeful. Also, it made me cry once. I never cry. (I can count the number of times TV/Film have made me cry on one hand. And still have three fingers free.) It’s come a long way from the pilot episode that I described as ‘Eliot DiMauro, The Pink Ranger, and a guy that looks like Josh Charles walk into a hostage situation…’
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Movies are a one night stand. Television is an abusive relationship.
Television.
I’m sometimes appalled by how much I love television. Well, not all television; I’m not as enamoured with some genres as I am with others, I don’t particularly care about the wheeling and dealing the buyers and planners do to get the content on air (as long as they don’t sacrifice whichever show I’m watching to make way for ad content; Channel Seven, I’m looking at you), and I have very definite preferences about what I like within a show. I’m always trying to qualify what I watch and why because, ironically, the thirty second grabs for current affairs shows have me convinced that television is inherently evil. Granted, I’m not twelve any more and I don’t have to run what I’m watching past Mum (even then, her approach was that if I could present a cogent and coherent argument for why I wanted to watch something, I was allowed to watch anything. Anything.), but I still have the, perhaps bizarre, notion that watching TV will rot my brain and turn me into some slobbering, hip-jutting, gum-popping, trend-following, moron wearing a cheap, Supre ‘Girls on Film’ t-shirt without any idea that it’s a song about pornography by Duran Duran and not an assertation of feminism and support of Helen Mirren.
I prefer to think that’s not the case. I prefer to think that Television is a pit stop between here and there; disseminating ideas and information in bullet point so that I can go to a more reliable source and find out more. This is as much applicable to fictive television as it is to the news and documentaries. Actually, probably more so since I don’t rely on television (in the broadcast sense) to bring me documentaries and the news as it stands is barely a step above tabloid journalism in its current sensationalist nature: disaster! disaster! injustice! sport. weather. human interest!
It’s really not that much different from the “issues based” drama I’ve seen in my time; it takes a little longer to disseminate, but it makes the same points, but with more over-acting and fewer … well, I can’t actually think of what there’s fewer. SVU practically does panel discussions, 24 does intercuts, and most of them have intractable, perfectly coiffured hair. Dramatic television shows take on social and political issues at greater depth, and often greater (if biased, but when is anything in the media not biased?) accuracy. Why am I supposed to believe that there is any less merit in watching narrative television rather than the news?
I have no idea.
But, anyway. I didn’t actually want to get caught up in a rant about the news. At least I managed to avoid reality television; that would probably have just been a vitriolic deluge of bilious invective, which, while fun, probably wouldn’t have helped.
But, I digress.
Leadership. Television.
There are shows I watch with regularity. There are shows I watch on and off. There are shows I fell hard for in the beginning, but stopped watching for one reason or other. There are shows that annoy me, shows that I adore beyond reason, shows that make me want to put the remote through the TV screen with great force, and shows that don’t even rate a seconds pause when I flash through.
A lot of the time, it comes down to two things: writing and character. I can forgive a lot of things if its well written and the characters are owned by the actors. Sure, I’ll point out the flaws and mock them within an inch of their lives, but I’ll generally keep watching.
There are, of course, a few exceptions.