I remember when Whitey and I would follow 2-3 shows per week and fill in the rest of the time with episodes of "dexter's laboratory" and "garfield and friends" that we recorded on the replay because we knew we would have hours and hours on end that we would want to watch TV, but would be unable due to the suckage that was television.
Now we watch so many shows we can barely keep up. I'll go through some of my recent favorites (including some that are now on DVD).
1. "Battlestar Galactica: the new series" on SciFi - This show is absolutely riveting. It is written by some of the head writers from Star Trek deep space nine, and they were allowed to take all the good things they did on that show, and do them even better here. They do tons of character development, and I think my favorite part of this show is the human element. These people are smart, cunning, strong, emotional individual and flawed. There is no utopic overtone with this series. It's a bunch of real people stuck on a bunch of space ships running from a relentless enemy trying to find a home. They don't all say please, thank you, and "captain, it could be a reasonable hypothesis that the cylons might attack at 23:32 because 23:32 is a significant number in the programming of the cylons" They say "move it", "frak you", and "Damnit, i'm telling you the cylons are going to hit in five fraking minutes and you're gonna kill the whole fleet because you're so sure I'm wrong." Great fucking series.
2. "Lost" on ABC - It surprises me that this show ever even got approval to be on network TV because it's so unorthodox and so good. It's a show about some people on an island. The way they wrote the show was to cast it first and then write characters around it. When they started out, they didn't know what the show was going to be about other than "some people crash on an island". They go nuts with the character development and how that plays out in people's interactions, actions and reactions. They also have thrown some nice, bizarre, but not ridiculously contrived twists in there. Actually, this show really throws out some drama and some craxy plot lines without it being ridiculously over the top. The writer's have found an incredible balance between keeping you guessing and not turning the show into an evening soap
3. "Black. White." on A&E (or maybe it was bravo) - This was a six week series where they took a black family and a white family and stuck them in a house together, and through the use of "revolutionary makeup techniques" (air brushing most likely), they were able to make them the opposite race when they went out into the real world. The star of the show turned out to be a 17 year old girl with the determination of a mack truck and a wonderful open attitude. It's worth it to watch the series just to watch her blossom and to see the world through her eyes. Everyone else on the show has interesting perspectives and conflicts as well. It's really intriguing to see their path of discovery (or non-discovery in some people's cases) and the way they go about it. I'm socially conscious because of my career, so this naturally appealed to me, but my husband, who works in computers and not social work, loved this show too.
4. "Wonderfalls" on DVD - Fox screwed this one over royally. They didn't advertise it hardly at all, and they put it in a horrid timeslot and then they pulled it after three episodes. This is a show that needed some time to get word of mouth out because it's not the type of thing alot of people would watch at first glance. IF they had run the whole first season twice, they would have been swamped with letters saying "omg when does wonderfalls season start? tell them to hurry" in between seasons. But as it stands, there was only one season and they were lucky to get it released on DVD. The series is about a Smart ass gen y slacker who starts being spoken to by god. I know, it sounds campy, but it's not. It's dramatic and funny and speaks to anyone with a heart, soul, and a cynical sense of humour.
5. "House, MD" on Fox - House is a brilliant doctor who works on all the near impossible hospital cases and solves them all while arguing that he is right regardless of how stupid it sounds, making buttsex jokes about his colleagues and breaking into his boss' office to snoop through her trash. The combination of mystery, drama, and off the cuff humor in this show keeps you on your toes the entire hour.
The music is also awsome in most cases because thomas neuman (of american beaty fame) writes most of the cues. Like nay other popular show, they use the occasional bad pop song or soft rock ballad or whatever (i wish they wouldn't), but overall it's some of the best music i've heard on a TV show.
The only bad thing about house is the promos. If you've ever seen the promos, you probably think it's a cheap ripoff of ER because they say things like "A mother is ill, a baby is dying, and you will NEVER. GUESS. WHAT CAUSED IT." This is a stupid promo for a show like house because the show is about the doctors and the process they use to figure out the tough cases and the nasty remarks that fly around the room when they are. The baby is a plot device to keep the show going, not the focus of the show.
6. "the Henry Rollins show" on A&E - If any of you know of Henry Rollins recent spoken word tours, you're probably already hooked on the idea of a TV show by him. For those of you who don't know, Henry rollins is a pretty famous musician who was the lead singer of black flag and the rollins band and he now does spoken word tours nationally, internationally, and for the USO. He gets up on a stage and talks for two hours about being a musician, the stae of politics, or whatever it is that comes to mind, and he is INCREDIBLE. So now he has his own show on A&E where he has guests on including Chuck D, and Oliver stone. He Chats with them about their achievements but not in a "so, i heard you're in a movie" sort of way but more in a "your latest movie, 'cinnamonhead' is about the war in the middle east. Tell me about your views and a little bit about the process that lead to you making this movie" sort of way. He also snidely pokes fun at modern technology and public figures and has some incredible (and not necessarily well known) musical guests on the show such as frank black and death cab for cutie.
7. "My name is Earl" on abc(?) - This is a quirky, funny show about a guy who was a complete asshole to a lot of people and has made a list of all his wrongs and is trying to correct them. We haven't actually been following this one very well, mostly because we follow so many other shows right now, but when we do happen to catch it, i'm usually pretty entertained. Jason lee is absolutely perfect for this kind of show because he balances just the right amount of cynicism, cunning and dubiousness to make earl a believable character and earl's world a believable place. Everyone on that show does a bang up job of keeping the quirky little world right where it needs to be.
There are others, but i'm drawing a blank, and i need to get to washing the dishes so we can move them to the new house(damnit). I'll see you guys in a few weeks.
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