Television

Last updated January 7, 2001

OK, first of all: yes, I watch the stuff. I enjoy it. Comment if you feel the urge, but:

1. Be original; I've heard the typical "burn your television" spew a dozen times.
2. Be warned: this also declares your vices legitimate conversational fodder. Overall I'll match my vice-list against most people's.

   Now that that's out of the way... this page lists shows I watch or have watched, with a few words on why sometimes.

   Current watchlist

   • Angel (see here)

     Vampires are people, too! I'm a fan for many of the same reasons I like its progenitor: its "monsters" are largely metaphorical ones, though of urban life rather than adolescence. Plus, admittedly, David Boreanaz is fun to watch... there's something compelling about this dark, brooding vampire type who periodically gets amusingly goofy. The show started repeating itself thematically halfway through the first season, which got tiresome, but still kept much of its amusement value. The second season is a little better.

   • Buffy the Vampire Slayer (see here)

     I was a fan before it was trendy, so there. I was hooked by Nightmares, where the demon-of-the-week brought people's nightmares to life. They do a couple of obligatory bogeyman-behind-the-curtains scenes, ho hum. Then Xander finds himself naked taking an exam for a class he's not in, and I laughed.
     And then Buffy's dad visits and they have a little chat something like this:

     Dad: "Well, I think you're old enough now that you deserve to know why your mother and I broke up."
     Buffy: "You and Mom said you just didn't love each other any more, right?"
     Dad: "Well, that's what we told you. But the truth is, it was your fault... you were such a disappointing, unbearable child that I really couldn't stand to be with you... I mean honestly, Buffy, what parent wouldn't abandon you?"

     
     That's typical of the show, metaphorically capturing the adolescent experience through horror movie genre cliches. Adolescence is a time of foreshortened perspective... the immediate highs and lows loom much larger than they do later in life. Threats become monsters, personal problems become world-shaking crises. Buffy captures that feeling literally. She dates an older man (a 240-year-old immortal vampire) who takes her virginity and thereafter acts like a total jerk, almost a completely different person (literally, due to a Gypsy curse), and she feels like the whole world is about to come to an end (which, in fact, it is). That sort of thing.
     Sadly, while season 4 started out much the same way (Buffy's roommate is literally from hell, Willow is paralyzed by college-freshman guilt over how the Puritans treated the American Indian while an Indian warrior ghost terrorizes campus, etc.) it became more of a generic "insidious badguy organization" plotline by the end, which was kinda dull. On the bright side, Willow got a girlfriend, which was fun to watch.

   • Earth: Final Conflict (see here)

     Somehow this show manages to make "superadvanced aliens come to Earth so we can have their babies" seem like a reasonable premise.

     Mostly I like their attitude towards heroes and villains. At first, our hero was a double agent working for the aliens and the anti-alien Resistance, and neither side was clearly the "good guys". I liked that. Later seasons lost some of that moral ambiguity; characters grouped more clearly along good-guy/bad-guy lines... then swapped moral axes several times. The characters themselves don't change much, but their motives become clearer or murkier to the audience. Refreshingly ambiguous.

   • Frasier (see here)

     I started watching the show when a friend was planning to move to Seattle, was startled by how much I enjoyed it (I never liked Cheers, and thought of this as a spinoff), and have been watching it ever since. Mostly I enjoy the banter between the brothers (my current favorite exchange is "Have you ever had an unexpressed thought?" "I'm having one right now.").

   • Freedom (see here)

     Guilty pleasure. Extremely violent and mostly plotless, not usually my cup of tea. On the other hand beautifully choreographed, lovely eye candy, and some funny banter.

   • Level 9 (see here)

     Not unlike Freedom, which it follows. Somewhat less violent, a bit more plot, more entertaining dialog.

   • Seven Days (see here)

     Pure escapist fantasy, and I love it. Like most time-travel stories, it has plot holes you could lose galaxies in (why is he never around when he arrives? why isn't anyone even remotely bothered by their upcoming nonexistence? or, alternatively, by the prospect that they will continue to exist, having made the entire point moot from their perspective? how can anyone other than Parker be an expert in running the damned thing when by its nature they've only run it once? why doesn't his boss hand coded status reports back to himself through him? and so forth...), but it quietly ignores them and moves on with the "make it didn't happen" wish-fulfillment adventure that lies at the heart of the genre.

     I also really enjoy his Groundhog's-Day-esque relationship with Olga... as with most of us, sometimes knowing how someone is going to respond doesn't actually help the interaction one bit.

   • South Park (see here)

     What can I say? If you like the show, you know why I do. If you don't, you're probably tired of people explaining why they do.

   • Star Trek: Voyager (see here)

     I've mostly watched this show in reruns... I lost interest in it after the first few episodes (which were dreadful) and didn't watch it again until the reruns over summer 2000 (which weren't bad... I leave it to the reader to decide whether the show or my taste changed). I'm watching the last season, though.

   • Third Rock from the Sun (see here)

     I only got into this show in mid-2000 or so, but it hooked me quickly... vaguely reminiscent of Mork & Mindy, a show I enjoyed enormously in my youth, but its humor depends more on the breadth of material it can satire than on the antics of a single actor, which I suspect gives it more staying power.

   • Whose Line is it Anyway? (see here and here)

     I often say about this show that I don't think it's funny, but somehow it makes me laugh anyway.

   • Will & Grace (see here)

     I often describe this show as "Seinfeld meets Ellen," but it manages to weave elements of two shows I couldn't stand into one I really like. The constant Seinfeldian barb-trading is redeemed by genuine friendships among its characters (I can believe that these people really care about each other, compulsive witty insults notwithstanding), and the Ellen-like painfully self-conscious political relevance is compensated for by actually being funny.
     Admittedly, it makes me cringe at times with the self-absorbed queerness of it all, but at its core it celebrates commonalities under superficial differences. I suspect it manages to convey the "gay lifestyle" to an audience that might not otherwise realize that, genitalia and fashion sense notwithstanding, they live it themselves: sleep, work, eat, go out with friends, do the laundry, love someone, be loved... you know, all the stuff you do to live life and make it worth the living.

   Other shows I like, or liked, but don't watch, either because they conflict with something else, or because I've seen 'em all/gotten tired of them, or because they seem to be off the air: Charmed, Dharma & Greg, Due South, First Wave, Friends, Highlander: The Raven, Invisible Man, M*A*S*H, Max Headroom, Murphy Brown, Northern Exposure, Picket Fences, Red Dwarf, Remington Steele, Roswell, Saturday Night Live, Star Trek ( original recipe, spicy, extra crispy), Twilight Zone (the elder), Young Americans