“deep thoughts” on television shows I watch or used to watch
The Simpsons via last.fm
1. Deadwood, aside from being far too foul-mouthed for my taste (and a bad influence on me) was pretty good the first season. After that it totally fell apart. I think this was because of the producers’ (and especially David Milch’s) urge to cast Ian McShane’s character, Al Swearengen, as a “good guy” in the final seasons rather than the more villainous role he plays in the first season.
2. I like The Tudors for its historical qualities. The English reformation is a fascinating period. But I get awfully tired of King Henry. At first I kind of liked how he was played, but he’s become entirely too flat.
3. Weeds lost me after the second season. Why does every episode need to end with some huge, dramatic cliff-hanger disaster? Why can’t some episodes just be funny?
4. Is The Wire really that good? I’ve seen one, maybe two episodes. Didn’t really capture my attention.
5. I almost stopped watching The Office after the third season. I’m glad I didn’t.
6. I’ll take The Simpsons over the Family Guy any day of the week.
7. I like South Park but I really, really don’t get this whole “generation Y conservatism” thing. What – are we basing the next generation of conservatives off of some potty-mouthed cartoon? (I know, South Park is very good at lampooning liberals. But remember, when asked, the creators said “I hate conservatives, but I really fucking hate liberals.” Okay. But they hate conservatives, too. Is generation Y conservatism actually…libertarianism?)
8. If you have a toddler in the house you should introduce them to The Wiggles. Not for your own sake. Australian kids music is not the most enjoyable thing for adults. But kids seem to love it, or at least my kid does. And it’s not Barney, so….
9. I’m still debating whether to continue watching Mad Men or not. What say you?
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://i0.wp.com/img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?w=720)
4.) Yes, the Wire is that good. The first few episodes of most seasons are slow, as they serve to set you up for the rest of the season. Judging the Wire by one or two episodes is like judging a novel by one or two chapters. If you’ve watched the first eight episodes of season one and still aren’t feeling it, then it’s not for you.
6.) I can’t stand Family Guy. It’s an active dislike.Report
That’s what I hear. Okay. I’ll watch it. (I have to convince my wife, which is the impetus behind this question….evidence!)Report
I have to go somewhere, but if I get back and no one’s made the case, I’ll see what I can do. But especially given your interest in (new) urbanism, communities, education, and politics, I think you’d get a lot out of the show if you stuck with it.Report
Agree with William on The Wire. I’d also go further and say that if you’re going to watch a whole season, you really need to start with season 1 or maybe seasons 3 or 4. Season 2, without the context of Season 1, can be pretty difficult to follow, and Season 5 takes a particularly long time to get interesting. Then again, Seasons 1, 3, and 4 are generally the consensus picks for the show’s best.Report
Agreed. The Wire is all about accumulative effect. It’s not paced like television usually is, but its structure is all the more powerful because of it.Report
The Wire is long form television – each season is a story arc. You really have to watch them in order, but the show is excellent. Richard Wright and George Pelecanos are two of the writers(!!)
The South Park guys are vaguely libertarian and when they take a shot at libertarians I’ll believe their “we’ll mock anybody” line.Report
Re: watching The Wire
Turn on close-captioning. I understood a lot more with that feature enabled. In fact I do this for most videos.Report
yeah i’ll come to the wire’s defense as well. my favorite show of all time by leaps and bounds. if bad language isn’t your thing it might grate on you a bit, but it’s a very perceptive look at urban life.Report
I refuse to let me son watch Barney. It’s an aesthetic decision bordering on an ethical one. Bob the Builder I can stand, but frankly I’m glad he’s moved on to watching The Princess Bride over and over again (minus a few scenes we distract him or make loud noices during). I’ll have to check out the Wiggles. Is it on DVD? We don’t have a TV hook-up.Report
Yeah – we watch it on Netflix online.Report
I’ve never comprehended the strong negative emotion that Barney brings out. A show for little kids with happy songs and big colorful goofy dinosaurs. How shocking and dangerous. Its as exciting as dry white toast for an adult but so what.Report
Either of you have an opinion on Yo Gabba Gabba ?Report
gabba gabba hey—–Most youngsters don’t get The Ramones.Report
Two things:
1. Since nobody has said it in your other thread, welcome to the Church. I went through RCIA last year and it really was like coming home. A couple years ago, I read Chesterton’s “The Man Who Was Thursday” and hated it with a strangely visceral passion. I couldn’t for the life of me understand why someone would bother to write a plot like that. Halfway through RCIA, I understood exactly what the book meant. I hope you have a similar experience.
2. Watch The Wire. It’s not a cop show, or a crime show, or a show about drugs and the inner cities. Those are some of its stuff, but it’s a show about how people respond to their incentives. It’s a show about how every person makes the rational, utility-maximizing choices based on what’s immediately in front of them, and the whole of those decisions is always less than the sum of its parts. The Wire will break your heart, and in a good way.Report
gauche –
1. Thanks! That means a lot.
2. I’m going to go fiddle with my Netflix queue….Report
I watched the first two episodes of Deadwood after hearing a number of people warn me about the language.
Given that that is what I sound like on the ride home whilst listening to NPR, I didn’t notice much of anything and left disappointed.Report
Family Guy started alienating me a few years ago and, while I’m not yet to the level of active dislike, I’m getting close. It’s not the offensive comedythat bugs me about the show; it’s the hacky way it’s used to cover up a lack of good writing.Report
The fisrt couple of seasons (before it was cancelled) were actually pretty good.
But then, I liked the first three seasosn of Aqua Teen Hunger Force too, so maybe take that with a grain of salt.Report
I never really got into Mad Men. Psychologically it was somewhat interesting, and the details were so perfect that the whole thing just looked like a masterpiece. My experience with it, however, was that it was basically a high-toned soap opera about unlikable people, peppered with anodyne observations about the 60’s. I didn’t really find the dynamics between the characters too compelling, though admittedly I haven’t been tuning in for a while. To me, it’s sort of like The Hudsucker Proxy: The Show, with basically the same flaws but lacking in the deliberate artifice of the Coens’ films.Report
I think I can say, with a fair amount of accuracy, that y’all watch too much television. But, so do most Americans. So, you should feel really good that you’re some of the “Real Americans”.
Here’s a question: You probably sleep 6-8 hours each night (~30% of each day). What percentage of your day is devoted to The Tube?Report
2 hours a week of pro-wrestling. 1 hour, maybe, of something on DVD that my beloved wife tells me to sit down and watch.
If you include “the intertubes” and “the PS3/Wii/360” in your definition of “the tube”, um… I decline to answer.Report
The “intertubes” doesn’t count, unless you’re watching shows on Hulu, et al.
“PS3/Wii/360” definitely counts, but should probably not count as much, since it is more active than watching a show (and studies have shown that it improves memory and spatial processing, not to mention hand/eye coordination).
Does that loosen your tongue?Report
Let’s say 40 hours.
Or 50.Report
Recalc… it’s only about 30ish. Stupid weekends.Report
Lightwight!Report
or weight, your choice.Report
I assume that is a weekly number, or you have altered the space-time continuum when playing COD: Modern Warfare 2. Which, I suppose is possible…Report
Wake up. Go to work. Stare at screen. Go home. Stare at screen. Go to sleep. Dream of screens.Report
You know what’s funny, nobody ever makes these complaints about other visual and performing arts.
“Y’all go to too many gallery openings! You watch too many operas and plays!”
Then again, television lacks the artificial scarcity and class bias in accessibility of other media.Report
Yes on the Wire, although if you don’t like the cliffhangers in Weeds, you might be somewhat turned off by every episode of the 1st season in that regard (gets somewhat better in later seasons). There was no point to Weeds anymore after the conclusion of Season 3; if you’ve seen it you know why. Mad Men’s good aside from the flashbacks (so far… haven’t seen much).Report
The Wire’s first season is its weakest. I went a year after watching the first season before watching the second; I finished the second, third, fourth, and fifth over about a week and a half.Report
#6 I enjoy Simpsons, Family Guy has always been a steaming mound of media fecal matter.
#7 Southpark is just a show (that I like a lot). I don’t know that they really have much in the way of a consistant political thrust. Maybe I’m projecting but they seem to be neoliberal; they disagree with conservatives and very very vehemently with social cons but they carry a lot of contempt verging on despising the far left.Report
The Wire is the greatest TV show I’ve ever seen, although it can be a bit slow to develop. I second the call to watch starting with season 1, and watch the episodes in order–you lose way too much otherwise. It’s a good show to rent season 1 on DVD and watch it all over the course of a week, shotgunning a few episodes at a time. And incredibly worth the investment–nothing I’ve seen on TV comes close to that kind of depth, realism, and meaning.Report
#6 Yeah, but I’ll take Futurama over The Simpsons without skipping a beat.Report
Oh yeah! Futurama rocks, but I think it sortof belongs in the same family as the Simpsons.Report
Damn right. And Billy West (who does roughly half the voices on the show) is an underrated comic genius.Report
What’s amazing about The Simpsons is that you can pass through a room with it on the TV and catch something really funny in those few seconds almost every time. No show has ever delivered so many laughs per second as The Simpsons, especially Seasons 4 through 7.Report
I feel about South Park roughly how most of you feel about Family Guy. I don’t get it, I really really don’t. Hey, we’re sophomoric jerks who like making incredibly obvious (or simply wrong) political points with bad potty jokes!
Home Movies was probably my favorite “adult” cartoon, as these things go, though. It was just so dry and perfect. None of the followups (Metalocalypse, Lucy the Daughter of the Devil, the teen series O’Grady on the N) came close.
Most of my television-wathcing lately, though, is stuff like Star Trek reruns. Other than that, just Mad Men, which Lex is absolutely right about: it is “basically a high-toned soap opera about unlikable people”. That’s why I like it.
I’ve also got sucked into Dollhouse, despite not really liking it at first for being too stylistically mainstream with its post-CSI/24 quick cuts and glossy violence.
And I’ve never seen the Wire because I don’t have HBO, and would have to really put aside the time to get into it. But I’ve always wanted to.
If we’re making recommendations, though, besides Home Movies I’ll throw in the original Manchester version of Life on Mars, which I may have mentioned before. Seriously though. John Simm is just perfect in it.Report
E.D. – one quote from David Simon (creator of The Wire) was “it’s a show about how bureaucratic institutions grind down individuals.” If that doesn’t get you to watch it, I don’t know what will.Report
About Al Swearengen going “good” in later seasons of Deadwood…yes, he became decidedly less brutal, this is true, but it’s useful to remember that the characterizations of Swearengen (and Bullock) were always studies in shades of gray. Swearengen was the bad guy with a kernel of goodness within him, while Bullock was the good guy with a streak of evil. They’re like the Yin and Yang of the show.
This applies to many of the characters on the Wire, too. (The mix of good and bad within the same person.)Report
Since you are already convinced, I don’t need to say that The Wire is the greatest television series every produced, so I won’t.
Another recommendation: I found HBO’s Rome, both seasons, to be as good as or better than Deadwood.
Dexter is a fun show as well.Report
Speaking of “used to watch”, my local PBS station is running the Jeremy Brett “Sherlock Holmes” series on Friday nights. I have caught several and am surprised at how trite they seem now. I was a big fan at the time (mid 80s?) after reading the Conan Doyle stories.
As we age our tastes change.Report