super super underwear nor any drop to drink

Smallville ran for ten years before ending not long ago. Today we've got Arrow, The Flash, Agents of SHIELD, Agent Carter of SHIELD, Gotham, and Constantine, with Supergirl, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Daredevil, Iron Fist, Powers, and a reboot of Heroes on the way, and God knows what else in development. There's a crazy number of superhero shows on TV right now. Like with the Lord of the Rings movies, the (upcoming) Star Wars sequels, the Spider-Man movies, it's the kind of thing that would've seemed too good to be true if you'd told me about it in the 80s. Unlike most of those things, though, maybe it really is too good to be true -- most of these shows are not very good.

My one concern with this entry is that I don't want this blog to just be a collection of things I don't like, you know? There is plenty on television that is either awful or, at least, Not My Kind of Thing. I don't think it's worth my time to talk about that television, nor your time to read about it.

So why do I feel like I want to write about superhero shows when I think they're largely mediocre? I guess because I love the genre. I guess because I'm invested. And that's a different feeling about mediocrity, a different experience of mediocrity, than the mediocrity of House or Two and a Half Men.

I don't know for sure if comics or television provided my first introduction to superheroes. There were, actually, a lot of superhero shows on TV when I was a kid, if you count the reruns and the cartoons: Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman, Adam West as Batman, The Courtship of Eddie's Father's Bill Bixby in The Incredible Hulk, the original Spider-Man cartoon, the Superfriends and related DC superhero cartoons, and the often-forgotten live-action Spider-Man show with Nicholas Hammond:


I was particularly a fan of Spider-Man and Batman, which I think is as much an effect of the era as of the innate qualities of those characters: there may have been few real classics being produced in superhero TV in the 60s and 70s, but the best of what was made always had Spider-Man or Batman in it. It probably helps that, although Spider-Man has actual super powers and Batman doesn't, they were both street-level heroes who didn't seem out of place fighting gangs and bank robbers (or "supervillains" in the form of bank robbers with outlandish costumes). Superman is a hard sell on television because he's so fucking powerful, how do you challenge him week in and week out, without a movie-level budget?

Comics-wise, I started with hand-me-downs and borrowed comics from older friends, like Jason, who was a few years older than me and had the cabin next to ours up at the lake. Jason had a bunch of DC comics that he'd bring up every summer, including a ton of Superman comics (and Superman Family, Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, etc) with that era's focus on imaginary stories, red kryptonite-induced transformations, and the many other colors of kryptonite (the below list isn't even complete).

That Marvel Team-Up issue below is the first Marvel comic I owned. Both these comics highlight some pretty stark differences between comic book superheroes and the TV superheroes at the time. TV superheroes lived in a much, much more normal world than the "real" Marvel or DC universes. In most shows, the protagonist was the only superhero in the world (the cartoons were the exception here), and often there weren't even any supervillains with actual powers - maybe you'd have a mummy now and then, or a commie robot or something. But forget about Spider-Man fighting Dr Octopus, or teaming up with the Invisible Girl.

The Incredible Hulk was one of the most successful of these shows -- one of the few to go more than a season or two -- and it's a pretty good example of how "superheroes" were approached. As everyone knows, the Incredible Hulk was just The Fugitive with a new skin: David Banner ("Bruce" was too gay for TV) was on the run because of havoc caused by his alter ego, The Hulk, and pursuing a cure to his condition, while being pursued in turn by investigative journalist McGee, who is determined to prove the Hulk exists. Like with the Fugitive or the A-Team, this builds some dramatic tension into every episode, because the main character has to stay on the move to stay safe; like those shows, it avoids worldbuilding or significant character development, because every episode the action has moved to a different dot on the blue highways, with a different guest cast and a different dilemma to be solved in an hour.

Until the X-Files popularized the "monster of the week" episode, this was the basic form that adventure shows took, whether their protagonists were superheroes, fugitive surgeons framed for murder, talking cars and their drivers, or an alien and his half-alien son. Like the rest of TV, in the days before VCRs and a post-broadcast market, most shows leaned pretty heavily on a formula, and continuity didn't change much, except occasionally in season premieres (often to tinker with the formula or cast, quickly setting up a new formula rather than an alternative to formula).

The adventure shows disappeared over time. Okay, it's not a genre with clearly defined boundaries, but I think of it as a 60-minute light drama in which every episode finds the protagonist(s) righting a wrong - whether fighting a monster, stopping an assassination, helping a family-owned farm stop the evil corporation from buying it out, whatever - while staying distinct from the police procedural. The 80s version of the genre was as influenced by The Dukes of Hazzard and Wonder Woman as by The Fugitive. I think it's easy to forget just how big this was. Look at 1987-1988:

Sundays: Werewolf and Supercarrier

Mondays: MacGyver

Wednesdays: Highway to Heaven

Fridays: The Highwayman

Saturdays: Once a Hero

That's six shows in an era of three and a half networks (Fox only had programming two nights a week, like the cable channels today), but I'm leaving out the detective shows, which sort of straddled the tonal line between adventure shows and cop shows: Spenser for Hire, Murder She Wrote, Magnum P.I., Sonny Spoon, Jake and the Fatman, J.J. Starbuck, The Law and Harry McGraw, Simon and Simon, Private Eye, and the when-it-was-good-it-was-very-very-good Moonlighting. 

Speaking of Moonlighting, Lois and Clark is a pretty great example of what's wrong with superhero TV, insofar as it followed the pattern of reassuring the viewer (and other decision-makers) by making a show that was a light and unchallenging version of a proven success, with a few costumes thrown in. It did give us this, though:

The early superhero TV shows often shot themselves in the foot by reinventing their superhero characters and risking the alienation of comic book fans. TV's Banner isn't exposed to gamma radiation -- traumatized by his inability to prevent his wife dying in a car accident, he studies the phenomenon of people calling on unexpected reserves of strength in crises and experiments on himself, turning himself into the Hulk. Which really makes no more sense than gamma radiation, but no gamma means no Rick Jones (as well as robbing the show of an easy way to introduce supervillains), one of the Marvel Universe's more enduring characters.

Probably the most egregious examples of reinventing the comic book character are Shazam, in which Captain Marvel's origin drops the wizard Shazam and has CM traveling the country in a Winnebago ...


... and even more inexplicably, Hanna Barbera's cartoon version of The Thing, in which the Fantastic Four don't even show up and Benjy Grimm is a teenager who transforms into The Thing with magic rings, an even more substantial change than the Hulk's.



I actually really loved the Thing cartoon as a kid! But it bore almost no resemblance to the comic book.

Thing is, I love the superhero genre. I still read comics, though fewer of them (Captain Marvel, Silver Surfer, and Star-Lord are among my favorites in years). I have a superhero novel in progress, inspired largely by the Marvel comics of the 70s and those Superman imaginary stories I grew up with. The mediocrity of superhero TV shows is more of a nuisance to me than that of police procedurals or Quirky Detectives.

There are two ... axes, I guess, of mediocrity to talk about here. First, most of these shows just aren't very engaging - whatever the flaws or virtues of their take on the superhero-specific elements, they're just not especially well-written or -acted. Second, those superhero-specific elements themselves are often handled in the dullest way possible.

Second point first. Like I said, in most superhero shows, the protagonist is the only super-powered being in the whole damn world. Smallville changed that, but for the most part it stuck to the slightly broader version: the source of the protagonist's powers is the only source of super powers in the whole damn world. I certainly didn't watch all of Smallville, but apart from the occasional guest appearance of Aquaman or whatever, most of the superbeings were either fellow Kryptonians or got their powers from "meteor rock."

You know what was great about the X-Files? It wasn't just about UFOs. It wasn't just about vampires. It was about UFOs and vampires and alien abductions and werewolves and prehistoric mites and cockroach robots and clones and mutant contortionists. Even Buffy the Vampire Slayer didn't limit herself to vampires -- or to the idea that everything supernatural in Sunnydale came from the Hellmouth or shared a common origin with the Slayer.

Interesting worlds are messy and complicated. Somehow the kids who grew up with Superfriends -- with a Kryptonian, Gotham's mystery man, the prince of Atlantis, a space cop with a magic ring, an Amazonian warrior, and Apache Chief fighting robots, aliens, and Solomon Grundy -- grew up and decided that a TV show where more than one thing is different from the real world would just be too confusing.

But look, take away the messiness from the superhero genre and you don't leave much. This is the genre of Secret Wars, Earth-1 and Earth-2, Spider-clones (and Spider-Man beating himself up over the death of Gwen Stacy, even in an era when most comics resisted major changes to their status quos), Steve Ditko art, Jack Kirby dots, the Cosmic Cube, Dr Doom's dabbling in magic and his mother's cursed soul, Reed Richards' time-traveling absentee father, Mantis becoming the Celestial Madonna, Wally West becoming the new Flash, the Swamp Thing's travels through time and space, don't even ask me to sum up Spider-Woman's backstory or explain who the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver's parents are, and geez, THE VISION, an android created using the body of a different android and the brainwaves of a dead superhero. As crazy as people think something like Game of Thrones or True Blood is, Marvel comics put them to shame. Any dozen issues of Thor before the 1990s would be sufficient to put them to shame.

That's what's GREAT about them. People don't like soap operas DESPITE the evil twins and amnesia and betrayals. Nobody watched the first season of Desperate Housewives thinking, boy, this would be great if not for the blackmail plot and the narration by the ghost of the dead friend with a secret. But so many superhero shows are put together as though the audience is expected to tolerate the superpowers and costume, while mostly being interested in some lukewarm love triangle and a couple of half-baked mysteries.

That brings me back to the first point. The main problem with superhero shows, I think, is one that plagues science fiction shows in general -- speculative fiction shows in general, if you like:

Almost every science fiction show is worse than the non-science fiction show it most closely resembles.

Maybe that's why Battlestar Galactica is so good - it doesn't really resemble any non-sf shows. It's impossible to imagine what the show would be, without its Cylons and spaceships and mythic trappings.

Most superhero shows aren't shows about superheroes so much as they're shows starring superheroes. They could as easily be shows about detectives or fugitive surgeons.

Agents of SHIELD isn't so much a superhero show, I suppose, as a show set in a superhero-adjacent world, but that gives it even less excuse for being such a piss-poor spy show. Yes, second season improved on the first, but if not for the Whedon or Marvel brand names, I don't see how in a million years it would have gotten a second season -- somehow, post-Alias, post-Chuck, post-Rubicon, post-Americans, it landed on television as a spy show that reads like it's made by people who don't like or watch spy shows, a spy show no more complicated or inspired than one that could have come out in the 80s. It brought nothing new to the table except the appeal of Clark Gregg, who deserved a better showcase.

And just like that Marvel brand name undoubtedly was sufficient for the show to be renewed, other superhero shows always seem to be put together as though -- even though the writers avoid the superhero genre's conventions and messiness as much as possible -- the fact that a superhero is present is supposed to be enough to attract our interest. Science fiction shows have been doing that for ages - a few robots or aliens cover up the sub-standard acting or reliance on formula, and the fans gobble it up often enough that it pays off.

Even Agent Carter, which as a miniseries doesn't need to depend on formula plots to kill time, and which is significantly better than Agents of SHIELD, is pretty awful if you gauge it as a period show (someone even coughs into their elbow, for Christ's sake). As a period show, it reads like it's made by people who read the back cover blurbs of a couple books about the period and decided that the most important difference other than the fashion was that since the main character is a woman, sexism needs to be front and center. Not realistic or well-written sexism. Just a bunch of buffoons constantly needling Carter for being a lady. Nevermind that the really insidious fact of the sexism of the period - or sexism now - is that very intelligent, competent, skilled, kind, and gracious men are just as capable of being sexist assholes as the rest are.

If you pay attention to my complaints, you may not be surprised that my favorite superhero show right now is The Flash, who lives in a world that actually has other super-powered beings in it. Time travel even features in the plot! It's a far cry from perfect -- I don't watch every episode, and it's not good enough to bump into the "stuff I watch with Caitlin" priority tier -- but it's a good deal better than Arrow, for instance, which I just can't take seriously despite having given it several tries, or the awful stink of SHIELD. (Gotham started out promising, but is already hamstrung by the problems introduced by its premise -- how does it plan to fill five or six years when it's having this much trouble in its first season?)

The show that gets everything right is Batman: The Brave and the Bold, which happens to be a cartoon. It might be tangential enough to merit its own post except that talking about it in this one gives me an opportunity to focus on the positive.




Airing from 2008 to 2011 on the Cartoon Network and available on DVD and Netflix now, Batman: The Brave and the Bold was the perfect way to do a Batman cartoon without mimicking the Art Deco cartoon of the 90s. Like the Silver Age comic for which it's named, each cartoon features Batman teaming up with another hero -- usually more than one, since the cold open at the beginning is usually a separate adventure. (In fact, the cold opens feature some of the show's most brilliant storytelling, managing to conjure up so much in so little time.) The cold opens sometimes tied in to later main episode storylines -- Equinox and Starro recur as villains in the first two seasons, for instance.

Why is it that the live-action shows feel like everything needs to be introduced in drips and dabs, slowly getting us used to the shocking idea of super-powers, when cartoons are happy to drop you right into the middle of things and sometimes never explain the backstory. Certainly BTBB doesn't give you an origin story for each and every one of its superheroes and supervillains, which is seemingly unthinkable for the writers of the live-action shows. Look at the list of characters, for heaven's sake! And although it's ostensibly a kids' show, it's full of nods and references they'd never get -- Kevin Conroy, voice of the 90s cartoon Batman, voicing the Batman of an alien planet; the appearance of Baby Plas, Plastic Man's son from his early 80s cartoon; cameo appearances by supervillains from the 60s Batman TV show. Over the course of the show, we get parallel universes, aliens, multiple generations of superheroes like The Flash or Blue Beetle, Dick Grayson as both Robin and Nightwing, time travel, a musical episode, and more Green Lanterns than you can shake a stick at.

It's a perfect model for how a live-action show should be done, especially something continuity-heavy like the X-Men. Even a Dr Strange show would benefit from dropping us into the tenth year of Stephen's stint as Sorcerer Supreme and revealing his origin over flashbacks in the cold opens of the first season, let's say. Throw Dormammu, Clea and Umar, Baron Mordo, and Nightmare at us all at once. Make references to Strange's former membership in the Defenders, and have the Silver Surfer or the Black Knight show up for help once in a while. We can handle it, I promise.

As an aside, although I decided only to focus on comic book adaptations here rather than original superhero shows like Heroes, there are two British shows of the latter category worth drawing attention to, both of which are available on Hulu: Misfits and No Heroics. Misfits is the more dramatic and goes on for more seasons, though it also gets gradually less engaging as half the cast leaves; it's of the "something happens and suddenly there are superpowers" genre, while No Heroics is a sitcom set in a superhero-filled world.

one, two, three, go

I saw someone on Facebook refer to television as a "passive, non-cognitive activity," and it was the dumbest fucking thing I'd read all week. If watching television is passive, so is listening to music. So is looking at a painting. So is going to the theater. Just because it's something you can do fresh out of the box, without needing to be taught a skill like reading, doesn't mean it doesn't invite, encourage, or benefit from engagement. If you're a passive television-watcher, that foolishness has nobody's stink on it but your own.

A couple days later, in response to news about Fox picking up a new series, another Facebook user referred to the myth that Fox never gives shows a chance, and cancels everything good -- one of those myths that makes me bang your head against the wall and, God help me, actually feel bad for Fox, because the reality is that in the period this myth developed, Fox regularly aired series other networks would never have touched. But the "Fox kills shows" myth survives because of a myopia endemic to fan communities, which is the subject of a rant that I should probably postpone forever.

Rolling your eyes at things people say on the internet is the worst reason to add content to the internet.

I will find better reasons.

ONE REASON

This is the best time to be a TV fan (whatever that means). Whether or not we're still in the Golden Age of television dramas, we still have that television -- an unbelievable amount of television, in total -- available to us. We took this for granted with remarkable alacrity. Between my girlfriend and myself, we have complete series sets of Twin Peaks, Breaking Bad, Friends, the Wire, the Sopranos, Wiseguy, Sports Night, The State, The Mighty Boosh, the X-Files, Sapphire and Steel, and Mary Hartman Mary Hartman -- I'm sure I'm forgetting some -- and only a couple of those sets cost a significant amount of money, and it's still crazy to me that these sets are even available to be owned. But nevermind DVD and Blu-Ray -- beyond that, we have a ridiculous breadth of shows available streaming on Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime, not to mention the free, subscription, and pay On Demand options through our cable company.

There is SO MUCH TELEVISION.

Almost twenty years ago I taught a course on television criticism, frankly a kind of self-righteous defense of "television is better than you realize, y'all dinks," and the biggest challenge at the time was finding ways to talk about television without knowing for sure that my students had seen it or could see it. Twin Peaks and The Singing Detective were available on videocassette, but not easy to find -- this was in that long, long age of scarcity, see, before you could find absolutely everything for purchase or piracy on the internet -- and talking about Hill Street Blues, Mary Tyler Moore, Soap, Mary Hartman Mary Hartman, St Elsewhere, and Family pretty much required summarizing series and episodes for students who weren't familiar with them.

This was a pain in the ass, and you know, it probably wasn't a very good course, my best intentions notwithstanding. Being a pop culture major in the early 90s was different, sort of the way being a comics reader in the 80s was different than it is now -- it was one of those things that seemed to demand explanation any time you brought it up, whereas now I think everyone has got over the novelty of "OMG the college kids are taking classes on Game of Thrones!!" We were immersed in a certain kind of sticky, elastic, drippy defensiveness, some of which may still cling today, though the environment for which it evolved has largely been displaced through the mainstreaming of geekery. This ties in with that fan community rant I said I wasn't going to get into.

Point being, the hardest part of putting that course together then would continue to be hard now, but for the opposite reason: with virtually everything available now -- an availability so near-complete that it's always a little surprising when you can't find something that only a few years ago it would never occur to you would be out there -- how would I whittle the syllabus down? How many hours of television would I insist my students watch? What assumptions would I make about what they'd already seen?

What, in fact, is the common ground when nothing needs to be watched live anymore and forty year old shows are no less accessible than last week's episodes? Television used to be the weather: everybody who wasn't sheltered got the same kind of wet.

TWO REASONS (ah ah ah)

I'm part of Generation X, which grew up on the reruns of the generations before. For decades, a number of shows -- probably most prominently, Gilligan's Island, The Brady Bunch, and I Love Lucy -- were on the air every week if not every day, while kids' shows like Batman, Spider-Man, and the Superfriends were rerun over and over for successive waves of kids. There was a common ground, a common frame of reference, a common language. Friends makes jokes about Three's Company, a show that'd been off the air for a decade when Friends premiered -- and at least into the late 90s, Dragnet and Gilligan's Island were still staple references for sitcoms and comedians.

These days, despite having access to All The Television, it can be hard to find reruns older than Seinfeld or Friends unless you turn to a channel devoted to them - MeTV, Cosi, and so on. But even though you can still technically watch the Brady Bunch every weekend on those channels, it's not the same as watching the Brady Bunch in the 20th century, because it's less and less likely that you're watching because "nothing else is on." We grew up with three networks and a handful of UHF stations, and until cable became ubiquitous, not everyone even got all three networks -- even as an adult, I've lived places where reception of one or two of the major networks was too poor to bother with.

People knew Gilligan's Island and the Brady Bunch not because these were the best shows across several decades but because they were available. They might be the only thing on when you can't sleep at 3am. They might be the only show that isn't boring to kids that's on during the day when you're home sick and you've had all the PBS you can take. They might be on one of the UHF stations when the networks are showing the news. That's ultimately what these reruns were, for many years - the alternatives to other things, the fallbacks. After after VCRs, we still needed fallbacks.

There are SO MANY channels now, though, and reruns of sitcoms have disappeared in favor of extensive daytime talk shows, court shows, and so on, while infomercials fill those 3am slots. As much as you would think a million channels leads to a billion reruns, every channel seems to produce its own content -- the popularity of cheap-as-shit reality TV has helped make that possible -- and rerun it over and over again.

That plethora of channels also means the viewing audience is more fractured, something people have written plenty about: it's one reason ratings aren't as high, and can never again be as high, as they used to be, something that I don't think the industry has finished adjusting to. When there were three networks, the most popular show at any given time was obviously going to get huge numbers compared to today, when there are five broadcast networks, a number of basic cable networks producing shows at at least the same level of quality and production values as the networks, a couple premium channels like HBO and Showtime with their own shows, and of course the endless glut of minor cable channels that at least nibble away at the shares of the bigger ones. Sports fans have more sports to watch. Reality show or procedural addicts need never watch anything else. Etc. There are fewer and fewer shows that you can comfortably assume "most people" are familiar with.

Lack of a common framework, or changes in where the pieces of the common framework come from, is something I've thought a LOT about, which isn't to say I have any conclusions about it. But perhaps a blog is a good place to think out loud, see.

THREE REASONS

Lately I've been obsessed with traditional pop or whatever you want to call it -- an obsession that grew out of my love of Frank Sinatra and spilled over into Dick Haymes, Nancy Wilson, Hoagy Carmichael, etc. It's a pretty big change from my usual musical choices and for the most part it's not an interest that's relevant here. But it gets me thinking about the idea of the Great American Songbook: the canon of songs from the middle of the 20th century by composers like Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hart, and Cole Porter. These are songs that are almost surely familiar to you, regardless of whether you and I have heard the same people sing them: Over the Rainbow, Georgia on My Mind, Puttin on the Ritz, Let's Face the Music and Dance, Fly Me to the Moon, I've Got You Under My Skin, The Lady is a Tramp, Ain't Misbehavin ...

When you put an Ella Fitzgerald album on, you don't get het up that you've already heard this song on your Peggy Lee album. You're not bothered that Hoagy Carmichael and Mel Torme sing some of the same songs, and you may not even prefer one to the other. What defines a Hoagy Carmichael album is very different from what defines a Pixies album, in other words. All the work of differentiation and personalization is being done in a different part of the map than I'm used to.

What this has to do with TV is it's a way of thinking about tropes and genre conventions. The bottle episode. The misunderstanding as a result of overhearing part of a conversation. The will they or won't they. Obviously the TVtropes site has been zealous in cataloguing these things, but a catalogue isn't a conversation. I'm interested in paying attention to when these conventions are used skillfully, and when it's just hackery, and where the difference comes from -- why is this guy's version timeless, but that guy's version is lounge-lizard cheese?

So there are some decent enough reasons.

WHAT'S THE DEAL WITH THIS GUY?

The deal with me is I'm a writer with a neglected cooking blog (after a while I just reached the point where there were fewer new things to say about cooking). I'm not a writer for or about television - I've published maybe forty, fifty thousand words about TV from a cultural history standpoint, in bits and pieces for textbooks and encyclopedias, but that's it.

My girlfriend Caitlin suggested that I start a blog about TV. We talk about it a lot, not just in terms of what we've been watching lately but the historical trends that interest us -- the way that television in the 70s was less conservative, and the Moral Majority put such a fear of God into the networks in the 80s that in 2015 we've barely caught up to where we were, for instance. I work at home, so I watch more TV than she does, sometimes checking out new shows to decide whether or not to recommend them as things we watch together when she gets home after her commute.

I knew immediately what I didn't want to do: a "this is what I watched last night" blog. There are a couple of good ones - Alan Sepinwall is the gold standard, of course, and Mo Ryan is quite good. There are also a lot of awful ones, even among the professional sites. I think it takes a special knack to have something to say every week about the same shows, even if you're selective in what you blog about. (Sepinwall is really the Roger Ebert of the genre, and part of his skill is knowing what to cover and what not to cover.) I don't want the tail to wag the dog: I don't want to find myself watching something in order to blog about it.

At the same time there is an awful lot going on right now that I certainly have thoughts about. Just some obvious examples, as they occurred to me after Caitlin's suggestion --

The retirement of Craig Ferguson and David Letterman, and the general decline of late-night television even as it's exploded to include ever increasing numbers of white men;

The final season of Mad Men, a strong contender for best series of all time, and the way that Mad Men seems to have shed viewers (or at least hype) over time, as opposed to the way Breaking Bad suddenly became a phenomenon at its end;

Community's probably-final season on Yahoo, of all things;

The explosion of superhero shows across all broadcast networks, Netflix, and even the freaking Playstation;

Better Call Saul starts soon, which is a fascinating idea independent of whether or not the show succeeds;

Lord, I am tired of all these serial killer shows, how do these shows' settings even have so many serial killers, is "death by serial killer" the most frequent cause of death?;

The Sci Fi Channel's recent commitment to "good TV," and my lifelong frustration that science fiction shows are almost always awful, even the ones that go on for years.

I'm so tired of snark, irony, and hate-watching, so none of that will play a part here.

So what I seem to be suggesting to myself is an occasional series of long posts, rather than a blog that is especially concerned with the present moment.

As far as my tastes, and whether they're close enough to yours that you should have any investment in what I say about TV, my favorites are probably not too far from the canon. Rectify, The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Friday Night Lights, Louie, Mary Tyler Moore, Taxi, Twin Peaks, The State, Community, Battlestar Galactica, Pulling, Gavin and Stacey, Peep Show, Eight is Enough, Mad About You, Family Ties, Parks, Curb, brief-lived wonders like Freaks and Geeks, Rubicon, Party Down, and Happy Endings, flawed greats like American Gothic and Wiseguy ... I'm also a little obsessed with Friends (I have the first season of Joey on DVD).


I love the utter ridiculousness of the Saturday morning cartoons of yore, and my love for animation in general is a whole nother thing. In theory I love the ridiculousness of 80s adventure shows like Automan or Knight Rider, but in practice I can't watch them for long.

I'm sick of the "oaf husband/long-suffering wife" sitcom, a la According to Jim, King of Queens, and so far about half of the episodes of Black-ish.

I love Bryan Fuller's whimsical shows but have had more trouble getting into Hannibal.

I hate the final seasons of Buffy and Lost, was fine with the ending of the Sopranos, had deep misgivings about the ending of Battlestar Galactica.

I don't like procedurals, whether medical, legal, or police, and I especially hate quirky or mentally ill people solving crimes while being all quirky or mentally ill. I do love The Good Wife, though.

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testy larue

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