Digg ThisMy bride and I were sitting in a local coffee shop recently, doing our marriage time, when we overheard a scary guy with a laptop in the corner tell a friend on his cell phone that he had “just updated his Battlestar Galactica page.”
My bride and I looked at each other, shook our heads, and went on about our business. Obviously, he had other priorities than we when it came to watching television.
In our house, we watch television late at night, mostly as a way for my bride to wind down from a stressful day at work. But we have regular shows that we watch, either because they are good, or because they are interesting.
So while we were visiting some relatives this past Easter Sunday, the discussion came up about what shows people watched.
CSI: came in #1 by far, although different people liked different versions: my brother likes the original (Las Vegas); one of his in-laws prefers Miami, but hates New York; we like New York the best (probably because of our familiarity with the New York area, and because we both are fans of Gary Sinise), although we watch all three.
When we started including other shows, a familiar theme arose, leading me to wonder what is going on with network TV these days.
Personally, we also watch Without A Trace, Criminal Minds, House, Two and a Half Men, and Monk.
With the exception of Two and a Half Men, all of them are pretty much cookie-cutter programs, in that they all follow a pre-set script, and they all tend to be the same thing from week to week; only the names have been changed to protect the ignorant.
Now, I can understand Monk, as it comes from the same vein as Rockford Files — humor. Humor differs from comedy in that it is a more serious look at life from a particular aspect. Humor makes you grin rather than laugh; it makes you think rather than react. You come away with something rather than leaving your baggage behind.
The rest all show the same thing every week. House battles a mysterious ailment every week, tries exactly three diagnoses (all wrong or partially wrong), the patient deteriorates severely only to be saved at the last minute by an off-track thought that brings to mind some obscure disease and an off-beat, controversial cure. In the meantime, he’s rude and crude, he insults just about everybody, he gets almost fired every episode, and he always walks away as the good guy in the end.
Oh yes, I almost forgot — the patients almost always end up in a “clean room” at some point during the show. Personally, I’m disappointed when this doesn’t happen.
Criminal Minds is a good show, although if you watch it regularly, you’d get the impression that every other person in the world is a serial killer. They have a new serial killer every week — as opposed to every eight or ten years or so in real life. And they always catch their “unsub” (just what the hell is an “unsub,” anyway?) just before he kills another victim.
Without a Trace actually has variant endings, and a really good premise, although it can be hard to watch if you have children and the subject of the story is a child. In the variant endings, sometimes the subjects survive, sometimes they die, and sometimes they are never found. But the usual track of the show is that someone goes missing, and the team tracks down the person’s whereabouts at the same time that they track the suspect.
Crossing Jordan simply gets on our nerves at this point, so we switched to Grey’s Anatomy. I haven’t found a pattern in Grey’s yet, but I’ll let you know when I find it.
The old series “The FBI” started this whole mess, with every criminal having the surname “Trask.” Then there’s NYPD Blue, when just about every crime started in, or centered around, or they captured a criminal in — or near — a “bodega.”
I guess just about every street corner in New York City has a bodega. Whether or not it’s a true bodega leaves the question unresolved — it’s just a cool-sounding word; recent crime dramas are in now love with “petechiael hemmoraging,” the latest hot sound bite in television lore.
When they find my dead body, I think they’ll find evidence of petechiael hemmoraging because I choked to death on all these repeated hot sound bites. With all of this, it’s a good thing I don’t play the CSI: Miami Drinking Game.
The other show we get to see now is the Sopranos, because a friend of ours brings the tape into the newsroom every Monday. Leave it to HBO to create one of the finest, most intelligent television shows I’ve seen in a long time. Well, since Sex and the City, at least. We started watching it this year, we’re about half-way through the season, and we’re totally hooked — and it has the best music, too. This is the show’s last season. It figures.
The X-Files are now off the air, sadly, as I always liked the show; they all have their time, I suppose. The return of Battlestar Galactica is, of course, an anomaly. I hear it’s a good show; somehow, however, I just can’t see being forever chased through the heavens by Cylons a feasible plot for a long-running television series.
But like Star Trek, it supposedly brings up social issues designed to make you think about how we could change some of society’s ills, which might not be such a bad thing.
Maybe we’re watching the wrong stuff. What do you watch?
(73.8 — 42.0 — 31.8)
