At lunch on Friday I was talking about a recent realization I had with regards to television. Right now I’m on my way through Breaking Bad. After that I’m doing Downtown Abbey. After that I think I’m probably going to start with the Eccleston Doctor Who revival and go all the way through today. Then maybe that Sherlock show that the Doctor Who guy is doing. Then who knows—a friend just recommended the hell out of Friday Night Lights, for example. I really could keep doing this sort of thing for at least a year, I would guess, without a pause.
So I realized that we may now be at the point, post-Sopranos, where TV is like literature, in that you can pretty much just keep watching good-to-great television series from start to finish for the rest of your life. That wasn’t true ten years ago. Probably not even five. And we’re at the point where if you wanted, you could probably put off the crown jewel HBO/AMC shows and still never insult your own intelligence with the shows you choose to watch. That’s a pretty amazing turnaround in a very short period of time. Not to mention all the technology that didn’t exist as recently as the ’90s that now makes doing this sort of thing possible: DVDs, Netflix, streaming, DVRs. It’s an amazing time for long-form fiction because of all this. I mean, obviously television is still a young medium with a very high price of admission for artists compared to literature, so the supply isn’t inexhaustible like the supply of great books is. But you can now make good-to-great television a consistent part of your life on your own terms for pretty much as long as you want.
Tags: TV
Gonna go ahead and rerecommend Justified and throw out a few more: Daria, Pushing Daisies, Homeland, and The Larry Sanders Show.
eccleston is the worst doctor, i’d skip right to season 2 with david tennant if i were you.
I’d disagree strongly with that “worst Doctor” assessment of Eccleston, and argue against the skipping of that first series. It is uneven, but that unevenness is a hallmark for the Russell T. Davies years. If you can’t abide the lows of the Eccleston series, you’ll have big troubles with the lows of the Tennant years too. Since I haven’t seen any other Who than the post 2005-variety, I can’t argue for the quality of Eccleston versus the previous Doctors, but he more than holds his own (acting-wise) against Tennant and Smith, at least.
Another vote for FNL here. I have actually been more or less anti-football all my life (growing up gawky and then going to LSU where the fans are shitheads and the game takes over the school), but that show really sucked me in, to the point where I’m vaguely interested in the game now. Other than the dire season 2, which I think was writer’s strike time, that is some good TV.
Hey I like Eccleston!
I’m too big a Shallow Grave/28 Days Later fan to ever skip something with Eccleston in a lead role if it’s on hand.
I could be misremembering, but I think Eccleston had a cameo on the underrated British sitcom Blackadder.
Any Eccleston fan has to see the somewhat recent BBC miniseries Shadow Line. Great stuff, with an especially great performances from Eccleston and Chiwetel Ejiofor.
Another +1 for Friday Night Lights from another anti-football person.
It’s certainly clear that not liking football is not a disqualifying characteristic for liking Friday Night Lights, so this thread has already been super useful to me. Thanks, folks!
(The funny thing is that while I truly don’t care about sports at all, and football in particular is gross to me given its hideous cultural hegemony (nerd culture will never, ever, ever, ever, ever approach it), I find it the most watchable sport when no teams you’re all that interested in are playing. So the show has that in its favor for me as well: Football’s reasonably interesting to watch.)
I’ve become more able to (kind of) enjoy and (kind of) understand a football game on TV since I got into Friday Night Lights, whereas previously the game always looked like a big mess of nothing… but this is weird, because the show almost never includes more than a few scattered moments of game action and doesn’t explain what they’re talking about, so I can’t have really learned much. I guess it’s just that by having that stuff happen in the context of a story, the game started to seem more like a story to me. The same thing happened with baseball when I read “The Golem’s Mighty Swing.”
I disagree with the premise. Most people weren’t aware of good TV shows before Sopranos and the internet, and even if they were there was no easy way to watch them start-to-finish in order like today.
But in the late 90’s and early 2000’s we still had things like The West Wing, Buffy & Angel, Firefly, Oz, Six Feet Under, Alias, Gilmore Girls, and Freaks and Geeks. Early and mid 90’s there was Twin Peaks, Babylon 5, Star Trek Deep Space Nine, EZ Streets, The X-Files, Homicide, NYPD Blue, My So-Called Life. The 80s gave us Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhere, V, Max Headroom, Wiseguy, Crime Story, Thirtysomething.
And that’s just some drams, leaving out comedies like Arrested Development, The Ben Stiller Show, or The Larry Sanders Show. And that’s just American dramas – the British have their own lists topped by the likes of Prime Suspect, Spaced, and The Office.
Admittedly much of these shows I’m citing based on reputation and word-of-mouth, some of the ones I have seen certainly had their ups and downs, and much of the recent cable shows are strong in ways some of these inevitably weren’t. But there’s been more than enough TV to “pretty much just keep watching good-to-great television series from start to finish for the rest of your life” for a long time.
I love Dr Who in theory, less so in practice. Nu Who in particular is very problematic. The problem is that RTD instituted an approach to Who writing that I find it very hard to get on with, one that hugely privileges spectacle and momentum and Saturday night polulism over considered plotting and detail. Deus ex machina, last minute saves, unearned emotion, and Every Famous Person throughout history litter RTD’s episodes. A big bugbear of mine is the almost weekly deployment of threats to the entire space time continuum – often seemingly tacked on to a much more manageable threat level as an afterthought – in combination with the speshulness of the sonic screwdriver, which under RTD became a way of magicing away story obstacles: the net effect is show where nothing feels solid, especially the stakes.
Interestingly, RTD and Moffat clearly owe a debt to Grant Morrison (amongst other writers) but they rarely manage to pull off the space opera with any degree of poetry or insight.
All that said, I do enjoy it in a brainless kind of way, even if most episodes, even the very best of the bunch, usually have me tutting.
Sherlock suffers from some of the same problems but not to the same extent. I like it a lot.
Texas Forever. I forgot to mention on thing about Friday Night Lights that just kept bringing me back…the score! Some time midway through the first season, the show really finds its groove. Even though I’m constantly wondering what Explosions in the Sky, who soundtracked the film version, thinks about the near-perfect aping of their style to pull it off. The right music in a show is can be just as important as the characters and the writing to me.
Considering the off-air battle that was going on around this show, we’re lucky to have gotten 5 incredibly satisfying seasons (and, yes, one so-so season early on. It’s still good.). After Breaking Bad, this series turned out to be my palate cleanser.
OH! And my wife is watching Downton Abbey and these are shows that make me leave the room. Jane Austen fare in any form makes my skin crawl. Nothing makes me softer than all that “Mr. Darcy has the dropsy!” shit.
And we’ve both been saying “Downtown” as well, and assuming people were pronouncing it as “Down-ton” just to drive a pretentious nail into the coffin. But alas…it’s spelled that way! There’s no W.
It ain’t Austen in any way shape or form, but fuck Downton Abbey and the Telegraph it rode in on. Seriously.
Whoa whoa whoa whoa WHOA whoa whoA WHOA WHOA WHOA whoa.
It’s not “Downtown”?
When I realized it was “Downton” and not “Downtown” I admit I was a little less interested in watching it.