Thought Storm

RIP Pilot Season

Thought Storm

No, Pilot season is not dead – yet. But the Networks don’t know what to do about it. Recently they’ve started to notice that there…

TV Junkie: A History

Thought Storm, TV Season Diary

I watched a lot of TV shows over the years. And when I say a lot, I mean A LOT. And I watched accross the board.

Keep in mind that I’m only 35 years old.

I watched The Guiding Light for two years straight (it’s a soap opera whose German title was the Springfield Story). I watched medical shows like Trapper John M.D. and lawyer shows like L.A. Law. I watched the 80s action shows from MacGuyver to Riptide. I even watched Love Boat every weekday on one of the first private channels in Germany: Sat.1. I got up at 6am on every Saturday morning to watch Rawhide (Tausend Meilen Staub, lit. “A Thousand Miles of Dust”) with a very young and pre-Fistful Clint Eastwood. I knew who Daniel Boone was around the same time I met the Cartwrights as well as the men from the Shiloh Ranch.

And last weekend I binge-watched the first Netflix show House of Cards (Big recommendation! Kevin Spacey is a brilliant Magnificent Bastard!) and I got curious as to how many shows I watched intently over the past two and a half decades.

With the help of the list on the German site Wunschliste.de I created a list of “my” shows.

I only counted live-action fiction shows, no animated shows may they be Saturday morning cartoons like Yogi Bear or Scooby-Doo or evening shows like The Simpsons or South Park. No scripted reality (which I’m avoiding to 99% anyway with the exception of Comic Book Men). In this list are only shows which I followed for more than a year unless the show itself didn’t last that long.

And the answer was: 244 246 247. Two hundred and fourty four six seven different shows I watched with active interest since I’ve started watching television. And the worst thing is: Of most of these shows I watched 90% or more episodes at least once.

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3D, Ticket Prices, …

Cinema, Thought Storm

I hate 3D. In the real worlds it’s somewhat OK so you don’t crash into the car in front of you. But in the theatres it’s just a pointless rip-off of which I hope it’s going to die again – and soon.

Movies in Technicolor and with sound – that were revolutions in the theatres. The evolution of special effects from Ray Harryhausen to CGI – that’s what brought movies forward.

3D? Not so much. The horribly boring Avatar started a trend which just won’t stop so far. And what’s even worse is that ever more theatres fail to show the 2D version at all because it’s much easier to milk your customers with the 3D ticket prices.

Don’t get me wrong; despite my actual glasses I don’t have a problem to perceive the 3D effect. It’s just that in my eyes (no pun intended) no movie became any better with it than it would have been without it. Either the movie is good on its own or its not. It’s just that simple.

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TV Shows – A Decade in Retrospect

Short Review, Thought Storm

Deutsche Version

Since everybody seems to be starting to count at zero instead of one the first decade of this century and millennium is now over. So it’s time to recap these past ten years and take a look at the TV Shows it has given us.

Let me give my résumé at the beginning: Of the four decades I know TV Shows from (70s – 00s) this was without question the best decade for us TV junkies. When you read my review you might say in the end “Hey what about <insert your favourite here>?” (e.g. The Sopranos, Dexter, The Wire, Six Feet Under, …) but that’s exactly my point. This decade has given us so many outstanding shows that it was impossible to watch them all. Also, everybody has a different set of favourite genres but I’d say that every genre got their fair share of excellent series in the last years.

But let’s face it: There’s rarely any series (if there’s one at all) that could keep up the quality and its appeal for its entire run. Some had a bad year in between, some fell short at the end. But even in these “bad years” they had more quality episodes in it than entire shows from previous decades. So all the shows I am going to name have of course aspects that can be criticized and I invite you to do so.

For me the most outstanding characteristic of this past decade’s shows is that they are more often than not more about the “journey” of the character(s) than the actual events. It’s not the character who shines a light upon the unfolding events but it’s the events that shine a light upon the character and his development. I have to say that shows (hereby excluding comedy shows that work with stereo- and archetypes) that don’t have a real character development don’t interest me at all. But if the character development is interesting I might even watch shows from genres that usually don’t interest me at all.

If the character development is interesting enough I might even set the fact aside that my second favourite characteristic is missing: A real story-arc. The first TV Show in my TV universe that had a real story-arc, was Babylon 5. Later Star Trek: DS9 did the same albeit not in that quality and complexity. But these shows were two of the rare exception in the 90s (another famous exception would be Twin Peaks, but I never watched it). It seemed that viewers weren’t interested in either developing characters or story-arcs.

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Technological Overdose?

Thought Storm

Deutsche Version

Let me start this post with a constraint. This post is not about science-fiction shows or shows that portray obvious über-equipment (like K.I.T.T.). This is about shows that at least try to pretend to display “reality”. I am of course aware that there’s a thin line but I hope than I can show my point during this excursus.

But first this College Humor video:

Technical equipment has always been part of TV shows that play in the “here and now”. And why shouldn’t it? It’s part of our every day life, so it should play a part in the TV shows we are watching. The questions are, what part, how big a part and how realistically the equipment is used. And – to give my conclusion at the beginning – I think the more modern a show is and the more real-world technologies there are the more unrealistic becomes its portrayal.

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