TV Junkie: A History

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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Wedding Band

Wedding Band @ Wikipedia
Wedding Band @ IMDb

The show follows a weekend band that plays on weddings and B’nai Mitzvah (that’s the actual plural of Bar Mitzvah, I had to look it up for spelling anyway ;)) while having “real” jobs during the week. The lead singer Tommy played by Brian Austin Green (Beverly Hills, 90210, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles) is a convinced single and he arranges for the band to play at the woman’s wedding “that got away”. Eddie is the lead guitarist and married man with children. The drummer is a Jack Black look-alike named Barry and the “new guy” Stevie is played by Harold Perrineau (LOST).

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The Librarian: Quest for the Spear

Director: Peter Winther

Noah Wyle … Flynn Carsen
Sonya Walger … Nicole Noone
Bob Newhart … Judson
Kyle MacLachlan … Edward Wilde
Kelly Hu … Lana

Synopsis: Flynn Carsen is what we call in Germany a “Dauerstudent”, a student who never leaves the comfort of the university – until he’s thrown out. He then gets a mysterious invitation to apply for a job at the library. But not any library, the Library.

The place where they keep the Ark of Covenant, Excalibur, Pandora’s Box – and one third of the Spear of Destiny. Unfortunately that piece is stolen shortly after he started working there and now he has to make sure that the other two thirds that are hidden around the world don’t fall into the hands of the bad guys.

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Person of Interest

Person of Interest @ Wikipedia
Person of Interest @ IMDb

After 9/11 Harold Finch (Michael Emerson, LOST) built a machine that scanned every internet communication, every phone call, every surveillance camera recording for possible threats to the United States. It divides the results into two categories: major casualties and minor casualties. The government was only interested in the list with the major casualties.

The machine cannot foresee accidents or spontaneous acts of violence but it does see planned crimes.

Harold has made it his mission to help those people the government deems of no interest to them. But he has to work in secret, no one can know the machine is giving him information. So the information has to be sparse – only a social security number. And that is not always the victim’s number.

He needs help. Someone who can handle the “hand-to-hand” business. And for this he recruits a former special forces soldier the government thinks is dead (Jim Caviezel, Outlander). They also have the help of two detectives, one straight, one crooked. Together they try to protect people who don’t even know that they’re in danger.

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Purchase Diary 2012 – May

The Blues Brothers (1980)


02 May – €8.92 (£7.43) @ Amazon.co.uk

Blues Brothers 2000 (1998)


02 May – €9.48 (£7.93) @ Amazon.co.uk

Castle: Season 3 (2010 – 2011)


02 May – €22.99 @ Amazon.de

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)


02 May – €11.68 (£9.89) @ Amazon.co.uk

Friends With Benefits (2011)


02 May – €8.37 (£6.94) @ Amazon.co.uk

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Smallville: The End of the Beginning

Let me start this by saying that it was better than LOST‘s ending. But that isn’t saying much…

Smallville has always been an uneven show. It had good years, bad years and worse years. It never had great years. It rarely had great episodes. They were there but there weren’t as many as one would hope in a ten year run with a total of 217 episodes.

And yet: Ten years and 217 episodes. There aren’t that many shows overall and even fewer shows in the Sci-Fi and Fantasy genre that can bring that much to the table.

For all its faults I love Smallville but I am also at peace with it ending now. I nearly gave up on it after what is commonly referred to as Failsday.
Seasons nine and ten became better again and quite a few episodes of season eight have grown on me.
But season ten and its finale also showed that even though they knew exactly how it was supposed to be ending they didn’t really have a clear idea of how to get there.

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