My shows generally fall into three categories, news,
historical-type fiction and outlandish fantasy.
Jon
Stewart and
Rachel
Maddow are news shows that I don't tape, I watch them in an
“Appointment TV” style, that is, I get to the TV when the show
starts, watch the program, often channel-jumping during commercials,
then at the end of the show, I turn off the TV and go on to something
else.
The Good
Wife and
The
Client List are historical-fiction type shows. Good Wife covers
various aspects of the legal profession from within a
fictionalized context. The individual, specific actions, the details,
are pretty trustworthy. We can be sure they're based on real
institutions and events. It's the overall framework , the personal
details about the characters and the context that's fictionalized. In
one episode, our protagonist Alicia (Julianne Margulies) is sulking
because she was appointed as a partner in her firm to fulfill a
financial need on the part of the firm, not so much because she was
an amazing lawyer. Her senior partner Diane (Christine Baranski)
tells her to get over it because Diane was appointed as a partner for
similar reasons. The lesson here is to take promotions for whatever
reasons they're offered. Don't get so pure that you get in the way of
your own career. Client List covers massage parlors that “give
their customers a little extra” and cover all sorts of issues that
arise from being a sex worker. A continuing, recurring problem is
“What does one do with all of that money?” Obviously, that's
problem a lot of us would like to have, but the show demonstrates
that it can be a real logistical problem to deal with piles and piles
of cash and to still maintain a cover. Our protagonist Riley
(Jennifer Love Hewitt) is speaking with some policemen about her
husband's legal problems and one of them loudly notes that the
clothes she wears are not exactly of the standard for those of modest
means. He notes that they're a bit more expensive than one would
expect from an ordinary housewife. Riley gets through the encounter,
but the point is made, that someone with a lot of extra, illicit
money, has to be careful how she spends it. In both cases, the show
are generally successful at being both informative about their
subjects and good dramas.
Grimm,
Merlin,
Nikita,
Beauty
& The Beast,
Vampire
Diaries,
Once
Upon A Time,
Lost Girl
and
Being Human are
outlandish fantasies. They all have explicitly stated rules for what
their characters can and can't do, but all of those rules go well
beyond what regular people can do. Being Human is a show where a
werewolf, a vampire and a ghost all share a house in the city. One of
the premises is that if a vampire drinks werewolf blood, it gives him
what essentially amounts to an immediate and really bad case of food
poisoning, so a young werewolf (Lydia Doesburg) who was staying in
the house decided to temporarily disable the vampire (Sam Huntington)
by putting some of her blood into the vampire's usual refrigerated
supply and to then attack him when he was weakened. Our vampire
prevails, of course, but it's a real challenge for him to do so.
Now, I think I can be reasonably certain that this is a problem
that will never occur to me. That's the fun of it. Someone once said
the whole point of watching disaster movies is to compare the
problems of the characters there with those of your own life and to
comfort yourself that “Well, at least I don't have to hide my
magical abilities from my king (Merlin) while trying to defend my
kingdom from all manner of mystical foes.” The show
Two
Broke Girls doesn't interest me because I'm far too often
actually broke myself, so it's far too real to me to be of any
interest to me as a TV show. It's more amusing to follow storylines
like those of Nikita's secret organization that undertakes covert
missions in the manner of
a
superhero team or Vampire Diaries that examines the many problems
of vampires, witches and werewolves that regular people aren't even
aware of (A marvelous scene occurred when the werewolf (Michael
Trevino) comes to the conclusion that a young woman he's sweet on is
more than human “You're a werewolf, too!” She (Candice Accola)
replies that, well, uh, sort of. She's actually a vampire, but yeah,
he's right, she's not human). By the way, it seems to me that Grimm,
Once Upon A Time and Lost Girl all more or less take off from the
idea presented in the comic-book series
Fables,
which also freely pulls in characters and storylines from a wide
variety of fables and legends near and far. Of course, that also
borrows from a lengthy tradition of freely plundering the past to get
stories, as Beauty & the Beast is a direct continuation of an old
legend, just as the comic-book
Thor
is a direct continuation of old Norse legends.
Update: Very interesting! Grimm and Vampire Diaries
both improved their ratings this past season.
