TV year-end meme

[snick_backup]

This meme seems especially apropos this year, not only so I can look back on what TV I've watched this year (answer: more than I thought), but as a way of introducing my fannish self to all the new folks who've come in from the friending meme.

Shows I’ve started watching

Leverage. I've started this and found it pleasant enough; I shriek with delight at least once per episode over some antic or bit of chutzpah from Hardison, and that's more than can be said for many supposedly fluffy and entertaining shows. However, I want Nate Ford to just go away, and I want Sophie to grow up into a much more complex character than she's allowed to be right now. Also the actual plots are more than my suspension of belief can take at times, and the team's ethics, it seems to me, are frequently a whole lot less ethical than the writers seem to believe. Eh. I have two more episodes of the first season, and then I may continue if I can get hold of more conveniently. Or not. I am uninvested.

Oddly, despite my lack of investment, Leverage is one of the few shows I watched this year that I could see myself getting fannish about and writing fic for. (The other is Twin Peaks.) There's just so much going on under the surface of these characters and their motivations and their relationships, and I could see myself getting interested in telling some of those stories. And also I want to write all the crack. Someone at insmallpackages asked for Leverage wingfic, and I was like, "I want to write that!" This after having only seen, like, four episodes.

Mad Men. You guys, this was exactly as good as you all said it was. It inspired me to write more meta than I've written on anything since, like, Buffy. And then I went through a slump and never got back to it (which really disappointed my roommate, who continued to watch and had no one to exclaim about it with). But I want to!

I also started watching Revenge, IT Crowd, Goong, and Coffee Prince this year, but I'm discussing them all under other categories.

Shows I’ve stopped watching

I started watched Revenge because of this vid, which is composed entirely of Emily and Nolan and watching the fires they start burn the world down, which sounded excellent. Alas, the show itself pretty soon got tied up in love triangles (how much do I not care about Emily/Jack? LET ME COUNT THE WAYS) and incidental characters I didn't care about at all (Declan/Charlotte, Ashley, Conrad). Also there was a lot less of Emily taking revenge and more of her doing damage control, and that was less the dynamic I was hoping for. I got through 1.09, I think? And I think I'm done.

The Vampire Diaries – I got bored, you guys. I didn't care about the werewolf plot at all, and I didn't care about Elijah, and I mostly just wanted Katherine to go away (preferably with Stefan, FOREVER). And even the characters I enjoyed, I wasn't feeling anymore – Caroline, Bonnie, Damon, Tyler. upupa_epops and ever_neutral have compiled me a list of must-see Damon/Elena eps, and perhaps I will take a look at that some of those eps at some point, but for now I think I am done. :P

Goong – I started watching this, my second kdrama, because it came highly recommended and because I loved Coffee Prince SO MUCH, but I got bogged down in the slow pacing. You'd think this would be exactly my sort of thing, what with the arranged marriage and the slow burn to romance and all, but I think the two main characters were just too young and too young-acting for me to get enthused about it. Also the male lead's old girlfriend was shaping up to be Evil, and I wasn't looking forward to that at all. So I think I'm done with this one, too.

Farscape – I TRIED. I think this is just not my show – too goofy in both its plots and the way it handles its relationships between its characters. Eh.

Sherlock - I watched the Irene Adler ep, and was both underwhelmed by the ep itself and overwhelmed by the fannish reaction to it. Plus, I'm apparently bored of the John-Sherlock dynamic.

Downton Abbey – see below in the "show that impressed me the least" category, because it was just that bad.

Shows I’ve continued to watch or completed

The IT Crowd! I watched the entire run this year and found it a delight, start to finish.

BSG! I finished it, you guys! Definitely one of my big TV accomplishments for the year. Looking back, I can’t say I think that last season was good, and in particular I hated the finale a lot, but the series as a whole is one of the meatier chunks of television I’ve ever seen. It’s a show in love with big ideas, which it frankly doesn’t always execute very well, but still they’re there and you have to either engage them or navigate around them to get on with the show. And meanwhile the cast of characters is richer and more varied (and let’s be honest, just larger) than almost any other show I can think of (LOST comes to mind; let us not speak of it), and the acting is superb. I didn’t enjoy a lot of it, but I can’t deny the power of what it was trying to do, however often it failed.

Coffee Prince: another piece of sheer delight. I adored this. I adored the entire ensemble cast of characters, I adored the gender stuff it played around with, I adored all the actors. This show had basically no flaws, IMO (except possibly for the lackadaisical finale, but whatever).

I continue to watch Twin Peaks. I continue to love it. I brought it home with me to the Land of Dial-Up, so I have hopes of actually maybe finished it before the new year. (It’s only, like, 29 episodes! You wouldn’t think it’d take me this long!)

SPN. Presumably y’all already know how I feel about that. There have been some great bits this eason (all the Dean+Cas stuff; the concept of the Sam/Amelia stuff, if not always the execution; the Trans; and the end of Heartache), and everything else has been some combination of unpleasant, inexplicable, and just plain bad writing (the dialogue, it is so obvious). But I’m in this one to the bitter end.

Chuck. I enjoyed Chuck and Casey and Elle and Captain Awesome as much this time around as I did before; I was even less enthused about the treatment of Sarah Walker as a character than before. That element alone might have killed the show for me. Bleah.

Monster – an anime my sister talked me into watching the first few eps of. It seems to be a mostly-real world story of a doctor too principled for his or the world’s good who accidently saves the life of the Antichrist. My sister wanted me to watch it because a) it’s full of medical goodness, which she enjoys a lot, and b) it doesn’t do any of the overemoting that I find off-putting in most anime. However, I just didn’t care. The pace is glacial, and I didn’t give a fig for the protagonist. Also his girlfriend is a shallow, self-absorbed brat who dumps him as soon as he’s out of favor with his boss, and I just didn’t need that.

Avatar: The Last Airbender – man, talk about lost momentum. I only have half a season left, and I can't get up the care to watch it. I really enjoyed most of S2 of this show, but somehow it lost me in S3. IDK.

So You Think You Can Dance - I only saw a couple of episodes of this, because the actual-real-live-TV situation at my house is complicated, and the delay before eps get put online is ridiculous. I was pleased that Keyon (sp?) won, though.

Shows I want to check out and/or finish next year

New shows:
* Breaking Bad (I'd say it wasn't at all my sort of thing, but the word of mouth is strong with this one)
* Dexter (again, mostly because of the amazing things I've heard about the first few seasons, and also for Julie Benze <3)
* Babylon 5 (depending on my tolerance for cheesy plots and bad dialogue; the first ten eps that I watched years ago suggested that there were things there I would like a lot, but the writing was so bad)
* The Sarah Connor Chronicles (dude, dystopian SF with female protagonist, I AM THERE)
* maaaybe Teen Wolf (It’s all Verity’s fault; if half the gender stuff is happening in this show that she says is happening, then maybe I can put up with the werewolves and the teen drama. Also, Lydia the math princess <3.)

However, as usual, I mean to be pretty casual about whether or not I watch any of those; TV is for fun, and I refuse to be ~pressured into watching it.

That said, next year I AM GOING TO FINISH TWIN PEAKS. Also I really want to watch a bunch more Mad Men.

Show that impressed me the least

Downton Abbey. UGH. Okay, so season two was not good, but it had redeeming features! Mary continued to be complex and interesting, there were some interesting character beats involving Thomas and the war, I came to really enjoy O'Brien, and Lavinia was the best thing ever to happen to the show.

S3, on the other hand, had all the soapy melodrama and really ridiculous and unbelievable plots of S2, but none of those redeeming features. I mean, Edith was tolerable. There was some enjoyable Matthew/Branson bromance going on. But mostly I alternated between being bored and actively hating most of the moments onscreen. And then the fifth episode happened, and I threw in the towel. I wasn't even particularly invested in that character, but the way it was handled was just Too Much.

All the other shows I quit this year, I quit because I was bored. This one, I am quitting in a fit of righteous annoyance. Show, we are done.

Show that impressed me the most

Ugh, this is hard! I think a list is required here. As mentioned, The IT Crowd and Coffee Prince were both delightful, if not perhaps impressive in that diamond-edge artistic sense. Mad Men was brilliant. Twin Peaks continued to be wonderful and unique. So let's go with those.

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Comments

[hamsterwoman]

Babylon 5 (depending on my tolerance for cheesy plots and bad dialogue; the first ten eps that I watched years ago suggested that there were things there I would like a lot, but the writing was so bad)

Ooh!

I'm guessing you've heard this already from any and all B5 fans you might know, but I really do believe it gets a lot better in season 2, especially in terms of cheesy plots (and dialogue, too). Actually, the big arc starts showing up in the second half of season 1, so you were almost to the good stuff. And I've definitely been wincing less at the dialogue during the second half of my s1 rewatch, and I don't think it's because I'm becoming inured.

[snickfic]

Yes, I'm told there is hope! And I really would like to get to these chewy wonderful things everyone has promised me. But inspired by writing this post, I've gone and ordered the first two seasons off Amazon, so perhaps soon y'all will be hearing about my latest adventures re: B5. :)

[scarletscarlet.livejournal.com]

Farscape: I got as far as the helium fart scene in the... first episode, I think it was? And just went NOPE. I wasn't at all interested in the lead guy, and so wasn't paying attention until the fighter-chick showed up, and I was a little more interested in her, but then it was all so horribly boring.

Breaking Bad is an interesting one. I love it, but I don't always like it, and it's fascinating how ambiguous it is in terms of heroes/villains. I may, when it finishes, have to seek out some kind of fannish thing to see if anyone has written Good Things happening for the characters who have my sympathy in the latest (last, I think) season.

It's shot beautifully and makes excellent use of the spaces between the words. Also does a really good line in showing you something early that won't make sense until later, but it's there, in the back of your mind, making you ask questions and providing some extra tension when you're wondering how on earth they're going to get to that point, and then it all comes together.

Mad Men is kind of like that, sometimes. SO FULL OF BASTARDS. But everyone is SO fleshed out. When I first started watching, I remember thinking the pace was very slow, and expected to get bored. But because there's so much character work, even just a couple of episodes in, it felt like EVERYTHING had happened because, when you're invested in the characters, even quiet little things have meaning.

I remember liking seasons 2-4 of B5 a whole lot. It has some really interesting secondary characters, too, who go through some good stuff.

Also, it has Ivanova.

Edit to add - big Dexter fan here. Three episodes behind what's currently screening, but watched it from the start. I think it takes a while to build much sympathy for the character - I mean, part of the point of him is that he's emotionally walled off, and he talks us through how he fakes it in the first episode - but the people around him are easier. Like, Dexter is very reserved, but Deb (oh, Deb ♥) keeps her heart and mind and everything about herself right out there in the open. I do rather love Deb.

[snickfic]

Yeah, my total disinterest in John Crichton did not help matters at all. I'm told he serves as an interesting deconstruction of manpain, in that while he's often pain, it's usually pain that's inflicted on him, rather than pain he feels out of guilt or on behalf of others. Which is interesting, but not enough to keep me watching. :P

I'm going to have to check out Breaking Bad, even though it is so very much Not My Sort of Thing, just because of the wonderful things everyone says about it. (Which was why I started Mad Men, for that matter.)

I will of course keep y'all updated on my TV progress!