1. People are saying that this is a golden age of television. Broadcast television is starting to struggle more and more,
The most coherent, lucid, articulate celebrity on VH1. No, really. This is VH1's A-Game.
and networks are willing to try crazy shit that they normally wouldn’t in a desperate struggle to get their hands on what little viewership is left. Sometimes that means that you have reality shows starring competitors from other reality shows starring competitors from other reality shows until you have ten degrees of separation from even a D list celebrity (I’ll fucking kill you, VH1. Then again, can I really blame them? They’ve managed to spin Brett Michaels, Flava Flav and their groupies into 14 different reality shows. What do you think 24 hours of programming costs VH1? Sixty dollars? One fifty if you throw in the cost of liability waivers and condoms? Doesn’t matter. Go fuck yourself, VH1.)
Anyway, as I was saying, when television networks are willing to try anything, sometimes you end up with a reality show that they have to cancel because one of the contestants is wanted for murdering his wife and stuffing her in a suitcase, but other times you end up with The Wire, or Lost, or Rob & Big. I fucking love Rob & Big.
2. I gave up video games for a year and pout about it regularly on this blog.
A few years ago, I started smoking. Not heavily, but my daily nicotine intake kept gradually creeping higher and higher until one day it dawned on me that, shockingly, I had developed a fondness for cigarettes that one might go as far as to describe as an “addiction”. I laid off the cigarettes at that point, which proved embarrassingly difficult. I only spent about six months as a very light smoker, but it was still a pretty big uphill battle. Sometimes I could distract myself with an alternative activity, but there were moments during my day when I was driving in the car or taking a break from flipping pancakes and my brain would say “You can’t distract me, asshole. Quit what you’re doing and find a cigarette. I need some flavor in my fucking T-Zone, stat.” All I could really do in those situations was gnash my teeth and try to decide if I would be willing to toss the salad of the guy in the car next to me if he would give me a pack of cigarettes in return.
Convincing me that I have a serious problem with games is the fact that I sometimes have these moments with this habit, too. I try to find other ways to fill my time, but every once and a while, my mind just stops me in my tracks and tells me “I don’t give a shit what you’re doing right now, you need to put a controller in your hand and blow some shit up”. Sometimes I find productive things to do during the time when I would normally play games – I’m trying to learn Spanish, finish school (again) in another of my futile attempts to achieve my dream of becoming financially solvent, and my laundry gets done on a far more regular basis, but I have those moments where I have to clench my fists and grit my teeth to stop myself from buying a gamecube and then having sex with it. There’s no hope of being productive in situations like that, so I have to find entertaining alternatives.
3. Everyone is gay for Mad Men.
It’s a show that takes place in the early 1960′s about an advertising firm and the people that work at it. Everyone has been ranting and raving about how great that show is. About two weeks before season three started, everyone started making little Mad Men themed avatars for their twitter and facebook profiles. With everyone’s status updates leading up to the Season 3 premier getting giddier and giddier, I couldn’t even log on to facebook without someone’s boner for that show smacking me in the face.
I’ll bet that you see where this is heading.
Normally, I wouldn’t give a television show a second thought, no matter how many twitter updates I saw in a day about excitement for Mad Men that resulted in loss of bladder control. Between video games and Internet pornography, I normally have more than enough entertainment to occupy my free time. Lucky for Mad Men (assuming Mad Men gives a shit about me watching their show), this year is different, so I decided to watch the first two seasons so I could jump on the bandwagon for season three.
Look, it's me! You can tell that it's 1960 because I'm drinking a martini and smoking indoors! I cropped it out of the picture, but I'm also cheating on my wife and discriminating against a homosexual!
At first, I didn’t really like it, mostly because the first half of Season 1 isn’t so much “Telling a story” as “Beating you over the head with the fact that it’s 1960″. I barely knew any of the character’s names or anything about them 6 episodes in, because they seemed to need the full hour every episode to show people smoking, drinking, being disrespectful to women, blacks and gays and wearing stupid clothing. The first four hours of it were kind of novel, but after that, I found myself thinking “I get it. Don Draper loves smoking and cheating on his wife, usually at the same time. All the better if he can slip in an anti-Semitic slur right before he climaxes. ”
I’m not saying that it’s a completely useless trick; I think that part of what people like about the show is that even though it takes place in what seems like it should be relatively familiar territory, 1960′s America is almost completely alien in a lot of ways. It’s also kind of fun to watch historical events play out on the show, like the Cuban missile crisis and Kennedy beating Nixon. Nonetheless, you can’t watch a scene with a man driving up to a gas station in an old car with his wife and then yelling “5 cents a gallon!? That’s highway robbery! Why, I’m so worked up I have half a mind to smack you right in the kisser, Gladys! Toss me a cigarette and freshen up my drink before my nerves get the best of me and I throw this goofy looking plaid blazer that I’m wearing right in the dirt! Negro boy – NEGRO BOY! Come fill up my tank!” without feeling like they’re leaning a little bit too heavily on a gimmick. (Spoiler alert: That scene never happened. I made it up. Are you listening, Mad Men? I can bring heat like that all day long! You can’t afford NOT to have me on your writing staff!)
I have to say, though, that about 3/4ths of the way through season 1, I started to really enjoy the show. They started telling a story that went beyond “No, really! It’s 1960!” with characters that I found interesting, and I’m pretty excited to start watching season 3 now. I even made a sweet little avatar of myself to show my enthusiasm for the show that you can see on the right. I am now caught up and looking forward to keeping myself from cheating on my video game resolution with the rest of the season at Sterling Cooper.
Up next: Battlestar Galactica.
Three and a half more months left.
I can do this.