Complete, Mindless Happines
September 15th, 2007 @ 12:30 pmThat has been summer television for me . . . and now it’s sadly ending. I can barely remember the pre-revolutionary 90210 summer episodes era when summer was a wasteland of reruns. Okay, well summer is still mostly reruns, but this summer has been particularly blissful with a range of fresh content, as it were, that render repeats to the extent networks show those - my cable box has rarely seen the single digits in the last three months. (That’s also because we have HD and the networks are all 70_, but . . . details).
Anyway, the summer season started off unambitiously with The Starter Wife, the semi-autobiographical dramatization of the novel by Brian Grazer’s (now ex-) third wife, which was both maddening and entertaining, frustrating and perfectly fluffy. I would never imagine myself devoting months of TV watching to such piffle, but six episodes was the perfect dose. I slightly hated the end - something about how apparently you do have to change yourself radically to make relationships work or something, but I had to admit I wasn’t watching for life lessons. I kind of wanted the bling.
Some summer programming choices were specifically designed to fill a hole, e.g., The History Channel’s Ice Road Truckers, a serviceable replacement for Deadliest Catch. Truckers was fascinating, if horribly repetitive, but has that same “it’s really freaking cold and we’re making a lot of money (relatively) doing manly things that most people never could and never will” element. The frigid temperatures and perpetual fear of crashing through the ice in the Northwest Territories echo the frigid temperatures, killer waves, and ice floes of the Bering Sea, and the question of whether diamonds or crabs are worth any of this resonate equally. Deadliest Catch wins, though, because the omnipresent man versus man while they’re both versus nature element is more compelling than the man versus nature and only occasionally versus a jerk.
Another source of amusement has been the burn off of shows I liked, but were yanked before their time. There are a number of shows that fit this bill, e.g., Vanished which the machine has been recording at 2 a.m. on Monday mornings, but we haven’t gone back to that yet.
In that category, we finished off Standoff, which was cool and unconventional in that they did us the favor of having the male and female lead hook up before we got there, which eliminated all the will-they-or-won’t-they nonsense by giving us an adult relationship as a twist on the buddy cop television genre. And the awesome Gina Torres was there too. No idea why the audiences never bit.
The other fun show that fits this bill is The Loop, with its fabulously endearing and catchy theme-song, “Hockey Monkey.” Again, not sure why the Loop wasn’t a hit with the kids - it featured a twentysomething with a college business degree who parlays that into a job as an exec with an airline where all his colleagues are older and more experienced (his boss calls him “Thesis”), which leads to lots of generational clashes and lots of episodes about the downsides of being drunk. But how can you not love a show with an episode where a very scary dog eats a flash drive with a crucial presentation on it?!
Probably the two best series this summer though have been Eureka and Burn Notice, which are not quite over. I fell in love with Eureka last summer, and was excited to see it back. It’s one of those quirky, fun sci-fi shows, but what I like the most is that other than casually advancing the mythology of the “Artifact” all the mysterious goings on are always the result of some scientist taking an experiment too far, grounding it in human frailties. Burn Notice was been a delightful surprise, following an ex-spy who’s trying to figure out why he’s been burned (kicked out of the spy business), and helping someone in need every week. Mr. Sassy expressed surprise that I liked Burn Notice, given that I like to “follow the rules” - which is so not true - and lead character Michael Westen has to break them to help his clients. Whatever. Anyway, the show is right up both of our alleys, fitting in with his love of The Incredible Hulk and Knight Rider and my love of Quantum Leap.
Finally, I’ve just started getting into Mad Men, AMC’s take on advertising execs on Madison Avenue in the 1960’s. So far I’ve learned that everyone smoked a lot and it really, really kind of sucked to be a woman back then. Also cool - Rosemarie DeWitt from Standoff shows up!
