We’ve gotten into the habit of watching an hour (well, a TV hour, meaning 42 to 50 minutes) of commercial-free TV before bed. Not every night, certainly, but probably four to five nights a week.
We don’t have a TV–we watch downloaded shows on a laptop. They’re what I’d judge to be ‘quality’ shows. Television has experienced a renaissance in quality in the last decade, and these shows are the result. They’re mostly critically-acclaimed–”Dexter”, “Veronica Mars” (though the acting on this show is appalling), “30 Rock”, “Battlestar Galactica” and so forth.
I got to wondering. If we, hypothetically, watched four or five episodes of quality television each week, is there enough out there for an entire year?
Let’s make it 230 TV-hours a year. What are the best shows that add up to about that number? I’ll use these critics’ lists as a starting point, and tweak them a bit for my personal preferences. I’ll also assume that the writer’s strike didn’t exist (so that there would be complete seasons). The numbers refer to the total hours for a season:
“Dexter” – 12
“Mad Men” – 22
“30 Rock” – 11
“House” – 22
“Big Love” – 12
“The Wire” – 22
“Battlestar Galactica” – 22
“Friday Night Lights” – 22
“Pushing Daisies” – 22
“Rome” – 10
“Damages” – 13
“Californication” – 22
“The War” – 7
No Project Runway at My House
I haven’t seen a single episode of many of these shows (this season or past ones), so I’m basing my notion of ‘quality’ on critical response and word of mouth. It’s in the eye of the beholder. If you think “Project Runway” is quality TV, well, all power to you. You just can’t watch it at my house.
Plus, back in Canada, I spend plenty of time watching the Canucks, so that qualifies as my brainless viewing. I was hoping I could come back to some local playoff hockey, but that’s not looking all that likely.
My list gets me to 219 hours of TV. That sounds like a lot when you say it like that, but it’s only about 3.5 hours of TV a week (as each TV hour probably averages 50 minutes or less).
That’s encouraging, in a way. If you’re disciplined in what you watch, you really could spend a reasonable amount of time enjoying just the cream of the television crop.
Plus, there’s plenty of good TV (I’ve never seen more than one episode of “Deadwood”, “Arrested Development”, “House” and so forth) that I’ve missed from the past five years to fill in the gaps
There isn’t a ton of English-language media floating around our village. However, some ex-pat friends of ours (she’s from Vancouver, if you can imagine) lent us season 2 of The Wire. I’d never seen an episode of the show, but a couple of people had recommended it to me, and it’s quite popular over at TVTorrents.
We watched episode one of season two, and I’ve got to admit that I was pretty lost. There seemed to be no affordances–to borrow a term from usability–for new viewers. And frankly, we were pretty bored. ‘The Wire’ is the talkiest cop show I’ve ever seen.
The show definitely seemed very gritty and realistic (I’ve never worked on the docks in Baltimore), and strongly influenced by the men-with-men tone and dialogue of David Mamet. Plus, the acting was strong. Still, it didn’t really float my boat. I guess I like my TV more in the middle-brow escapist mode of Weeds or The West Wing.
If you’re a fan of “The Wire”, why do you like it?
We don’t have a television in Malta. The only TV we see are shows that I download and the occasional football game at the local pub. So, I’ve been watching a fair bit of TV–just grazing, as opposed to watching specific shows–here in Toronto. I was reminded how weird it is:
Does anybody else think this Irish Spring body wash ad is bizarre? I mean, the guy is rubbing Essence of Irish Lass all over his body in the shower. Weird.
I have no interest in golf, but I was waiting for the highlights and the Grand Slam of Golf (I think) was on TV. All the players (and, I think, their caddies) were wearing microphones, so we could hear their conversations about club selection and so forth. Is this commonplace? How often do they curse on-air after a bad putt?
Who watches Ellen and who watches Oprah? I noticed that they’re on at the same time–do they have different demographics?
Isn’t the subtext of Take Home Chef hilarious? A ridiculously handsome and charming Aussie greets an attractive young woman at the grocery store, helps her shop for a special meal, goes home with her while her boyfriend or husband is away and prepares the meal. It ought to be called The Cuckolding Chef Comes Calling.
Speaking of the Canadian Football League…I was looking for some Vancouver Canucks news today, and accidentally learned that Joost users will be able to watch CFL content on the Internet TV startup’s network this winter.
I tried out Joost a couple of months back, and literally found nothing in their video network to interest me. Hopefully that’ll change, or I’ll develop an interest in Peruvian rugby.
“There is a huge pent up demand for Canadian Sports and the CFL in particular, across the World and with the launch of Wildcard Sports Network on Joost, with the CFL as our featured launch partner, we can now provide this compelling League’s most hard-hitting content to a worldwide audience on today’s most advanced Internet TV platform.â€Â
Really? A “huge pent up demand” for the CFL “across the World”? That just struck me as downright amusing. I see that Wildwave is based in Dublin (ah, Dame Street), where I never heard anyone mention Canadian football for the two years I lived there. And I’m Canadian. Maybe they’ve tapped into some hidden enclave of Roughriders fans in Kilkenny?
We’re not big fans of the press release, and we learned a long time ago not to write absurdly effusive quotes for CEOs. It’s unlikely that Mr. McCormack actually wrote that himself.
Also, I know I’m writing from a grammatical glass house here, but that release shows symptoms of that common marketer’s disease, Over Capitalization Syndrome. It’s a scourge across our industry.
I’ve been helping to promote this Future Shop event (I always want to spell that as one word–FutureShop. Maybe they’ll rebrand?). It’s a debate/discussion about the future of HD-TV featuring Tod Maffin, Amber MacArthur and Leo Laporte. It’s being held here at a Vancouver ‘in-store’, as part of FutureShop.ca’s launch of their community forums (which, to my surprise, have already proven quite popular).
The Maffinator wrote a blog post about it, as did Ms. MacArthur. We’ve got about 15 local bloggers/podcasters/documenters-of-all-types coming to the event, but you can watch from anywhere via the magic of the webcast. Here are the details:
Thursday, September 27, 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM PST
You need to register to watch the thing.
UPDATE: I’ve had a cancellation, so there’s one spot available for tomorrow’s event. If you’re a blogger or podcaster-type, and would like to attend, please shoot me an email. First come, first served.
UPDATE #2: Somebody asked, so it might not be clear. I’m working for Future Shop to promote this event. Or, to be precise, I’m working for Future Shop’s marketing agency.
Plenty of TV shows get canceled. Some of those have an incredibly loyal fanbase who, upon announcement of a show’s impending doom, leap into action to try to rescue the show. This almost never happens, and can be a lot of wasted energy. After all, it’s only a TV show. Popular examples include Jericho, Firefly and My So-Called Life.
Jericho is a rare, partial exception to the ‘dead show walking’ syndrome. From Wikipedia:
However, after a grassroots campaign to revive the series, CBS officially announced on June 6, 2007 that it had purchased seven new episodes of Jericho for broadcast as a midseason replacement.
This is the fifth time the network has resuscitated a cancelled series due to viewer demand. Fans of Cagney and Lacey, Designing Women, The Magnificent Seven and Touched by an Angel all were successful in convincing CBS to bring the shows back after their respective cancellations were announced.
Interestingly, three of those series would have 18 to 50 year-old women as their core audience–they’re traditionally the most powerful grassroots organizers.
Anyhow, that’s a long-winded introduction to this article (which could do with some subheadings), which discusses the rejuvenation of Jericho and the unfortunate, premature demise of Veronica Mars. As you’d expect, fans are in a tizzy.
We recently started watching Heroes. I have pretty mixed feelings about the show, but I’ve only seen three episodes. I’ll give it some more time before passing final judgement.
As you probably know, the show’s brightest star is Hayden Panettiere. She plays Claire Bennet, who has a (as Wikipedia puts it) ‘spontaneous regenerative ability’.
Last night we were watching episode three, and Julie raised a good question:
In a lot of TV shows set in high school, the cheerleaders often wear their uniforms to school. That is, they showed up for class in their uniforms. At our high schools, cheerleaders never did this. Do cheerleaders actually do this (or did they when you were in school), or is it an invention of television?
I haven’t run a poll for a while, so here’s an easy way to respond.
It turns out that Ms. Panettiere is releasing an album this month. You can hear some of the tepid pop on her MySpace page.
I’ve just returned from the local pub, where I watched Malta and Turkey play to an exciting 2-2 draw in Euro 2008 qualifying. I’m not aficionado of Maltese international play, but given the difference in populations (400,000 and 71 million) and FIFA Rankings (115 and 22), I assume this must be a historic result. Unimportantly, Malta’s squad may also be the baldest team in international football.
It’s extra sweet, because today is the 442nd anniversary of the lifting of the Siege of Malta, when the Ottomans were sent packing by to what’s now Turkey.
Hopefully some highlights will be available tomorrow on FootyTube, my newly-discovered source for football highlights on the web.
We don’t have a TV, so it’s nice to be able to get my fill of goals and incidents from the English Premier League and international play. The site is unquestionably illegal, so we’ll see how long it lasts. If anybody knows of similar sites (besides good ol’ BitTorrent), let me know.
I’ve also got a question for my Maltese readers: during the game, I saw that some people in the crowd were wearing black t-shirts with big white Maltese crosses on them (and no text, as far as I could see). Do you know where I might procure such a shirt?
UPDATE: Here’s the second Malta goal. Unquestionably, it’s the ugliest goal scored last night. But, as the saying goes, they all look the same on the score sheet:
We’ve gotten into the habit of watching an hour (well, a TV hour, meaning 42 to 50 minutes) of commercial-free TV before bed. Not every night, certainly, but probably four to five nights a week.
