TV

Katie D.

January 25, 2009 - 12:54 PM

I've never been much of a TV watcher. Not the kind that would watch a show every night, anyway. For many years (between my Scooby Doo years and recent changes in habit) I hardly watched at all. I sort of missed the Friends mania, have never seen an entire episode of Survivor, and occasionally discover some new cultural necessity. I contented myself with MASH and Seinfeld and generally preferred to be reading.

But I hit college and discovered some pretty wonderful new TV opportunities. So I'll take a break from describing my epic adventures at large in Eugene and the world, and instead give you the low-down on the incredibly average: the TV watching we all seem to do. Starting at the very best...

I had never seen a full episode of The Daily Show before freshman year. It became quite a ritual, actually. Five to twelve of us would cram ourselves into a dorm room to watch Jon Stewart's Daily Show and The Colbert Report every Monday through Thursday. Turns out that the news can be funny. Biting, somewhat horrifyingly mock-able at times, but very, very funny. I was getting really excited about politics at this point, attending College Democrats meetings every night, reading the news, and letting Eugene work its hippie ways into my soul. Some fake news about the real world made me awfully happy. Plus it was a ritual: every school night, from eleven to midnight.

TV watching on school nights was not allowed in my house growing up, by the way. We all go through some youthful rebellion when we leave for college. Mine was politically charged news TV. Go figure.

Anyway, I soon added Scrubs and the Office to my TV repertoire. That Thursday night tradition has continued for all of my three years of college. Last year it meant a mile-long walk from my apartment to a friend's house for use of their cable TV, but it's always been worth it. It's time with my friends, a chance to laugh myself sick for an hour, and a source for endless references and jokes. We've added 30 Rock this year, and Scrubs has moved to Tuesdays, but the tradition continues. TV isn't a solitary experience under these circumstances: it's something I look forward to, a chance for all of my friends to get together. Leah makes us cookies, Ben and I laugh until everyone else gets annoyed. We catch up on what's going on in our lives: now that we've moved out of the dorms we're not touching base every few hours.

Plus, as a sociologist I can say that there is a strong social feedback for knowing the right cultural references. I have a good mind for the dumb one-liners and show quotes. And when you've got a group that have seen all the same shows, the right reference at the right moment can take a roomful of people conversing normally and send half into hysterical laughter while those not "in the know" look awkward and confused.

I love that.

Last term I fell in love with a new show. Well, actually an old show. A failed show. Firefly was canceled halfway through its first season, leaving only fourteen episodes and a relatively small population of dedicated fans behind. They made a movie called Serenity as well, but most of the loose ends were left to the disappointed viewers' imaginations.

I love this show. It's a Sci-Fi Western. There's old-fashioned gunfights, amusing banter, and a really wonderful set of characters. I'm more than half in love with the main character, the captain of a smuggling ship. He's a Han Solo figure; the tough smuggler with a serious moral code and a tendency to get into trouble. The basic premise is that Earth's resources got used up, so we went out into the galaxy and "terra-formed" or "Earthified" a bunch of planets. And some (rather like the countries in our current world), ended up prosperous and developed, while others live on the edge of nothing, populated by desperate or backwards peoples either fighting for survival or existing just fine without much help from civilization. That's where the Wild West themes come in, how you can have both spaceships and horse chases in a single show.

The people who watch this show really truly love it. My friend who introduced it to me was seeing it for the fifth (or so) time. I immediately forced my friends into watching it, and now that other friends have come back from abroad I watched it through with them as well. I also strong-armed my friend from Colorado into watching with me. My friend Maddy and I would text Firefly quotes to each other randomly during the day, and now that she's abroad in Singapore I think of her every time we watch the show. Every single time.

Fourteen episodes run out pretty fast. This most recent adventure through the show only took us a week. And, like I said, the ends don't all get tied up.

Other popular shows in my life: Planet Earth (most beautiful documentary ever filmed), Arrested Development (wins the award for Most Awkward Humor), and Friends (best inter-character dialogue I've ever witnessed).

I do not watch Reality TV. I don't find it terribly interesting, and often am somewhat offended by the quality of the writing and the way people portray themselves. My newest vendetta is against the show The Biggest Loser. Some friends I hold in the highest regard enjoy the show and think it is inspirational, but in my opinion a show that makes money by humiliating obese people and putting it to film for an audience's idle consumption is more than inane, it's a sad commentary on the taste of American consumers. I take my fiction seriously, and do not appreciate when it's clumsily obscured by "real" people and situations, knowingly manipulated for the entertainment of the masses, Truman Show style. But I really don't want to get started down this road...

The point of all this is that I grew up a reader, not a TV viewer. Now that I'm into TV I can see how a show is crafted like a novel. I like to see characters put together and how a good writer can make the extraordinary believable and the ordinary hilarious. Maybe because I grew up on books, I have a hard time seeing the characters as actors playing roles. I see them, instead, as their characters, with their individual agendas and personalities. For that reason, when I fall in love with a show I tend to fall in love with characters, and am then confused when people start spouting facts about this actor's dating scandal or that actress's drug history. The lives of actors are slightly interesting, like I find the lives of novelists to be vaguely relevant, but only so far as a book cover will tell you. It is the story I love, and not the actors. With a few exceptions, I don't even see the actors for who they are, but instead see the characters as they have been imagined and then embodied. Film is fiction made visible to me.

Visible, quotable, and disseminated throughout my culture. When you know the shows like I do, they're waiting around every corner. And because I watch the shows with my friends, the context of each show is a group of people similarly involved in story lines and unfolding histories.