Friday, November 30, 2007

Fiction is life with the dull bits left out..

I don't get to watch alot of television. I've one of those jobs that means I'm not at home at the same time every week. I'm up at half four every morning so the notion of staying up late to watch your Desperate Housewives or Losts or Heroes is not really an option. As SL will vouch even the carrot of staying up to watch the tail end of the Champions League some weeks is a step too far for me.

Instead I've turned into a boxset junkie; The Sopranos, Knightrider, Rome to name a brief few - countless discs which keep me entertaining in the evening and safe from boredom on the mountain of flights and train journeys I seem to have been on recently. I'm afraid though that rather than enjoying, I'm really becoming addicted to The West Wing.

My entire afternoons when I should be doing nixers is now spent wondering whether or not Iran is about to have the bejaysus blown out of it or if Bartlet is in the shits for hiding his MS - the fact that I'm on series 3 of 7 ruins finding out that he gets away with it but comes nowhere near dampening the exciting of watching hours of it on end.

I'm starting to curse the guy who decided it ok to put 4 52minute long episodes onto a single disc. It's near on impossible to watch a single episode when the temptation of another is there. Then you've the added problem that a storyline that draws you in in episode 4 say might not reappear till episode 9 so by the time you discover what happens to Iran you're already pondering an Estate Tax, missing Marines, and whether or not the fact that the Deputy Communications Director is doing a line with an escort will bring down the Administration.

I've now found myself scouring episode guides to make sure that I haven't missed any minor details, wikipediaing (is that an acceptable spelling) issues that appear in the show and recently in Chicago debated why Clinton should adopt some of the media approaches that the fictional Democratic Party did if she's to get home and hosed......I need help, does anyone know of a support group?

6 comments:

  1. When Heores first came out, my brother had downloaded all of them, and i used to get home at teh weekends and watch back to back episodes on a saturday night.

    Don't tell anyone how lame i am.

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  2. I'd love if someone bought me peep show box sets, I only got into that this year! So I have loads of episodes I've never seen!

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  3. My first ever box set was WW season 1 on video (not DVD) boxset. I had already started on Season 2. I watched it all in 2 nights & it took over my brain, you start thinking everything in terms of WW. But then I stopped watching it in S5 so I plan over christmas to finish off the last few years. I really want to watch Sopranas but the thought of 7 yrs of it is too much.

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  4. At least you're not addicted to shite telly....imagine if it was soap operas or those Jerry Springer type shows that you were into???!!! Then you'd really need a support group!

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  5. Aaron Sorkin is my god. If you can find copies anywhere of Sports Night, watch that. Only 2 seasons, but EXCELLENT behind the scenes tv of a nightly sports show. Brill, plus starred some of the Aaron "regulars"...Joshua Malina, Felicity Huffman, Bill Macy (he's a friend, so I can call him that...well, he's not, but I want him to be).

    One game I like playing is who appears where in Sorkin movies and tv :-).

    And the 5th season of WW was crap (Aaron's last season, when he was busted for carrying shrooms at Burbank Airport and thrown into rehab), but the last two (when Aaron was gone) is was better but not the same.

    I remember the first episode...it finished, I looked at Atreus and said "DAMN! *That's* why I work in television!!!"

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  6. I'm still suffering from Studio 60 "all American TV executives are bastards and the audiences are worse because it's pearls before swine" syndrome.

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