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healingmirth(Believe it or not, I put a fair amount of effort into most of my journal entries, even the seemingly random ones, and this feels incomplete and it sort of bugs me, but I'm not sure what else I want to say. So.)
I'm watching Oz still (Season Two! OMG!) which means I haven't watched SYTYCD this week, or the Top Chef Masters finale, or the past two weeks of Justified or SGU. But today is a day where DVDs are in the mail rather than in my home, so I expect I'll get to most of it.
I've been watching like 15-20 hours a week or TV and/or movies lately. With the exception of the last few episodes of NCIS this season, I don't think I've watched a single thing where I really, truly, wanted to know what was going to happen, where I was really paying attention to the screen because I didn't want to miss a gesture or a glance. It's not news to anyone who's heard of the show that Oz is compelling TV, but I'm going to say it again in case any of you, like me, just never got around to it.
Yes, it is really violent, and the characters range from neutral-and-troubled-at-best to really evil, but on the bright side, when someone is inevitably, suddenly, killed, it's a lot less heart-wrenching than when Joss kills someone off.
I will say this though: The opening credits? Are a minute and twenty seconds long. I can feel myself getting older while they play. I miss TV theme songs as much as the next gal, but at least nowadays, if I were watching it live, I could check my e-mail or something. What did people do with that minute in 1997? Talk to their spouses? Crazy!
I am more likely to give up on shows because they lose my attention rather than because they make me angry, which probably makes me a complete failure as an activist, but I'm not all that twisted up about it. For instance, SGU does not bore me. Many of the choices that the writers make are really frustrating, and I can be sitting there, analytically and cynically pointing out the "mysterious" things that the audience is meant to care about, and yet I keep going back. But I think, in the case of SGU, that I would be as well-served by reading detailed episode summaries. Same for Lost.
Now that I think about it, I think the last thing I watched that had me really paying attention was the first two seasons of The Office, and before that, Veronica Mars maybe? So I'm thinking that I don't so much have a genre that holds my interest.
I'm something of a completist, so if I'm going to watch, say, an episode of House, it really bothers me if there are episodes in the middle that I have missed. (I am, not incidentally, the same way about LJ/DW and Facebook. Even if I don't pay detailed attention to every item, at the very least I keep hitting the button back in time until I get to what was there the last time I checked.)
I may have self-selected out of watching the compelling television by my stubborn viewing habits, but I think if I really wanted to know what was going on, I'd catch up. I am anxious to know what happens next, to almost every character, but without, I think, the sort of emotional attachment to characters I usually look for in my shows.
The other thing is that watching Oz, like watching most ensemble shows, is a constant exercise in "hey, it's that guy!" for me. I know I've seen doppelganger challenges in a few communities (at![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
sga_flashfic, at least), and a few years ago there was a community called ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
doppelgang_land that I found through Veronica Mars fandom, though I didn't write anything for the first (and as it turns out, only) round.
I'm not sure if I could, or would really want to, write truly sinister, manipulative characters, but I'm sort of in love with the idea of the Em City residents in that mix.
I'm watching Oz still (Season Two! OMG!) which means I haven't watched SYTYCD this week, or the Top Chef Masters finale, or the past two weeks of Justified or SGU. But today is a day where DVDs are in the mail rather than in my home, so I expect I'll get to most of it.
I've been watching like 15-20 hours a week or TV and/or movies lately. With the exception of the last few episodes of NCIS this season, I don't think I've watched a single thing where I really, truly, wanted to know what was going to happen, where I was really paying attention to the screen because I didn't want to miss a gesture or a glance. It's not news to anyone who's heard of the show that Oz is compelling TV, but I'm going to say it again in case any of you, like me, just never got around to it.
Yes, it is really violent, and the characters range from neutral-and-troubled-at-best to really evil, but on the bright side, when someone is inevitably, suddenly, killed, it's a lot less heart-wrenching than when Joss kills someone off.
I will say this though: The opening credits? Are a minute and twenty seconds long. I can feel myself getting older while they play. I miss TV theme songs as much as the next gal, but at least nowadays, if I were watching it live, I could check my e-mail or something. What did people do with that minute in 1997? Talk to their spouses? Crazy!
I am more likely to give up on shows because they lose my attention rather than because they make me angry, which probably makes me a complete failure as an activist, but I'm not all that twisted up about it. For instance, SGU does not bore me. Many of the choices that the writers make are really frustrating, and I can be sitting there, analytically and cynically pointing out the "mysterious" things that the audience is meant to care about, and yet I keep going back. But I think, in the case of SGU, that I would be as well-served by reading detailed episode summaries. Same for Lost.
Now that I think about it, I think the last thing I watched that had me really paying attention was the first two seasons of The Office, and before that, Veronica Mars maybe? So I'm thinking that I don't so much have a genre that holds my interest.
I'm something of a completist, so if I'm going to watch, say, an episode of House, it really bothers me if there are episodes in the middle that I have missed. (I am, not incidentally, the same way about LJ/DW and Facebook. Even if I don't pay detailed attention to every item, at the very least I keep hitting the button back in time until I get to what was there the last time I checked.)
I may have self-selected out of watching the compelling television by my stubborn viewing habits, but I think if I really wanted to know what was going on, I'd catch up. I am anxious to know what happens next, to almost every character, but without, I think, the sort of emotional attachment to characters I usually look for in my shows.
The other thing is that watching Oz, like watching most ensemble shows, is a constant exercise in "hey, it's that guy!" for me. I know I've seen doppelganger challenges in a few communities (at
sga_flashfic, at least), and a few years ago there was a community called doppelgang_land that I found through Veronica Mars fandom, though I didn't write anything for the first (and as it turns out, only) round. I'm not sure if I could, or would really want to, write truly sinister, manipulative characters, but I'm sort of in love with the idea of the Em City residents in that mix.
