TV. Teevee. Telly. Television. It's been a big part of my life for as long as I can remember. As you can imagine I was the weird kid who would disappear home to watch television while everyone else was out playing. Drove my mother nuts, to the point where she would kick me out of the house so that I would get some fresh air.
As a teenager I was a bit of a recluse. Not terribly sure why. I would go to school and then go home and spend most of my time with the television on. Yeah, I'd sit and scribble things: stories, games and bad drawings. All the time the comforting grumble of the television going on in the corner of the room. Film and TV are, unsurprisingly, my biggest influences when it comes to fiction. My brain is full of flotsam and jetsam from years of watching some of the most obscure things because I couldn't bring myself to hit the 'off' switch. Oh, fucking hell, does late-night Channel Four programming in the nineties have a lot to answer for*.
So. Now you know what my viewing habits were like as kid**, you get to see the special relationship I've developed with it over the years. The magpie effect of flicking around when nothing was on means I know things about programmes I didn't chose to watch. It's had the dual effect of making me more discerning and more willing to try new things. I know, for instance, bone-deep, that I ain't going to sit through an episode of a soap opera; horrible cancerous things that choke out anything else that might turn up on the air.
In the interests of community-mindedness, I'll give you a little list of the current programmes I'm watching and enjoying. Should be fun. Might show you a shocking lack of taste in your eyes, and if that's the case: FUCK YOU, YOU MALICIOUS CUNT! HOW DARE YOU JUDGE ME! I'LL JUDGE YOU RIGHT BACK!
SEE! THAT'S ME JUDGING YOU! DON'T LIKE IT, DO YOU? NOOOoooOOO!
Ahem, anyway, onto the list.
Person of Interest. I'll actually start with a complaint about this – go me! Why are we in the UK a year behind on this? Not everyone has Netflix, motherfucker. Channel Five have to be applauded for showing it, but it's irritating having to avoid places because there are people who have to talk about what's going on twelve months ahead because it's so fucking good! I want to know!
The show had a bit of a slow start. The first half of the first series is almost a write-off. Then it hit its stride. It's a fantastic mix of conspiracy thriller, A-Team style good-deed of the week and comedy. It's exciting, dark and asks some big questions. Just don't tell me what happens in series three, I will have to have you killed or, at the very least, severely beaten.
The Blacklist is another bit of conspiracy and espionage, but it manages to be far darker and uncompromising than Person of Interest. We are introduced to the wonderful character Raymond 'Red' Reddington, a criminal facilitator and extremely bad man who drops himself into the FBI's lap telling them he'll give them access to criminals they haven't even heard of, the titular blacklist. Oh and he'll only talk to a particular analyst. It's murky in the best kind of way. There's no question about the people Reddington is handing over are extremely bad, but his motives aren't clear and as it goes on it's obvious a lot of the characters' motivations are uncertain. I don't know what the fuck's going on and I love it. You should jump in and not know what's going on either.
Talking about being reeealllyyyy behind on series, I give you Parks and Recreation, a comedy programme filmed in a fly-on-the-wall documentary style† and we're three series behind on this. This took even longer than Person of Interest to get into its groove, but in the third series the insanity set in and the documentary presentation gives great opportunities for characters to give silent reactions to the madness around them or getting little interviews to give their insights. For ages before BBC Four started showing it I was seeing things about Ron Swanson on the internet and got really annoyed, but now I see the appeal, he's a stand-out character in a programme of brilliant characters.
Without Community, I would never have tried Parks and Recreation. This is another one I'd been hearing about for a while and finally found the whole first series on catch up. That was a rewarding Sunday afternoon. For a while we were a year behind this one as well, but last year the Sony channel showed both series three and four. Four wasn't quite as good because Dan Harmon had been dumped as show runner, but it still managed some interesting episodes. Community relies on the interplay between the fantastic ensemble, guiding us through their time at a US community college. It starts off pretty grounded, with some odd moments, but by the end of the first series and the paintball episode it laid the groundwork for the strangeness to come. Then we have the references, you remember what I said about references, right? It's chock-full. A lot of it is self-referential, something a lot of people point out as a bad thing, but I think it's great and gets you invested in the strange family unit of the Study Group.
The most recent addition to my watching is Brooklyn 99. This is an odd one, because it has a bog-standard police procedural as its basis with all the beats and tropes the genre has, yet it's all wrapped up in a comedic skin. Yeah, I know a lot of police procedurals have elements of comedy in them, and Castle is even described as a comedy-drama, but the writers will ditch any semblance of comedy trappings in favour of a dramatic storyline. Brooklyn 99 is straight-down-the-line funny. Yes, there's a case of the week, and it forms a big part of each story, but the characters' eccentricities make up the rest of the bulk. It could have been fucking awful, but it, amazingly, works.
There are others, like the slew of crime dramas I watch, like Castle, Rizzoli and Isles, Elementary‡ and Bones, but the ones above are the programmes I feel most excited about watching of a week. I highly recommend them if you can get access to them.
* Now a bit of a sad imitation of its gloriously vibrant and mad landscape. Late-night television, in general has become a depressingly conformist precession of gambling shows. That made me a little sad, writing that.
** Or reiterated for some of you. Yeah, I'm looking right at you, dude.
† As pioneered in The Office. One I never did get around to watching in either its original UK run or its US incarnation.
‡ That I think in a lot of important ways is far superior to Sherlock, though I did enjoy that too.
Will
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