A confession here: For the last few years, my wife and I have missed most of the Most Acclaimed Best Series Must Watch TV.
And we’ll probably continue to do so. Despite the TV critics who tell us that we must watch this and can’t miss that and are, I guess, woefully culturally illiterate if we aren’t chattering about the other.
On one hand, we have an excuse of sorts. We pay for limited basic cable–which is, essentially, what you’d get with a good antenna. (If we could get decent reception with an antenna, without building a tower, we wouldn’t use cable at all.) So: no HBO, no Showtime, no AMC, no…whatever.
But, of course, if we wanted to watch most of these shows we could, the same way we watch about half of the TV we do now: Delayed, on DVD/Blu-ray, from Netflix.
Don’t come back at me with “But Hulu Plus! But Netflix streaming! But Roku!” Our broadband–which will switch from AT&T DSL to AT&T “Uverse” midweek–is nowhere near fast enough for streaming to look worth a damn on our HDTV. We tried it. To get sufficient speed would mean switching our broadband provider to C…no, won’t say it…and paying a whole lot more than we do now, or than we’re willing to. For that matter, if AT&T ever actually builds out real Uverse to our neighborhood, the bill for really fast broadband may be more than we’re willing to pay, since the only thing really fast broadband would add is more TV. We’re seriously considering dropping the minimal cable we have, increasing our disc-only Netflix plan, and watching entirely from discs. We haven’t made that move yet, but…
Oh, I’m aware of most of these shows. How can you not be?
I’m certainly aware of the near-universal acclaim and loads of awards they win.
Here’s the thing, though. My wife and I like to have at least one or two characters on a show that we like–that we empathize with. We watch TV (usually about an hour a night, either broadcast or old series on DVD or Blu-ray) for entertainment. We don’t find consistently downbeat shows with antiheroes as protagonists particularly entertaining.
Telling us that they’re Great Drama doesn’t help. Telling us that they’re Daring–nah, I don’t buy that any longer. Ten years ago, maybe a dramatic show with primarily unlikable characters was Daring. Now, it’s In. At this point, doing a show like West Wing, with superior writing, directing and acting but also with mostly sympathetic characters, would be daring. To get great critical acclaim, Pres. Bartlett would probably have to become an adulterer and the rest of the cast embezzlers, influence peddlers, drug runners or possibly serial killers on the side.
If you just love these series, that’s fine: More power to you. I don’t think you’re going to run out of dark series. But, y’know, when you tell me that these are the only good things on TV, I’ll probably ignore you.
And if we really are missing magnificent acts of writing and acting that have never been paralleled on TV and will live forever in the history of drama…well, that’s OK too. Life is too short to watch TV that we don’t find entertaining…by our standards.
(This confession partly prompted by a post on a psychologist’s blog about why “we” watch these shows. It was an interesting post. It did not make me the slightest bit more interested in watching these shows.)
