Rupert

what to watch when everything you like has ended

all the shows i'm into have pretty much hit the end of the line--alias, charmed, it is probably the last season of the gilmores

and i've been casting about for replacements--of course feeding my ipod is also a concern so i have tv shows to watch whilst commuting.

thanks to my ipod i've discovered the house of carters--my one no reality show rule breaker cuz it is so unbelievably bad and truly sad that a family was torn apart to such extremes and used by the adults in their lives that they have no idea how to function on there own except to cling to one another. but it is a completel dysfunctional clinging. and it is incredibly patriarchal in a way that fascinates me.

other stuff i've found that is good is weeds-that is actually one of the best tv shows i've seen in a while it is up there with 6 ft under et al when they were good.

sleeper cell ain't bad and i also really like studio 60. there was one episode a few back about the writer played by mathew perry who is in love with the actress on the show who also happens to be a born again christian and they actually break up over their religious differences yet neither of them are over one another and in this episode a riter id oing a piece for vanity fair about the "show" and she says something like the romance between mathew perry and i think sarah paulson is fascinating because the country is more polarized than it ever has been yet those two have an attraction that is both symoblic of the split and transcends it and it is those kind of insights into the world outside the idiot box that make wasting time watching it seem worthwhile.

long time no post

i purchased one of the magic ipods where i can watch tv shows on it when i'm commuting into the city and i'm downloading which takes forever especially since i can't get an internet connection where i live so i'm borrowing airtime....hence i decided i'd post a bunch of crap that has been floating around.

when the WB went off the air and became the CW the last Sunday they showed Felicity, Dawson's Creek, i think another show and some early buffy the vampire slayers. i have to admit to having rarely ever watched the show despite the fact that i loved the movie. i had severe sarah michelle gellar hatred at the time and i felt like casting a pretty little blonde as buffy when in the movie buffy was yes blonde but she was a little chunky and muscular and ms. gellar was just such a sort of insult in a way because she was so slim and it was like another stereotypical move and i thought there really is no point to watching the shows cuz i didn't care about the show and i wasn't into television then--it was during my rabid knicks fan phase and i didn't watch much else. so anyway, years pass and i end up sick and during my recovery i start watching charmed reruns on tnt and angel reruns until they moved them to 6am. so now i like charmed and i started to enjoy angel (or maybe it was a reaction to the fact that the only other thing you can watch on tv when you are in your "sickbed" is law and order off every ilk on tnt and usa and whatever...)

so the other hash slinger/rupertville dweller has been a bufffy fan for years and would talk to me endlessly about the shows and i'd just be like yawn and because i know the other half of rupert has more to say about the television show i figure i'll post my stuff and hope he post his far more interesting analysis. although i keep having to have the discussion about "intentionality" and the fact that i come from the shcool that says there is no right or wrong reading of anything with him because he won't give up the belief that he somehow has to be proven right that his ideas aren't valid unless he can somehow point to definitive "proof" so i've tried to be a gentle post-structuralist and point him to Barthes because besides being smart is a really good writer. unlike bourdieu who i think is of course brilliant but the only reason i've read him is for class work-- barthes work i actually read for see i could be all annoying and say "pleasure" or even more obnoxious and say "jouissance" but i'm eschewing the cheap pomo humor and just saying that barthes wrote so much really beautiful works that i read him for more than reasons that have to do with syllabi or something i don't know how to correctly say that. and if i'm having a discussion with myself i will say i've never been able to really get that same pleasure from foucault. tho of course its actually like apples and oranges in a lot of ways because barthes was a journalist and foucault an academic...

so anyway back to buffy....i downloaded a bunch of buffy shows for my ipod and enjoyed them then borrowed another seaon's worth of cds and enjoyed those too...and i have a couple things to say--i had a friend who worked for danny jacobsen who produced mad about you and ended up a writer for that show so i know a little bit about the whole "scene" and television writers aren't cool and they HATE the actors and actresses....especially those that try and change the writers lines...so i always hate saying a show is well-written because it is like congratulating dubya on his success in iraq to me...and besides i think the buffy shows are over written. but there are self congratulatory writer commentaries all through the buffy dvd set that i borrowed and i just want to say SHUT UP to the writers. i think most tv writers if you had to spend time with them would make you feel a little icky--altho the only writers i've recently liked were the sherman palladinos...but so i decided that enough time had passed and having issues about sarah michelle gellar is so retarded because gee that was a career that had staying power....and i really liked the bitchy valley girl cordelia played by charisma carpenter....so now i quas like buffy which has opened the flood gates of buffy is really about something deeper and more meaningful from the buffy fan and i'm like no it's not--to you it is and that's fine but basically it is toying with some tv genres about horror, sci fi, and what they do is nothing too spectatcular.

however, what i've noticed having first been a charmed fan (because i'm first last and always a shannen doherty fan) is that there is an incredible crossover between people who have appeared on buffy, angel and charmed...it is like some kind of paranormal typecasting and then the other show i started liking in time for it to go off the air was alias and marshall shows up in an early charmed episode. and buffy and charmed both have a demon named balthazar. and this the question who the hell is balthazar--there has to be some mythological character with that name. i mean there is balthazar getty--an actual person with the name and on alias so yet another part of the weird web of never ending connections. and then julian mcmahon (spelling?) went on to play one of the evil drs in nip/tuck.

but here's the last point at work someone once said they hated the gilmore girls because it is so unreal like a girl can have such an open relationship with her mother? i dunno when did the barometer of what makes something entertaining become how "real" it is? it is all these dumb reality shows that make housewives famous for .05 seconds and i once read something by i think gary indiana about the popularity of shows like jerry springer and the fact that unless you are on television your exisstence is not vaiidated--everyone has to go on these dumb shows and air their endlessly desire to be seen....why can't a television show lack verisimilitude? what does everything have to be so crushingly REAL? and even then like the reality shows are even real? they are a performance of "real" --edited, somtimes scripted, definitely set up to provoke a belief that they are "real"--so in reality as it were---nothing is real--everything is fiction so why say a show is worthless because it isn't real? nothing on television is real...not even the news.