The Greatest Moments in Television History

Last night was the Breaking Bad finale and I have to confess that I'm only three episodes in on the entire series.  My boyfriend has been trying to get me into it since he started binge watching a year ago. I have this superstitious thing that I don't like to watch a lot of scripted TV while I'm writing something.  And since I haven't been writing anything that is as dark as Breaking Bad, I have been putting it off.  I only watched the pilot and two episodes at his insistence last month.  Needless to say, I need to catch up on the show.

I am missing out on all of these conversations about whether the finale lived up to expectations.  I stopped watching Dexter three seasons ago, so I didn't mind clicking on the Entertainment Weekly website to read the recap of the series finale.  Seems like most people hated it.

I loved The Shield finale with Vic confined to a desk.  I thought it was a perfect ending and an example of ending on a whimper instead of a bang.  Yet it worked.  I had the advantage of seeing the finale in a theatre with a bunch of executives and with Shawn Ryan, the creator of the show because I used to work for his manager.  I had mixed feelings about 30 Rock.  I loved the ending of Sex and the City, where Carrie talks about the most important relationship being the one you have with yourself.  And that's the real ending for me with those characters, not the films.

I also really dug The Sopranos ending.  Crickets.

So I have been around for some of the Greatest Moments in Television History. I can feel a part of some cultural conversation.  However, recently I have a problem.  There's too much to watch.  I am missing out on other great moments.

Here's where I start my confession.

I have never seen an episode of Mad Men.
Or Walking Dead.  Or  The Wire.

Should I go on?  Or is my credibility just shot at this point?

I'm not watching Scandal.  I have not started watching any Netflix shows, including House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, Derek or Arrested Development.  

The last show I binge watched was David Chang's The Mind of a Chef and that's because I'm writing a script about chefs.  I do watch a lot of Netflix shows about cooking.

The last scripted show I binge watched was Downton Abbey.  But that's the problem.  I stopped doing everything for the weekend I was watching Downton. I didn't sleep.  I didn't eat.  I certainly didn't write or have sex with my boyfriend.  I think he was out of town.  I was too focused.

And that's what happens to me with everything.  If I devote time to anything, it gets my full attention.  And I'm afraid to lose that much time.  A good friend of mine suggested that I get into Ray Donovan.  We don't have Showtime right now, but I was dogsitting for some friends and they have Showtime on Demand.  But the service was down because of internet issues.  So my friend Amanda, who had made the suggestion, came over and got on the phone with Direct TV so that my friend Emily and I, who had also been beaten down to watch the show, could start watching it.

We started out with the pilot.  Okay...interesting set up of this fixer in Hollywood. But it seemed kind of cliche to me in a way.  It's about this Irish thug with a thick accent like a New Yorker in Scorese's 70s Manhattan.  The acting is great.  I love Jon Voight.  But it all seems a little too stereotypical gangster for me.  We watched episode two and then episode three.  It's a good show.  But nothing about it made me feel like I had to catch up before the season finale.   So we stopped watching after three episodes.  I'll probably go back and check it out at some point.  It's well done.  But it's not in my queue.

My queue.  Here's what's on it:
http://creativityinrealtime.blogspot.com/2013/09/my-netflix-queue.html

TV is so competitive these days because there's so much you can watch--old or new--at any time.  And now that a lot of the entire history of TV is available at a moment's notice, a new show has to be faster, shinier, darker, funnier, more everything than ever.

But it does give me anxiety.  Am I just missing out on the Greatest Moments in TV History?  I still never finished watching The Comeback.  It's scary that we used to do this with books.  But who really reads anymore?  I try to.  There's a stack of books that I have on my shelf that I need to get to.  I was visiting my friends Drew and Tim a few weeks ago.  They just moved into a new place.  And they had books everywhere.  They're theatre dudes, so they also had plays, which are thinner.  And books.  And anthologies.  Just laid out everywhere.  Imagine if everything that was on my queue was a DVD?  I would have to have a separate closet just for the films and TV shows I haven't watched it.  The same thing goes with music and CDs.  If things weren't digital, do you think we'd accumulate and over stuff our queues the way we have?

My computer has a lot of virtual clutter.  But what does that even mean?  Is it like the concept of a higher power?  It's all around and it takes a lot of space, but it's easy to ignore it.  It's easy to question its existence.  I'm sure studies will come out soon about how all of this accumilation is making us anxious. More anxious than ever.

We are in a supposed Golden Age of TV.  That makes sense since we have entire encyclopedias of information and research at our finger tips.  We can reference what came before in great detail and improve upon it.  This Golden Age is a great example of how important it is to know your history.  Now if I could just get back to those books and plays I should be reading, maybe I could make a dent in working on a couple of other potential Golden Ages.