I like television, and I watch a pretty good amount of it in normal times. In our current other-than-normal time, I don't think I'm watching much more TV than I would have watched if we weren't all sheltering in place. There are some specific things I would have watched if they hadn't been canceled due to pandemic, of course. I was looking forward to watching the Syracuse University men's basketball team parlaying their win over North Carolina into an inevitable ACC Tournament championship, earning an automatic bid, and stunning the world as they redeemed their season with a piledrivin' surge through NCAA March Madness en route to an unlikely but absolutely assured national title. That is what would have happened. Don't waste your breath trying to convince me otherwise, you soulless non-believer.
My wife Brenda and I have found a little bit more time to watch TV together at night, though it's a minimal difference. Prior to the lockdown, we had already started watching Gilmore Girls from the beginning. This activity was originally undertaken because we were jonesing for more of the Amazon Prime series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and there won't be any new episodes of Maisel for many months yet. Both The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Gilmore Girls were created by Amy Sherman-Palladino. I had been a big fan of Gilmore Girls during its original run, but Brenda had only seen it a few times, so it seemed like a worthy jolt of virtual methadone for our Maisel withdrawal. Both shows are driven by fast-paced banter, an occasionally screwball point of view, an agreeable embrace of quirk, and just the right mix of drama and laughs. The return visit to Stars Hollow was well worth the trip.
When we finished all seven seasons of Gilmore Girls, as well as its four-part reunion mini-series, we turned to Bunheads, another series created by Sherman-Palladino. This series about a dancer, her new mother-in-law, and their teenage ballet students only lasted one season in 2012. Bunheads is not the equal of Maisel or Gilmore Girls, but it has that rat-a-tat approach to dialogue, that shared, spunky DNA that characterizes a Sherman-Palladino series, and we enjoyed it a lot. I wish there'd been a second season, and we would absolutely be all in for a ten-years-later sequel.
With Bunheads finished, we nosed around for another series that we hadn't seen yet. We considered Parenthood and This Is Us before trying Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. We sampled the first few episodes of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and we may return to that. But Hulu's High Fidelity was our immediate binge choice. Based on the wonderful Nick Hornby novel and its great 2000 film adaption, the new series makes some material changes--most notably switching the lead character Rob from male to female, replacing the film's lead actor John Cusack with Zoë Kravitz, and also changing the locale from the novel's London (and the movie's Chicago) to New York--but retains the essential spirit of both the book and the film. As I write this, we've just completed the first season. It's very good, and we hope there will be a second season.
That's our streaming TV story. We've also been watching some broadcast programming, including an engaging musical dramedy series called Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist, which just finished its first season. We gave up on The Voice, but have started watching American Idol again for the first time in years. Jeopardy! is an essential nightly appointment, though we're skipping it this week and next as it reruns its big greatest-of-all-time tournament from earlier this year. We were already watching all of these shows in pre-quarantine days. More recently, we added the new prime-time weekly Who Wants To Be A Millionaire with Jimmy Kimmel, which has been interesting, so we'll keep watching that one, too.
I also like superhero TV shows--an interest Brenda does not share--so I've kept up with The Flash, Batwoman, and Supergirl, and I'm eager to see the new series Stargirl when it begins in a couple of weeks. I can no longer feign interest in DC's Legends Of Tomorrow, and I have stopped watching that.
Brenda and I just don't get around to watching movies on TV. With Verizon Fios offering a bunch of free premium movie channels in April, I figured I'd load up on flicks to record and watch at my leisure. But the only ones I bothered to record from these free samples were Aquaman off HBO and Pleasantville off Starz, two movies I've wanted to see but haven't yet gotten around to viewing. I have a difficult time committing two hours or more to watch a film on TV, and I don't like to interrupt a movie when I'm watching it; it's from start to finish, or it's a no-go as far as I'm concerned. So those movies remain lodged in my DVR queue for now.
I've also recorded a ton of stuff from Turner Classic Movies. I did sit and watch A Hard Day's Night for the zillionth time when it aired on TCM several weeks back, my DVD of the film likely glaring at me from its perch, saying, Helloooo! I'm right HERE...! My recent stash of TCM recordings includes My Fair Lady, North By Northwest, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Searchers with John Wayne, Double Dynamite with Frank Sinatra, Jane Russell, and Groucho Marx, A Girl In Every Port with Groucho and William Bendix, the 1982 movie Smithereens, Carmen Jones with Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte, and Best Friends with Burt Reynolds and Goldie Hawn, a movie partly filmed in Buffalo right around the time I moved there in 1982. Other than (obviously) A Hard Day's Night, I have never seen any of these, and I would like to see them all.
And I keep on recording more. My DVR has a lot of space available. I'm going to record 7 Faces Of Dr. Lao, a 1964 film that was one of the first movies I ever saw in a theater, perhaps the first (as discussed here). I should record some of the many Humphrey Bogart movies that TCM shows; I love Bogart, particularly The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca, but I've only seen a handful of his films. I really oughtta remedy that.
But I can't seem to find the time. Not even in quarantine.
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Carl's writin' a book! The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1) will contain 134 essays about 134 tracks, each one of 'em THE greatest record ever made. An infinite number of records can each be the greatest record ever made, as long as they take turns. Updated initial information can be seen here: THE GREATEST RECORD EVER MADE! (Volume 1).
Carl's writin' a book! The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1) will contain 134 essays about 134 tracks, each one of 'em THE greatest record ever made. An infinite number of records can each be the greatest record ever made, as long as they take turns. Updated initial information can be seen here: THE GREATEST RECORD EVER MADE! (Volume 1).
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