Call me a retard...
KevinTMC:
Quote from: idtaminger on 2006 September 15, 19:14:50
That's the problem w/ these shows. They're good, but they require invested attention. Just a few glances aren't enough to hook you. And that's both their appeal and their downfall.
Mark Steyn was talking about this very thing in his Aaron Spelling obit in the September Atlantic Monthly. The second graf from his piece:
Quote
Indeed, the more "classic" your show, the more ephemeral it is. Getting in to Ovid or Gregorian chant is a piece of cake next to getting in to thirtysomething 15 years on. Conceivably, one might find oneself in a motel room unable to sleep at four in the morning and surfing the channels come across St Elsewhere. But they made 137 episodes of complex multiple interrelated plotlines all looping back to Episode One: if you've never seen it before and you stumble on Episode 43, who the hell are all these people and what are they on about? By comparison, if you happen to catch, say, an episode of Naked City from the late Fifties, you might not know who the detectives are or recognize Billy May's wailing theme tune and the whole monochrome thing might be a bit of a downer, but you could still pass a pleasant hour with a self-contained one-hour cop drama. The "better" TV got at its art (in the critically-acclaimed best-thing-since-Middlemarch sense) the more transient it became. I doubt The Sopranos will be an exception to this rule. Ninety per cent of all the people who'll ever be into it are already into it. That's not true of Lucia di Lammermoor or "My Funny Valentine".
I'm much more bullish on contemporary "classic tv" than Steyn or Terry Teachout, mostly because DVD sets are now so widespread. Blasting through the set containing the miniseries plus season one of the new Battlestar Galactica was immersive, addictive, a great ride, and did not require me to have tuned in every week at the same time when it first aired. (Then the miracle of TiVo let me get caught up with season two in similar fashion.)
I wonder how much of the new direction in dramatic television series would have been possible in the US without TiVo and DVD sets. (Though complex plotlines and long story arcs were hardly unknown in British television in earlier years...and there was the Dallas moment of prime-time soaps here in the US too...)
SaraMK:
WTF?
dusty:
You ignored the necromancy warning guy for that?
SaraMK:
Quote from: dusty on 2007 May 07, 10:48:58
You ignored the necromancy warning guy for that?
Aw, you missed the funny. :)
Some idiot came out of lurkdom (seriously, it was his 1st post) just to say he'd gotten the 4th season of Buffy.
dusty:
Oh, no, my reply was directed at Ashes (?) but I neglected to quote. ;)
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