I’d like to begin this whole process with something exceptionally witty and intelligent but I won’t. Instead I’ll just go ahead and give a little bit of background like every other hack out there with a decrepit Dell and weak ass wireless signal who starts a blog, and I’m not going to claim to be anything but a common hack (hopefully if I sell myself short enough you’ll be wowed when I can throw together a complete sentence and a coherent thought and feel compelled to return after sharing my undersold brilliance with all your non-hipster friends). So on to my dark and dusty past. (cue comically ominous music)
Beginning from a very young age I have been hopelessly drawn to brightly colored, moving shapes broadcast into my living (though in recent years my bed) room. I would get lost in my stories. Well not always my stories. I grew up spending my afterschool hours watching the ABC soaps that my mother loved. Those mid and late 90s twists and turns for the Chandlers, Casadines, Lords, Quartermaines, Buchanans and of course kooky Erica Kane. Obviously any hope of my ending up some sort butch heterosexual was all by gone, and thank God, because straight men really have no appreciation for the finer aspects of TV (and by “finer aspects” I obviously mean Bravo reality shows, Bad Girl’s Club and RuPaul’s Drag Race).
I don’t remember exactly when I started to move away from my mother’s habits and form my own television identity but the earliest “adult” shows I can think of that I made the choice to follow were Star Trek: Voyager and Earth 2 (oh shit, he’s a nerd, run for the hills!!!!). Both debuted a couple months apart when I was nine and I watched the entire runs of both of them, though for Earth 2 that only amounted to a five months or so. As the 90s dragged on some other shows I chose to follow include; 3rd Rock from the Sun, The Drew Carey Show, Oz (which a 12 year old had no business watching), Futurama, L&O:SVU.
In October of 2000 my mother, my grandmother and I moved from the house we had lived in for almost 9 years to home were I essentially had an entire third of the space to myself (my bedroom was in the finished basement which had it’s only family room, while both of their rooms were two floors above me). This allowed me to really start making all of my own television choices as I had my own floor with my own TV. The early-mid 2000s saw me become a late but obsessed adopter of Buffy, Angel and The West Wing. I’ve also had a love-hate relationship with reality shows (mostly I hate myself for loving them) that continues today.
Finding good things late has also been a habit of mine in recent years. Currently, thanks to the wonderful people at Netflix (maybe if I get enough readers they’ll comp me, freebies are cool) I’ve just finished the first season of the Wire, I’m a third of the way threw season 3 of Battlestar Galactica, about a week ago I finished a binge of the entirety of Arrested Development and a couple months ago I finally got around to watching Firefly. I also came late to the party for 30 Rock.
My obsession is not just a private thing however, currently (though only for about 10 more days because the office is being moved to Florida and all of us part-time drones are being put out to pasture) I write market research surveys about TV shows. Essentially I get paid $14 an hour to watch TV and have for the past 27 months. Between DVDs and Watching Instantly offerings from Netflix and what I record with my TiVo I probably watch 60-70 hours of television and movies per week. Clearly I have a sickness, an affliction that probably accounts, at least partly, for my extreme paleness and abundant softness but a disease that I openly embrace and enjoy. Television makes me happy. Bad TV makes me smile, often times through gritted teeth, but smile nonetheless. And good TV, well let’s just say you wouldn’t want to do my laundry after a good episode of Fringe or 30 Rock.
Well this has been really swell but I need to get to back to crying myself to sleep as I relive the disaster of Studio 60’s soufflé like collapse from the heights of it’s brilliant pilot to the less than successful back 9.
