I’m quite enjo­ying just sit­ting at my com­pu­ter lis­te­ning to music, so rather than do nothing pro­duc­tive I have deci­ded to make another blog entry. I have no idea why at the start of each diary-esque entry I must jus­tify myself. Maybe I should take an intros­pec­tive look at the real me ins­tead; give the ol’ cogs a tweak and come out bet­ter on the other side.

Lost

Sea­son one of Lost pre­mie­red on chan­nel 4 over the sum­mer. My hec­tic sche­dule and pro­found wis­dom led me to miss the first four terres­trially aired epi­so­des. I saw clips and heard quo­tes invol­ving beasts, an island and a guy named Jack; I wrote it off as a Lord of the Flies mimic. When I found all my hou­se­ma­tes gathe­red on the sofas in the dark, faces like those of man­ne­quins as they sat wide eyed in front of our old 14″ watching epi­sode six I rea­li­sed that this was not neces­sa­rily the tame US import we so often receive. Through the won­ders of the inter­net I acqui­red the older epi­so­des and pla­yed catch up.  This new show was actually inte­res­ting, ori­gi­nal and enter­tai­ning, not to men­tion an adeptly named cha­rac­ter based upon the great “Tabula Rasa” phi­lo­sopher John Locke. Flashing cre­dits also revea­led to me some mem­ber of the old Buffy team wor­king on the pro­ject which essen­tially roo­ted some sort of faith in this show.

In my house of 7 we all have highly varied and diverse tas­tes, we like dif­fe­rent music, films and sty­les and it is very rare to find something we all equally enjoy (aside from faji­tas); Lost is one of those rare things. Each of us seems to draw dif­fe­rent ins­pi­ra­tions and plea­sure from the ongoing ins­tal­ments and our opi­nions dif­fer dra­ma­ti­cally as to our favou­rite inci­dents and whether or not an epi­sode cons­ti­tu­tes as good. The absur­dity of having a simi­lar tele­vi­sion line-up for six months and having to watch a show con­sis­tently for half of a year has esca­ped the Ame­ri­can audien­ces. The mere thought of wai­ting a mas­sive twenty weeks until the sea­son finale filled our house with terror—our atten­tion spans would drift, we would stray away and good heaven’s, we may (all) have to pay for a TV license. Thus we came to a collec­tive deci­sion: I must down­load all the epi­so­des imme­dia­tely and watch them as soon as we can. Once again the inter­net has come through for us, yet orga­ni­sing 7 peo­ple to all be in the same place at once when term has star­ted and we all have sig­ni­fi­cant res­pon­si­bi­li­ties and other plans pro­ves extre­mely dif­fi­cult. Alas we have only tra­ver­sed up to “In Trans­la­tion”, epi­sode 17. But we’ll get there, oh yes we will and then we can move onto sea­son 2 and start the pro­cess all over.

Vero­nica Mars

Ah yes, the other great Ame­ri­can tele­vi­sion show I have grown addic­ted to. This time it is without the sup­port of my hou­se­ma­tes or terres­trial tele­vi­sion. This show was for­cibly inser­ted into my face via the V-mars goons at Something Awful who felt it their need to adver­tise through ava­tars and ban­ners. The intri­gue finally got to me at the end of August and I asked the inter­net ever so nicely to kindly place a copy of UPN’s pilot epi­sode into My Docu­ments; and that it did. Thanks Inter­net. Vero­nica Mars is one of those shows you can casually watch 10 epi­so­des of without having to stop for water, and after a week I had prac­ti­cally finished. Who killed Lilly Kane? Who attac­ked Vero­nica at that party? Why is Logan such an asshole and how does he still manage to be so awe­some? All of these could be essay tit­les for media stu­dies stu­dents who have cho­sen to do something highly prac­ti­cal and aca­de­mic with their time.  They also per­tain to the most bri­lliant and evol­ving story­line of this great genre brea­king teen adven­ture. The blurb for Vero­nica Mars makes it sound so incon­gruous that when desc­ri­bed to peo­ple it acti­vely turns them away: “A teen girl inves­ti­ga­tes school mys­te­ries and deals with being a high school out­cast while loo­king for clues as to the mur­de­rer of her for­mer best friend in a ste­reoty­pi­cal Cali­for­nian poor vs. rich sunshine city.” Yet the cha­rac­ters you would ordi­na­rily expect to be woo­den cut-outs: the bully, the drop out, the boy­friend, the father and the bitches all break the boun­da­ries of tra­di­tio­nal teen sit­coms, they have issues and they have back­ground sto­ries that aren’t sto­len from a soap opera brains­tor­ming ses­sion.

Herein lies my true Buffy repla­ce­ment: it makes my laugh, it makes me cry and it is ori­gi­nal. I can only hope that sea­son 2 lives up to the ever gro­wing inter­net fan­dom that is sprea­ding con­sis­tently through word of mouth. UPN does not adver­tise this show, it had a poor slot in last years sche­dule and in the UK it is only just star­ting to air on cable only Living TV yet somehow the sea­son 2 pre­miere which was pitched in direct com­pe­ti­tion with sea­son 2 of Lost still mana­ged to draw in over 3.3 million vie­wers: UPN’s highest ever (appa­rently).

So that’s that, after going for a year without tele­vi­sion two new fan­tas­tic shows have just drop­ped into my lap.