The Nature of Things

Do you watch the HBO show "Girls"? If you don't, I can tell you briefly that it follows the adventures of four friends, twenty-something girls in New York, as they flounder their way through relationships, jobs, life, basically creating mayhem and angst wherever they go.  Sounds a lot like a lot of other TV comedies, doesn't it? Things like "Sex in the City," "Seinfeld," even "Friends." The thing that sort of makes "Girls" different is that all those other shows generally have at least one character with whom you can empathize, one who is likable. All the girls on "Girls" are so messed up, so totally self-absorbed, that it is hard to feel sympathy for them when life sends hard knocks their way.  These are characters that are really...well, unlikable. And yet watching them has been somewhat like watching a train wreck for me. I just can't turn away. I have watched the show faithfully for five years now. This season...

I am really angry and disgusted! There are plenty of things in the world to be angry and disgusted about, you may well think. Which one has set me off? Nothing so portentous as ISIL/ISIS or Russia/Ukraine or any one of a dozen other seemingly intransigent problems. No, I am upset because I have wasted five-and-a-half hours of my life that I will never get back watching dreck on television. I am generally pretty picky about what I watch on TV, but recently, I read about a new series that was starting on Masterpiece Theatre on PBS and the reviewer liked it, so I told hubby about it and we made plans to watch it. It was called "Breathless" and it started with two episodes back-to-back on Sunday of last week on our local PBS station. Fifteen minutes into the first episode, I was thoroughly confused and wondered what that reviewer had seen that I wasn't seeing. Still, it was Masterpiece Theatre which has provided me with a lot of quality entertainment and viewing pleasure over...

"The Wire" premiered on HBO on June 2, 2002. It ran for five seasons, 60 episodes, and ended on March 9, 2008. I never watched it during that time and, in that, I was a member of the majority. The show was never particularly popular and never garnered big audiences. It also never won any of the major television awards, but it was greatly admired by critics, many of whom considered it one of the best television dramas of all time and it had a devoted hard core following. In all the years since the show ended, I've read time and again about how good it was and I've heard the same opinion expressed by my husband, who did watch it. All that praise from people whose opinions I respect made me curious and I decided that I needed to watch it at some point. HBO-GO makes it easy enough to do that, so this summer, I've been catching up with that twelve-year-old show. Now I see what all those critics were raving about. "The Wire" is excellent television. The UK...

Are you a fan of Cosmos , the currently running television remake of the old Carl Sagan series about the wonders of the universe? I admit that I look forward to each of the Sunday night episodes, which I actually watch on Monday because my viewing schedule on Sunday night is over-crowded. I am very interested in the subject matter, but one of the main attractions of the series for me is its host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, who does such an excellent job of narrating and of making the complicated material understandable for an average viewer like myself. Not everyone is a fan, of course. Tyson and his series have thoroughly freaked out the creationists whose basic approach to history and to science is that if it isn't covered in the Bible then it never happened and it can't be true. They have twisted themselves into pretzels trying to disprove the science that is covered in the series. They've even gone so far as to demand equal time to present creationist views. The creationist...

HBO's Louisiana bayou noir series "True Detective" has kept me looking forward to Sunday nights during this late winter period which has proved mostly barren for TV watching. The show features detective partners Rust Cohle (played by Matthew McConaughey), a metaphysical philosophy spouting loner, and Marty Hart (played by Woody Harrelson), the ultimate macho bearer of the sexual double standard who is a philanderer in his own right but who can't abide the thought that his daughters or wife or women in general might do the same thing. Were any two television detective partners ever more ill-matched? If you are unfamiliar with the show,  it's a bit difficult to describe the attraction - and the action. The events of the story take place over a period of about twenty years. Cohle and Hart had investigated the disappearances and murders of women and children in the 1990s and had ultimately supposedly solved the case and taken out the bad guys, for which they had recei...

Last Sunday night provided an embarrassment of riches for television watchers. Or at least more than the usual interesting choices for watchers. You had "Downton Abbey," the new HBO show "True Detective," the premiere of the new season of the old HBO show "Girls," and the evening-long Tina Fey and Amy Poehler hosted "Golden Globe Awards Show." So, what to watch? We solved the conundrum at our house by watching HBO and recording "Downton Abbey" and the awards show. "True Detective" looks interesting and promising. "Girls" was not nearly as irritating as it sometimes is. We saved "Downton" and watched it yesterday, but we watched the Golden Globes, or at least most of it, Sunday night. Recording awards shows so that you can zip through the commercials and the boring or embarrassing speeches is about the only way I can tolerate watching them. It was fairly entertaining, watched in that way. I admit that I had ...

Treme  returned to the HBO schedule last night, giving me a new reason to look forward to Sunday night television. This is the show's third season, and it was announced today that its fourth half-season will be its last . This David Simon show about New Orleans in the aftermath of the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina has never gained the viewership of HBO's most popular series such as The Sopranos or Game of Thrones, so I guess, in a way, it will be lucky to last three-and-a-half seasons, but, as one who has come to love the series, I see its short run as a shame and just another indictment of the taste of the American television viewing public. I admit that it took me a while to get into it also. It's a show with a lot of different and very diverse characters. The story lines attempt to do justice to each of them and so we get lots of scenes of just a minute or so of exposition for each story as the camera jumps back and forth among the characters. I think it is easier for...

Will McAvoy is a fathead. A pontificating, holier-than-thou, blowhard of the kind of character that I love to hate. The problem is I had really hoped to love him. When I first saw the promos for the new Aaron Sorkin show for HBO, The Newsroom ,  I thought it looked interesting. The cast was well-known for their good work, the idea of a series about a cable news show seemed relevant, and Aaron Sorkin is an award-winning producer and writer ( The West Wing , Moneyball, The Social Network ), so the whole thing offered the promise of keeping me entertained on Sunday nights this summer. So far it has been a disappointment, and it is mostly because of the character of Will McAvoy. He just sucks all the air out of the room for me. Jeff Daniels, who plays Will, is terrific, as, in fact, all the actors are in their respective roles. There really isn't a stinker among them. But the words that they are given to speak are the problem. Will seems to be channeling Eric Sevareid and his commenta...

Last night I saw the third episode in this second season of Game of Thrones on HBO. Having now read all five of the books, since the end of the first season of the show, I can state unequivocally that those involved in the production of the series have done a terrific job of translating it to the screen. With its huge number of characters that are important to the story, not to mention the many varied locations where the action takes place, it would seem to me to be an absolutely daunting task and yet they've passed the test with flying colors. My understanding of the books and of the television series has been deepened recently by the book that I'm currently reading, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara Tuchman. Indeed, The Game of Thrones could easily have been set in the Europe of the 14th century with its constant wars, its religious conflicts and schisms, the intermarrying for political reasons of the great families of the time, the utter brutishness...

I missed the first season of the excellent PBS (by way of BBC) television series Downton Abbey , but in this day when the Internet can provide instant gratification, failing to catch the series when it is first shown is no barrier to its enjoyment. After all the acclaim and awards it received in its first season, I decided that perhaps I was missing something, and that I needed to catch up on it by watching online in order to prepare myself for the second season which started a couple of weeks ago. I didn't quite make it in time for the start of the season, but this week I finished watching season one and then went on to watch the two episodes already shown in season two. Now I'm all caught up and ready for Sunday night's showing of the third episode. I'll be there because I am well and truly hooked ! What is it about this upstairs, downstairs soap opera of the veddy, veddy rich of early twentieth century England and their faithful (and not so faithful) servants that so...

The HBO show "Entourage" had been on television since 2004.  This was its last season.  Its last episode showed on Sunday night . I never watched the show, except for a stray episode here and there, until this year, but certain members of my family had watched it faithfully, and since this was my last chance to find out, I decided to watch and see what appealed to them and what caused this show to continue being renewed for seven more years past its initial season.  I watched every week of this season's shows and I still don't understand. Okay, it's a male bonding fantasy.  A group of not very smart, not particularly good looking, lazy young men get very, very rich while exerting practically no effort.  They live in a huge and extremely tacky mansion and drive hot cars and take beautiful young women to bed, again, while never breaking a sweat.  Literally.  I can see how that would fulfill the wildest fantasies of some men.  Maybe all men.  Ju...

Yes, I admit it. I am addicted. I'm not quite sure how it happened. I didn't intend it to happen. I only did it really to placate my daughter who insisted that I should. I didn't know what I was getting into. I had never even heard of George R. R. Martin before I started seeing ads for the HBO series based on his fantasy series of books about the continent of Westeros and the Seven Kingdoms. But I watched the first episode of " Game of Thrones " when it started on HBO back in April, and now I am hooked. And how do I know that I am hooked? Because I am suffering withdrawal. The last show of the season aired on June 19 and yesterday at the time that the show would normally have been on, "True Blood" started its season. No more "Game of Thrones" until next spring. At 8:00 P.M. last night, I started suffering severe depression. How will I ever survive without my weekly fix? Admittedly, GOT does not fit the profile of my usual choice f...

I didn't watch the first season of " Treme" on HBO last year, but my family did, and they kept nagging and nagging me, telling me how great it was and how much I would love it until, as the second season of the show was looming, I gave in and took to HBO On Demand and watched all ten episodes of the first season in just a few days. All things considered, I think I was smart to view it this way. I'm not really much of a television junkie and I can't claim to have watched other David Simon series like "The Wire" or "Homicide" so I came to "Treme" as a Simon-virgin, so to speak. Having now watched the first season and the first episode of the second season, I might want to go back and look at some of his earlier work. "The Wire" springs immediately to mind. For the uninitiated, "Treme" is set in New Orleans. The first season's episodes begin three to four months after Katrina. The city is in ruins. So are t...

Here are three stories that are bouncing around in my head on this Thursday: 1. Do you watch the Sunday morning news talk shows on network television? Admittedly, I don't. I gave up on network news in all its permutations quite a few years ago. But I do read about the shows and what I've noticed in reading about them is that the people they have on as guests are almost exclusively Republicans and almost exclusively extremely conservative. I'm not the only one who has noticed this. Paul Krugman, for one, has taken note of it and he's a sometime panelist on one of those shows - I'm not sure which one. He's written in his blog about the disparity in political philosophies represented by guests on the shows. But the most glaring example of that may be this: The biggest domestic news story at the moment is what is happening in Wisconsin - the protests by unions and ordinary citizens and the Democratic senators leaving town in order to deny a quorum. So you ...

I settled down with the hubby on Sunday night to watch a little television. We set the DVR to record PBS' Masterpiece and headed over to HBO for "Boardwalk Empire", their new series set in Atlantic City during Prohibition. This series, starring Steve Buscemi, is very good. It's well-written, well-acted, and it is about an interesting period in history. Moreover, it has characters that can engage one's empathy, people that one can care about. After that, "Bored to Death" came on, another well-written and well-acted show. This one, though, is a comedy, not a drama, and it is flat-out funny. It certainly kept me entertained. Next up was "Eastbound and Down." I watched a couple of episodes in this series last year and quickly decided that it wasn't for me, but hubby was going to watch it so I thought, "What the heck? I'll give it another try." Well, I won't make that mistake again! If you haven't seen the show, c...

Have you noticed that there is literally almost nothing but crap on television these days? Oh, I know there is the occasional worthy show, but, on the whole, at any given hour of the day or night, when you pick up the remote and hit the on switch, all you will have to choose from is crap. Wasn't there a song a few years back about "200 channels and nothing to watch"? Well, if there wasn't, there should have been. Maybe I'll even write one. This wouldn't really bother me so much normally, because television and I went our separate ways several years ago. I used to be deeply in love with it in my younger days. In fact, you could hardly drag me out of its embrace. But over the years, I admit I grew increasingly unfaithful because I had met other, more interesting and satisfying loves. (I'm sitting in front of one of them now.) In the end, we had just grown too far apart. Irreconcilable differences, I believe is the term. I still tried to remain fri...