That’s not the only change. Those who follow this blog might have noticed a change in the frequency of posting. A large part of that is due to the need to write things that actually pay when I have the chance, and between that and the vast amount of time spent consuming fine alcoholic beverages, I simply have less time to post. There’s another reason, though — another big, and very unwelcome change: I have less to say about television.

It doesn’t make sense. I’m doing a masters in Film & Television Studies, and as the only television-focused student in the group, I spend a lot of time defending the small screen. I talk about TV all the time. Surely, I should be able to transfer some of it to this page?

I still love TV, even though it’s trying very hard to push me away. These days, if TV was a lover, it would be staying out late and forgetting our anniversary on a regular basis. Instead of bringing me roses in the form of shows like The Wire, it is stopping at a convenience store on the way home to pick up a bunch of pink carnations in the form of Fringe and The Eleventh Hour. TV, I fear, is taking me for granted. It’s just stopped trying.

I still watch most of my old favorites, but today I tallied up all the shows I still watch, and it averaged out to fewer than two hours a day. TWO. Okay, yeah, that might be a bit much for the average sort, but I am no average TV viewer. I am a TV blogger. It is my sacred duty, imposed upon me by the gods of Wordpress and the Google search function, to watch as much TV as I can possibly get away with.

Maybe it was the strike. Maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s the fact that the networks insist that my life will be better if I watch crap like Worst Week or The Ex List. Maybe it’s the long span of time before Battlestar Galactica and Lost start up again. Whatever it is, TV and I are in a slump. It just doesn’t excite me like it once did.

How are you and TV getting along these days? Are you still close, or has the spark gone out for the moment?

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No, I didn’t have some sort of epiphany about how I was wasting my life on the sofa, or decide that turning off the TV would reduce my carbon footprint. I simply ran out of time. Apparently, running two sites about television and doing a degree in Film & Television Studies means that I don’t have enough time left to actually watch the damn shows. That’s a cruel twist of fate, that is.

So, I had to make a choice — give up the blogs (never!), forget about school (not the most forward-thinking choice) or watch less TV. And so, as of this week, I am streamlining my viewing schedule, limiting my sofa hours to only those shows that I love. No more will I watch shows that just mildly entertain me, or ones I think I must watch just so I can write about them. It’s time to separate the wheat from the chaff.

FOX didn’t come out so well in my cleaning binge. Fringe was already off the list, but Prison Break and The Sarah Connor Chronicles are now in the waste pile, as well. By giving up these three shows, I not only save myself three hours a week, but also the additional hour required to make sense of the gaping continuity errors and inexplicable plots.

Reality shows are taking a hit, as well. Years after everyone else tuned out, I finally figured out that Survivor might have gotten a little repetitive. Despite not watching this season, I’m pretty sure there will be fights about who does the most work in camp and who betrayed whom, and lots of pretty people in bikinis will gang up on the old and weak. It’s like I’m psychic, it is. Surprisingly, I think I’m also done with Project Runway. I’m a little sad that it’s come to this, but after a season in which every challenge felt familiar and nearly every contestant was someone I wanted to slap repeatedly, it may be time to go our separate ways.

And, after trying to break up with Grey’s Anatomy for ages now, I think I’m finally ready for a trial separation. I was willing to give it one more chance after it made all those sweet promises to me at the end of last season, swearing that Meredith was over her issues. As soon as I relented, though, it started back up with the whining. Perhaps we’ll reunite if it ever grows up, but for now, I’m walking away. It’s about self-respect, you know.

I feel lighter. I feel a bit freer. I feel a bit less like an overgrown sloth. And, most importantly, I now have time for Dollhouse when it premieres in January. It’s about priorities, you know.

What about you? Have you decided to remove any old and stale shows in your own fall cleaning?

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I love the Olympics with a love that makes absolutely no sense. I’m not a sporty type at all, unless you count my high school basketball career and fierce Wii tennis skills. I rarely sit down to watch a full game of anything, and typically find the snack buffet at a Super Bowl party far more interesting than the game itself. And yet, I plan to be glued to my sofa for the next two weeks, watching everything from archery to wrestling with equal amounts of unabashed glee.

The Olympics aren’t like anything else on TV. It’s a chance for every obscure sport to have its moment in the sun. Forget about soccer or baseball — I want to see diving, rowing, pole vaulting. Hell, I want to see synchronized swimming. It’s niche programming brought to the mainstream.

There is, of course, a certain wonder in watching people do things that no human body should be able to do. These athletes show exactly what people are capable of doing if they completely devote themselves to one thing, and I can’t help but be a bit awed by that. Even more than that, though, I love the stories.

Professional sports are the stories of professional athletes, people who are lucky enough to be very good at what they do and get paid a tremendous amount of money for that talent. Most Olympic sports, however, are the stories of human perseverence, of will and determination. It doesn’t matter what anyone’s background is; they all worked harder than you or I have likely ever worked to get there. There will be athletes that come from poverty, or war. We’ll get orphans and cancer survivors and hare lips and tragic fashion sense and none of that matters. These athletes all wanted one thing, to be the best in the world, and nothing was going to stop them from trying. For most sports, there isn’t any lingering fame or fortune to accompany the win, either — just the knowledge that, for a moment, they were the greatest. I’m one of the laziest people to ever own a sofa, but even I get inspired by that.

I love the fact that everyone is represented. Sure, you get the same countries appearing over and over again on the medal stand, but everyone gets to compete. And, every now and then, someone from a country I’ve never heard of will take home the bronze medal in a sport I didn’t even know existed, and I get to watch an entire nation celebrate. I find it physically impossible to be unmoved in those moments, when one person’s work and skill makes an entire nation feel a moment of pride and belonging. I love that women’s sports, which usually get relegated to the fourth page of the sports section, get equal airtime to the men’s — and not just for beach volleyball. I love that we see 16-year-old gymnasts walking next to weightlifters who look as if they might eat them for breakfast. Though every country is sure to provide its own blatantly jingoistic coverage, it doesn’t change the fact that the Olympics belong to everyone.

So, for the next two weeks, I’m putting any sort of cynicism on hold (along with any plans to have a life) and just diving into the sporting goodness. If anyone needs to find me, I’ll be on my couch, waving my tiny flag and chanting, “USA! USA!” at key moments.

Who’s with me?*

*chanting optional, of course

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Buffy. The list has to start here, doesn’t it? Although there have been great female characters before and since, for many Buffy is still the gold standard of the ass-kicking woman. The thing that made Buffy so remarkable (other than her ability to have fabulous shiny hair despite spending half her waking hours fighting in the sewers) is that she was always, completely female. Lots of powerful women, particularly in film, have appeared strong by taking on traditionally male traits – masculine or gender-neutral clothing, bulging muscles – but Buffy was never anything other than a typical teenage girl who happened to save the world. A lot.

By typical, I don’t mean that she was obsessed with fashion and worried about boys all the time. Sure, she shed a few tears for her undead boyfriend and wouldn’t turn down a good shopping spree, but she never did so in a ditzy way, and she was always aware, first and foremost, of her responsibility as the Slayer. Besides, find me a person, of either gender, who didn’t stress about appearance or dating when they were 17. With Buffy, it never descended into stereotype, and she was allowed to keep all her power while still being a person, first.

Buffy as we know it wouldn’t exist without television. The film on which the series was based featured a silly, one-dimensional lead lacking in confidence, and it was quickly forgotten by all but the most devoted Luke Perry fan. While the first season of the television series had echoes of that silliness, the character was given time to grow and develop, and it didn’t take long for her to become the one true love of fan girls and boys everywhere.

Bones. Reasons to love Bones: she’s smart, caring, capable and successful. Plus, thanks to Emily Deschanel, she looks damn good in a Wonder Woman costume. Still, she’s far from perfect. She’s socially awkward, as you’d expect from someone who spent most of her life in academia. She’s tactless. She tells really bad jokes. Of course, all of this only serves to make her a more interesting character.

Bones wears exactly the sort of clothes and jewelry you would expect from someone in her field of study who has traveled a fair bit, rather than clothes that best show her ass. In other words, professional (I’m looking at you, Cuddy). She never apologizes for being smart, And, in a world where women tend to use lots of verbal qualifiers (”I just want to say…”, “I think the answer is…”), her abrupt, to the point speech shows absolute, unwavering confidence in her own abilities. She knows what she wants to say, she’s gonna say it, and considering that she has a much bigger brain than anyone around her, she’s probably gonna be right.

Characters like Bones are hard to find in mainstream cinema. You might have the female scientist, but rarely one who embodies all her traits and can go toe-to-toe in a battle of wits with the male lead. Certainly, Jodie Foster did all that in Silence of the Lambs, but that was one film. From 17 years ago. We get to see Bones in all her case-solving glory week after week – and hopefully for years to come.

Xena. Xena may seem an unlikely character to have on this list of quality shows, but I can’t help it. Xena was awesome. Sure, she was on a television show that was roughly the equivalent of a B (or C, D or J) movie, but she was possibly the most unapologetically powerful female character ever. She was the sword-wielding blend of traditional male and female traits. Even the costumers got in on the gender-bending action – she was dolled up in tough leather that just happened to show every inch of her legs. How about a Freudian take? She carried a long, pointy sword and a round chakrum, and was equally deadly with both. Hey, I said it was cheesy. Don’t look for subtlety here. Even her personality carried that balance. She was aggressive and blood-thirsty, but still motivated by the desire to help. Lucy Lawless managed to bring both humor and a sense of respect to the role, which elevated it above its very, very silly plots.

Basically, Xena broke through all gender boundaries. For all that I praised Buffy for being a typical girl, it was equally refreshing to see someone that just didn’t give a fuck. It wasn’t that she was a tomboy or a man in a woman’s body, but more that she really couldn’t be bothered to worry about that stuff. She was way too busy kicking ass from Athens to India to question whether she was properly fulfilling her role in society. For all intents and purposes, her gender was a non-issue.

Interestingly, Xena was the highest rated syndicated show in the US for several years of its run, handily beating its partner in cheese, Hercules. More people wanted to watch the adventures of the complex, leather clad heroine than the do-gooder covered in baby oil — as well they should.

Scully. (written by PV’s resident X-Files expert, Plattie) Name any kick-ass female TV lead currently on the small screen, and I guarantee she is merely a poor imitation of the woman who came before them all. Special Agent Dana Scully was the first character to break the leggy-busty-blonde-sidekick mould of female TV leads, and fifteen years after the X-Files pilot first aired, she’s still the best.

Scully was smart, ridiculously smart – with a master’s thesis that re-interpreted Einstein and a medical degree on top of that. And, more importantly, she wasn’t afraid of showing her intelligence. Week after week, for almost a decade, she grappled with Fox Mulder’s implausible theories and wacky pseudo-science, argued back, stood up for rationality and scientific rigour, and still managed to look calm, tough, and not a little hot throughout.

Scully gave girls like me hope – faith that smart was sexy after all, trust that if we studied hard and applied ourselves, we too could end up in a basement office with Fox Mulder and his collection of bad ties and cattle mutilation slides. And what more motivation could a girl need, frankly?

We owe TV for a character like Dana Scully. Over 9 years we watched her grow, from a sceptical innocent, to a woman who has seen true evil in the world, in all its manifestations. Such a character arc, with all its myriad twists and turns would never work in a two-hour movie.

Thank goodness for TV for giving us this remarkable character who stood up for herself and other people; who wielded a gun and a scalpel, but still had a deeply sensitive, caring side; and who gave us a good seven years of sexual tension and intellectual flirting before finally, finally taking Fox Mulder to bed.

I know this list barely scratches the surface, and there’s a whole separate post dedicated just to the women of BSG. Help fill in some of the blanks. Who are your favorite female characters from television, and why?

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Guest poster Shelly had far too much to say about the women of BSG to limit it to a blurb in another post. Here, then, are some of the reasons the women of BSG are worth talking about.

On Tuesday, Marcia posted about the lack of strong female characters in movies, especially compared to the abundance of strong women on television. She listed a few women as an example: “Buffy, Scully, Bones, Betty Suarez, Roslin and Starbuck,” and later Xena. Did anybody else notice how many of those women were in science fiction shows? Poor science fiction has a similar image problem to that of television: it’s thought of as a waste of time, and many don’t see art in the genre.

Science fiction is a wonderland for strong female characters. Setting a story in the future, or on another planet, gives a creator of science fiction the license to ignore contemporary gender roles. The two strongest cinematic women I can think of are both from sci-fi films: Ellen Ripley from the Aliens franchise, and Sarah Connor from Terminator 2 (I specify 2 because she’s a wimp in Terminator). Ripley is possibly the most well drawn female action hero ever to be seen in a movie (at least one that didn’t originate as a television show, with all of the history of a TV series, like Serenity)—she is tough as nails (without caring about breaking them), she’s fiercely smart, and she’s in a position of power that isn’t “Mother.” Granted, it’s not like there are many other female action heroes with which to compare Ripley, but she’s pretty fantastic.

Ripley also goes back for the cat. Some may see this as a feminine weakness, but for me it is a note of grace brought to the typical action hero role. Going back for the cat is a crucial part of Ripley’s character, one layer that is uniquely female.

As great as Ripley was, when it comes to character, television still does it way better. There are plenty of awesome female characters on television these days (or in the recent past, when 75% of them were created by Joss Whedon), and one of the best examples is Battlestar Galactica.

BSG treats gender as if it informs but never defines a character. In BSG, women are aggressive soldiers, icy presidents, and violent revolutionaries at the same time they are caring mothers, manipulative seductresses, and neglected wives. They also use the same bathrooms as the men. I am often surprised when the show messes with my own gender expectations—like when I look back at how I thought Roslin was trying to save the fleet after the Cylons first attacked out of pure compassion when really, she was playing a numbers game, and saving the human race came far above saving individuals in her estimation.

It’s obvious from day one that the women of BSG never exist as a pure object of conflict between two men, a simple moral compass, or in any other way as secondary to the men of the cast. Let’s look at how the BSG women bring their ovaries to the roles without ever becoming caricatures of what it means to be a woman. In other words, how do they “save the cat”?

Boomer/Athena/Eights
The Eights come closest in the series to having a fatal flaw that is stereotypically feminine: They base most of their behavior in their emotions, specifically in their love for individuals. Athena proves herself to be a little higher minded than that when she tries to commit herself to duty and honor above all else, but even then she ends up shooting Natalie when she’s afraid of having her child stolen. She betrays duty, her superior officers, and potentially the human race, all because her worry for her daughter overrides everything else. Athena also left her birth race and served in the human military purely out of love for Helo rather than any strong conviction about the rightness of either side. It seems likely that Boomer sided against the rest of the Eights due to love for Cavil as much as her sense of isolation in the fleet (because she initially thought she was human). I’m not going to argue whether this love of the individual above all else is good or bad, but it does seem like a particularly feminine trait for someone who is also a soldier.

Because I tend to set up cage-matches in my head, I have to ask: Who would win in a fight between an Eight and Ripley? I’m afraid that Ripley would kick an Eight’s ass, unless Ripley happened to threaten the Eight’s baby or boyfriend.

Caprica Six/Natalie/Other Sixes
At first, it seems like the Sixes aren’t too far off from the Eights in their basic motivation. Caprica Six, especially, seems obsessed with her love for Baltar. It turns out that the Sixes are driven more by social concerns than anything else, which you can see as early as the pilot, when Caprica Six snaps a baby’s neck, with tears in her eyes, just before the coming nuclear holocaust. She already understands the wrongness of the Cylons’ plan, and it doesn’t take long before she’s spreading the word among her race and trying to find common ground with the humans. This switch—from a focus on love to a larger focus—is one of the ways the Sixes mess with our gender expectations. This is not to say that fomenting social dissent is a particularly gendered activity, but the way we were misguided as to her basic nature at first says something about the Six’s overt sexuality and our assumptions about a woman who looks like that. These are assumptions that the BSG creators seem to share, given how Gina (the first truly revolutionary Six) and Natalie (the leader of one side of the Cylon civil war) are transformed into comparatively modest brunettes.

In a Ripley/Six showdown, who would win? The Six, sort of. She would’ve set up a bomb beforehand, but she’d also sacrifice herself to take Ripley out.

President Roslin
Roslin is the trickiest female on BSG, as far as her gender goes. She starts out with the label of “little schoolteacher” (she’s the Secretary of Education who is suddenly promoted to President) and immediately saves the lives of thousands by insisting that they flee rather than fight. As I mentioned earlier, we expect a “little schoolteacher” to do something like that out of compassion, rather than practicality, but she fools us. President Airlock is ruthless, and she and Adama switch roles as time goes on, until Adama is the one letting people he loves (such as Starbuck) get away with things they perhaps shouldn’t, while Roslin would shoot Starbuck just to make sure they all stay safe. She is almost the opposite of the Eights in that she’s lost her affection for the individual in order, she thinks, to keep the human race alive.

Ripley and Roslin wouldn’t fight. They’d have tea, and it would end with Ripley joining Roslin’s side. Winner: the President.

Kara “Starbuck” Thrace
When we first see the exquisitely hot Kara Thrace, she’s chomping on a cigar, drinking liquor, and playing cards with other soldiers. She ends up in a fight with her XO and is thrown into the brig. If you had the presence of mind to think about it—I didn’t, I was too busy being awed—you might’ve thought that Starbuck was just a male character with boobs.

Kara’s femininity shows up in her history, when she lets Zak Adama get his pilot’s license even though he failed his flight test, a display of tenderness that I can’t imagine seeing in the current-day Starbuck. She’s also a highly sexualized character—a typical way to weaken a woman on television or in movies by pandering to male fantasies—but she’s sexual in a very dominant, dismissive way, which turns our expectations around.

Who would win if Starbuck and Ripley got in a fight? Starbuck—while she’s got a feminine side, she would never go back for a cat.

Shelly obsesses over science fiction in Durham, NC, where she lives with her partner and their, uh, several cats.

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The brevity and economy of film is one of its assets. Although, if you ask me, movies are getting way too long these days. (But you didn’t. So nevermind.) It’s a delicate and thoughtful process to trim out what isn’t necessary in a film to create the most powerful piece of art possible. Ask TiFaux Kyle — he’s famous for this stuff. I won’t go on this tangent because I don’t know exactly what I’m talking about.

But what I’m getting at is this — in a movie you’ve got two hours to make your point. And, generally, you hit or you miss and the characters work or they don’t. However, the nature of television means that not only do you have more time to develop relationships with characters, but they have more potential to develop and grow.

Think of Jim and Pam on The Office — the will-they-won’t they tension on that show could never have built up and paid off if you’d only known about them for two hours. Not only did you have dozens of episodes to build upon, but you had the weeks in between to analyze and speculate about how things would pan out.

Furthermore, the plotlines have the potential to be richer. While the miniseries of Battlestar Galactica laid a great foundation, the series has taken the potential of the concept and run with it. The depth of the mythologies of TV series is something that is distinct to the medium — whether it’s knowing all about Gaius Baltar and his misdeeds or knowing why Meredith Grey has become the basketcase she is today.
Heck, think about packing all the twists and turns of Lost into a feature film (or a book for that matter).

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It took me a long time to admit that I liked television better than film. Film, you see, is an art form. Film is Fellini and Hitchcock and Scorsese; television is David E. Kelly and Jay Leno and Jerry Springer. Film is respectable, but those who watch television should feel shame for wasting their days.

I’m over that now, and not just because I decided to live my life with absolutely no sense of shame (though that helps). I’m a television blogger, I’ve taught media studies, and I’m about to start a masters degree in television studies. I’ve thought about this stuff, and there’s a fair amount to think about. I keep coming back to one clear, objective fact: television does lots of things much, much better than film.

Film may win in the cinematography or A-list actor category. It owns the special effects battle, hands down. I’ll even give it soundtracks and editing. Really, it should win all these, since it has the budget to do so. The one place, however, where film is consistently beaten to a bloody pulp by television is in the character category. When it comes to creating rich, believable, complex characters, television is the playground bully kicking sand in the scrawny face of film.

Some of the reasons for this are obvious. Television has more time to build and develop characters, to reveal their quirks and contradictions. It allows them to change over time, just as (gasp) real people do. Though film characters can and do change, these changes are usually based on external events that cause the hero to react and adapt. In television, characters may react to outside influences, but they’re just as likely to develop in relation to their community. They grow because of relationships, their environment or sometimes because they just get older. Film is based on the hero’s journey, in which characters must become something grand and, well, heroic in two hours’ time. Television needs to create characters we relate to so that we keep tuning in week after week. Heroes are all well and good, but as someone who’s far more likely to spend a day mastering the hammer on in Guitar Hero than in saving the empire, I’ll take TV any time. Film is escapism. Television, I believe. (This is not an absolute, of course; I have yet to find a single thing worth believing on One Tree Hill, but I’ll still escape there once a week.)

Even more than that, television offers something film doesn’t seem to bother with: female characters that don’t suck. Women in films don’t have a whole lot to do, you see. They get to be the love interest for the man, of course. Sometimes they get to be the source of conflict between a couple of men. If they’re really lucky, they might get to be the moral compass for some misguided man who will eventually see the light and become, of course, the hero. Women are almost exclusively relegated to secondary roles, complete with secondary character development. Some excellent actresses will do their best work with what they’re given, but at the end of the day, they are little more than catalysts for the men.

If you think I’m exaggerating, have a look at the top films for 2007 and 2008. In 2007, the top ten films all feature male leads. Spiderman 3, which claims the top spot, could be the annoyingly overproduced poster child for my point. Mary Jane is the love interest that men fight over, and she frequently looks at Peter Parker with disappointment in her eyes, letting him know that he’s on the wrong moral path. Of course, despite all this moral superiority, all she really does in the film is serve as villain bait. Also, she screams. A lot.

In fact, in 2007, the first film with a female lead is Juno – all the way down at #15. With Enchanted at #20, that gives us two – count ‘em, TWO — films in the top 20 with interesting female leads. In 2008, Sex & the City made it into the top ten, at least. Still, I’m not ready to have a big old dance party about that, when Iron Man, The Dark Knight, Indiana Jones, Hancock and Kung Fu Panda all claim the top spots.

(And, please, please don’t argue that people just don’t want to see women in lead roles, as that will make me very grumpy. Give me a Hollywood film with a female lead that’s as well scripted and directed as The Dark Knight, rather than, say, Elektra, and then we’ll talk.)

Television has given us Buffy, Scully, Bones, Betty Suarez, Roslin and Starbuck. Hell, it gave us Xena, for which I will always love it. Even in male-dominated shows, the female is given more to do than stare at the man adoringly and/or with reproach in her eyes. Burn Notice may belong to Jeffrey Donovan, but Gabrielle Anwar’s ass-kicking Fiona can certainly hold her own. Lost may often be about the battle between Jack, Locke and Ben, but Sun and Kate are given plenty of meaty things to do. The man’s world of Mad Men gave us Peggy, one of the more complex women currently on television. Even in television’s version of the hero’s journey, a show subtly called Heroes, the gender balance is fairly even, as is the allocation of interesting powers.

It’s not just women that get the short stick in films. If you’re not Will Smith, black actors don’t make out that well, either, unless they want to play the Sassy Sidekick or the Mystical Black Person (a close cousin to the Female Moral Compass). Gays, of course, are all but invisible in the top 20, unless you count 300 (which you probably should, all things considered). Basically, if you want to watch male heroes save the day, film is the medium for you. For everyone else, it’s television.

So, film creates the same damn hero over and over again, while television gives us fully developed roles that represent wide swathes of the population. Which one is art, again?

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Watching television is a social experience. I’m serious.

The couch potato stereotype involves pot bellies, Cheetos, bed sores and awkward social interactions. As a TV blogger (a two-fer of descriptors that carry negative connotations), I have to accept that some of these things may apply to me (I’ll leave it to you to guess which ones), but I’d also like to establish the fact that television has the capacity to serve as a social experience better than movies ever could.

Let’s start here: I’ve never understood the idea of going out to the movies in the company of people you haven’t seen for a while or on a first date (where you should spend the entire time asking each other how many siblings you have while you nervously sip lattes). Seeing a movie on the big screen is pretty much a solitary experience and, counter to the popular notion, is probably best experienced when one is feeling antisocial. You’re in a dark room, not facing your friends, and you’re teleported to a completely foreign setting with characters you don’t know. There’s no social interaction except for the moment where you leave the theater and discuss the movie before you go get burritos (or, well, at least that’s the way it goes with my friends).

There should be less shame associated with going to the movies solo.

(Before I get started praising the television, I’ll just put it out there that I’m not trying to say that watching television is the best way to interact with friends. However, television is more conducive to healthy socialization than a solitary movie experience. I’m not saying that people should watch more television in order to solve any social problems. I’m just saying that the tube has been given a bad reputation as a vortex for laziness, antisocial behavior and all things awful. All of these tendencies do exist, but it’s the people who watch it who are responsible for their own social lives.)

While people frequently watch television by themselves (of course), television shows are much more conducive to social interaction in a variety of ways. I’ll talk about what I think are the two biggies.

You watch television at home, within your comfort zone. It’s a pressure-free environment and, in a group, you can pay as much or little attention it as possible. Whereas movie theaters run trailers asking you to not talk during movies, in the comfort of your own home you can heckle the screen as much as you want, guffaw if you feel like it, or hit pause on the TiFaux so you can blend more margaritas.

It’s a quiet indignity that television suffers that people are more cavalier in talking over the action, but it does make the medium a bigger experience.

The second reason that television is a social experience is because there’s a higher likelihood that people will have at least some concept of the shows their peers and acquaintances keep up with, thus providing them with a basis for conversation. Movies come and go in the blink of an eye and, unless you’re talking about franchises, there’s no continuity. Since television shows last longer, there’s a stronger chance you’ve heard of them.

Keeping up with television shows is a way for unlike people to establish common ground. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve been stuck with and the only thing we’ve had to talk about is Project Runway (speaking of — how dreamy is Keith.  Rowr.) With television, you’ve instantly got a common backstory.

I wouldn’t worry that talk of television is ‘dumbing down’ the discourse between strangers. If television went away, first dates wouldn’t be replaced by talk of Descartes and the human condition.  Furthermore, television is less emotionally charged than politics or religion (although I can understand people having strong feelings about the Blayne “girlicious” issue)

To sum up — television may not get a lot of respect from a lot of folks, but it is a pretty decent (if counterintuitive) way for people to stay in touch with each other.

PS — And for the contingent who will inevitably shout “Why don’t you go outside! Meet people!  Join a club!,” all I have to say is this: right now you are reading a blog about television. On the internet. Alone.

Physician, heal thyself.

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But then something happened this morning that was very much not fun. It was, in fact, anti-fun. At 8:00, gigantic mug of coffee firmly in hand, I happily clicked over to the Dr. Horrible site, pressed play and waited to be astounded by the Whedon wonderfulness. Instead, I got a message from Hulu, firmly rebuffing my attempts to view the first act. Apparently, only US viewers can watch it.

So much for the grand global launch, huh? My first thought (because I only think of you, my lovely readers) was, “Oh, hell. I have posted erroneous information! I am a terrible, awful, no good, very bad blogger!” Then, I read this announcement on the Dr. Horrible blog:

Many fans around the world have been disappointed to discover the feared message “not available outside the USA” but rest assured the problem is being addressed and we’ll report back as soon as we’re aware of the details.

Never fear, Doctor Horrible will save the day…..err……ahh….. Captain Hammer will save the day? …. well, rest assured, someone will!

The team behind Dr Horrible are really sorry about the problems and want to assure you that they really are working hard to get it all sorted out. The best news is, it’s worth the wait!

I didn’t screw up. Yay! Someone else did. Boo. No, really, boo. Of all the stupid-assed mistakes to make, putting an international product on Hulu is a pretty big one. For television addicts that live in the US, Hulu is the greatest thing ever. For the rest of us, it is evil. EVIL, I say.

Hulu is quickly becoming the default way to embed video on websites and in blog posts, due to the depth of its catalog and its high quality video. I see more and more sites using it every day, and I would like to say, as courteously and politely as possible: STOP IT. Yes, Americans make up the bulk of your readership. That is true for Pop Vultures, as well, despite the fact that I live in the UK and cover a fair amount of British television. However, Hulu immediately excludes everyone not residing within those 50 states, and that just ain’t right.

Thanks to the Internet, the television market isn’t what it once was, when everyone would watch shows as they aired live in their home country. It’s an international market now, and any pretense to the contrary is just foolishness. People want to watch shows as they become available, and anyone with the technical knowledge of an eight-year-old has learned about these magical things called torrents that allow that to happen. Yes, downloading copyrighted material is wrong, but until the networks figure out that television viewers want to be a part of the international conversations about their favorite show — whether that show is Battlestar Galactica or Torchwood — and start offering all viewers equal access to the programs, it will continue. I can’t fault a single viewer that choice. If it wasn’t for my US bank account, which allows me to use the US iTunes store, I’d be doing the same damn thing. I’m not going to wait three months to watch Gossip Girl, then try to dig up old blog posts about the episode while frantically avoiding spoilers. That just doesn’t make sense. I’m well aware that the international economics of the entertainment industry are complicated, but I don’t care. They need to change, to fit the new audience and their needs.

And this is why Hulu is EVIL. It actively promotes the old model, in which those in the US can see everything first and the rest of us have to wait for it to become available online, legally or otherwise. People aren’t going to stop downloading, and it’s not because they inherently lack respect for copyrighted material. It’s because they want to watch the same things everyone else gets to see at the same time. I was able to download Act I from iTunes, but there are currently plenty of grumpy people around the world who just wanted to watch Neil Patrick Harris sing this morning, and weren’t able to do so. That’s not fun at all, not one little bit.

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