Who can turn the world on with a smile?

Back in college, when I was depressed and took a semester off, I started watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show. This was the era of Ally McBeal, and I remember thinking "everyone praises this show for showing a single girl in a career... wasn't this basically Mary Tyler Moore?" To see if I was right, I needed to watch it.

We didn't have cable, so I got some of my sister's friends to record it for me off of Nick at Night (which now shows stuff like George Lopez and Roseanne!!! How old does that make me feel?), plus I bought the available box sets on VHS. I didn't see every episode, but I saw a lot of them. This was a show that I swear, helped me get through my depression. It was just one thing that helped, but it did help.

I recently got rid of my VHS box sets, because I hadn't watched them in a long time, and they were taking up space. I bought the first season on DVD, and then didn't really watch it. I had buyers' remorse.

Recently, I decided to watch it again, after probably not seeing it in about 8 or 9 years.

Damn, that show is funny!!! I was surprised at how funny it is, even though I watched it a lot 10 years ago. I had forgotten how snappy and hilarious the writing is, and how lovable the characters are. This show premiered in, what, 1970? And honestly, it doesn't seem dated at all. The basic premise of the show is one that still gets used today- single career girl tries to balance work with life- sounds like Ally McBeal and also 30 Rock, doesn't it? But the jokes are still hilarious- as much as I adore 30 Rock, I am not convinced that in 35 years, someone who wasn't even born when the show went off the air will watch it and think "Wow, this show is hysterical!" Very few of the jokes are topical- some are, like a reference to Eric Sevareid, or being able to give the plot of a John Wayne movie without having seen it ("Oh, you know... he won."), but not so many that you don't get it. Incidentally, 30 Rock did a great episode featuring Laugh-In as EXACTLY that kind of comedy- so topical that people can't get the jokes at all 30 years later.

The Mary Tyler Moore Show was this gently feminist show, touching on everything from men getting promoted because they were men, anti-semitism, the drudgery of being a housewife when you have ambitions to go on and do other things, being single in your 30s when everyone else expected you to be married, having a job that you like, and the fact that even good girls like Mary Richard had premarital sex, and she could do that and still be considered a "good girl." It wasn't ahead of its time, exactly, but it was definitely au courant.

I watch it and I STILL think "Wow, who wouldn't want to be Mary Richards?"

Architecture School

I discovered, via reading the boards on Television Without Pity, that there is a new show on Sundance called Architecture School. When I clicked on the forum to read about it, I discovered that Architecture School follows a group of undergraduates at Tulane's architecture school.

Oh God. Oh God. This was where my friend (the one who died) went to school. He was in this program. The show follows an aspect of the program that wasn't in existence during my friend's time there- the students design and build houses for low-income residents as part of the gradual rebuilding of New Orleans post-Katrina. My friend graduated and died in 2001, so well before the need for this program.

This brings up a question- do I watch this show? I don't have Sundance (or cable at all anymore, see my previous posts), so I would have to buy it on iTunes.

I am leaning towards not watching; I feel that it would be wallowing on purpose. Maybe people who have never grieved don't understand this impulse that draws you in to face that black hole of grief and jump in. When you are early in the grieving process, you fall in that hole all the time on accident. As time goes on, you learn to avoid that hole. It is still there, though. Maybe it is smaller, but make no mistake, it's still there. And sometimes, yes, you jump in on purpose, especially after you have learned how to avoid it. There is something about losing someone so close to you. It tears you apart, and even though you want to be better, you want to get back to normal, sometimes, when you are mostly back to normal, you miss that grief. Well, not the grief exactly. You miss the person, and the grief reminds you of them. The reverse is true as well- be reminded of the person, be reminded of the grief.

I don't really jump in any more. The desire to do so surprised me, a little. I might just watch some of the clips on Sundance's website. Probably that will give me my fill. To tell the truth, I think architecture is frightfully boring, so once the initial shock is over, I'm sure it will be just like every other reality TV show that I have abandoned.

Too Much TV

We cancelled cable so my husband wouldn't watch so much TV, and now I am the one having the problem! Who knew that when you combine TiVo and Netflix, you end up watching TV for hours??? I think I am motivated in some way to get the biggest bang for my buck from Netflix (even though they slow down your service if you are too quick with the returning).

My sister did assure me that it's normal to binge on DVDs when you first get Netflix, but then you taper off to a normal level. I hope so.

Back to the Dark Ages (of TV)

We took the plunge. We cancelled cable. We didn't just switch from digital cable to regular, or from regular to the local-channel-reception-only package. We went cold turkey. The Comcast tech came today to take away our box. I made sure he took the remote too, since I bet they would charge us for it.

The seed for this drastic step was planted by the digital reception converter boxes that we got. Our TVs are old with cathode ray technology. No shiny new flat screen HDTVs for us, at least, not until the price for them plummets. While we had digital cable in our living room, the small TV/VCR (double whammy of obsolete technology) just had an antenna. I had been seeing the ads warning us that we will lose reception in February 2009 if we didn't get one of these boxes, so I signed up for the government-issued $40 coupon. I signed up for two of them, in fact, since we have two televisions. We have lived without cable in the past, it wasn't inconceivable that we would live without it in the future. I wanted the option, anyway.

Turns out that the reception is fabulous and crystal clear. Apparently with digital, you either get it clear and perfect, or you don't get it at all. When we saw how good the reception was, we thought, "Hmmm.... we could cancel cable and save a little money...."

A few weeks later, we had a very real discussion about the fact that my husband comes home from work and gets sucked into every episode of Law & Order and crappy movie that TNT/TBS/FX can put on. It doesn't matter how bad, if they blow crap up, he's there. This seems weird to me, because while I watch a lot of TV, I can't watch just anything, I have to watch things that I really enjoy, a category that does not include Lethal Weapon 3 or SVU. He felt that he should be doing work in the evenings instead, but just couldn't resist the siren call of Sam Waterston and former Senator Fred Thompson. As a good wife, I made the offer that we could get rid of cable, if he really thought this would help him do work at night. Plus, it would save us about $70 a month once our Triple Play deal expired.

We decided to do it. To make up for it, we signed up for Netflix, a decision I am not sure is terrific, given how long it is taking them to ship our initial movies out, plus we are getting TiVo, which was part of the deal I made with myself for passing my oral exams. I am not really sure how great TiVo is going to be with broadcast, but at least now I should be able to watch every single episode of Globe Trekker.

Our TiVo is supposed to arrive today. By UPS. This means that I will need to sign for it. However, since we don't have cable anymore, and our Netflix movies aren't supposed to get here until tomorrow (and I'm not even sure that I'm getting one that I want- I know that discs 1 and 2 of Season 2 of The Wire, another show that I hate but my husband loves, are supposed to arrive, but no word on my copy of The Holiday), I wanted to run to the library to get some DVDs to tide me over.

My local public library is a lot like TJ Maxx in a bad neighborhood. You walk in and it's dirty and unorganized with sketchy people in there (seriously- my library has homeless people looking at bikini pictures on the internet), and at on any one given visit, you can't find anything you want. However, when you start stopping in all the time, you find treasures. Masterpiece Theatre DVDs! That new non-fiction book you've been wanting to read! An audiobook of Terry Pratchett's YA novel The Wee Free Men!

Unfortunately, Friday is usually not the best day to find treasures, as everything tends to be picked over. However, I was desperate. I have one episode of the first season of Big Love left (and my liking for this show has gone downhill over the 11 episodes that I've seen so far), and beyond that, nada. And I was worried I would miss the delivery of our TiVo. I tried to make my library trip as brief as possible, and ended up with Masterpiece Theatre's Adam Bede (someone at the library must have ordered the George Eliot boxed DVD set because they have all these DVDs), the sequel to Before Sunrise called Before Sunset, and Supersize Me. Not my top selections, but they will do.

Meanwhile, at the library, I am shaking with fear that the TiVo is going to arrive while I am gone, and then we're not going to get it until Monday, because UPS doesn't deliver on Saturday. I quickly do my cursory browse of the new non-fiction, cookbooks, and craft books, pay my fine (because I always have fines on my account), and hightail it out of there in the hopes of catching Big Brown, should he happen to come by.

There's no yellow/brown post-it on the door of our apartment building. Phew! It ended up being anticlimactic, though, because the UPS guy didn't even need buzzing in. He just left the package, which was half my size, downstairs by the mailboxes.

So for this weekend, it's George Eliot, PBS, fast food, and me.

House, M.D.

I have been a Hugh Laurie fan for ages now, since he and Stephen Fry were in Jeeves and Wooster on Masterpiece Theatre back in middle school.

I didn't just stumble on Jeeves and Wooster, though. Well, I didn't stumble on the TV show. I did stumble on the books back when I was in middle school. I was looking through the fiction section at the library, and picked up one or two of P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves & Wooster novels. I read them, thought they were funny.

Sometime later, I found them on Masterpiece Theatre, and since I liked the books, I watched the TV adaptation. After that, I started following the careers of both Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie.

For a long time, there wasn't much to follow. I bought the VHS tape of sketches from their show A Bit of Fry and Laurie. I read Stephen Fry's first three novels. I watched Stephen Fry in the movie I.Q.. Noticed that Hugh Laurie was in movies like Stuart Little and 101 Dalmations. Watched them both in some of the Blackadder series. Watched Peter's Friends. Saw Hugh in Sense and Sensibility (with his college friend, Emma Thompson).

And now, Hugh Laurie is this huge drama star in House, M.D.! Crazy. For someone who has been SO well known for comedy to make this big switch to drama... it's really funny. And the show is this big hit now. I feel like the world has discovered my little secret- Hugh Laurie is really good!

(side note: he was also a rower back in college. A really good one. I have a thing for rowers. And he has blue eyes. Something else I have a thing for. And he's tall and thin. And British. Yet again... )

Back to The Simpsons

My favorite show, The West Wing, concluded its seven-year run on Sunday night. The show hasn't been the same since maybe the middle of Season 4, but I just couldn't abandon it. It picked up this season, although I couldn't ever get on board with the campaign episodes, and was incredibly bored whenever C.J. (Allison Janney) wasn't featured in an episode.

I thought I would be more upset that the show was ending, but the final episode just showed me that I probably would have faded out if it had continued another season. I don't care that much about Josh and Donna (in fact, they should have never gotten together- Josh treated Donna so badly while they were working together; she could have found someone who didn't patronize her like he did), and did not find the candidates compelling, except for Alan Alda in The Last Hurrah. While many viewers hated this episode, and maybe I only liked it because I watched it a week after it aired, right before watching my tape of Institutional Memory, I thought watching Vinick moping around not knowing what to do with himself was fascinating and sad, especially in contrast with the hustle and bustle of the Santos transition. Alan Alda is really good. Never let it be said that The West Wing suffered from crappy acting.

I felt that watching the Bartlet administration wrap up (both literally and figuratively) was a fitting ending to seven years of the smartest show on TV, even in its dumbest years. (although in its dumbest years, "smart" did not necessarily equal "entertaining.")

And now, I look forward to the next projects of the cast, especially Allison Janney, and I am more than a little excited about Aaron Sorkin's new project Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, which will have not only Bradley Whitford and Timothy Busfield from WW, but also Nate Corddry from The Daily Show! Sports Night and The West Wing were so good and so smart that I think lightning will strike a third time (never mind that Sorkin's movies are also really good. The man can write.). There's some concern that it's been overhyped, but I doubt it. I have high hopes.

And failing that, there are always my The West Wing DVD sets.

Feeling better

All right, the pissiness in my last post has dissipated, mostly, although the underlying sentiment is still there. I was the bigger person and apologized to DH for being so difficult, esp. since I knew he was trying hard.

Did I mention I was on vicodin when I wrote that last post? I had a root canal on Wednesday, and ibuprofen just wasn't working on the pain yesterday. I called the endodontist, and he phoned in a prescription for vicodin. I was on vicodin all yesterday afternoon and last night. Good stuff. I can see why it's addictive. I'm making a point of not taking it today, since the ibuprofen actually is working on the pain now. The vicodin did mean that I had a hard time keeping my eyes open when DH and I went to see The Lion, The Witch, & The Wardrobe. I managed it, but it was tough.

That movie was pretty meh, though. I felt like the moviemakers had ripped so much of the battle scenes from Lord of the Rings, not to mention the White Witch's mutant/trollish army, which looked kind of like orcs, if you ask me. There also was no ambiguousness about good and evil in the story, and the feminist in me was asking, "Why is it that Peter, the oldest boy, is basically the top king/warrior/etc. of them all? And why is it that the bad character is female?" I haven't read the book in ages, but my friend mentioned that C.S. Lewis refers to the Queen as a "daughter of Lilith," which opens up a whole other feminist can of worms. Sigh. Since I haven't read the book in so long, it's hard for me to tell whether the flaws in the movie were actually from the movie, or if they were there in the book too. I suspect the latter, personally.

I also learned that my DH seriously, SERIOUSLY knows nothing about Christianity, despite whatever his mom did in taking him to church when he was little. I had to explain to him last night what Jesus's death and resurrection really meant, and how yes, in Christian tradition, this vanquished evil b/c Jesus conquered death. In a nutshell. Sigh. I seriously need to get him a "Christianity for Dummies" book that will spell everything out to him. I am far from a Bible scholar, but I could see how the story of Aslan had a few more parallels than just Aslan dying/coming back to life. Susan and Lucy, for instance, were the parallel of Mary and Martha.

I also thought there were some vague similarities between LW&W and Harry Potter, although I think that may be b/c LW&W, Harry Potter, and LOTR all have similar grounding in archetypal mythology (just like Star Wars, although from what I remember, Lucas was very, very specific in following Joseph Campbell's description of the typical hero story), so in that sense, the stories are going to be similar, at minimum.

Next on my list of movies to see is Memoirs of a Geisha. I hear it's also meh, but I liked the book a lot. We're going to see Walk the Line first, though. Tomorrow, in fact. I've heard so many people say how much they loved that movie... and then there was my mom, who said, "That story is just SO trashy!" LOL. My mom has no patience for drug abuse, violence, or infidelity, so it's no wonder she thinks that people like Johnny Cash and Elvis were trashy.

Also, on the subject of John Spencer's death, which I mentioned in my last post-

I've been reading a lot of Television Without Pity's West Wing boards today, just to see the reaction. There are a lot of really, really sad people out there today. John Spencer was only 58 years old- too young, in my opinion. (younger than my dad!) What I didn't know until I read the New York Times obituary was that John Spencer, like his character Leo, was a recovering alcoholic and drug addict. Sadly, alcohol and drug abuse really take a lasting toll on your system, and I'm sure that it contributed to his too-early demise. I'm not really shaken up by his death like some are, because I've experienced the death of a close loved one, so the death of a television actor that I didn't feel that passionately about doesn't affect me much. I was neutral on the character of Leo- I prefer C.J. and Toby, myself, but even I can see that if there was any question that this was the last season of West Wing, this has pretty much answered it. When The Powers That Be make the decision to put a major character in what I think is the extremely unrealistic position of vice presidential candidate, it's because they are saying "The future of this show lies with this character." And now he's gone. I think it's safe to say that the show will be too, after this season.