Yes, precisely, to the minute, one day after part 1, the second part of quick catch-ups for the shows I’ve been watching – Robin Hood, Heroes, Lost and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Serial dramas have taken over television in a big way. Serial dramas are like… umm… soap operas… but soap operas aren’t cool. Serial dramas are.
Robin Hood has never made any pretense that its plots don’t largely revolve around events in the modern world. The Sheriff of Nottingham spent the first couple of episodes quoting George W. Bush, when he wasn’t hanging innocents and kicking puppies.
I’m no Bush fan, but this was too harsh. I asked a British friend of mine about it, and she said she couldn’t stand Robin Hood, but asked if I knew just how much we were hated by the rest of the world. So harsh! I thought at least they could put Tony Blair in… maybe as a malevolent toady who does whatever his boss says… oh wait, that’s Guy of Grisholme.
When last we left Robin Hood, a Saracen boy girl had joined the Merry Men Prancing People in Sherwood Forest Fashion Outlet. I guess it was inevitable that a tale set during the Crusades would draw parallels to the Iraq war.
Sounds like I’m down on the show, but I’m really not. The anti-American tone of the first few episodes has been toned down quite a lot, and it is turning into the action-adventure series it really ought to be.
I wonder, though, how Maid Marian will get out of her betrothal to Guy of Grisholme?
Studio 60 on Sunset Strip has been canceled, so I guess I’m not really waiting for this one to return. By the guy who gave us West Wing, a show I never watched as it came out before I started watching television again a year ago. I guess it was smarmy, self-indulgent, and talked down to its viewers while trying to be hip, though, because that’s what people are saying about Studio 60.
Me? I like smarmy, self-indulgent, wittier-than-thou shows. Maybe that’s why I liked this. I only saw the last few episodes, but looked forward to it almost as much as its lead-in show, Heroes.
Studio 60 is the backstage story of a Saturday Night Live-like show, perhaps back in the 70s or something when people actually cared about the lives of the people involved with SNL. It was smarmy. But it was also sweet. And the New Orleans Christmas montage that closed their last show was just one of the hints that showed what this show could become.
If it hadn’t been, you know, canceled.
And speaking of Heroes…
It was the sixth or seventh episode of Heroes before the cheerleader showed up in something other than her uniform. Only TV cheerleaders wear their uniforms all the time. I had to laugh at the first episode when all the cheerleaders lined up… and they all looked identical.
Unlike, say, Lost, this is a serial drama that actually answers the questions it raises in a reasonable amount of time. We know when New York will be turned into a nuclear fireball. And it looks like Peter “The Mimic” Petrelli will somehow absorb Mr. Fission’s nuclear powers and blow up.
It’s not a show that holds up if you watch it too closely. The weird reluctance of any of the heroes to acknowledge there were any others; Mohinder’s dismissal of his father’s research when it was clear he was killed because it was true; and for that matter, why did his father move to New York, become a cab driver, gather information on the local specials, meet Syler, regret meeting Syler, die, be cremated and so on, when all the time his computer was sitting back in India, waiting for him to type in his password?
But you can’t ask these kinds of questions. It’s fun and it’s light and it’s a great way to spend an hour on a Monday night.
I have friends who won’t watch Lost anymore. All they do is ask more questions without ever giving answers, they say. I don’t care about the answers. They’d probably seem kind of silly if you knew them.
I watch Lost for the surprises. How Jack turned the tables on the Others in the season cliffhanger despite being a prisoner and in a situation he knows nothing about? Genius. I was shocked. And I liked it.
I’m a huge fan of the show because I can’t ever predict what happens next. But it does move slowly… This would be one show I might recommend someone watch an entire season of at once. That’s how I watched the first season. The pace isn’t so slow when you don’t have to wait a week between episodes.
Serious or silly, nighttime drama has never been better. Once I hated TV, but now… not so much.
