Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Five TV Shows I Should Have Liked But

1. West Wing-too smug
2. Scrubs-too frantic
3. Lost-to0...lost
4. The Simpsons-too much like a cartoon
5. My Name is Earl--too driven by a concept plus narrated by an annoying voice. Let Randy do it, Earl.

What are yours?

8 comments:

MysterLynch said...

I loved the first four seasons of The West Wing, if only for the killer dialogue. After Sorkin left, the show turned to utter crap.

Might I suggest you pick up Sport Night?

It was Sorkin's first tv show and was fantastic.

pattinase (abbott) said...

Loved Sports Night. Fantastic cast, wasn't it? But Studio 60 is even worse than West Wing. TV writers have even less reason to be smug than Presidents.

Christa M. Miller said...

Great word for West Wing! That's how my husband and I feel about it too.

1. Lost - too gimmicky
2. Grey's Anatomy - too juvenile
3. Veronica Mars - don't care for the lead actress
4. 24 - too... hmm. FOXy? ;)
5. Any reality show - too much fake drama!

pattinase (abbott) said...

Foxy is perfect. Cause it encapsulates their politics. Do whatever is necessary to serve your ends.

Anonymous said...

The Office is often funny though sometimes a little over the top. West Wing is pretentious and, ironically, no one EVER walks in the halls of the White House. By far the most annoying TV show voiceover is Meredith in Grey's Anatomy. I had to stop watching it because of it.

Anonymous said...

LOST: Too stupid, and arrogantly sure that anything enigmatic they toss out is necessarily engaging. But these are the common failings of every JJ Abrams show (ALIAS, FELICITY).

THE WEST WING: Sorkin knows about television. Hence, I find STUDIO 60 more tolerable than TWW ever was, because his understanding of politics is about on par with MURPHY BROWN's understanding of journalism. SPORTS NIGHT was the keeper, however.

24: I have difficulty with the protagonist being the One Sane Competent Man in the world. Even before he began weilding the torture tools.

BATTLESTAR GALACTICA: It's dull and simplistic, even if on the side of the angels, I suppose.

ANGELS IN AMERICA: It's dull and simplistic and horribly, horribly overacted by many of the assembled, to say nothing of extremely precious that is accepted where, say, SHORTBUS is castigated for much less blatancy in a less "serious" context. That these last two debuted on the same weekend, and that they were aimed at viewers like myself, tends to link them in memory, as does the fulsome praise they've received.

And two bonus items: COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF and THE BLACK DONNELLYS--two spectacularly bad collections of cliche and arrant foolishness that were meant to be taken seriously since they were personal projects of two of our most ridiculously overrated auteurs, Rod Lurie and Paul Haggis.

pattinase (abbott) said...

Todd-I certainly agree with all of these assessment, most especially Sports Night. I thought I was the only one to disliked Angels in America.

Anonymous said...

Well, it did give Mary-Louise Parker a paycheck, and I'm all for that (happily she's got a regular gig now that's surely no more precious). And perhaps more of us should speak out, albeit more grammatically than I did, about the criminal waste of opportunity and talent that ANGELS was, and the free pass it go for being about the important matters it didn't really deal with particularly well.

Congratulations on your son's b-day! And on being so apparently undestandably proud of the man...