Lately, I have become slightly motivated to write about sports, but then my need to write went away soon after I began writing an article on something sports-related and I found myself disinterested in finishing. I can't seem to put enough focus into finishing a detailed, numbers-driven article. Usually a sports post will take me hours, so I'm assuming that has a lot to do with it.
So here I am giving writing about television a try, which for the past year or so has become an insane habit of mine. My purest intention is to watch good television. So I never go into a TV show blind (I doubt many do). I check IMDB ratings, I check my favorite TV reviewers opinions of shows, I take into account what my friends think of the show, and basically just get a feel if the show is worth my time. (This sounds harsher than I intend, I assure you.)
My opinion is that this is the golden age of television. At least, this is the age where you can pretty much watch a good television series as long as you buy Netflix. There are seriously enough good TV series on Netflix to last you years so long as you don't burn through entire series in a month.
I am mostly going to be writing season reviews, although doing episode reviews of classic television shows such as The Sopranos has intrigued me. So I periodically do episode reviews of that nature. I've also sporadically done episode reviews of personal favorite television shows of mine. I wrote Breaking Bad episode reviews and doing episode reviews for The Americans. I'll pick and choose which shows I do very strictly so this isn't going to be a normal thing.
To be clear, here's an idea of how crazy I am with this obsession of mine. I mentioned sports writing before which I wrote three times a week for a while. That was replaced by needing to watch the greatest movies of all time, which I usually found searching random sites. (Needless to say, I was devastated when megavideo was declared illegal) Then last year, I signed up for a month-long free trial of Netflix for a reason I'm not sure of right now, and you pretty much need Netflix once you've experienced it. (Netflix is not paying me, believe it or not)
Anyway, somewhere along the line I started slowing watching good series, not really trying to watch ALL of the good series. Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Dexter, etc. I had a bit of a slow start on this little quest of mine since my TV experience was limited to every Friends episode (each one I've seen more than once), CSI, Law and Order: SVU (strangely not the original), and... that's about it. I never really committed to a series besides Friends (which I grew up on).
While on my winter break, I realized I was watching so many TV shows at once, that I decided to categorize the TV shows I was watching. I ended up with eight different categorizations, totaling (don't laugh and I swear this is the real number) 76 shows. 76. I've seen every episode of the series for 10 of those 76, so that means I'm either in the process of or haven't started 66 series that I want to see.
I should also mention that six of the 66 shows I literally cannot watch more episodes due to the fact that they have more seasons or they haven't been posted on Netflix. And lastly, seven of the shows are in the last season that I can watch or that aired.
That still leaves a TON of shows. I'm not delusional. This is going to take a few years especially with school. I'm sure summer will bring an uptick in episodes watched. (Also, I expect the shows to gradually decline as the year progresses as the beginning features little homework and the end is finals)
So I guess this is a good place to mention what my eight categories are. First, are the greatest shows on television or the
shows that changed television (
Link) - according to Alan Sepinwall, my favorite TV critic. Here's the list and whether I've watched, am watching or plan to watch (updated 6/24/14):
Breaking Bad - Status: Seen all five seasons
Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Status: Seen all seven seasons
Friday Night Lights - Status: Seen all five seasons
Lost - Status: Seen all six seasons
Mad Men - Status: Seen all seven seasons
The Wire - Status: Seen all five seasons
The Shield - Status: Seen all seven seasons
The Sopranos - Status: Seen all six seasons
24 - Status: Seen first six seasons
Deadwood - Status: Watching first season
Battlestar Galactica - Status: Not started
This category is my most exciting and the one I look forward to completing the most. The best part is that I own all seasons to Deadwood and Oz plus 24 is on Amazon Prime, which I recently purchased. I finished The Shield by watching the free seasons that popped up on Hulu every three months. Soon the first two seasons will be there and I recommend you start when given the chance. I'll be finishing 24 over the next year and beginning Deadwood sometime next spring. Oz and Battlestar will be considerably later.
When I first wrote this post in January of last year, I had a different group of categorizations that I became dissatisfied with so I changed my categorizations to better fit how I ended up actually watching these shows. I still have the shows that changed television, which I still only watch one television series at a time meaning I wait until I finish one series before I start another. The exceptions are Mad Men, which is still airing, and 24, which is a show I try to binge-watch and I can safely separate my viewing experiences by seasons. Basically, I make sure I have a week or so of time available to watch the show before I begin a season and that means I'll probably be unable to watch any seasons during the school year.
Another categorization that hasn't changed is Classic Comedy. I've re-arranged some of the shows, but this is the simplest one and mostly is undisturbed. The most recent of the shows stopped airing in 2006. The earliest of the shows began airing in 1960. I'll refer you to my
updated Classic Comedy post if you're interested in reading about the 14 shows that fall under that.
The category formerly known as Quirky Comedy is now just Comedy. This has mostly not changed. I switched out Scrubs and Arrested Development and added a few shows. This is another 14 show category. If you're interested in reading about specific shows, read my
Comedy post.
Another category that has survived is Procedurals. In fact, I've basically split this into two different categories, Procedurals and USA Shows. USA Shows from what I've seen are procedurals in the loosest sense (a drama that isn't serialized - you can watch any episode in any season and be able to not be affected too strongly; maybe you missed a relationship that developed but nothing important). But I felt uncomfortable listing Burn Notice and Law and Order in the same category as they are not even close to the same show. If you're interested in reading about these two categories, I consolidated them into one post
here.
(If you've fallen upon this link now, it means you've seen this earlier than I intended. I had eight original categories, but only three of them were even close to the same as my revised categories. I now have 13 categories. My unconventional drama's name is now changed and is basically unrecognizable from its original group of shows. I scrapped Supernatural as a category as I realized Star Trek would take too long to watch and was detracting from me watching anything else in its category and made Star Trek its own category; Anyway, I should update the rest of the categories soon)
Next Post: I'll talk about shows that changed TV
