The Influence of Television

Yesterday I was over at Jim’s blog, Suldog, and he had written this great post about television and his top 5 shows of all time.  I laughed, I cried, I did all the usual things I do when reading one of his posts (including but not limited to: snorting, dropping my jaw in surprise, cackling hysterically, marveling in the way he can spin something small like TV shows into something so well written).

As I was commenting back I realized I’d already typed about 200 words and decided instead that it would make for a good post of my own.  So in piggybacking my own drivel off Jim’s much better written content, here’s a list of my top five favorite television shows and a little description of why based on his rules:

You…

1. Watch every episode

2. Love reruns

3. Can name every actor who graced the screen

4. Have favorite episode(s)

5. Still enjoy even if it jumps the shark

6. Tell your friends to watch

7. Can identify when parts have been cut in reruns

8. Smile and/or laugh just thinking about the show

9. Wouldn’t mind a reunion

10. Find yourself quoting the show all the time

11. Feel the show would hold up through generations

And finally, that the series has come to an end.

With all of that in mind (which I think are a fine set of rules by the way), I’d have to go with:

Sex and the City

Not only have I watched every episode numerous times I own the super girlie, pink velvet boxed DVD set and still watch when it’s on regular TV, just because.  Quoting this show is like part of my personal lexicon, in fact at times I probably do it without even realizing.  There were so many perfectly timed moments, scenarios of friendship, love and sex in the modern day that entire urban phrases were created due to this show.  Ever call someone a Modelizer (a man who only dates models) or a Frenemy (so much a word that MSWord recognizes the spelling)?  Ever refer to the cheating curve?  Ever tell someone they’ve Susan Sharon’d something?  Curious where Bradley Cooper or Dean Winters got their start?  And oh yes you know Dean, he plays Mayhem in those trendy Allstate commercials now.  SATC streamlined so much of pop culture and made the bold move of showing the world just what women were capable of.  Even if they ‘lost their Choo!’ while doing it.  The one caveat here is that there was already a reunion of sorts, 2 movies have been made since the series ended.  I was so disappointed with shifting characters that were Hollywood-ized for big screen appeal in the first movie that I never saw the second and I pretty much pretend they were never even made.

Friends

This one is truly era/generational specific for GenX I think.  As this show aired I was moving into my own apartments and starting to realize what it was like to live and love on my own for the first time, just like the cast.  I discovered how much of a family my own friends really were.  I don’t have to tell my friends to watch though, most of them already own the box set and have all 10 seasons looped on constant rotation.  I’d just like to point out that no one told me life was gonna be this way…

Get Smart / Inspector Gadget (yes the cartoon, because these two are basically the same show)

Okay truthfully I can’t say for sure if I’ve ever seen every episode of Get Smart or if I could quote it on cue, but let me just say that during my nightly bouts with insomnia when I was a teenager I would stay up until 1:00 in the morning most nights just to catch the reruns on Boston channel 38 (I think, might have been 56).  The guy had a shoe phone.  Does it really get much cooler than that?  Also, 99 was really the brains behind the operation and I thought she was super crafty.  As far as Inspector Gadget goes it was essentially the cartoon version of Get Smart so what wasn’t to love?!  I was never really into cartoons but a bumbling fool who has a helicopter hat to get out of tough situations was too cool.  Plus Penny & Brain (the dog) actually solved the crimes (seeing a pattern here?).  I’m quite sure this is the reason I instantly fell in love with the character of Data when The Goonies came out in 1985.

Golden Girls

This is on the list because I’ve recently started watching reruns of this show again and I can’t believe for even an instant that any of my family would have let me watch it when it first came out.  Talk about racy!  Luckily I was only about 12 when it first aired and had no clue what they were talking about.  Of course that all changed as years went on and I loved all of their spunky attitudes and sharp tongues.  Those gals are who I aspire to be when I’m in my 60’s – smart, funny, out of control and still self-proclaimed sexy (okay so I aspire to be Blanche but will likely end up much more Dorothy).  Wait a second, 4 gals living in the same town, dating and generally waxing on about life and relationships?  Sensing a pattern here?  Plus there was Betty White.  And even after not watching it for decades I could still sing the entire theme song from memory.  What’s not to love?  I don’t quote it yet but I guarantee this will end up in the quote rolodex in the near future.

Lost

Conspiracy theories.  Unanswered questions.  More frustrating plot twists than characters on the show.  “Live together, die alone.”  “You’re gonna die , Charlie.”  “See ya in another life brotha.”  “Freckles.”  “The Others.”  Oh yeah, and there was that time when the Mega Millions was huge right after the end of the series’ run and Matt was picking up tickets.  I told him to play 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42 (yes I just typed that from memory, if you’re a Lostie you could too).  Apparently lots of people played those numbers.  And we all won a couple hundred bucks.  Hurley won 150 million playing them on the show but who’s complaining?  We got back our investment 150 times over.  The writing was smart and those bastards kept us guessing until the very end…and beyond.  And of course after my Vampire post you pretty much know how I felt about Boone.  Someone get me a drool bucket would ya?

The one show I didn’t include, and I’m sure many are surprised, is Moonlighting.  I loved that show.  No wait, I love, love, looooooovvvvvvved that show!  Right up until Maddie and David slept together.  In the 80’s no one knew how to write so that there was still tension after the sexual tension dissipated and the show went downhill fast.  But EVERYone was on that show, Whoopie Goldberg, Judd Nelson, Pierce Brosnan and of course, Mark Harmon (who they should have kept around as Maddie’s love interest longer, just sayin’).  I loved that they talked right into the camera, something I still enjoy to this day (brought to even greater heights with movies such as Ferris Bueller) and the rhyming scripts were classic.  But there’s no such thing as reruns and I pretty much wouldn’t watch the last season again so it wouldn’t have been fair to include this one.  It broke the rules.

So do you have favorites?  Shows that cross the great divide of generations and can still tug at you like they did when they were first aired?

Good Television?

Today's topic:

A picture of the cast from your favorite show

I proudly admit that I am a product of my generation. Because of that I’m not going to sit here and try to say that the old classics are some of my favorite shows because, frankly, they simply don’t resonate with me. To the moon, you got some ‘splainin’ to do, or beam me up are not what make me tune in every week.

Oh, and anyone who knows me by now knows there’s (as my Wicked Step Mother would say) ‘a better chance of seeing God as we speak’ than me only posting one picture. Enjoy!

I really can’t begin to express my sadness over learning that Perfect Couples is getting kicked to the curb in favor of a new show with some washed up actor who hasn’t been on TV in 20 years. I’m bitter, and begging another network to pick this show up because it really deserves at least three seasons (I’m looking at you USA!). If someone gave it a chance they’d see the perfectly captured dynamic between these six characters. I think the network execs were just afraid because they identified with the “wrong” couple. Matt and I? Dave and Julia, all the way.

Okay, if we’re being 100% honest here I started watching the new Hawaii Five-0 for a couple reasons. First, the original aired in syndication super late night when I was a teenager and it got me through a lot of bouts of insomnia so I wanted to see if this new version measured up. Second, a favorite actor from another show on this list (Daniel Dae Kim) is in it. Finally…seriously, how hot is Alex O’Laughlin? I mean come on! Now I tune in for the witty humor and to place bets if McGarrett will be in cargo khakis with a navy blue tee shirt or a gray tee shirt.

I was twelve when Moonlighting first aired in 1985, probably didn’t get half the jokes, but seriously couldn’t stop laughing at Bruce Willis. A crime show that was also a comedy. They just don’t write ‘em like that these days, it’s all about psychological mind twists and realistic gore not sunglasses and the limbo in the office. A modern day take on (take your pick) “Taming of the Shrew” or “Beauty and the Beast” it sure was fun. Until the second they killed the sexual tension.

How could I not include Sex and the City? They were a little older than I was when it first aired but it couldn’t have resonated more seeing as though I was a single, hard working, slightly crazy, city girl also trying to find love through many (read: way too many) bad dates, relationships, fix ups, etc. If we’re taking the ‘who are you most like’ quiz I’m coming up as Miranda every time.

There was no theme music. There was only a very loose plot at best. There were about 20 actors no one had ever heard of before. There was a beach in Hawaii and a plane crash. And there was Lost. This show definitely was a love it or hate it type of animal. I know a lot of people who couldn’t get past the smoke monster, and that’s understandable it was a quirky plot line. Theology, Godliness, Heaven and Hell and simple, old fashioned true love made this show great. Well that and an encyclopedia’s worth of unanswered questions.

Remember the one with the Yeti? How about the one with the lesbian wedding? Maybe the one when Ross and Rachel took a break was your favorite? No matter which is “The One”, Friends was the one at number one for me. I was living in one of my first apartments (of course mine wasn’t half as nice as theirs but I’m also old enough to distinguish fantasy from reality ya know?) and going through the trials of love, friendship, family, work and life in my early twenties. It was perfectly cast, perfectly written and perfectly captured my generation’s struggle with adapting in a modern world. They grappled with everything from death and disease to marriage, babies, being broke, getting a dream job, making a fool of yourself, making a life for yourself, love, and so much more over the ten seasons it would take an entire blog to list it all. But no matter what they always did it through humor, and the six of them always faced it together. They were more than Friends, they were family.

Some honorable mentions that were close to making this list but I had to bump include Burn Notice, 24 (the first 3 seasons), Biggest Loser, Melrose Place and ER (the first 6 seasons).

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Catch up on anything you missed  30 Photos, 30 Days
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The Million Dollar Idea

It really isn’t a big secret that I would love to be a millionaire. That old adage ‘money doesn’t buy happiness”? Well I’d love to know if it really is true or not. There is also another famous line about the ever popular, substantial sum of money that sounds a lot more appealing: “If I had a million dollars, I’d be rich.” If I were rich, maybe I would invest in a canoe so I could paddle my way out of my street.

But I digress…Let’s talk for a minute about what could get a person into the million dollar club. Specifically, that person, being me.

So as you all know by now I have this book, well manuscript in its current incarnation, and it’s a pretty satisfying story to me. I’m in love with my leading male character, didn’t feel like killing off anyone more than I actually did, feel good about the plots & sub plots and like the way it flows overall. Is it a million dollar idea though? I’m not quite sure.

The book is Chick-lit (a term which I absolutely loathe but sadly seems to be here to stay), mainstream fiction. The basic premise is: 4 middle to upper middle class friends, from all manner of backgrounds but who share the common bond of entrepreneurship, live and work in the Boston area and try to make their way through the muck that is life with a smile and a laugh knowing they will be there for each other no matter what that life may throw at them.

Can’t you just see the rainbows shooting across the sky?

Okay, before you start to retch all over your keyboard, the story is actually fairly real, none of them do anything for a living that could have them jetting off to distant lands with loads of money and a perfect significant other waiting for them back home.

Okay, well maybe one of them does. Wait, two. Er, thr…never mind. It’s a piece of fiction. Chick-lit at that. Suspend the disbelief people.

But therein lies the issue of the million dollars.

Quick, name the last Chick-lit novel that made its writer a boat load of cash? Sex and the City? And didn’t that only become a hot selling book after the show of the same name got made? Suddenly people everywhere were asking the questions ‘Wait, it’s a book too?’ and ‘Who the heck is Candace Bushnell?’

I would wager that not many know she also wrote the book that, for some reason, NBC also tried to turn into a television show, Lipstick Jungle. (In that case, I’m sure the book did do way better than the show.)

It isn’t as if the genre won’t sell, it certainly does to people who are hungry for a flirty read that lets them laugh through a fantasy woman’s tragically hilarious trials so they can feel better about their own life. Hell, I felt better about myself just for having written the damn thing, but a best seller that makes a million dollars? Hmmm…not really sure.

Now, that’s not to say that if it doesn’t end up in the Times it won’t make a million dollars. Not strictly. There are many ways to pimp oneself out these days that have nothing to do with the top critic’s gauge of the awesomeness of the novel (although it is awesome, I assure you). Two words my friend -- Social Networking.

There are so many ways to market a story, so many people out there in the virtual world, that it almost seems pointless to go with a standard publishing house and wait the year after acceptance just to get it printed, when I could just hop on over to one of the bajillion self publishing sites, upload the MS and have copies on hundreds of people’s shelves by this holiday season.

Hundreds. Hundreds? Well at roughly $2 profit per sold copy, let’s just do the quick math here. That means (assuming it’s at the very top of the hundreds category) I only have $998, 002 to go. Seventy or so more books and I could be a millionaire! Yippie!

Yeah, the day I croak. Maybe even long after.

The potential for sales does greatly increase with an old school publishing house. But of course the profit decreases. But of course the editing is better. But of course that might mean I have to rewrite the entire thing to what they want it to be. But of course they can sign me for a multi book deal.

Ugh.

Maybe if I want to really make boat loads of cash I should go literal and just build boats. But not some silly, lame canoe. Instead, I bet I could sell a million, $1.00, “Build Your Own Ark” kits to everyone up and down the east coast this week.

They can take 2 copies of my book on board with them when they float away.

Scrabble Games Just Got A Lot More Interesting

The new dictionary is out. Or rather, the codicils to the Merriam-Webster American dictionary have been officially released and I don’t want to sound like a dork or anything but since I don’t really hide it all that well anyway, what the hell, I love when Merriam-Webster appends their tome with additions. It makes me giddy to add even one word to my arsenal let alone fifteen or more at a time. If anyone ever wondered what to get me for a gift think huge, antique, hard cover dictionary (an 1828 first edition would be great, especially if it smells like a 180 year old book).

This year, thanks to popular culture, I can finally add frenemy and staycation as official words. There are others but these two are my favorites at the moment. Their irony of existence pulls at the very strings that attach my heart to my keyboard. Funny, of course MS Word does not yet recognize them, what with that little red squiggle underneath. Let me go ahead and fix that now. Right click, add to dictionary. Ah, that’s better. And I can do it without feeling as if I have added some made up word because they are not. They are real, Webster said so.

Okay truthfully they are made up, completely fabricated in fact but aren’t all words just something someone said once and it caught on? I wonder how many words were even in that originally printed version of the Merriam-Webster’s in 1828 as compared to today’s version. In the past half century alone I imagine the dictionary to have at least doubled due to all the rapidly changing technical terms out there, never mind all that stuff having to do with the Green movement and hip-hop.

Both of these newly contrived words that I love are catchy. Both of these words were flung into the annals of popular culture as meaningful. Both words are what happen when oxymorons get in on in the back seat of their father’s Caddy, while enjoying some Reggaeton, and then produce a love child. In this case, when they say opposites attract they are truly accurate.

Frenemy. A word birthed by the contrasting parents of friend and enemy. Its definition is when someone acts to be a friend although they are in truth an enemy. One might not understand how this word even came to be or what caused it to enter popular speech. Off the top I can remember a Sex and the City episode entitled “Frenemies”, looking it up the episode aired in 2000 but, according to the Wiki on this word, it may have been in print as early as 1959. Way to celebrate your golden birthday by being officially added to the dictionary, frenemy. Way to go!

Then there is staycation. This word, the bastard child of stay and vacation, is possibly the grandest of all oxymorons. When taken literally that is. I have taken plenty of vacations from jobs where I fully intended to do nothing more than enjoy a week at home catching up around the house making scrapbooks or other things I never have time to complete otherwise, its just that someone finally granted this activity with an official name. This one has apparently only been around for six years; just a babe in linguistic terms.

I suppose that attempting to play either of these words in Scrabble will be a challenge if I were to play with my Mom who is a stickler to the official Scrabble dictionary but by next year I could have my very own copy of the shiny new Merriam-Webster edition which shows them plainly in black and white; undisputable as real words to even the most hardened player. Worth fifteen points each in their pure format, I will surely do my best to ensure I land either of them on a triple word score. And hey, if frenemy comes in one fail swoop I get that bonus fifty. Now that’s a score worth vlogging about.

Inspiring

As someone who primarily works from home it is sometimes difficult to find a muse because there are fewer opportunities where I am forced to leave the house and locate stimulation of creativity that just does not exist in my beige carpet and white walls. Over the past week I have sold items from my online shop, wrote a new article on another MySpace musician that should be finalized and published within days, and completed a few new pieces to list online in the coming week. Not too shabby right? Sure all of those things are very exciting, even I will admit to that, but there is no spark in my days right now. I feel no rush of a thrill for doing what it is I love to do. I sit at my keyboard and mutter out loud to no one but myself “blah, blah, blah.” Even though there is no doubt of my busy factor, I feel like a drought has arrived just twenty one days after I boasted that it would never come. Awesome. Perhaps I need this for my brain.

Online surveys have been all over the place lately so not only did I respond to one the other day but shamefully posted it as a bulletin on MySpace just to try something new. Although I thought I could not go any lower, I seriously almost asked someone to tag me in order to have something to post on my blog. Luckily I got my head together enough to determine you all, my fine readers, deserve far more than that. You truly deserve to read something more fulfilling, deeper. I wanted to post something with meaning that would open up a little piece of my soul and let my readers into the part of my brain reserved for the most intimate situations where I use words like incumbent and profess my knowledge of complicated sounding wines like Montepulciano; truly convincing people I actually know what I am talking about.

But it’s all just a big pack of lies; I am nothing more than an illusion. And seriously, what kind of writer starts a sentence with the word but. Or And. Or or.

In an effort to get a little crazy I changed my profile picture (hold me back!) which is the cropped version of this AMAZING artwork I commissioned of Matt and me. In life I talk like a truck driver but in my written words rarely will you find a curse; they are only used to emphatically punctuate my feelings on a subject when I feel there is no other alternative than to include it. So when I tell all of you that Vic is the fucking best you should know that an immediate visit to her shop is in order.

Today the Sex and the City movie opened and tonight is going to be a super fun double feature for Matt and me. We haven’t been to the movies since very likely the last Lord of the Rings opened but tonight our goal is to see Indiana Jones and SATC in what will hopefully not force us to take a mortgage out just to pay for it. In an effort to save a few bucks we plan to arrive with our own snacks. Getting away with this bold of a task requires a lack of guilt and a really big bag. Done and done. I made a new tote bag the other day so I will be able to bring in a sweatshirt (since I always freeze in the movies) and buried within that sweatshirt will be our own snacks. Microwave kettle corn popped at home and placed in a Ziploc container, devil dogs and probably some other delicious snacks will all be smuggled in. Gee, I hope they do not frisk at the movie theaters now like at concerts.

Tomorrow evening we will get together with friends, perhaps play a little Rock Band, perhaps not but food and fun conversation will definitely be involved. Maybe after the end of the weekend the dam of my mind will burst and reveal that I am not as much of a parody as I proclaim to be.