Urban Arson

Some people jokingly claim to have been raised by television but in my case it’s the stone cold truth. I was one of those kids who would sit 2 feet from the screen absorbing every pixel as if they were going to tell me the secret of life. In many ways those pixels did give me life lessons which I still adhere to today. I got to see first hand the mistakes of television characters while not having to actually go through the experiences myself. You can experience an entire lifestyle without ever having to leave the comfort of your living room.

I consider television, even more than film (when done right) to be the highest form of art. It’s a collaborative art form which combines some of the greatest artists and minds this world has to offer, all of them coming together to put out 12 to 24 contiguous episodes in a 4 month period which each have a beginning, middle and an end, talk about pressure. 

 Television is fascinating. It wasn’t until I turned about twenty that I realized just how much it has shaped me. Everything from F-Troop to I Love Lucy, Get Smart, The Brady Bunch and The Wonder Years impacted me significantly. I was raised by the television, or Bill as I used to call him. Nick at Nite and I were best friends. My family moved a lot when I was a kid and my home life was dreadful, I didn’t have any friends at my new schools so Nick at Nite was my only constant, the way to escape the monotony. I’d sit in a dark room staring at that glowing box for hours until I konked out around 02:00 Just before the infomercials came on. This was a nightly occurrence, weekends, holidays, birthdays, and school nights. It didn’t matter what was going on George Jefferson was going to get pissed at someone and take it out on his beloved Weezy; Carl Winslow was gonna tell Steve Urkel to go home after he destroyed the kitchen with his homemade tornado machine; and Bob Newhart was going to crack some jokes so dry they wouldn’t get wet in a swimming pool. It was those inevitabilities that kept me sane during the nightmare that were my 1990’s.

To this day I watch more television than anyone I know, I’ve seen everything on the big four networks (except CBS because I don’t need 15 flavors of CSI (The Unit rules because it’s Mamet)), and everything on the cable networks. On Showtime alone I can say that Californication is the rebirth of Duchovny as someone other than Fox Mulder, Dexter is freaking genius, and Weeds is perfection. I could go down the list of some shows that I think are awesome, so I’ll do that now.

In alphabetical order, shows which have aired within the last 10 years and longer in some cases:

• 24
• 30 Rock
• Ally McBeal
• Andy Barker P.I.
• Arrested Development
• Band of Brothers
• Battlestar Galactica
• Big Love
• Boston Legal
• Brothers and Sisters
• Burn Notice
• Californication
• Chappelle’s Show
• Cowboy Bebop
• Crossing Jordan
• CSI (The Tarantino Episode(s))
• Curb Your Enthusiasm
• Daria
• Deadwood
• Dexter
• Eli Stone
• Entourage
• Eureka
• Everybody Hates Chris
• Extras
• Family Guy
• Felicity
• Firefly
• Flight of the Conchords
• Freaks and Geeks
• Friday Night Lights
• Fringe
• Futurama
• Generation Kill
• Grey’s Anatomy
• Heat Vision and Jack
• Hell’s Kitchen US
• Heroes
• House
• It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
• Jericho
• John Adams
• Late Night With Conan O’Brien
• Life
• Little Britain USA
• Lost
• Mad Men
• Merlin (2008)
• Mind of Mencia
• MissGuided
• Monk
• Mr. Show
• My So-Called Life
• MythBusters
• Numb3rs
• Oz
• Penn & Teller Bullshit!
• Prison Break
• Project Runway
• Psych
• Pushing Daisies
• Reaper
• Reno 911!
• Robot Chicken
• Rome
• Samurai Champloo
• Samurai Jack
• Saturday Night Live
• Scrubs
• Seinfeld
• Six Feet Under
• Skins
• South Park
• Spaced
• Stargate Atlantis
• Stargate SG-1
• That 70s Show
• The 4400
• The Adventures of Pete and Pete
• The Black Donnellys
• The Boondocks
• The Closer
• The Dead Zone
• The Drew Carey Show
• The Evidence
• The Eyes of Nye
• The Fixer
• The IT Crowd
• The Last Enemy
• The Mole (US)
• The Office (UK)
• The Office (US)
• The Real Wedding Crashers
• The Riches
• The Sarah Silverman Program
• The Simpsons
• The Tonight Show with Jay Leno
• The Twilight Zone Complete 156 Episodes 
• The Unit
• The Venture Brothers
• The Wire
• The Wonder Years
• The X-Files
• Tin Man
• True Blood
• Twin Peaks
• Ugly Betty
• Undeclared
• Unhitched
• Veronica Mars
• Weeds

This entry was posted on Friday, January 2nd, 2009 at 13:52:59 and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.