TV's Where It's At

When I was a kid I watched a lot of television. For whatever reasons I abandoned television (most likely going away to college and being more interested in having fun than cooping myself up in my dorm room)and haven't looked back since.

To be fair, I had some legitimate excuses. Sometime around the dawn of the 21st century there was a noticeable lapse in the quality of television series and channels that I had grown up with; Fox being the prime offender when it destroyed "The Simpsons" and began pumping out garbage like "24". Unable to cope with the loss of one of my favorite outlets of original story telling I adapted to watching more movies and became somewhat of a film head.

Flash forward several years and I've got a pretty decent library of useless movie trivia cached in my brain and almost all the movies I want/need to see have been viewed. Unfortunately, the present state of films is in disarray. With the increasing popularity of Michael Bay and the Seltzer/Friedberg movies I am losing interest in what my local cinema has to offer. Don't get me wrong, I still love going to the movies and there are still movies I want to see. Part of my inner most being blames the sudden sour taste in my mouth on this recent summer season for my sudden lack of enthusiasm for films. When the number of movies that I was genuinely excited for can be counted on a single hand you know things are in a rough state.

But to clarify, I'm not a doomsayer who heralds in the end days of cinema like a lot of hyperbolic film school rejects, I recognize that modern film has a lot to offer and just because we are being dragged through the muck of one bad year worth of film doesn't raise any red flags to me that movies are dead. Hell, '09 and '08 were so good that I can accept a bad year or two as it gives me the time to go back and re-watch all those masterpieces.

Still, I need something else to do besides comic books, novels, and video games to feed my imagination. After scrounging around the internet I read several articles detailing how television has become the new Hollywood. With bigger budgets and more focus from screenwriters and famous directors going to peoples' homes with their HD mini theater systems, there has been a clear drive towards moving creative story telling to the small screen.

And why not? The one limiting factor that both works against and for films is their time constraint. Having a built in run time cap can help bring a lot of focus to a story, but it also has a nasty tendency to leave out character and plot exploration which gets jury rigged into a sloppy sequel years later.

Part of the reason I enjoy comics so much is that they tell a very lengthy story over an enormous span of time giving you tons of ups and downs and allowing the writers a lot of maneuverability to develop extremely deep and compelling character arches.

Needless to say I'm going to give my old pal TV another shot. I'm afraid I already missed a lot of good programming, but in the era of box-sets and Netflix I'll be caught up to speed in a matter of weeks. Hopefully with the added knowledge of television, I'll have something else to post on this blog in the future.