TV by Politics

I came across this post from Entertainment Weekly today about the TV preferences of Liberal Democrats and Conservative Republicans (categorically), and it made me chuckle. Not that it's any of your business, but I would consider myself a moderate Republican, right-leaning on fiscal and defense policies, and left-leaning on education and many social issues.

Apparently, though, I watch TV like a liberal Democrat. According to the survey cited by EW.com, left-wing Democrats tend to like "'sarcastic' media-savvy comedies and morally murky antiheroes", while these shows tend to turn off right-wing Republicans, who generally favor "serious work-centered shows" and reality shows instead. EW doesn't provide a link to the Experian-Simmons survey in the post, but I would also be curious to know the ages, income, and education levels of the participants. The categories are pretty black and white, but it's still interesting nonetheless to see where one's preferences tend toward.

Among the shows used as examples of Democrat-friendly fare are 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation (two of my favs!), The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Treme, The Office, and even Parenthood; while the examples of Republican-friendly shows ranged from The Deadliest Catch (one of my parents' personal favorites) to Dancing with the Stars to crime procedurals like NCIS and Castle.

My preferences land mostly with the Dems on this one. Give me something I can bite into: a sarcastic comedy sans laugh track, or a drama with lots of gray areas. A good anti-hero has more to teach me about the life, humanity, and the Divine than a boring archetype, anyway. That's what art should do, right? I would like to note, though, that like my Republican counterparts, I have a very strong dislike of Treme, Weeds, and The Big C, which can only be explained as an aversion to premium cable shows that make me feel icky.

Out of curiosity, reader, where do you land on the not-so broad spectrum painted out for us here?

When Bad Writing Happens to Good Shows

I recently had a conversation with a friend about the departure of Aaron Sorkin at the end of season four of The West Wing, midway through the Zoey Bartlett kidnapping. Although we're both diehard WW fans (he's in love with Ainsley Hayes; I heart Josh "Lemon" Lyman), we both agreed that it wasn't the show at it's best. For a show that made political action narrative action, the kidnapping plot seemed out of place: a soapy, emotionally manipulative way for the show to scoop up ratings as the show was starting to lose viewers (Rob Lowe left that season, and it dropped 5 million viewers as a result! Dear Rob Lowe, don't ever leave Parks and Recreation. Thanks).

Not that it wasn't fun to watch. It totally was! It was just...wrong for that show.

So that got me thinking about other great shows that suffered the occasional writing misstep. I'm not talking about shows that are already pretty bad, like One Tree Hill and Grey's Anatomy. Bad writing happening to good shows is a special kind of bad writing because it's only bad due to the fact that it's weirdly affecting a good show. Here are some classics:

5. "Jose Chung's Doomsday Defense" on Millennium, season 2. It pains me a little to include this because Millennium was such a great show, and I would venture to guess that many of you have never seen it. Let me just remind you that this post is about bad writing happening to good shows, so you really should watch it if you haven't seen Chris Carter's Millennium. It's freaking cool. That said, its second season had some bumps. I have absolutely no problem with genre shows oscillating between episodic and serial episodes to try to build an audience of geeks. In fact, I welcome it. But I really hated those Jose Chung episodes that Darin Morgan and Chris Carter felt like we needed to see on this and their other big show The X-Files. On Millennium, it halted the movement of the season by altering the ambiance in a distracting and self-indulgent way. It wasn't quite as dramatically jarring on The X-Files, where the Jose Chung episode took place during the unsteady first season of the show, but it wasn't exactly a shining moment either. If you watch Millennium, as per my sage advice, you won't miss anything if you skip over this particular episode.

4. Scrubs: The New Class, seasons 8 and 9. This was a simple case of a great show refusing to go out on a high note, and it was not entirely the fault of the showrunners. Scrubs found itself perpetually in danger of cancellation, and at the end of its seventh season, NBC finally pulled the plug. Both creator Bill Lawrence and star Zach Braff said that the seventh would be its last season. Then, through a series of weird happenings and threatened litigation, ABC ended up picking it up for an eighth season of 18 episodes, in which most of the leads would return at least on a temporary basis. The seventh season finale was pitch perfect as a finale, with JD imagining a happy ever after with Eliot, as he left the hospital. Bringing back these characters for another two seasons, along with new characters that were funny enough, but not the cast we had grown to love, felt like an unwelcome, two-year epilogue. As far as I'm concerned, Scrubs ended on NBC.

3. Lorelai and Christopher hook up and get married on Gilmore Girls, seasons 6 (finale) and 7. Okay, I get why Luke and Lorelai had to break up in season 6. They had legitimate communication problems that centered on Luke being a curmudgeon. What I didn't care for, however, was Lorelai immediately jumping into bed with Christopher the same night she and Luke broke up. Lorelai didn't always make great decisions, but it was a stretch to believe that she'd do something that self-destructive at the expense of slow-moving Luke potentially instigating a reconciliation. I just don't buy it, and I think this was the moment that the usually delightful Girls went a little off the rails. At the time it felt like a big middle finger from departing creator Amy Sherman-Palladino, and it still feels that way.

2. The Mexico foray on Big Love, season four. I'm still not sure how we got to that point on Big Love. From the first season, the elements of the show that frequently proved the most compelling centered on Bill and the wives, their relationships with one another and with the family. Whenever the show drifted too far outside of this nucleus, particularly with Bill's random business ventures and all the compound drama, it lost some of its initial zing. I think this is what happened during season four: it just seemed like Bill was juggling too many balls in the air, and while this was a recurring theme throughout the show (e.g., overworked, stressed out, power-hungry Bill), for the whole of this season, I felt like I was being overworked as a viewer. We should have known something was going to be off this season, when the premiere gave us a literally frozen Roman Grant being transported to the Henricksen's new casino. WTH?? The heights of this season's weirdness, though, came when Bill drove to Mexico to rescue his kidnapped eldest son, crazycakes mother, and SOB of a father, culminating in a bizarre standoff with one of the ruling FLDS clans, in which Lois cuts off a dude's hand. Season five was thankfully better.

1. The Landry-Tyra murder plot on Friday Night Lights, season 2. Ah, season two, the season otherwise known as the season that FNL fans warn their FNL-virgin friends about before they start watching. For the most part, the season was just...off, and the murder plot was a microcosm of where it went wrong. FNL was at the height of its creative powers when characters were allowed to develop through everyday situations. The forced intensity of a murder was too sensational, too unreal to happen to our characters in Dillon. It remains the quintessential example of bad writing happening to a good, nay, great show.

Honorable Mention: Mr. Eko on LOST; the "Jose Chung's From Outer Space" episode of The X-Files (see above); the will they or won't they ridiculata with Joey and Rachel on Friends.

Shows I'm Most Thankful For

AOL TV did a list of shows they're most thankful for this year (spoiler: their choices are awesome), and it got me thinking about my favorite shows still on air. I've spilled much ink (figuratively speaking -- it's a blog, right) on my sadness about the departure of three of my three favorite shows in the last year and a half (in death march order: LOST, Big Love, and Friday Night Lights).

Even though two out of three of those weren't surprises, it still stings to lose a favorite. One of the things I love about a good show is the way you're allowed to get invested in characters for several years, as opposed to just a couple of hours in a movie. Friday Night Lights, in particular, told lots of stories, but held true to whom these people were throughout. I feel privy to a large chunk of Coach and Tami's story, not just an event in their "lives".

Anyway, with the departure of those favorites, I've begun to revel in the new stories to be told, compiling a new list of favorites. So here's a list of the shows I'm most thankful for this year.

1. Parks and Recreation. I chose this one over the dramatic and consequential Homeland because I've just fallen head over heels for Leslie and the gang over the last two and a half seasons. The show's innate optimism makes the characters easy to care about, which is, believe it or not, not always easy to do on a comedy show, where it's easy for characters to turn into cartoon characters. Usually I'm a fan of serialized drama shows and episodic sitcoms, but Parks and Rec works in both cases. The six-episode build up to the Harvest Festival at the beginning of last season was note-for-note perfect, combining the best elements of stand alone and continuing storylines. I can't imagine liking a comedy show much more than I like this sweet little show.

2. Homeland. Man, oh man. This show knows what it's doing! When a show commands, no, demands your undivided attention throughout, you're either stuck with a complicated plot-driven show, where anything you missed while you were surfing the internet, cooking dinner, or writing a paper (my life) could turn into a confusing hour for you, or you're blessed with a show that has actors who know how to make you question them, and think about what they might possibly be thinking. This is what I love about this show: the layers. So. Many. Layers. The episode "The Weekend" is the first A+ episode of any show this season because of the web it wove in all three storylines. TV doesn't get much better than that episode, folks.

3. Southland. Southland's long hiatuses kill me, yo! Don't get me wrong: I'm grateful that when NBC gave this show the old premature farewell, TNT rode in on a white horse to rescue it from cancellation obscurity. But, man, these six-episode seasons are not enough. In all fairness, I'm being a little dramatic: season three had ten episodes. My point, however, is that shows like this get relegated to shortened seasons on cable, while shows like Law and Order: SVU make 24 episodes a year of the same, predictable formula. It's sad. Southland stands on its own feet, though, even without many episodes in which to do so. "Code 4" from last season was another perfect episode of TV. [SPOILER!] Nate's death was one of the most disturbing TV deaths in a long time, in part because it was based on a real incident, but also because of the way it was so beautifully written. Southland is consistently shockingly good, and I would take it to the mat for this show being one of the most quality dramas on TV.

4. Happy Endings. This was another comedy that came out of left field, but has delivered hilarious stuff every week. There's no question about the talent-level of the cast. The most surprising thing about it, though, is how funny it was from the beginning because of how well the cast managed to build a believable chemistry. Ensemble comedies rise and fall on the chemistry of the cast, since comedy relies so much on timing, and this cast figured out pretty early how to work well off of each other. The result is that it's only a few episodes into its second season (coming off of a short first season), and it's already sharp. I'm glad ABC has stuck by it this season (where the H is Cougar Town, ABC??), and I really hope it's able to build and maintain an audience.

5. Fringe. There's some stank talk of season four being Fringe's final season, but I don't wanna talk about it. As it now stands, Fringe has solidified itself as one of the most compelling serial dramas on TV, combining excellent characterization with an X-Files-worthy mythology and philosophical depth (don't believe me on the last point? I dare you to read NT Wright's Surprised By Hope without thinking of Fringe. Chills). To add to all the goodness, it's such a treat to watch Anna Torv and John Noble act every week. It's truly a Lauren Graham on Gilmore Girls-sized tragedy that Torv hasn't been recognized for her work on this show because of its genre. Oh well, though, while I do find it discouraging that this show hasn't managed to build the mammoth-sized audience that The X-Files once had, I have to admit that if it was too populous, I probably wouldn't root for it as hard. For now, I'm thankful to be one of the devoted few that adores it.

6. Parenthood. I thought for a while that Parenthood was going to be FNL's successor in my affections. It hasn't turned out that way, mostly because sometimes the plots seem a little contrived sometimes, but I've got to give it up for this show nonetheless. Like with Fringe, I also find it slightly depressing that a show this good could have a difficult time finding an audience. All of these actors are so good at what they do that I'm not really bothered by its emotionally-driven storylines. It's managed to not let itself become a soap because the acting is so good, and because everyone has such excellent chemistry.

7. Cougar Town. The cul-de-sac crew has gotten lots of critical love, but, again, not a lot of viewer love (I'm sensing a theme on my list, here), which is a real shame because along with Parks and Rec and Happy Endings, Cougar Town is one of those shows that makes me laugh out loud every single week. What started as a tongue-in-cheek Courtney Cox vehicle quickly became a great ensemble comedy that works like a lady version of Scrubs, and as far as I can tell it's only detractor is a silly title that no one who watches the show cares about anymore. It's terrible that ABC hasn't announced a return date for the comedy, but I'm sure that when it finally does return for its third season, it will be just as delightful as ever.

8. Once Upon a Time. I'm still settling into this show and where it's going, but I've been loving the ride so far. A friend of mine pointed out that the show would probably be more compelling if the "mythology" wasn't so well-versed in the Disney versions of the fairy tales, but I understand the impulse to make it more accessible to a large audience at such an early stage in its "life". It would be really cool to see it go darker by doffing its Disney chains and diving into the real fairy tales, but given the fact that it's an ABC show, I'm not holding my breath. For now, I'm delighting in a fun, creative show with fantastic potential, come what may.

9. The Vampire Diaries. You guys, I LOVE The Vampire Diaries. It doesn't take itself too seriously, but it still manages to keep the stakes high every single week. Vicki's shocking death in season one was enough to keep me on my toes for that season, and it's been really fun to admit that the tension hasn't really died for me. Never a dull moment in Mystic Falls!

10. American Idol. If I'm being honest with myself, Idol is so much more than my tenth favorite show. It's definitely my favorite reality show on TV, and on top of that, the show I look forward to the most in the month leading up to its premiere. I love going along with its shenanigans, but still playing "spot the producer conspiracy" every season. It will be hard, nay, impossible for Idol to ever live up to season 7 again (the Davids + Carly Smithson + Brooke White [whose 'High Hopes and Heartbreaks' record is a gem! A real grower!] + Michael Johns + Jason Castro + the best theme nights Idol has ever managed to pull off + the introduction of contestants playing instruments on the main stage = DREAM SEASON), but as long as it producers at least one or two deserving underdogs per season (I'm lookin' at you, Haley Reinhart), I will continue to enjoy and obsess over it. Whoop!

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

'Prime Suspect' Not Canceled Yet

According to AOL, NBC is shutting down production on their great freshman drama Prime Suspect. This doesn't necessarily mean it's canceled, but the writing's pretty much on the wall. It kind of looks like NBC is waiting to see if any of their midseason replacement shows (especially Smash and Awake -- which both look awesome) will stick before they officially pull the plug, but they're not giving a lot of reason to be optimistic about Prime Suspect's chances.

This news makes me cross.