Telenirvana

Belated confession: when I was going through Days Of The Week Week here and I sidestepped discussing what Thursday means to me in order to discuss what Thor means to me, I had an ulterior motive. I had wanted to riff on that Thor and Loki and the giants myth for a long time and was staring at a perfect opportunity, and I took it, but I also wanted to avoid an unpleasant truth, namely that I am slavishly devoted to the Thursday Night Comedies on NBC. I am of course old enough to remember the heyday of Must See TV but that was when I was in my very early 20’s and I was just as likely to watch no television of any kind on Thursday night because I was kicking off the weekend debauchery one night early. I honestly believe that the current Thursday sitcom lineup on NBC is vastly superior to whatever aggregated around Friends and Seinfeld on any given season (although ER back then of course kicked the shit out of primetime Leno and The Marriage Baseball Referee put together) but I also am somewhat ashamed that I am now totally middle-aged and thoroughly bourgeois and kicking back on the couch for two hours of corporate programming is one of the highlights of my week.

But this is neither the first nor the last time I’ve used this blog to cop to my own lameness, so there it is. My wife always has Thursdays off so it is kind of nice to have a sort of ritual in place. When I get home on Thursday evenings the two of us can tag-team making our own dinner, feeding the little guy, getting him bathed and ready for bed, and then ensconce ourselves on the couch with dessert and/or wine, sometime during Jeopardy. My wife’s as big a fan of the NBC sitcoms as I am, so there’s really no question as to what we’re going to watch, as opposed to other nights we find ourselves in aimless glass teat intake mode. We sometimes fight about who gets the remote but it’s the exact opposite of the “standard” fight most couple have (assuming that the notion of “standard” which I have, in fact, apprehended from television shows, is correct) – we each try to push the remote into the other person’s hand, because neither of us wants the responsibility for having to find something that both of us want to watch. Each of us wants to be the one saying “I don’t care, let’s watch whatever YOU want.” It’s like two tai chi masters entering the MMA octagon.

So anyway, last night we watched TV. Some stray thoughts along the way:

- My wife and I were in complete agreement that if NBC.com were to sell “Abed and Troy In The Morning” oversized coffee mugs, we would snap them up without a second thought.

- Community and Parks and Rec are actually more consistently entertaining than the better-known Office and 30 Rock. 30 Rock still has flashes of genius that are far and away better than anything else out there, but they are becoming fewer and farther between. The Office is starting to show real signs of suffering from something I like to call the Tribbiani Effect. Yet another thing I could blow out into an entire post, in brief it’s the way that Joey on Friends went from being the guy who didn’t go to college and thus sometimes missed references that are (somewhat douchily) considered common knowledge to most upper-middle-class white kids but certainly had street smarts to spare, to a completely unrealistic broadly-drawn caricature of a clueless actor who was as dumb as a bag of doorknobs and had the impulse control of a five-year-old off his meds. It took a decade, but the writers pushed and pushed and pushed the boundaries of how stupidly Joey could behave until he was a one-note character. Maybe writing 220+ nuanced episodes of tv about the same characters is really hard, maybe they were just giving the audience what test groups told them they wanted, who knows, whatever. It’s just not my cup of tea, as it goes. And the Office is heading down the same path. Michael Scott gets more unbelievable all the time, but the supporting cast is showing symptoms, too. Kevin, for example, started out as kind of socially awkward and maybe a bit of a dullard, but ever since the (admittedly, funny) storyline where Dwight convinced Holly that Kevin was mentally challenged and it took a long time for Kevin to naturally prove otherwise, they’ve gone broader and broader with Kevin acting, in a word, totally retarded. (Fine, two words.) Ah well, nothing good lasts forever. At least, as I said, Community and Parks and Rec are spinning comedy gold.


- At one point there was a commercial for Twilight Saga: New Moon on DVD and that got me going on a rant to my wife about the book series. Which my wife hasn’t read. Nor have I. But lately I’ve been semi-obsessed with the whole Twilight phenomenon, and that’s kind of become a whole internet meme of late, with people knowing full well that Twilight wouldn’t be their cup of tea, but feeling compelled to read it and tweet or blog about it because so many people are so fanatically into it. So I read these blogs and I keep seeing the foregone conclusion that the books are dreadful, but I’ve also learned the surprising fact that it’s not just a story about a bunch of stupid mopey kids, some of whom happen to be vampires and werewolves, but that it’s a story about a textbook abusive relationship (Edward pushes Bella around and constantly tells her he’s fighting the urge to kill her and insults her and generally treats her like crap) which mindlessly presents itself as a romance for the ages. No irony, no introspection, just abductions and death threats which somehow convince an idiot girl that she’s found her soulmate. And the reason this bugs me to rant-imperative levels is because I’m pretty sure I bought my sister (she’s 12) the Twilight box set for Christmas, because she asked for it and at the time I thought it was just harmless (if poorly written) escapist fantasy. Now I feel like I need to have a heart to heart with Sis and inform her that if she ever lets anyone treat her the way that Bella allows herself to be treated, I don’t care how sparkly the guy is, I will come down on him and her both (in different ways of course). Of course this is one of those weird intergenerational circles of life, because I’m now worrying that Sis will emulate Bella the way my dad used to worry that I would emulate the misanthropic rapist anti-hero of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. So I’ve talked myself down to planning to open a dialogue with Sis by asking her what she thinks about the putative love story in Twilight, because I am still open to the possibility that she sees it as trainwreck entertainment rather than a blueprint for her upcoming high school years. Whereas my dad always went straight to assuming the worst and busting out the admonitions.

- Also good on Thursday nights: the new cartoon Archer on FX, which comes on at 10 p.m. That’s convenient in the sense that it’s not competing with any of the NBC stuff (and I am apparently the Last Person On Earth Who Doesn’t Have a DVR) but it’s also inconvenient because, come on, 10 p.m.? That’s time for all good bourgees to be getting ready for bed on a Thursday night.