Monday, May 7, 2012

My New Love

It is nigh on impossible to get me to start watching a new television show. It took an entire season for my best friend to convince me to watch Alias and it took YEARS for me to finally sit down and watch The West Wing, which is bar none, my favorite show ever, in its entirety and from the beginning. Part of this stems from my prevailing television abandonment issues. I became convinced, at a fairly young age, actually, that if I were to fully invest in a new show from its infancy and then happen to fall in love with it, it would be summarily canceled. Case in point, Rags to Riches, which may, in retrospect, be the most awful thing ever to happen to music and acting, but when I was eleven, represented the pinnacle of television achievement. I loved it. It was canceled. This happened to me several times over the years. I would discover something. It would be AWESOME. Networks would cancel it. When Alias was ending, to much wailing a gnashing of teeth at my abode, I knew that I had to find something new. Hence Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Look, I know that a lot of people thought it was relatively horrible. But I also know a bunch of people who LOVED it. I was one of those people. And I got all caught up and invested in the characters and, of course, it's canceled. Which sucked, but I guess I should at least be thankful that they knew it was happening and wrapped up the ending in a nice little package. I also fell head over heels for Pushing Daisies. Which had TWO WHOLE SEASONS. Okay, not really. There were two seasons. Sort of. It was on sporadically at best. Anyway. These and many other events in my television past have made me extremely wary of anything new. Which is why when daytime shows were being absolutely flooded with promos for a new ABC show three years ago, I studiously ignored it. No matter how adorable it looked. And so, into my world came Castle. I knew it was there. I knew it was starting. But it was a mid-season replacement, which can mean it's gonna go huge and be awesome. It can also mean it's gonna suck and last for twelve episodes as a filler until the fall season starts. It was also fortuitous that three years ago, almost EXACTLY when the show was starting was when I was making my first foray back into community theater in several years. So, it was easy enough for me to dismiss it with, "Well, I probably won't be around to watch it anyway." And I guess to be honest, a lot of the time, I wasn't. And even though the promos still danced adorably through General Hospital commercial breaks, I didn't watch. Which brings me to the end of January. I had just finished my run of Pirates of Penzance and had the first completely free weekend I had had in MONTHS. Which was great. Except for the fact that I had absolutely nothing to do. So on Friday, as I wandered through Target, I saw a display with the Castle Season One DVDs. And they were something like $20. So, I figured it couldn't hurt. When you think about it, twenty dollars is pretty cheap for a weekend of entertainment. Plus, if it turned out to be awesome, there were two more seasons on DVD waiting for me AND the current season. And, for real, y'all. I am in LOVE. It is one of the cutest shows EVER. And also, Nathan Fillion. Which rocks. I've had a thing for him since he was Joey Buchanan on One Life to Live when I was in college. It's a cop/detective show. Which usually, other than Law & Order: SVU, I avoid like the plague. Actually, there are things about it that remind me very much of SVU. It's certainly, as Buffy would say, "dark and twisty" from time to time. But where SVU is, at heart, a procedural and is always heavy and actually kind of dismal, Castle is delightfully funny. There are a couple of scenes that I have saved on my YouTube favorites that I can watch over and over and still laugh out loud. Every. Single. Time. It gets compared with Bones quite a bit, but I'm old-school and it feels like there's much more in common with Moonlighting and Remington Steele. It brings the banter. And the people in it are just ridiculously attractive. And it makes references to the late, much-lamented Firefly all the time. I'm pretty excited about tonight, which is the season finale. And by "pretty excited", I mean REALLY REALLY SUPER EXCITED OMG!!!!!!111!!! I mean, the promo at the end of last week pretty much showed Beckett (awesome lady police detective) DIVING for Castle's face, in particular the mouth part of his face. With the mouth part of her face. Castle being Nathan Fillion's character, who is a best-selling mystery writer who shadows Beckett for research for his books. And also because they are TOTALLY IN LOVE WITH EACH OTHER. Anyway, the point is, this show is awesome. You should be watching it. Tonight. 10/9 Central. ABC. Or get thee to a Target/WalMart/Best Buy and buy those DVDs. Or watch on ABC.com.. And if you hear shrieks of joy or mournful wailing coming from central New Jersey in that hour? It's me. And I'm sorry for disturbing your peaceful evening.

Thursday, February 16, 2012

Love in the Afternoon: Strange and Wondrous Joy

Okay, so at some point, I am going to discuss the state of soapdom as a whole. I have simply tons to say about ABC Daytime, the cancellations, the possible cancellation, the returns and (sobs) the leavings. BUT, before that, I need to start on this. I am 100% reinvested in General Hospital, which, again, I'm going to get into later, but for now--and this could fail at any moment because I am sporadic if nothing else--I am going to try to give a daily recap-type entry on what went down. However, my dear friend, Anne Marie, is allergic to commercials or something, so so she always watches a day behind. So just to be safe I'm going TWO days behind. I had thought about starting when I started watching on a daily basis again, which was the Monday after OLTL ended. But it was just...awful. The worst I've ever seen the damn show in 30+ years of watching. I mean excruciating, y'all. Even at the worst it had ever been, I had been able to watch while spewing hatred and vitriol. But this shit was just boring. And for a soap there's nothing worse. Hence starting this business with two days ago. Valentine's Day. Which, considering that this is, in fact, A SOAP OPERA, should be a big deal. But let's be real...for the last decade or so, "big deal" on this mess of a show means a mob shootout or maybe some kind of an inferno. Which is just offensive. I mean IT IS VALENTINE'S DAY!!! And considering that my very favorite thing that ever happened on GH--and I mean EVER-- happened on Valentine's Day. Twenty-one years ago to be exact. It involved Anna and Robert, which means that it was always a win for me whatever happened. And what happened was that their relationship, eternally at a low simmer, was ratcheted up to a rolling boil. Specifically, Anna used her stockings to tie Robert to a column in his penthouse, then she dumped ice water on him and left him, her revenge for him calling her a 'frump'. It was hilarious. It was unexpected. And most importantly, it was dead sexy. Which brings me to Tuesday. The last time I watched the show with interest was the day that Sonny and Brenda got married. The last time I watched it with JOY was the day Robin and Patrick got married. So, despite the fact that everything that's happening is the lead up to (and this subject is probably gonna get its own EPIC post) Kimberly McCullough's--and her character, Robin's--exit from the show and the role she has played SINCE SHE WAS SEVEN, I must admit to feeling complete and utter giddiness on Tuesday. Because Anna, my beloved and adored favorite character ever, is back. Y'all, I love her so much. I love her so much that even the fact that a portion of the show involved Jason and Sam and his stupid, broken brain didn't make me have complete and utter rage. Granted I only paid attention to it because it is kinda dovetailed into the Robin story, but usually I want to throw things when Jason and Sam are onscreen. And in other parts of the show, Dante and Lulu, who I don't dislike at all, but in whom I'm not really invested, were super cute. But at the Scorpio-Drake house, things were so unbelievably cute that I almost can't process it. Patrick and Emma make a trail of Hershey's Kisses to the front door. And can I just say Emma is the second cutest kid ever? And she's only second because her mother was THE cutest kid ever. I mean for goodness' sake...Emma pronounced it "ValentiMe's". So. Damn. Adorable. And of course, on the other side of the door is Anna. And the pure, and seemingly REAL, happiness that the two actresses show when they see each other...just suffice it to say, I was crying five minutes into the show. And then there was Anna and Emma. I guess it should come as no surprise that the mother who was most adorably real with her onscreen child would be equally adorable with her onscreen grandchild. And, SHOCKER, despite the fact that it has seemed for these many years that the morons in charge at ABC Daytime think that all the viewers want is young characters doing young things, my favorite character interacting with her granddaughter was sublime. So, in short, despite the fact that other things that may have sucked a little happened on Tuesday, the approximately none minutes that Anna was onscreen more than made up for it. And, yeah...I cried. More than once. Sue me. I know that there's no way this ends happily. It just...can't. But oh, but it was lovely while it was happening.