Everything I know, I learned from television

Closure

Have you ever felt the need to finish a bad movie or a bad book, just to see how it ends? Sure, who hasn’t, right? I mean, you feel like you’re being tortured for a while, but then you have a nice sense of accomplishment when it’s finally over!

Unfortunately, when it’s a tv show, you have to spend hours and hours of viewing time before you reach to relief of a series finale. (And aren’t you relieved when a show you have mixed feelings about is canceled? Now the decision’s been made for you! The network will no longer allow you to watch this crap!)

Some of these shows started out pretty good, then went bad (or just boringly repetitive when they ran out of storylines). Some were always horrible. Here is a list of shows I’ve watched in entirety, purely for closure:

Rescue Me (the first season is great, the next few were decent, the last couple of seasons were pretty bad. Any story with the firefighters was usually pretty good; the family storylines were unbearable.)

Nip/Tuck (I loved this show for the first few seasons. Now I look back and I have no idea what I was thinking. By the last season, I hated it, but I had to see it end. For the longest time, I had the last 3 episodes on my DVR and I could not bring myself to watch them. Finally, I forced myself to. Closure!)

Entourage (fairly amusing for a few seasons. The last few were pretty dull though.)

How to Make it in America (always boring, but I think it started out kinda funny… it was supposed to be a comedy, right? If you have to ask that, it’s probably a bad sign. Well, it managed to get worse!)

Hung (first season kinda funny, went downhill from there.)

Lipstick Jungle/Cashmere Mafia (these were both Sex and the City ripoffs that I watched purely because I was afraid that they would be “the next big thing” and I would be the only person out of the loop. I was wrong, and I suffered through every episode of both these horrible shows.)

And now, some truly awful reality shows. I don’t recall if I ever enjoyed these shows at all, but once I started watching, I had to watch EVERY SINGLE EPISODE due to OCD or something. Here they are:

Scott Baio is 45 and Single

Scott Baio is 46 and Pregnant (it’s a medical miracle!)

Some other show I’ve forgotten the name of where Scott Baio coaches a bunch of other actors who are trying to make comebacks. It was on VH1. Anyone else remember it?

My Fair Brady (about a winner of America’s Next Top Model who married Christopher Knight, of Peter Brady fame. This was a cautionary tale about what happens when you had a role on a hugely popular television show but don’t receive royalties from it.)

Celebrity Rehab (I did not see every season of this. But the one season I watched, I had to watch until the end. I don’t know how this show is legal, because the premise alone proves that everyone was high was when they signed up for it.)

Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew

My Super Sweet 16 (don’t know why I had to watch all the episodes, since they were all exactly the same.)

Engaged and Underage

Watch What Happens Live (I hate this show and I am watching it right now. Why am I doing this??)

Shows that got so bad I actually managed to quit watching them:

Grey’s Anatomy

The Office

Jersey Shore (I hung in there for the first 4 seasons!)

Anyone else have any bad shows to share?

polinapel

I'm a huge fan of Frasier. I am 18 years old so i'm not "that" young but i've been watching it since I was 15 years old. How old are you?

Hey! Glad to find another Frasier fan:) I’m in my late 20s.

Ten Tropes We Never Want to See on TV Ever Again

On Netflix Instant, lately, I’ve been catching up on the last seasons of… Frasier. For a show that ran for 11 seasons of basically the same jokes, it’s actually pretty funny. But I have to ask:

1 - Am I the youngest viewer of this show? I’ve never met anyone other than my parents who watched it. If there is anyone out there who watched it, let me know!

2 - If there are any Frasier viewers out there, did you know that the 10th season involved a few episodes about Niles being hospitalized for a heart condition? And the 11th includes a whole arc about Maris (yes, never-seen Maris, who is not present in these episodes either) on trial for murdering her Argentine polo player boyfriend and Niles being followed by the press due to his former marriage to her? This show took a weird turn. But it’s still good.

People tell you who they are but we ignore it, because we want them to be who we want them to be.

Don Draper, Mad Men (via rejoycee)

The photographer will ask you what kind of music you want to play during the shoot. Remember that whatever you choose will be blasted through the loft and heard by an entire crew of people who are all so cool that the Board of Ed officially closed school.

Just murmur, “Hip-hop,” or make up the name of a hipster-sounding band and then act superior when they’ve never heard of it. “Do you guys have any Asphalt of Pinking? [disappointed] Really? [shrug] Whatever you want, then.”

Sometimes they ask if you want to hook up your iPod for background music. Do not do this. It’s a trap. They’ll put it on shuffle, and no matter how much Beastie Boys or Velvet Underground you have on there, the following four tracks will play in a row: “We’d Like to Thank You Herbert Hoover” from Annie, “Hold On,” by Wilson Phillips, “That’s What Friends Are For,” Various Artists, and “We’d Like to Thank You Herbert Hoover” from Annie.

Tina Fey, Bossypants

(This part of the book refers to photo shoots. After reading this, I started asking myself every time I listened to my iPod, “would this song be acceptable or embarrassing if I were on a photo shoot and it played over the speaker?” Usually the answer is: embarrassing.)

Kenneth: How was substitute teaching sir?
Pete: Just like Lean On Me, in that a guy who looks like Morgan Freeman swung a bat at me.

30 Rock

The problem with dramadies is that they are often neither funny nor dramatic.

And they’re self so righteous. I never pissed my pants. This man Rutledge killed a man with a motorboat. You know what gets you over something like that? Drinking!

Roger Sterling, Mad Men

Comedy is not something you can really back away from. It’s like being in prison for several years. If you try to come out of it and do something else, you don’t have any credibility or value in the marketplace.

Louis C.K, Entertainment Weekly

Link to full article here

In 1991, five years after the end of [Dallas], Larry Hagman happened to attend an OPEC conference in Vienna, and he was asked what the price of oil should be. He quoted a figure from one of the episodes, $36 a barrel, and the participants went wild with joy. The real oilmen respected him as one of their own.

He got hate mail for propping up the price of imported oil.

Lazar, Allan; Karlan, Dan; Salter, Jeremy (2009-10-13). The 101 Most Influential People Who Never Lived

TV was saying it’s what the astronauts drank on their way to the moon. You drink it, well… You could be an astronaut too.

All summer long, that shit was all the Hare kids drank, Tang with breakfast, Tang with lunch, Tang when they woke up scared in the middle of the night. What do you think they grew up to be?

Stevedores.

Frank Sobotka, The Wire

Last time I taught, I was like Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society—by which I mean I got fired.

Pete Hornberger, 30 Rock

TV Laws

If you are a “free spirit,” chances are that you have a hippie name to match. Parents just have a sense about these things when they’re naming their kids!

Survey

If you could only watch one tv show over and over for the rest of your life (I guess you should assume that you’re on a deserted island with only one set of DVDs, a DVD player, and (somehow) an electrical outlet?), what show would it be?