Pushing Paper and Chucking Rocks
Posted by Rey
This sort of thing happens all the time. Billions of light years from earth some white dwarf of a star finally collapses, its immense gravity and mass inverting until it forms a singularity in space, pulling all things, including light, into itself. These singularities, popularly known as Black Holes, remain distinctly unobserved by people except for the part of my home where a singularity resides inside a thirty two inch flickering box on top of an entertainment center.
Just about every day my wife and I are irresistibly drawn to our living room. We try to do other things, live life like always, maybe get to sleep at a decent hour but then beckons the Box.
Monday: Heroes, Journeyman, Prison break, Chuck; Tuesdays: NCIS, The Unit, Law & Order: SVU; Wednesdays: Pushing Daisies, Life, Bionic Woman; Thursdays: Ugly Betty, The Office, 30 Rock, Scrubs, Without A Trace; and Fridays: Ghost Whisperer, Numbers, Star Gate Atlantis. Worst these aren’t even all the shows that we watch: 24,
But out of all of these four just stand out as simply fantastic, specifically drawing all our attention: The Office, Chuck, Pushing Daisies and 30 Rock.
What Are They About.
The Office is a mockumentary on the life an times within a Pennsylvanian Paper company.
Chuck, part of Buy More’s
Nerd Herd is also a super-secret intelligence repository making him both the most dangerous (and powerful) asset to the U.S. Government and every Geek’s dream come true.
Pushing Daisies is a modern day fantasy about a boy who (so far inexplicably) has the power to give life to the dead, winds up doing so to his long lost love and now goes on private eye investigations with her and his friend Chi McBride, the knitting P.I. Lastly
30 Rock is about life behind the making of a live Saturday night sketch show in the NBC offices at 30 Rockefeller Center.
Why I Love Them.
30 Rock repeatedly pushes the humor envelope at points broaching a subject that I don’t know how they’re going to be funny doing and yet they manage it. Admittedly sometimes its done in a really heavy handed way (as in making terrorism commentary while having someone doing the Re-Run dance mid-screen: its funny but only because the one scene is distractingly funny—not like when they actually write the story into the script and play out the American fears of terrorism as
Tina Fey is witnessing what seems to be terrorists in training).
Pushing Daisies’ story is amazingly rich and smart and dorky and funny and poignant and heart wrenching all at the same time (that last bit was so scoboco of me). The fact that the writers actually thought out reasons for why the characters like what they do, or even what they enjoy to smell, shows the depth they’re willing to go with these characters—not just your regular TV two dimensional template people.
The Office has just been going solid for a while now, firmly established on the great run from the British Office. The characters are so well rounded that sometimes—embarrassingly enough—I dream about them.
Chuck may just be an all out Geek fest on my part. Maybe I find the lead actress adorable, maybe I love the Hispanic side-kick, maybe I clap every time Adam Baldwin shows up on TV, maybe I love all the geek references or maybe its just about time that a show wound up not taking itself so seriously and yet really highlighting all of that awkwardness that comes with post-college life when reality comes crashing into all of our expectations.
2 Responses to “Pushing Paper and Chucking Rocks”
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November 24th, 2007 at 10:15 am
Not that you need something else to watch on Mondays, but have you dropped HIMYM? And no Simpsons or Family Guy on Sunday?
I’m surprised to see Bionic Woman listed; I thought I was the only one giving it a chance. It has been getting better, and it cracks me up when they try too hard to be Alias. It has its moments though. Favorite quote: “How’s your British accent?”
Reaper’s another show you’d like. It’s Chuck meets Buffy meets Ghostbusters. The first few episodes were a little formulaic and one-shotty, but now they’re starting to break formula and develop the mythos.
For some reason I didn’t realize Morgan was hispanic until his boss SAID it in that one episode. Now I see the name “Joshua Gomez” in the credits and think, “duh”.
The Office is great. My boss loves that show and was hanging out in my office for like 20 minutes talking about old episodes the other day. They’ve really been on point this season and that last episode until who-knows-when left me wanting more. I love Michael’s irrational dislike of Toby like when he shoves his tray while Toby’s trying to connect and have a heartfelt conversation. It’s great when Toby gets to crack up later while the board is reading about “that Ryan woman” and how she’s “hot in a different way” in Mike’s journal.
I think you’d also dig Supernatural; it’s a solid X-files/Buffy/Hardy Boys hybrid. Thursdays are crazy for me with that, Smallville, and NBC sitcoms. Smallville is either laughably bad with soap opera cheese, or amazingly “why isn’t it like this every week?” good. They finally added Supergirl this season, and both Dean Cain and Helen Slater have made some great guest appearances.
B13 told me we won’t see 24 until 2009 now, so that’s one less show for your black hole. Don’t forget BSG: Razor premieres tonight. SO much to watch, SO little life…
November 24th, 2007 at 10:33 am
Oh I didn’t mention all the shows. DVR’s are great because you can just tape the junk and decide when to go through it. Heck, 30Rock takes about 15 minutes to watch without commercials!
And snippets like that (Dean Cain/Helen Slater) make me so want to tune in but then when I do its either a cheesy repeat or a cheesy original: that show is just cursed for me.