a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  2193 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Hubski, what's your favourite TV show that is more than 20 years old?

It's funny. There's a big difference between what I want to say vs. what it actually is.

I want to say Rat Patrol because it's a bunch of dudes driving around the Southern California desert pretending to fight Nazis. But the shows are actually boring.

I want to say Space: Above and Beyond because it was the most promising hard sci fi series ever to come out and it just died from lack of interest. But since it's unresolved it's unrewarding.

I want to say Upstairs, Downstairs because it's a masterful exploration of class and culture but it's also a long haul and I don't need to see it again.

I want to say Star Trek because it's an excellent and important exploration of issues from an era where that wasn't really done on television but it's also often campy and trite.

I want to say The Wire but it's only sixteen years old.

I don't want to say Twilight Zone but the answer is Twilight Zone.

Twilight Zone is one of the most thoughtful things ever aired on American television. It's golden-age sci fi from golden-age sci fi writers, performed on a shoestring budget for people who were paying attention. It's cheap, it's quick, it's poignant as hell and it's haunting. Twilight Zone is the kind of show that would stage Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. Twilight Zone is the kind of show that would give Richard Matheson sixteen episodes. Twilight Zone is such a pop cultural icon that you can go meta three deep on the fucking thing and have the audience laugh along:

Twilight Zone is Charles Bronson and Elizabeth Montgomery in a postapocalyptic love story. Twilight Zone is the kind of show where a bad episode ends with "but it turns out I was a mannequin all along!" Twilight zone is...

I mean, my wife wanted to watch Fringe. I'd read the pilot and knew it was garbage but whatever. So we watched Fringe. Then to prove a point we watched the pilot of X-Files, which had more interest in the fucking pre-title sequence than all of Fringe. Then to really hate ourselves we watched the pilot of Twilight Zone, which was literally a dude wandering around the Warner lot on a Sunday when nobody was there.

And Rod Serling made the Warner lot on a Sunday more interesting than Kurtzman, Orci and Jj Abrams could do with $2m an episode.

Twilight zone. The answer is Twilight zone.





user-inactivated  ·  2193 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Which was considered the better one? Twilight Zone or Outer Limits?

kleinbl00  ·  2193 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Twilight Zone.

Watch some Outer Limits. They'll make you wish you were watching Twilight Zone. They didn't all suck but on balance they weren't great.

Friend of mine is a raging Rod Serling fan. Has listened to the dictaphone tapes at USC, shit like that. Written two biopics about Rod Serling. He made Jim Aubrey the villain of one - the executive who cancelled Twilight Zone so CBS could show Petticoat Junction, Green Acres, Beverly Hillbillies, Gilligan's Island. You know, shit television. I made the point that shit television or not, CBS dominated the ratings because fuckin'A, we like to pretend our country has only been full of ignorant hicks recently but go ahead and explain Hee Haw.

You wanna see culture wars? I gotcher culture wars right here.

user-inactivated  ·  2193 days ago  ·  link  ·  

:)

I'll see if Twilight Zone is on Netflix or Hulu.

kleinbl00  ·  2193 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Pretty sure CBS has it all locked up on cbs all access.

user-inactivated  ·  2193 days ago  ·  link  ·  

It feels like streaming media is simultaneously saving and killing television at the same time.

kleinbl00  ·  2193 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Netflix is making more movies than all the movie studios combined. And that doesn't even get into TV. It's all pretty much mid-90s USA Network stuff (if you've decided Stranger Things is a masterpiece you have embraced the "soft tyranny of low expectations") but the fact of the matter is, the only thing that needs realtime eyeballs are sporting events and competition variety.

We were talking CBS. This year, CBS premiered "Young Sheldon" and "SWAT" on broadcast. Online, they premiered "Star Trek: Discovery". You wanna watch "Young Sheldon?" Bow to the one-eyed god. You wanna watch "Star Trek: Discovery?" Any screen you want, any time you want, just pay CBS $6 a month for the privilege.

The only shows anybody talks about anymore are behind a paywall. Really, Comcast is just another streaming service with a really fuckin' expensive dongle in front of it. Broadcast television is for the dead-enders and if you need to get home to catch your shows they're either American Idol or you're already dead to advertisers.