Tuesday, September 12, 2006

TV on DVD once held me in its siren sway, intoning its appeal in melodies too delicious to ignore, and yet something has changed. The laundry list of perks should be obvious. No commercials. Crisp anamorphic quality. Portability designed to fill my television-shaped void. Honestly, these days it’s more fun–funner, I believe, is the street-sanctioned adjective–to anticipate a season’s imminent release.

I imagine the ABC trifecta is still miles better than most programming out there, in a trashy sea of reality this and reality that. It’s a hard road getting through the second seasons, however, and I expect the world’s smallest violins are poised for the downbeat this precise moment. Really, though, the decline in appeal is secretly pleasing, since it always feels a little grody sitting through episode after episode.

Desperate Housewives, once a guilty pleasure, has become a kind of guilty chore, primarily because the marquee gimmick for this outing–recall the toy chest in the first season–is far less sinister. Grey’s Anatomy continues to maintain its vice-like grip, bless its soul, which may be tacit evidence for writing by committee. But Lost! Oh, my prodigal son.

The structure of the show now annoys, with the sheer frequency of flashbacks grating unreasonably. I don’t know, maybe I should care how Jack picks his nose exactly as his father did, but only half as well as Kate picked Sayid’s nose during the Gulf War in one of those intertwining flashbacks that reveal–ho ho!–these characters are related.

The biggest kick to the teeth was discovering in advance the fate of my favorite new character in a news article, of all places. The actor had gotten a traffic ticket or something, which constituted license enough for the reporter to spoil the season finale. The tenets of entertainment reporting were never fully revealed to me, after I dropped my one journalism class like a misplaced modifier, but it apparently disciplines writers to ruin the fucking magic for people.