Through the rise and rise of DVD box-sets and HBO and the like, using favourite television shows as a gauge of someone's personality - and, likewise, its likely compatibility with your own - has long since become an acceptable form of screening.
Where once upon a time people would sniff, "Oh no, I don't watch much television, except for perhaps
Foreign Correspondent and the odd episode of
Compass" in between slugs of chardie and cheese chunks, now it's perfectly normal to get stuck into a passionate discussion of favourite television series.
Where one person hasn't seen the other's Best Of All Time™, there opens an opportunity for an all-weekend DVD marathon, or a promise to lend you the box set (thus necessitating a further appointment to return said deevs and discuss your findings).
Or perhaps you both end up having the same favourite show, or least favourite show, or favourite ten seconds of
Seinfeld or most amazing final two decision of
America's Next Top Model, and so on. In short, somewhere around the end of the last century, television became the great cultural equaliser.
Or, if not that, then at least the great cultural pick-up line.
But this brings me to today's
isshew: what do you do when you just don't get it?
And by "just don't get
it", I mean those television series that have people waxing lyrical in the streets and adding profile boxes to their Facebooks, quoting verbatim once the red starts flowing at dinner parties, and breathlessly discussing the merits of while you sit there, stony faced, wondering whether you really do like vanilla.
When I find myself in that position, this is what I end up like:
(The "in Homer's mind" bit, that is, not the Spanish.)
I like to think I have a fairly decent raft of "favourite ever" television shows or series under my belt; I count
The Simpsons,
Freaks & Geeks, Fast Forward, Black Adder Goes Forth,
Big Train,
The Young Ones,
Sex & The City and
Seinfeld in my "all time" basket. Of the more 'recent' additions,
True Blood, Curb Your Enthusiasm and
Dexter make an appearance, as do
East Bound And Down and, I suspect (having seen the pilot),
Glee.
And anyone who doesn't collapse into apoplexies of laughter at
Armstrong & Miller is banished from my living room forever:
And I know what it's like to be banished from the living room, so to speak, because I've been in precisely that situation, numerous times. Let me give you a little play-by-play of some current favourites that I don't or can't seem to "get".
We'll start with the most glaring:
30 Rock. WHAT THE HELL YOU GUYS. I've tried, and I've tried again, and then I tried some more.
It's just. Not. Funny.
Or, at least, not in my mind. And I do have rather odd and exacting tastes in comedy; to paraphrase every bogan's favourite art quote, I don't know much about comedy, but I know what I like.
The fault falls, I think, with Tina Fey, who I find too self-conscious to really enter the realm of the side-splittingly hilarious. I value a slightly unhinged quality in my female comedians, the ability to go to ugly and uncomfortable places (think Amy Sedaris or vintage Julia Louis Dreyfuss). Tina Fey seems so stuck on having become "the pretty one" after her dumpy improv days that Liz Lemon is forever jammed in first (comedy) gear.
The supporting cast aren't much better, though Tracy Jordan did raise a few half-hearted sniffs of something you could call laughter.
This is very much not a popular opinion to have; there are a LOT of women of roughly my age who think
30 Rock is the greatest thing to have ever happened to comedy, ever, in the history of the whole entire universe. I know because I have teetered close to being cut from Christmas card lists for expressing something even vaguely differing from that opinion.
Hell, just look at what some anonymous
30 Rock fan said to someone (not me, mind) who dared to write "
30 Rock isn't funny" on a Videogum piece on the show: "
If you can't find 30 Rock
funny I hate to see what you actually do find funny. Probably baby kittens being run over by your haterade."
There is some hope for kitten-killing hateraders like me; Jonah Weiner made some very astute points over at
Slate when
discussing one of the things that irks me the most about
30 Rock, the show's distinct conservative streak:
- "How do these story lines fit into a show masterminded by a successful, self-described feminist like Fey? Flawed people are funny, sure, but why does Liz Lemon have the traditionally gendered flaws she does? Elaine Benes and Murphy Brown, for example, were strong, feminist-friendly characters and funny, to boot. On Seinfeld, Elaine was a frumpy-sexy career woman who slept around without censure, inspired suitors to get vasectomies, and made the birth control "sponge" famous. Murphy Brown is a funhouse-mirror image of Liz. She works in TV, wants to be a single mother, rolls her eyes at the cleavage-flashing coquetry of her bimbo co-worker, Corky, and embarks on a love-hate relationship with a right-winger, Jerry Gold. But she's also confident, ambitious, and doesn't run to her boss for guidance so much as bully him constantly."
I should note here that Elaine Benes is one of my all-time personal heroes:
Anyway, lest this become an anti-
30 Rock moanfest (oh, too late),
Arrested Development is another that went straight through me. There's deadpan, and then there's dead. I didn't laugh once. Seriously. Admittedly I didn't soldier on for particularly long with
Arrested Development, but just couldn't really be stuffed either way. Life's too short, and I had
East Bound And Down to watch instead.
These are just two of my "didn't get it" television moments; there are more, though
30 Rock and
Arrested Development seem to be the most 'controversial'.
But I
hope know I'm not alone here, if not with these specific shows then at least in terms of the predicament of not liking others' favourites. So what of your "don't get it" shows; have you ever been theoretically evicted from a dinner party for meekly raising your hand mid-whoop-fest and saying "actually..."?
Come join me in the corner, I've got some great worms for us to eat.