Confessions of a Liberal Puritan

Is anybody else a) watching NBC's "Hannibal" on Thursday nights (it requires some sacrifice -- I'll have to catch the recent episodes of "Elementary" in reruns, since I couldn't watch that AND "Scandal" AND "Hannibal" in first-run eps), and b) kind of sort of rooting for Hannibal Lecter to draw Will Graham into his cozy, incredibly well-catered web ( Spoiler Warning! )

Or is that just me?

I gotta say, I never expected to root for any kind of Hannibal/Will relationship, since I'm a big fan of the dynamic between Hannibal and Clarice in the Thomas Harris novels, but I'm being lured to the dark side by this very different, alternate universe version of Lecter and Graham and other characters from Red Dragon (several of whom have undergone a gender-switch). Instead of cookies (the traditional lure offered by the T-shirts), THIS alternate incarnation of Hannibal Lecter is trying to entice Will Graham over to his side of the Force with the promise of belonging and good-doing and being NEEDED by people who love him, instead of just by the stray dogs he takes in.

( more spoilers for last night's episode )

Darn that Mads Mikkelsen and Hugh Dancy: they're totally sucking me in to yet another TV obsession! Just what I did NOT need!

*pout*

Picking up where my previous post left off, here are the remaining eleven 'days' for your enjoyment, critique, or total ignoring, as you choose.

30-day TV Meme (Days 20-30):

Day 20 - Favorite kiss -- ( Hawkeye/Hot Lips (M*A*S*H finale) )

Day 21 - Favorite 'ship -- Strictly TV? No movies or books? ( then I've got to say Spuffy )

Day 22 - Favorite series finale -- ( BtVS or DS9, maybe? )

Day 23 - Most annoying character -- Of all TV series that I've watched, ever? ( Dr. Smith must die! )

Day 24 - Best quote -- ( from BtVS 'Earshot' )

Day 25 - A show you plan on watching (old or new) -- ( something currently unavailable to me on premium channels )

Day 26 - OMG WTF? Season finale -- ( The end of 'Enterprise' sucked the hardest )

Day 27 - Best pilot episode -- ( Sins of the Past )

Day 28 - First TV show obsession -- ( Yes, it's ST:TOS )

Day 29 - Current TV show obsession -- Currently in first-run episodes?( Grimm? )

Day 30 - Saddest character death -- ( The Body )

The 30 Day Buffy the TV Series Meme (snagged from shadowkat67 because as soon as I saw it I realized it had been far too long since I'd last talked about one of my very favoritest TV series and most-favorite-ever source of fanfic)

Day 1: Favorite Season of BtVS?

SEASON FIVE. Hopefully, the following long walk down memory lane will explain why:

( How I Learned to Love BtVS Even More When It Became a Grown-Up )

Looking back ten years later, I now suspect that a big part of my love for season 5 was the underlying and very grown-up themes of family (families bound together by choice and willingness to go to the mat for one another) and vocation. Watching the first few seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 1997-99 as a thirty-something minister recently returned to students status in search of a PhD, I felt an emotional and intellectual joy in the idea of 'My High School Really IS the Gateway to Hell', and soon found that there was a whole lot more going on than just high school developmental issues and supernatural metaphors as a backdoor approach to addressing 'Stuff That's Too Touchy or Scary for Me to Talk About'. But the issues addressed still weren't necessarily my issues.

I recognized the family part of the BtVS season 5 equation at the time (and we had a lovely panel on that subject at the Atlanta "WriterCon" in 2006), but I think the vocation part took a while (say, 10 years or so) to dawn on me -- no pun intended.

Yet, so much of that season was about the characters finding their adult calling for the first time, or finding a new calling and purpose in the face of drastic life (or even unlife) changes.

For instance,

( Light Years Beyond 'Career Day' Counseling )

Okay, this has taken several hours longer than I'd planned, and it's only the first day. I think I'm going to have to skip over some of the rest of the days and just post on the ones I actually have a strong feeling about, or else the 30 days will last through next Christmas.

As a final note, I see that NONE of the days in this meme ask, "Which Season of Buffy First Inspired You to Read and/or Write BtVS Fanfic?" Too bad, too, because I could probably post another incredibly verbose essay on SEASON SIX as the answer to that one, most likely bringing in all that Good Enough Media Mother-Text stuff from my 2004 posts.

Oh, well . . . again!

What I'd been fearing for a while now (in a distant, maybe that might happen in a couple more months, 'sometime' kind of way) actually happened last night, when I'd been lulled into a false sense of security by thinking that I'd figured out how to more or less cope with the problem.

( The Dratted DVR Debacle of 2010 )

Goodbye to the entire 5th season of Dr. Who, as well as the last couple of specials covering the final appearance of David Tennant's Tenth Doctor!

Farewell, my 3rd and 4th season episodes of Chuck!

Buh-bye, all three seasons/series of Torchwood!

And the list goes on, and on, and on.

Kiss it all bye-bye.

["Good-bye, God! I'm going to Missouri!" -- quoted from Hal Holbrook's "Mark Twain Tonight".]

( Today, Xenos, everything is new again. We start fresh! )

No more hard decisions to be made about what to keep and what to delete. No more worries about my DVR having taken hostages, keeping me tied to it out of fear of losing all my lovely shows.

Today, I am free to try something new and different!

. . . And, of course, I'm adding lots of DVD sets that I never thought I'd need to my Christmas 'wish-list' for my siblings and parents to peruse.

One must be practical, after all.

I thought this show was going to be lame, lamer, lamest when it first premiered, but then it started to get better after a few episodes and became a guilty pleasure -- popcorn TV to watch when I had time on my hands, and then immediately deleted from the DVR.

And now I'm recording "The Vampire Diaries" on Thursday nights instead of "FlashForward" (I can only record two shows at the same time, and skipping "Bones" is still non-negotiable, even if I rarely feel inclined to re-view an episode of that series anymore). For the past three or four weeks I've even re-watched all or part of the new episodes of "Vampire Diaries" before deleting.

What's wrong with me? (As if I didn't know.)( Read more... )

Spike, of course, is still the ultimate 'little black dress' that goes with everything, as far as vampire characters go. But Damon is shaping up to be (perhaps) a rather nice pair of pumps that look sharp and have a lot of uncommon style but are surprisingly comfy for walking in (if indeed there ever was a pair of shoes like that!).

I can't wait to see who Damon snarks at, kills, and/or strangely befriends next!

I unpacked my new Dell laptop from Amazon.com today (and spent way too many hours getting it fully set up and functioning), so to celebrate the fact that I have internet access at home for the first time in over 6 weeks I decided to belatedly pick up the TV on DVD meme.


TV shows I own on DVD:( Read more... )


And I know it's not part of the meme, but I have to include my commercial VHS collection, since these tapes are the reason why I haven't been able to bring myself to buy some of those same episodes/seasons on DVD:

( The VHS Collection, 'cause I'm just that old )


Good thing I bought at least half of these DVD's and tapes used, or I'd feel even guiltier about the investment they represent!

I've seen every Lerner & Loewe movie musical numerous times on TV over the years, and I used to have at least a couple on VHS (Paint Your Wagon and Camelot -- and I had all the soundtracks on vinyl, of course!), but I still gave in to the temptation to record Gigi off of TCM Sunday afternoon and re-watch it, just for the sake of nostalgia.

And you know what? I noticed something this time that I'd never seen before.( somewhat lengthy ramblings on relationships, movies as mirrors, and the virtues of fannish re-viewing )

And speaking of mirrors, isn't it strange to look in an old familiar one -- like an often-watched movie, or a novel you've re-read many times over -- and realize that you might finally be ready to leave behind some of your own childish issues (once so prominently displayed there) and see something a little more substantial, in its place?

Because even when the previews lead me to expect some predictable set of responses from the characters, and even when a quibbler (if I were one) could balk at certain political developments, BSG manages to knock my expectations into a cocked hat, sometimes, with an episode so engrossing and so surprising that I not only watch it while I'm taping, but have to immediately watch it again right afterwards.

( spoilers for the most recent episode )

Now and then, it's good to be reminded of why I started watching BSG in the first place.

( not-so-brief, spoilery grumblings about last night's episode of 'Bones' )

Maybe my expectations for this latest episode were simply way off-base, and maybe that's making me think it was worse or more manipulative than it was. But I am not a happy camper.

I'm sure I'm not the first to mention this on LJ, but I just caught the last half of this report on NPR's Morning Edition this morning, and it did my heart immense good:

Vampire Slayer Buffy Saves Iraq Reporter's Soul
by Jamie Tarabay

'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' saved the world and the sanity of NPR's Jamie Tarabay while she was in Baghdad. Tarabay explores why she needed the slayer during her time in Iraq.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90584068