A couple of years ago I finished the year with a summary of the eight biggest media moments of 2007. Then last year I didn’t do one. So this entry will have to serve for both 2008 and 2009.
Michael Jackson overkill – Saying anything more about this would just add to the problem. So I’ll just note in passing that it happened.
I was President Palmer – Nearly a half a century after Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, white people still tend to learn most of what they know about Black people from television. But at least they finally seem to be learning some positive lessons. Though Bill Cosby first broke the jive-talking, ghetto dumdum sitcom mold some time ago, the most obvious TV precedent for America’s first Black President is Dennis Haysbert’s portrayal of President Palmer on 24. Now if only the intelligence community could be similarly inspired and come up with a real Jack Bauer.
TV on DVD – Obviously TV shows have been available on DVD for some time now, but last year and this year I started seriously taking advantage of the opportunity to get caught up on the previous seasons of popular shows. When it comes to trends in broadcasting and cablecasting, I don’t tend to be an early adopter. So if I had to join a show like Lost when it’s already five seasons in, well, it just wouldn’t work. But when we can get caught up in a month or two of steady disc viewing. The only disadvantage to this scheme is that when a good show is in danger of dying for lack of audience, I don’t start watching it until it’s too late. Alas, poor Deadwood.
Netflix instant view – At the end of 2008 Netflix finally made its Instant View option available for Mac OS. After the start of the new year, I took major advantage of it. By year’s end I’d watched 115 movies and several episodes of the Masters of Horror TV series. Though I was already used to watching DVDs on my computer at home, my guess at the outset of the Instant View experiment was that it wouldn’t work. And though it isn’t effective for anything I actually want to see (or anything with subtitles), it’s great for anything that requires only half attention while I get some work done.
DVR in the office – The other new bit of technology that contributed to the tremendous increase in the movie review rate in 2009 was the addition of a DVR to my office at home. Though we’d had a Tivo box in the bedroom for awhile now, we mostly used it to time shift TV shows. The DVR in the office at home swiftly became the equivalent of Instant View at work. I thought at first that being stuck with only the movies that happened to be on the non-premium channels would be limiting, I soon found out that I was recording more than I could possibly watch. By the end of the year I’d learned to be a bit more selective.
Disappointing attempts to relive my childhood – During the last couple of years I’ve had several chances to relive experiences I remembered enjoying when I was a kid. Many of the movies I loved when I was younger turned out not to be as good as I remembered them. For kid-oriented fluff like the goofy movies Kurt Russell did for Disney back in the day, it came as no surprise when they turned out to be, well, dumb. But for some productions – particularly Frankenstein: the True Story and The Guns of Navarone – I was surprised to discover that what thrilled me at seven barely held my attention at 43. Oh, and don’t even get me started on the giant dump the Speed Racer movie took on a cherished childhood memory.
Successful attempts to relive my childhood – On the other hand, a few repeat experiences from my younger years proved more successful. For example, I re-watched all of the episodes of the original Jonny Quest series. Sure, they’re bad by 21st century grown-up standards. But they were still fun to watch. Likewise a prowl of the back shelves at a local hobby store netted some recent reissues of the old Monster Scenes model kits, the kind I was forbidden to buy when I was a kid. I haven’t finished assembling them all yet, but they’re still fun to have around. So at least the news on the inner child front wasn’t all bad.
The 10th anniversary of the first time we saw Dress to Kill – We’ve never been big New Years Eve party people, so it wasn’t terribly surprising that even the big millennial to-do ten years ago found us camped on the couch enjoying our adult beverages of choice and watching TV. As we surfed, we came across what at first looked like just another stand-up act on HBO (thank goodness we had HBO at the time). But after watching it for just a couple of minutes, Amy and I said to each other, “Hey, this guy’s really funny.” And the rest, as they say, is history. The performance was Eddie Izzard’s Dress to Kill show, and it remains one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. So on Dec. 31, 2009, we re-watched it on DVD (as we have many times in the past). We started to keep a count of all the things Izzard says during the show that we’ve picked up and used in everyday conversation, but the tally swiftly grew too high to track. What a wonderful way to start and end the first decade of the new century.
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