4 posts tagged “tv series”

Note: This is the sixth in a series of posts looking back at 2007, in some key areas of my life that were important to me.

I watched this year.

I've been an avid TV watcher for many years now, but we set aside the idea of watching movies for much of our marriage just for lack of time and money and my health.  This year, we did all of those things.

The end of last TV season, I was enamored with Heroes and Lost and several other shows.  This had me continuing to read TV news through the summer to decide what shows I was most interested in watching for the new fall TV season (2007-2008).  Even though not every show I started with was fabulous, I found some new loves.  Unfortunately, the writer's strike took a toll on my enjoyment, and some shows are being considered as cancelled by default because of that.  My very favorite new show of the year was Journeyman.  Heroes and Bones were probably my favorite returning ones, even though there were storylines on Heroes that just didn't thrill me.

We spent a lot of time watching Netflix movies in the evenings this year.  We were just on the one at a time plan, but we tried to take as much advantage of it as we could by watching it the same day it came and stuff like that.  This let us see a nice combo of movies and TV series.

We received 71 dvds from Netflix, an average of 6 per month.  27 of those were series disks, part of a TV series (like the 3 seasons of the 4400 and 2 1/2 seasons of Babylon 5 so far) or miniseries (in the case of Into the West).  I put 52 movies into Vox, with the difference being just that some dvds were part of a series.

This year was also a big year for TV on DVD.  In addition to the aforementioned Netflix series we got, we also purchased a nice pile.  At the beginning of the year, we owned 3 seasons of TV on DVD.  Now, we own 10 (talked about in September) + 12 more for a total of 22 seasons!  We got the rest of Buffy and Angel on sale at various times and E just received the 4 seasons of Futurama.  Obviously, we haven't watched all of those (so they aren't added to Vox), but it's a great thing to slowly rewatch and enjoy commentaries and other specials.

One thing that's been fun in the last year was finding the local Hollywood Video Outlet, where you can get a really good deal on previously viewed movies.  I've been able to get some of my favorites to own, like Paycheck and Poseidon (big screen one with Josh Lucas AND the TV movie with Adam Baldwin) among others.  This is a fun way to get to rewatch my favs, especially when there isn't great things to see on TV.

And then we saw movies in the theater - 4 in the summer and then the Golden Compass recently.  It's fun to be able to sit through a movie without my body hurting so much, that's what slowed us down a lot before.

My favorite TV on DVD series that I watched this year was The 4400, season 3.  The most surprising good movie I saw in the theater was Transformers.  And my favorite out of the movies I rewatched on TV this year was A Knight's Tale.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Radio Sunnydale

Various Artists

My most bloggable present from Christmas was from my parents, who got me Buffy's Radio Sunnydale CD off my wishlist.

I resisted getting this soundtrack back when it first came out because I wasn't enamored by the number of songs on it.  But the more and more I watch the show again, the more I wanted to have some of these songs that were unavailable elsewhere.    Mainly the super Blue by Angie Hart (talked about getting it stuck in my head in this post).  Some of the other songs are great, too (just noticing that the beginning of Bohemian Like You is reminds me of Real Gone by Sheryl Crow from Cars, LOL!)  I already had purchased the Aimee Mann song on this album because I liked it so much, so I have two copies now!

Surfacing

There's also a Sarah McLachlan song on here that I couldn't easily get, The Prayer of St. Francis, and I love making my Sarah-collection more complete.  Funny thing, this made me notice that somehow when I ripped my music in, Surfacing never made it in, so Full of Grace, another song used on a Buffy ep, wasn't on my computer.  Most of the songs I liked from that CD were on Mirrorball, so I guess I hadn't noticed.  Fixed now, Surfacing is all ripped.

While listening, I start digging for other Buffy-on-episode music that I didn't yet have that was available on iTunes, and I added a nice pile to my wishlist (Tip: for a low-tech personal wishlist in iTunes, just create a new playlist and drag the 30 second clips into it) 

BuffyGuide.com

http://buffyguide...

Welcome to BuffyGuide.com, home of The Complete Buffy Episode Guide, the most detailed episode gu...

While Buffy Guide is the best overall site for anything related to specific episodes, I wanted to find a site that listed out the songs played in each episode rather than clicking through to each.  I found Dusk 'till Dawn, which has a really nice short overview of each song, the artist, and the brief summary of when it plays for most of them.  That works!

Oh, and I'm really excited right now about Buffy because right before Christmas, I used some Amazon gift certificates to finish up my collection when all the seasons were on sale.  That was the 3 remaining Buffy's I needed and the 3 final Angel's, too.  I'm adding them to my Vox when I finish them, and we'll be done with Season 2 of Buffy the next time we sit down to watch - I won't watch Becoming I without watching II at the same time, so it'll be a double feature :)  We watched the one before those over the weekend, Go Fish, which is fun because it has not only Shane West (of ER, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), but Wentworth Miller (Prison Break) too :)

Pretty soon, I'm going to have to decide if I want to watch Buffy and Angel intermixed like they played on TV, or finish out Buffy and then start Angel.  I hadn't thought of that until E said something, but the more I think about it, the more that makes sense for the timeline and the things that did cross over a little.  That'd be 4 seasons worth that match up: Buffy 4/Angel1, Buffy 5/Angel 2, Buffy 6/Angel 3, Buffy 7/Angel 4.

I think I'll have to pick up Angel: Live Fast, Die Never at some point too, because even though most of it instrumental, it's got Christian Kane's LA Song too. ;)

And there's my fangirlyness that made me all happy even though I'm a bit worn out from the festivities!

Not everyone I know is as into TV news as I am, but one thing that I've read a lot about over the weekend is the Writer's Guild of America (WGA) strike.  This is a strike that has been in negotiation for month, and they finally went on strike at midnight this morning.  Here's the facts as I know it for anyone who is interested...

• Writers are striking because they want to renegotiate their contracts; the main issue I''m hearing discussed is that they want to receive more money on alternative ways of viewing their work, like dvds and internet viewing.
• Right now, writers get about 3 cents on the sale of a $20 dvd.  I'm guessing that's further divided when it's multiple writers on the same show.
• The strike impacts film and TV writers, more than 10,000 nationwide (source).  The impact on movies will be much less in the short term than TV.
  
• The WGA is the only group striking, but some people who are not only writers, but actors (SAG) or producers or directors (DGA), may be caught in the middle, being required to participate in their other role (see related news mention B.J Novak of The Office)
• Whedonesque pointed out a list of some of the striking writers on the TV side: Pencils down means pencils down
  
• This will not affect all shows immediately, but it will impact late-night talk shows right now and shows like Jon Stewart, Colbert Report, and Tonight Show will start with reruns today (source).
• Reality shows won't be affected because they don't use WGA writers.  This means we might see more reality shows pop up as networks run out of scripts.
  
• Most soaps have enough scripts written to go through January (source).
• Comedies are expected to be hit more than dramas because they depend on writers to rewrite on set to tweak and polish.  Without those writers, we are left with less "polish" (source).
• Midseason shows are also going to be in trouble, with things like Lost only half-way done writing their season, and same for 24; and these shows are counting on being able to run their whole season non-stop. (little bit more divided up by network here, but I think we'll see more definitiv guides really soon as tv sites get those details together).
• Depending on how long this goes, shows for next year will also be affected.
  
• The last major strike happened in 1988 and went on for 22 weeks.  That was in the days of Star Trek: TNG and they recycled unused scripts from the original Star Trek to get by (I don't see the link to where I read that now).
• Many people tuned out of TV during this time, and many viewers were lost that didn't come back afterwards.  We could see that similar tuning out and not coming back and viewership is already down this year; it could be bad news for TV for a long time.
  
• Because networks were expecting this could happen for the last few months, they've been increasing orders of shows that they may not have saved in any normal season.  This could be good news for some shows that I love, like Journeyman, because we'll get to see more of it potentially than we would have if they had just cancelled it already due to low ratings.
• Even though it's not going to impact the next few weeks worth of regular serial TV, the long term affect could be really bad.  Heroes has apparently refilmed a few parts of episode 11 in case they have to use that as the season finale!  Eek, that means the viewers are missing out on a huge storyline that would be happening at the end of the season.  I'm sure more instances of stuff like this could come up, too.

If this keeps up, I'll probably be increasing my Netflix quantity (we are only at 1 at a time right now) and watch old stuff.

I'm bummed that it comes to this, but I do agree that there has been great changes in the way that shows are distributed since back when these agreements were made that it makes sense they should renegotiate. 

Back in March, there was a QotD about TV shows on DVD, and I answered about the 3 seasons of shows that I owned so far.  I got some recommendations in the comments, and I started watching sales at my fav stores for more sets I was wishing for.

We've found that now that we are cooking more, we enjoy sitting down to watching a Tv episode with our meals.  Since we are only on the 1 dvd at a time through netflix deal, and our TiVo is upstairs so we don't watch anything new, the TV series that we own are the things we watch when we don't have a netflix movie/show to watch.

Right now, we own quite a few more than we did in March (3 vs 10 seasons!):

• 3 season of Roswell
• 2 seasons of Tru Calling
• Full season of Firefly
• 2 seasons of Buffy
• 2 seasons of Angel

Next up, we'll start in on season 3 of Roswell - we didn't have that one yet when we finished season 2, so we started on the next thing we did have.  After that, Buffy and Angel even though we don't have the whole series on either.

In the meantime between the ones we own, we've been getting TV DVDs from Netflix.  We watched 3 seasons of The 4400, and omg, love!  I'm only sad that I didn't start watching it soon enough that I would have been able to watch season 4 in real time (I think it's just finishing up for the summer).

The 4400 is super and definitely fits my kind of show with some action, drama, and scifi all in one.  I'm so glad quornflour thought to suggest it!

Babylon 5 - The Gathering (Pilot)

E wants to rewatch Babylon 5, which obviously will take a while since there are 5 seasons, but I haven't seen any of it before.  I'm more excited about the episodes with Bruce Boxleitner (season 2, I think).

I think I'd like to see Sliders again.  I faithfully watched the first few seasons, but then trailed off at the end.  Another older series that might be cool would be Quantum Leap (since Journeyman is being touted as something similar and I like that concept a lot).

I've slowed down on buying TV on DVD, but I'm still watching for good deals on the series that need to be finished (Buffy - 5 more seasons - and Angel - 3 more seasons).  I would like to own Heroes at some point too, super show that I know I'll enjoy rewatching (as judged by how excited I am still on Monday nights while they are playing reruns).  No hurry, but it's sure nice to have such great options to watch!

Do you have any other suggestions along these type of shows for me? :)