Not The Real Review 2004: Television

Given that in fact I've hardly watched any television this year, you'll notice this section of Not The Real Review 2004 is slightly shorter than that last two. You may see a pattern forming with the somewhat limited ...

Three TV Bits and Pieces from 2004

The Last One

It was a year in which a number of long running tv shows finished forever (or until someone offers them pure cash to return for the reunion). Certain shows have a habit of becoming part of the furniture so you feel a loss when they're gone. Neither Friends or Dawson's Creek had been half as good as their earlier seasons but because they were ongoing stories and because there was also a germ of something unique, interesting or magical about them, we stayed right through to the end. To a degree, both endings offered something unexpected. No one really expected Ross and Rachel to actually get together at the end there, or that Joey would end up with Pacey. But there they were at the end of everything cuddling together, fictional examples of how great things can happen.

BBC Four

I keep banging on about it, but if there was rationing and I was only allowed on television channel, I couldn't live without BBC Four. Not in my memorable lifetime has a channel had the capacity to surprise, amaze and impress on a nightly basis as consistently as the place to think. As well as The Alan Clarke Diaries I always offer Holidays In The Danger Zone as another example -- how better to discover the heart of the country that to vacation there and try not to get shot. Meet The Stans introduced us to a series of countries we hadn't even heard of, let alone their internal conflicts and America Was Here showed us the wreckage that our wars create. What happens when a people have been 'saved'. Who picks up the pieces? Another impressive film was No 17 is Anonymous in which an investigative reporter scoured Israel looking for the identity of a seventeenth victim of a suicide bomb on a bus. I learnt more about Middle Eastern politics and religion in that hour and a hour than years of anything else because it punctured the surface of the matter.

Shiny

This was the year I met Firefly, the Joss Whedon show not set in the Buffyverse, the most gut wrenching experience this side of My So-Called Life. On the back of the dvd box, The New York Post says it's 'A very funny, very hip, very terrific sci-fi show.' Well yes. So why did it get thrown about by the network to the point of being ignored by the general audience? Who knows. I haven't met anyone whose heard of it and seen it who doesn't love it. It's easy to go over old ground by asking how dreck like Charmed or Andromeda continue broadcasting when a treasure like this couldn't be nurtured. That a film is being made is a miracle. That it means we'll only be spending another two hours with these characters on that ship under this writer is not.