TV Watch: Notes from a season from hell (being slightly more like a post than that thing that appeared last night)

Mad About You's Murray remains TV's all-time greatest dog, but he faced a late-in-the-series nudge from Gilmore Girls' Paul Anka. (It's worth remembering that Murray in his time had to go snout to snout against Frasier's Eddie.)

by Ken

When the then-new TV season had reached pretty much "full swing," I let out a cry of desperation. The depth of the horror exceeded anything I could conjure from either memory or imagination. Since then, it has merely seemed to me that I was understating the dimension of the catastrophe.

(1) IT BEATS GOING OUT AND GETTING WASTED
(DOESN'T IT?)

So here I was last night, struggling to finish knocking out my evening post, having gotten as far as finding and uploading a picture to go with my admittedly not very jolly pass-along of the question made relevant now that we may be within reach of a readily available test for Alzheimer's: Will people who may have it want to know they have it?

I could have posted the post without any artwork just to make sure it would go up on time at 9pm ET, then add some kind of art as soon as I had it ready. Goodness knows, I've dont that before. But I got cocky. Once I had the idea to illustrate the post with a photo of the New York Rangers clinching a spot in hockey's Stanley Cup finals, I figured that, despite the tightness of the time, it could be done. And I was making satisfactory progress -- getting a photo downloaded, then sized and prepped for uploading to our blog host site. Then potential disaster struck. When I went to try to choose the file for uploading, my computer played dumb, or maybe it wasn't playing.

Maybe it was about to look for the file in question, maybe it wasn't; either way, while I awaited further developments, there was nothing else I could do in the designated browser, Safari. I could have just shut Safari down and reopened it; the only thing was, I didn't know how advanced a stage of the blogpost had been saved, and while the browser was in, er, action mode, therre was no way of finding out -- unless I opened a different browser, and opened the blog software in it, and saw what there was to see for the post in question. Assuming it was a reasonably late version of the post, at least I could go ahead and post it without art, then proceed with the job.

The only problem is that I don't think of my other available browsers, Firefox and Google Chrome, as speedy loaders, and I was already down to my final minute or so. Nevertheless, with the "action" on Safari still at a standstill, there didn't seem much else to do. I went with Chrome, and as it proceeded to make approximately zero progress toward loading, I became confident that Chrome would be open and ready for business in under an hour.

About this point, the surveillance tapes will show, I was uttering frequent gentle exhortations that were roughly equivalent -- assuming there's only surveillance video, and not audio -- to "Consarn it all." (That's my story, and, again assuming there's no audio record, I'm sticking to it.) While we're on the subject, I realize I have been remiss lately in pointing out to the Great Google frequently enough that it sucks, but now, in honor of Chrome's stellar performance, it seems only fair to point out to the boys and girls at Google: You suck!!!

Eventually, after what seemed like an hour or two but was probably only a minute or two, or maybe three or four, I was able to access the "draft" post, and found it apparently close to posting condition. You'd have thought I'd have the sense to go ahead and follow the old Plan B of posting it as is, then fill in some art. But it must already have been a minute or two past post time, and I decided what the heck, since the artwork was ready to upload, why not just go ahead and upload it, so the post would be complete, and I could get on with my life?

As soon as I issued the command to upload a photo, I realized that this was exactly what had landed me in computer quicksand on Safari! What is that thing about humans supposedly learning from history? You couldn't prove it by me.

But after a not excruciatingly unreasonable while, probably punctuated with additional colorful expostulations, I was able to load the picture, add the captioni about the Rangers' onward march toward the Stanley Cup, and post the whole shebang -- maybe a few minutes past post time! I called that a pretty darned fine save: "Do you want to know if you have Alzheimer's?" Looking at it now, I think I would probably have centered the picture and caption, but I'm not going to nitpick. In a word, whew!


(2) ACTS OF GOD AREN'T USUALLY GODSENDS

But wait just a second. Before heading back to Real Life, I noticed that I already had a 9pm ET post up! Which kind of impressed me, except for what I'd put myself through the preceding quarter-hour.

On closer inspection, the phantom post turned out to be not a post at all, but the shell of a post I had in fact made reference to just last week, a "draft" that had been parked for months under the working title "A love letter to Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino." It was a collection of potential "post elements" that had been sitting there in storage, which I don't think I'd even looked at in a month. As it happened, by now I had decided that if and when I got around to doing that first Gilmore Girls post, I would be approaching from quite a different angle. Nevertheless, I thought I might still want to use that stuff that was sitting under the tarp for a later post.

Think of it like you're planning to build or rehab a special new room, and by luck you have a handy storage space where you can dump lovingly deposit stuff that you meanwhile build or acquire for eventual use in the new room, in the event that it ever actually gets built. Of course the stuff lying under the tarp was still kind of missing -- well, everything that might show what the new room was supposed to be about. My gut reaction upon realizing that this random batch of artifacts had leapt, apparently via an act of God, into full-fledged post status was, approximately, "Golly."

I rebounded quickly, though, and mixed in there somewhere felt an unmistakable feeling of relief: Now I no longer had to worry about writing the so-far-unwritable post! And it wasn't as if anybody was going to read it anyway. When you get right down to it, who cares?

And after all, "acts of God," which always sound to me as if they're the sort of thing where we get to experience our shared humanity in the face of a hostile universe, are actually almost the opposite. It's the weasel term by which insurance companies get to tell you, when you come to them for help following the act or acts in question, "Sorry, ducks, you're on your own. Didn't you read your policy?"


(3) IS THERE LIFE AFTER GILMORE GIRLS?


In the X Files Season 6 two-parter "Dreamland," the great Michael McKean guest-starred as a Reaganite black-ops spook who took maximum advantage of his accidental identity switch with Mulder (David Duchovny).

In a sense, yes. As I mentioned in that post last week, finishing my second traversal of "the Gilmore Girls 153" freed me to return to my rewatching of the first six seasons of Mad Men, which had stalled in Season 6 when the GG mania overtook me, and to complete Season 6 and knock back the six episodes from Season 7 my DVR- had been carefully storing in time to watch Episode 7, the "midseason finale" in real time last Sunday night!

I was also able to figure out where I'd paused in Season 5 of The X Files, complete that season, and even advance to Season 6. Of course once I started up Episode 1, I understood why I should have watched the first of the two X Files movies, Fight for the Future, before dipping into Season 6. I had actually remembered that the movie was designed to fall between Seasons 5 and 6, but even when people in Episode 1 of Season 6 kept referring to all sorts of events I had no recollection of, I didn't make the connection. I thought maybe I should go back and rewatch the end of the Season 5 finale to see if I'd snoozed through the mystery events that were puzzling me.

Oh, after a while it dawned on me that no, I couldn't watch an episode or two of Season 6 and then go back and tackle the first movie. So I shut the episode down and went to dig out the movie. Happily, both movies had been included in my X Files Amazon Gold Box Deal. I tried to make sure I was pulling out the correct X Files but satisfied myself (on what basis I no longer recall) that I Want to Believe was the movie I wanted, and I watched it. It didn't plug my Season 5-to-6 gaps, and actually raised more questions, like why did Gillian Anderson look so funny? In fairness to me, let me say that I was probably half-sleeping (it was getting late) through, shall we say, the "middle" of the picture. All the same, I didn't grasp my fundamental error until I began rewatching the movie with the Chris Carter-Frank Spotnitz audio commentary. Finally it sank in. Oops!

None of which prevented me from eventually watching the correct movie, this time spread over two nights, and proceeding to Season 6, and encountering such notable events as a guest-starring shot by Bryan Cranston in an episode that turned out to have been written by X-Files co-executive producer Vince Gilligan. (Hmm, "When Vince met Bryan?") And then wonderful guest shots by such wonderful actors as Michael McKean, Ed Asner, and Lily Tomlin. Eventually it dawned on me that these, rather than any change in the look of the show, were hallmarks of the show's Season 6 change of production venue from Vancouver to Los Angeles.

In my post-Gilmore Girls period I was also able to finish up my nearly completed Season 1 of the spectacular Paul Reiser-Helen Hunt comedy Mad About You. Just to be safe I went back and rewatched a couple of episodes it turned out I had in fact watched, but they were so incredible, I was delighted to watch them again. And I've zipped ahead into Season 2 (happily noting a run of episodes directed by that great director Thomas Schlamme), not only chronicling all sorts of firsts for the show, but more importantly being staggered by the quality of the show. I understood now why, when Mad About You and Seinfeld were NBC stable mates, I went back and forth as to which was the better show.


(4) AND THE DEPRESSING TAKEAWAY IS . . .

Well, the obvious: how nearly non-existent shows are now that show even awareness of, let alone any aspiration to, the level of quality represented by Mad About You and Gilmore Girls.

I don't know yet whether the 2014-15 TV season will represent any upgrade from the catastrophe of 2013-14. I'm not optimistic, but far be it from me to prejudge. However, the vast stockpile of DVDs and Blu-rays I've built up will keep me going.

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