Reflections: Entertainment...

Still posting from Corrin's prompts. Today's task:

Entertainment: What music do you currently listen to? Why do you prefer this genre? What kind of TV shows do you watch? What do you love about them? Do you have a favorite movie that you have really enjoyed watching this year? Game? Pastime?

There's a lot to talk about here... so today, I'll stick with TV.

Laura and I don't own a television.
We never have.

The strange thing about this is that we both grew up around televisions. When I was growing up, I spent my summers sitting in front of a television. People who talk to me will often say, "Wow, you're from Alabama? (after they find out that I'm from Alabama, of course) I can hardly notice an accent." I quickly respond, "Yeah, it's because I was raised, in part, by television," because I know it gets a laugh; trustme, this has been tested many times. Laura has mentioned that at times, her family would leave the television on just for the background noise. My dad would rest in front of his television on the weekends and literally fall asleep while watching westerns, war movies or science fiction.

But when I left for college, I left my television at "home."
There was a reason... but I can't really remember why. Though, I left a lot of things at "home"...

None of this, however, was due to some sort of religious conviction. It was not because a television could not be afforded (I mean, seriously, televisions cost less than eReaders these days). It wasn't due to a strict asceticism.

When Laura and I first married, we decided to not purchase a television so that we could talk more.

These days, we still don't have a television. But neither do we talk as much as we used to (not saying this is good or bad, because we still talk often).

These days, we watch television online.
We buy our music online.
We rent movies... online.

Television we watched online

It would be difficult to talk about our television watching experience without discussing the phenomena of Lost. If you watched, then you know that all of us "Losties," came back to the Island, season after season, for different reasons. You also know that most of us were fairly disappointed by the sad ending. And by sad, I mean "fairly lame." These days, television writers are under the impression that almost all viewers are okay with vast swaths of ambiguity. So Lost continued to spiral around like so many pieces of plane falling to the earth until not too much was recognizable anymore. What I loved about the series was the complexity of the characters... at some point, you could come to love aspects about every main player (even John Locke... even Ben Linus). At several points, it was easy to absolutely loathe the actions that the characters partook in... the expressed thoughts they had... the directions they chose (you might think Hurley is ultimately lovable - but do you remember early on when he was hiding and hoarding the food he found?). But the end... **you might want to stop reading if you're only just now catching up with Lost**... all I can say is "Seriously?"

I mean... walking into a "place of worship," whose stain glassed windows represented all major religions. Coming to find that Jack's dad was some sort of guardian angle. Realizing that while the island was some sort of key to all of existence via space and time... that it all ended with some sort of mushy and confused "feel good" moment.

Blech.
Still, as a series, it was awesome.

These days, as I feed the baby, we've been watching Undercover Boss. One of the great things about this show is that every executive starts by seeming to give off an air of, "I'm going undercover to try to figure out how we can really make this company (read: Bottom line total cash intake) better by seeing what our employees are really doing," and comes out on the other side often realizing how inept they are at the nuts and bolts of their own business.

Another trend I've started to notice is that in every show, there is at least one ridiculously sad circumstance with one of the workers. One show depicted a single mother of an autistic son while also being behind on her mortgage. Another showed a man who was saving up money with his fiance to purchase burial plots next to his stillborn daughter. This is often juxtaposed with an executive that is so blown away by a person's work ethic in spite of their circumstances that he (because I've only seen "he's" so far) gives that person a fat check, or puts them on a path toward a promotion in their company, or sometimes both. What really comes out (for me at least) is one of the the things that several of us perhaps fear - that the divide between those who have much and those who have little is severely deep in our society... but this is perhaps another topic for another time.

There's also The Office, Coco and Colbert (among others) when we want a good laugh.

What I am actually getting into now (when I feed Jude alone, because Laura doesn't like this show) is Dexter. A friend of mine told me he wasn't a fan because the sense of morality in the show is very black and white. I can understand that criticism (i.e. Dexter's vision of what should and shouldn't be done is very clear and doesn't allow a lot of flexibility in understanding the human condition)... but I also can't stop watching...