An article that sums up a lot of my feelings about a wonderful show. With so much crap on TV it is sad to see a truly smart, thoughtful show get cancelled. The West Wing was my favorite show all through college, and I strongly associate it with a time when I was learning to think for myself about political issues. What a great show. I would rank it the #1 overall TV show of my lifetime.
(Side note: although this author points out that the current popular drama Lost is escapist, I do enjoy Lost and I think that it also falls in the category of smart, quality TV.)
Edit: another article about the cancellation
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3 comments:
I'd hesitate to call Lost smart... one of the major problems is that you can simply introduce any conflict you want by having something otherwise inexplicable happen, because it's the island... need a polar bear? check. need a parapalegic to walk? check. etc. Since there are no viewer-evident limits on what the island can and can't do, this makes for cheap and thin plots. It's like scifi with no physics model.... That and they keep having these 45 minute shows where nothing really happens :) It's not really a bad show, there's some half-decent character development, but the circumstances surrounding that development seem ... weak, I guess. Uninteresting, perhaps.
Maybe I just don't like it because it tries to be a realistic drama and scifi at the same time, but it makes zero effort to explain any scifi element (or maybe we're even in fantasy here...), and that makes it seem like the scifi is just a copout for lazy writers.
I suppose I label it as "smart" because it doesn't spell everything out for its viewers. It makes you think. Even if you are thinking "there is no way this could happen!". So perhaps I should say "thought provoking", as opposed to West Wing which was "smart" and "thought provoking".
RIP Malcolm in the Middle, too. :( Okay, I wouldn't call Malcolm a "smart" show, but it was funny and witty and I liked it. :)
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