TV Week - Day Two

The second day of monitoring my media consumption, and as yet there are no physiological changes to report. I read a couple of chapters from the Elric novel I started yesterday. After work I rushed home so I could watch one of my favorite television programs, House.

If you know me you know I love stories. House demonstrates everything that is great about TV for a guy like me. One hour of viewing can deliver a whole bag of stories. In the first few minutes we get a little story about grifters. We know that the man is a hustler and that the woman who seems to be his mark is his partner. The real target is the suit in the crowd. No one tells us this. It's all done with facial expressions and camera angles. Good stuff, an interesting little story in itself. Since this is House we know someone is about to get really sick, but we can never guess. It's a little game of three card monte that the writers play with the audience every week.

You want stories? Lets see, we've got Foreman and his parents. We've got Chase and Cameron. We've got Wilson and Cuddy. We've got House obsessing about Wilson and Cuddy. We've got the mystery of the illness. We've got Foreman's initial attitude toward the patient, what that says about him and how it evolves. We've got Foreman's pain and guilt. We've got little stories that begin and end here, and great big stories that will play out over months. Episodic television has the ability to tell character stories over a long period of time, creating an opportunity for writers and actors to create stories of depth and complexity. When everything is done right it can be great stuff, finest kind. When it's not right then you have melodramatic pablum. Most of what's on the tube is the latter. No surprise.

After House there was nothing on that I wanted to see (except perhaps for The Vicar of Dibley, but I've seen it once before), so I checked out some things on the web. The new Homestar cartoon is up, so I checked it out. It was pretty good. Strongbad is always good for a chuckle.

That's it for my second day of defying TV Turnoff Week. Can I survive? Will TV rot my brain? Tune in tomorrow.

UPDATE: Oops. I forgot to put a link in for the new Homestar cartoon.