TV Is Where It's At

TV is where it's at.

Last summer, I interned at Samuel Goldwyn Films in Los Angeles. It was an awesome experience, but over the course of the summer, only one or two scripts out of the few dozen I read were any good.  Actually, most were awful. What I learned in my time in Southern California is that most screenwriters can't seem to get a story moving without cliche and predictable plot points. Needless to say, it was very rare that I found myself really loving a character or really enthralled in a story

(If you are interested in screenwriting, read Story by Robert Mckee. It really sets you above the competition and will help you improve your story telling!)

But I don't blame the screenwriters. It's tough to write a great story. It's even tougher to write a great story and fit it in an hour and a half while developing characters and evoking some sort of emotional response. I get it. It is tough. But the scripts still sucked.

I remember one in particular about a giant, conscious ceramic rabbit that is constantly getting shipped around from place to place, home to home, you get the picture. Now, I know what you are thinking: this rabbit's resilience in the face of adversity must have been a tale of great heroism!  That's what I thought, but shockingly, the story was not very good.

My favorite part was when one character (a babysitter who will not rest until all ceramic rabbits are destroyed, or at least that's how I remember it) had such a deep hatred for this fragile bunny that she stole it from the children she was watching and drove it to the dump in hopes to incinerate it.

Are you biting your nails just thinking about what is going to happen to the rabbit?

Of course you're not.

Cause it is a fucking ceramic rabbit, and a ceramic rabbit is a terrible protagonist.

In a nut shell, this is the problem in Hollywood: screenwriters come up with a story, write it, but don't consider if anyone in this country wants to go see a nomadic china bunny have a fucking heart warming adventure. No one does.

Obviously TV has a lot of shitty content too, and there are probably more great movies than there are great TV shows. But the landscape of story telling is changing. And right now, the real geniuses, the real masters of story telling -  they are moving into television. This is seen from the bottom of the industry to the top: film is falling apart and the young talent is going to TV. There are still great movies here and there (the rest of America and I can't wait for The Dark Knight Rises), but for every good movie, you have twenty bad pictures and one John Carter. And I'd say, for every good script, you have a thousand bad scripts and two John Carters. That's not a fair trade off.

More often than not, a great show provides me with so much more than a great movie. A great show will immerse you in the lives of all the characters, not just the protagonist. If it is a drama, it will make you laugh. If it's a comedy, it will add suspense. A great show incorporates all aspects of story telling. A great show should tell you something about yourself and something about the world. It should be complete, building from episode to episode, season to season, always with an end goal in mind from the very beginning.

For some reasons, many shows lose me on this aspect. True Blood, Entourage, Weeds, and even Dexter have fallen on my list because the quality of the series is not consistent throughout. While I love these shows, I still evaluate them not just on my enjoyment in their prime, but the story as a whole. How did the story progress, is it consistent with these characters, and did I enjoy each step along the way?

In the upcoming weeks, I will be reviewing all of the shows I have watched and giving you my honest recommendations. I'll be posting links and videos to try and give you the best picture of why you should or shouldn't watch a TV show. I hope you enjoy my opinions. I've watched a lot of TV and I take a lot of pride in my list.

First, I'll start with shows I never finished.

I started watching the first seasons of these shows, but I couldn't get into making them a full time watch. Nothing personal against these shows, but there is a lot of TV out there and if something isn't going to get to the point early on, I will usually come back to it later.  I'll do my best to explain why I stopped watching these shows and I'm open to fans of these shows convincing me to start back up :

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer 
• The Walking Dead
• Prison Break
• Boardwalk Empire
• The Hard Times of RJ Berger
• Battlestar Galactica
• Deadwood
• Carnivale
• Archer
• Hung (Season 2)

Then I'll start my list of 30, ranking and explaining each show in order until we finally reach number one. Here is a taste to get you hungry.

30. Bored to Death
29. Sit Down, Shut Up
28. True Blood
27. American Horror Story
26. Fringe (Season 3)
25. Modern Family (Season 2)
24. Eastbound and Down
23. The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret
22. Spartacus
21. Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia (Season 6)

Fuck this guy, right. You probably love at least one of these shows? Are you having a hard time wrapping your head around how it's not even cracking my top 20? Good. Come back and learn why.

You'll also be hearing about the shows I'm currently watching:

• Parks and Recreation
• Veep
• Girls

And shows I plan on adding to that list:

• Homeland
• Mad Men
• How I Met Your Mother
• Luther
• Heroes
• Wilfred
• United States of Tara
• Doctor Who
• Rescue Me
• 24
• Shameless
• The Office

I love TV and I hope to share that love with you. I will do my best to help you avoid all that shit that is out there (as I've mentioned, there is a lot) and make sure you watch the good stuff. It is my ultimate goal to encourage one person to watch LOST or The Sopranos or really anything else in my top 10 (there's another little preview for you). If I can do that, I have changed the world for the better.

Let's do this. 

JG