Popular TV

One good thing about Breaking Bad finishing is that, at last, the sort of websites I visit can stop talking about it.

I never get caught up in these series that develop a huge following about how they will end.   In any event, let's face it, most TV drama wears out its welcome long before the last series, no matter how impressive the first few years were.  (This has been brought to mind recently by my wife and kids watching early X Files on DVD from the library.  It's the classic case of "should've been killed off 3 years earlier.")

I see that the other example of the cultish "bad dude who people love to watch" drama which recently ended is Dexter.  Its ending went over very badly; Breaking Bad's pretty well.

I have no idea whether I would have liked any of Breaking Bad - I am inherently leery of the moral worth of TV series which dwell on pretty evil characters doing bad stuff for years, no matter how much good acting, wit or "coolness" is involved.   As I have said before, at least a movie of that type is over with in a few hours and doesn't have quite the same potential to influence people.   But I haven't heard of cases of people getting into drug manufacturing because of BB, unlike Dexter, where the connection with actual cases of murder seems to have been pretty much skipped by with little media attention.  Maybe everyone figures that they can kill; making drugs takes equipment and (as I understand it) BB also indicates it takes a certain cleverness.

As for my limited exposure to current TV dramas, last night, under the influence of weeks of ads shown during X Factor, I decided to watch the series opening of The Blacklist.   You know, the show where everyone's first reaction is "oh my gosh, James Spader looks old!"

It's completely over the top in nearly all respects, somewhat derivative, and poor at explaining how the characters are drawing connections to solve a terrorist attack.

But it mainly lost me with the pen in the neck.   I hadn't realised before that FBI training included how to unexpectedly thrust a pen an inch into a side of a neck in such a way that you can nearly, but not quite, cause their death during interrogation.

The show was, in other words, really ridiculous.  And James Spader is old.