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I don't currently watch a lot of TV. I don't mean that in that terrible smarter-than-thou way; I mean that I spend so much time on the computer that my staring-at-screens quota is just full up. There's pretty much one show I actually plan on watching during the week, and that's Lost. But, like many things I do, when I get into something, I tend to do the hell out of it. I spent at least one year, maybe more, with nothing but Turner Classic Movies on twelve hours a day. I watch Twilight Zone marathons on the Sci-Fi Channel any time I can catch them. I was completely obsessed with The X-Files in high school and most of college, until the point where it started to suck and BROKE MY HEART. Well, I'll get to that in a moment.

Television entries on the wiki

• Days of Our Lives
• Empire
• Lost
• Moonlight
• MST3K
• Oscars
• True Blood

A Brief History of TV in My Life

The Nickelodeon years

Like any red-blooded American child, I lived on this channel for my entire childhood. There's a lot of shows I could mention, but I've noticed over the years that I seem to have been obsessed with older shows than most people I run into--hardly anyone ever remembers what I'm talking about. Well, DangerMouse. Everyone loves DangerMouse. But mostly people seem stuck on the '90s shows. Me, I used to get up at five am on a Sunday morning to catch the elusive Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea, which apparently no one else remembers. I loved Belle and Sebastian and The Little Prince, and was particularly obsessed with The Mysterious Cities of Gold.

The X-Files

I loved this show. Well, the Monster of the Week episodes, anyway, and some of the earlier alien conspiracy episodes were pretty awesome. It's when the show mythology got so top-heavy that it started tripping over itself that I started getting bored--they'd so much as mention Samantha and it would be like, Awww, shit. It's one of those again. And then Duchovny left, and it all went to hell. And I like Robert Patrick. Seriously, I couldn't stand watching the show go into a long, painful tailspin, so I bailed out, and I heard something years later about lovelorn emails to "Dana." I'm pretty sure I made the right choice, is all I'm saying. But it was a long, long time before I Learned to Love Again.

Felicity

There was also Felicity when I was in college--she was a freshman when I was a sophomore. It spoke to us, what can I say? You could hear, literally, an entire dormitory floor of girls scream when that one random guy got hit by a bus that time.

Mystery Science Theater 3000

I used to stay up Saturday nights (and later, drag my ass out of bed Sunday mornings) religiously to watch MST3K. Good times, y'all.

True crime

Some time after I graduated college I got heavily into true crime shows (MSNBC Investigates, City Confidential, Dateline NBC, 20/20, 48 Hours, your basic newsmagazine shows, you name it), then I OD'd on Real Life TV and went into my TCM sabbatical.

Turner Classic Movies

I'm not saying I watched every single movie from ten in the morning until ten at night. I'm just saying, I kept the TV on that channel and I'd look over every hour or so to see what the next movie was while I worked at the computer. If it was from the '30s or '40s, though, there was a pretty good chance I'd give it a shot.

My TV gets lonely

And then I stopped watching much of anything at all for a couple of years. Again, the screen quota thing.

Lost

And then Lost came along, and I thought, well, anything with a hobbit can't be that bad, right? And then I started doing recaps, which, like many other things I do, started strong and then trickled off. I don't know why I love the show so much, though (although the first half of season three nearly lost me, just because I felt so bored for some reason. I think the Otherville National Zoo storyline dragged on a bit too long). Maybe it's the fact that Lost made me realize how much I love to be surprised; I've noticed that I've gone from being a spoiler whore before Lost to avoiding spoilers--for movies as well--ever since. And of course, I've always been a sucker for anything that gives you chills, regardless of genre.

The Amazing Race

There was also TAR, for one glorious season that I actually watched, and I think I may have watched the season after that as well, but it wasn't really worth it, because nothing could match the blinding glory of Omg My Ox Is Broken.

Veronica Mars

I watched this one for a while during the first season--I forget why I stopped, exactly. A time conflict? I'm not sure. I did get the full first season on DVD (and I've heard the end of the storyline as well), but I haven't actually watched the whole thing yet. From what I've heard of the second and third seasons, I don't know that I'm missing all that much by skipping those two.

Carnivale

I totally loved the first season. For some odd reason, I just didn't watch the second at all--I kept forgetting and thought, I'll just get it on DVD. And then I never did, because HBO shows are damn expensive.

Rome

I totally loved the first season. For some odd reason, I just didn't watch the second at all--I kept forgetting and thought, I'll just get it on DVD. And then I never did, because HBO shows are... oh my God. My suck is so predictable, isn't it? (Parenthetical note: I also watched Empire the summer or so before Rome started up, and I have to say, I keep meaning to go back and finish those recaps because the show was so very, very, horribly wonderfully bad. Seriously, it was a gem.)

Judging Amy

I only got sucked into this after TNT started showing reruns, and when Sister Girl would come home from class, she'd start watching the four-hour Shows About Justice block, and if I happened to be walking by, I would inevitably sit down and watch the whole show. I don't know why, exactly, but something about this show always sucks me in. It's also how I then got sucked into...

Law & Order

...although I'm pretty much there for just Briscoe and/or Green. I got into Law & Order: Criminal Intent for a while the year that The Lovely Emily came over every Wednesday night to watch Lost (season two, I think), if only because it was so much fun to watch Vincent D'Onofrio start putting the deep-down on the suspect at exactly 7:53 pm every time.

Talent competitions

My mother is always watching something or other about random people competing to be the best at something, which is how I've ended up seeing various episodes of American Idol (well, and also they've had a number of high-profile contestants from Alabama), Dancing with the Stars, So You Think You Can Dance, America's Got Talent, so on and so forth. She also watches a lot of shows about people trying to win ever-increasing amounts of money. It's the kind of thing I'm okay with watching if I'm downstairs for dinner, but I wouldn't ever watch on my own. Well, except for that season I got way invested in Blake and Jordin on Idol. And the one after that, where I got way into David Cook and Carly Smithson. And...

The Most Dramatic Rose Ceremony Ever

I am not proud of this, but if there happens to be one of those Please, Dude Who Really Isn't Worth All This Trouble, Let Me Stay Here with All These Other Bitches for Just One More Week shows about "really making a connection" and doing really ill-advised (and sometimes blurred-out) things on camera, I will be unable to change the channel. As far as I'm concerned, one of the most awesome moments in television history was that time on Joe Millionaire where he went off into the bushes with the blonde chick and they subtitled the slurping sounds. I managed to dodge most of The Bachelor and Flavor of Love, but Rock of Love nailed me; I shudder to think what over-the-hill celebrity looking for "love" they'll dig up next, because I will probably be watching. And then there was that all-day marathon of that one season of The Bachelorette where the chick really did marry that one guy. I still haven't lived that one down.

True Blood

After a summer of writing about the Twilight books, it was perhaps my destiny to get sucked into recapping True Blood. So to speak.

See also

• Lost
• MST3K
• True Blood
• The X-Files